Month: February 2022

This piece by David Corn addresses the question I think we’ve all be asking. What is John Durham really up to?

Special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal has turned into a conspiracy-theory-generating machine for feverish right-wingers. And his latest filing raises the question of whether that is by design.

[…]

Durham’s case is based on the allegation that during a 2016 meeting with then-FBI general counsel James Baker, Sussmann, who was sharing with the bureau information assembled by cyber-researchers that raised the prospect of an unusual computer link between a Trump-related business and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank, lied when he said he wasn’t representing the Clinton campaign related to this matter. (Sussmann denies this charge.) In the conflict-of-interest filing, Durham referenced a meeting that Sussman had on February 9, 2017 with the CIA, in which he presented an “updated set of allegations” that included information compiled by a tech executive named Rodney Joffe and other researchers. Joffe and the others believed they had come across cyber data called “DNS lookups” that indicated suspicious links between both Trump Tower and the White House and a Russian mobile phone provider. Durham claimed that Sussmann told the CIA, as the document characterizes the conversation, “that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” Durham added, “The Special Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations.”

In this recent filing, Durham also suggested that Joffe had been working on behalf of the Clinton campaign without providing specifics about the nature of any such relationship, and that Joffe had “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data” for this research work. Durham alleged that Joffe’s company “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers” for the White House, “as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services” to the White House and that Joffe and his associates “exploited this arrangement…for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

Putting together all the allegations and suggestions—a tech exec possibly tied to the Clinton campaign “exploiting” data related to the White House and Trump Tower—right-wing journalists reached a dramatic conclusion: The Clintonites hacked Trump at his home (or office) and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and spied on him. But this leap was based on cyber ignorance and possibly misinformation presented by Durham.

Researching DNS lookups is not hacking a server. It is tracking the pattern of connections between servers and computers or smartphones. Much of this information—DNS logs—is not private. The researchers examining the DNS data were not infiltrating anything. Lawyers for Joffe and David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the research Sussmann shared with the CIA, have challenged Durham’s representations. Dagon’s attorneys note that the DNS logs examined related to the Russian phone service came from the time of Barack Obama’s presidency. That appears credible, given that Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA was only three weeks after Trump had taken office. And they told the New York Times that Dagon and associates were using “nonprivate” DNS data and “were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign.”

Joffe, too, says that this research was focused on whether Russian malware had infected the White House and the Trump campaign. (Trump’s campaign office was in Trump Tower.) As the New York Times reports,

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data—including from the White House—for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

On Monday, Sussmann’s lawyer’s filed a response to Durham’s conflict-of-interest motion that insisted the research discussed at the CIA meeting “pertained only to the period of time before Mr. Trump took office, when Barack Obama was President.” This filing also claimed that Durham was “well aware” of this—suggesting that the special counsel had purposefully fudged this particular and critical point. Sussmann’s legal team, in this document, accused Durham of making “a filing in this case that unnecessarily includes prejudicial—and false—allegations that are irrelevant to his Motion and to the charged offense, and are plainly intended to politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.”

Sussmann and others who are part of the investigation should not be taken at their word. But it’s clear from Durham’s own filing that there is no evidence that Trump and White House servers were infiltrated. This charge originated with Kash Patel, a onetime aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and pro-Trump operative who has long toiled to discredit the Trump-Russia scandal. Discussing the Durham motion, he made an inaccurate claim to Fox that the document showed that Clinton lawyers had tried to “infiltrate” Trump Tower and White House servers. (Patel, who was a top Pentagon aide at the end of the Trump administration, has been subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot.)

Ultimately, the fault for this phony bombshell rests with Durham. His filing did not specify the exact time period the DNS lookup research covered. It did not include sufficient details of the alleged links between Joffe and the Clinton campaign to provide a clear picture. And a central issue remains a matter of dispute between Durham and Sussman, Joffe, and the researchers: What allegations did Sussmann present to the CIA? Durham maintains that Sussmann and the researchers were falsely claiming that Trump and his crew were using Russian-made wireless phones, as part of an underhanded effort to tar Trump with a nefarious connection to Moscow. The researchers say their concern was Russian security breaches of the Obama White House and the Trump campaign. This seems to be a question that Durham could easily resolve with a piece or two of evidence. If he wanted to. 

