It’s hard to believe anyone would even think of passing such a law or that it would be constitutional. But considering that it’s against the law to give water to immigrants who are dying of thirst in the desert, I’m fairly sure it is. Which is sick.
Mail-in voting did not significantly increase turnout nor did it benefit Democrats in the 2020 election, a new study has found, undermining the talking point, advanced by Donald Trump and others, that mail-in ballots cost him the election.
States that required an excuse to vote by mail saw increases in turnout similar to those that did not, the researchers from Stanford found. In Texas, where only voters ages 65 and up can vote by mail without an excuse, Democratic turnout did not “substantially increase” relative to Republican turnout.
“Despite the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 election, vote-by-mail’s effect on turnout and on partisan outcomes is very muted,” the researchers wrote. “Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.”
Those findings challenge the conventional wisdom that has emerged after Joe Biden’s victory in November. Republicans have repeatedly pointed to the decision to expand vote by mail – a choice driven largely by the Covid-19 pandemic – as a major reason Trump lost the election. They have filed a flood of bills in statehouses seeking to restrict voting, several of which take aim at mail-in voting specifically. In Georgia, for example, there are proposals to require voters to provide identification information as well as an excuse when they vote absentee, which would end the no-excuse policy Republicans adopted there in 2005.
The Stanford findings also come amid an effort by Democrats in Congress to push nationwide changes that would require states to offer no-excuse balloting nationwide. Republicans staunchly opposed that effort, saying it is part of a broader set of reforms to help Democrats’ political prospects.
What this means is that making it easier to vote should not be a partisan issue, even for the wingnuts who want to suppress the vote, because cutting off mail-in voting will end up hurting their own voters too.
Of course, they are just trying to make voting so hard that only rich white people can do it but they really should think twice. A lot of rich white people are sick of their craziness too these days.
With elected Republicans working so feverishly to distract public attention from their complicity in the Jan. 6 Trump insurrection, who is left to run interference for the former, would-be-future president who inspired it?
The prosecutorial heat on Donald Trump is turning up, and not just in Manhattan and the state of New York (Reuters):
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has enlisted the help of Atlanta lawyer John Floyd, who wrote a national guide on prosecuting state racketeering cases. Floyd was hired recently to “provide help as needed” on matters involving racketeering, including the Trump investigation and other cases, said the source, who has direct knowledge of the situation.
The move bolsters the team investigating Trump as Willis prepares to issue subpoenas for evidence on whether the former president and his allies broke the law in their campaign to pressure state officials to reverse his Georgia election loss. Willis has said that her office would examine potential charges including “solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering” among other possible violations.
Trump faces civil and criminal probes from five independently elected investigators “from Georgia to New York to Washington,” CNN reported last week:
And the former President’s actions on his way out of office, including his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and to stir up his supporters with baseless claims of fraud until they stormed the US Capitol on a harrowing January day, have only added to his legal problems.”
It’s never happened in our history but every single one of these prosecutors and attorneys general has more than sufficient predication to investigate what they’re investigating,” said Daniel R. Alonso, who was a top deputy to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from 2010 to 2014.
Vance too has retained expert help in investigating Trump and the Trump Organization in an insurance and tax fraud investigation. Vance last month hired Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor with expertise in white-collar and organized crime. His investigation will accelerate now that the U.S. Supreme Court in February ruled Vance could obtain “eight years of Mr. Trump’s federal income tax returns and other records from his accountants” Trump had long fought to keep secret. New York Attorney General Letitia James is also investigating Trump and his company for possible financial crimes.
Vance has turned his attention to the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. Pomerantz, the mob prosecutor, is expected to lead questioning designed perhaps to get the CFO to flip on Trump:
Typically, efforts to flip witnesses have two parts: First, prosecutors work to build evidence that a witness may have their own legal liabilities. They then try to convince the witness to save themselves by turning on a higher-up.
