Dominion has sued Lindell for a lot of money for doing this. And they threatened to sue Newsmax over it too which is why they have reacted the way they have reacted.
I think the impeachment managers ought to bring this into the trial to show how toxic this Big Lie is even on their favorite cable news networks.
Lindsey Graham is dancing on the head of a pin trying to save Donald Trump and he’s not doing a very graceful job of it:
Sure, right. Trump is listening to that.
He has staked EVERYTHING on the lie that he’s won the election in a landslide. He’s going to want his lawyers to make that case when he sees how the Democrats lay out the case that the Big Lie incited the crowd on January 6th.
In fact, they have already put that out there:
To the extent Averment 5 alleges his opinion is factually in error, the 45th President denies this allegation.
It is not factually in error. And, by the way, Trump and his people knew it was a lie.
Former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election largely due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a post-election autopsy completed by Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio.
The 27-page document shows that voters in 10 key states rated the pandemic as their top voting issue, and President Biden won higher marks on the topic. The report also indicates that Trump lost ground among key demographic groups he needed.
The internal report cuts against Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him and that Biden could not have fairly beaten him — and mirrors what many Trump campaign officials said privately for months.
The analysis by Fabrizio, a Florida pollster who has worked for Trump for years, was shared among campaign advisers late last year and was provided to The Washington Post on Monday night. Politico first reported on the existence of the document.
He lost a whole lot of people he needed for entirely legitimate reasons:
The report, which groups states into ones Trump held versus ones that were flipped, says that voters found Biden more competent to deal with the coronavirus crisis and in both groups gave him higher marks on being honest.
Although Trump “dominated” among voters focused on the economy, according to the analysis, “Biden won Coronavirus voters, which was a bigger share.”
It outlines in specific detail how Trump lost key demographic groups that he needed to win, while lauding some of his gains among minority groups.
“POTUS suffered his greatest erosion with White voters, particularly White Men in both state groups. However, he made double digit gains with Hispanics in both groups, while his performance among Blacks was virtually the same as 2016. POTUS lost ground with almost every age group in both state groupings,” the autopsy reads, adding that the worst loss was among White college-educated voters.
“In 2016, Trump won Independents by double digits in both the Flipped and Held groupings. They shifted against him significantly in 2020,” the analysis reads.
Voters over 65 also shifted away from Trump, the report says.
There were several other findings that hurt him, too. Voters who made up their minds in the final month of the campaign narrowly went for Biden over Trump, the report says, even though Trump hoped to gain steam after his final debate performance.
And while Trump spent much of the final days pushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination, it may have backfired politically, Fabrizio writes.
“9-in-10 voters in both groups said that SCOTUS was a factor in deciding their vote. Ironically, those who said it was a factor voted for Biden in both state groups while those who said it wasn’t a factor voted for POTUS by large margins.”
He knew. He did it anyway. And there’s no way in hell he will ever concede. In fact, I think he wants his team to say the election was stolen, implicitly defending the insurrection.
The president’s TV Impeachment lawyer is planning to defend him both on the grounds that the impeachment is illegitimate because Mitch McConnell wouldn’t take it up until he was out of office. But it’s clear they are also preparing to defend him on the basis of the First Amendment saying he had a right to lie about the election results, just like any other guy on the street.
Ok. But here’s a nice rundown on what he actually did after the election:
From November through January 6, Trump engaged in an aggressive, meritless quest to hang on to power.
Even before election day, there were many earlier indications that Trump would not go gently into a post-presidency. He spent months laying the groundwork for delegitimizing the election in case he lost. In September, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
By election night he was upfront about his intentions. As it began to look like he would lose, he put the country on notice: “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said in a televised speech shortly before 2:30 a.m. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election—frankly, we did win this election.”
That was the beginning of the big election lie that led thousands of Trump supporters to breach the U.S. Capitol in a failed quest to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Without the lie, perpetuated by Trump and his acolytes, there would have been no insurrection. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick would still be alive.
Just as soon as the media called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump and his lawyers whipped up false claims about election fraud in hopes of stopping the states from certifying Biden’s election. Trump wheeled out White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to accuse the Democrats of “welcoming fraud” in a spectacle that was so embarrassing Fox News cut away from it.
There was no substance to any of it. Trump’s campaign lawyers went on to lose dozens of cases in court. Even Bill Barr, his strongly supportive attorney general, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. (At odds with Trump on this issue, Barr announced his resignation even though he had just a little more than a month left to serve.)
Still, Trump pressed on with his longshot bid to wipe out election results in the swing states.