Prosecutors have much discretion when it comes to telling the stories of their cases. They can stick to the narrow specifics of the allegations. They can elaborate. Through his tenure as special consul, Durham has chosen to use narrow indictments to disseminate information that suggests wider conspiracies. That ought to place a weighty burden on him to be fair and accurate—and to not feed any partisan conspiracy fever. Yet Durham’s latest filing falls short of that standard and fuels the suspicion that he might be more conspirator than investigator. 

John Durham was the guy who “investigated” the torture regime for the DOJ and didn’t find anything worthy of charging. It seems clear to me that he’s on one of those white whale hunts that right wing special prosecutors tend to launch when they get the power to do it. He hasn’t found anything but he’s going to make damned sure that Republicans get something out of it anyway. And you never know. Maybe he’ll find that someone used a private email server and all bets will be off.

Tom Sullivan already posted a link to the great New Yorker interview with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and added his own excellent observations. Here, I’d like to focus on her effectiveness. Here is Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s second question to Michael Cohen when he testified before Congress.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez:

To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?

Cohen:

Yes.

Her third question:

Who else knows the president did this?

Cohen:

Alan Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman, and Matthew Calamari.

And she went on to ask whether the House Committee should review his financial statements and compare them with his tax returns. Cohen agreed they should. Then she inquired about Cohen’s assertion that Trump had improperly devalued his properties to avoid paying taxes. She went into detail and Cohen confirmed the scam.

Yesterday, Trump’s long time accounting firm cut their ties with the Trump Organization and disavowed ten years of Trump’s financial statements that they prepared. This is a severe blow, on many levels, not only for Trump but for his entire gang.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning was certainly not the only impetus for this. Letitia James and her staff deserve significant credit for the immense effort it took to piece this together in a legal fashion (and many others contributed with lower profiles). But with her concise, accessible questions, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez highlighted Trump’s simple, crude grift in a way that made the issues crystal clear to the wide American public.

This is only one of the many substantial ways Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has influenced American politics for the better over the past few years.

I don’t even know what to say about this:

A Delta Air Lines passenger is facing federal charges after he allegedly tried to open an emergency door in-flight in the hope that other passengers would record him sharing his views on coronavirus vaccines, prosecutors announced Monday.

Michael Brandon Demarre, 32, was on a Friday flight from Salt Lake City to Portland, Ore., when he removed a plastic covering over the handle on the aircraft’s emergency exit and forcefully pulled on the handle, Justice Department officials wrote in a news release. After a flight attendant intervened and demanded he let go of the handle, Demarre complied and was physically restrained by the flight crew, officials say.

When asked why he attempted to open the emergency door in-flight, the Portland resident told police he hoped passengers onboard would start filming him so he had “the opportunity to share his thoughts on covid-19 vaccines,” according to an affidavit from FBI agent Adam T. Hoover. In a passenger video obtained by the Register-Guard, Demarre is seen yelling, “We’re all being lied to,” and muttering about coronavirus vaccines as he is taken off the plane by authorities.

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1493735012704743427

I think he’s just an idiot…

Back in November of 2000, I recall telling everyone who would listen that there was no way that the Supreme Court would take the case of Bush vs Gore. It was unthinkable that they would want to wade into a partisan argument being waged in the state of Florida over the disputed election result. After all, only 537 separated the two candidates in a state that would decide the electoral count. And the circumstances couldn’t have been more partisan: the dispute was happening in a state run by the Republican candidate’s brother and two of the justices on the Court had been nominated by that same candidate’s father. How could the Supreme Court even think of intervening under these circumstances, particularly since the process in place under Florida law was still going on and there are remedies for a stalemate written into the Constitution?

Well, history proved me an ass. 

As you know, the Supreme Court took the case and not only decided in favor of George W. Bush, they did it on a strict party-line vote. It still stands as the most blatantly partisan decision in American history. The conservatives used inane inverted reasoning to say that it would violate Bush voters’ equal protection rights to have the votes recounted under the standards set forth by the state and would harm Bush’s “legitimacy” if the recount was to change to Gore’s favor and then back again. To add insult to injury they also insisted that the decision did not set a precedent, writing:

“Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”

Yes, it does present many complexities, none of which were considered in that notorious decision.

