Month: August 2021

And Donald Trump has good reason to be worried.

There is so much going on at the moment between the massive spike in COVID due to millions of intransigent holdouts who refuse to get vaccinated and the excruciating events unfolding in Afghanistan that one important story got lost this week: The House January 6th Committee sent letters to eight different government agencies demanding documents and communications regarding administration strategizing to overturn the 2020 election results.

Considering what happened on January 6th and all the open discussions by former President Trump and his allies prior to that date, it’s very reasonable to suspect that this evidence exists. But what has surprised people is the sheer scope of their records requests. Here are some examples:

“Documents and communications pertaining to “planning by the White House for legal or other strategies to delay, halt or otherwise impede the electoral count.”

“Any documents and communications relating to instructions to stop or delay preparations for transition of administration.”

“… communications discussion the recognition of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election.”

“All documents concerning the potential invocation of the Insurrection Act”

“All documents and communications concerning Federal law enforcement or military personnel during voting in the 2020 election.”

And that’s just for starters.

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There are requests for documents going back as far as April of 2020, prompting MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to ask Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Ms, what lawmakers were looking for. His reply? They have information that he can’t go into but which is credible enough that they are seeking evidence to prove it. Recall, April 2020 was about the time that Trump was starting to rail against mail-in voting, following up on his 2016 strategy by laying the groundwork to reject the results of the election unless he was declared the winner. Perhaps Thompson believes this strategy may have been formal than it seemed?

The committee is looking at Trump himself and dozens of his closest associates, including his children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, as well as close confidantes such as Roger Stone, along with political friends like Chris Christie. It appears they suspect at least one top GOP congressional aide is involved in publicizing the “Stop the Steal” rally which turned into a violent insurrection. They want information about the Trump henchmen who were placed in important positions throughout the government after the election as he set about invalidating the results. And they are demanding all documentary evidence regarding the planning and funding of the January 5th and 6th rallies and any other plots to slow down the confirmation of the electoral vote.

They also demanded a lot of information from the Pentagon, including documents pertaining to the delay of the transition and any discussion of the potential use of the military to impede the transfer of power. They even asked why the DOD denied that Michael Flynn’s brother, Lt. General Charles Flynn, participated in the January 6th meetings about the response to the attacks. Michael Flynn, after all, was intimately involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement.

Probably the most important requests are for information from the Department of Justice, which former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal characterized as serving as “a blank check” throughout the Trump presidency. The DOJ finally said “no” when Trump tried to make them help him declare the election corrupt. “How significant must the demands have been for even them to say no to Donald Trump?” Katyal asked Joy Reid on MSNBC. 

It’s a comprehensive set of demands investigating whether Trump planned to invoke various executive powers and strategies to remain president despite losing the election. In other words, they are seeking the documentary evidence of Donald Trump’s coup attempt.

This comes on the heels of news that the committee plans to require phone companies to preserve all their electronic data around January 6th, including for members of Congress and others who were in communication with Trump on that day or involved in the planning.

Most of the government requests will be answered by the National Archives which keeps all official records. It will be very interesting to see whether members of the administration made “memos to the file” of these events in case this ever came back to haunt them.

Needless to say, Trump was not amused. In fact, he had something of a temper tantrum, putting out this statement:

“The Leftist “select committee” has further exposed itself as a partisan sham and waste of taxpayer dollars with a request that’s timed to distract Americans from historic and global catastrophes brought on by the failures of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Unfortunately, this partisan exercise is being performed at the expense of long-standing legal principles of privilege. Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my Administration and the Patriots who worked beside me but on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our Nation. These Democrats only have one tired trick—political theater—and their latest request only reinforces that pathetic reality.”

All of this seems even more necessary in light of NBC’s Lester Holt’s interview on Thursday night with the Capitol police officer who shot insurrectionist Ashlie Babbitt as she broke through the door that separated the mob from the trapped officials they were hunting on January 6th. He had not been officially identified but felt it necessary to come forward and tell his side of the story and it was compelling, particularly when he pointed out that he would have done the same to protect the life of the president and his family if the same thing happened when they were in the capitol. The right-wing crazies have been calling for his head for weeks, led by Trump who is working overtime to turn Babbitt into an innocent martyr and raise suspicions about this officer whose name is Lt. Michael Byrd, a 28-year veteran of the Capitol Police and who also happens to be Black, which I’m sure had nothing to do with Trump’s eagerness to portray him as a crazed gunman.

