So far. Thank God:

The Justice Department has met President Trump’s fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud with two weeks of skeptical silence, not taking any overt moves to investigate what Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims is a globe-spanning conspiracy to steal the election.

Such deafening silence from one of the government’s main enforcers of election law indicates just how little evidence there is to support the wild, wide-ranging claims made by Trump and his supporters, most notably Giuliani in a Thursday news conference held inside the Republican National Committee headquarters.

Privately, Justice Department officials have said they are willing to investigate legitimate claims of vote fraud; Attorney General William P. Barr even loosened some restrictions that might otherwise have discouraged prosecutors from doing so before results are certified.

But current and former officials said they thought Giuliani’s accusations sounded “crazy,” and they have not seen or heard of any evidence suggesting large-scale fraud, let alone the kind of ­intercontinental conspiracy described by the president’s lawyer. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter.

The Justice Department’s silence is “a tiny sliver of normalcy, and frankly a positive sign that we are on our way back to a better place,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department voting rights official in the Obama administration who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“In a way, that’s hard to say because it feels like lowering the bar to below the floor, to say we should all be pretty pleased that the institution of law enforcement for the United States didn’t go either full-on partisan talking-point machine or full-on conspiracy theorist. In normal times, that wouldn’t be something to celebrate, that would just be a given. . . .

The Justice Department also hasn’t come out and said the world is round, because they don’t need to.”

Actually:

I was at this rally in Georgia yesterday — one of the guys on a mic was talking about the Earth being flat. https://t.co/zS3bQWpjtC

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 21, 2020

Donie O’Sullivan is a CNN correspondent who covers the right wing disinformation stream.

The truth is that Barractually gave them special permission to look into illegal activity during this counting period which is outside the normal purview of the DOJ. (They generally wait until the election is settled before investigating so as not to influence the election results.)

So, this isn’t really evidence of restraint because it’s Trump who is trying to influence GOP officials, possibly bribing or blackmailing them, into changing the results of the election on his behalf. A Justice Department that was following Barr’s directive would be looking into all the shenanigans from the Trump campaign.

But really, they should stay out of this altogether and Barr should have kept his mouth shut. The feds don’t need to be involved at all at this stage. But if they choose to take a look later at the massive amount of pressure being put on GOP officials to throw out legal votes once this thing is over, they would well within their purview. In fact, they should. This is outrageous.

I wrote the following nearly seven years ago. It’s stale, but still relevant. Unfortunately:

“Avowedly with them” redux

Published by digby on January 11, 2014

Ed Kilgore pointed me to this article at the Monkey Cage about the difference between what we ordinarily think of as “polarization” and the scorched earth style of politics we see in our politics today:

I have been studying party polarization in Congress for more than a decade. The more I study it, the more I question that it is the root cause of what it is that Americans hate about Congress. Pundits and political scientists alike point to party polarization as the culprit for all sorts of congressional ills. I, too, have contributed to this chorus bemoaning party polarization. But increasingly, I’ve come to think that our problem today isn’t just polarization in Congress; it’s the related but more serious problem of political warfare….

Perhaps my home state of Texas unnecessarily reinforces the distinction I want to make between these two dimensions. Little separates my two senators’ voting records – of the 279 votes that senators took in 2013, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn disagreed less than 9 percent of the time (the largest category of their disagreement, incidentally, was on confirmation votes). In terms of ideology, they are both very conservative. Cruz, to no one’s surprise, is the most conservative. Cornyn is the 13th most conservative, which is actually further down the list than he was in 2012, when he ranked second. Cornyn’s voting record is more conservative than conservative stalwarts Tom Coburn and Richard Shelby. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz disagreed on twice as many votes as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

The difference between my senators is that when John Cornyn shows up for a meeting with fellow senators, he brings a pad of paper and pencil and tries to figure out how to solve problems. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, brings a battle plan.

Kilgore links to this Strategy Memo he and some colleagues at the Democratic Strategist published a while back on this subject and it’s well worth reading. He writes here:

We discerned this tendency in the willingness of conservatives to paralyze government instead of redirecting its policies, and in the recent efforts to strike at democracy itself via large-scale voter disenfranchisement initiatives. And while we noted the genesis of extremist politics in radical ideology, we also warned that “Establishment” Republicans aiming at electoral victories at all costs were funding and leading the scorched-earth permanent campaign.

All I’d add at this point is that it’s not terribly surprising that people who think of much of the policy legacy of the twentieth century as a betrayal of the very purpose of America—and even as defiance of the Divine Will—would view liberals in the dehumanizing way that participants in an actual shooting war so often exhibit.