Remember the lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court by the attorney general of Texas, seeking to nullify 20 million votes in four states, thereby throwing the election to Trump? The lawsuit that 18 other state attorneys general supported? It was “secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House,” the New York Times has reported. Filed on December 7, the suit absurdly claimed that it was statistically impossible for Trump to have lost the election:
<blockquote>The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.</blockquote>
White House staff—which is to say, paid government employees—pushed that preposterous statistical fabrication, too. And Trump’s White House pressured members of Congress—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—into signing an amicus brief supporting the bogus case. Two thirds of the Republicans in the House would do so. An array of longtime conservative grassroots leaders enlisted in the effort as well. These swamp creatures—including Tony Perkins, Al Regnery, Tom Fitton, Becky Norton Dunlop, Brent Bozell, and Gary Bauer—falsely and bizarrely stated: “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”
When the Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit on December 11, Trump still did not concede.
When the Electoral College met on December 14 and confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, Trump did not concede, either.
Instead, he kept grasping and clawing for more options. His efforts to overturn the election results were so many and so varied that by mid-December, journalists had run out of clichés to describe them: “last-gasp,” “last-ditch,” “eleventh-hour,” and “hail Mary” had all been burned through.
At that point, only one more deadline was left.
January 6, the date scheduled for the constitutionally required congressional “counting” of the Electoral College votes. It was supposed to be a mere formality—but as the final procedural step before the new president was sworn in, Trump and his supporters seized it as their last chance to alter the outcome, by any disruption necessary. His efforts, and those of his allies, began to converge on that date.
On December 27, Trump began promoting a January 6 gathering in Washington—what would eventually serve as the staging point for his rally-turned-mob:
On December 30, Sen. Josh Hawley said that he would object to the certification of Electoral College votes on January 6. Three days later, Sen. Ted Cruz and a batch of other Republicans also said they would object.
In Georgia, where incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were campaigning to retain their Senate seats in a pair of run-off races that would determine the balance of power in the chamber, Trump hijacked the spotlight for his own means.
In public, he repeatedly berated Georgia officials over their handling of the election. Behind the scenes, he squeezed them to change the results of the presidential election with the aim of blocking Biden’s election from being certified by Congress on January 6. Trump pressed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to use the state legislature to overturn Biden’s win in the Peach State. Trump called Georgia’s elections investigator and told him to “find the fraud.” When no one bit, Trump then directly called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on January 2 and told him to “find” the precise number of votes Trump needed to win the state or else there would be “a big risk to you.”
Meanwhile, lawyers and organizations working on Trump’s behalf, such as Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and an activist outfit called Women for America First, enthusiastically promoted Trump’s baseless claims with splashy events designed to garner grassroots support for Trump’s cause.
Militia groups started raising money and organizing to take mass action on January 6.
Trump returned to Georgia on January 4 for a final campaign rally for the senators and told the crowd he would stop Biden from becoming president.
“They’re not going to take this White House,” Trump said. “We’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now.”
Earlier that day, Loeffler and Perdue both revealed that they would join Hawley and Cruz in objecting to Biden’s certification on January 6, which jazzed the crowd. Trump welcomed newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to the stage. Known for embracing all manner of bigoted and delusional conspiracy theories, Greene said said she was “so fired up” that Loeffler agreed to object. “We have to save America and stop socialism. . . . We’re going to fight for President Trump on January 6! God bless, Georgia, God bless America—let’s do this!”
On January 5, Loeffler and Perdue ended their campaigns in failure. But Trump’s campaign was just about to reach its bloody climax.
At his January 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse by the White House, Trump’s tough talk became explicit marching orders. Trump falsely suggested to the rallygoers that he would accompany them to the Capitol, giving them the full impression that he shared their goal of physically descending on Congress to prevent the certification of Biden’s election. His apologists have made much of his one remark about “peacefully and patriotically” marching to the Capitol. But that line must be looked at in the context of the rest of his speech. He said:
<blockquote>We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.</blockquote>
And:
<blockquote>We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will ‘Stop the Steal’. . . . You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. . . . We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.</blockquote>
And:
<blockquote>Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. . . . We are going to the Capitol, and we are going to try and give—the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote, but we are going to try—give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re try—going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.</blockquote>
And then the mob came.
The Washington Post reported that “as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who—safely ensconced in the West Wing—was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their pleas.”
While the violence unfolded, Trump didn’t send help to protect Congress. He remained focused on pushing Republican members of Congress to object to or delay the vote count, dialing the phone in hopes of finding another recruit for his cause.
It wasn’t until long after the windows had been smashed and the blood had been spilled that Trump issued any kind of public statement about the shocking scene that had unfolded. In an awkward, short video shot in the Rose Garden, he didn’t manage to unequivocally condemn the violence; rather, he bathed the insurrectionists with warm words in support of their shared cause.
“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you’re very special, you’ve seen what happens, you’ve seen the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home and go home in peace.”
