You may recall that he was already let off the hook once:
"what digby sez..."
Month: February 2021
Of course Palin is an idiot. That goes without saying. But this exchange with Piers Morgan in interesting because Morgan was once one of Trump’s strongest supporters:
Donald Trump’s 2nd impeachment trial is set to begin in the Senate today.
Trump’s close supporter @SarahPalinUSA maintains the former President only ever advised people to protest peacefully.
She says Trump never told people break laws and it’s convenient to blame Trump.
‘There were shenanigans, obviously.’
@SarahPalinUSA responds to @piersmorgan saying Joe Biden won the US Presidency by fair means.
She avoids answering whether she accepts Biden won legally.
‘No one will convince me that there were not shenanigans going on.’
She cites ‘dead people who voted’ as so-called shenanigans but @piersmorgan says she’s talking nonsense and there is no evidence of voter fraud being upheld anywhere.
Originally tweeted by Good Morning Britain (@GMB) on February 9, 2021.
I think we’re going to see a lot this buck-passing during this impeachment trial. And this, by Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark makes a great point which Trump’s loyal minions should stop and think about:
There is something deeply, cosmically unfair about a group of elites force-feeding voters a lie about a stolen election, bilking them out of their money, demanding with the most overheated rhetoric that they “fight” to save the country—and then avoiding all responsibility while those people are hauled off to jail for doing what they’d been asked to do.
Look: The people in mobs are supposed to be held accountable for their actions. That’s the law. But there’s also a whole section of the law which realizes that the creation and instigation of a mob is, itself, a criminal action. And people who do that are supposed to be held to account, too. And the January 6 mob was no different. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
The QAnon Shaman, of all people, seems to understand what’s happened here:
The so-called QAnon shaman who took part in the Capitol riots sporting face paint and a horned hat has indicated he is willing to testify.
Jacob Chansley’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, said he hadn’t spoken to any members of the Senate since announcing his offer, but it was important for senators to hear the voice of someone who was incited by Mr Trump.
Mr Watkins said his client was previously “horrendously smitten” by Mr Trump, but now felt let down by the former president’s refusal to grant him and others who participated in the insurrection a pardon.
“He felt like he was betrayed by the president,” the lawyer said.
I can understand why he would feel that way. Trump pardoned all of his criminal accomplices, but he didn’t pardon the people who stormed the Capitol on his behalf. They will probably do some time and will have records. Trump will be golfing in Mar a Lago and fundraising from his followers.
“You’re not going to have a Republican Party if you don’t get tougher. They want to play so straight, they want to play so, “Sir, yes, the United States, the Constitution doesn’t allow me to send them back to the States.” Well, I say, “Yes, it does because the Constitution says you have to protect our country and you have to protect our Constitution and you can’t vote on fraud, the fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it?” When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.” – Donald Trump, January 6th, 2021
Trump is building “wonderment” for what’s to come:
As Republicans get ready to beat back a DONALD TRUMP impeachment conviction for the second time, sources close to the former president say he’s already imagining his comeback.
“He’s compared it to that time in between seasons of ‘The Apprentice,’ building anticipation and wonderment for what’s to come,” one adviser told us of the period between his White House exit, eventual acquittal and his second act.
Other Trump advisers said he has revelled in his silence on Twitter — expressing amazement at how much coverage his few public statements have garnered.
“He finally realizes less is more,” one of them said.
IVANKA TRUMP and JARED KUSHNER have warned Trump that while he has the votes for acquittal, he can still screw this up. “Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” is the phrase Kushner has been heard using most frequently to describe the worry.
Trump has actually taken the advice, spending most of his days golfing when he’s not tossing out bad legal advice to his lawyers, advisers said.
“Right now Trump is thinking, ‘I’ve got 45 votes, all I have to do is go golfing and not do anything,’” one of the aides told us.
As for the actual impeachment programming, expect it to start with Trump’s lawyers laying out an argument that the trial itself is unconstitutional.
After that, they will “roll the tape” — video that one source likened to “the first three segments of a Hannity monologue.”