Recent polling by Quinnipiac shows that 61% of Americans say the Supreme Court is motivated mainly by politics with 67% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans in agreement. The Supreme Court has lost the trust of most Americans over the past few years and I would suggest that this decision was a major factor. It was just so overtly political that it’s impossible to overlook.

As a result of that traumatic event, which I think has been underappreciated as a precursor to the modern right’s ongoing assault on voting rights in the 21st century, I have had little faith that the courts would resist intervening if the situation presented itself again. I admit that I was pleasantly surprised to see that former president Donald Trump’s handpicked majority resisted the temptation to take up any of the bogus cases that he and his henchmen spewed forth after the election. Trump was certainly disappointed by that, calling them “cowardly” and reportedly fuming that they refused to step in and hand him the White House. (It must have burned him up to realize that the Court had done so for the Bush family and not for him.)

So, as much as I hate to admit it, the courts may be our last hope of saving our democracy despite that horrible precedent. 

As you no doubt know by now, there are many machinations happening in certain battleground states at the behest of the Trump extremists in the Republican Party. They are doing the usual voter suppression and intimidation tactics. But there is more going on that requires immediate attention and it goes beyond the Electoral Count Act reforms the Congress is currently contemplating which includes:

• Extending the safe harbor deadline, the date by which all challenges to a state’s election results must be completed.
• Clarifying that the role of the vice president on Jan. 6 is purely “ministerial,” meaning the vice president merely opens the envelopes and has no power to reject electors.
• Raising the number of members of Congress needed to object to a state’s electors; currently, one lawmaker from each chamber is enough to do so.

Unfortunately, that’s inadequate to the problem. The New York Times reported that according to Yale Fellow Matthew Seligman (who wrote a 100 page paper on the subject but didn’t publish it for fear of someone actually using it to steal an election) The Electoral Count Act of 1887 has been a ticking time bomb from the beginning. Seligman told the Times:

“Its underexplored weaknesses are so profound that they could result in an even more explosive conflict in 2024 and beyond, fueled by increasingly vitriolic political polarization and constitutional hardball.

It just took an amoral, sore loser like Donald Trump to fully expose it. 

The most prominent concern is what Seligman calls the “governor’s tiebreaker,” a loophole that could result in a constitutional crisis. The Times laid out the scenario:

Suppose that on Jan. 6, 2025 — the next time the Electoral Count Act will come into play — Republicans control the House of Representatives and the governorship of Georgia. Seligman conjures a hypothetical yet plausible scenario: The secretary of state declares that President Biden won the popular vote in the state. But Gov. David Perdue, who has said he believes the 2020 election was stolen, declares there was “fraud” and submits a slate of Trump electors to Congress instead. Then the House, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, certifies Trump as the winner.

Perhaps most stunning is the fact that even if the Democrats had a Senate majority at the time and rejected the Georgia GOP slate, those 16 electoral votes would still go to Trump. If, after all you’ve seen this past year, that doesn’t convince you that we have a problem you haven’t been paying attention.

So what’s to be done? It’s unclear. (In fact, it’s unclear if even the modest reforms they are talking about can find 10 GOP senators to vote for it.) Seligman suggests that it include a provision for judicial review in case a governor or legislature takes it upon themselves to overturn the popular vote in their state. Conservative legal superstar Michael Luttig, a former Federal Appeals Court judge, takes that suggestion a step farther.

In an op-ed in the New York Times last week, Luttig suggested that the reform should explicitly give federal courts the power to decide disputes in these matters and require them to decide the cases quickly. It’s entirely possible that these cases would, once again, wind up before the Supreme Court.

My first reaction to that idea is, as George W. Bush would say, “fool me once, fool me twice, won’t get fooled again…” On the other hand, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out in his excellent piece on this subject, we don’t really have much choice — “it’s basically either that or a situation in which a Speaker Kevin McCarthy decides which electors count.” No thank you.Advertisement:

I think there’s a pretty good chance even this Supreme Court would deny Donald Trump’s attempt to do this in 2024. But would they deny Republicans like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Or Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in a legitimately close election? Frankly, I doubt it. That opinion that was not supposed to be a precedent is actually a precedent. And I think it might be one of the few precedents this conservative majority will follow. 