The person with knowledge of the case said investigators were trying to “cast a wide net . . . looking to shake the tree a little bit.”
In this case, prosecutors have scrutinized Weisselberg’s work in helping to assess the value of Trump buildings as the company sought to obtain loans or property-tax reductions, people familiar with the investigation said. They have also asked about a Trump-owned luxury apartment where Weisselberg’s son Barry lived for several years. The exact nature of Vance’s interest in the apartment is not known, but if Barry Weisselberg, who manages Trump’s ice skating rinks, got the apartment rent-free, that might be considered a fringe benefit of his job and subject to income tax.
[…]
A person familiar with thinking at the Trump Organization said company executives are confident their practices for assessing the value of property fall within industry norms for New York City. The person also said there is broad confidence in Weisselberg’s loyalty.
One might wonder then why Trump is making his first return to his Manhattan penthouse since leaving the White House, although the Associated Press explains his visit “does not appear connected to either of the investigations.”
Alabama State Troopers attack civil rights demonstrators outside Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. (Public domain.)
“Then they came for my voting rights,” Martin Niemöller might say in a 21st-century reworking of his famous quotation,
On this 56th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” 1965 when Alabama state troopers beat and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful civil rights protestors in Selma, President Joe Biden will sign an executive order to promote voting access in this new age of vote suppression. Biden’s Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill face an uphill — or perhaps up the Edmund Pettus Bridge — battle to pass H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” a sweeping elections and voting reform act over unified Republican resistance and pushback from a few Democrats opposed to changing Senate filibuster rules.
It calls for a revamp of Vote.gov, the government’s voting information website, within 200 days.
The order directs the Department of Defense to make it easier for active-duty military and voters living abroad to cast their ballots.
It calls for a review of voting practices and how they affect people with disabilities.
It also creates a steering committee on Native American voting rights.
Biden’s order is timed to remind Americans of the struggles of Black Americans to secure voting rights over a half-century ago (New York Times):
The multipart order is aimed at using the far-flung reach of federal agencies to help people register to vote and to encourage Americans to go to the polls on Election Day. In a prepared speech for the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast on Sunday, Mr. Biden will argue that such actions are still necessary despite the progress of the last half-century.
“The legacy of the march in Selma is that while nothing can stop a free people from exercising their most sacred power as citizens, there are those who will do everything they can to take that power away,” Mr. Biden will say, according to the prepared remarks.
“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have it counted,” he plans to say. “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let more people vote.”
Moses he is not, but Biden knows how to evoke him before a crowd still struggling to reach the promised land.
The cracks of those clubs, the shrieking of those marchers were not just heard in the moment. They were heard nationwide later that night, when ABC interrupted its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show footage of the horror — a horror that proved pivotal in the civil rights movement.
A week later, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act without which “there would not be a Jimmy Carter, or a Bill Clinton, and I’m positive there would not be a Barack Obama as president of the United States of America,” the late Rep. John Lewis wrote.
Violence by police against Black people provoked street protests last summer from coast to coast, the largest ever seen here. Right-wing backlash against the browning of America has provoked wave after wave of legislation aimed at reversing the gains of the civil rights era.
Capehart adds:
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments involving voting restrictions in Arizona that could snuff out the Voting Rights Act entirely. Also last week, Georgia Republicans started moving legislation aimed at restricting access to the ballot in a number of ways, including leaving it up to each county whether to have any Sunday early voting. This would be a devastating blow to “Souls to the Polls,” the Sunday practice of African Americans casting their early voting ballots after church service. Such aggressive moves to thwart the vote are happening after President Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 and after Democrats won both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats.
Georgia is not alone in putting limits on the right to vote. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “As of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.“ With the “For the People Act,” Congress is stepping in to stop this.
Many of Trump’s establishment henchmen are still trying to convince their gullible cult members that January 6th wasn’t the insurrectionist assault on the capitol to overturn the election for Dear Leader we all know it was.
GOP lawmakers are desperately trying to deflect blame away from Donald Trump and themselves.
