For democracy’s sake, don’t wait! Get them the docs now! All of them!!
The White House has informed the National Archives that it is not asserting executive privilege on behalf of former President Donald Trump, paving the way for the Archives to share documents with the House committee investigating the January 6 violence at the US Capitol.
What are you waiting for????
Before the 2016 election General Michael Flynn went on television and pushed the PIzzagate conspiracy theory. This was before we became inured to the fact that Trump had surrounded himself with lunatics and it seemed pretty shocking at the time. Now we know just what a total nut job Michael Flynn really is and it isn’t so surprising to see him trafficking in the most insane conspiracies.
But that’s a dangerous game. These things tend to blow back on you when you least expect it:
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has been on a relentless media tour since his pardon last year, sitting for interviews with even the most obscure right-wing media outlets to promote the MAGA agenda.
But on Tuesday, Flynn appeared on a little-known YouTube channel called Truth Unveiled TV for a very different reason: rebutting the idea that he led a church congregation in a Satanic ritual borrowed from a nuclear doomsday cult.
In a video entitled “Some Have Said That General Flynn Prayed to Satan in a Recent Prayer,” host Paul Oebel gave Flynn a chance to rebut the growing right-wing controversy alleging he’s signed on with Lucifer.
“I even saw a show the other day saying ‘Michael’s flipped on the side of the devil,’” Oebel said. “Can you please explain what happened there?”
“All of these people that talk about turning to whatever…” Flynn said. “People need to stop overthinking what everybody is saying.”
The bizarre YouTube interview marked Flynn’s latest attempt in a weeks-long campaign to convince his one-time fans in the QAnon conspiracy theory movement that he isn’t a Satanist.
Prior to the unusual controversy, Flynn had embraced his position as a hero to supporters of QAnon, taking a QAnon oath, raising money from QAnon believers, and selling QAnon T-shirts. In May, Flynn even appeared at a QAnon conference and endorsed the idea of a military coup.
But QAnon fame is a fickle thing. After promoting QAnon for more than a year, Flynn now finds himself on the business end of the conspiracy theory. Like QAnon targets before him, Flynn is now struggling to persuade angry QAnon believers that he isn’t a secret Satan-worshipper.
Nobody is safe from this craziness, not even true believers.
This has to be a joke, right?
Can you believe it? After Donald Trump? I honestly don’t know what to say except that if this isn’t just a troll, this person is literally insane.
It seemed odd last December when then-Attorney General Bill Barr resigned before the end of President Trump’s term. Barr had been such a loyal soldier throughout, defending Trump’s misdeeds and corrupting the Department of Justice (DOJ) on his behalf over and over again. Barr had broken DOJ protocols repeatedly as well, most recently ordering the department to investigate claims of voter fraud before any suit or legal proceedings had been initiated. But it all fell apart when Barr said in an interview that he had not actually seen any evidence of such fraud. The president was very displeased. Barr later told him to his face that the claims were “nonsense” and a major rift developed between the two.
Nonetheless, Barr apparently still tried to appease Trump and later told the U.S. Attorney in Georgia to look into Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani’s wild claims and make it a priority. But within a few days, Trump announced that Barr would be leaving his post and he was gone by the end of the month, replaced by his deputy Jeffrey Rosen.
I don’t think we know the full scope of what was going on with Barr and Trump during this period despite Barr’s self-serving recitations to several authors of books on the final days. But it’s clear that he knew that Trump was out of control and he decided to jump off the sinking ship before it went under.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an interim Senate Judiciary Committee Report covering the testimony of various high-level Department of Justice officials during that period between the election and the insurrection and it is a blockbuster. It’s titled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election,” which pretty much says it all.
We knew quite a bit of this already. There was earlier reporting about how Trump had called Acting Attorney General Rosen to instruct him to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” And we knew that an obscure Justice Department lawyer in the civil division by the name of Jeffrey Clark had somehow found his way into Trump’s inner circle and was pushing some corrupt schemes to overturn the election which Trump liked very much. But until this report we didn’t know the scale of this plotting to get the DOJ to step in and use its muscle to carry out Trump’s coup.