Trump’s team asserts that at no time did Trump try to subvert the election results. Oh my goodness did they open up can of worms there. Just the stuff in Georgia alone, documented on tape is enough. But he also had Rudy calling Tommy Tuberville while the riot was happening to get him to object to the results. The way we know this is because he got the wrong number and called Mike Lee instead and left a voice mail. We have heard the voice mail.
Trump’s defense seems to be that he should not be impeached because he lost and is no longer in office. Also, he didn’t lose. Also, he can say what he wants.
If January 6th didn’t show that he was a clear and present danger, you are blind. It’s a miracle we survived the past four years.
Good lord. This last Axios insider account of one of the White House meetings about how to overturn the election is just mind-boggling:
Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
“How the hell did Sidney get in the building?” White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
President Trump’s private schedule hadn’t included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they’d come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who’d been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
Herschmann took a seat in a yellow chair close to the doorway. Powell, Flynn, Newman and Byrne sat in a row before the Resolute Desk, facing the president.
For weeks now, ever since Rudy Giuliani had commandeered Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the election, outsiders had been coming out of the woodwork to feed the president wild allegations of voter fraud based on highly dubious sources.
Trump was no longer focused on any semblance of a governing agenda, instead spending his days taking phone calls and meetings from anyone armed with conspiracy theories about the election. For the White House staff, it was an unending sea of garbage churned up by the bottom feeders.
Powell began this meeting with the same baseless claim that now has her facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit: She told the president thatDominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
[Note: In response to a request for comment, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: “I will not publicly discuss my private meetings with the President of the United States. I believe those meetings are privileged and confidential under executive privilege and under rules of the legal profession. I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.”]
Powell waved an affidavit from the pile of papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela.
She proposed declaring a national security emergency, grantingher and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.
“Hold on a minute, Sidney,” Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. “You’re part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?”
Giuliani’s legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.
“It’s foreign interference,” Powell insisted, then added: “Rudy hasn’t understood what this case is about until just now.”
In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. “Get Pat down here immediately!” Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, “Who are you?”
The meeting was already getting heated.
White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell’s allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.
But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.
Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: “So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?”
As for Powell’s larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign’s lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.
By now, people were yelling and cursing.
The room was starting to fill up. Trump’s personal assistant summoned White House staff secretary Derek Lyons to join the meeting and asked him to bring a copy of a 2018 executive order that the Powell group kept citing as the key to victory. Lyons agreed with Cipollone and the other officials that Powell’s theories were nonsensical.
It was now four against four.
Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.
“You’re quitting! You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” he exploded at the senior adviser. Flynn then turned to the president, and implored: “Sir, we need fighters.”
Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell’s pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. “All you do is promise, but never deliver,” he said to her sharply.
Flynn was ranting, seemingly infuriated about anyone challenging Powell, who had represented him in his recent legal battles.
Finally Herschmann had enough. “Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?” he shot back at Flynn. “If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down.” Flynn sat back down.
The meeting had come entirely off the rails.
Byrne, backing up Flynn, told Trump the White House lawyers didn’t care about him and were being obstructive. “Sir, we’re both entrepreneurs, and we both built businesses,” the former Overstock CEO told Trump. “We know that there are times you have to be creative and take different steps.”
This was a remarkable level of personal familiarity, given it was the first time Byrne had met the president. All the stanchions and buffers between the White House and the outside world had crumbled.
Byrne kept attacking the senior White House staff in front of Trump. “They’ve already abandoned you,” he told the president aggressively. Periodically duringthe meeting Flynn or Byrne challenged Trump’s top staff — portraying them as disloyal: So do you think the president won or not?
At one point, with Flynn shouting, Byrne raised his hand to talk. He stood up and turned around to face Herschmann. “You’re a quitter,” he said. “You’ve been interfering with everything. You’ve been cutting us off.”
“Do you even know who the fuck I am, you idiot?” Herschmann snapped back.
“Yeah, you’re Patrick Cipollone,” Byrne said.
“Wrong! Wrong, you idiot!”
The staff were now on their feet, standing behind one of the couches and facing the Powell crew at the Resolute Desk. Cipollone stood to Herschmann’s left. Lyons, on his last day onthe job, stood to Herschmann’s right.
Trump was behind the desk, watching the show. He briefly left the meeting to wander into his private dining room.
The usually mild-mannered Lyons blasted the Powell set: “You’ve brought 60 cases. And you’ve lost every case you’ve had!”
Trump came back into the Oval Office from the dining room to rejoin the meeting. Lyons pointed out to Powell that their incompetence went beyond their lawsuits being thrown out for standing. “You somehow managed to misspell the word ‘District’ three different ways in your suits,” he said pointedly.
