Month: October 2021

Business Insider has a fascinating article today interviewing 34 people who were at the capitol on January 6th. The following is just the intro:

“We have the building!” Those words sent “a wave of terror” through congressional staffer Jay Rupert as he barricaded himself in his House office on January 6 while an angry pro-Trump mob breached security and ransacked the building.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth made a split-second decision to hide alone with a staffer, fearing to use Capitol escape routes ill-designed to accommodate wheelchair users.

A Metropolitan Police Department officer described being beaten back and crushed by a mob, only to be finally knocked out by a perfectly-timed blast of bear spray. Photojournalist Alan Chin thought of his 7-year-old daughter as an angry group of Proud Boys surrounded him.

Though more than 600 people have so far been charged for their roles in the attack on the Capitol, and investigations continue, pro-Trump factions of the Republican Party continue to downplay what happened 10 months ago when Congress was supposed to certify Joe Biden as president-elect.

Insider has created a comprehensive and vivid account of the January 6 riot, compiled from interviews with 34 lawmakers, journalists, photojournalists, law-enforcement officers, Capitol Hill staff, and others. They shared the details of that day, where split-second decisions may have saved their lives.

A Metropolitan DC police officer and two custodial workers were granted anonymity to allow them to speak candidly without risking their jobs.

On the morning of January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump, the defeated president, gather for a rally at the Ellipse, outside the White House, that starts at 11. Over on Capitol Hill, lawmakers, reporters, and a skeleton crew of staff make their way to Congress ahead of a noon session to formally certify the election results.

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a freshman Massachusetts Democrat: I woke up, and I actually said to my roommate, another member of Congress, and I was like, “It’s going to be a good day. We took Georgia.”

Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican: I was nervous about that day already. I was concerned that something might happen, based on the information that I had.

Katherine Tully-McManus, a reporter for CQ Roll Call: I know that a friend, very early in the morning, texted me, like, “Stay safe today.” Or something. I literally texted back, “I don’t think I’m going to be fighting Proud Boys on my commute. Thanks.”

John Eastman, an attorney and Trump associate who spoke at the Ellipse: I’m working with several of the teams that have been putting together evidence — statistical, sworn affidavits — with legal teams from around the country to try and get members of Congress to object to the various certification slates as the various states came up. And then the president apparently was still on the phone with the vice president and therefore was delayed in heading over to give his speech at the rally on the Ellipse.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat: I’m a 24-year veteran of Capitol Hill. And that is the only time I felt a sense of real personal threat and menace. But my reaction was: I’m coming. I don’t care. By God, no one’s going to stop me from being a witness to this election.

Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat: What I do specifically remember is parking on Delaware Avenue and getting out, and seeing a handful of Trump folks with flags and signs but not looking particularly menacing, and saying, “Oh, there’s going to be a big protest today, right? Yes.” And saying, “I’m sure the Capitol Police have got this.”

Jay Rupert, deputy director of the House Periodical Press Gallery: I came in around lunchtime. And I remember my direct quote, “I work in the safest building in DC. Next to the Pentagon.”

A Metropolitan Police Department officer: There was just a standard briefing. “This is what we got coming. This is what we expect.” But we kind of knew it wasn’t going to be a regular day just from the sheer number of people. Also the day before there had been arrests of guys with guns from, like, the Proud Boys.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat: While things were closed off, there wasn’t a significant Capitol Police presence that would have indicated that there was going to be big problems, big trouble brewing. It seemed like we were ready. And I felt pretty secure.

Karlin Younger, a Capitol Hill resident: If you live in this neighborhood, this happens a lot. We had gone through the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and so you just kind of know when people are going to kind of show up in the neighborhood.

Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat: I thought that security was way too light considering the threats that we had heard. I thought there would be more present and they would be more heavily armed.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican: I usually don’t take my gun to work. I can, but I usually don’t, just because we have so many police. But I did take it that day.