Needless to say, he’s plotting his revenge. It’s what he lives for:
Already, Trump aides contend, the impeachment process has proved beneficial to the ex-president — exposing disloyalty within the party’s ranks and igniting grassroots backlash against Republicans who have attempted to nudge the GOP base away from Trump. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse spent last week fending off constituent criticisms and censures from state party officials after he compared Trumpism to “a civic cancer for the nation.” And Trump’s allies believe the ex-president’s impending impeachment trial will further illuminate who the turncoats are.
“It’s going to help expose more bad apples that he can primary if any senators vote to convict,” added the former campaign official.
While ensconced at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Trump has remained in touch with political allies and advisers. But he has intentionally kept a low profile, something that will likely continue this week. A former aide suggested Trump try to demonstrate his indifference to it all by spending much of impeachment playing golf, “as a way of sort of saying, ‘Who cares?’”
Aides expect that to change once the trial wraps up though, with Trump gradually reemerging in public and turning his attention toward seeking revenge against Republicans who, he believes, crossed him after he left office.
The format in which he pursues retribution is less clear. The president is still considering what mediums he should use as he remains barred from Twitter and has lost influential media allies like former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, whose show was abruptly canceled last Friday.
That Politico article portrays Trump as a teflon juggernaut who is benefiting from impeachment because it’s corralled the Republicans back into his corner. It might be true, I don’t know. But from what I can tell this just fits the usual pattern in which Trump does something so reprehensible that decent people everywhere are shocked and appalled and then the Republicans come crawling back to kiss Dear Leader’s hem like the cowardly weasels they are once they remember that their voters are deluded cult followers who celebrate his grotesque behavior.
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This is by another conservative lawyer, this one a founder of the Federalist Society, making the obvious argument:
Front and center in former President Donald Trump’s defense this week will be the argument that convicting him and disqualifying him from holding future office would violate his First Amendment rights—that it would essentially amount to punishing him for speaking his mind. His new lawyer, David Schoen, has warned that convicting Trump “is putting at risk any passionate political speaker, which is against everything we believe in in this country.”
That is wrong. Even if the First Amendment protected Trump from criminal and tort liability for his January 6 exhortation to the crowd that later stormed the Capitol, it has no bearing on whether Congress can convict and disqualify a president for misconduct that consisted, in part, of odious speech that rapidly and foreseeably resulted in deadly violence.
To start, let’s examine how breathtaking Trump’s argument is. His advocates are relying on the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that the First Amendment prohibits criminal liability for advocating violence that is not imminent. According to their theory, Congress could not impeach, convict, remove, or disqualify a president who, like Clarence Brandenburg, spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally in a white hood, advocated violence, used the N-word repeatedly in declaring that African Americans should be forcibly returned to Africa, and proclaimed that “the Jew” should be sent to Israel.
Nor, under Trump’s argument, could Congress use its powers if the same president burned an American flag on national television to demonstrate contempt for the country he or she had been chosen to lead. Nor could Congress use its powers if the same president wore a swastika while leading a Nazi march through a Jewish neighborhood.
These supposed limitations on Congress’s powers are not merely contrary to common sense; they are without any basis in law. Courts have held that none of those activities can constitutionally be criminalized. But as the University of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman exhaustively demonstrated in The Atlantic in 2019, the impeachment, conviction, removal, and disqualification powers of Congress do not require that the president, or any other federal official, has committed a crime. The phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution declares impeachment, conviction, removal, and disqualification to remedy, dates back to 1386. As the nation’s Founders knew, that term had been used repeatedly for four centuries to remove and disqualify officials for heinous conduct that was committed while in office but was not a crime.
For example, in a celebrated instance, Massachusetts removed its chief justice in 1774 for accepting a royal salary—an act that was politically disloyal, but not a crime. In 1788, James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention that abusing the pardon power—also not a crime—would be impeachable. In “Federalist No. 65,” Alexander Hamilton likewise wrote that “the abuse or violation of the public trust” would be impeachable.
And, in the more than two centuries since the Constitution was ratified, multiple officials have been impeached, convicted, removed, and disqualified for official conduct that was heinous but not criminal. Indeed, President Andrew Johnson was impeached, and President Richard Nixon would have been impeached and convicted, on certain counts that did not allege a crime. So while the First Amendment might protect a former president from criminal and tort liability for his speech, that same speech can still demonstrate his “abuse or violation of the public trust,” warranting conviction and disqualification by the Senate.