In a Georgia case, the Powell team had misidentified the court on the first page of their filing as “THE UNITED STATES DISTRICCT COURT, NORTHERN DISTRCOICT OF GEORGIA.” And they had identified the Michigan court as the “EASTERN DISTRCT OF MICHIGAN.”
These were sloppy spelling errors. But given that these lawsuits aimed to overturn a presidential election, the court nomenclature should have been pristine.
Powell, Flynn and Byrne began attacking Lyons as they renewed their argument to Trump: There they go again, they want to focus on the insignificant details instead of fighting for you.
Trump replied, “No, no, he’s right. That was very embarrassing. That shouldn’t have happened.”
The Powell team needed to regroup. They shifted to a new grievance to turn the conversation away from their embarrassing errors. Powell insisted that they hadn’t “lost” the 60-odd court cases, since the cases were mostly dismissed for lack of standing and they had never had the chance to present their evidence.
Every judge is corrupt, she claimed. We can’t rely on them. The White House lawyers couldn’t believe what they were hearing. “That’s your argument?” a stunned Herschmann said. “Even the judges we appointed? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Powell had more to say. She and Flynn began trashing the FBI as well, and the Justice Department under Attorney General Bill Barr, telling Trump that neither could be trusted. Both institutions, they said, were corrupt, and Trump needed to fire the leadership and get in new people he could trust.
Cipollone, standing his ground amidst this mishmash of conspiracies, said they were totally wrong. He aggressively defended the DOJ and the FBI, saying they had looked into every major claim of fraud that had been reported.
Flynn and Powell had long nursed their antipathy to the FBI and Justice. Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation but withdrew the plea after hiring Powell as his lawyer in June 2019.
The two alleged the FBI had entrapped Flynn and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence, known as Brady material, as required by law. They had found an ally in Barr, a fierce critic of the Russia investigation who finally directed the DOJ to drop Flynn’s case.
Herschmann, known inside the White House as a defender of Barr and the DOJ, went off on Flynn again: “Listen, the same people that you’re trashing, if they didn’t produce the Brady material to Sidney, your ass would still be in jail!”
It was no longer technically true that Flynn would be in jail, as he had received a post-election pardon from Trump. But Flynn was furious. “Don’t mention my case,” he roared. Herschmann responded, “Where do you think Sidney got this information? Where do you think it came from? From the exact same people in the Department of Justice that you’re now saying are corrupt.”
Byrne, wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: “I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation.”
Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?” Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.
Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.
He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They’re saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let’s give this a shot.
The words “martial law” were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.
But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.
Powell was arguing that they couldn’t get a judge to enforce any subpoena to hand over the voting machines because all the judges were corrupt. She and her group repeatedly referred to the National Emergencies Act and a Trump executive order from 2018 that was designed to clear the way for the government to sanction foreign actors interfering in U.S. elections.
These laws were, in the view of Powell, Flynn and the others, the key to unlocking extraordinary powers for Trump to stay in office beyond Jan. 20.
Their theory was that because foreign enemies had stolen the election, all bets were off and Trump could use the full force of the United States government to go after Dominion.
It was remarkable that the presidency had deteriorated to such an extent that this fight in the Oval Office between senior White House officials and radical conspiracists was even taking place.
“How exactly are you going to do this?” an exasperated Herschmann asked again, later in the conversation. Newman again cited the 2018 executive order, which prompted Herschmann to question out loud whether she was even a lawyer.
Then Byrne chimed in: “There are guys with big guns and badges who can get these things.” Herschmann couldn’t believe it. “What are you, three years old?” he asked.
Lyons, the staff secretary, told the president that the executive order Powell and Flynn were citing did not give him the authority they claimed it did to seize voting machines. Morgan, the campaign lawyer, also expressed skepticism about their idea of invoking national security emergency powers.
To help adjudicate, Trump then patched in the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, on speakerphone. Trump’s personal assistant brought O’Brien into the call with no explanation of what madness would await him.
O’Brien said very little in the short time he was on the call but intervened at one point to say he saw no evidence to support Powell’s notion of declaring a national security emergency to seize voting machines. There was so much fiery crosstalk it was hard for anyone on the telephone to follow the conversation.
Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell’s theories, but he said, “At least she’s out there fighting.”
The discussion shifted from Dominion voting machines to a conversation about appointing Powell as a special counsel inside the government to investigate voter fraud. She wanted a top secret security clearance and access to confidential voter information.
Lyons told Trump he couldn’t appoint Powell as a special counsel at the Justice Department because this was an attorney general appointment. Lyons, Cipollone and Herschmann — in fact the entire senior White House staff who were aware of this idea — were all vehemently opposed to Powell becoming a special counsel anywhere in the government.