Around noon, about a mile from Capitol Hill, Trump starts talking to thousands of supporters. He and other speakers egg the crowd on to fight for him.

That’s just the beginning. It’s actually a fascinating read to see from the perspective of all these different participants in the events that day, what they went through.

Whenever I read something like this or watch one of the documentaries I’m struck again by how outrageous and dangerous it was and how easily it could have been so much worse.

I’m glad to see the media pointing this out:

I noted this one yesterday:

Sadly, the truth is that this is a feature not a bug for the average right winger. In fact, it not even that. It is the fundamental reason they love these people so much. Sticking it to the libs or really anyone, as crudely as possible is their only organizing principle. Being a mean, nasty bully is second nature to them now and they don’t even see what they are doing.

I think what amazes me the most is the fact that so many of them call themselves Christians.

Neil Cavuto is a hard core right winger. But apparently, he’s not entirely cynical or totally brainwashed. That’s a rarity at Fox News:

Cavuto had only given a written statement until today. And this is how his comrades at Fox News dealt with it:

On Tuesday, Fox Business host Neil Cavuto informed the public that he has contracted COVID-19—an announcement he used to advise others to get vaccinated. “While I’m somewhat stunned by this news, doctors tell me I’m lucky as well,” Cavuto, who underwent an open-heart surgery in 2016, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997, and has previously been treated for cancer, said in a statement released by the network. “Had I not been vaccinated, and with all my medical issues, this would be a far more dire situation. It’s not, because I did and I’m surviving this because I did.” He then expressed his hope that everyone who is still unvaccinated “gets that message loud and clear. Get vaccinated, for yourself and everyone around you.” 

While Cavuto’s statement on his health and the vaccine has been frequently discussed on his network’s rivals MSNBC and CNN, Fox News and Fox Business did not immediately discuss his remarks on-air, according to a search using media-monitoring service TVEyes, or on their home pages. Even with Cavuto suddenly absent from the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of Fox Business’s Cavuto Coast to Coast, the program’s fill-in host, David Asman, failed to mention his COVID-19 diagnosis or otherwise explain his absence to the audience. His situation was not discussed until the Wednesday airing of Cavuto’s later show on Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto. “Neil Cavuto has tested positive for COVID-19,” said the program’s fill-in host, Charles Payne. “I want everybody to know that he’s feeling fine. He’s a fighter and we look forward to getting him back in his chair as soon as possible.”

A number of Cavuto’s colleagues at Fox have made pro-vaccine endorsements of their own, including Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld, and Bill Hemmer. Rupert Murdoch is, of course, also vaccinated, and the COVID-19 safety protocols instituted at the Fox News offices are actually more stringent than those outlined in the Biden administration’s employee vaccine mandate. But over the past six months, Fox News has been a nightly destination for anti-vax rhetoric, with Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity using their prime-time shows to characterize vaccine and mask mandates as attacks on constitutional liberties; allege that Joe Biden is utilizing the vaccine to force Christians out of the military; and boost misinformation claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine is linked to thousands of deaths. 

As recently as Monday, Carlson used the coronavirus-related death of Colin Powell to suggest that getting vaccinated is all but pointless. “Like almost everyone his age, Colin Powell was fully vaccinated against COVID, and yet according to his family and doctors, Colin Powell died of COVID,” said Carlson, failing to note that Powell, 84, suffered from ​multiple myeloma cancer and Parkinson’s disease and therefore had a severely weakened immune system. This fact was not acknowledged by Carlson, who went on to say that Powell’s death shows Americans that “you’ve been lied to. Vaccines may be highly useful for some people, but across a population, they do not solve COVID.”

Carlson failed to note that Powell must have gotten the virus from someone and the most likely culprit was an unvaccinated person. (Studies are showing that vaccinated people who get exposed do not easily transmit the virus.) I would imagine the unvaccinated person who spreads this killer virus around is also likely to be a person who refuses to wear masks.

