Month: February 2021

It seems Lindsey Graham has permanently joined the crazies. I guess he just can’t quit Donald Trump, even now:

What first seemed like a petty partisan power play in the U.S. Senate has escalated into a setback for President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice before it even really leaves the starting block.

At the center of the imbroglio is a figure who is accustomed to being collateral damage of partisan warfare on Capitol Hill: Merrick Garland.

The former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee is Biden’s pick to serve as attorney general—but unlike other key Cabinet appointees, he has yet to receive a confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee for his nomination to lead the Department of Justice.

That’s because it took the parties’ Senate leaders weeks to agree on how to divide resources and set the rules in the evenly split Senate. During that time, Democrats were technically in the majority, but the last session’s rules were still in place, meaning Republicans ran the committees. So when the incoming Judiciary chairman, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), wanted to schedule a hearing for Garland, he first had to ask the permission of the outgoing chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—and Graham said no.

With the impeachment trial of former President Trump slated to take up at least all of next week, and the chamber scheduled to be in recess the following week, it’s possible that another month could pass before Garland takes over as attorney general, said Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a member of the Judiciary panel and a close ally of Biden.

That possibly lengthy setback in installing leadership at the department is especially troubling to Democratic lawmakers and outside advocates—not only because they’re itching to get started on a new DOJ agenda, but because of the acute importance of its business at the moment. Among many other things, for example, the department is investigating and prosecuting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. It’s an urgent task in the eyes of Biden and his allies.

It’s possible he was just being a petty little jerk. He’s certainly not above that. But it’s more likely that he had another agenda. Emptywheel has some thoughts:

One of the very last things Lindsey Graham did as Senate Judiciary Chair was to send a letter to Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson urging him not to do anything about two investigations that — according to his addled little brain — “Democrats would rather go away.” In addition to the Delaware investigation of Hunter Biden, Lindsey included the John Durham investigation in that.

<blockquote>I was even the primary sponsor of bipartisan legislation, favorably reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to protect Special Counsel Mueller’s probe from being terminated. Special Counsel Mueller of course found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it was important for public trust that the probe be completed without interference.

We now find the shoe on the other foot. We have two properly predicated, ongoing investigations Democrats would rather go away: Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office into Hunter Biden. Special Counsel Durham’s probe has already yielded a felony conviction.

I am writing to respectfully request that you refrain from interfering in any way with either investigation while the Senate processes the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the position of Attorney General. The American public deserve the truth and must know that these investigations will continue without political interference.</blockquote>

There’s a lot that’s ridiculous about this letter. It is laughably false to claim that Mueller “found no evidence of ‘collusion,’” — that would be a false claim even if Lindsey had used the legally relevant term of “conspiracy.”

The shoe is not on the other foot. In contradistinction to Trump’s incessant focus on the Russian investigation, there has been no peep about these investigations from the Biden White House. Instead, Hunter Biden rolled out a book deal the other day, which led his father to focus on the import of recovery from addiction, not legal risk.

Lindsey waves Durham’s single felony conviction around — as compared to Mueller’s much more productive investigation and based on evidence entirely derived from Michael Horowitz’ investigation — even after presiding FISA Judge James Boasberg concluded that Kevin Clinesmith did not commit that crime out of any ill-will and sentenced him to a year of probation.

It’s just such a pathetic effort to sustain conspiracy theories Trump chased, and in spite of the Fox News piece on this letter quoting someone that sounds remarkably like Lindsey Graham talking about an ongoing investigation he shouldn’t know about off the record, it’s not actually clear that either of these will result in a showy prosecution. Hell, for all we know, Durham has shifted his focus to what the FBI Agents who were sending pro-Trump tweets on their phones did during the investigation or why Bill Barr’s DOJ submitted altered documents to a criminal docket, precisely the crime Clinesmith pled guilty to.

To repeat, Graham wrote this to urge Wilkinson, who remains in charge of DOJ and oversees the Durham investigation (Acting Deputy Attorney General John Carlin probably oversees the Hunter Biden one) because Merrick Garland remains the most senior Cabinet official who hasn’t been confirmed yet. This was one of his last acts as Chair of SJC.