Salon

Ryan Grimm offers some caution for the left in how it to respond to the Ottawa Canadian trucker protests (that in Windsor and elsewhere are not so much truckers).

Polling from Ipsos shows a generational and economic split between those with more sympathy for the protests and those with less:

Overall, 54% of Canadians said the protesters do not deserve any of our sympathy. That might be a comforting number for Canadian progressives, but the trouble lies deeper in the numbers. For people 55 and up, only 37% sympathized with the protesters. But among people 18-34, that number was 61%.

Meanwhile, people who made less than $40,000 a year were supportive of the protesters, 54-46%. People who make over 100k are the least supportive.

Ipsos also asked whether people agree with the statement, “The truck protest is mostly economically disadvantaged Canadians letting governments know that they are struggling.”

51% of People making less than 40k agreed with that assessment. For those making over 100k, only 32% agreed. Now, who would you say is more plugged into the feelings of working-class Canadians – those making less than 40k a year, or those making more than $100,000?

Ipsos also asked folks if they support the Black Lives Matter movement. Overall, Canadians say they support BLM by a 68-32 margin. Among Gen Z, the support was 86%, which is practically universal. Among 18-34 year olds, it was 77%. Ipsos doesn’t offer economic crosstabs for this one, but they do have a category for people with only a high school degree, and among those, support for Black Lives Matter is 64%. 

Polling suggests, Grimm believes, young, working-class Canadians, at least, are up for grabs politically. It would be a mistake for the left to dismiss the protesters simply as “right wing reactionaries [when] the right wing is all too happy to tell them that yes, that’s exactly what they are, and welcome them in.”

What is driving populist movements worldwide is a deep sense that the system is rigged against Average Janes and Joes. Right and left disagree about how to deal with it, but not about the rigging itself, Emma Jackson wrote at The Breach.

That became clear when she came face-to-face with an angry trucker from another Canadian convoy three years ago:

My story tells me we should punch up. The corporate elite and their political allies in government, from where I stand, are knowingly torching my generation’s future to continue lining the pockets of a billionaire class.

His story points to hardened borders, low taxes, and “small government” as solutions. Mine turns to universal public programs, repatriating land to Indigenous peoples, and worker control over all aspects of our economy.

Same complaints about government failures. Different solutions. Perhaps we should look for common ground, Lincoln Project style.

Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.

One of the outcomes of living through late-stage capitalism and COVID-19 has been an overwhelming breakdown of community and social fabric. People desperately want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and the anti-mandate movement is openly extending them that opportunity without requiring that they belong to an activist subculture.

In fact, I’d venture a guess that if you had walked around Parliament Hill last Saturday and asked those with the convoy whether they considered themselves to be “activists,” the vast majority would have shrugged and said, “I’m a regular person fighting for my freedom.”

I don’t know if either Grimm and Jackson are right about these protests. The fringe right, like the fringe left, has elements more than happy to hijack protests for their own more-extreme ends. But the activist subculture’s tendency to adopt jargon as signifiers of political insiderness comes off as elitist to those looking in from the outside. Perhaps as much as “Have a blessed day” and “covered by the blood” on the Christian right.

At a time when the right actively radicalizes the disaffected online, the left probably needs a “mass on-ramp” of its own.

(h/t ML)

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What is it like to go from holding forth about politics from behind a bar to being an insider in Congress overnight? And a national political figure? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York discussed her experience in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker. (There is audio.)

I’ve sketched before the campaign industrial complex and the track budding careerists might take to becoming members of the political fraternity. By the time they’ve ingratiated themselves with enough party “poohbahs” to run for office, they are already the kind of Democrat progressive activists love to hate. It is uncommon to hear a progressive activist reflect on working in the “shit show” after jumping the line at 29. Her perspective is far more grounded than one might expect.