Vaccines are “highly useful” to the entire human race and if Carlson would stop telling his deluded followers not to get them, we wouldn’t be losing as many people as we are. He has blood on his hands. But, of course, that too is a selling point to the Death Cult he speaks for.

I have often wondered about the mechanism for cultism in our era, whether for Trump, QAnon or anything else. I know that Fox News and talk radio are huge purveyors but they mostly hit retired people and people who don’t have jobs that allow them to listen to the radio all day. When you look at the rallies, it’s not just older people. There are mostly middle aged people with a few young ones sprinkled in among the elderly. These people are getting their disinformation from other sources and it’s pretty clear that it starts with Facebook.

So, Following up on Tm’s piece below, I’ll just add my two cents:

In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump.

Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.

Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.

Smith wasn’t a real person. A researcher employed by Facebook invented the account, along with those of other fictitious “test users” in 2019 and 2020, as part of an experiment in studying the platform’s role in misinforming and polarizing users through its recommendations systems.

That researcher said Smith’s Facebook experience was “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.” 

The body of research consistently found Facebook pushed some users into “rabbit holes,” increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. People radicalized through these rabbit holes make up a small slice of total users, but at Facebook’s scale, that can mean millions of individuals.

The findings, communicated in a report titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” were among thousands of pages of documents included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, who worked as a Facebook product manager until May. Haugen is now asserting whistleblower status and has filed several specific complaints that Facebook puts profit over public safety. Earlier this month, she testified about her claims before a Senate subcommittee. 

Versions of the disclosures — which redacted the names of researchers, including the author of “Carol’s Journey to QAnon” — were shared digitally and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including NBC News. The Wall Street Journal published a series of reports based on many of the documents last month. 

“While this was a study of one hypothetical user, it is a perfect example of research the company does to improve our systems and helped inform our decision to remove QAnon from the platform,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a response to emailed questions.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has broadly denied Haugen’s claims, defending his company’s “industry-leading research program” and its commitment to “identify important issues and work on them.” The documents released by Haugen partly support those claims, but they also highlight the frustrations of some of the employees engaged in that research. 

Among Haugen’s disclosures are research, reports and internal posts that suggest Facebook has long known its algorithms and recommendation systems push some users to extremes. And while some managers and executives ignored the internal warnings, anti-vaccine groups, conspiracy theory movements and disinformation agents took advantage of their permissiveness, threatening public health, personal safety and democracy at large.  

“These documents effectively confirm what outside researchers were saying for years prior, which was often dismissed by Facebook,” said Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and one of the earliest harbingers of the risks of Facebook’s recommendation algorithms. 

Facebook’s own research shows how easily a relatively small group of users has been able to hijack the platform, and for DiResta, it settles any remaining question about Facebook’s role in the growth of conspiracy networks. 

“Facebook literally helped facilitate a cult,” she said.

Forget Q, although that’s a fascinating case. Look at the general right wing disinformation pipeline on that platform and it’s obvious that a whole lot of people were drawn into the Trump by those same algorithms.

Sure, wingnuttia is a pre-existing condition for the most part. It’s a tribe people are born into or marry into. But Facebook fed them Trumpism by the truckload and they just ate it up.

It’s hard to know where the cycle begins and ends with right wing media — Talk radio to Fox to Facebook or does it go from Facebook to Fox to talk radio or some other combination. I don’t think it matters. But Facebook exposes it to people who are not necessarily all that interested in politics, which you have to be to tune in to Fox and hate radio. And that’s how new people get recruited into the cult. They don’t choose it. It gets spoonfed to them and they get indoctrinated without realizing that what they are reading is lies and propaganda.

Update — The stuff about Facebook and January 6th is going to hit the fan this week. It’s bad:

Measures of online mayhem surged alarmingly on Facebook, with user reports of “false news” hitting nearly 40,000 per hour, an internal report that day showed. On Facebook-owned Instagram, the account reported most often for inciting violence was @realdonaldtrump — the president’s official account, the report showed.