Sure, the attack on the Capitol was bad, but did you hear about the attack on the White House last year?
The supposed siege of the president’s residence is the latest Republican deflection from the events of Jan. 6, when a pro-Donald Trump mob stirred up by Republican lies about voter fraud ransacked the U.S. Capitol.
Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have admitted what actually happened.
“They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president,” McConnell said in February. “They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth ― because he was angry he’d lost an election.”
But others are compiling a growing list of distractions, excuses and alternate theories of the day’s events, hoping that as time passes, the public forgets what actually went on. Here are some of the ways Republicans are trying to deflect blame:
The Rioters Were Just A Group Of Random People, Not United By Anything
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said this week that the fact that “these extremist groups are not monolithic” ran counter to the Democratic “narrative” about what happened at the Capitol.
“I’ve heard some of these folks described as white supremacists, domestic terrorists, insurrectionist, rioters, seditionist, anarchist, the list goes on and on,” Cornyn said at a Tuesday hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Cornyn was upset that Democrats “wanted to create a narrative about white supremacists, but clearly that is part of the problem but it’s not a monolithic group,” he told HuffPost after the hearing. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) had said the rioters “might as well have” been wearing Ku Klux Klan robes.
“I don’t think there was any single reason why people were here,” Cornyn said.
Wray testified that many had militia ties and some were white supremacists, but there’s no doubt they were all Trump supporters trying to overthrow the election. Indeed, they had just marched from a “Stop the Steal” rally featuring Trump, who told them to go to the Capitol and stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election.
“They were here for a variety of reasons,” Cornyn insisted.
Nancy Pelosi Is To Blame
An increasingly common theme is blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
“I think Nancy Pelosi will have a lot of questions to answer about what she knew leading up to the riot on Jan. 6,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on Fox News last month.
Four GOP House members also wrote Pelosi a letter, claiming that “many important questions about your responsibility for the security of the Capitol remain unanswered.” And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said Pelosi was using the riot as an excuse to consolidate her power.
The argument is that Pelosi wanted all this to happen ― or, at the very least, she looked the other way on the potential for violence. In other words, Republicans think she didn’t take seriously a mob of pro-Trump supporters who despised her and, in at least one case, wanted her dead.
The GOP has continued to push the theory that Pelosi stood in the way of police requests for additional assistance, even though then-House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving has repeatedly shot down that suggestion.
It Was Antifa
The likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) wasted no time blaming the supposedly fearsome anti-fascist group known as “antifa” for the attack, based on a false story that was almost immediately retracted.
But this outrageously untrue claim will not die. Trump’s lawyers even uttered it on the Senate floor during his impeachment trial, when they claimed “a leader of antifa” had been arrested for infiltrating the building.
It may seem ridiculous, but a significant number of Republican voters believe the Capitol attack was an antifa operation, according to several polls. A majority of Republicans said in a January survey they believed it was antifa, as did 58% of Trump voters in a February survey.
It Was Fake Trump Supporters
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claimed during a Senate hearing last week that the crowd marching toward the Capitol at Trump’s direction was a peaceable bunch, and that the riot had been carried out by “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters.”
“Many of the marchers were families with small children; many were elderly, overweight, or just plain tired or frail — traits not typically attributed to the riot-prone,” Johnson said, reading from a delusional piece published in The Federalist, a far-right website. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”
The FBI director testified this week that there is no evidence of antifa involvement in the attack, and no evidence that there were fake Trump supporters. Some of the pro-Trump rioters charged in the attack have even complained about antifa getting credit.
HuffPost asked Johnson on Thursday whether he himself believed the statements he read aloud during the hearing, since they’d been written by someone else.
“He witnessed it. He wrote down what he witnessed,” Johnson said. “We need to assemble a bunch of eyewitness accounts to determine what all happened from different perspectives, different vantage points.”
