Month: June 2021

Some good news from Ari Berman:

“Today the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference at the Justice Department headquarters.The lawsuit challenges a number of provisions of the law, including a ban on election officials sending unsolicited mail ballot request forms to voters, a shorter period of time for voters to request absentee ballots, new voter ID requirements for mail ballots, restrictions on the number of mail ballot drop boxes, a ban on giving out food and water to voters in line, and throwing out provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Gov. Brian Kemp has said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia law, enacted in March, but it includes 16 different provisions that make it harder to vote and that target metro Atlanta counties with large Black populations.Advertise with Mother Jones

The lawsuit is being overseen by Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general—two longtime civil rights lawyers with extensive records litigating against new restrictions on voting.

The Georgia law, known as SB202, appears to have been part of a coordinated national effort by conservative activists to make it harder to vote in states across the country. The dark money group Heritage Action for America bragged in a leaked video to donors in April, first reported by Mother Jones, that the Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” including several targeted by the Justice Department lawsuit. 

In a speech earlier this month, Garland said he would double the number of lawyers in the department’s voting section to scrutinize new laws making it harder to vote. Still, litigation against new voter suppression laws faces an uphill battle against a conservative-dominated judiciary.

The Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that states with a long history of discrimination—including Georgia—no longer need to get their voting changes approved by the federal government. Since that decision, 26 states have enacted new restrictions on voting, according to an analysis by Mother Jones published on Friday. Garland said Friday that if not for that Supreme Court ruling, “it is likely that SB202 would have never taken effect.”

It is a welcome move but these things take time and there are few guarantees so it’s unlikely it will positively affect the 2022 election which features the all-important Warnock race.

And the election subversion and voter nullification stuff that happening all over the country isn’t being addressed yet, which is very disturbing. The next two elections are going to be very dicey. And keep in mind that even if the Democrats succeed beyond all expectations at getting out their vote, the way the right has framed their narrative means they will take that huge turnout as proof that the Democrats engaged in voter fraud and use their new laws to overturn the election. It’s a real heads we win, tails you lose situation.

They have convinced their voters that it is impossible for them to lose.

Remember:

Ratfucking.

It figures that Erik Prince would be in this up to his neck:

The young couple posing in front of the faux Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas fit right in, two people in a sea of idealistic Democrats who had arrived in the city in February 2020 for a Democratic primary debate.

Large donations to the Democratic National Committee — $10,000 each — had bought Beau Maier and Sofia LaRocca tickets to the debate. During a cocktail reception beforehand, they worked the room of party officials, rainbow donkey pins affixed to their lapels.

In fact, much about them was a lie. Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca were part of an undercover operation by conservatives to infiltrate progressive groups, political campaigns and the offices of Democratic as well as moderate Republican elected officials during the 2020 election cycle, according to interviews and documents.

Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump.

At the center of the scheme was an unusual cast: a former British spy connected to the security contractor Erik Prince, a wealthy heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune and undercover operatives like Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca who used Wyoming as a base to insinuate themselves into the political fabric of this state and at least two others, Colorado and Arizona.

In more than two dozen interviews and a review of federal election records, The New York Times reconstructed many of the operatives’ interactions in Wyoming and other states — mapping out their associations and likely targets — and spoke to people with whom they discussed details of their spying operation. Publicly available documents in Wyoming also tied Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca to an address in Cody used by the former spy, Richard Seddon.

What the effort accomplished — and how much information Mr. Seddon’s operatives gathered — is unclear. Sometimes, their tactics were bumbling and amateurish. But the operation’s use of spycraft to manipulate the politics of several states over years greatly exceeds the tactics of more traditional political dirty tricks operations.

It is also a sign of how ultraconservative Republicans see a deep need to install allies in various positions at the state level to gain an advantage on the electoral map. Secretaries of state, for example, play a crucial role in certifying election results every two years, and some became targets of Mr. Trump and his allies in their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The campaign followed another effort engineered by Mr. Seddon. He aided a network of conservative activists trying to discredit perceived enemies of Mr. Trump inside the government, including a planned sting operation in 2018 against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and helping set up secret surveillance of F.B.I. employees and other government officials.

Mr. Prince had set Mr. Seddon’s work in motion, recruiting him around the beginning of the Trump administration to hire former spies to train conservative activists in the basics of espionage, and send them on political sabotage missions.