By this point Trump had also patched into the call his personal lawyer Giuliani and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows indicated that he was trying to wrap his mind around what exactly Powell’s role would entail. He told Powell she would have to fill out the SF-86 questionnaire before starting as special counsel.
This was seen as a delaying tactic. The sense in the room was that Trump might actually greenlight this extraordinary proposal.
At its essence, the Powell crew’s argument to the president was this: We have the real information. These people — your White House staff — don’t believe in the truth. They’re liars and quitters. They’re not willing to fight for you because they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Put us in charge. Let us take control of everything. We’ll prove to you that what we’re saying is right. We won’t quit, we’ll fight. We’re willing to fight for the presidency.
On some level, this argument was music to Trump’s ears. He was desperate. Powell and her team were the only people willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that a path to stay in power in the White House remained.
The Oval Office portion of the meeting had dragged on for nearly three hours, creeping beyond 9 p.m. The arguments became so heated that even Giuliani — still on the phone — at one point told everyone to calm down. One participant later recalled: “When Rudy’s the voice of reason, you know the meeting’s not going well.”
Giuliani told Trump he was going to come over to the White House. The president, having forgotten about the others on the line, hung up and cut multiple people off the call.
Herschmann, Cipollone and Lyons left the Oval Office, but soon discovered that the Powell entourage had made their way to the president’s residence. They followed them upstairs, to the Yellow Oval Room, Trump’s living room, where they were joined by Giuliani and Meadows.
Trump sat beside Powell in armchairs facing the door, separated by a round, wooden antique table. Giuliani sat in an armchair to the right of them, while Byrne and Meadows sat on a couch. Byrne wolfed down pigs in a blanket and little meatballs on toothpicks that staff had set on the coffee table.
Herschmann was primed to brawl and ready to dump on Powell. It had been a long day.
“Rudy,” he said, turning to Giuliani, “Sidney was just in the Oval telling the president you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Right, Sidney?” He turned to Powell: “Why don’t you tell Rudy to his face?”
“Eric, really it’s not appropriate,” Trump replied curtly.
“What’s not appropriate?” Herschmann shot back. Turning to Powell, he said, “Why don’t you repeat to Rudy what you just told the president in the Oval Office — that he has no idea about the case and that he only just began to understand it a few hours ago.”
Three days later, Giuliani would publicly distance himself from Powell, telling Newsmax that Powell did not represent the president, and that “whatever she’s talking about, it’s her own opinions.”
It didn’t take long for the yelling to start up again. They were now in hour four of a meeting unprecedented even by the deranged standards of the final days of the Trump presidency.
Now it was Meadows’ turn, blasting Flynn for trashing him and accusing him of being a quitter. “Don’t you dare challenge me about whether I’m being supportive of the president and working hard,” Meadows shouted, reminding Flynn that he’d defended him during his legal troubles.
Trump and Cipollone, who frequently butted heads, went at it too, over whether the administration had the authority to do what Powell was proposing.
Powell kept asserting throughout the night that she had — or would soon produce — the evidence needed to prove foreign interference. She kept insisting that Trump had the legal authority he needed to seize voting machines. But she did not have the goods.
Powell at one point turned to Lyons and demanded, “Why are you speaking? Are you still employed here?” The staff secretary, who had already resigned, laughed and joked, “Well I guess I’m here until midnight.”
It was after midnight by the time the White House officials had finally said their piece. They left that night fully prepared for the mad possibility Trump might still name Sidney Powell special counsel. You have our advice, they told the president before walking out. You decide who to listen to.
Yes, Trump lost the election and he lost it because of his personality and performance in office:
Former President Donald Trump has blamed the election results on unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance. But at the top levels of his campaign, a detailed autopsy report that circulated among his political aides paints a far different — and more critical — portrait of what led to his defeat.
The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.
The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers just before President Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
It is unclear if Trump has seen the report.
The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.
The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.
Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”
The picture of the election presented in the report is widely shared by political professionals in both parties, if not by Trump and his legions of his supporters. Trump never offered a concession to Biden, and up until his final days in office, he clung to the debunked idea that the election had been stolen.
Fabrizio declined to comment on the post-mortem. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s personal behavior, the autopsy makes clear, contributed to his defeat. “Biden had a clear edge over POTUS on being seen as honest & trustworthy,” Fabrizio writes.
Trump’s response to the pandemic was also critical. The autopsy says that coronavirus registered as the top issue among voters, and that Biden won those voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. A majority registered disapproval of Trump’s handling of the virus.
Most voters said they prioritized battling the coronavirus over reopening the economy, even as the president put a firm emphasis on the latter. And roughly 75 percent of voters — most of whom favored Biden — said they favored public mask-wearing mandates.