This crystallized for me during the 90s, when they impeached a president over a sexual indiscretion and then manipulated the system to win an election to win the presidency they hadn’t legitimately won. It’s especially interesting that today so many Villagers consider traditional acts of civil disobedience to be a grave threat to the security of the nation, even as these same people have accepted the blatant destabilization of our system and the escalation of undemocratic political behavior on the part of the Republican party.

There have been a few grave threats to the nation over the years. But there is another one that nearly succeeded in destroying the country. Our president at that time explained the dynamic very well in this famous speech. I can’t help but come back to it whenever this subject comes up. The sad fact is that this has happened before:

And now, if they would listen – as I suppose they will not – I would address a few words to the Southern people.

I would say to them: – You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to “Black Republicans.” In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of “Black Republicanism” as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite – license, so to speak – among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.
[…]
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.
[…]
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us!

That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another…Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This has not changed. This faction of American politics, then the southern slave states associated with the Democratic Party, today the GOP, still centered in the South but ideologically organized throughout the nation, inevitably becomes frustrated that it is not universally acknowledged for being right. It is not enough that they can exert outsized power in the political system in proportion to their population. Our system was born of compromises that have always allowed them that. But it’s never been enough. They simply cannot accept the fact that the rest of the country does not agree with them and at some point their bitterness and resentment boils over into this determination that they must declare war to solve the problem once and for all.

Obviously, this time it is a “cold” civil war rather than a hot one (although the amount of gun violence could be seen as an offshoot of the culture war in some respects.) But this attitude and the reckless strategy that stems from it is not unprecedented. The ideological descendants of those Southerners Lincoln so vividly describes are at the same psychological place they were in 1860. It makes no difference how much the Democrats compromise or try to split the difference. Unless these Democrats cry uncle and loudly proclaim that they are “avowedly with” the Republicans in every way, they will not be satisfied.

It’s a psychological problem not a political one.

I wrote yesterday about the disinformation stream that is destroying democracy. As it happens Chris Hayes had a great monologue about this on his show last week which I somehow missed:

We have a whole lot of serious, fundamental problems in this country from the urgent need to confront the existential crisis of climate change, a depraved and corrupt Republican party, to wealth inequality that’s getting close to third world levels and more. But this disinformation bubble is what’s making it impossible to create the consensus to do anything about it.

Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan has some thoughts:

So what, if anything, can the reality-based press do to counter it?

I see three necessities.

First, be bolder and more direct than ever in telling it like it is. No more pussyfooting or punch-pulling. No more of what’s been called “false equivalence” — giving equal weight to truth and lies in the name of fairness.

I’ve been encouraged to see more of this unabashed approach lately. “Trump wages full assault to overturn election,” read the print-edition banner headline in Friday’s Washington Post. The first paragraph described his “orchestrating a far-reaching pressure campaign . . . to overturn the will of voters.”

And David Sanger of the New York Times began his analysis: “President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history, an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.”

Earlier last week, “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and correspondent Paula Reid described the state of the nation in stark terms.

Reid’s first words: “Even as top health experts warned the pandemic is spiraling out of control, President Trump made no mention of it today, had no public appearances and tweeted only falsehoods about the election.” One of the first visuals: a hospital room with health-care workers scrambling to treat covid-19 patients.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an opening three minutes of a network evening news broadcast quite like this,” said University of Maine media historian Michael Socolow.

Socolow called it “brilliant showing not telling,” and told me that it was more likely to get through to those in denial because it used everyday Americans — Michigan voters, nurses, etc. — instead of politicians to deliver the message.

Can these mainstream outlets, influential as they are, really go up against the counter-messaging on places like Fox News, or Steve Bannon’s podcast or fact-averse outlets like Newsmax, with its surging, though still relatively small, viewership? On the latter, Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell was given an unchecked platform to declare: “The election could not have been more rigged than it was.” In what should be astonishing, but isn’t, the Republican National Committee used its official Twitter account Thursday to promote this same lie of hers: “President Trump won by a landslide.”

This battle can’t be fought with facts alone, argues journalism scholar Nikki Usher of the University of Illinois.

The only hope, she wrote, is for mainstream journalism to appeal to passion as well as reason — “providing moral clarity along with truthful content.” Or, as NYU’s Jay Rosen recently wrote, journalism must reposition itself in the media ecosystem, to seize this moment in history to take a clear stance, in everything it does, as “pro-truth, pro-voting, anti-racist, and aggressively pro-democracy.”

In other words, the reality-based press has to unapologetically stand for something. Otherwise, it’s just a pallid alternative to the excitement of burgeoning lies.

And third, journalists and news organizations have to get much more involved in media literacy — working with educators and advocates to teach people of all ages, but especially students, to distinguish lies from truth, propaganda from factual reporting.

This can be an uncomfortable role for journalists because it smacks of advocacy, something that mainstream journalists are taught to be wary of. Still, some organizations and journalists are working on it.

