No, not New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He’s done. Elizabeth Spiers’s New York Times epitaph for his career reads in brief: “Mr. Cuomo is not a nice guy” whose daughters “don’t appear to loathe him.”
Cuomo just another in a long line of political jerks and bullies. We have seen his kind before and will again. But Donald Trump and his cult are threats to the republic if not to western democracy. Trump’s political career cannot end soon enough. It’s the waiting as his zombie cult shambles relentlessly toward autocracy that’s nerve-wracking.
Emails from December 28, 2020 reveal Jeffrey Clark, then acting head of the Department of Justice civil rights division, attempting to coax department higher-ups to place the department’s thumb on the election to overturn Trump’s November loss to Joe Biden. Clark sent a draft letter to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue urging Georgia’s governor to call a special legislative session to investigate Trump’s fraud claims (ABC News):
“The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States,” the draft letter said. “The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”
The draft letter states: “While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.”
In other words, urging Georgia Republicans to overturn the presidential results there.
The DOJ provided the emails to the House Oversight Committee investigating events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, the DOJ investigator general is investigating whether any department officials took actions to overturn the election results.
The Department had uncovered no evidence of “irregularities,” and Attorney General William Barr had said as much publicly. Neither had an historic audit of the Georgia results completed in mid-November. But Trump and loyalists such as Clark would not accept the loss, graciously or otherwise.
Clark attached the draft letter in an email to Rosen and Donoghue telling them “I think we should get it out as soon as possible.”
“Personally, I see no valid downsides to sending out the letter,” Clark wrote. “I put it together quickly and would want to do a formal cite check before sending but I don’t think we should let unnecessary moss grow on this.”
Donoghue responded that issuing the letter was “not even within the realm of possibility,” citing Barr’s prior statements. Rosen also dismissed the draft as a non-starter.
The New York Times revealed in January that Clark then devised a plan with Trump to oust Rosen and install Clark to “wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.” Department officials threatened to resign en masse if Trump fired Rosen. Trump relented only after a White House meeting “two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show ‘The Apprentice.’”
As the House begins its investigation into events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, it is clearer still that Trump and his allies will go to any length and corrupt any democratic process to ensure Republicans control the outcome of future presidential elections. The groundwork for seizing control of the Electoral College process from the voters is happening in various Republican-controlled states now.
The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer followed the dark money behind the drawn-out, privately funded election audit in Arizona. The goal (as I’ve written for a decade) is not to uncover the truth, but to obscure it in the way voter fraud fraudsters travel the country flinging figurative smoke bombs into news rooms to create in the public’s mind the impression of fire, somewhere, where there is none.
Mayer writes:
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”
As with previous decades of voter fraud promotion, the goal of promoting election audits is to support legislation to disenfranchise voters who do not vote Republican. Only now, by monkey-wrenching the vote count directly.
Watch the Chris Hayes monologue from Tuesday.
Due process for Trump and his cohort, of course, but can we speed it up?