HuffPost reporters witnessed the attack on the Capitol from both the inside and outside and saw only Trump supporters.
“They ― they might have been Trump provocateurs, OK?” Johnson said.
The Mob Wasn’t Even That Dangerous
Five people died in the Jan. 6 riot, including one police officer. Another 140 officers were injured, suffering cracked ribs, concussions, loss of part of a finger, burns and a mild heart attack. Two officers involved in the response that day later died from suicide. The pro-Trump mob smashed officers with flagpoles, pipes, bats, metal barriers and doors in order to push past them and break into the Capitol.
Yet according to some Republicans, this crowd wasn’t dangerous at all.
“If it was armed, it would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who said Democrats were trying to make it seem like “there’s a bunch of people running around in the woods with Army fatigues on the weekends, and they’re going to take over the country, and that’s just nonsense.”
“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” Johnson said in a radio interview last month.
“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms? Here’s the questions I would have liked to ask. How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I’m only aware of one and I’ll defend that law enforcement officer for taking that shot. It was a tragedy, OK? But I think there was only one,” he added.
Authorities actually confiscated a range of weapons from that day, including an assault rifle, a crossbow, Molotov cocktails, stun guns, knives and brass knuckles. Since they weren’t searching attendees for weapons, there likely were far more.
Black Lives Matter Attacked The White House First
Many Republicans who condemned the violence at the Capitol broadened their condemnation to include violence against police officers in 2020.
But Republicans have begun to suggest a more direct false equivalence, decrying an “attack on the White House” by Black Lives Matters protesters last summer.
“Sixty-seven Secret Service officers were injured during a three-day siege on the White House, which caused then-President Trump to be brought into a secure bunker,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Tuesday.
At a separate hearing on Wednesday, Hawley also brought up “the attack on the White House where 60 Secret Service officers were injured, the president had to be evacuated into a bunker.”
Most people may remember the “siege on the White House” as a protest against police brutality near the White House. (Officers wound up tear-gassing protesters so the president could pose for photos holding a Bible in front of a church that had been damaged.)
The Secret Service said more than 60 officers were injured as protesters threw objects and scuffled with officers, 11 of whom received hospital treatment for non-life-threatening injuries.
But they weren’t trying to storm the White House.
“No individuals crossed the White House Fence and no Secret Service protectees were ever in any danger,” the Secret Service said in May.
Trump subsequently said he was only “inspecting” the bunker.
‘Everybody’ Is Responsible
In January, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack. A week later, however, he said he didn’t actually believe Trump had “provoked” the mob of his supporters.
And in an interview that aired a day later, McCarthy found a way to both blame Trump for the riot while not really blaming him at all.
“I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility,” he said.
McCarthy later tried to clarify his remarks, insisting he wasn’t necessarily saying everyone in the country was responsible for Trump’s supporters attacking the Capitol, but rather that “it is incumbent upon every person in America to help lower the temperature of our political discourse.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) on Thursday night released an absolutely massive report compiling the social media posts of every Republican who voted to object to the counting of certain states’ Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.
Then-President Donald Trump had hyped that Jan. 6 congressional objection effort as his last real hope of stealing a second term, and on the morning of Jan. 6, he urged the thousands of supporters that he’d summoned to Washington, D.C. to march on the Capitol and provide some “courage” to the members of Congress voting inside.
Many of those members spent weeks spreading what Democrats have begun calling the “big lie” — the false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and that Joe Biden was not the rightfully elected president. Lofgren’s report, documenting over 1,900 pages of tweets, creates a detailed record of the effort to justify overturning an election. Here are some takeaways:
The Lofgren review of social media posts — it’s more like a PDF database, organized alphabetically by member — makes one thing clear: A small handful of congressmen and women made much of the social media noise from November through January.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to have been the most prolific. The Trump die-hard, who recently spoke at a political conference organized by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes, takes up a full 176 pages of the 1,900 page report. Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Billy Long (R-LA) aren’t far behind, taking up around 120 pages each. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) tweets take up 94 pages.