Recently, I was a guest on a call-in radio program on Wisconsin Public Radio, talking about media coverage of the election’s aftermath. Two of the three callers I fielded, though polite, were misinformed. Both were convinced that it’s too early for President-elect Biden to claim victory since the votes haven’t really been counted.

This is untrue. With a few minor exceptions in places that can’t possibly make a difference, the tallies are complete. There is no question that Biden is the unequivocal winner, both in the popular vote and the electoral college.

But I can’t imagine that my responses changed their minds. They sounded dug in. And, remember, these were public-radio listeners, presumably not Alex Jones fans.

Can journalists, mired in our “how we’ve always done it” mind-set, really change their stripes to fight the war on disinformation? Can we be more clear and direct, embrace a moral purpose, help to educate news consumers? And even if we do, will it make a significant difference?

I have serious doubts about the answers to those questions. But I do know that we have to try.

I have my doubts too. But it’s a start.

Vanity Fair on Ivanka’s little temper tantrum last week:

Among the many consequences of Donald Trump losing the election to Joe Biden is the fact that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will likely do everything they can to reenter polite society, which will likely slam the door in their faces. Oh, sure, as a source put it to my colleague Emily Jane Fox, they’ll “probably be welcomed by real estate types and that group of Upper East Side and Palm Beach families that read about themselves in Quest magazine but don’t matter,” but the people whose opinions the couple actually care about will presumably have lost their numbers. Also probably at the top of Javanka’s mind are the billboards circling Trump Tower reminding passersby about their role in the COVID-19 crisis, which they really, really don‘t appreciate. But seemingly the most pressing issue keeping the first daughter up at night is the prospect of her father going to prison, if her unusually huffy response to the news that he’s being investigated for tax fraud is any indication.

Commenting on a New York Times report that both Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance and New York state attorney general Letitia James have expanded their probes of Trump and his businesses to include suspicious tax write-offs on millions of dollars of consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to his favorite child, Ivanka fumed on Twitter that this whole thing is apparently a witch hunt designed to take her extremely innocent father down:

This is harassment pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.https://t.co/4dQoDzQlRX

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) November 20, 2020

She added: “This fishing expedition is very clearly part of a continued political vendetta.”

According to the Times, both Vance and James’s office issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks relating to the consulting fees, following an investigation by the paper that revealed the president paid little to no income tax in the last two decades. That report also showed that Trump was able to reduce his taxable income by deducting approximately $26 million in fees to “consultants” as business expenses between 2010 and 2018. While the consultants’ identities were not shown on tax records, some of the fees definitely seem like the were paid to Princess Purses, which might explain her testy reaction:

On a 2017 disclosure she filed when joining the White House as a presidential adviser, she reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The subpoenas were focused on fees paid to the firm on her disclosures, TTT Consulting LLC, and represented just a portion of the $26 million, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The name of the firm appears to be a reference to Ms. Trump and other members of her family. Ms. Trump was an executive officer of the Trump companies that made the payments, meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant while also working for the company. While companies can deduct professional fees, the Internal Revenue Service requires that consulting arrangements be market-based and reasonable, as well as “ordinary and necessary” to running a business.

The examination of fees apparently paid to his older daughter is likely to arouse even more vitriol from the outgoing president. And it raises questions about whether the payments were a tax-deductible way for him to compensate his children, or avoid gift taxes he might incur from transferring wealth to them, something Mr. Trump’s father had done through legally questionable schemes uncovered by the Times in 2018.

In a statement, Alan Garten, the general counsel for the Trump Organization, said, “this is just the latest fishing expedition in an ongoing attempt to harass the company,” adding, “Everything was done in strict compliance with applicable law and under the advice of counsel and tax experts. All applicable taxes were paid and no party received any undue benefit.”

While the latest investigation seems to have provoked the most ire in the first daughter, who’s probably stressed about all the packing she needs to do before shipping out of Washington, it’s not the first time she and her siblings have had their dealings probed by the New York attorney general’s office. Last year, as part of a settlement in a case that had led to the closing of President Trump’s sham charity, Ivanka and her brothers, who were board members of the organization, were ordered to receive “mandatory training” on the “duties of officers and directors of charities so that they cannot allow the illegal activity they oversaw at the Trump Foundation to take place again.” As a reminder, that illegal activity involved basically using the charity as a slush fund for Donald Trump’s personal, business, and political interests, which included spending $20,000 of the foundation’s money on a six-foot-tall oil painting of the real estate developer.

In related news, earlier this month the Times reported that Trump “expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors” after he leaves the White House and is “concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.” While Trump has apparently asked numerous times if he can pardon himself, such a move—which might not even be possible, short of faking sick and making Mike Pence president so he can do the honors—would obviously not protect him from state crimes, meaning there’s a nonzero chance Ivanka might be visiting him in prison.