But the other major final stunt before handing his gavel over to Dick Durbin was precisely that delay. In spite of Garland’s bipartisan support and in spite of Durbin’s exhortations to stop delaying, Lindsey simply didn’t take up Garland’s nomination when his counterparts were doing so. And so DOJ may not get a confirmed Attorney General until late February or early March.

Probably, Lindsey primarily stalled this confirmation just to impose a price on Democrats for impeaching the former President.

But I had been wondering whether Lindsey didn’t have more in mind, perhaps the delay of charges that DOJ would not unseal without Garland’s sanction. And that may be the case.

But along with that delay, Lindsey has also delayed his opportunity to obtain assurances from Garland that he’ll leave these two investigations Lindsey is obsessed about untouched.

Trying to unravel the twisted machinations of Lindsey Graham in the post-McCain era is worthy of a doctoral dissertation and clearly beyond my ken. But we do know that his ongoing need to support Dear Leader has nothing to do with getting re-elected at this point. He’s got 6 years ahead of him. And maybe he’s just trying to cover his behavior under Trump by pretending that he was serious about all this stuff and will gradually disengage. But I won’t be surprised to see him as a high priest of the Trump cult from now on. He seems to like it. It suits him.

On Jan 6th I knew that incitement was going to be a key issue. I found Lee Rowland, an ACLU lawyer who made a video about incitement and asked what she thought. She said she thought Trump had crossed the line.

Yes, I believe it crossed the line today.

— lee rowland (@berkitron) January 6, 2021

Last week I watched Chris Hayes’ experts praise the Impeachment brief by the House managers then attack Trump’s brief. (A typo in the first line! 14 pages of Incoherence!) But attacking Trump’s lawyers’ incompetence isn’t enough. We need to make the case to regular people who don’t understand what incitement is and what it takes to fulfill a legal definition. On the Feb 4th episode of Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, he brought up the argument that Trump’s lawyers will make.

-Trump’s lawyers} will make some of these points beyond the procedural points, Donald Trump did not say, “Invade the Capitol.” Donald Trump did not say, “Break windows.” Donald Trump did not say, “Engage in violence.” Donald Trump did not say, “Insurrection.” He did not say, “Riot.” He didn’t say any of those things, does that make a difference? And if the impeachment lawyers on behalf of Donald Trump make that argument in full or form than I just made it, what’s the rebuttal to that?

At 36:49 Adam Schiff gives his thoughtful and articulate legal response. But Dan Goldman’s reply 40:40 is the one that hit home for me.

Goldman: [Trump] talks like a mob boss. He is not going to use those words you referenced like, “Go execute an insurrection, go riot, go storm the Capitol.” He never would actually say those words, just like a mob boss would not say, “Go kill that person.” The mob boss would say, “Can you please take care of this?” …

When he says, “Go fight.” Or, “If Mike Pence doesn’t do the right thing, bad things will happen.” That’s violent talk, everyone understands that. And if you have any question as to whether they understood it or not, just wait until we see all of the Parler videos from social media of the people who attended his rally, who were going to the Capitol and saying that the president told us to storm the Capitol. They understood what he was trying to say.

Trial 2 for Individual 1 (with Daniel Goldman and Adam Schiff)

I haven’t read the brief yet, but just now @chrislhayes discussed how hard incitement is to prove. Pls get an expert to explain what incitement is AND book someone who successfully prosecuted someone for incitement.@LenNiehoff @markfollman https://t.co/vpEh0qn9A1

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) February 3, 2021

I found this article two days later, it needs to be read and retweeted.

Yes, what President Trump did was incitement

 Opinion by Len Niehoff

Law professor Len Niehoff laid out the incitement criteria in the Detroit Free Press:

• The speech must be directed toward producing action.
• It must be likely to result in such action.
• The action must be unlawful
• And the action advocated for must be imminent.

Liehoff thinks Trump’s words and actions on Jan 6 met these criteria. I wrote Niehoff last week explaining why I want to see him on my favorite MSNBC shows.

I’ve found the MSM often goes out of their way to defend speech that falls in the category of threatening speech–and in this case speech that fits the criteria of incitement.

Please explain why incitement IS possible for Trump and explain how his words & actions up to and during the Jan 6th riot meet the criteria for incitement. I find it fascinating how much of this case will be about threats, both behind the scenes, public, real and/or perceived.