If you want to see how the right-wing media is handling this, Tucker Carlson is a good example:

Tucker Carlson repeatedly says Michael Byrd "executed" Ashli Babbitt (Babbitt in fact was part of a mob that was trying to lynch members of Congress) pic.twitter.com/hYxPFTff0V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 27, 2021

Whether a former president can legally claim executive privilege on evidence that he fomented a coup is a complicated question but either way that’s going to take time. The good news is that this investigation is going to be serious and thorough by looking at what happened on January 6th from a very wide perspective which, for the first time with Donald Trump, may succeed in actually getting to the bottom of what he did. 

Salon

“I’ve done my research” is destined to enter the pantheon of famous last words like, “Hey, watch this!”

Is it possible Trumpomania will kill off the species before climate change? This thread collected by one Ryan Graney speaks to the insanity coursing through America like the Delta variant. It wasn’t that long ago these people insisted Covid was a hoax. Now they concede, okay, Covid is real. The doctors were right. That just makes them distrust professionals even more. And it gives them an opportunity to self-diagnose and self-prescribe veterinary antiparasitic medicines they researched on the internet.

Graney joined some ivermectin groups and did some trolling. Here’s a sampling:

https://twitter.com/RyanEGraney/status/1430857409107464195?s=20

https://twitter.com/RyanEGraney/status/1430889884131135489?s=20

“The research is out there. You can go find it. It is readily available,” says Russell.

https://twitter.com/RyanEGraney/status/1430883702750556160?s=20

https://twitter.com/RyanEGraney/status/1430980578741047305?s=20

https://twitter.com/RyanEGraney/status/1431227934732427268?s=20

We’re doomed. Worse, it’s too early to start drinking.

Psychologists and or social scientists will eventually study Trumpism as a form of moral panic or hysterical contagion. Studies will encompass the Jan. 6th insurrection (and attempted coup) and the QAnon conspiracy. Someone will publish a paper and assign a name to it. Trumpophrenia? Trumpomania?

The panic among Donald Trump’s ovewhelmingly white Christian followers provokes risk-taking behaviors such as boat parades which send family after family into the drink and their boats to the bottom. They travel the country like Deadheads to Trump rallies where in the fullness of time they willingly exposed themselves to a dangerous contagion in defiance of medical authorities so they might display their fealty to their tribe and to their one, true political messiah.

A QAnon follower explains how she responds when somebody asks her "What is Q?" pic.twitter.com/jDtZpjBRL7

— Travis View (@travis_view) August 6, 2019

Many equate Trumpism with racism or, more generously, with economic insecurity. But those answers are far too facile. This is lizard-brain stuff. Their fear is loss of social status for a dwindling (okay, white-Christian) majority in a diversifying society. Skin color is just handy shorthand for who is who.

“People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of ‘last place aversion,’ the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself,” Sean McElwee wrote in 2015.

“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you,” President Lyndon Johnson told his press secretary Bill Moyers in 1960.

Fear of loss of status was behind the Redemption movement, the white backlash that followed Reconstruction. Fear of loss of status was behind the violent insurrection by white supremacists against Black men governing Wilmington in 1898 and behind the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa that just saw its 100-year anniversary. It was behind the T-party that arose after the U.S. elected its first Black president. The backlash against that eventually turned violent on January 6th.

Maintaining their position in the social pecking order means more to Trumpists than money. More than the security of universal health care for them and their families. More than life itself. Story after tragic story surfaces of dying Trump believers who refused to wear masks and refused vaccination against COVID-19 in defiance of the the norms of an emerging society without them (and their political messiah) at its apex.

I have long suggested that the right is playing out “Banks of the Ohio” with their beloved country. If they couldn’t have it for theirs and theirs alone, they would murder it so no one else could possess it. But until COVID-19, I never saw them reimagining the ballad as a murder-suicide.