Facebook has never publicly disclosed what it knows about how its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, helped fuel that day’s mayhem. The company rejected its own Oversight Board’s recommendation that it study how its policies contributed to the violence and has yet to fully comply with requests for data from the congressional commission investigating the events.

But thousands of pages of internal company documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the whistleblower Frances Haugen offer important new evidence of Facebook’s role in the events. This story is based on those documents, aswell as on others independently obtained by The Washington Post, and on interviews with current and former Facebook employees. The documents include outraged posts on Workplace, an internal message system.

“This is not a new problem,” one unnamed employee fumed on Workplace on Jan. 6. “We have been watching this behavior from politicians like Trump, and the — at best — wishy washy actions of company leadership, for years now. We have been reading the [farewell] posts from trusted, experienced and loved colleagues who write that they simply cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects on its platform.”

Efforts to pass Joe Biden’s spending plan over the objections of Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia begin to resemble an old Monty Python bit. Despite appearances, they’re not dead yet. Or at least, that’s the story Democrats are sticking with.

Politico:

President Joe Biden will host Sen. Joe Manchin in Delaware on Sunday as the two seek to finalize an agreement on Biden’s domestic agenda, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting.

The president will huddle with the the West Virginia moderate in Delaware, where Biden is spending the weekend. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will also attend. The meeting comes at an absolutely critical time for Biden, who is seeking to clinch a deal with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on his social spending plan in the next week.

Democrats are hopeful that the president and the two senators can hash things out and strike a framework on a top-line agreement for the legislation aimed at climate action, child care, health care and education. But they are somewhat far apart, as Manchin sticks to his $1.5 trillion number, and the White House and Democratic leaders aim to go as high as $2 trillion after initially pursuing $3.5 trillion.

The slimming of the legislation is threatening to derail two long-held Democratic priorities: paid leave and Medicare expansion for dental, vision and hearing. Neither Biden nor progressives in the Senate have signed off on eliminating those, though that could become necessary to win Manchin’s support and strike a quick deal.

After the long setup, Democrats are going to have to pass something just not to look dysfunctional. The fact that their House and Senate caucuses — even the supposed dirty hippies among the progressive caucus — are solidly behind the president’s agenda is being obscured by the antics of Manchin and Sinema. What payoff the two expect from passing less of Biden’s popular proposals is a mystery. Even more so with Sinema’s dead end politics.

But by the eventual signing, public attention may have moved past the infighting to focus on the holidays. The punchline, when it finally arrives, will be as anticlamactic as Biden impressions are old.

“Facebook is a Nazi firehose” is the title of Scott Lemieux’s Lawyers, Guns & Money post that caught my eye. Lemieux points to a report by MSNBC’s Brandy Zadrozny on the perverseness of Facebook’s feed algorithm.

A flood of “Facebook is toxic to democracy” stories have surfaced since whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, came forward last summer with tens of thousands of internal documents that formed the basis of the The Facebook Files multi-part investigation from The Wall Street Journal and published beginning in in September. Several more have reports based on them appeared in recent days.

“Carol’s Journey to QAnon” is the name of one internal report among thousands of redacted pages released by Haugen’s attorneys to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress. A consortium of news organizations also obtained copies.

Zadrozny writes:

In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump.

Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless conspiracy theory and movement that claimed Trump was secretly saving the world from a cabal of pedophiles and Satanists.

Smith didn’t follow the recommended QAnon groups, but whatever algorithm Facebook was using to determine how she should engage with the platform pushed ahead just the same. Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation.

Smith wasn’t a real person. A researcher employed by Facebook invented the account, along with those of other fictitious “test users” in 2019 and 2020, as part of an experiment in studying the platform’s role in misinforming and polarizing users through its recommendations systems.

That researcher said Smith’s Facebook experience was “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content.” 