I want people to understand the legal, technical part of incitement so that when they hear the EMOTIONAL part of the riots, they don’t go into a defensive crouch thinking they have to defend the inciting or threatening speech because they think it is going against upholding the 1st Amendment or free speech.  

I’m not a lawyer, but I learned about the specifics of legal incitement  years ago, when I was working to defund RW media. I found out that what one radio host said didn’t meet all the criteria for incitement since he wasn’t advocating for action that would be imminent. So when I watched Trump’s speech, and he told them to march to the capital, I knew that this fit the criteria for incitement.

Great thread by @SethAbramson breaking down Trump’s incitement before the insurrection. He ACKNOWLEDGES the crowd chanting “FIGHT FOR TRUMP” & thanks them. @berkitron @JameelJaffer @benwizner https://t.co/QCarg631il pic.twitter.com/FE20GObiyO

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) January 9, 2021

Also, actual scholars and lawyers spoke out last week:

“Legally frivolous”: Over 140 lawyers, scholars slam Trump’s First Amendment defense

“The First Amendment is no defense to the article of impeachment leveled against the former President, because the First Amendment does not apply in impeachment proceedings; because the president does not have a First Amendment right to incite a mob and then sit back and do nothing as the hostile mob invades the Capitol and terrorizes Congress; or because, in context, President Trump engaged in unlawful incitement.”

The letter is great, but I really hope the media gets some PROSECUTORS on to talk about incitement because when I see 1st Amendment experts on they are always putting themselves in the shoes of the person saying something horrible.

The right loves to use any attack on their speech and actions as an opportunity to be aggrieved and turn around to use the same criteria to attack the left.

I’ve already been seeing this in the Trump incitement case. “But BLM! PORTLAND! You liberals loved that! Kamala Harris set up defense funds for rioters!”  I’ve seen these comments on OANN and Newsmax lately.

What you will be seeing next week will be campaigns to go after people on the left who they say incited a riot at BLM protests. Another thing that I learned when defunding the right wing media is that they will attack the people who interrupted their revenue stream. They will attempt to say we did the same things at they did — EVEN IF OUR WORDS AND ACTIONS DON’T FIT THE CRITERIA OF INCITEMENT.  And when we don’t have a clear understanding of what is incitement, the mainstream media picks up “the controversy” and does a “both side do it” story.

I’ve taken actions to hold people and companies accountable for their violent rhetoric and threatening speech. I’ve written a lot about threatening speech, violent rhetoric and what we can do to hold people accountable for them.  I looked for economic leverage points because they are the most powerful in a country that cares about money above all else. IT WORKS.

As we have seen recently with the voting machine defamation lawsuits, when someone get in the way of the revenue stream, things happen. But I also know that focusing on the money can’t be the only method, the RW media moved to get funding by Dark Money and hides under the cover of monopolies to push an agenda. (Reminder, the New York Post loses 60-100 million dollars EVERY YEAR!)

Will Trump be convicted for incitement? I don’t know, as Schiff and Goldman said on the podcast, the senators have already made up their minds and they are making a political decision. I’ve always believed that when plan A doesn’t work you need to have plan B, C and D ready. So the other thing that I hope Professor Liehoff or Prosecutors talk about during the trial is what else can we do because the jury is rigged?

For example, when I found that the local radio host didn’t meet the specific criteria for incitement, I went to plan B and contacted his management AND the insurance carrier for the radio station. I sent them links to all the violent rhetoric and language from the host and the context of his words.  I also copied the SF District Attorney, Kamala D. Harris.

Before the actual event happened the host suddenly started talking about being peaceful. I also noted that that was the last event that he organized through the station.  I want Trump to face multiple consequences for all this horrific words and actions, I hope that they bust him on incitement on Jan 6th.  Because as Schiff said, we need to learn from what happened.

Adam Schiff: And I continued to worry that if he escapes accountability in this impeachment now, he will feel once again at liberty to engage in new and more destructive conduct, in just the way that we warned during the last trial, that if he was left in office, we could expect him to try to cheat again. If he’s not disqualified from office, we can expect that in four years, he may very well try to cheat in new and more destructive ways.