It’s no mystery what’s happening in Florida right now — or why.

The state is experiencing its worst surge of the pandemic. Last week, it was averaging nearly 25,000 new cases every day. The previous high, in January, was about 18,000. More than 17,000 Floridians are hospitalized with Covid-19, another record; around 230 people are dying every day. Florida leads all states in the number of hospitalizations and deaths per capita.

The city of Orlando has urged residents to limit their water use, because the same liquid oxygen used to treat the water supply is being used to provide air to Covid-19 patients. The Florida health department asked the federal government to send more ventilators as the number of hospitalized patients spiked — a request Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has staked his political reputation on his laissez-faire response to the pandemic, claimed to know nothing about.

In recent days, cases may have started to plateau, increasing “only” 11 percent in the past two weeks. But it’s hard to be sure because testing is inadequate: Nearly 20 percent of tests are coming back positive in the state. Experts say that number should be at 5 percent or lower in order to be confident most cases are being caught.

For most of last year, Florida looked like a success story for the people who advocated for a less restrictive response to Covid-19. Its case and death rates weren’t noticeably worse than other states that were more aggressive about mandating masks or closing businesses.

Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday.

So why is Florida is experiencing its worst surge now, 18 months into the pandemic, when the vaccines are widely available?

In some ways, what’s happening in Florida is a microcosm of the current surge across America: A middling vaccination rate has collided with a more contagious version of the virus. And it’s doing so in a state where political leaders continue to insist people should act as though the pandemic is over — even as more people are dying every day than at any point in the past year.

About half of Florida residents, 52 percent, are fully vaccinated, according to the Times’s data. That’s not terrible — Mississippi and Alabama currently rank last, with less than 38 percent — but it’s not great either. The Sunshine State is 25th among states in vaccination rate.

Florida is not a monolith; some communities have much higher levels of protection than others. Case levels trend accordingly, with the less vaccinated areas seeing more spread. In counties with more than 1,000 new cases per 100,000 people, vaccination rates are stuck in the 30s and 40s.

Counties with vaccination rates of 60 percent or above are still seeing a significant amount of spread. But it’s substantially less, sometimes by more than half, than the worst-off areas, according to the state’s data. Less vaccinated counties have been driving the current wave.

“Insufficient vaccine coverage is contributing a lot,” Cindy Prins, a University of Florida epidemiologist, told me.

The piece points out that Florida was considered the big winner last year because its cases were not worse than others even as DeSantis had opened up the state and ridiculed mitigation efforts. But guess what? By doing that he “downplayed” the virus like his mentor Donald Trump so a lot of people didn’t take it seriously. When this latest surge with the much more infectious variant came along, they weren’t vaccinated and they didn’t bother to adapt their behavior. Now it’s killing them.

And yes, it is all Ron DeSantis’ fault.

DeSantis, who has clear presidential aspirations in 2024, has positioned himself and his state’s Covid-19 response against the public health establishment and, more recently, the Biden administration.

Though he, like most governors, closed many businesses last spring, they were allowed to reopen in May of 2020; DeSantis steadfastly refused to consider any new closures during following waves in the summer and winter. He ended the state’s mask mandates on May 4, 2021, before the CDC changed its own masking guidance, and he has resisted calls to reimpose them even as cases surged again.

The governor tried to block local school districts from setting their own mask mandates for the new school year and threatened to withhold the salaries of any officials who implement a masking policy. Some school districts are pushing ahead anyway. He also has opposed businesses requiring vaccines for their employees or customers.

Experts said the state’s policies, which have signaled to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike that it’s okay to go about their normal lives, are making it easier for the virus to spread.

“There are still a large absolute number of unvaccinated people, relatively few people practicing social distancing or masking, by choice and also due to the absence of policies requiring them,” Joshua Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “Schools and universities going back into session, and lots of delta introductions in the state all happening at the same time.”

The situation has led to a sort of theater of the absurd, with DeSantis fighting local mitigation measures while at the same time promoting new treatments for people who get so sick they need to be hospitalized because of Covid-19.