Ocasio-Cortez reflects on where President Biden ought to take his presidency to make the most of it with the thin voting margins he has. Executive actions should not be left in the toolbox. Time is short to get anything done before the next congress. If he is to have “any chance at preserving any of our majority,” student-loan cancellation could not only help her demoralized generation but motivate them to political action now that it is needed most. Democracy itself is in peril.

“What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t,” she says. We don’t need to look to post-WWI Germany for a model when Jim Crow was home-grown:

And the question that we’re really facing is: Was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before, which, by the way, wasn’t just Jim Crow but also the extraordinary economic oppression as well?

Ocasio-Cortez is careful in commenting about Nancy Pelosi’s speakership but insists there is need not just for structural but generational change in the caucus Pelosi leads. AOC has no nostalgia for past congresses that passed out of existence before she was born. For Biden, that’s a stumbling block. Her youth, plus coming from a working-class community accustomed to being ignored, brings clarity where long experience can be a hindrance.

Could she walk away if she finds her effectiveness stymied, asks Remnick.

Sure, there are other ways she could help working people that might be useful, Ocasio-Cortez says, “But I also reject the total cynicism that what’s happening here is fruitless. I’ve been in this cycle before in my life, before I even ran for office, before it was even a thought.”

Ocasio-Cortez elaborates on a time she lost hope. She responds in a penetrating way hip cynics need to hear:

It manifested in depression. Feeling like you have no agency, and that you are completely subject to the decisions of people who do not care about you, is a profoundly depressing experience. It’s a very invisibilizing experience. And I lived in that for years. This is where sometimes what I do is speak to the psychology of our politics rather than to the polling of our politics. What’s really important for people to understand is that to change that tide and to actually have this well of hope you have to operate on your direct level of human experience.

When people start engaging individually enough, it starts to amount to something bigger. We have a culture of immediate gratification where if you do something and it doesn’t pay off right away we think it’s pointless.

But, if more people start to truly cherish and value the engagement and the work in their own back yard, it will precipitate much larger change. And the thing about people’s movements is that the opposite is very top-down. When you have folks with a profound amount of money, power, influence, and they really want to make something happen, they start with media. You look at these right-wing organizations, they create YouTube channels. They create their podcast stars. They have Fox News as their own personal ideological television outlet.

Legitimate change in favor of public opinion is the opposite. It takes a lot of mass-public-building engagement, unrecognized work until it gets to the point that it is so big that to ignore it threatens the legitimacy of mass-media outlets, institutions of power, etc. It has to get so big that it is unignorable, in order for these positions up top to respond. And so people get very discouraged here.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been there, and she isn’t going back. She is not giving up again.

There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed. Even on climate—or especially on climate. And so the day-to-day of my day job is frustrating. So is everyone else’s. I ate shit when I was a waitress and a bartender, and I eat shit as a member of Congress. It’s called a job, you know?

So, yes, I deal with the wheeling and dealing and whatever it is, that insider stuff, and I advance amendments that some people would criticize as too little, etc. I also advance big things that people say are unrealistic and naïve. Work is like that. It is always the great fear when it comes to work or pursuing anything. You want to write something, and, in your head, it’s this big, beautiful Nobel Prize-winning concept. And then you are humbled by the words that you actually put on paper.

And that is the work of movement. That is the work of organizing. That is the work of elections. That is the work of legislation. That is the work of theory, of concepts, you know? And that is what it means to be in the arena.

Political “Survivor.” Outwit. Outplay. Outlast. Commit to it, work through the frustrations and setbacks and your goals will advance. Quick fixes are few and far between. Those who don’t show up to play forfeit.

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The right has been attacking pubic schooling as long as I can remember. They wish to end it, actually, and to that end have tried to starve it of funds by forcing taxpayers to support private religious schools and have periodically gone on crusades to take over the school boards. But I don’t think I’ve seen quite this level of violent rhetoric before, at least since the civil rights and busing eras back in the 60s and 70s:

The letter came to the home of Brenda Sheridan, a Loudoun County, Virginia school board member, addressed to one of her adult children. It threatened to kill them both unless she left the board.