By the end of 2018, Mr. Seddon secured funding from the Wyoming heiress, Susan Gore, according to people familiar with her role. He recruited several former operatives from the conservative group Project Veritas, where he had worked previously, to set up the political infiltration operation in the West.

Project Veritas has a history of using operatives with fake names to target liberal organizations and make secret recordings to embarrass them.

The endeavor in the West appears to have had two primary goals: penetrate local and eventually national Democratic political circles for long-term intelligence gathering, and collect dirt on moderate Republicans that could be used against them in the internecine party battles being waged by Mr. Trump and his allies.

Nate Martin, the head of Better Wyoming, a progressive group that was one of the operation’s targets, said he suspected that its aim was to “dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody.”

…“dig up this information and you sit on it until you really can destroy somebody.” That sounds about right. The right has morphed into a straight up criminal organization.

And I think part of the purpose is to make everyone involved in progressive politics as paranoid as possible and suspicious of the process as possible. It’s just one more way of degrading our democracy.

Political leaders usually understand that when there is a disaster with potentially great loss of life it’s important to be on the scene, talking to the media and portraying themselves as leading the efforts to deal with the crisis. But in the Trump era, that makes you a pussy.

DeSantis, Village 2.0’s favorite new Governor exemplifies that new political logic. Here he is this morning — in Pensacola, not Surfside.

Ron DeSantis is live on Fox News from Pensacola, where he's seeing off Florida law enforcement as they deploy to the southern border pic.twitter.com/zlIhHHWrXq

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 25, 2021

This happened yesterday:

Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency in Miami-Dade, finally laying to rest concerns that he might not.

However, those concerns were misplaced, according to knowledgeable sources, who contend that travel time back to Tallahassee, drafting, and briefing the Governor accounted for the delay of the order, released Thursday evening. [sure, right…]

The order was a matter of speculation in the wake of the condo collapse in Surfside in the Miami area Thursday.

At the White House Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden addressed the matter, saying that his administration is “ready to move with federal resources immediately” once DeSantis makes the official ask.

“We’ve gotten in touch with FEMA. They’re ready to go,” Biden told reporters in the afternoon.

“The Governor is going to have to  — they’re down there inspecting what they think is needed. But I’m waiting for the Governor to ask or to declare an emergency. Especially as we learn more about what might happen with the rest of the building,” Biden added.

“We’re ready to move with federal resources immediately, if in fact we’re asked, but we can’t go in now. FEMA is down there, taking a look at what’s needed, including looking at whether those other buildings have to be evacuated now, finding housing for those people, making sure they have the capacity to have a place to shelter, having food to eat, etc,” the President continued.

“My chief of staff has been deeply involved in this from the very beginning. We have the Cabinet involved now in terms of dealing with FEMA. We are working on it now, and I made it clear. I say to the people of Florida, whatever help you want the federal government to provide, we’re waiting. Just ask us. We’ll be there,” Biden said.

Biden said he had a “long discussion” with Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and had “been in contact” with U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Mayor urged DeSantis to declare a state of emergency, contending in a press conference that the paperwork was on his desk.

But confusion still reigned. A DeSantis spokesperson told Scripps’ Forrest Saunders that “every need had been met,” meanwhile.

National media questions got no good answer either.

“I don’t know that the President has called him. I don’t believe that has happened. I have not talked to the Governor as to whether he’d be in contact with the President,” Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez told Jake Tapper on CNN at 5 PM.

“We’re going to continue to look at it and we should have some answers shortly,” the LG added, regarding the order itself.

DeSantis held two press conferences Thursday, one of which was at the scene where the 12-story building collapsed. He did not mention a pending ask for a State of Emergency and federal help during those availabilities.

But in the end, and despite the well-documented political differences with the White House, the emergency declaration came through.

Update:

He’s made time to go to Surfside this afternoon. Big of him.

If you are confused about the state of the i bill, don’t feel like the lone ranger. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. We are in the midst of a negotiation with a lot of moving parts and nobody knows how it’s going to come out. I talked about it yesterday on my weekly hit on Seder’s Ring of Fire/Peacock show and Signorelli’s Sirius show yesterday and my understanding changed each time as new information emerged. It’s probably best to just let it unfold at this point.

Having said that, I thought this analysis of where we stand this morning by Josh Kovensky at TPM rang true. If you want a quick overview of where it stands, read this:

When someone is laying an obvious trap, there’s always an option to avoid it.