As people who’ve been reading this blog for years already know, I have been writing about “pain compliance” for years, specifically in terms of tasers. Torture, in other words. This story out of Louisiana about a cop who used “pain compliance” (beating a citizens with a flashlight) shows how torture is used by police in many different ways:

“I’m not resisting! I’m not resisting!” Aaron Larry Bowman can be heard screaming between blows on the footage obtained by The Associated Press. The May 2019 beating following a traffic stop left him with a broken jaw, three broken ribs, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. . . .

On the night Bowman was pulled over for a traffic violation, [Trooper Jacob] Brown came upon the scene after deputies had forcibly removed Bowman from his vehicle and taken him to the ground. The trooper later told investigators he “was in the area and was trying to get involved.”

Wielding an 8-inch aluminum flashlight reinforced with a pointed end to shatter car glass, Brown jumped out of his state police vehicle and began bashing Bowman on his head and body within two seconds of “initial contact” — unleashing 18 strikes in 24 seconds, detectives wrote in an investigative report.

“Give me your f—— hands!” the trooper shouted. “I ain’t messing with you.”

Bowman tried to explain several times that he was a dialysis patient, had done nothing wrong and wasn’t resisting, saying, “I’m not fighting you, you’re fighting me.”

Brown responded with: “Shut the f—- up!” and “You ain’t listening.” . . .

Brown, 31, later said Bowman had struck a deputy and that the blows were “pain compliance” intended to get Bowman into handcuffs. . . .

Bowman, 46, denied hitting anyone and is not seen on the video being violent with officers. But he still faces a list of charges, including battery of a police officer, resisting an officer and the traffic violation for which he was initially stopped, improper lane usage.

Jonathan V. Last looks at all the “layers of rot” in this behavior:

So this is all bad enough. “Bad” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But the violence and assault is just the first layer of corruption. The rot goes much deeper. Because what’s wrong in law enforcement isn’t just that there are bad cops. It’s that institutions protect and cover these bad cops, rather than rooting them out and punishing them.

Let’s move through the different layers of rot.

---

The second layer, following Trooper Brown’s assault, came in the official report he filed:

Brown not only failed to report his use of force but mislabeled his footage as a “citizen encounter” . . .

The third layer is that the Louisiana State Police refused to even investigate the assault for almost two years—and didn’t do so until their hand was forced by a civil lawsuit:

State police didn’t investigate the attack on Bowman until 536 days after it occurred — even though it was captured on body camera — and only did so weeks after Bowman brought a civil lawsuit.

The fourth layer is that even with the investigation and the lawsuit, the State Police refused to release the body cam footage to the public. We’re only seeing it now because the Associated Press did journalism and uncovered it.

The fifth layer is that Trooper Brown probably shouldn’t have been employed at the time of the assault because he had 23 use-of-force incidents between 2015 and 2019. (And those are just the ones we know about. Given his self-report of the assault on Bowman as a “citizen encounter,” there may well be others.)

And the sixth layer is that other officers knew that Brown was a psychopath and did nothing about it:

He also faces state charges in two other violent arrests of Black motorists, including one he boasted about last year in a group chat with other troopers, saying the suspect is “gonna be sore” and “it warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.”

Who talks like that? I mean, aside from the Southern KKK cop villain in a movie. If you heard a work colleague talking like that, would you just chuckle and move on with your day? I doubt it.

There will always be bad cops—just as there are always bad doctors, bad priests, bad teachers, and bad journalists. The goal of police reform isn’t to change human nature so that only good people work in law enforcement.

No, the goal is to change the institutions so that police departments and prosecutors are incentivized to discover, remove, and prosecute bad actors within their ranks.

Last lays out some good ideas if you want to click over.

But first we need to recognize that law enforcement commonly uses torture to gain compliance and we need to decide, as a society, whether or not we are going to tolerate it. Obviously, we cannot continue to allow police to continue to shoot unarmed Black men all the time. That’s straight up murder. But torture is part of the problem as well and I am afraid that we are in the process of rationalizing it as somehow better because it stops short of killing people — most of the time.