A similar pattern emerges in India too (New York Times):

On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.

For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.

The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.

“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.

It’s not that Facebook does not try to moderate and eliminate hate speech, but that it does not understand the cultures where it’s introduced and under-resources efforts to curb misinformation and violent content outside the U.S.

Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts, according to its documents. Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users, according to one document describing Facebook’s allocation of resources.

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said the figures were incomplete and don’t include the company’s third-party fact-checking partners, most of whom are outside the United States.

Publicity surrounding The Facebook Files reports have prompted another whistleblower to come forward echoing Haugen’s allegations. This one alleges in an SEC affidfavit submitted Friday that “the company prizes growth and profits over combating hate speech, misinformation and other threats to the public,” according to The Washington Post’s reporting. While the whistleblower’s name is redacted in filings, the person’s identity is known to the Post:

As the company sought to quell the political controversy during a critical period in 2017, Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds allegedly said, according to the affidavit, “It will be a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine.”

Bounds, now a vice president of communications, said in a statement to The Post, “Being asked about a purported one-on-one conversation four years ago with a faceless person, with no other sourcing than the empty accusation itself, is a first for me.”

Facebook is on defense.

The SEC affidavit goes on to allege that Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook’s multi-billion-dollar profits.

[…]

The whistleblower told The Post of an occasion in which Facebook’s Public Policy team, led by former Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, defended a “white list” that exempted Trump-aligned Breitbart News, run then by former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, and other select publishers from Facebook’s ordinary rules against spreading false news reports.

When a person in the video conference questioned this policy, Kaplan, the vice president of global policy, responded by saying, “Do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?” according to the whistleblower in The Post interview.

The Guardian’s report adds:

Haugen in her testimony [to Congress] stated that Facebook at one point tweaked its algorithm to improve safety and decrease inflammatory content but abandoned the changes after the election, a decision that Haugen tied directly to the 6 January riot at the Capitol. Facebook also disbanded the civic integrity team after the election.

“As soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me,” she said in her testimony on 5 October.

Referring to the algorithm change, Haugen added: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, and [Facebook] will make less money.”

Facebook is simply another corporate beast unleashed on the world in the name of maximizing profits. The specifics of Facebook’s corporate culture or Mark Zuckerberg’s personality are not the core issue. The flaw is not in Facebook or its algorithms but in the DNA underlying the modern corporation, in its basic programming which shall not be questioned. Like kudzu introduced in the South to control erosion, it spreads unchecked. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I wrote here once, “We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?”

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Suggest we examine alternative models and they’ll brand you a communist.

Ok, I know my writing today feels like crazy wingnut day and you are probably sick of hearing about it. But I’ve decided to roll with it because, well, there’s just so much of it:

If you haven’t seen this yet, take the time.

They actually sell female pee funnels at the rally so the adoring women don’t have to leave the line to get in as they await the arrival of Dear Leader.

Hookay…

I realize these people are the fringiest of the Maga crowd. But there is a married couple in that video who represent the mainstream Trumpers. They don’t think Donald Trump is still the president or that Q is real. They are the ones who complain that Biden is dividing the country and that everyone should be able to get along. And in the same breath they say that Mike Pence should be afraid to show up at this rally but also insist that nobody would try to kill him. Of course not.

These are the regular Trump voters. They say these things because that’s what we were all taught and they know it.

But the shirt says it all:

They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.

The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.

They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.

The effort underscores the extent to which Trump and a handful of true believers were working until the last possible moment to subvert the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even block certification of the election, leveraging any possible constitutional loophole to test the boundaries of American democracy.

“I firmly believed then, as I believe now, that the vice president — as president of the Senate — had the constitutional power to send the issue back to the states for 10 days to investigate the widespread fraud and report back well in advance of Inauguration Day, January 20th,” one of those present, senior campaign aide and former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn, told The Washington Post. “Our efforts were focused on conveying that message.”