The posts from these loyalists offer a real-time view of the Trumpian strategy. Brooks, for example, shifts over time from complaints about “en masse” mail-in voting, to his own dubious claims about voting machines, to assertions about votes from an “illegal alien block” and people other than “eligible American citizens.” On the morning of Jan. 6, Brooks said from the rally stage in front of the White House that patriots ought to start “taking down names and kicking ass.” But in the middle of the attack, he’d already begun shifting blame for the riot: “Rumor: ANTIFA fascists in backwards MAGA hats” he tweeted at 2:20 p.m., the start of a lie that persists today.
All but one member of GOP House leadership (Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney from Wyoming) voted to overturn the election: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Republican Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer (R-AL)
Lofgren’s compilation included a McCarthy tweet that promoted a clip of his Fox Business interview on November 4, when Joe Biden was beginning to emerge as the winner. McCarthy declares in the clip: “We’re going to have to fight because we want to make sure every legal vote is counted.”
That soundbite — ”every legal vote needs to be counted” — and demands for “transparency” became the codewords employed by the House minority leader and Scalise in their attempts to legitimize Trump’s lies about election fraud. Their language indicates how they were careful not to lean too much into Trump’s more outlandish claims; they never explicitly accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election (though McCarthy did accuse them of trying to steal the razor-thin race in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District). Rather, their tweets show them trying to chip away at the legitimacy of the election in more subtle ways, by raising supposedly “serious” questions “about election integrity” and baseless claims that “millions” of ballots are “ripe for voter fraud.”
(Lofgren’s compilation did not include posts from Palmer. The methodology notes that a lawmaker may not be listed if they didn’t post relevant content in the study’s set time frame.)
For weeks after Election Day, Republicans following Donald Trump’s lead amped up the rhetoric as his options for a legal victory dwindled. As the vote-counting continued and the reality of Biden’s lead became clear, the violent rhetoric only grew.
On Nov. 6, for example, Gaetz tweeted “I’ll fight on the floor of the House of Representatives to stop the Electoral College from being certified.”
Gosar quote-tweeted him and commented, “Where do I sign up?”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene frequently tweeted about the need to “fight” the election results. On Dec. 19, when Trump first announced a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C. for Jan. 6, Greene tweeted “I’m planning a little something on January 6th as well, @realDonaldTrump.” She tweeted the #FightForTrump hashtag the following day, before boosting details of the Jan. 6 protest as it came together. “I need a massive grassroots army behind me to STOP THE STEAL,” she wrote a week before the rally. The day prior to the rally, she referred to “OUR 1776 MOMENT” in an interview with Newsmax.
Even on clean-up duty after weeks of false and inflammatory claims, some Republicans used the prospect of violence as a lever: Brooks, on Jan. 7, wrote that when citizens lose faith in the system, they have “three bad options”: Emigrating, submitting, or fighting back with violence. “We don’t ever want citizens in America feeling they have been forced into the aforesaid box, with 3 bad options,” he wrote.
The conservative media’s role in amplifying Trump’s bogus claims about the election has already been well-established.
However, this study highlighted the extent to which the ex-president’s foot soldiers in the House used pro-Trump outlets like Fox and Newsmax as a bullhorn in their crusade to overturn the election and then to do damage control as they tried to shift blame away from themselves and Trump for the insurrection. When they weren’t posting clips of themselves ranting to Lou Dobbs and other sympathetic pro-Trump media cranks, they were sharing bogus articles from fringe websites like the Epoch Times or Town Hall to boost their false claims.
One example of this was when Gaetz and Greene shared a Washington Times article that falsely claimed that facial recognition technology found that members of antifa were part of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Times was forced to issue a correction after the tech company stated that their article was “outright false” and that their software had actually caught two neo-Nazis, with no evidence of antifa being present.