Unless, of course, you are the Democratic Party as it exists in the mind of the GOP.

Several Republican senators, columnists, and others are playing the victim this week after Democrats headed off an attempt from the Republicans to block Biden’s agenda.

They did that by yoking the passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill to the passage of a reconciliation bill — in theory heading off a GOP strategy that would let a bipartisan bill through while allowing Democratic infighting to kill a second, follow-up bill that would contain Biden’s priorities.

“If he’s gonna tie them together, he can forget it!” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) complained to Politico, adding about Republicans who wish to continue: “There’s no way. You look like a fucking idiot now.”

Biden has had to jump through a few hoops in the long-running but crucial talks that will determine whether he can implement a large part of his plan to transform the country’s physical and human infrastructure.

Partly thanks to a condition set by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the White House needed a bipartisan deal on infrastructure before anything else could go through.

That gave the GOP an opening: why not cram all of the sweeteners into a bipartisan deal, and leave more politically tough items, like tax increases and health care changes, to reconciliation?

This would have allowed vulnerable GOP senators to reap the benefits of a bipartisan infrastructure package, while leaving the rest of Biden’s agenda to founder on corralling 50 Democratic senators to vote for a package containing tax increases and policies on which there is intra-party disagreement.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) outlined that strategy to Politico last week, explaining that he believed “it’ll be awful hard to get those moderate Democrats to be for” tax increases, particularly “if you do do something bipartisan.”

“Then, I think, doing something partisan on reconciliation — in some ways, with certain Democrats — it gets a lot harder,” he added.

That was based on the idea that centrists like Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) would get cold feet. But events this week suggest that that was a miscalculation.

Manchin signaled support for tax increases and suggested he would back a second reconciliation bill as a way to do it.

“Republicans have drawn a line in the sand on not changing anything, and I thought the 2017 tax bill was a very unfair bill, and weighted to a side that basically did not benefit the average American. So I voted against it,” he told NBC. “I think there are some adjustments that need to be made.”

Then, on Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Biden further corralled centrist Dems, shortly after a bipartisan group of senators with enough Republican support to clear a filibuster reached a deal: The House would only take up, and Biden would only sign, a bipartisan deal if it is passed simultaneously with a reconciliation package.

This led to a hilarious sequence of events in which the bipartisan group released a statement supporting the infrastructure framework as senior GOP officials began to realize what happened.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), a GOP supporter of the bipartisan bill, reportedly began to try to have it both ways, “seeking assurances” that Democrats would not try to use reconciliation to pass entirely separate legislation.

It fell, of course, to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to really serve up the sense of victimhood and betrayal that began to permeate GOP members of Congress, once they realized what had happened.

“It almost makes your head spin,” McConnell said. “An expression of bipartisanship and then an ultimatum on behalf of your left-wing base.”

He added, referring to Biden’s statement that he would sign reconciliation in “tandem” with a bipartisan bill: “Really, caving completely in less than two hours, that’s not the way to show you’re serious about getting a bipartisan outcome.”

Since then, only Graham has definitively pulled his support from the bill.

But the conservative victimization-outrage-grievance complex has kicked into full gear, with an obligatory Wall Street Journal editorial calling it a “bipartisan double cross” and McConnell telling Fox News later in the day that “we have gone from optimism to pessimism as a result of the president’s second press conference,” again referring to Biden’s commitment to only sign a bipartisan bill once a reconciliation package had already cleared Congress.

It’s a strategy that could gin up an atmosphere that would allow GOP senators to kill the bipartisan deal, claiming that they were somehow, improbably, duped.

But others have been less whiny about the process.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) told CNBC on Friday morning that he had assumed from the start that Democrats would aim for a reconciliation package alongside the bipartisan bill.

“Democrats are going to move forward with a broad reconciliation bill with a lot of tax increases, regardless,” he said.

He also boasted that the bipartisan deal, in his view, still retained all the sweeteners and no unpopular policies like tax increases.

“None of that is in this package,” he added.

I will be shocked if they get 10 votes for anything considering McConnell’s vow to obstruct everything. But maybe a combination of GOP Senators running in 2022 who need something to show for themselves combined with a handful who are retiring and want to restore their consciences before they die will make it happen. But I have my doubts.