But there is yet another reason why the First Amendment is no defense against impeachment, and that is that a central object of the Constitution was to restrain a government leader who was a “demagogue.” And essential to being a demagogue is engaging in “passionate political” speech.
In the first Federalist Paper, Hamilton wrote, “History will teach us … that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” And he reiterated in “Federalist No. 85,” the last Federalist Paper, that a core aim of the Constitution was to prevent “the military despotism of a victorious demagogue.”
Madison began drafting the Bill of Rights within months of the publication of Federalist No. 85. In what became the First Amendment, Madison built and expanded on the protections already established in English common law. Nothing in that tradition, or in the congressional or ratifying debates on the Bill of Rights, suggested that protections for free speech precluded impeaching, convicting, removing, and disqualifying a senior public official who engaged in the very demagoguery the Constitution was designed to safeguard against.
Accordingly, although the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech limits the scope of permissible criminal prosecutions and tort suits, it does not limit any of the separate removal and disqualification powers conferred by the Constitution. The most frequently used of these powers is the president’s right to remove senior executive officers—that is, those with administrative or policy-making authority.
Every president has exercised this power, often in response to political speech in a policy statement the official had made that would be protected by the First Amendment from criminal and tort liability. No one would argue that a president cannot remove a senior executive officer for that officer’s expression of political views, much less for odious expression that rapidly and foreseeably led to lethal violence.
First Amendment freedom of speech likewise does not limit the Senate’s historic role in the confirmation of senior federal officers. It’s never been suggested—nor could it plausibly be—that the Senate cannot refuse to confirm an executive-branch nominee on the grounds that the nominee previously made odious and dangerous statements. But under the view of Trump and his advocates, if such individuals made such statements after being confirmed, Congress could not use its impeachment and conviction powers to remove and disqualify them.
How could the First Amendment permit the Senate to decline to confirm a senior officer based on prior, odious, dangerous speech but then preclude it from removing or disqualifying the same official for making the same (or worse) statements while in office?
There is no serious risk that Congress will abuse its removal and disqualification authority, particularly in the case of presidents. Presidential impeachments are exceptionally rare events, and in the 230 years of American history, none has yet resulted in a Senate conviction. That history confirms that Hamilton was correct when he predicted in “Federalist No. 66” that the requirement that two-thirds of the Senate support conviction would ensure that “the security to innocence … will be as complete as itself can desire.” Congress plainly understands the gravity of its powers in this area and does not easily or lightly exercise them.
Consider that, on December 6, 2017, a resolution was introduced in the House to impeach then President Trump. The resolution was based on his reference to “very fine people” in connection with the by-then-concluded violence in Charlottesville, and other statements the resolution characterized as conveying various forms of bigotry. The House rejected consideration of that resolution on the same day by voting 364–58 to table it. We would have voted with the majority, as those statements did not cause violence or spark an attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.
At least four things distinguish Trump’s January 6 address. First, it was made to a mob that he had called to Washington, D.C., and then instructed to march to the Capitol.
Second, he used words that foreseeably could cause and rapidly did cause violence, including “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” His speech resulted in our nation’s first non-peaceful transfer of power in modern times.
Third, Trump, during his remarks, repeated lies he had been promoting for weeks about nonexistent voter fraud. Even the First Amendment does not protect “knowing lies” that cause foreseeable violence that interferes with government functions and personnel from criminal or civil liability.
Fourth, Trump’s speech was part of a course of conduct to override the 2020 presidential election results outside the court system. That course of conduct included attempts to extort Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” approximately 12,000 more Trump votes, to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence to violate the Constitution and refuse to count Biden electoral votes from six states, and to misuse the Department of Justice to subvert Georgia’s election results.
There is no legal or other basis for inventing unfounded obstacles to conviction and disqualification by Congress of a president for such demagoguery and other misconduct. To the contrary, there are important reasons not to disable Congress in that way. History shows that republics can perish when they give a potential authoritarian a pass without serious consequences. As the wise Justice Robert Jackson explained in his famous dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”
To protect our republic, the Senate may and should convict and disqualify a president whose official misconduct included odious speech that rapidly and foreseeably caused lethal violence.