Recall that the Trump’s daddy made a habit of running expenses through the kids to avoid taxes, for him and the kids:

But an investigation by The New York Times has revealed that Donald Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire. What’s more, much of this money came to Mr. Trump through dubious tax schemes he participated in during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, The Times found.

In all, the president’s parents transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate on gifts and inheritances that was in place at the time. Helped by a variety of tax dodges, the Trumps paid $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax returns show.

Ivanka shrieking about political harassment is going to be something you’ll hear going forward from all the Trumps so get used to it. The whole family is going to be facing a whole lot of legal trouble and it’s one of the main reasons Trump will want to stay involved in politics as a presidential candidate. He believes it will confer on him a legal argument that he can deploy in courtroom where his Federalist society toadies can protect him. And it will help his Maga Martyr brand going forward as well.

And he has some good reasons to think they will. If you look back at what happened in the 90s and the judges involved in the political persecution of Bill Clinton, there were a handful on the DC circuit who worked hand in glove with right wing operatives to help them pull it off. While it’s true that he hasn’t had any joy with the courts in this ludicrous post-election whine fest, protecting him from prosecution or civil liability after he’s gone is a very different thing. They may not be willing to completely destroy democracy but I have little doubt some of them will see it in their interest to shield a corrupt Republican politician. That’s job one.

This piece in the Washington Post about Trump’s refusal to accept his loss is quite interesting. The founders understood the ugly side of human nature and tried to put together a system that could mitigate the worst of it, but they didn’t see Donald Trump and his Party coming:

“No, the framers did not envisage a president refusing to step down or discuss what should be done in such a situation,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “There’s obviously nothing in the Constitution about it.”

“This is a contingency that no one would have actively contemplated until this fall,” said historian Jack Rakove, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.AD

“We [historians] pride ourselves in saying, ‘Don’t worry, this has happened before,’ or, ‘Worry, this has happened before,’ ” said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “Right now, if all your historians can say is, ‘We are in entirely uncharted waters,’ I don’t even know how the rest of that sentence ends.”

Recently, Engel asked the post-doctoral fellows and undergraduates affiliated with the center — whose areas of study range from George Washington to Trump — to drop everything they were doing and search for any historical clues or parallels.

“They all say they got nothing,” Engel said.

The Constitution says a president’s term expires after four years. That’s it. Congress set Washington’s first term as officially beginning on March 4, 1789. March 4 became the de facto inauguration date until the 12th Amendment made it official in 1804. Then, in 1933, the 20th Amendment moved that date up to Jan. 20 and further specified that a president’s term expires at noon.

This has been followed to the letter throughout U.S. history, when it was both easy and hard, Engel said. He pointed to Inauguration Day in 1989, when Ronald Reagan’s second term was ending and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, was about to assume the presidency. At the close of his last daily briefing in the Oval Office that morning, “Reagan said, ‘Good. Well, I guess I’m done,’ and got out the nuclear codes from his pocket to hand them to Colin Powell, who was national security adviser. And Powell said, ‘Mr. President, you have to hold onto those until you’re not the president anymore’ ” — meaning, until noon.

Some losing presidential candidates have had better claims than Trump to seek legal remedies, Engel said, such as Andrew Jackson in 1824, Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000, “but none of those people ever gave any hint that they were not going to respect the legitimate authority of whoever ended up winning the process.”

The Biden campaign has said that should Trump refuse to leave on Jan. 20, “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” But that’s simply “common sense,” Wilentz said, not a documented process described in the Constitution or any other law.AD

But weren’t the Founders obsessed with the encroaching nature of tyranny? Didn’t they worry constantly about a president having too much power?

Most of them did, yes, though not all. During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton floated the idea of presidents serving for life, but when put to a vote, the proposal failed 4 to 6.

The power that scared many Founders the most was that of commander in chief.

Though not necessarily tied to an election loss, “there was a lot of discussion of the possibility that a president with control of the Army might refuse to relinquish power,” said Michael McConnell, a constitutional law professor at Stanford and author of the new book “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution.”

At the Virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry said: “If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him; and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design.”AD

Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, warned that if a president was limited to one term, he might “be unwilling to quit his exaltation … he will be in possession of the sword, a civil war will ensue, and the commander of the victorious army on which ever side, will be the despot of America.”

Perhaps most ominously, one prominent Pennsylvanian identifying himself only as “An Old Whig,” wrote about this in Antifederalist No. 70 and is worth quoting at length:“Let us suppose this man to be a favorite with his army, and that they are unwilling to part with their beloved commander in chief … and we have only to suppose one thing more, that this man is without the virtue, the moderation and love of liberty which possessed the mind of our late general [Washington] — and this country will be involved at once in war and tyranny.… We may also suppose, without trespassing upon the bounds of probability, that this man may not have the means of supporting, in private life, the dignity of his former station; that like Caesar, he may be at once ambitious and poor, and deeply involved in debt. Such a man would die a thousand deaths rather than sink from the heights of splendor and power, into obscurity and wretchedness.”