In seeking to compel testimony from Bannon, the congressional panel investigating Jan. 6 this week cited his reported presence at the “ ‘war room’ organized at the Willard.” The House voted Thursday to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with the committee’s subpoena.

The committee has also requested documents and communications related to Eastman’s legal advice and analysis.

Eastman told The Post on Wednesday that he has not yet been contacted by the House select committee investigating the insurrection. Asked about his involvement in the Trump team’s operation at the Willard, Eastman said: “To the extent I was there, those were attorney discussions. You don’t get any comment from me on those.”

In May, Eastman indicated that he was at the hotel with Giuliani on the morning of Jan. 6. “We had a war room at the at the Willard . . . kind of coordinating all of the communications,” he told talk show host Peter Boyles, comments first reported in the newsletter Proof.

I’m pretty sure that he gave up any claims to attorney-client privilege when he gave a ridiculous interview to National Review this week:

Why is John Eastman still talking? Is Trump’s favorite coup-curious counsel under the impression that there is something he could say that would help? Because even if there was, this ain’t it.

“Call me the white-knight hero here, talking [Trump] down from the more aggressive position,” Eastman told the National Review’s John McCormack in a spectacular train wreck of an interview that ran this morning under the headline “John Eastman vs. the Eastman Memo.”

Suffice it to say, no one will be calling John Eastman a “hero” after watching him try to claim that he meant something other than exactly what he said in those two infamous memos where he argued that the Vice President has the sole authority to reject duly certified electoral college votes. And not just in the memos — the man stood next to Rudy Giuliani onstage at the January 6 rally and blessed their braying for Mike Pence to prevent Biden’s certification.

“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o’clock he let the legislatures of the states look into this so that we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!” he shouted, before the crowd moved toward the Capitol to make sure that his demand was carried out.

And yet, in his discussions with McCormack, Eastman insists that these were just “internal discussion memos for the legal team,” prepared at the request of “somebody in the legal team” whose name Eastman can’t now recall, because he’s such a busy guy, yaknow.

“I was asked to kind of outline how each of those scenarios would work and then orally present my views on whether I thought they were valid or not, so that’s what those memos did,” he said.

In fact, that is not “what those memos did.” Those memos mapped out multiple strategies whereby “VP Pence opens the ballots, determines on his own which is valid, asserting that the authority to make that determination under the 12th Amendment, and the Adams and Jefferson precedents, is his alone (anything in the Electoral Count Act to the contrary is therefore unconstitutional).” Eastman had three ways to make the math work to get Biden under the magical 270 electoral vote threshold and throw the vote to the House, where Republicans could ratf*ck it.

Pence was supposed to brazen it out — “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.” — and hope that Republican legislators would play along with him.

“IF the Republicans in the State Delegations stand firm, the vote there is 26 states for Trump, 23 for Biden, and 1 split vote,” he wrote in the longer memo. But in the interview with McCormack, Eastman downplayed the idea as mere speculation, because Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney would never have gone along with it.

“So anybody who thinks that that’s a viable strategy is crazy,” he scoffed, ignoring the fact that he himself is the one who proposed it and apparently Trump’s people took it seriously enough to pass him along to Sen. Mike Lee.

Hilariously, Eastman first claimed that he “never had any dealings” with the Utah Republican. But when McCormack pointed out that Robert Costa and Bob Woodward had reported extensively in their book Peril on Lee’s rejection of Eastman’s scribblings — “You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time.” — the attorney made a miraculous recovery from his amnesiac episode.

“I want to be very precise here: I said at the time I did not recall having any conversations with Mike Lee, and I certainly don’t have any record of having given him the memo,” he told McCormack. “But now that I’ve seen that quote from — I do recall that Mike Lee called me at one point. I don’t remember the subject of the conversation.”

Once the White House finally grokked that Pence wasn’t going to unilaterally toss out electoral votes on Eastman’s theory that “we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules,” they switched to a strategy of getting him to adjourn congress and toss the issue back to swing state legislatures for “a comprehensive audit/investigation of the election returns in their states.”