You can see the beating video here, if you can stomach it.

Here’s some interesting perspective on the debacle of the Afghanistan war from the NY Times. It would be nice if the people reporting on the current situation would read it:

Just days after the Taliban took Kabul, their flag was flying high above a central mosque in Pakistan’s capital. It was an in-your-face gesture intended to spite the defeated Americans. But it was also a sign of the real victors in the 20-year Afghan war.

Pakistan was ostensibly America’s partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Its military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid over the last two decades, even as Washington acknowledged that much of the money disappeared into unaccounted sinkholes.

But it was a relationship riven by duplicity and divided interests from its very start after 9/11. Not least, the Afghan Taliban the Americans were fighting are, in large part, a creation of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., which through the course of the war nurtured and protected Taliban assets inside Pakistan.

In the last three months as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, the Pakistani military waved a surge of new fighters across the border from sanctuaries inside Pakistan, tribal leaders have said. It was a final coup de grace to the American-trained Afghan security forces.

“The Pakistanis and the I.S.I. think they have won in Afghanistan,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan. But, he warned, the Pakistanis should watch what they wish for. “If the Afghan Taliban become leaders of a pariah state, which is likely, Pakistan will find itself tethered to them.”

Pakistan’s already shaky reputation in the West is likely to plummet now, as the Taliban take over Afghanistan. Calls to sanction Pakistan have already circulated on social media. Absent foreign financing, Pakistan faces reliance on a jihadist drug trade encouraged by the new rulers in Kabul. A Taliban-run state on its border will no doubt embolden Taliban and other Islamist militants in Pakistan itself.

Not least, relations with the United States, already on the downslope, will unravel further. Aside from maintaining the stability of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the Americans now have less incentive to deal with Pakistan.

So the question for the Pakistanis is what will they do with the broken country that is their prize? Already Pakistan, along with Russia and China, is helping fill the space the Americans have vacated. The embassies of the three nations have remained open since the Taliban seized Kabul.

Good luck to Russia, China and Pakistan on that.

I have always wondered why we never discussed this complicated relationship with Pakistan but I guess we never discuss complicated issues like this. If you have time to read the whole story I recommend it. And then imagine Donald Trump trying to understand it. Yikes.

This, apparently:

Quite a sad contrast with the images dominating the news today. https://t.co/DaWS1R5LGu

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) August 24, 2021

Ezra Klein has a smart column in the NY Times today about our ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan:

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan.

“The pro-war crowd sees this as a mechanism by which they can absolve themselves of an accounting for the last 20 years,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told me. “Just think about the epic size of this policy failure. Twenty years of training. More than $2 trillion worth of expenditure. For almost nothing. It is heartbreaking to watch these images, but it is equally heartbreaking to think about all of the effort, of lives and money we wasted in pursuit of a goal that was illusory.”

Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, phrased it well. “There’s no denying America is the most powerful country in the world, but what we’ve seen over and over in recent decades is we cannot turn that into the outcomes we want. Whether it’s Afghanistan or Libya or sanctions on Russia and Venezuela, we don’t get the policy outcomes we want, and I think that’s because we overreach — we assume that because we are very powerful, we can achieve things that are unachievable.”

It is worth considering some counterfactuals for how our occupation could have ended. Imagine that the Biden administration, believing the Afghan government hollow, ignored President Ashraf Ghani’s pleas and begins rapidly withdrawing personnel and power months ago. The vote of no-confidence ripples throughout Afghan politics, demoralizing the existing government and emboldening the Taliban. Those who didn’t know which side to choose, who were waiting for a signal of who held power, quickly cut deals with the Taliban. As the last U.S. troops leave, the Taliban overwhelms the country, and the Biden administration is blamed, reasonably, for speeding their victory.

Another possible scenario was suggested to me by Grant Gordon, a political scientist who works on conflict and refugee crises (and is, I should say, an old friend): If the Biden administration had pulled our allies and personnel out more efficiently, that might have unleashed the Taliban to massacre their opposition, as America and the world would have been insulated and perhaps uninterested in the aftermath. There have been revenge killings, but it has not devolved, at least as of yet, into all-out slaughter, and that may be because the American withdrawal has been messy and partial and the Taliban fears re-engagement. “What is clearly a debacle from one angle may actually have generated restraint. Having spent time in places like this, I think people lack a real imagination for how bad these conflicts can get,” he told me.