Trump worked hard to twist Rosen’s arm. He had Clark calling him with threats that he was going to replace him and demanding that he send a letter to Georgia and other states to advise them of “serious irregularities” in their elections, telling them to call special sessions of their legislatures and deal with the electoral votes however they chose. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was haranguing him as well demanding that he look into Giuliani’s crazy conspiracy theories, as well as odd lawyers involved in Trump lawsuits around the country, one of whom told Rosen “you’re going to force me to call the President and tell him you’re recalcitrant,” as if that would frighten him into compliance.
Trump himself inappropriately called Rosen and his deputy nine times, and met with him personally several more, the final denouement coming just days before the January 6th insurrection in which he literally said, “one thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” As usual, he said the quiet part out loud.
The report is damning. The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup.
The ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, R-Ia, issued a GOP rebuttal to the report. It is truly mind boggling and makes you wonder if the Republicans even bothered to read it. It suggests that Trump was right to be skeptical of Rosen and Donohue because of Carter Page and the FBI and some other irrelevant nonsense from the Russia investigation. This was pure red meat for their base, of course. But this line is so fatuous you have to wonder if they were just trolling for laughs:
“The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we’d expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations,”
Yes, we expect our presidents to refuse to admit they lost elections and plot a coup to stay in power. It’s perfectly normal. And yes, he did back down on firing Rosen and replacing him with his lackey — only once his White House counsel’s office and the entire top level of the Department of Justice said they would quit en masse if he did it. I guess you can call that “advice and recommendations” but Trump’s White House counsel had another term for it: “a murder-suicide pact.”
And anyway, once that part of the plot was foiled, he just switched to plan B — the right-wing lawyer John Eastman’s plot to have Pence refuse to count the electoral votes. At the same time, he had his crack legal team of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani all over the country filing half-baked, embarrassing lawsuits and was egging on activists to come to the Capitol on January 6th saying it was going to be “wild.” He was juggling several coup plots at the same time. And he’s still at it today, calling for “forensic audits” even in states he won! This deranged plot is still unfolding even though he’s been out of office for nine months.
That Senate Republicans would actually defend these actions is outrageous. It’s also chilling.
It’s quite clear that that brief moment after January 6th when the Republicans seemed shaken by Trump’s incitement of a violent insurrection passed very quickly and they have comfortably settled back into rationalizing their complicity by saying that it’s no harm no foul if the president tries to extort foreign leaders to help him sabotage a rival’s campaign or plan a coup to overturn an election if he doesn’t manage to pull it off.
Grassley is appearing with the former president at a rally this weekend where Trump will no doubt insist that he actually won the election. Grassley won’t blink an eye, apparently believing that if Trump gets back in power, it will be perfectly fine if he behaves exactly the same way as he did during those insane final weeks of his term. This is how pathetically corrupt and compromised the GOP’s moral reasoning has become. According to one of the major political parties in the country, attempted coups are now normal politics in America. And as a result we can be quite sure this isn’t the last time that will happen. The only question is whether they can corral enough accomplices to actually succeed next time.
Salon
Democrats could be headed into the wildreness for the next decade, David Shor tells Ezra Klein. Democrats in North Carolina have experienced that for much of the last decade. So it bears attention that the data analyst sees this as the last opportunity Democrats will have to pass an expansive agenda. Use it or lose it. Because they are likely to lose control of the Senate and not get it back for some time:
Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.
Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.
All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. “Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks,” Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as “popularism.” It doesn’t sound as if it would be particularly controversial.
It is.
To be sure. Especially among the wokest of the woke. These peace-loving, anti-gun folks want nothing better than to browbeat “stupid” conservatives into submission with the power of their superior command of the facts. It’s not an approach likely to win friends and influence people out where Democrats need to expand their vote totals. Deep canvassing (listening more than talking) not focused on specific elections might help, but it requires a serious commitment of time.
Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.”
Klein offers much more to consider in his column about Democrats’ longer-term fate. But let’s move to the short term.
