Month: October 2021

It looks like the House Speaker Hopeful is telling the Big Money Boyz that he can handle Trump so everyone can keep sending in the big bucks:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has regaled top donors at private events in recent months with a behind-the-scenes story about a fight he says he had with former president Donald Trump.

The 2020 clash began when Trump broke an agreement with McCarthy to consult before making endorsements in House races and took sides in a North Carolina primary contest. The California Republican responded by calling up Trump with curse-laden fury, he has told donors. When Trump’s candidate lost in the primary to McCarthy’s pick, Madison Cawthorn, Trump acknowledged that he had been wrong and, McCarthy argues, he gained respect for his advice.

The point of McCarthy’s tale is that he knows how to work with Trump in this strange moment in Republican politics, when the former president both holds the keys to the party’s most animated voters and threatens to alienate the moderates the GOP needs to win control of Congress, according to a person who has witnessed the pitches and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

With only a handful of seats needed for Republicans to win control of the House next year — and the likely prospect of McCarthy becoming speaker — he has been selling himself as a singular leader of the party, able to stand up to the unpredictable former president without breaking their bond.

“I stay close to him. We have a good relationship. But he and his team don’t have a veto power on what we do,” McCarthy, 56, tells the donors, according to the witness. He even contrasts himself with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has distanced himself from Trump and earned his public scorn.

“I can do it,” McCarthy has assured his donors about the balancing act before him, according to the witness.

Gosh, I wonder what Trump thinks about all this? I’m sure his Kevin (he calls him “my Kevin”) hopes he doesn’t read this article.

Lol.

Remember, Kevin thinks he can handle Trump because he once noticed that Trump only likes the red starburst candies so he had an aide go out and buy a case and pull out the red ones and then sent them to Trump as a present. Again, lol.

Chris Hayes really nailed it with this segment:

Here’s an example of how the Vice signaling goes directly into the wingnut lizard brain:

Listen to this. It’s the Tucker Carlson effect. Tucker attacks me. His fans respond with threats to kill my family. And Tucker knows exactly what he’s doing. pic.twitter.com/PsSLYbctXa

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) October 22, 2021

To think they all had the vapors when Clinton said there was “a basket of deplorables” in the Republican party. I’d say it’s more like the whole Republican Party at this point because they all enable, encourage and benefit from this grotesque behavior.

This just hit from the Washington Post this morning:

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.

The gang was all there.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance responds in a tweet, “The Willard isn’t cheap & this story reports the campaign paid $55K in bills for the Trump war room. This is campaign activity, not covered by executive privilege unlike the work of the presidency. The Jan 6 Comm is entitled to info about who knew/who paid”

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.

House investigators cited the presence of the “war room” in the contempt resolution passed this week after Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena to testimony in the Jan. 6 investigation.

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.

Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, did not respond to requests for comment.

Giuliani was likely otherwise occupied.

Breaking: Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas has been convicted on all counts related to his campaign finance schemes. There’s a shell of a man sweating out his hair dye right now. He knows he’s next.

— 𝐁𝐞𝐤𝐬 (@antifaoperative) October 22, 2021

Seth Abramson posted a thread on Thursday reprising his own PROOF reporting (many for subscribers only) from months ago about this second Trump war room (the first was at the Trump International Hotel in D.C.) In it, he identifies additional players present, claiming that in fact there were three war rooms at the Willard.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1451223849769570308?s=20

“Most folks don’t realize that the highest-traffic, most ‘celebrity’-laden war room at the Willard Hotel on January 5 wasn’t Giuliani’s—it was Alex Jones’s. Roger Stone was there. Michael Flynn was there,” Abramson tweets, citing interviews given by the talkative Stone and Jones.

All this means that the House Select Committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol had better make haste. They’ve got a lot of people’s stories to cross-check.