Let’s be prepared for a failure to convict, and start the other cases against him. If he gets convicted for felony money laundering he won’t be able to hold office either! Keep prosecuting him for all of his other crimes.

Ron Johnson absurdly floats that Nancy Pelosi is somehow responsible for a MAGA mob descending on the Capitol for a deadly insurrection pic.twitter.com/hUi6SydEe1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 7, 2021

That’s right. Nancy Pelosi set up January 6th apparently so that she could impeach Donald Trump again.

He is one step up from MIke LIndell, the My Pillow Guy.

Do yourself a favor and listen to “The Filibuster’s Sordid Past and Present with Adam Jentleso‪n,” the latest “Why Is This Happening?” podcast. Jentleson’s “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy” details the curious history of the Senate filibuster from a process by which a minority speaks its mind before a bill passes by majority vote to a means by which a minority vetoes the will of the majority. An early Senate rule allowed a majority of senators to end debate; it was never intended that a minority overrule the majority. But because it was rarely used, it was removed in an effort to streamline the rules.

In time, lack of a rule for cutting off debate became handy for southern senators to stop civil rights legislation for which they used it almost exclusively, says Jentleson. The filibuster became a means of flexing power out of proportion to their numbers. How little has changed.

Ed Kilgore elaborates:

Fundamentally, the filibuster (which really didn’t exist in a meaningful sense until the late 19th century) allows any determined Senate minority to resist and in many cases kill legislation it dislikes. Until 1917, with the invention of “cloture,” there was no way to force the end to a filibuster. Still, the filibuster didn’t achieve its full evil flowering as the favored tool for preservation of Jim Crow until between the world wars, and then the late stages of segregation. And it didn’t become a de facto supermajority requirement until a 1970s “reform,” designed to let the Senate function during a filibuster, relieved those using it of the exhausting chore of actually holding down the floor and gabbing incessantly.

Since then the filibuster has become a tool of convenience. And, as we know too well, it is just another tool in the anti-democratic tool box along with the electoral college, structure of the Senate itself, surgically precise gerrymandering, manipulation of the census, vote-suppression laws and other practices limiting access to the polls.

Kilgore concludes:

But all in all, the filibuster has been used to halt progress more often that it has been useful to facilitate it or defend it from attacks. And it remains incontestable that limited reforms — such as restrictions on the measures subject to the filibuster, or a return to the days when “talking filibusters” were required — are available short of its outright abolition which could preserve minority rights in the Senate without thwarting majority rule. Filibuster reform should remain at the top of every progressive legislative agenda. Those center-left or center-right politicians who always find excuses to oppose reform need to be regularly asked: How much damage to America and Americans are you willing to accept to maintain this terrible tradition?

Time to go bye-bye.

Conspiracy theories are like opinions. Everybody’s got one and they all stink … except yours, of course. Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia about fluoride lampooned by director Stanley Kubrick stands out as the iconic takedown of the anti-communist and Bircher paranoia of the 1950s and 1960s. Such ideas feel today like vintage collectibles from another time. Half a century from now our own conspiracy theories will possess some of the same nostalgic patina.

Except they never went away entirely. Like men’s ties growing wider then thinner, it is only a matter of time before yesterday’s fashion becomes fashionable once more.

David Corn reveals at Mother Jones that among the notions entertained by Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are Bircher ideas of the sort William F. Buckley sought to “drum out” of the conservative movement at the time Kubrick was filming his classic satire. As onetime national director of Family America Project, Greene helped moderate the group’s Facebook page featuring “death threats against Democrats, bigoted attacks on the Obamas and others, and assorted conspiracy theories,” Corn writes:

Despite Buckley’s efforts, the conspiracist legacy of the Birchers has continued to find adherents on the right and among Republicans. Greene’s loony paranoia—calling the Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas shootings “false flag” operations, claiming Jewish space lasers caused California wildfires—is nothing new. It’s the continuation of a trend that has infected and at times been exploited by the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement for over half a century. (Look at Trump and birtherism and his rants about the deep state.) Last year, as Peters and the Family America Project protested lockdowns and mask-wearing, the group’s Facebook page spread a meme citing something called “The Plan,” which suggested that unidentified forces would use COVID to deploy UN troops to take control of US cities.