Jordan Weissmann (Slate) thinks that with their narrow margin for error in the Senate, Democrats need to lock in wins now that will last. Trying to pass everything on their wish list will fail. Trying to shorten the time window for a raft of new programs to lower the cost will leave them prone to expiring under a House and Senate soon to be controlled by Republicans. Some in the progressive caucus who want to go big or go home could go home with nothing or see their victories undone in a few years. Moderates want to see fewer programs funded for longer so they might endure:
To some extent, which approach you prefer really boils down to whether you’re a political optimist or pessimist, as well as your level of risk aversion. The underlying assumption among progressives seems to be that many of these programs will be so popular that Republicans won’t dare let them expire if their party retakes power in Washington—that, or Democrats will be able to run and win on renewing them. The moderates generally seem less hopeful, worrying that the GOP will in fact be happy to sit on its hands and let a paid leave or pre-K program vanish. (Manchin’s view is a little different: Ever the budget hawk, he’s suggested that once programs are in place, they’ll become “ingrained,” so Congress should fully finance them from the start.)
It’s not objectively obvious who’s right in this fight. Democrats probably shouldn’t count on popular policies sweeping them to another congressional majority in a difficult midterm year where they’ll be facing freshly gerrymandered maps. At the same time, once new government benefits are in place, it really can be hard to dislodge them—see the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act after promising to do so for a decade.
On the other hand, think about just how close Republicans seemingly came to repealing Obamacare. And, to borrow a point others have made, think about how much simpler it might have been if all Republicans had to do was sit back and let it disappear. Maybe timing these programs to expire in 2025, right along with the GOP’s tax cuts, would give Democrats negotiating leverage. But it’s also entirely possible that Trump’s party will have a trifecta in Washington by then, allowing them to renew their tax cuts while letting Biden’s programs fall by the wayside. Or, if Biden is still president, perhaps conservatives would just try and damage him by letting the tax cuts and social spending programs expire together. Who knows. The GOP is full of loons and nihilists these days, and planning a legislative strategy partly around the hope that they’ll come to a responsible bargain in a few years’ time seems a little Pollyannaish.
Watching these negotiations is as frustrating as watching a staring contest. Somebody has to blink. But more importantly, Democrats have to deliver something for average Americans before, as Shor warns, their chance slips away. That’s not exactly visionary, but given the realities of the situation, it may be the best we can do.
Commenting on the Republicans’ willingness to push the United States to the brink of financial default, Paul Waldman on Wednesday noted “one of the most fundamental and disheartening truths about the American system.” That truth is as obvious as it is profound.
“There is almost never any accountability for the people who deserve it the most.”
There are many ways of expressing it. A two-tiered system of justice. One set of rules for the rich and another for the rest. “All you’ve gotta be is white in America.“
A report released Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee majority Democrats detailed efforts Donald Trump and allies made to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election Trump lost. Most was old news. The only surprise was that no one has yet been indicted for plotting a coup. See Waldman’s quote above.
A Trump lawyer sent letters to four former advisers — Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, Dan Scavino and Stephen K. Bannon, at the least — instructing them not to comply with congressional subpoenas in the Jan. 6 insurrection investigation. The four were ordered to turn over documents to House investigators by Thursday. Trump’s contention is that records and testimony about Jan. 6 are protected “from disclosure by the executive and other privileges, including among others the presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client privileges.”
That assertion of privilege is contested. At this hour, it is not clear whether any of the four complied.
True to form, Trump will dodge, delay, and go to court to evade accountability by running out the clock. With any other adversary, Trump would spend them into bankruptcy in the courts. Not so when his opponent is the U.S. government. But he will defend principles and standards of conduct he spent four years trampling underfoot. Even the Devil will tell the truth when it suits his purposes.
“Donald Trump always seems to get away with it. And he’s trying to do it again,” writes Stephen Collinson of CNN:
Accountability is critical for multiple reasons. The Capitol insurrection and Trump’s multiple attempts to subvert the election, in Washington and in the states, rank as the worst assault on the US electoral system in history. Inflicting a price for such behavior is vital to stop such abuses from happening again, and potentially could include new laws to bolster faith in elections. Recent escalations of Trump’s attacks on bedrock democratic values and signals that he is planning a new White House bid prove that his threat to democratic governance is far from elapsed and is getting worse.