Well, that didn’t take long. Shortly after El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago announced the launch of his Trump-branded social media platform, TRUTH Social, hackers from Anonymous had defaced it as part of an “online war against hate” (New York Times):

Within two hours, hackers had gained access to a private version of the social network, creating fake accounts for Mr. Trump; the far-right personality Stephen K. Bannon; Ron Watkins, the QAnon conspiracy theorist; and Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, who barred Mr. Trump from Twitter after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Using a false “donaldjtrump” account, hackers posted images of defecating pigs, wrote expletive-laced rants aimed at Mr. Dorsey and inquired about the whereabouts of the former first lady Melania Trump. Images of the hackers’ handiwork were circulated on other social media platforms.

A Washington Post reporter easily signed up using the account name “mikepence” and found no security in place. “New sign-ups were blocked shortly after,” the Post reports.

That was inevitable. Everything Trump touches is sloppily done. If experienced hackers from Anonymous had not hacked him, Trump’s mythical 400-pound guy sitting on his bed or someone in New Jersey would have. But that’s not particularly worrisome.

It is a big “if” that Trump’s social network actually materializes, Damon Linker muses at The Week. “The man has proven himself a master of precisely one aspect of business, which is branding, often with little substance behind the hype.” But if it should, given the events of Jan. 6, the prospects of Trump using it to mobilize violent street actions in real time through people’s smart phones is not something to take lightly.

Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and former alt-right blogger, sketched out in May how that might work in a Claremont Institute podcast with former Trump National Security Council official Michael Anton.

Linker writes:

Yarvin calls himself a monarchist, but it’s more accurate to say he favors dictatorship — the seizing of emergency powers by a strongman who, backed by populist (though perhaps not majority or plurality) support, uses those powers to smash the resistance of the bureaucratic-administrative state and its ostensible allies in civil society, including the mainstream media, the universities, and “woke capital.”

It’s a fantasy of Caesarism, in which the right wins a total victory over its opponents. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fantasy completely disconnected from reality. Yarvin — who has since appeared as a guest for over an hour on Tucker Carlson Today, the online daytime interview program run by the prime time Fox News host — has many concrete suggestions for how his would-be Caesar should go about turning himself into a tyrant. One of them involves the use of social media to mobilize supporters around the country.

Yarvin’s vision (not repudiated during Anton’s Claremont podcast) makes the more recently revealed John Eastman memo look tame.

Linker wrote about the podcast at the time, in a post titled, “The intellectual right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’,” and quoting Yarvin on how Trump might use such an app:

to communicate directly with his 80 million supporters on their smart phones, using notifications to tell them that “this agency isn’t following my instructions,” which will prompt them to rally at the proper building, with the crowd “steered around by a joystick by Trump himself,” forming a “human barricade around every federal building, supporting Trump’s lawful authority.” Where maybe 20,000 people stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, millions responding to the Trump app would be much more effective — a modern-day version of the paramilitary groups that ensured Lincoln’s safety during the hard-fought, dangerous 1860 campaign for president that preceded the Civil War (and the president’s subsequent suspension of habeas corpus and shuttering of hundreds of newspapers).

When Anton asks how Trump-Caesar should respond to Harvard, The New York Times, and the rest of the theocratic oligarchy blaring air-raid sirens about the imposition of dictatorship, Yarvin indicates that it would be essential to “smash it” with one blow. To suggest that Caesar should be required to deal with “someone else’s department of reality is manifestly absurd.” Going on, Yarvin explains that “when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn’t sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon” and uses “all force available.” Once that happens, the whole world can be “remade.” 

This scenario assumes Trump is already president, Linker notes. But used from the outside against a presidential victory by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, Trump could use the tool to “sow electoral chaos.”

In place of spontaneous election protests by Trumpists, Trump could organize flash-mob protests outside the offices of secretaries of state across the country or, where there was one Brooks Brothers Riot in Miami-Dade County organized to stop vote-counting in November 2000, there might be hundreds in November 2024.