The left is hardly immune. At New Age trade shows of the 1990s one could find charts tracking connections between the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the supposed Illuminati. Or hear tales of alien technologies secretly exploited by the government at Area 51.

Today vaccine paranoia is back. Anti-mask sentiment has morphed into anti-vaccine protests, reports the New York Times:

An out-of-work stand-up comic originally from New Jersey. An actor and conservative podcast host dressed in a white lab coat. A gadfly who has run several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Los Angeles. And at least a few who had been in Washington the day of the Capitol riot.

They were among the motley crew of so-called anti-vaxxers who recently converged on the entrance of the mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium to protest distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.

The loosely formed coalition represents a new faction in California’s long-established anti-vaccine movement. And the protest was the latest sign that Californians have become the unlikely standard-bearers for aggressive criticism of the vaccines even as virus cases continue to spread in the state.

About 50 protesters carrying signs reading “Don’t be a lab rat!” and “Covid = Scam” arrived at the entrance to the Dodger Stadium vaccination site last week. The Los Angeles Fire Department shut down the public operation for about an hour as a precauation because bullying, threatening, and intimidation of never goes out of style. The Covid-19 crisis has produced “an uptick in confrontational and threatening tactics,” the Times reports. Protesters allege firefighters overreacted.

“Anti-vaccine attitudes are as old as vaccines themselves,” said Richard M. Carpiano, who is a professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Riverside, and who studies the anti-vaccine movement. “The other thing that gets tied into this is the wellness movement, this idea that natural is better. There’s a broader kind of mistrust of Big Pharma, and about medical care and medical professions. There is this real market for discontent that these groups can really kind of seize upon.”

There is plenty of distrust to go around, some of it justified, some of it just insane.

Safety tip: Crude oil is 100 percent natural but I would not advise drinking it for what ails ya.

This twitter thread from photographer Leah Millis says it all:

I took this photograph a month ago, today.

@Kiehart took this photo as I climbed back down the scaffolding not long after taking that photo. @chrismatography said it best, “I don’t think my mind ever left. I’m still there.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CK9v6I0l5O5/?igshid=1290x7u9ozgsm

And this one will be with me forever, too. It’s hard for me to look at.

Originally tweeted by Leah Millis (@LeahMillis) on February 6, 2021.

That last one is still hard to believe is real. But it is. And the Republicans cannot summon the tiniest bit of patriotism it would take to shut this whole thing down. They just don’t have it in them.

Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey tweeted this out today:

It was a month ago when I found this broken eagle while cleaning the Capitol after the insurrection. I kept it as a tender reminder of the enormous work ahead to heal. This is one of several symbols I want to share with you as we think what comes next for our nation (THREAD)

SYMBOL OF THREAT: This shattered window on the center doors of the Capitol is the last remaining major damage I saw left as I walked around the Capitol last night. It remains as a symbol of the hate that penetrated our democracy and flooded inside.

SYMBOL OF LOSS: This week, we paid our respects to Officer Sicknick. I learned that over 140 police were injured. Suffered from cracked ribs, smashed spinal discs, stabbed with metal fence stake, one officer lost an eye.

SYMBOL OF UNCERTAINTY: I now have to pass through two layers of razor wire fencing to get to work at the Capitol. I walked the perimeter this week with the National Guard and they said they have no idea how long this protection will be necessary.

SYMBOL OF GRATITUDE: The reminders of trauma have been met with incredible kindness and compassion. The attacks, meant to break our democratic process, have instilled a newly strengthened resolve to protect it. 100s of signs thanking Capitol Police line tunnel under the Capitol.

SYMBOL OF RESILIENCE: I saw this quote over a door in the Capitol. It reminded me that healing is more than about accountability of the President and others that participated that day. “Oppressions and injustice and hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization”

SYMBOL OF COMMUNITY: I still see members of Congress, staff continuing to struggle with their own trauma and grief. I get text messages regularly from my colleagues with a simple “how are you doing?” I appreciate that they are looking out for me and I for them.

SYMBOL OF HOPE: When I arrived at my office this week, there were hundreds of cards from all over the country expressing hope from the image of me cleaning the rotunda. One woman said the actions reminded her of her immigrant mother and father who taught her humility.