“It is too bad that your mother is an ugly communist whore,” said the hand-scrawled note, which the family read just after Christmas. “If she doesn’t quit or resign before the end of the year, we will kill her, but first, we will kill you!”

School board members across the United States have endured a rash of terroristic threats and hostile messages ignited by roiling controversies over policies on curtailing the coronavirus, bathroom access for transgender students and the teaching of America’s racial history.

Reuters documented the intimidation through contacts and interviews with 33 board members across 15 states and a review of threatening and harassing messages obtained from the officials or through public records requests. The news organization found more than 220 such messages in this sampling of districts. School officials or parents in 15 different counties received or witnessed threats they considered serious enough to report to police.

While school controversies are traditionally local, these threats often come from people out of state with no connection to the districts involved. They are part of a rising national wave of threats to public officials – including election officials and members of Congress – citing an array of grievances, often underpinned by apocalyptic conspiracy theories alleging “treason” or “tyranny.”

About half the hostile messages documented by Reuters were sent to Sheridan, former chair of the Loudoun County, Virginia, school board, amid controversies over coronavirus protections, anti-racism efforts and bathroom policy. Twenty-two messages sent to Sheridan or the entire board included death threats or said members should be or would be killed.

In June, she received a threat saying: “Brenda, I am going to gut you like the fat f‑‑‑ing pig you are when I find you.”

The message, like the letter to her home, also threatened her children. Reuters agreed not to publish any personal details about Sheridan’s family members, at her request, because of her continuing safety concerns. 

Board members in Pennsylvania’s Pennsbury school district received racist and anti-Semitic emails from around the country from people angry over the district’s diversity efforts. One said: “This why hitler threw you c‑‑ts in a gas chamber.”

In Dublin, Ohio, an anonymous letter sent to the board president vowed that officials would “pay dearly” for supporting education programs on race and mask mandates to stop the coronavirus. “You have become our enemies and you will be removed one way or the other,” it said.

School officials reported the messages to law enforcement in those three cases, as in many others documented by Reuters. No one has been arrested for sending these threatening messages, though a few people have been arrested for unruly or threatening behavior at board meetings.

“This why hitler threw you c‑‑ts in a gas chamber.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed last year to devote federal resources to combating threats to school officials after the National School Boards Association in September sent the White House a request for federal enforcement to stop the “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.” But the association’s plea for help only added to the controversy as Republican politicians argued the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, sought to censor free speech and label dissenting parents as terrorists. Nineteen state school boards withdrew their membership or withheld dues from the national association in protest of its Sept. 29 letter.

The school boards association apologized to its state members for the letter on Oct. 22, saying there was “no justification” for some of its language, without specifying what it regretted. The organization did not respond to requests for comment.

The hostility faced by school officials mirrors the campaign of fear documented by Reuters against U.S. election workers in response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voting fraud. A federal election-threats task force was announced in June, after a Reuters investigation that month revealed the widespread threats. In January, the task force reported the arrests of two people who had threatened election officials.

Biden’s Justice Department has also convened a task force on threats to school officials. The department, however, declined to say who serves on it, whether the task force has met or whether it was investigating any threats. In a statement, the department said it had “taken action” to prevent violence and intimidation of “those who are threatened because of the jobs they hold,” including school board members, election workers and other public officials.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a statement, characterized Attorney General Garland’s commitment to protect school officials as simply highlighting the FBI’s “ongoing efforts” to address threats of violence “regardless of the motivation.” The agency emphasized it was not “investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings.”

Nearly half of the 31 school boards contacted by Reuters said they had added extra security at meetings, limited public comment or held virtual meetings when in-person gatherings became too chaotic.

Social media has unleashed the beast in a lot of people so maybe this is all just right wing blather. But we’ve had enough mass shootings by people with these ideas in the last few years that anyone who is the target of this sort of thing is justified in being terrified. Which is the point.

Keep in mind that much of this is astroturfed:

The wave of mostly anonymous threats has emerged against a backdrop of public protests by a new constellation of local and national activist groups, such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education. Parents started some groups. Others have ties to veterans of the conservative movement or Republican political operatives. […]

Many Republican elected officials have sought to harness the anger over education policy in advance of this November’s midterm congressional elections, releasing strident statements or passing laws addressing the issues igniting the school protests.