It might not put Trump in the White House should he lose. Republicans across the country are already organizing Republican secretaries of state and state legislatures to fix the election for whichever Republican candidate runs. But it would be yet another tool in the authoritarian toolbox meant for unmaking our democratic republic under a banner of “freedom” as corrupt as Trump and his cronies themselves.

Or, says Linker, for provoking something akin to “a postmodern, high-tech blending of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with elements of the 17th-century English Civil War and Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.”

Yay!

Wally, the walrus who has found fame during his travels round Europe, has been spotted in Iceland more than 550 miles from his last known location, Seal Rescue Ireland said.

He was previously seen 22 days ago in West Cork, Ireland, sparking concerns for his safety, but the Irish rescue charity said new pictures of a similar-looking walrus taken in Iceland were indeed Wally.

“We are absolutely over the moon that he’s not only still alive and well, but he is well on his way home to the Arctic,” said Seal Rescue Ireland.

It had come to the conclusion after comparing pictures with the British Divers Marine Life Rescue organization and other seal rescue centers in Britain and Europe, where Wally has previously been spotted.

“We compared the photo to confirmed photos of Wally, and were able to identify markings on his flippers that were an exact match,” Seal Rescue Ireland executive director Melanie Croce told Reuters by e-mail

Wally is quite the star:

I’m so glad he made it. 🙂

Paul Krugman’s newsletter today points out that we are not alone in this world. Not only that, we are not the only one’s experiencing disruption:

​These are scary times in America, with one of our major parties careening into authoritarianism and the other having difficulty moving forward thanks to two uncooperative senators. Most of what I write, inevitably, focuses on the troubled prospects for our republic. But everyone needs a break. So today I want to talk about a happier topic: The risks of an economic crisis in China.

OK, not exactly happier. But a change in subject, anyway.

Warnings about the Chinese economy aren’t new — but until now the worriers, myself included, have been consistently wrong. Back in 2013 I suggested that China’s growth model was becoming unsustainable, and that its economy might be about to hit a Great Wall; obviously that didn’t happen.

Yet the more closely you look at how China has been able to keep its economy going, the more problematic it looks. Basically, China has masked underlying imbalances by creating an immense housing bubble. And it’s hard to see how this ends well.

The background: The reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s created an economic miracle. China, which was desperately poor, is now a middle-income nation, and given its size, that makes it an economic superpower. But China’s economic growth has been gradually slowing. Here’s a five-year moving average of the country’s growth rate:

A slowing miracle.University of Groningen

There’s nothing mysterious about this slowdown. China was able to achieve incredibly rapid growth through a combination of technological borrowing from more advanced nations and a huge transfer of population from rural areas to cities. As its technological sophistication grew and the reservoir of rural labor shrank, growth was bound to slow. In addition, the one-child policy gave China the kind of demography we usually associate with richer countries: The working-age population peaked a few years ago and is now shrinking:

The legacy of the one-child policy.FRED

In and of themselves, slower growth and a demographic transition needn’t imply a crisis. But here’s the problem: Chinese spending patterns haven’t adjusted to the needs of a slower-growth economy. In particular, the country still has a very high savings rate, so to maintain full employment it needs to invest an incredibly high share of G.D.P. — more than 40 percent.

What drives investment? Normally, it depends a lot on how fast the economy is growing: growth is what creates a demand for new factories, office buildings, shopping malls and so on. So very high investment as a share of G.D.P. is sustainable if the economy is growing at 9 or 10 percent a year. If growth drops to 3 or 4 percent, however, the returns on investment drop. That’s why China really needs to change its economic mix — to save less and consume more.

But Chinese savings have stayed stubbornly high — and yes, excessive saving is an economic problem.

A few years ago a study from the International Monetary Fund tried to explain high Chinese savings. It suggested that the biggest culprit was the same demographic transition that is one cause of slowing growth: A declining birthrate means that Chinese adults can’t expect their children to support them later in life, so they save a lot to prepare for retirement. This demographic factor is reinforced by the weakness of China’s social safety net: People can’t count on the government to support them in their later years or to pay for health care, so they feel the need to accumulate assets as a precaution.