Some Founders who supported the Constitution still predicted that it wouldn’t stop a president from seizing power.

“The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” Benjamin Franklin said, referring to Washington. “Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards. The executive will be always increasing here, as elsewhere, till it ends in a monarchy.”

So why didn’t the Founders plan for this particular scenario, of a president simply denying that he had lost an election? Because they couldn’t even fathom it, Engel said.

“They couldn’t fathom two things: a person who had become president who was so utterly lacking in classical virtue that they would deign or dare to put their own interests above the unity of the country. And the second thing is, I think they couldn’t fathom how any president who would so vividly display disdain for the unity of the country, and mock and undermine the legitimacy of American democracy, why that person [wouldn’t have] already been impeached and removed from office.”

Who could imagine a depraved leader would be fully backed by an unscrupulous faction, a corrupt partisan press and a country in which half the inhabitants are completely delusional. I’m not sure anything can prepare you for such a confluence of circumstances. But here we are.

She makes Rudy look normal.

https://twitter.com/alexsalvinews/status/1330341145805611008

Powell says that Brian Kemp and the Georgia Secretary of State are corrupt officials who the Dems paid off. Seriously.

And note that Mark Halperin has made a triumphant return to the media and is now employed by Newsmax. Who says there are no second acts?

Aaan, the other member of the “elite strike force” is quite a gal as well.

Shot:

Chaser:

Michael Tracey’s tweet about the curious cases of Rudy Giuliani made me ask whatever happened to Lev and Igor?

If I had earth-shattering evidence of systematic election fraud that was sufficient to invalidate millions of votes in a key swing state, the first thing I'd do is hire Rudy Giuliani, who hadn't argued a case in federal court since 1992 and currently sells cigars on YouTube

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 22, 2020

Lev Parnas turned up in a Washington Post story last week, “All the president’s ‘Guys’“:

… a fraternity of oddballs, attention hounds and hapless bagmen who never would have come within 100 yards of presidential affairs under normal circumstances — but who now, thanks to President Trump, will remain part of history long after we forget their names. Scaramucci. Lewandowski. Omarosa. Seb Gorka. Carter Page. Mike Lindell and his company, MyPillow. Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas and his old company, Fraud Guarantee.

Parnas and his partner, Igor Fruman, were detained at Dulles Airport while holding one-way tickets to Germany, charged with planning to direct funds from a Russian citizen to U.S. politicians. Today Parnas is under house arrest, allowed out only to go to the store or walk the dog. He’s got three children at home, the youngest still in diapers, which he is changing for the first time in his parenthood. And with plenty of time to think about it, he’s come to regret his time as a Trump Guy.

Turns out their court date date “on charges of violating campaign finance laws to Feb. 1, 2021 because of difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic.”

One of Parnas’s former business partners recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a scheme to dupe investors in a company he founded with Lev Parnas.

I guess we’ll have to wait until February to hear the last stanzas of The Ballad of Lev and Igor.

It starts when you’re always afraid….

The outgoing president wants a second recount in Georgia where the Biden victory margin is inside 0.5 percent. The state completed a hand recount last week and certified election results on Friday. But the losing team is determined to make the rubble bounce atop its political grave (AP):

A Trump legal team statement said: “Today, the Trump campaign filed a petition for recount in Georgia. We are focused on ensuring that every aspect of Georgia State Law and the U.S. Constitution are followed so that every legal vote is counted. President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards.”

Except signature matching won’t be included in the recount they have requested, NBC News explains:

Campaign-requested recounts involve rescanning paper ballots, which would not address Trump’s call to “include signature matching.” The statewide audit did not verify signatures because once outer envelope signatures are verified before votes are originally tallied, they are separated from the ballots inside to maintain voter secrecy.

Plus, “signatures for mail ballots in Georgia have already been verified twice to ensure that each voter only voted once,” the Washington Post adds.

None of which will cool either the hot mess of Trump’s efforts to undo his loss or the fever gripping Trump cultists everywhere. In Atlanta Saturday, Trump supporters held “Stop the Steal” rallies at the Georgia State Capitol, outside the CNN headquarters, and later outside the Georgia Governor’s Mansion in the Buckhead neighborhood. Counter-protesters gathered at City Hall (AJC):

Broadcasts of the rallies showed the crowd shouting “Stop the steal” and “We want justice” while waving Trump 2020 flags.

Police in riot gear lined up between protesters at the pro-Trump rally and counterprotesters, and some counterprotesters lined up holding their own shields. The Capitol rally lasted close to two hours, before coming to a close when police started clearing the roads at 2 p.m.