One group, Fight for Schools, is led by Ian Prior, a former deputy director of public affairs in Trump’s Department of Justice. The group took in $10,000 in donations in the past year from 1776 Action, a national group opposing critical race theory that is run by veteran Republican operatives. The organization also accepted $5,000 from the Presidential Coalition, which is overseen by former Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie.

These right wing operatives have been organizing this sort of thing for decades. But I’m very afraid they can no longer control their people.

We knew the Trumps lied to their marks … er customers. They’ve had to settle multi-million dollar lawsuits regarding everything from their “charity” to their supposed “university.” They lied to their vendors and contractors, burying them in protracted lawsuits if they refused to take a cut in their agreed upon price once the work was done.

They also routinely lied to banks and investors and it looks like their (former) accounting firm has the receipts:

Former President Trump’s longtime accounting firm has cut ties with Trump and his companies, according to a Monday court filing from New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Mazars USA LLP General Counsel William Kelly said in a letter dated Feb. 9 that filings from James’ investigation had played a role in persuading the accounting firm that the Trump Org’s financial statements from 2011 to 2020 “should no longer be relied upon.”

Mazars will immediately stop working for Trump, the letter says.

“Due in part to our decision regarding the financial statements, as well as the totality of the
circumstances, we have also reached the point such that there is a non-waivable conflict of
interest with the Trump Organization,” reads the letter, addressed to Trump Org executive vice president Alan Garten.

Mazars asked the Trump organization to rescind the financial statements, though the accountant noted that it did not believe there were “material discrepancies” in the filings “as a whole.”

James has been conducting a civil investigation of the Trump organization, probing statements that Trump submitted in order to receive loans from various banks. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has been conducting a criminal investigation of the same alleged conduct.

At the center of the probes is the question of whether Trump tricked the banks into providing sweeter loan terms by providing them with fraudulent financial statements about his own company. The Manhattan DA investigation, now under DA Alvin Bragg, has also covered allegations of tax fraud.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen alleged to the House Oversight Committee in 2019 that Trump would routinely inflate the value of his assets to secure better loan deals, and deflate them for tax purposes.

James has been fighting an attempt from Trump to block a subpoena for his testimony and those of his son and daughter, Don Jr. and Ivanka, after her office found substantial evidence that Trump’s children allegedly played a role in some of that inflation.

She argued in a court filing that the Mazars letter shows cause for the subpoena to go forward.

Remember, she is working with the Manhattan DA on this case. We have no idea if the Tax authorities are also investigating. But they should be. These lies almost certainly add up to tax fraud, something we know the Trump family specialized in for decades.

Remember this?

UPDATE: Republican Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters appeared to attempt to kick a law enforcement officer while struggling with police during her arrest. This is video from a witness. pic.twitter.com/TILJ1198BV

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) February 8, 2022

She seems nice. And guess what?

A Republican county clerk in Colorado who was stripped of her election-oversight duties last year after she allowed an outsider to copy voting-machine hard drives said Monday that she is launching a bid to become the state’s top elections official.

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has embraced the false claim that former president Donald Trump won the 2020 election, made the announcement during an appearance on former Trump White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Peters said she is running to “restore trust” and “put an end to government overreach in our election process.”

“Colorado deserves a secretary of state who will stand up to the Biden administration. … And, Steve, that’s why today I’m announcing that I’m running for Colorado secretary of state,” she said.

I have no doubt that Trump will endorse her. She’s the most loyal of all loyalists, someone willing to commit crimes on his behalf:

Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) filed a lawsuit last year seeking to strip Peters and her deputy of their election powers after passwords for Mesa County’s voting machines were posted online and copies of the hard drives were presented at a symposium hosted by MyPillow executive Mike Lindell, who denies that President Biden won the 2020 election.

A Colorado judge in October barred Peters from overseeing her county’s elections, finding that she had neglected her duties and was “untruthful” when she brought in someone who was not a county employee to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines.

Peters, who has said she wanted to copy the voting machine hard drives to preserve alleged evidence of fraud, has denounced the lawsuit as a “power grab” meant to serve as a “warning to all other potential whistleblowers.”