Chinese policymakers know all this, but somehow haven’t been able to deal with these underlying issues. Instead, they’ve kept the rate of investment very high despite slowing growth — mainly by encouraging huge spending on housing construction. A 2020 paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang shows that Chinese investment in real estate now greatly exceeds U.S. levels at the height of the 2000s housing bubble, both in dollar terms and as a share of G.D.P.:

Now that’s a housing bubble.Kenneth Rogoff and Yuanchen Yang

Rogoff and Yang also show both that housing prices in China are extremely high relative to incomes and that the real estate sector has become an incredibly large share of China’s economy.

None of this looks sustainable, which is why many observers worry that the debt problems of the giant property developer Evergrande are just the leading edge of a broader economic crisis.

I’ve already pointed out that until now China has been able to defy the doomsayers. So you might be tempted to give Chinese policymakers the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they’ll manage to deal with this situation. It turns out, however, that they haven’t really been dealing with their economy’s underlying problems, they’ve been masking those problems by creating a housing bubble that will ultimately magnify the problem.

But why should the rest of the world care? China, which maintains controls on the flow of capital into and out of the country, isn’t deeply integrated with world financial markets. So the fall of Evergrande isn’t likely to provoke a global financial crisis in the same way that the fall of Lehman Brothers did in 2008. A Chinese slowdown would have some economic spillover via reduced Chinese demand, especially for raw materials. But in purely economic terms, the global economic risks from China’s problems don’t look all that large.

China does, however, have an autocratic government — the kind of government that in other times and places has tended to respond to internal problems by looking for an external enemy. And China is also a superpower. It’s not hard to tell scary stories about where all this might lead.

And with that, I return you to your regular worries about what’s going on in the United States.

Right now, with our own country destabilized, I would have hoped that China would at least be stable if not thriving. It’s not a good situation.

Nonetheless, it’s important to be aware that the Chinese juggernaut is not actually a juggernaut. It’s another country caught in the maw of globalization and internal instability. There is nowhere on earth that isn’t affected by this stuff.

And his name is Donald Trump:

President Joe Biden is not a popular politician at this point in his presidency. This is even true in Virginia, a state he won by 10 points last year, where his net approval rating (approval – disapproval) is under water.Yet in Virginia, and even nationally on the generic congressional ballot, Democrats are holding onto slim within-the-margin-of-error advantages.Why? It could be in part because former President Donald Trump is unusually present for a politician not in office, and he’s as — if not more — unpopular than Biden.

Why Virginia is the biggest test yet for whether Trump still motivates DemocratsYou can see the Trump dynamic playing out in real time on the campaign trail. Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe has repeatedly tried to tie Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin to the former President, both in his speeches and ads. Youngkin is walking a fine line, leaning into some of Trump’s rhetoric to help boost Republican turnout, but also distancing himself on certain issues and playing up hyperlocal issues to appeal to the center of the electorate.

With a little under two weeks to go until Election Day, McAuliffe’s plan may just work. McAuliffe holds a nominal advantage of about 2 to 3 points over Youngkin in a recent average of polls. If you look back at more than 240 gubernatorial elections with polling since 1998, a lead of this size in the final three weeks of the campaign has held up about 70% of the time. (Hillary Clinton had similar odds of winning based on the pre-election polls in 2016.)

If the polls were exactly right, McAuliffe would greatly underperform Biden’s win last year and current Gov. Ralph Northam’s win in the 2017 governor’s race. They won by 10 points and 9 points, respectively. The drop in McAuliffe’s position relative to other Democrats shouldn’t be surprising given that Biden’s net approval in the state in recent polling has averaged about -2 points.

Still, a lead is a lead, and McAuliffe is outrunning Biden’s net popularity rating by a little less than 5 points.