A few protesters from both camps arrived bearing weapons.

The only outcome Trump supporters will accept is a second term. Democracy (and cogency) be damned.

https://twitter.com/IranUFDT/status/1330237679565496320?s=20

President 20,000+ lies assured them the only way he could lose the election is if Democrats stole it. They believed him, of course.

His faithful are out there, vigilant, still sniffing about for “evidence” to confirm their suspicions that the election was stolen and the perpetrators in Republican-controlled Georgia are covering it up.

Attorney Lin Wood has filed a lawsuit in Georgia alleging improprieties in verifying absentee ballot signatures there. On Friday, Wood unleashed a volley of retweets of breathless videos by a Trump super-sleuth who spotted a shredding truck outside a Cobb County facility used for ballot processing. “They may be destroying evidence,” he tweeted.

Election evidence about to be destroyed in Cobb County, GA?

DEMAND answers, Cobb County, GA Patriots!!!#FightBack pic.twitter.com/PCQHI0hX88

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) November 20, 2020

There were several others like that as the sleuths went in hot pursuit of the truck. The social media chatter was enough that Cobb County officials had to issue a statement on the matter:

It reminded me of the time someone alerted me that “windowless” white rail cars used to transport conservative victims to Obama’s FEMA camps were parked in the local rail yard. PROOF! Uh-huh.

This is not going to end well.

https://twitter.com/ACoupleOkooks/status/1330310604956061698?s=20

Matt Gertz at Media Matters has some cold water to splash in our faces:

[T]he Trumpist effort to steal the election in broad daylight doesn’t rely on whether its arguments can stand up to scrutiny in court. It is a fundamentally political effort. Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team are propagating a shambling mass of lies and deranged conspiracy theories about the election. They hope to create enough confusion to give cover to Republican officials at the local, state, and federal level working to subvert the will of the electorate and use their power to preserve the president’s. They want local and state Republican officials to refuse to certify election results in key states that Trump lost, in hopes that either Republican state legislators in those states will overturn the results and hand the president a victory or the election is thrown to Congress, where Republicans can grant him a second term. 

This seditious conspiracy to shatter American democracy relies on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble: The facts are not on their side, and the law is not on their side, but the Trumpist media is on their side, so they are banging the table as loudly as they can. They will likely fail — in no small part because the key players in the would-be coup are incompetent loons — but the cost America pays will be high nevertheless.

GOP leaders spent decades building an elaborate disinformation network of partisan media outlets and telling their supporters not to believe reporting from mainstream news sources. It worked — polls show that Republicans overwhelmingly trust right-wing outlets with low or nonexistent journalistic standards and scorn more credible news outlets, and the president’s most fervent supporters are Republicans who trust Fox News. A vast swath of the public is now firmly ensconced within an alternate reality, making decisions about not only politics but their personal health and safety based on propaganda and conspiracy theories. 

Within that right-wing information bubble, it is virtually uncontested that Trump is correct that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and that he actually won if you only count the “legal votes.” The result is that polls show a majority of Republicans say that the election was stolen from Trump.

Fox declared Biden the president-elect on November 7. But since then, both its news and opinion sides have pushed conspiracy theories about the election and cast doubt on its results hundreds of times.

Fox hosts, contributors, and guests have claimed that “many are trying to steal this election from President Trump”; asserted that “many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election”; declared that “there’s good reason here not to have confidence or not to believe this is fair”; argued that “this is a war, this is a battle for the control of our government and for the future of this nation”; attacked Republican officials for being insufficiently committed to Trump’s scheme; called for the arrests of election workers; suggested that Republican state legislators in states Trump lost should “appoint a clean slate of electors” who support him; and demanded lawsuits and congressional investigations. The network has aired promos that hype its prime-time line-up casting doubt on the election. 

Fox’s work to systemically delegitimize the election is important not only because the network remains the largest and most powerful entity within the right-wing media machine, but because Trump himself frequently watches its programming and amplifies it to his Twitter followers. The president has cast doubt on the election dozens of times in response to Fox’s coverage, including by promoting deranged conspiracy theories the network’s stars pushed about computer systems changing votes to benefit Biden.

In spite of this barrage of attacks on the democratic process, Fox has actually been under fire from the president’s supporters for not going far enough. The network’s cable and digital competitors are even crazier and more propagandistic. And the social media channels bombarding Republican users are completely unhinged. 

The Republican officials targeted by the president’s scheme are likely to be either swimming in that fever swamp or dependent on those who do. 

At the low end they look like William Hartmann, the Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who temporarily blocked certification of the county’s election results and subsequently signed an affidavit seeking to rescind the certification. His social media feeds are filled with conspiracy theories about the election from OAN and other far-right sources. 