Unfortunately, tens of millions of Americans have been convinced that the lying, incompetent, imbecile won in a landslide and the election was stolen from him. And some are seeking revenge.
With Coke, maybe. With Democrats, definitely.
The president has limited control over the whole economy. Even less so now that it is global. But that does not stop presidents from claiming credit when things go well. And even (as with Donald Trump) when Main Street’s economy is in the toilet while Wall Street’s cruises along profitably. Nonetheless, over most of the last century the economy has been more prosperous under Democratic presidents.
David Leonhardt runs the numbers:
Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans, according to a Times analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.
Experts are unsure why this is. But it is more than statistical noise:
First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.
That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.
Also, water is wet.
Also also, Democrats make public investments that pay off down the road in jobs and prosperity. Investments “that the private sector does not make when left to its own devices.” Not that Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon failed to make them.
But the difference could come down to which interest groups the two parties most heed:
One possibility is that the two parties are both responding to the interest groups that support and finance them, suggested Ms. Wanamaker, who worked in the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration. But the Democratic-leaning groups (like labor unions and civil-rights organizations) may favor policies that lift broad-based economic growth, while Republican-leaning groups (like the wealthy) favor policies that mostly shift income toward themselves.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to that regularly (this quote from 2015 or so):
“From 1935 to 1980, we’re coming out of the Great Depression. What do we do? We do two things. We put a cop on the beat on Wall Street and we started investing in our future together — in education, in infrastructure, in research. And we build America’s great middle class — the 90 percent, everybody outside the top 10 percent. The 90 percent get 70 percent of all wage growth in this country. So GDP [gross domestic product] is going up. And families across the spectrum, they’re doing better.
“Trickle-down economics hits in the 1980s and you just watch this reverse. So from 1980 to 2012, that’s the latest year for which we have data, the 90 percent, everybody outside the 10 percent, do you know how much they got? They got zero percent of income growth; 100 percent of income growth — GDP kept going up — 100 percent of income growth went to the top 10 percent in America.”
The Washington Post fact checker examined Warren’s statements. Including after-tax resources from all sources (including government payments) to measure prosperity makes the difference somewhat less stark. But that analysis uses “sizable improvement” to compare a 50 percent increase in after-tax income for the bottom one-fifth of families and a 36 percent for the middle fifth with a tripling for the 1 percent from 1970 to 2011.
Lacey Rose, a spokeswoman for Warren, responded that market income “paints a better picture of the plight of middle class families than looking at an income measure that includes transfer payments.” She noted that transfers are illiquid and not fungible –housing vouchers cannot be used to fix a car—and that refundable tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit are erratically timed.
Whatever the cause of presidential-term differences, Leonhardt writes, the pattern is clear: “The American economy has performed much better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century.”
You can take that to the bank.
Post-election reporting made it clear that President Donald Trump wanted others to fabricate evidence to back up his unfounded claims the Nov. 3 election had been stolen. When that failed, Trump pressured state election officials to falsify results. In a taped Jan. 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggets he “find 11,780 votes” to allow him to win the state’s electoral votes. It would be a “criminal offense,” Trump threatened, to allow the allow results to stand that awarded them to Joe Biden.
This is a clear pattern of behavior.
Former special counsel Robert Mueller testified to a House Judiciary Committee in July 2019 that President Trump had asked his White House counsel Don McGahn to create a false record that Trump had not ordered him to fire Mueller. McGahn refused.
Now a blockbuster New York Times story published Monday recounts a Dec. 1 White House meeting between a furious Trump and White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, in which “Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results.”
Did Trump direct Barr to fabricate evidence? Federal authorities and Democratic impeachment managers will want to know.
The Times report examines 77 days in which Trump nurtured a lie of a stolen election. His lie was “propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media” all the way to the violent insurrection of Jan. 6.
Before Thanksgiving, a team of attorneys Barr called “clowns” had drafted a plan to challenge before the Supreme Court the election results in states Trump lost. But only a state attorney general could bring such a case, and only Ken Paxton of Texas would do it. Other attorneys general saw too many red flags in the plan to attach their names to it. Paxton filed his brief on Dec. 7, not disclosing “it had been written by outside parties.”
The Times continues:
The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
Condemnation, some of it from conservative legal experts, rained down. The suit made “a mockery of federalism” and “would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles,” read a brief from a group of Republican office holders and former administration officials. Putting a finer point on it, Richard L. Hasen, an election-law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, called it “a heaping pile of a lawsuit.”
One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
That prompted a call from the president, who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed. The pressure campaign was on.
Another Trump threat to a Georgia official. Another possible federal and state crime from the former president.