The local district attorney, state prosecutors and the FBI are investigating whether criminal charges are warranted in the voting-machine breach.

Peters was also arrested last week for allegedly resisting authorities’ attempts to seize an iPad in an unrelated case.

In the podcast interview Monday, Bannon called Peters “an American hero” and likened her to Trump. Peters cast herself as “the wall between your votes and nationalized elections.”

He’ll probably make her the first woman FBI Director if he wins in 2024.

Here’s more on that grotesque attack on LGBTQ people in Florida from Tim Miller:

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Part Deux: Scholastic Boogaloo.

Critics have termed the proposal “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and I have to be honest, when this first hit my radar I thought it was too ridiculous to be something that could actually become law.

Maybe this was one of those cases where a freakazoid state legislator proposes some hopeless nonsense for media attention? Or activists overstate the particulars of what’s being proposed for attention? Or maybe it’s one of those scenarios where a president attempts a multifaceted putsch to stay in power and New York Times columnists tell us we shouldn’t take it that seriously because he’s just a big joke and nothing will come of it?

But as it happened: No.

I talked with some people involved in Florida state politics and Don’t Say Gay is not at all DOA.

It has passed the education committees in both Florida’s House and Senate. It has the support of the governor. It is set to be debated in both chambers in the coming weeks. And while controversial bills that arise early in the session sometimes die on the vine, as things stand today there remains a political path in Florida to codify this effort to silence any gay talk in the state’s schools.

If they are successful in Florida they won’t let teachers or students to talk about Bruno* and the silence will be enforced by Florida Man.

The bill’s supporters aren’t even bothering to hide their intentions with Don’t Say Gay. The case these culture warriors are making for a DADT redux invokes all the wanton cruelty of the bipartisan O.G., but with the added innovation of bounty-style litigiousness that modern day Republicans find so appealing.

Here are the basics of what’s being proposed, where the relevant segment of the legislation is identical in both the House and Senate versions: “A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.”

The enforcement section of the legislation takes a cue from the Texas abortion bounty legislation: “A parent of a student may bring an action against a school district to obtain a declaratory judgment that a school district procedure or practice violates this paragraph and seek injunctive relief. A court may award damages.”

So what exactly constitutes “encouragement” of classroom discussion?

Lets say a teacher asked their students to make a Valentine and the sample he gave was the card he made for his husband. Is that a violation? Or what if a student asked to draw a picture of their two moms? How about if she wanted to make her Valentine to Mirabel Madrigal. Or Spider-Ham? (Ye gods—encouraging bestiality!)

Or what about a project that asks students to complete a family tree? Could my daughter turn in an assignment featuring her two dads? On the anniversary of the Pulse Shooting in Orlando, could a kid whose uncle died there talk about him in class? Could the school assign the reading of My Tio’s Pulse?

The answer to these hypotheticals all hinge on whether a crazy-ass parent of another student sees the valentine or family tree or Pulse book and decides to target the school. In each case, the Don’t Say Gay bill would give our Panhandle Karen something to sue over.

Representative Carlos Smith, the first openly gay member of the state’s legislature, argues that the open-ended nature of the language is a feature, not a bug for those pushing the bill.

“Lawyers are going to be conservative in a way that censors conversations,” he told me. In at least some school districts that is going to “push LGBTQ families back in the closet.” His view is that by keeping the language vague, a better-safe-than-sorry ethos will encourage certain districts to shut down all of these types of conversations.

This is especially a concern in the most sensitive scenario: safety precautions when a student is struggling with questions about their own sexuality or identity. Conversations with mentors at school can be an important outlet for this type of at-risk student. But a Don’t Say Gay bill would make administrators especially reluctant to have staff engage for fear of legal reprisals.

In short they “want kids to be fearful,” Smith said.

Miller explains that the people who are pushing this, including Desantis swear up and down that they aren’t really trying to put gays back in the closet. But they are. They do not want it to be something that is considered just a normal part of American life as it currently is. They don’t want to see it or hear about it, just as they don’t want to see or hear about structural racism in America.

This is a national movement to make American kids bigoted again. Ron DeSantis is leading the charge.