The existence of the mammoth document is notable in the first place, and marks a major step from Lofgren in creating a social media record for any investigations that may be coming down the pike. On her website, the congresswoman noted that she participated, either as a staffer or as a member of Congress, in all four modern presidential impeachment hearings, in addition to congressional removal proceedings for other government officials including former federal Judge G. Thomas Porteous, Jr. and former Rep. James Traficant. Lofgren is today the chair of the Committee on House Administration.
In light of that experience, Lofgren wrote, colleagues have asked her for guidance on what can be done about other members’ of Congress “involvement in the January 6th attempt to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.” Lofgren cited some potential avenues of accountability, including expulsion from Congress for violating the 14th Amendment’s provisions related to insurrection, congressional punishment for disorderly behavior and even potential criminal investigation.
Disciplinary action, the congresswoman wrote, “is a matter not only of the Constitution and law, but also of fact.” To establish those facts, Lofgren said, she asked her staff to take a “quick look” at social media posts from members who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The 1,900-page document is an attempt to compile statements that may be part of Congress’ future responsibilities.
I’m still hopeful there will be a commission that will investigate everything that happened but I’m afraid there will be no accountability for Republican members of congress for what they did. They are backed by their voters and that is not likely to change, unfortunately. But time will pass and there needs to be a record. This is a good start.
Whew. The COVID Relief Plan passed the Senate. If things go well, the bill will sail through final passage and Biden will sign it shortly.
It is imperfect. The loss of the $15.00 minimum wage is a blow but maybe there will be a possible compromise down the road. But what is left in it is extremely impressive:
Still kind of stunned and heartened at the scale of the American Rescue Plan.
And it creates a child allowance that will (knock wood) be very hard to roll back.
It’s also remarkable, even after the drama of the last few days, how little Biden had to backtrack.
He proposed a $1.9 trillion package, and both houses of Congress passed a $1.9 trillion package.
Anyway this is the best thing I can remember happening in American policy since, at least, Obergefell, or maybe the ACA, so I think people should celebrate a little/a lot tonight.
When he’s right he’s right
As Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, I am proud that we passed the American Rescue Plan, which, in my view, is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country.
It’s a BFD. I wouldn’t have bet on the Democrats ability to pass a 1.9 trillion dollar bill. And I never would have guessed that the Republicans would spend all their time rending their garments over Dr Seuss and Mr. Potatohead instead of ranting about Big Gummint and spending.
Times have changed. We have a lot of difficult challenges ahead, some more threatening than anything we’ve faced. But at least we aren’t singing that tired old tune.
By the way:
Joe Biden is enjoying an early presidential honeymoon, with 60% of Americans approving of his job performance thus far and even more backing his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
At a moment of deep political polarization in America, support for Biden’s pandemic response extends across party lines. Overall, 70% of Americans back the Democratic president’s handling of the virus response, including 44% of Republicans.
There were several moments during the past year that illustrated the incompetence of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. The Hydroxychloroquine drama, Trump endorsing the use of disinfectants are a couple that come to mind.
But this early press conference at the CDC made it clear that we were in trouble. It showed that sycophancy, ego and ignorance were at the wheel.
"First I want to thank you, for your decisive leadership … I also want to thank you for coming here today … I think that's the most important thing I want to say" –CDC Director Redfield slathers Dear Leader-style praise on Trump during his tour of CDC headquarters pic.twitter.com/erxQxbYh1x
The head of the CDC felt “the most important” thing he had to say about the pandemic was to lick Trump’s boots. That said it all …
CDC officials are unable to explain why they didn't just use the WHO's coronavirus test instead of trying to develop their own, which ended up being a failed effort that got in the way of efforts to promptly test more Americans pic.twitter.com/2fpQ5TQEv5
"Who are you from by the way? I don't watch CNN. That's why I don't recognize you. I don't watch CNN because CNN is fake news" — Trump insults a CNN reporter pic.twitter.com/0pADjTCLtV
"I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship" — Trump explains that he doesn't want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn't want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up pic.twitter.com/ELhZDjiZW9
This made me laugh out loud. The Republicans sell their souls, flush their integrity down the toilet and completely trash their own reputations and these are the thanks they get:
SCOOP: TRUMPS SENDS CEASE-AND-DESIST TO RNC, NRCC AND NRSC. Lawyers for former President DONALD TRUMP sent out cease-and-desist letters Friday to the three largest fundraising entities for the Republican Party — the RNC, NRCC and NRSC — for using his name and likeness on fundraising emails and merchandise, a Trump adviser tells Playbook.