I guess the Senators will mostly ignore this. In fact, you have this sad creature Lindsey Graham going on TV making inane comments like this:
‘What Democrats have done is basically declared war on the presidency itself. You can’t get a traffic ticket based on what they used to impeach President Trump. They’re going to destroy the presidency itself.”
One might say that his Dear Leader already went a long way toward doing doing that.
The video clip below by @Awusernameisno1 is from October. But since my friend Vicki @vickiroush reposted it this morning, I thought it worth sharing.
Replies to the TikTok video resurfaced this link to a 2014 Politico Magazine article by Randall Balmer, now the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. It is worth rereading regularly. Andrew (Awusernameisnotavailable) either read this Politico article or others on the subject. He seems well-versed.
Balmer argues that the anti-abortion movement arose out of opposition to desegregation, not to Roe v. Wade. A 1971 ruling by the U.S. District Court in D.C. in Green v. Connally removed the charity status from religious schools that engaged in racial discrimination. Movement conservatism godfather Paul Weyrich saw an opening for mobilizing religious conservatives as a sizable voting bloc:
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
In abortion, Weyrich found his catalyst. The IRS rescinding the charitable status for Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC over its racially discriminatory practices was key, Balmer writes:
Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.
By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just Roman Catholics—were beginning to feel uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978 Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate conservatives where it hadn’t in the past. That year in Minnesota, pro-life Republicans captured both Senate seats (one for the unexpired term of Hubert Humphrey) as well as the governor’s mansion. In Iowa, Sen. Dick Clark, the Democratic incumbent, was thought to be a shoo-in: Every poll heading into the election showed him ahead by at least 10 percentage points. On the final weekend of the campaign, however, pro-life activists, primarily Roman Catholics, leafleted church parking lots (as they did in Minnesota), and on Election Day Clark lost to his Republican pro-life challenger.
In the course of my research into Falwell’s archives at Liberty University and Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, it became very clear that the 1978 election represented a formative step toward galvanizing everyday evangelical voters. Correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.” Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich had found his wedge issue, one for galvanizing voters opposed to civil rights under a less-obviously racial banner. “[T]he real roots of the religious right lie not the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation,” Balmer concludes.
But you knew that.
The second Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump begins today at 1 p.m. Eastern time.
This is the fourth presidential impeachment in U.S. history. Trump owns two: the first for abuse of power in attempting to extort personal favors from a foreign head of state, and for obstruction of Congress; the second for inciting a deadly insurrection just a month ago against the government he was sworn to defend. It is a treacherous legacy.
With the COVID-19 death counter headed toward half a million dead in the U.S. alone, with ongoing protests against the military coup in Myanmar, with dozens dead and hundreds missing in a climate change disaster in India, and with two U.S. carrier groups conducting naval exercises in a tense South China Sea, the impeachment trial feels a bit like U.S. navel-gazing instead. But here we are. Again.
Trump’s defense team will attempt to dismiss the case today, arguing that trying a president who is now a private citizen is unconstitutional. Most legal scholars agree that past precedent and practice say it is not. Because an impeachment conviction prevents an official from holding future office, it “defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders,” Republican attorney Charles J. Cooper wrote in a Sunday Wall Street Journal column. Nonetheless, Trump’s team will argue otherwise today in four hours of debate.
House impeachment managers will present their first arguments on Wednesday at noon. The Associated Press reports each side will have up to 16 hours to present arguments:
The Democrats are expected to try and take advantage of the senators’ own experiences, tapping into their emotions as they describe in detail — and show on video — what happened as the mob broke through police barriers, injured law enforcement officers, ransacked the Capitol and hunted for lawmakers. The carnage led to five deaths.
The impeachment managers have argued that the mob subverted democracy and that Trump was “singularly” responsible for their actions after months of falsely saying there was widespread fraud in the election. They will appeal to Senate Republicans to vote to convict after most of them criticized Trump in the wake of the riots, with many saying he was responsible for the violence.
There was no widespread fraud in the election. Election officials across the country, and even then-Attorney General William Barr, contradicted Trump’s claims, and dozens of legal challenges to the election put forth by Trump and his allies were dismissed.