The Democrats’ Reconciliation plan that has Huckleberry Graham having a hissy fit is clever in that it hangs over Mitch like a sword of Damocles leaving him with the choice of either letting some of his senators bring home some bacon or nothing. But that’s assuming Sinemanchin are on board and we won’t know that until it happens. You can certainly imagine Sinema doing her thumbs down performance again in the mistaken belief that she’ll be rewarded at the ballot box. (She won’t.)

So buckle up. This is going to be a tedious back and forth. But it is a real negotiation and that alone is a surprising return to some kind of functional legislative process.

If there was one thing I always thought Donald Trump truly cared about, it was men in uniform. After all, one of his earliest forays into politics, if you want to call it that, was an infamous full page ad he took out about the Central Park Five jogger case entitled, “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police,” in which Trump waxed nostalgic about the days when police had free rein in the city and recalled fondly the time he saw a couple of cops violently rough up some guys in a diner when he was a kid. Trump was also said to have loved dressing up in his military high school uniform and considered his four years there akin to serving in the military. He would always call the Pentagon leadership “my generals” and loved it when they looked as if they came out of central casting. His 2016 campaign was filled with lurid stories of tough officers committing war crimes, which he enthusiastically endorsed.

Trump’s idealized view of the men in blue and the military brass was sorely tested as president, however.

He locked horns with his first defense secretary, retired General James Mattis, whom he had chosen on the basis of the nickname “Mad Dog” and was sorely disappointed when he turned out to actually be sane. Likewise he had nothing but disdain for those who insisted that military discipline and preparedness required that the military not allow war criminals to go unpunished, much less be lauded for their crimes.

His great respect for law enforcement had its limits as well.

Trump was vicious when it came to the FBI, insulting the agency and many employees by name when it became known that he was in their crosshairs. And on January 6th, as a wild mob of insurrectionists engaged in hand to hand combat with police trying to protect the Capitol and a joint session of congress, it took hours before Trump could be persuaded to gently admonish them to not be violent with the police. It was clear he was siding with the mob. After all, he did send them there.Advertisement:

I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the Republican base would be hostile to the FBI. Being gun fetishists, the extreme right has long had issues with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which certain politicians called “jack-booted thugs” back in the 90s. And there has always been the pretense among some on the far right fringe that they are preparing for war with the federal government. But I have to say that I never thought we’d see the day when average Republican voters would storm the Capitol and openly beat rank-and-file cops over the heads with metal flagpoles, all with the not-so-subtle encouragement of the man who professed to be the “law and order” president.

CNN has excerpted a new book about the last months of the Trump administration and the 2020 campaign by Wall St. Journal reporter Michael Bender called “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” and it reveals just how uncivilized and tyrannical Trump really was. Recounting the period of the George Floyd protests a year ago, Bender writes that Trump was beside himself with anger at the protesters. He loved footage of police getting confrontational with the protesters telling his staff, “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people! Crack their skulls!”

This isn’t a total surprise. I wrote about this last year, quoting a source for the Daily Beast saying that he kept talking about returning to “eye for an eye” and wanting to “go in” to Democratic run cities and round up (Black) people for summary executions, one of his favorite fantasies. But I didn’t know how hard he pushed the military to “go in and beat the fuck” out of the protesters. According to the book, Trump said “just shoot them!” multiple times.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Miley pushed back Trump’s intention to invoke the Insurrection Act so the military could get involved in domestic protests (although he made the monumental mistake of wearing battle fatigues to accompany Trump on his ill-fated photo-op and had to apologize.) According to the book, at one point, Milley pointed to a portrait of Lincoln and said: “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.”

Seven months later, we did have an insurrection — at Trump’s direction. And this week Milley appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to discuss it: 

Wow! This is a must watch.

Asked about Critical Race Theory, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley delivers an answer you need to watch.

“I’m white, and I want to understand white rage, why they attacked this building?”
pic.twitter.com/ISUQNDQV3v

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) June 23, 2021

If you had asked me a few years ago if this would be the way Fox News would respond to such comments, I would not have believed you:

An angry Laura Ingraham says she’s totally outraged over General Milley after she suggests withholding funding to the military pic.twitter.com/wApq1qytRV

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 24, 2021

Who had money on the Republican Party running on “Defund the Military” in 2022? Not me. And the next night, there was this:

Tucker: Mark Milley is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant or because he’s brave or because the people who know him respect him. He is not and they definitely don’t pic.twitter.com/MJv4n8T0jP

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 25, 2021

He made that up, of course. Milley is actually known to be blunt spoken and has spent a great deal of time on the battlefield. Carlson topped off that insulting commentary with this charming observation:

Tucker on Milley’s comments: He’s not just a pig. He’s stupid pic.twitter.com/XNxNCBjLHp

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 25, 2021

I won’t go into Tucker Carlson’s ongoing descent into madness on national TV but suffice to say that right-wing pundits are now completely incoherent.