The Times report also reveals that plans to march from the Ellipse to the Capitol were not part of the long-planned Jan. 6 rally planning until the White House became involved. Dustin Stockton, one of the organizers and a Breitbart veteran, said he only learned of it on the day of the rally. Rebranded “March to Save America,” the rally had “effectively become a White House production.”
New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.
Not that any of these details will prevent feckless, weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate from voting to acquit Trump at the end of his second Senate trial. They have too little integrity to do otherwise.
We aren’t alone. But we are the world’s only military superpower and as such form a unique threat if this gets any further out of hand.
We are closer than we think and not incidentally because the last administration went out of its way to excuse far right extremists and misdirect law enforcement to focus on a non-existent threat from the left:
As racial justice protests erupted nationwide last year, President Donald J. Trump, struggling to find a winning campaign theme, hit on a message that he stressed over and over: The real domestic threat to the United States emanated from the radical left, even though law enforcement authorities had long since concluded it came from the far right.
It was a message that was quickly embraced and amplified by his attorney general and his top homeland security officials, who translated it into a shift in criminal justice and national security priorities even as Mr. Trump was beginning to openly stoke the outrage that months later would culminate in the storming of the Capitol by right-wing extremists.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to focus his administration on the antifa movement and leftist groups did not stop the Justice Department and the F.B.I. from pursuing cases of right-wing extremism. They broke up a kidnapping plot, for example, targeting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat.
But the effect of his direction was nonetheless substantial, according to interviews with current and former officials, diverting key portions of the federal law enforcement and domestic security agencies at a time when the threat from the far right was building ominously.
In late spring and early summer, as the racial justice demonstrations intensified, Justice Department officials began shifting federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents from investigations into violent white supremacists to focus on cases involving rioters or anarchists, including those who might be associated with the antifa movement. One Justice Department prosecutor was sufficiently concerned about an excessive focus on antifa that the official went to the department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, telling his office that politics might have played a part.Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left-wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized, according to two people who worked on Justice Department efforts to counter domestic terrorism. They were told to do so even though the F.B.I., in particular, had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well-organized far-right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the president.
White House and Justice Department officials stifled internal efforts to publicly promote concerns about the far-right threat, with aides to Mr. Trump seeking to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism” in internal discussions, according to a former official at the Department of Homeland Security.
Requests for funding to bolster the number of analysts who search social media posts for warnings of potential violent extremism were denied by top homeland security officials, limiting the department’s ability to spot developing threats like the post-Election Day anger among far-right groups over Mr. Trump’s loss.
The scale and intensity of the threat developing on the right became stunningly clear on Jan. 6, when news broadcasts and social media were flooded with images of far-right militias, followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement and white supremacists storming the Capitol.
Militias and other dangerous elements of the far right saw “an ally in the White House,” said Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who teaches at Georgetown University and focuses on domestic terrorism. “That has, I think, allowed them to grow and recruit and try to mainstream their opinions, which is why I think you end up seeing what we saw” at the Capitol.
Good old Bill Barr was right there with him, you’ll recall:
Mr. Trump’s focus on what he portrayed as a major threat from antifa was embraced in particular by Attorney General William P. Barr.
Mr. Barr had long harbored concerns about protests and violence from the left. Soon after taking office in early 2019, he began a weekly national security briefing by asking the F.B.I. what it was doing to combat antifa, according to two people briefed on the meetings. Officials viewed his sense of the threat as exaggerated. They explained that it was not a terrorist organization, but rather a loose movement without an organization or hierarchy, and tried to correct what they described as misperceptions, according to one of the people.
Still, in meetings last year with political appointees in Washington, department investigators felt pressured to find evidence that antifa adherents were conspiring to conduct coordinated terrorist attacks.
When F.B.I. intelligence continued to deem white nationalists the leading domestic terrorism threats — part of what the bureau describes as racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists — prosecutors were asked to also consider information from the Department of Homeland Security that antifa and radical leftist anarchists were instead the leading threats, according to a person involved in the conversations.
Mr. Barr said in a statement that “there was no ‘prioritization’” of the leftist threat, and that all violence should be condemned.
“The F.B.I. already had a robust program to combat violence driven by white supremacy and nationalism,” Mr. Barr said. “I wanted there to be a comparable one for antifa and antifalike groups.”
The pressure from Mr. Trump was unrelenting. After Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, testified to Congress in September that antifa was “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization,” Mr. Trump lashed out at him on Twitter, saying that the F.B.I. protected such “anarchists and thugs” and allowed them “to get away with ‘murder.’”
Investigators at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security moved quickly and forcefully to address the violence that erupted amid the summer’s racial justice protests.