As with the plot to allow House Republicans to overturn the election, Eastman defends himself by pointing it his own incompetence, noting that “even if you had that authority, it would be foolish to exercise it in the absence of state legislatures having certified the alternate slate of electors.” It’s not a coup plot if it’s patently unworkable, right?

Except, ROLL TAPE:

Because of these illegal actions by state and local election officials (and, in some cases, judicial officials, the Trump electors in the above 6 states (plus in New Mexico) met on December 14, cast their electoral votes, and transmitted those votes to the President of the Senate (Vice President Pence). There are thus dual slates of electors from 7 states.

Eastman closed out this shitshow debacle by assuring McCormack that he’d never dream of suggesting that the Vice President has such godlike powers and that he’d give the same to Vice President Kamala Harris if she came knocking. Which is mighty … nice coming from a guy who wrote an article suggesting that Harris wasn’t even eligible to run for president because her parents were both immigrants and thus she’s not a “real” American.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was some extremely weak shit. It was ridiculous when the Claremont Institute tried to ride to Eastman’s rescue last week, and it’s even more pathetic now with Eastman puckered up and staring into the mirror trying to put lipstick on this pig himself.

In case you’ve forgotten, he made the case for his coup plot at the rally on January 6th:

And…

thread on Willard from “Peril”

After Pence leaves Oval on Jan. 5, Trump is furious. Pence isn’t breaking. He opens the door near the Resolute Desk. “A rush of cold air blasted the room.” He can hear the mob in the streets outside the Willard. He’s elated to hear them. (p. 230)

“As staffers filed in, some began to shiver. Still, Trump did not close the door… The noise outside grewe louder, almost like a party.

‘Isn’t that great?’ Trump exclaimed. ‘Tomorrow is going to be a big day.'” (p. 231)

“Trump went around the room, asking for advice about congressional Republicans. ‘How do we get them to do the right thing?’ he asked. No one offered an answer that satisfied him.”

Trump then calls Senator Cruz. You need to object to all the states that could be raised by the House, Trump said. Cruz says his group will object to Arizona and focus on calling for his proposed commission to probe the election. Trump is unhappy, wants more to be done. (p. 232)

With his back to the wall and Pence not budging, and Senate Rs holding to doing their own thing, Trump decides to turn to the Willard group for backup, for more aggression. He knows the mob is outside. He knows Bannon, Giuliani, Boris, Eastman, etc. are over there. (p. 232-233)

“People in the streets were yelling, delighted and almost euphoric about Trump possibly taking back the election on Wednesday. They waited to see Giuliani and other Trump stars emerge from the Willard. They nodded warmly at others in red hats, a movement in total solidarity.”

Trump decides to act, with help from Willard war room. Push Pence to brink.

“Late Tuesday evening… Trump directed his campaign to issue a statement claiming that he and Pence were in ‘total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.’ [Marc] Short was stunned.”

“This breaks protocol,” Short said tersely.

[Jason] Miller refused to retract a word.

“The vice president has the ability to do this, he needs to be loyal,” Miller said.

Trump soon called Giuliani, and then called Steve Bannon, who was also at the Willard. (p. 234)

With Bannon, Trump brought up his meeting with Pence. There had been a power shift. “He was very arrogant,” Trump said. “Very arrogant,” Trump repeated. To Bannon and others, Trump’s four words were sobering. Pence was not going to break.

But Trump, Willard crew kept pushing…

Giuliani wonders if he should go see Pence at the Naval Observatory. A 1-on-1. Make it happen. Old school, Trump lawyer to VP. For Pence advisers, the suggestion “felt straight out of a bad mafia movie.” (p. 233)

Based on our reporting, the Willard scene on Jan. 5, 2021 and into early hours of Jan. 6, 2021 is the culmination of a pressure campaign to prevent Biden from taking office. They first tried (and failed) in the courts. Then they pushed Eastman memo/argument to VP. Relentless.