The party that once extolled the police and the military as the highest form of civic duty and patriotism is now celebrating the actions of people who beat cops over the heads with metal pipes and calling the military leadership stupid pigs, as if they’ve traveled back in time to a Bizarro World version of 1968. They are simultaneously excoriating the Democrats because some activists used the slogan “defund the police” in the wake of the murder of George Floyd while angrily demanding that we “defund the military” — which will certainly come as a surprise to their leader Donald Trump who considers his bloated military budgets to be among his greatest achievements.

If there’s one lasting legacy of Donald Trump it’s that there are no longer any sacred cows on the American right. They have given themselves permission to literally say anything in the moment without regard to principle or ideology while at the same time wringing their hands over the supposed destruction of American culture by “wokeness” and political correctness. They no longer have any commitment to making sense and I’m not sure that anyone knows exactly how to combat such surreal intellectual anarchy.  

Sally Kohn’s fine opinion piece Thursday in USA Today employed some old-fashioned personal experience to slap back at the moral panic ginned up by the right over critical race theory. She once took a class from Derrick Bell, a founding scholar of critical race theory (CRT), at New York University law school. Because law schools — not grade schools — are where CRT is actually taught:

For Derrick Bell, the criticism at the core of critical race theory was never aimed at us as students, including white students, nor arguably is that the case for most critical race theory founders and scholars. In fact, quite the opposite. The whole point of critical race theory was to help our collective understanding of racism move past a focus on individual acts and blame to instead scrutinize systems, policies and institutions that are by far the most pernicious and pervasive ways in which our racial caste system is perpetuated.

Professor Bell wasn’t implicating us as in creating those systems and injustices in the first place; he was inviting us to help dismantle them. He wasn’t blaming us for not comprehending the history and complexity of systemic injustice; he was helping us learn – to open our eyes and our minds. That saying that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem? That’s not a critique of whiteness, or any specific identity, but an attack on ignorance and complicity. Critical race theory is about helping Americans – all Americans – understand the reality of our nation’s past and present in order to scrutinize and ultimately fix what has long been broken for communities of color. The criticism is focused on systems, not people. 

By the same token, I remember one moment during class when professor Bell asked whether any in the class had ever felt nervous getting into an elevator with a man they didn’t know. Every woman in the class put their hands up, myself included. Most of the men didn’t, and several looked around at the rest of us and were visibly perplexed. That’s not because the question was anti-male, but because it abruptly revealed the ways in which gender shapes our different realities – and how women are acutely aware of the ever-present reality of sexism and gender-based violence, while most men go about their lives completely unaware. 

I guess some of those men got “woke.” The horror.

It took a nine-minute video of George Floyd being slowly murdered under Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee to wake the rest of the country (some of it) to how differently our system of justice treats non-white citizens. Chauvin is scheduled to be sentenced for the Floyd murder today.

Here is how that system treats white people:

A grandmother from Indiana who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced Wednesday to three years of probation for her participation in the riot, making her the first person sentenced in the attack.

Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old hair salon owner, pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building, which carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. Washington, D.C., District Judge Royce Lamberth also ordered her to complete 40 hours of community service and pay $500 in restitution.

A TV commentator observed that Black people get worse treatment for sitting in front of a grocery store.

https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1408257042570256385?s=20

Much reporting on the Jan. 6 insurrection has focused on “failures of preparedness and intelligence sharing by the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and the Pentagon,” ProPublica reports this morning. The involvement of Donald Trump White House officials has gone largely uninvestigated.

Despite the GOP’s cowardly failure to defend our Constitution, the Jan. 6th Select Committee will investigate the truth of the desecration of the Capitol that resulted in multiple deaths, injury to over 140 law enforcement officers & terror among staff, workers & Representatives. pic.twitter.com/77kT9sgr0D

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 25, 2021

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday she would convene a Select Committee to investigate the mayhem of Jan. 6. How much cooperation the committee could either get or compel from White House officials is unknown, but their roles should be part of that investigation:

ProPublica has obtained new details about the Trump White House’s knowledge of the gathering storm, after interviewing more than 50 people involved in the events of Jan. 6 and reviewing months of private correspondence. Taken together, these accounts suggest that senior Trump aides had been warned the Jan. 6 events could turn chaotic, with tens of thousands of people potentially overwhelming ill-prepared law enforcement officials.