Further up the food chain, Republican members of Congress are going on Fox to promote Trump’s election theft. 

At every step in the process, at the local, state, and federal level, Republican officials can be pressured by the president’s supporters consuming this disinformation. Those are GOP primary voters who likely believe Trump actually won and can threaten the jobs of any politician who takes action to prevent him from staying in office.

This coup is likely to fail; Biden’s lead is too great, Democrats hold key offices that can foil the attempt, and the plotters are too nutty. But the Republican base is being primed to treat Biden as illegitimate — and to question the results of any future elections the party loses. If this behavior is normalized, the next time the right-wing media machine pushes for an anti-democratic solution to an election defeat, the margin may be narrower, the playing field more favorable to Republicans, and the plotters more disciplined. 

Our democracy is fragile, and it is under attack. If the truth of the election results can’t break through the right-wing information bubble, it may not survive for long.

I think I feel more despair about this problem than anything else. I believe in free speech and do not believe that we can use any kind of government control to suppress this or we risk even worse than what we have. But this propaganda network is killing our politics and Trump has shown that it’s powerful enough to keep the truth from permeating it for more than 70 million people (and who knows how many other?) I don’t know how democracy can survive this level of disinformation, particularly when you have a political faction that sees it as a boon to maintaining their power. How does reality break through? I just don’t know.

Donald Trump practices cheating as a way of life — Mary Trump

There are people out there on the left, right and anti-anti Trump middle who are suggesting that Trump is justified in stealing the election because Democrats allegedly pursued patently bogus suspicions that Trump may have been involved in the Russian interference in 2016 (which many of them also suggest never happened.) This despite the fact that exactly nobody in power ever suggested that the election itself was illegitimate or that Clinton would have been justified in using any means necessary in 2016 to stop Trump from taking office.

This latest rationale for defending Trump’s efforts to overturn a legitimate election gives away the game, particularly among self-described leftists who have always seemed to find reasons to defend Trump and condemn anyone who reported and analyzed what they could see with their own eyes. Some people just hate Democrats and like Trump more than they are willing to admit.

Anyway, Marcy Wheeler rips apart the grotesque twisting of facts in her own inimitable fashion:

[T]he same propagandists who’ve helped Trump survive in recent years — on the left and the right — are claiming that because Democrats and others backed the investigation of Russian efforts to get Trump elected in 2016 (an investigation that attempted to understand why Trump fired Jim Comey, the person most Democrats chiefly blame for Hillary’s loss), it is precedent for Trump’s efforts to disclaim Joe Biden’s resounding win.

This exemplifies the vicious cycle we’ve been on since since August 2016, when Donald Trump authorized his rat-fucker to take desperate measures to find bullshit stories to tell to try to win an election.

After WikiLeaks released the first set of files Russia had stolen as part of its plot to help Trump get elected in July 2016 and someone — it’s not clear who — released damning information about Paul Manafort’s corrupt ties with Russian-backed Ukrainian oligarchs, Donald Trump doubled down. Rat-fucker Roger Stone, desperate to save Trump’s campaign and maybe even the job of his lifetime buddy, made a Faustian bargain for advance access to fairly innocuous John Podesta emails that Stone believed would provide the smoking gun for a conspiracy his allies had been chasing since March. The Faustian deal, by itself, exposed Stone as a co-conspirator in a hack-and-leak operation led by a hostile foreign agency. But the deal also brought ongoing exposure: at least as soon as he was elected, Trump’s rat-fucker (and maybe his eldest son!) started pursuing an effort to pay off Julian Assange with a pardon or some other way out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, thereby implicating Trump in a quid pro quo. After Trump assumed the Presidency, his own exposure through Stone gave him reason to want to shut down the investigation, even the investigation into the hack-and-leak itself. As a result, from very early in his presidency, Trump had obstructed justice to hide the quid pro quo and conspiracy his rat-fucker (and possibly he and his son) had joined to help him get there.

Meanwhile, early on in the investigation, acting on advice that Paul Manafort gave after returning from a meeting with one of Oleg Deripaska’s key deputies, the Republicans defended their President by attacking the credibility of the Steele dossier — one that Deripaska himself likely ensured was filled with disinformation — as a stand-in for the larger investigation itself. Deripaska even has apparent sway at one of the outlets that most relentlessly pursued that synecdoche, the dossier as the Russian investigation. Former hawks on Russia, like Trey Gowdy, were lured into fiercely defending Trump even in the face of overwhelming proof of his compromise by the able gate-keeping of Kash Patel and the discovery of how the use of informants can implicate members of your own tribe, as it did with Carter Page. By the time Billy Barr deceived the nation with his roll-out of a very damning Mueller Report, almost every single Republican member of Congress was susceptible to ignoring damning evidence that their President treated both the pursuit of the presidency and his office as a means for self-benefit, no matter what that did to US interests.