No witnesses are expected at this time. Trump himself will not appear to testify. Seventeen Republicans need to vote with all Senate Democrats to reach the two-thirds margin required to convict.
The prosecution expects senators’ fresh recollections and vivid videos of the violence on Capitol grounds will help make their case along with months of Trump’s unsupported lies about election fraud and his own catalog of violent rhetoric. The presentation is expected to be fast-paced and aimed at renewing outrage at the deadly insurrection of Jan. 6.
Michelle Goldberg speaks for many in saying she dreads another impeachment putting the national spotlight again on Trump’s pathological narcissism and amorality. There is important legislative work to be done that this trial will delay:
The Senate trial will almost certainly not bring justice, because Republican senators make up half the jury, and even if many of them privately disapprove of Trump’s insurrectionary attempts to cling to office, their base does not. If this process drags on, it will slow the urgent work of passing an economic rescue package, increasing human suffering and possibly the chance that the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene will retake the House in the midterms.
But yet again, the only way out is through. A full public accounting of how the insurrection unfolded is necessary even if the Senate fails to convict. Trump’s true conviction will be in the court of public opinion here and abroad as well as in the pages of history. A congressional commission should follow to ensure the documentation is available for posterity.
Goldberg continues:
This is necessary not just to cement Trump’s disgrace, but because his election lies are being used to justify new restrictions on voting. Trump’s attack on democracy didn’t begin on Jan. 6, and even though he’s out of office, it hasn’t ended.
“Obviously there’s a political price that you pay in looking back instead of looking forward,” said Norm Eisen, co-counsel for the Democrats in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “No one really wants to ever hear from or talk about Donald Trump again, but we have no choice.”
The Republican Party has made its choice and its bed. God help the rest of us not have to lie in it.
The Senate trial will almost certainly not bring justice, because Republican senators make up half the jury, and even if many of them privately disapprove of Trump’s insurrectionary attempts to cling to office, their base does not. If this process drags on, it will slow the urgent work of passing an economic rescue package, increasing human suffering and possibly the chance that the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene will retake the House in the midterms.
Yet it is still crucial that when the Senate trial commences this week, the House impeachment managers take all the time they need to make their case.
According to Politico, there’s tension between several managers, who reportedly want to call witnesses, and senior Democrats who just want to get the trial over with. The desire to rush is understandable, because Democrats are sacrificing valuable legislative time. But if they miss the opportunity to give the country the fullest possible picture of Trump’s treachery, that sacrifice will be in vain.
Perhaps it goes without saying that the real jury for this trial is not the Senate but the public. Most Americans have decided on Trump’s guilt: according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, 56 percent say Trump should be convicted and barred from holding office again. But it’s still important for Democrats to tell the comprehensive story of how Trump tried to steal the election, and how that attempt ended in death and desecration.
This is necessary not just to cement Trump’s disgrace, but because his election lies are being used to justify new restrictions on voting. Trump’s attack on democracy didn’t begin on Jan. 6, and even though he’s out of office, it hasn’t ended.
[…]
The argument for a quick trial is simple: There’s more than enough in the public record to convict him. “The single most important witness to what happened is Donald Trump himself, and whether he wants to or not, he’ll be forced to appear because we have the video,” said Eisen. “We have Donald Trump saying the words that, on top of a long pattern of incitement, triggered the insurrection on Jan. 6.”
But if the broad outlines of Trump’s offense are clear, significant details are not. On Fox News this weekend, Liz Cheney, one of just 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment, spoke about what could be uncovered by the ongoing criminal investigation.
“People will want to know exactly what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know, for example, whether the tweet that he sent out, calling Vice President Pence a coward, while the attack was underway, whether that tweet for example was a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
People will indeed want to know this, and ideally they should know it before their senators cast votes to acquit or convict.
Similarly, in their trial brief, House impeachment managers write that once the violence began on Jan. 6, Trump didn’t take swift action to stop it: “Instead, while Vice President Pence and Congress fled, and while Capitol Police officers battled insurrectionists, President Trump was reportedly ‘delighted’ by the mayhem he had unleashed, because it was preventing Congress from affirming his election loss.” Trump’s lawyers deny this, insisting that Trump was “horrified” and that he “took immediate steps to coordinate with authorities to provide whatever was necessary to counteract the rioters.”