Rather than trying to halt the march, Trump and his allies accommodated its leaders, according to text messages and interviews with Republican operatives and officials.

Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign official assigned by the White House to take charge of the rally planning, helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5. That event ended up including incendiary speeches from Jones and Ali Alexander, the leader of Stop the Steal, who fired up his followers with a chant of “Victory or death!”

The record of what White House officials knew about Jan. 6 and when they knew it remains incomplete. Key officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, declined to be interviewed for this story.

ProPublica obtained a Dec. 27 text from Women for America First organizer Amy Kremer that suggests the White House was warned that the Stop the Steal rally organized by Alexander and Cindy Chafian, an Alex Jones ally, could get out of hand. In particular, any impromptu march on the Capitol. Kremer, who has known Mark Meadows since his early days in Congress, denies speaking with Meadows or other White House officials about the matter. Kremer did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the text and Meadows refused to comment on whether he’d been contacted.

An intelligence report from that day obtained by ProPublica shows that the Capitol Police expected a handful of rallies on Capitol grounds, the largest of which would be hosted by a group called One Nation Under God.

Law enforcement anticipated between 50 and 500 people at the gathering, assigning it the lowest possible threat score and predicting a 1% to 5% chance of arrests. The police gave much higher threat scores to two small anti-Trump demonstrations planned elsewhere in the city.

However, One Nation Under God was a fake name used to trick the Capitol Police into giving Stop the Steal a permit, according to Stop the Steal organizer Kimberly Fletcher. Fletcher is president of Moms for America, a grassroots organization founded to combat “radical feminism.”

“Everybody was using different names because they didn’t want us to be there,” Fletcher said, adding that Alexander and his allies experimented with a variety of aliases to secure permits for the east front of the Capitol. Laughing, Fletcher recalled how the police repeatedly called her “trying to find out who was who.”

A Senate report on security failures during the Capitol riot released earlier this month suggests that at least one Capitol Police intelligence officer had suspicions about this deceptive strategy, but that leadership failed to appreciate it — yet another example of an intelligence breakdown.

On Dec. 31, the officer sent an email expressing her concerns that the permit requests were “being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and that those requesting permits “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble” on Jan. 6.

A Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica on April 2, “Our intelligence suggested one or more groups were affiliated with Stop the Steal,” after we asked for a copy of the One Nation Under God permit, which they declined to provide.

Yet 18 days later, Capitol Police Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that she believed the permit requests had been properly vetted and that they were not granted to anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Pittman did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.

One Nation Under God obtained a permit from Capitol Police to gather on Capitol grounds, while Women for America First held the Park Service permit for the rally on the Ellipse where Trump spoke. His decision to speak “came as a surprise to both rally organizers and White House staff,” or so they told ProPublica. Trump’s announcement from the stage that the crowd would be marching to the Capitol shocked Women for America First organizer Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. The rest is history.

As of Thursday, 500 have been arrested, including 100 for assaulting police. Marcy Wheeler adds, “FBI has released 410 BOLOs, most for assault, and well over 200 of those people remain at large. And of course, the FBI has not yet apprehended the pipe bomber.”

A lot of people “did not respond” to or “declined to comment” on ProPublica’s questions about planning leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection still under investigation by the FBI. Pelosi’s Select Committee has a lot of questions that need answering.

AG Merrick Garland has said that he’s going to leave it up to the Inspector General to sort out any DOJ wrongdoing during the Trump administration. That’s not good enough. So the House Judiciary Committee is stepping up. I’m sure it will be a circus with the Beavis and Butthead show trying to sabotage any investigations. But they have to do it anyway:

Top Democrats in the House are investigating whether Trump justice department officials ran an unlawful shadow operation to target political enemies of the former president to hunt down leaks of classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, is centering his investigation on the apparent violation of internal policies by the justice department, when it issued subpoenas against Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell in 2018.

The use of subpoenas to secretly seize data from the two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and fierce critics of Donald Trump – would ordinarily require authorization from the highest levels of the justice department and notably, the attorney general.