Let me offer one more: Even though few believed Ghani’s government would prevail in our absence, and the Trump administration cut them out of its deal with the Taliban, there’s widespread disappointment that the government we supported collapsed so quickly. Biden has been particularly unsparing in his descriptions of the Afghan Army’s abdication, and I agree with those who say he’s been unfair, underestimating the courage and sacrifice shown by Afghan troops throughout the war. But put that aside: Americans might have felt better seeing our allies in Afghanistan put up a longer fight, even if the Taliban emerged victorious. But would a multiyear civil war have been better for the Afghans caught in the crossfire?

Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, put it simply: “I think there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and smart people are struggling with how to rationalize defeat. Because that’s what we have here in Afghanistan — a defeat.”

I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.

Ezra’s last point is one I cannot stop screaming about internally as I watch and read the coverage of this event. We all knew that withdrawal was on the table. Both presidential candidates said they would do it. An agreement was in place. (Whether Trump would have had the guts to actually do it is another story — he had four years, after all.) But the intention was clear. I don’t remember anyone putting up much of a fuss over it. There were numerous debates and months of campaigning and everyone knew it was happening.

Fast forward to the withdrawal and everyone is suddenly upset about the plight of the Afghanistan people, which is understandable. It’s a horror. But either they never thought about the consequences of withdrawal until now or they thought that the Afghan Army would fight off of the Taliban (with whom we were directly negotiating, remember) for months or years, resulting in a blood civil war that would kill massive numbers of Afghans. Is this really the outcome we wanted, because that’s the real counterfactual? Essentially, it just would mean that the US could get out clean and then blame the inevitable defeat on the Afghan army, which is grotesquely self-serving.

The media, which is leading the hysterical reaction to the complicated withdrawal, should have understood this better than anyone. Their apparent shock is inexcusable.

Update: there was a bombing at Kabul airport this morning.

A couple of days ago, Matt Yglesias tweeted this:

On 8 September, 2009, at around 8:22 AM, a suicide bombing took place near the entrance of the airport’s military base

On 3 July 2014, Taliban fighters fired two rockets into the airport, destroying four helicopters. One of the four helicopters belongs to Afghan President hamid Karzai

On 29 July 2015, three American defense contractors and one Afghan national were killed by a gunman outside the airport in the late evening

On 17 May, 2015, a suicide bombing by the Taliban near the entrance of the airport occured, killing three and injuring eighteen

The point, of course, is that we have been dealing with violence at the very location where the violence took place today, for a very long time with nobody paying any attention to it.

I don’t think so. They’ll try but it really depends upon whether or not Joe Biden’s White House claims executive privilege on Trump’s behalf. Let’s hope he doesn’t do that.

Anyway, the House Jan. 6 Committee’s  voluminous document request  about January 6th and the events leading up to it has made Trump explode:

Trump whipped out the typical “executive privilege” claim that he’s clung to in every investigation into his or his administration’s corruption for the past four years.

“Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my Administration and the Patriots who worked beside me, but on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our Nation,” he ranted in a statement sent through his Save America PAC.

Trump accused the “leftist” committee, which includes Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), of being a “partisan sham.”

The committee is being very aggressive, even looking at Trump’s princess Ivanka and her beloved Jared, the son Trump never had. I’m impressed.

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder how in the world anyone can think the Trump Organization isn’t guilty of much worse. First you had the Trump University scam, which required them to pay out 20 million dollars to plaintiffs in a civil fraud case. And then you had the suspicion of payoffs to public officials to keep them from joining a multi-state fraud investigation, specifically Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Here’s some new evidence from the Daily Beast:

It was the personally signed $25,000 check that landed then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in hot water—the check that sparked accusations that he had bribed Florida’s top prosecutor, Pam Bondi, with funds from his charity.