We reported yesterday that Trump was furious that his name has been bandied about by organizations that help Republicans who voted to impeach him — without his permission. Trump, who made his fortune in licensing, has always been sensitive to how his name has been used to fundraise and support members, even while in office.
On Friday, the RNC sent out two emails asking supporters to donate as a way to add their name to a “thank you” card for Trump. “President Trump will ALWAYS stand up for the American People, and I just thought of the perfect way for you to show that you support him!” the email states. “As one of President Trump’s MOST LOYAL supporters, I think that YOU, deserve the great honor of adding your name to the Official Trump ‘Thank You’ Card.” A follow-up email was sent hours later to “President Trump’s TOP supporters” warning of a deadline of 10 hours to get their names on the card.
None of the committees returned a request for comment. But privately GOP campaign types say it’s impossible not to use Trump’s name, as his policies are so popular with the base. If Trump really wants to help flip Congress, they argue he should be more generous. His team, however, sees this differently.
“President Trump remains committed to the Republican Party and electing America First conservatives, but that doesn’t give anyone – friend or foe – permission to use his likeness without explicit approval,” said a Trump adviser.
ROTFLMAO!!!! They were apparently under the impression that he was a member of their party. They were wrong. The Republican Party is a member of the Trump Organization and it is not empowered to use the brand without permission. They are very confused.
I think this also speaks to Trump’s money problems. His brand is his name and it’s in trouble. Having it diluted by the Republicans selling it all over the place takes money directly out of his pockets.
From her five-hours-ahead redoubt across the Pond, Marcy Wheeler has this to offer the FBI, “I can understand how this might be difficult for the FBI to find, seeing as how it says a Proud Boy was ALSO working the FBI — the same FBI that for some reason had no idea that the Proud Boys were planning an insurrection.”
Breaking/Not Breaking:
Rudy Giuliani POSTED texts from a Proud Boy associate, apparently TO HIM discussing how they would lie about the attack. They are public and have been for weeks. https://t.co/JjgxmSkTwC
“Here’s a text of Rudy and someone with ties to the Proud Boys talking about how they were going to false flag the whole thing,” Wheeler tweeted early this morning:
Usually when suspects try to coordinate their stories they don’t do it in public.
Not Roger Stone
The original story in the New York Times says the call between Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Trump adviser Roger Stone days ahead of the Capitol breach is not the conversation being investigated here:
WASHINGTON — A member of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys was in communication with a person associated with the White House in the days just before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation.
Location, cellular and call record data revealed a call tying a Proud Boys member to the Trump White House, the official said. The F.B.I. has not determined what they discussed, and the official would not reveal the names of either party.
The connection revealed by the communications data comes as the F.B.I. intensifies its investigation of contacts among far-right extremists, Trump White House associates and conservative members of Congress in the days before the attack.
The same data has revealed no evidence of communications between the rioters and members of Congress during the deadly attack, the official said. That undercuts Democratic allegations that some Republican lawmakers were active participants that day.
That is likely not the entire story, but what is known now on top of the arrest of former Trump State Department appointee Federico G. Klein on Thursday.
Wheeler tweeted about the Giuliani communication back in February:
For those asking, "Kash" here is Kash Kelly, whose parole office in IN recognized him at the riot. He has been charged with the trespassing crimes used as a first charge against a lot of people. https://t.co/a93FBwgg0H