The same polling reveals that Trump remains deeply unpopular in the state. A Fox News poll released last week had his net favorability rating (favorable – unfavorable) at -9 points among likely voters and -18 points among registered voters. Trump’s more unpopular than McAuliffe or Youngkin, who both sported positive net favorability ratings in the Fox News poll among likely voters.This seems to matter.You can see how closely feelings toward Trump and vote choice align by looking at the crosstabs of the Fox News poll.

On a scale of -1 to +1, the correlation across demographic groups between Trump’s unfavorable rating and McAuliffe’s standing in the horse race was over +0.98. You rarely get that type of correlation between the popularity of an out-of-office politician and vote choice. It’s nearly the same as Biden’s popularity and vote choice (over +0.99 correlation).

Indeed, a CBS News/YouGov poll from Virginia shows just how motivating a factor Trump is in whether voters cast a ballot. A majority of likely voters (51%) said feelings about Trump were very motivating. That’s basically the same as the 48% who said the same thing about their feelings toward Biden.

Separate polling from a Monmouth University poll in August showed that about the same share of Virginia voters indicated that Trump was a major factor in their 2021 vote as they did in 2017.This is something we’re seeing nationally as well. Trump continues to cast a shadow in a way I’m not sure we fully appreciate.

OH, I appreciate it.

The Democrats are not performing well, obviously. The sturm und drang of the legislative sausage making is taking a toll and it doesn’t look good. What with that and COVID and the sluggish economy, the border etc, they can’t count on winning on the basis of their competence and superior governance. It’s not altogether air, but that’s the way it is. The two Divas have ruined their momentum and the Vaccin refusniks have ruined the rest. But they were elected to tone down the drama and fix the government and all this drama is not what anyone wanted.

But Donald Trump is out there being way, way worse and he is not going away. At the end of the day, it’s always a choice. And Democratic voters are still sufficiently freaked out by the alternative that they are highly unlikely to sit this out.

I hope …

Of course he’s running. Who can doubt it?

Former President Trump is telling most anyone who’ll listen he will run again in 2024 — and poll after poll shows the vast majority of Republicans would gladly cheer him on and vote for him. 

Why it matters: Trump is the heart, soul and undisputed leader of the Republican Party and will easily win the nomination if he wants it, the polls make unmistakably clear.

It’s not just idle chatter. Trump is spending much of his time thinking about politics, holding calls with his political team and surveying polling.

Trump is keeping close tabs on his would-be rivals for the nomination — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former V.P. Mike Pence and former SecState Mike Pompeo in particular.

A source close to Trump told me he “is keeping all options open for 2024. With [an 84%] approval rating in the Republican Party, he doesn’t need to keep ‘close tabs’ on anyone.”

What we’re watching: Trump has been endorsing loyalists who back his fraud claims in secretary of state races around the country — a sign he’s thinking ahead about political levers and remains obsessed with the “Big Lie.”

What we’re hearing: Trump’s most likely opponent is Pence, who — I’m told — has no plans to defer to his former boss.

Reality check: The idea someone could challenge Trump as an anti-Trump candidate seems ludicrous. The market is minimalist inside the new GOP. That means someone would need to out-Trump Trump when the latest Quinnipiac Poll shows 8 in 10 Republicans want him to run.

Almost every top Republican we talk to said it would take a severe illness, death — or criminal charges sticking — to stop Trump from walking away with the race before it even begins.

Pompeo has been the most obvious about his presidential ambitions — starting a PAC and doing all the obvious travel.

Trump aides have commented on how much weight Pompeo has lost — another sign, they interpret, of his ambitions.

But Trump’s advisers cannot imagine Pompeo or DeSantis would dare run against him.

Trumpworld is more uncertain about Pence, who has been quiet about his intentions but maintains a strong and loyal team around him.

Nikki Haley — the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor, who’s often talked of as a potential 2024 candidate — has explicitly said she wouldn’t challenge Trump.

Pence has notably not made any such declaration.

And you know who’s noticed? Donald J. Trump.

I care nothing about his rivals, none of whom have a chance unless he’s incapacitated or dead. But it is a huge problem that he helping to stack the electoral processes with Trumper nut-jobs in various swing states. I don’t think they will be subtle about stealing the next election. They are planning to do it and they will do it without shame, just as they do everything.