By the time Trump takes the stage on Jan. 6, he has pulled every possible lever of power to try to stay in power. Courts via Rudy. VP via Eastman. Lawmakers. DOJ. Now, all that is left to stoke, the last lever, is the sprawling crowd before him.

Originally tweeted by Robert Costa (@costareports) on October 23, 2021.

Vaccines are the “new coke”? What???

Tim Miller:

Dr. Joseph Ladopo has an MD/PhD from Harvard. Harvard! And here he is yesterday taking over as Florida’s new surgeon general and offering his best medical advice to the great and wise people of the Sunshine State:

This is one of those cases where the context makes it worse. Ladopo—sorry, Doctor Ladopo—is expressly talking about vaccination when he tells the general public that their “intuition and sensibilities” are the best guide for understanding complex health decisions.

And he does this after a mini-rant in which he tries to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines by saying, hey, we don’t know everything about them yet.

Which is true! We don’t know everything about anything yet. That’s the thing about human knowledge: It is always expanding! Total certainty is an unobtainable philosophical construct.

I do not know totally, completely, for certain that the world won’t be invaded by aliens tomorrow at noon, eastern time. But I’m sure enough that it that I’m not heading to Vegas tonight to blow my life savings at the Rhino.

For a man of science to say that individual intuition matters more than data is ridiculous. For a doctor to talk this way about the COVID vaccines while 1,600 Americans are dying every day is unethical. For a doctor holding a public health position to do so for the benefit of his patron’s political aspirations borders on the criminal.

I suspect we’ve always been this crazy but we weren’t able to see the evidence of it every single day before so it spreads like wildfire. Combined with the overweening egotism that leads right wingers to believe they are the smartest people in the world, it’s deadly.

Update: Oh my God, he is a monster!

Florida’s top public health official was asked to leave a state Senator’s office this week after refusing to don a mask in her office.

Sen. Tina Polsky, who was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in August, asked state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and his two legislative aides to leave her office after Ladapo refused to comply with her request to put on a mask.

“I told him I had a serious medical condition,” said Polsky, who will begin radiation therapy treatment for cancer next week.

Polsky said that Ladapo had requested to meet with her in Tallahassee this week; he was making the rounds visiting several Senators who will be asked in the upcoming Session to confirm him.

Polsky said he offered to go outside when she asked him to put the mask on, but she declined.

“I don’t want to go outside,” Polsky said she told Ladapo after he made the offer. “I want you to sit in my office and talk to you.”

Polsky said there was a brief back-and-forth, and then she finally asked whether there was a reason he couldn’t wear a mask.

“He just smiles and doesn’t answer. He’s very smug,” Polsky recalled. “And I told him several times, `I have this very serious medical condition.’ And he said, ‘That’s OK,’ like it basically has nothing to do with what we are talking about.”

Eventually, Polsky said she asked Ladapo to leave her office, which he agreed to do, she said. But the Senator said before going, Ladapo remarked, “Sometimes I try to reason with unreasonable people for fun.”

Weesam Khoury, a Department of Health spokesperson, confirmed Ladapo’s comment, but said it was not directed to the Senator.

“Dr. Ladapo is committed to meeting with members of the Legislature regardless of their party affiliation to discuss policy, even when they do not agree on the subject at hand,” Khoury said in an email. “Meetings between highly regarded and intelligent, elected and appointed officials happen all the time, and it is disappointing you don’t hear about them more — but it is probably because the only time they get reported is when a genuine meeting turns into a media headline expected from a gossip column.”

Khoury added, misspelling Polsky’s name, that she and Ladapo “are saddened to hear about Sen. Polsky’s recent diagnosis and wish her well.”

Polsky said she is taking all precautions she can to protect herself from getting infected with COVID-19. A positive test means a delay in her treatment, and she doesn’t want to take any risks.