The January 6 committee’s role is important in establishing a contemporary and historical record of what happened that day and Trump’s culpability amid efforts by his media propagandists and political allies to whitewash the truth and downplay an outrageous assault on the epicenter of US democracy.
Trump once again “appears to be seeking to assert privilege to cover up what multiple accounts and reports suggest is an attempt to mount a coup.” And Republicans in positions of power will again support him in evading accountability.
The argument that Trump’s nefarious plots failed so he is free of accountability is a familiar one. It was used by Republicans to excuse his abuses of power during his first impeachment on the grounds that Trump’s plan to withhold military aid to Ukraine in return for the announcement of a criminal probe into Biden did not actually come to fruition. This essentially boils down a case that a President who seeks to thwart the Constitution is only guilty if he succeeds. This discounts, for instance, strong evidence that Trump repeatedly pressured officials in the Justice Department and in states like Georgia to overturn the election — a clear and staggering abuse of power.
The courage and integrity of these officials was in the end all that stood between the United States and a lost democracy. But the near miss this time should not mean that officials subordinate to a President should be left exposed to such pressure in the future.
With Chuck Grassley, the dean of the GOP Senate, speaking at this weekend’s Iowa Trump rally, “Jan 6 has completely faded from view in the party,” tweeted Sam Stein. Trump is the now the Republican Party and the party is him.
“Through him, with him, in him,” the priest recites at the conclusion of the Eucharistic Prayer, called the Per Ipsum. Should Trump attempt to run for president again in 2024, it will be not as figurehead but messiah.
“There is almost never any accountability for the people who deserve it the most.”
Perhaps in hell.
Update: Define “consider.”
I’ve written before about my belief that the two Senate diva’s can be appeased even as the progressives get most of what they want. It’s about how you interpret the numbers. This article explains why:
The forthcoming budget reconciliation bill has been described by members of both political parties and in news reports as a $3.5 trillion spending bill. It isn’t. Such a description is inaccurate for several reasons.
First, the $3.5 trillion figure relates to the potential amount of spending increases and tax cuts, before offsetting savings are taken into account. Some expected parts of the bill with significant price tags — such as a good part of the Child Tax Credit and Child and Dependent Tax Credit expansions — are tax cuts; they reduce people’s tax bills. Raising the cap on the state and local tax deduction is another tax cut. So are the “clean energy, manufacturing, and transportation tax incentives” listed as part of the package in a memo Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sent colleagues last month.
Second, the price tag for any bill — and a bill’s impact on deficits and debt — is the net of its cost-increasing measures, which can include both spending increases and tax cuts, and its offsetting savings — i.e., its spending reductions and tax increases. The budget resolution Congress just passed limits the net price tag of the reconciliation bill to no more than $1.75 trillion. This is seen in the budget resolution’s reconciliation instructions. In the Senate, those instructions allow committees other than the Finance Committee to approve new spending measures costing no more than $1.75 trillion over 10 years. With respect to the Finance Committee, the budget resolution requires it to fully pay for everything it does that has a cost. As a result, the cost of the bill as whole can’t exceed $1.75 trillion.
The widely cited $3.5 trillion figure assumes the Finance Committee will approve about $1.75 trillion in spending increases and tax cuts that are financed by an equivalent amount of tax increases and spending reductions (with the spending reductions expected to come from drug savings in health programs). The $3.5 trillion thus includes the cost of all of the spending increases and tax cuts without any of the offsetting prescription drug savings or tax increases.
If the approach used to arrive at the $3.5 trillion figure had been used for the 2017 Trump-era tax cut, that measure’s cost would have been said to be far greater than the $1.5 trillion figure used for it when the measure was enacted (later revised by Congressional Budget Office to $1.9 trillion), as the $1.5 trillion (and $1.9 trillion ) figures were net rather than gross figures.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that if the 2017 tax cut had been assessed in the same manner used to arrive at the $3.5 trillion figure for the current reconciliation bill — if its cost measures were added up without its offsets taken into account — it would have been described as a package of more than $5 trillion.