I wish I understood why the Democrats aren’t “hair on fire” over this. It’s as if they simply feel that ‘everything’s going to be ok” without ever acknowledging that we have already seen just how “not ok” things can get and that it will be much, much worse if Trump has his way.

Are they just waiting for him to die?

Josh Marshall on that weird letter sent by Congressman Jim Banks pretending that he’s the “ranking member” of the Committee that he is not on and has no use for:

Kevin McCarthy and Trump toady Jim Banks want what I guess we could call backsies on the whole Jan 6th committee thing.

Republicans had plenty of opportunities to get a commission or committee in which they not only had complete control over who served on the Republican side but veto power over any significant action the body took. They refused that and after stonewalling for months ended up with one that gave the final say on membership to Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi accepted some McCarthy nominations but put her foot down in the case of two reps who are such consistent supporters of the Big Lie and the insurrection that it was absurd to place them on the committee investigating either. Now Banks is sending letters to executive departments claiming that he is in fact that rightful ranking member (i.e., top Republican) on the committee.

The most generous read of this is that it’s yet more Trumper theater. It seems unlikely that any Biden appointee at any relevant department is going to get confused about who’s on the committee. They watch TV too. But it is of a piece with the larger story. We get to try to overthrow the Republic and equal billing on the committee charged with investigating what we did. We also get to stonewall and block the investigation from starting for months. But if you decide to do it without us – because we refused to participate – well, we still get to participate.

This is hardly a surprising move from the crew that lost the election and lost fairly badly but aren’t interested in the course open to people who lose elections: admitting you lost and moving on.

We’ve spoken a lot about Trumpism as the grievance politics par excellence. Every political movement has grievances of some sort. There’s nothing wrong with that. Indeed, petitioning for the “redress of grievances” is literally written into the constitution. But Trumpism is basically all grievances and grievances in a way that is the flip side of accountability. Rules aren’t fair – when they’re applied to us. The law is “very unfair,” as Trump often puts it – when it’s applied to us. Elections are fair – as long as we win.

Is this privilege or lack of accountability or is it really simply a politics of power? It is really no different from the authoritarian impulse and hyper-masculinity politics that pervades Trumpism. We should have the power. Because we should. And anything that stands in the way of that is by definition unfair. Because we should have power.

They are spoiled children, playing games and disrupting everything just for fun. GOP officials are these guys:

And this incredible projection:

On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 229 to 202, with nine Republicans joining all the Democrats to hold podcaster and former White House adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to testify before the committee investigating the insurrection of January 6th and events leading up to it. The order was sent to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who will evaluate it and will likely put it before a Grand Jury to determine if Bannon should be prosecuted for criminal contempt, a crime which carries a possible fine of $100,000 and a year in jail.

It’s not uncommon for congressional committees to threaten contempt of congress when they don’t get the cooperation they believe they deserve and the committees even vote to take the case to the floor of the House from time to time. It’s usually a sort of game to get the parties to the table to work out an agreement — which they usually do. Or, they will instead file a civil action, where the case slowly wends its way through the courts. And sometimes, the Department of Justice just says no and that’s the end of that.

The last time the Department of Justice prosecuted such a case was back in the 1980s when it indicted then former Reagan administration Environmental Protection Agency official Rita M. Lavelle for failing to testify about the department’s handling of the EPA’s $1.6 billion “Superfund” to clean up hazardous waste. Reagan had fired her and the House voted unanimously to hold her in contempt but she was acquitted at trial. (She was later jailed for lying to Congress in a different case.)