Much has been written about the suspicious timing of Trump’s 2013 gift to the Florida attorney general’s political campaign. But contrary to previous claims from Trump’s presidential campaign and company executives, new records acquired by The Daily Beast show that Trump Organization employees were explicitly told this was a donation to a political group, and emails show that Trump’s own executive assistant had met in person with Bondi’s finance director in New York City.

In its 2018 case against the Trump Foundation, the New York attorney general noted how Trump broke the law by using his charity to fund Bondi’s political group. And the charity was ultimately dissolved after a state judge found Trump had “breached his fiduciary duty” to the charity in other ways, behavior that the AG’s office called a “shocking pattern of illegality.”

The donation occurred just as Bondi was supposed to be considering joining New York’s investigation of the Trump University scam. And Trump himself got off easy. His campaign and foundation executives chalked it up to a mistake. The nonprofit didn’t realize it was a political group, the campaign told The Wall Street Journal. An ignorant company clerk hadn’t known, otherwise “we would have taken it out of [Trump’s] own personal account,” Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg told The Washington Post.

The conversation is laid out in an email exchanged on Aug. 28, 2013 between Bondi campaign finance director Deborah Ramsey Aleksander and Trump’s long-serving executive assistant, Rhona Graff.

Aleksander provided Graff with the name and federal tax identification number for “And Justice for All,” a political action committee associated with Ms. Bondi’s re-election campaign. Aleksander described it as an “ECO,” which stands for “Electioneering Communications Organization.”

“Again, it was a pleasure meeting you today!!! Thanks again for always being so responsive and wonderful to work with.” Aleksander wrote to Graff. “Let Mr. Trump know that we are SO VERY thankful for his commitment of 25k and If he wants to make it 50k, that’s perfectly acceptable. 🙂 Seriously, thanks again for everything!!!”

In a subsequent email sent exactly two weeks later on Sept. 11, 2013, Aleksander mentioned their previous meeting in New York City and provided Graff with a copy of And Justice for All’s Internal Revenue Service W-9 form, which lists the group’s “federal tax classification” as a “political organization.”

Two days later, Trump sent Bondi the check with a signed letter that misspelled her name as “Pam Biondi” and read, “Dear Pam: You are the greatest!”

The signed check to the political group was issued from The Donald J. Trump Foundation, Inc., a tax-exempt nonprofit regulated by Section 501(c)(3) of U.S. tax code—which prohibits political donations by charities.

The Daily Beast showed these documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group that filed the initial complaint that exposed this entire ordeal. Jordan Libowitz, the CREW communications director who led this project, called the emails “a smoking gun.”

“It kind of blows up their whole story,” Libowitz said. “The Trump Organization staffers knew they were making this political donation. There are no questions about it. There is no ambiguity.”

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about the matter on Wednesday. Bondi, who is now listed as a partner at the Washington offices of the lobbying firm Ballard Partners, did not respond to a request for comment, neither did Aleksander, who lists herself as an independent fundraising consultant for Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

The emails obtained by The Daily Beast also cast doubt on another explanation given by the Trump Organization when this matter came under public scrutiny in 2016.

At the time, finance executives claimed that a series of blunders allowed the funds to be drawn from the Trump Foundation and led to the charity incorrectly identifying the recipient on annual tax forms submitted to the IRS.

According to the Trump Organization, a clerk erred by using an outdated list of charities to identify a non-political nonprofit in Utah also called “And Justice for All.” And staff made another mistake when they tallied up donations on the charity’s 990 tax form and listed yet another nonprofit in Kansas called “Justice for All.”

But these emails show that Bondi’s campaign staff twice provided the Trump Organization the correct group’s Federal Employer Identification Number, which does not match the Utah or Kansas nonprofits.

“I don’t understand how you could be this sloppy, even for people working for Donald Trump,” Libowitz said.

The check was dated Sept. 9, 2013, nearly two weeks after Trump company staff were told that the group was related to electioneering. The check appeared to be cut two days before Bondi’s campaign sent over the IRS form, but it was still sent anyway.