But with the former Trump attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions denying any knowledge of the subpoenas, Democrats are focused on whether rogue officials abused the vast power of the federal government to target Trump’s perceived political opponents, the source said.

That kind of shadow operation – reminiscent of the shadow foreign policy in Ukraine that led to Trump’s first impeachment – would be significant because it could render the subpoenas unlawful, the source said.

And if the subpoenas were issued without proper authorization from the attorney general level, it could also leave the officials involved in the effort open to prosecution for falsely operating with the imprimatur of law enforcement.

The sharpening contours of the House judiciary committee’s investigation into the Trump justice department reflects Democrats’ determination to uncover potential politicization at the department.

We know something was rotten and we may never fully understand what it was. But more and more trickles out all the time. Someone needs to try to put it all together and it appwears the congress is the only institution with the will and the power to do it.

There's a real fascist vibe to this One America News personality calming calling for the execution of potentially tens of thousands of Americans over fake voter fraud claims. pic.twitter.com/wm4E0qVJaf

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 24, 2021

TPM:

“What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?” Sharp mused to camera, in a clip flagged by The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer. 

“Well, in the past, America had a very good solution to dealing with such traitors: Execution.” 

The monologue offers a chilling glimpse at what appears to be a growing comfort with violence from far-right platforms like OAN and their viewers. Sommer noted that members of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement had gleefully circulated the clip online, seeing it as “proof that the mass executions are right around the corner.” 

At least one OAN viewer uploaded footage of themselves cheering on the call for killing their political opponents. “They get hung!” the viewer shouted after Sharp asked about the punishment for traitors.  

The monologue only grew more explicit as Sharp went on. 

“There have been numerous indications that foreign governments, including China and Pakistan, meddled in our election to install Joe Biden as president,” Sharp said. “Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government official, is guilty of treason under U.S. Code 2381, which carries with it a penalty of death.” 

The projection here is enough to give you a massive headache if not a full-blow aneurysm. But consider the fact that they have already harassed hundreds of election officials and workers into quitting with their death and rape threats. Now they are suggesting that they should be tried and executed.

Now this:

TPM asked Sharp by email about the monologue, noting that it seemed to embrace executing thousands of people for purported election crimes. (Sharp had asked his viewers, “How many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election. Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?”)

“No, neither myself, nor OAN is ‘embracing executing thousands of people,’” Sharp replied. “OAN is simply pointing out that if election fraud is proven, then it could very well constitute treason. And according to our laws, treason is punishable by death. If it is found that government officials coordinated with foreign countries to overthrow the election, then that would be the very definition of treason. Which, according to our nation’s laws, could result in execution.”

He then helpfully directed TPM to the federal law defining treason and its punishment, death.

“These are simply facts,” he said. “You may disagree with the suggestion that election fraud was committed. However, it is indisputable that the US has laws which lay out consequences for committing certain crimes, including treason. This report is only making that point clear.”

“I’m simply reporting that conspiring against the government to overthrow an election, with the help of a foreign government, would be treason,” Sharp said in a subsequent email. “If that is investigated, and if that is proven, then US laws maintain that execution is a legal punishment for those crimes. That is the extent of the report.”

“Neither I, nor OAN, are suggesting anyone should be executed,” Sharp told TPM. “That is for the appropriate law enforcement agencies to determine.” He also denied that OAN was advocating for “vigilantism.”

“Execution for treason is strictly a legal process,” he wrote.

I’m so old I remember when Democrats all made very clear that Trump didn’t commit treason when he openly colluded with the Russian government in 2016 by hiring Paul Manafort and saying on television “Russia, if you'[re listening …” Treason only applies to nations with whom the country is at war. But whatever. These people are batshit crazy and they’ve brainwashed tens of millions of people into thinking this is normal discourse.

But hey! Bipartisanship!

Fox has an exclusive poll showing Biden with 56% approval.

Just go to the homepage, click the link about the lab leak, and scroll down a bit. Hard to miss! pic.twitter.com/DQDBoTJRrz

— Philip Bump (@pbump) June 24, 2021

Fox News pays Lara Trump to go on Fox and say Fox polls are fake https://t.co/1JMVuqSO03

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2021

This is hilarious. But Lara Trump is just parroting Dear Leader who always said the polls were rigged, especially the Fox News poll which, despite its mission to spread disinformation and propaganda to the MAGA cult, still has integrity.

“You can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes…”