RELATED: Jan. 6 committee votes unanimously to recommend Steve Bannon for criminal prosecution

The only person to be convicted of contempt of Congress in recent memory was none other than G. Gordon Liddy, who received a suspended sentence because he was already doing so much time for his other Watergate crimes. Even Nixon didn’t have the nerve to pardon all of his henchmen before he left office as Trump did. (Liddy went on to have a lucrative career as a right-wing talk show host so it all worked out well for him. )

The vice-chair of the committee, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, made it clear what they want to discuss with Bannon and you can certainly see why Bannon wouldn’t want to do it. She said in comments to the committee on Tuesday:

“Based on the Committee’s investigation, it appears that Mr. Bannon had substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans. The day before this all occurred — on January 5th — Mr. Bannon publicly professed knowledge that ‘(a)ll hell is going to break lose tomorrow.’ He forecast that the day would be ‘extraordinarily different’ than what most Americans expected. He said to his viewers on the air: ‘(S)o many people said, “if I was in a revolution, I would be in Washington.”‘ (W)ell, this is your time in history.”

Bannon also said on his podcast:

It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. Okay, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in. … You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready. It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.

Before Thursday’s vote by the full House, Cheney said,

“Mr. Bannon’s own public statements make clear: he knew what was going to happen before it did … The American people deserve to know what he knew, and what he did,”

She believes Trump did too:

Mr. Bannon’s and Mr. Trump’s privilege arguments do appear to reveal one thing, however: they suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th,

Trump was certainly involved in the planning. He invited people to come to the Capitol on that day tweeting, “it’s going to be wild.” And we know from the Bob Costa and Bob Woodward book “Peril” that throughout the post-election period, Bannon was pushing January 6th as the big event. (Some of that was, no doubt, Bannon’s way of cozying up to Trump for a pardon, which he duly received on Trump’s last day in office.) His involvement in the Willard Hotel “war room” with a group of Trump cronies on January 5th and 6th explains why he knew all about the John Eastman coup plot to have Mike Pence throw the election to the House where they could declare Trump the winner. (He alluded to Eastman’s scheme in his podcast on the 6th.) What he might have known about any planning for subsequent violence remains unknown although his rhetoric certainly did sound like a call to arms.

Trump knew everything about the Eastman coup plot. He knew about all the coup plots and there were a bunch of them, including, in my opinion, his direction to the rowdy crowd on January 6th to march to the Capitol as the joint session of Congress was meeting to certify the vote. Did he know, or suspect, that the crowd was going to storm the building?

Whenever I think of that I can’t help but recall the January 5th exchange in “Peril” between Trump and Pence in which Trump, listening to the crowd outside the White House cheering for him, told Pence that he wanted him to let the House of Representatives decide the election. Pence responded that he didn’t have the authority and Trump gestured to the crowd outside the window and said to him, “Well, what if these people say you do?” Pence replied that he didn’t think any one person should have that power and Trump pressed him. “But wouldn’t it be almost cool to have that power?”

As we know, Pence refused, but according to the book Trump later commented to others that there was a lot of anger “out there” and we all know what he said the next morning to his ecstatic and worshipful crowd. As he sat in the White House watching his people, carrying Trump flags, breaking windows and beating cops, it’s not hard to imagine that he was thinking about how “cool” it was to have that power.

Bannon, meanwhile, is almost certainly “in heaven,” as author Michael Wolfe put it to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell earlier this week:

“Remember, Steve has been in the wilderness for the last three years since Trump forced him out of the White House. But the real pain in Steve’s heart is that the attention has been on Donald Trump — who Steve regards as, as stupid, crazy and a crook — rather than the attention being on Steve Bannon. So, yes, it’s a good day for Steve.”

A good day, indeed.

I suspect Bannon will be happy to fashion himself as a “political prisoner,” comparing himself to everyone from Nelson Mandela to Gandhi to Martin Luther King. He won’t mention the one he really resembles, but he has certainly seen the parallels — and Steve Bannon certainly thinks it would be very “cool” to have that guy’s power. 

Listen to Steve Bannon talking about #January6th. The American people deserve to hear his testimony. pic.twitter.com/JDnotq5eDr

— Rep. Liz Cheney (@RepLizCheney) October 21, 2021

Salon