The ordeal revealed how the Trump Foundation was essentially an empty vessel that relied entirely on the staff at the for-profit Trump Organization. To get answers about how the check was erroneously cut from the charity, for example, New York Attorney General investigators had to question Jeff McConney, a high-ranking accountant at the Trump Organization. During a confidential 2017 interview, McConney told an investigator he “probably didn’t know at that time that we probably shouldn’t be using foundation funds for this type of thing.”

“We made a mistake,” McConney said.

The emails between the Trump Organization and the Bondi campaign were obtained by The Daily Beast via a public records request to the New York Attorney General, which has conducted multiple investigations into Trump corporate entities over the years.

Under Eric T. Schneiderman in 2016, that office helped win a $25 million class action settlement from Trump University after the for-profit school was caught duping wannabe entrepreneurs and squeezing cash out of students seeking to learn Trump’s “art of the deal.” Then, in 2018, under Barbara D. Underwood, the office got the Trump Foundation to dissolve itself in the aftermath of a fishy fundraiser for veterans that got caught holding back donations and supporting his own political campaign.

Now, in 2021, current Attorney General Letitia James has teamed up with the Manhattan district attorney to indict the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, for criminal tax fraud. That case is ongoing.

As for the check itself, Bondi reportedly tried to return the donation—but that was rejected. She never did investigate Trump University, and a local prosecutor in Florida cleared her of wrongdoing.

Months after she left office in 2019, she joined the Trump team fighting his impeachment.

So far, Allen Weisselberg seems to be willing to go to jail rather than turn on his boss Donald Trump. It’s not surprising. Trump is the most powerful gangster in the world with a large militia ready to fight for him.

There once was a time when evidence that a candidate had blatantly bribed a political official would be a deal breaker. But with Trump it just makes his cult following love him all the more. His criminality is a selling point. It means he’s willing to do whatever it takes, by any means necessary, and they love that about him.

Crooks and Liars reminds us there were “big and evil plans” afoot should the 2020 presidential election not go Donald Trump’s way.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the select committee on Jan. 6th insurrection, about the extensive document request the committee made on Wednesday pertaining to the assault on the Capitol. The committee gave multiple federal agencies two weeks to produce the documents (Washington Post):

The requests include information on “communications within and among the White House and Executive Branch agencies during the leadup to January 6th and on that day,” as well as on issues further removed, such as “attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions across government after the election.”

Other agencies being asked to provide information are the Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and Justice departments, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Many timelines. Many players. Documents dating back to April 2020. What is that all about, Maddow asked.

“Well, we have information that I can’t share with you at this point that individuals were planning in anticipation of the election not going their way and by getting access to this information, we’ll be able to prove it. Clearly the things we cited in our letter kind of lay out the predicate for what occurred. ‘If this happened, we’ll do this. If this happened, we’ll do something else.’ So there was always a plan A, B, C, D in this process. And so there were a lot of people involved,” Thompson said.

“We want to find out from the people who took out the permits for January 6th, the march. We want to make sure that those individuals who financed individuals coming here, that we talk to them. There are a lot of information that we will need and that’s why we did a significant wide net casting effort with this first letter, which I anticipate, to be very honest with you, there will be some other letters forthcoming also, because we need access to all the available information.

“Because, you know, when the president of the United States invites people to come on a particular day and in that invitation says, ‘It’s going to be wild,’ that causes the committee and a lot of other patriotic Americans real concern, because in America, we’re supposed to settle our differences at the ballot box. Not with an insurrection or anything like that. We are not a tin horn dictatorship, we’re the United States of America.”

Donald Trump now threatens to invoke executive privilege to prevent release of some documents.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the broadness of the document request in her newsletter:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the committee’s action proved it is not looking for truth but rather is engaging in politics. The committee asked NARA for records of communications between the president and “any Member of Congress or congressional staff.” This will sweep in McCarthy, who had a heated conversation with Trump on the phone as rioters invaded the Capitol. “They come for members of Congress, they are coming for everybody,” he said.

But, in fact, such a sweep is precisely how scholars actually figure out what has happened in historical events. Limiting research before you know the lay of the land simply obscures the larger picture. 

But then, that’s the Republicans’ goal, isn’t it?