What we do next with that resolve is on my mind today. Do we let this moment fade, let those who brought our country to the brink of disaster be held unaccountable, or let the conditions that led to this attack go unaddressed? No.

We cannot, for a moment, treat the attack of 1/6 as something normal that happened. It was a truly dark day in our nation’s history and it deserves a response of that magnitude.

The actions of those who perpetrated this attack – from inciting it to the death of a police officer – must be punished as to send a clear signal that violence is not an acceptable path to political change.

We must also work to strengthen the very institutions placed under attack. Our democracy is far too fragile if a demagog with a social media account and a megaphone can incite an insurrection.

We need to rebuild trust, understanding and accountability for our democratic institutions. We need to invest in civics and service to counteract lies and hate.

And finally, we need to recognize that this is the job of all of us – not just those at the Capitol. We are part of a singular American story. I am working on some ideas to do just this and I hope to work with all of you. I hope that is the true legacy of Jan 6. (end)

Originally tweeted by Andy Kim (@AndyKimNJ) on February 6, 2021.

Republicans are working overtime to diminish what happened that day on both a literal and symbolic level. After all, attacking the US Capitol during a joint session of congress to overturn the presidential election is more than just a riot or a protest or even a more standard act of terrorism. They cannot be allowed to whitewash what happened.

I have been watching Barbara Comstock, the former hard right political operative in the picture above, become more moderate over the years as she tried to jumpstart a political career. She got to congress in 2014 but lost her seat four years later. She’s a Never Trumper today and has apparently left the GOP.

Anyway, this came to mind as I was writing the post below about QAnon’s roots in the 1990s:

"Rip off the Band-Aid today and be done with her": Fmr. Rep. @BarbaraComstock (R-VA) on GOP declining to take action on @mtgreenee ahead of a vote by House Democrats to strip her of committee assignments for past antisemitic posts, embracing false QAnon conspiracies. pic.twitter.com/xeO21IfIEq

— Hallie Jackson Reports (@HallieOnMSNBC) February 4, 2021

Uhm:

Barbara Comstock with Representative Dan Burton, who publicized conspiracy theories claiming that a Clinton aide was murdered.

Friends of Comstock’s don’t like to talk about it, but her boss at the Reform committee, former Indiana Republican congressman Dan Burton, was a true Clinton conspirator. In his own back-yard version of the Warren Commission Report, Burton shot a watermelon (some contend it was a pumpkin) to test whether the 1993 death of Clinton aide Vince Foster was a suicide or, as feverish and repeatedly debunked stories on the far right alleged, a murder. In 2001, the Washington Post dubbed Comstock, by then a Republican National Committee dirt-digger, “a one-woman wrecking crew.”

During this time, Comstock also became close with David Bossie, the conservative activist who served on the Reform committee with her and later became head of Citizens United and Trump’s deputy campaign manager. Comstock is godmother to Bossie’s eldest daughter.

David Brock, the anti-Clinton writer who turned into a liberal Clinton champion, described how Comstock came by his home during one set of Clinton hearings “to watch the rerun of a dreadfully dull Whitewater hearing she had sat through all day. Comstock sat on the edge of her chair screaming over and over again, ‘Liars.’ ” That may be hyperbole from an admitted fabulist who has renounced much of his younger writings. [This is a bullshit, Brock renounced his younger wingnut writings a long time ago and he was a lot braver than the rest of the Never Trumper Johnny-come-latelys.]

[…]

Still, despite Comstock’s partisanship, many in the media found her reliable. “Facts were our bread and butter,” says Betsy Fischer Martin, the former executive producer of Meet the Press who became a friend, too. “She was very aboveboard and never tried to pull a fast one.”

As the Clinton wars wound down in the late 1990s, Comstock moved to the Republican National Committee, where she ran the research department, putting together voluminous volumes on Al Gore. She was in Florida in 2000 to help with the election recount that won George W. Bush the presidency, then served in his government as Department of Justice spokesperson, working under the man who may have been the administration’s most polarizing culture warrior, attorney general John Ashcroft.