When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores the bill, there will be three headline numbers — the net spending increase, the net tax increase and the bill’s overall cost — none of which will be close to $3.5 trillion.
As noted, under the budget resolution, committees other than the Finance Committee can approve new spending of up to $1.75 trillion over 10 years, while the Finance Committee must pay for everything it approves. The Finance Committee is expected to seek savings from prescription drugs to fully cover the cost of measures expanding Medicare and Medicaid and bolstering subsidies for health coverage purchased in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. Let’s assume for the sake of illustration that the Finance Committee secures $400 billion in drug savings and spends that amount on health insurance expansions. If the Committee is to approve a total of $1.75 trillion in spending increases and tax cuts as well as $1.75 trillion in offsetting spending reductions and tax increases — and if the drug savings bring in $400 billion — then the committee would be adopting $1.35 trillion in tax increases.
On the cost side, let’s assume that $600 billion of the assumed $1.75 trillion in Finance Committee previsions with a cost goes for tax cuts while the other $1.15 trillion consists of spending increases. If so, the CBO score for the package would show:
$2.5 trillion (not $3.5 trillion) in net spending increases (the $1.75 trillion for the other committees plus the $1.15 trillion for the Finance Committee, minus the $400 billion in prescription drug savings)
$750 billion in net tax increases (the $1.35 trillion in tax increases minus the $600 billion in tax cuts)
A $1.75 trillion increase in deficits over 10 years (before interest costs)
These figures are illustrative. But no matter what precise provisions the reconciliation bill ends up including — it will not be a “$3.5 trillion spending package” or anything close to it.
In other words, there are many ways to configure this thing that could conceivably kill two birds with one stone: help the American people and soothe the all-important egos of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Apparently, those are of equal priority in our system so they’ll just have to find a way to do that.
Yesterday Stephanie Grisham was on CNN pushing her new book. She said she thought it was a coup. That Trump was fomenting violence. Jake Tapper asked her if she had talked to the 1/6 commission. She said no, but that she would if they, “reached out.”
Brazilians of books are being written by former Trump staff. They’ll be careful not to incriminate themselves, but they might incriminate others. If they didn’t commit the crime, they might have witnessed others committing them.
People like Grisham and Omarosa aren’t experts on the law. They likely witnessed multiple crimes. They might have been told what was happening was legal. Or, they knew it was illegal, and looked the other way hoping the entire admin would never be prosecuted.
I think the DOJ, state AGs and various committees investigating the Trump White House should get early copies of the books.
Someone should be reading these books looking for crimes and prosecution worthy information.
The publishers can send advance copies to former US attorney’s like Preet Bharara, Barb McQuade or former prosecutors, like Glenn Kirschner to review them on their podcasts.
People complain that journalists like Woodward have withheld critical info for their books so they could make headlines and sell more books. If they want bigger headlines, the publisher of the book should send early copies to the various committees and the DOJ in appropriate states. They could say:
“Hey, based on our reporting it looks like Trump’s staff might have committed crimes in your state. You might want to check it out. People could have lied to our authors, since they weren’t under oath when we talked to them. The book is coming out in 2 weeks. You might want to subpoena some people
This would have been great for Carol Leonnig’s books. For example, when Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker wrote their books on the Secret Service and Trump, I spotted actions taken by Trump’s staff that were violations of Oklahoma’s COVID-testing reporting laws and New Jersey’s mask laws, but Leonnig & Rucker didn’t know it was a violation of specific testing laws. They couldn’t, since they weren’t allowed access to private data. But a state Attorney General getting the book and told to check it out, could. The committee that oversees the Secret Service could investigate. But only if they knew where to look for the info.
I”ve read these books. I know what will make the ears of the TV producers stand up. But I don’t know all the laws. I can’t read a story about a meeting and, based on the account they are giving, realize that the people were probably breaking laws. A prosecutor can say, “This needs to be investigated to get hard evidence and hear from witnesses under oath.”.