Key to the process of co-opting virtually all Republican members of Congress was the process of villainizing the people who had tried to keep the country safe from Russian compromise, starting with Peter Strzok but also including Andy McCabe. That process easily exploited the same apparatus of Congress’ “oversight” powers — and the same susceptibility to heated rants over logic — that had been used to turn a tragic incident in Libya into a multi-year investigation of Hillary Clinton. Also key to that process were certain propagandists on Fox News, including three of the lawyers that stood with Rudy yesterday: DiGenova and Toensing and Sidney Powell.

The day after Mueller closed up shop, those same propagandists joined with Rudy to pursue a revenge plot for the investigation — they started pursuing a way to frame Joe Biden in anticipation of the 2020 election. Most Democrats didn’t believe that Hillary lost because of Russia, but Trump and his conspiratorially-minded advisors believed they did. And so Rudy, relying on advice Manafort offered from prison, used the same networks of influence to try to frame Biden in a Ukrainian plot that, at the same time, might provide an alternative explanation for the Russian crimes Trump was personally implicated in.

Once again, Trump got personally involved, extorting the Ukrainian president over a series of months, “I’d like you to do us a favor, though.”

There’s no doubt that Trump’s abuse of Congress’ power of the purse in an effort to extort a campaign benefit from a foreign country merited impeachment. There’s also no doubt that it served to heighten the tribalism — and ranting illogic — of Republican members of Congress.

Things snowballed further.

That tribalism, by itself, might have gotten Trump re-elected. But it wasn’t enough for Trump. Instead, the President prepared an attack on the integrity of the vote by dissuading his own supporters from using mail-in ballots, setting up the Equal Protection hoaxes that Rudy has pushed in recent days. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger claims that, by itself, the effort to discredit mail-in voting cost Trump the state of Georgia. But partisan attacks are what got Trump where he is, and partisan attacks are what he knows.

Trump also doubled down on what had gotten him elected in 2016: overblown attacks sourced to stolen emails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, in this case rolled out by one guy at legal risk for his ties to Fraud Guarantee, and another under indictment for exploiting the tribalism of Trump’s supporters to commit fraud. According to CNN, the FBI believes these emails may have been packaged up by the Russian agents that have been buying access through Rudy and DiGenova and Toensing.

Trump’s DOJ, working with Sidney Powell, even tried to invent an attack on Joe Biden by altering exhibits in a court proceeding. In that case, the overblown attack was sourced to real notes, albeit notes that actual law enforcement officials had packaged in such a way as to tell a false story. Yet again, however, this was a false story that scapegoated those who’ve protected the interests of the country — adding Joe Biden to the targets along with McCabe and Strzok — to try to cover-up unbelievably damning evidence about Trump’s coziness with Russia. The effort to deny that Mike Flynn was secretly working for Turkey while claiming to work for Trump and to deny that Mike Flynn repeatedly called up the country that had just attacked us to try to obtain further benefits turned into an attack on those who tried to keep the country safe from sell-outs like Mike Flynn.

It’s a false story. But Republicans in Congress believe it with all their being. And so it has succeeded in convincing those Republicans they need to redouble their efforts to defend Trump.

So, yesterday, Rudy and the other propagandists gave a press conference that was, for the first time, broadly labeled as a coup attempt and roundly mocked, even by otherwise true believers. Trump, Rudy, Republicans, they’re all victims of an international plot launched by George Soros, Cuba, China, Venezuela, according to Rudy and the lawyers who spun the last several conspiracy theories on Fox News.

And this propaganda, an attempt to set aside the clear will of the voters, derives its strength not from any basis in fact. Rather, it derives its power from the fact that Republicans have gotten so tribally defensive of Trump, they will set aside the clear good of the country to back him.

Donald Trump, if he leaves office, may face legal consequences for what he did in 2016 to get elected. If Trump leaves office, Rudy may face consequences for the things he has done since to keep Trump in office.

To save themselves, they’re pursuing the same strategy they’ve pursued since 2016: telling bullshit stories by waving documents around and lying about what they say, relying on tribalism and raw power rather than reason to persuade their fellow Republicans.

Trump cheats. Republicans cheat. And while Trump may not have conspired with Russia in the legal sense in 2016, he damn sure befitted from the antics and dirty tricks of his various collaborators which, in the end, did include Russian government hackers and propagandists. I’m sorry that’s a fact. And anyone who didn’t find that more disturbing than the garden variety Democratic party rivalries that were revealed in those stupid emails has a major ethical blindspot, to say the least.

Excusing Trump getting “payback” for the Russia investigation and impeachment is monumental gaslighting. Both of those pertained to the manipulation of elections as well. It’s all the same political strategy! The inability to hold him accountable in the first two cases has led directly to this attempted coup.