Back in the private sector, Comstock worked at Blank Rome, a law firm where she was a registered lobbyist for the likes of Koch Industries, the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, and a pro-immigration group on Cape Cod, where her parents have a home. Comstock “made it clear she could get the real right-wingers, the crazies, onboard,” says one Democratic lawyer who worked with her on an issue for a well-known tech company.

She was a professional right wing character assassin who people like Tim Russert and Meet the Press turned to for the juicy gossip they craved. She knew what they wanted and gave it to them. The Democrats never successfully played that game and the imbalance in coverage was obvious for years and years.

As regular readers know, I tend to be forgiving of Never Trumpers who walked the walk and left their careers and social networks when the GOP elected an unfit, authoritarian, conspiracy theorist to the White House. I am not going to say “get out” if people do have a change of heart and for all I know, Comstock has. But when she’s in conversation about QAnon and conspiracy theories she would bring a lot more credibility to the argument if she copped to being one of the people who pushed the conspiracies back in the 90s that formed basis of the turbocharged alternate universe of the right wing today.

Tom mentioned this Michelle Goldberg column in his post this morning but I thought it was worth excerpting a bit more of it. Having followed the Clinton sagas from the beginning, and acknowledging their own contributions to their troubles, it is important to remember just how central the hate for them, particularly Hillary, was to the development of Newt Gingrich’s GOP cult, which Trump took over and expanded:

A clear indication that Marjorie Taylor Greene was more than a dabbler in QAnon was her 2018 endorsement of “Frazzledrip,” one of the most grotesque tendrils of the movement’s mythology. You “have to go down a number of rabbit holes to get that far,” said Mike Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, “The Storm Is Upon Us,” comes out later this year.

The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.

When Greene posted a picture of Donald Trump with the mother of the slain N.Y.P.D. officer Miosotis Familia on Facebook, one of her commenters described Frazzledrip and wrote, “This was another Hillary hit.” Greene replied, “Yes Familia,” then continued, “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad to see your comment.”

Contemplating Frazzledrip, it occurred to me that QAnon is the obscene apotheosis of three decades of Clinton demonization. It’s other things as well, including a repurposed version of the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat.

But QAnon is also the terminal stage of the national derangement over Clinton that began as soon as she entered public life. “It’s my belief that QAnon really took off because it was based on Hillary Clinton,” said Rothschild. “It was based specifically on something that a lot of 4chan dwellers wanted to see happen, which was Hillary Clinton arrested and sort of dragged away in chains.”

I was curious what Clinton thinks about all this, and it turns out she’s been thinking about it a lot. “For me, it does go back to my earliest days in national politics, when it became clear to me that there was a bit of a market in trafficking in the most outlandish accusations and wild stories concerning me, my family, people that we knew, people close to us,” she told me.

The difference is that, even if Fox News or Rush Limbaugh spread demented lies about the Clintons, there was no algorithm feeding their audience ever-sicker stuff to maximize their engagement. For most ordinary people, there were no slot machine-like dopamine hits to be had for upping the ante on what might be the greatest collective slander in American history.

Looking back to the 1990s, it’s easy to see QAnon’s antecedents. In “Clinton Crazy,” a 1997 New York Times Magazine story, Philip Weiss delved into the multipronged subculture devoted to anathematizing the first couple. He described “freelance obsessives, the people for whom the Internet was invented, cerebral hobbyists who have glimpsed in the Clinton scandals a high moral drama that might shake society to its roots.”

The people Weiss wrote about targeted both Clintons, but there was always a special venom reserved for Hillary, seen as a feminist succubus out to annihilate traditional family relations. An attendee at the 1996 Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” Running for Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trump’s secretary of the interior, described her as “the Antichrist.” (He later said he was joking.) Trump himself called Clinton “the Devil.”

[I might add that he called her “the Devil” to her face, in a nationally televi =sed presidential debate!]

For Clinton, these supernatural smears are part of an old story. “This is rooted in ancient scapegoating of women, of doing everything to undermine women in the public arena, women with their own voices, women who speak up against power and the patriarchy,” she said. “This is a Salem Witch Trials line of argument against independent, outspoken, pushy women. And it began to metastasize around me.” In this sense, Frazzledrip is just a particularly disgusting version of misogynist hatred she’s always contended with.