The demonstrations gave way to looting and rioting, including serious injuries and shootings. Over several chaotic nights in Minneapolis, rioters burned down a corridor of largely immigrant-owned businesses and set a police precinct on fire. Similar scenes played out in other cities.
In late August, Michael Reinoehl, a self-professed antifa supporter, shot and killed a pro-Trump protester in Portland, Ore. The president cheered his death at the hands of the federal officers who later tried to apprehend him. “We got him,” he said.
But while Mr. Trump and others saw the developments as evidence of a major assault from the left, the picture was actually more complicated.
The shooting by Mr. Reinoehl, as the F.B.I. pointed out this month in an internal memo, was the first killing in more than 20 years by what the bureau classifies as an “anarchist violent extremist,” the type of threat Mr. Trump had emphasized.
Over the late spring and summer, the F.B.I. opened more than 400 domestic terrorism investigations, including about 40 cases into possible antifa adherents and 40 into the boogaloo, a right-wing movement seeking to start a civil war, along with investigations into white supremacists suspected of menacing protesters, according to F.B.I. data and a former Justice Department official. Even among those movements, career prosecutors saw the boogaloo as the gravest threat.
Members of violent militias began to go to protests as self-appointed police forces, sometimes saying that they had heeded Mr. Trump’s call. They attended Republican events as self-described security forces.
Still, Justice Department leadership was adamant that terrorism investigators focus on antifa as the demonstrations spread, according to an official who worked on the inquiries.
The small cadre of intelligence analysts inside the department’s counterterrorism section were pulled into the effort, writing twice daily reports. National security prosecutors staffed command posts at the F.B.I. to deal with the protests and associated violence and property crimes, and to help protect statues and monuments seen as potential targets.
All of this was a strain on the counterterrorism section, which has only a few dozen prosecutors and like other parts of the department was reeling from the coronavirus. A top F.B.I. domestic terrorism chief also expressed concern to Justice Department officials over the summer about the diversion of resources.
The counterterrorism section at the time was working with prosecutors and agents around the country on cases involving people affiliated with the Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, other militia members and violent white supremacists. In some parts of the country, agents who had been investigating violent white supremacists pivoted to investigate anarchists and others involved in the rioting, struggling in certain cases to find any conspiracy or other federal charges to bring against them.
Around the same time, the F.B.I. was tracking worrisome threats emanating from the far right. Agents in Michigan monitoring members of a violent antigovernment militia called Wolverine Watchmen received intelligence in June that the men planned to recruit more members and kidnap state governors, according to court documents.
After six members of the group were charged in October with plotting to abduct Ms. Whitmer, one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal opponents, the president insulted her and reiterated that the left posed the true threat. “She calls me a White Supremacist — while Biden and Democrats refuse to condemn Antifa, Anarchists, Looters and Mobs that burn down Democrat run cities,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.
Dozens of F.B.I. employees and senior managers were sent on temporary assignments to Portland — including the head of the Tampa field office, who was an expert in Islamic terrorism, according to current and former law enforcement officials — where left-leaning protests had intensified since tactical federal teams arrived.
Some F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials expressed concern that the Portland work was a drain on the bureau’s effort to combat what they viewed as the more lethal strains of domestic extremism. The bureau had about 1,000 domestic terrorism cases under investigation at the time, and only several hundred agents in the field assigned to them. The Homeland Security Department even sent agents to Portland who were usually assigned to investigate drug cartels at the border.
Mr. Barr also formed a task force run by trusted U.S. attorneys in Texas and New Jersey to prosecute antigovernment extremists. Terrorism prosecutors working on the investigations arising from the summer’s violence were not told beforehand of Mr. Barr’s decision. They questioned the rationale behind the task force because it seemed to duplicate their work and could create confusion, according to two people familiar with their pushback.
Ultimately, the federal response to last year’s protests elicited a mixed bag. Federal prosecutors nationwide charged more than 300 people with crimes, including some who self-identified with antifa.
But the F.B.I. also charged adherents of the boogaloo, including an Air Force sergeant suspected of murdering a federal officer and trying to kill another in California. The sergeant had previously been charged with the shooting death of a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz County during a gun battle on June 6 that led to his arrest.As attorney general, William P. Barr played up the threat from antifa, a loose collection of leftist agitators, even as Justice Department and F.B.I. officials saw a greater threat from the far right.
There’s more at the link. Just another one of Trump’s anti-democratic fascist moves. Just because he’s incredibly stupid, it doesn’t mean his isn’t dangerous.
I have been having this thought a lot in the past couple of years. Kate McKinnon illustrates it perfectly:
For all its faults, America used to be a “can-do” country. We seem to have lost that somewhere along the line.
Donald Trump and his cult are just one of the manifestations of a nation that just can’t do anything right anymore. It’s not just our politics.