For example, in this disappointing interview by Brian Williams he refers to Trump’s “mishandling” of the pandemic. I think what he did was more than “malpractice.”
We now have several books by insiders and journalists about what the Trump admin was doing during the pandemic. Someone needs to read those together with the goal of identifying the crimes committed, so they can be investigated.
The people promoting the book are looking for “newsworthy” stories when setting up interviews for the book like, “Trump was getting a colonoscopy but didn’t want late night comedians to make him the butt of their jokes!” That was covered by all the major late night comedy shows.
In the future when I see Trump-era books come out, I want more than juicy “newsworthy” items. I want to know who in the book is being investigated and prosecuting for the crimes they committed!
It will never stop being weird that Donald Trump tries to undermine election results that he won but he does. (Recall that he convened a “vote fraud commission” after 2016…) His insistence on audits in Arizona and other state he narrowly lost are ridiculous enough but now he wants Texas and Florida, states he won, to do it as well:
Gov. Ron DeSantis and top Republicans in the Florida Legislature are under mounting pressure from their own party to audit the 2020 election even though former President Donald Trump easily won the state.
The Republican push for a “forensic audit” — and a hand recount of more than 11.1 million votes — could create an awkward moment for DeSantis, who said in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election that Florida has shed its reputation for electoral mishaps and was now the “model” for the nation.
The Republican Party of Lake County near Orlando last week adopted and sent a resolution to the governor, top legislators and other elected officials that demanded a full audit of the entire election. The move dovetails with a bill filed by a GOP legislator from the same county who wants the Florida Legislature to order a review.
“It’s not about margin of victory,” said state Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R-Howey-in-the-Hills), a MAGA-style conservative who sponsored the bill calling for an audit. “The fact is that people want total verification of the election results. They want an independent review of the votes.”
The demand for an election audit follows a push by Trump and others in the GOP to review 2020 election results in key states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Since the election, Trump has held a near-obsession with the election results and has repeatedly made baseless allegations that he lost the contest to Joe Biden due to fraud.
Most recently, Texas election officials said they would review the results in several counties in the Lone Star State after Trump called on GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to conduct an audit.
The MAGA faithful are just nuts and really think this is a thing. But the Republicans, led by Trump, are simply trying to undermine elections in general so they can contest every vote they lose by saying it was riddled with fraud. And I’m increasingly convinced that they are also trying to undermine faith in the elections for Democrats by putting all these phony rules in place. After all, if Dems lose close elections going forward it’s going to be very difficult to accept the results in states where they fire non-partisan workers, intimidate voters and ban most forms of voting except for standing in line for hours on election day.
In the end, the goal is to destroy our democratic process. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that the replacement will look a lot more like January 6th than November 8th. This is serious — the fever isn’t breaking.
Robert Mueller laid out a full obstruction case against Donald Trump in his report saying that he could be indicted after he left office. Obviously, nothing is happening on that front. Now he’s doing it again:
Former President Donald Trump is directing a group of his former aides to ignore a subpoena from the House committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and signaling he will go to court to block their testimony to the investigators.
The committee has subpoenaed documents and testimony from four Trump administration alumni: former social media czar Dan Scavino, former Defense Department official Kash Patel, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former White House adviser Steve Bannon. The four men were ordered to turn over documents related to Jan. 6 by Thursday and to sit for interviews with investigators next week.
But Trump is saying otherwise. In a letter that POLITICO viewed, a Trump lawyer tells them not to cooperate with the probe.
The letter stated the committee is seeking materials that are covered by executive privilege, as well as other privileges.
“President Trump is prepared to defend these fundamental privileges in court,” the letter said.
Then the letter directed its recipient to hold back any documents about his White House work and to refuse to testify about his official duties.
@Southpaw made this pertinent observation about all that:
They put McDougal in shackles, perp walked her, and jailed her for 18 months for not talking to the mfn whitewater investigation. That was about vacation properties near Flippin, Arkansas.
This is about an attempted coup in which the Capitol building was sacked.
Originally tweeted by southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) on October 7, 2021.