Nor is the claim that she’s a murderer new; it’s been an article of faith on the right ever since the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, an aide to Bill Clinton and a close friend of Hillary’s. Recently I spoke to Preston Crow, who, when he was a graduate student in 1994, created one of the first anti-Clinton websites, where he posted about things like the “Clinton body count.” (He has since become a Democrat, and he voted for Hillary in 2016.) “Once you start following the conspiracy theories, it’s fairly similar,” he told me. “QAnon took it several steps farther.”

I remember all those looney conspiracy theories about the Clintons and was always a bit surprised at how so many people just sloughed them off as some sort of gothic Arkansas arcana instead of the truly weird, dangerous stuff it was. I knew people who weren’t especially conservative but who hated the Clintons passionately, as people tended to do, and over time they began to buy into bits a pieces of these fringe theories. The strange obsessive misogyny came from a lot of different directions:

Let’s just say that I’m not surprised to see Hillary Clinton at the center of this irrational, bizarre QAnon cult. And I must confess that the ubiquitous”Lock Her Up” chants take on a whole different character when you realize what the QAnon cult is all about. Jesus…

Goldberg talks a bit about Marjorie Taylor Greene and her comment, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” which made me angry when I heard it because she knew exactly what she was doing:

To my surprise, Clinton thought Greene’s passive account of her own radicalization wasn’t entirely absurd. “We are facing a mass addiction with the effective purveying of disinformation on social media,” Clinton said. “I don’t have one iota of sympathy for someone like her, but the algorithms, we are now understanding more than ever we could have, truly are addictive. And whatever it is in our brains for people who go down those rabbit holes, and begin to inhabit this alternative reality, they are, in effect, made to believe.”

Clinton now thinks that the creation and promotion of this alternative reality, enabled and incentivized by the tech platforms, is, as she put it, “the primary event of our time.” Nothing about QAnon or Marjorie Taylor Greene is entirely new. Social media has just taken the dysfunction that was already in our politics, and rendered it uglier than anyone ever imagined.

No doubt about it. It’s been there all along. But technology has turbo-charged it into an international threat, just waiting to be exploited by hucksters (“Influencers”) who are ready to take advantage of it.

Dana Milbank’s column in WaPo today is absolutely chilling and brilliant. It is titled “199 House Republicans have embraced anti-Semitism and violence”. I knew about the Jewish lasers in space garbage, but the extent of Republican Representative Taylor Greene’s hatred of Jews still came as a shock:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who is quickly becoming the de facto face of the Republican Party, has suggested that the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was actually an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.”

She shared a video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation” with the purpose of “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.”

She posed for campaign photos with a white-supremacist leader and then refused to renounce the man.

She approved of a claim that the Israeli intelligence service assassinated John F. Kennedy, and she speculated that wealthy Jewish interests — the Rothschilds, a target of anti-Semites since the 19th century — set forest fires in California using lasers from space.

This isn’t idle bigotry, for she “liked” a social media suggestion that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who has committed “a crime punishable by death.” She posted on social media about hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, approved of a suggestion that FBI agents be executed, and posted a photo of herself with an automatic weapon next to three Democratic members of Congress, calling herself their “worst nightmare.”

On the House floor this week, she offered no apology and no direct mention of her anti-Semitic and violent statements. Using Christ-on-the-cross imagery, she condemned those who would “crucify me in the public square for words that I said, and I regret, a few years ago.”

But she didn’t regret them. She had tweeted the night before: “We owe them no apologies. We will never back down.” She retweeted an article featuring another QAnon adherent attacking the Republican Jewish Coalition. And several Republican colleagues gave her a standing ovation Wednesday night when she delivered a private speech that Republicans said was similar to the unrepentant one she gave in public on Thursday.

House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.

Like Hitler, Greene’s bigotry and hatred isn’t confined to Jews. But like Hitler, Jews seem to be an especially large obsession for her bizarre and profoundly sick mind.

If there was even a semblance of sanity left among the Republican leadership, they would be moving heaven and earth not only to expel her but every member of their party that stood to applaud her speech. She is extremely dangerous.

But the GOPQ abandoned sanity years and years ago.

UPDATE: The author of this great column is Dana Milbank. This post originally credited a different great WaPo writer. My apologies to both of them for the switch and thanks to RP for catching it.