This is the sort of dispute that can be settled empirically. It’s probably true, as [Norm] Eisen argues, that Trump’s cronies would fight subpoenas, and that Democrats don’t want to get dragged into a long, frustrating legal battle. But surely there are people still working in government who can explain the holdup in sending help to the beleaguered Capitol Police. And it would be good to hear from some of those police officers themselves, more than 80 of whom were injured, along with 65 District of Columbia police officers.
One of the nightmarish hallmarks of our time is how quickly the intolerable becomes ordinary. Just over a month after Jan. 6, the shock is already wearing off. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revived some of it in her remarkable Instagram Live account last week. Her story got sucked into a depressingly predictable debate about whether a woman recounting trauma was being hysterical, but it still demonstrated the unrivaled emotional power of first-person testimony.
The outcome of this trial may not be in doubt, but Democrats have one chance to show the country exactly what Republicans are condoning.
We don’t know if there will be a commission appointed at some point or if the various prosecutions will reveal more about what happened. This may be it so they’d better get as much into the record as possible.
It looks as though after this trial is over we’re going to forget about Trump’s crimes and “move on.” This means that he, or someone even worse, will repeat them. They know how to do it now.
CREW reports on Javanka’s earnings during their stay as public servants:
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working in the White House, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by CREW. It is impossible to tell the exact amount as the income is sometimes reported in broad ranges and cover four months of income before Ivanka Trump officially joined her father’s administration and nearly one month before Jared Kushner joined.
Both Kushner and Trump announced they would not take a salary while working for the government in an attempt to shut down nepotism concerns. While their supporters marked this as a public sacrifice, the massive amount of money they made on the side undercuts that argument, as government salaries would have been less than 1% of their income.
Javanka made a ton of money on the Trump Hotel. I’m sure that had nothing to do with politics.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should never have been allowed to work in the White House. The Department of Justice reversed decades of precedent to grant President Trump’s wish to have his children work in the White House. While taking on enormous responsibilities that they were unqualified to carry out, and debasing their positions with constant ethics scandals, they likely made hundreds of millions of dollars from questionable sources. All that was waived off by the same nepotism that got them their jobs. Some “sacrifice.”
If you look at the detail of that piece it is just insane, particularly since they now have the brass balls to wring their hands over Hunter Biden’s book deal (signed in 2019) in which he talks about his election. They are as shameless as it gets in every way.
Liz Cheney is all in and it will be interesting to see how that goes. She’s betting that being the tough, pistol-packing, wingnut who stood up to Trump and won is going to be a winner for her in 2024. But I’m honestly not sure that the GOP will go there with her. So far, we’re seeing the Trump cult double down on their devotion and without most of them, she’ll never get out of a primary.
But this is interesting. As far as I know, Cheney is the first to suggest that Trump could be prosecuted. Which is interesting because unless he is, this impeachment trial is all the punishment there will be for a president who incited an insurrection in an attempt to steal an election.:
If I were in the Senate, I would obviously listen to the evidence.
I think that’s the role the Senate has as jurors.But I would also point out, though, Chris, that the Senate trial is a
snapshot. There’s a massive criminal investigation underway. There will be
a massive criminal investigation of everything that happened on January 6th
and in the days before. People will want to know exactly what the president
was doing.They want to know, for example, whether the tweet he sent out calling Vice
President Pence a coward while the attack was underway, whether that tweet,
for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence. There are a lot
of questions that have to be answered and there will be many, many criminal
investigations looking at every aspect of this and everyone who was
involved, as there should be.
I’m with her on that. Why shouldn’t there be a legal investigation of Trump’s actions that day? You can bet that if the same thing had happened after a speech by AOC or Bernie Sanders there would be.
I’ve never thought that would happen because the Republicans inoculated themselves against it with their “Lock her up” chants and lur argument rebutting it: “we aren’t a banana republic.” But there must at least be a commission formed to look into the whole thing and go wherever it leads with respect to Trump’s ongoing assault on democracy. This impeachment can’t do it — they had less than a month to put together the evidence and present a case. There must be a much more concerted effort.