I don’t actually think these Justices care about this. Why should they? They have lifetime appointments and there is clearly no appetite for doing anything to change that so they can do whatever they want. In our culture today, the values of honesty, integrity and higher principles are for losers. And these guys aren’t losers. They do what they want:
More than two dozen legal ethics scholars asked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Thursday to impose a code of conduct for the court’s judges, as the conservative-leaning court faces declining public trust and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas spark new ethics concerns.
A code of conduct would help the Supreme Court “transparently address potential conflicts and other issues in a way that builds public trust in the institution,” the 25 scholars wrote in their letter to Roberts, which was released through activist group Fix the Court.
The scholars said their request wasn’t in response to any particular concern, and they “do not question the integrity of any justice,” but it comes amid concern about ethical conflicts.
Gorsuch will speak Friday evening at a conference in Walt Disney World for the conservative Federalist Society, drawing criticism because of the event’s overt political nature—other speakers include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Vice President Mike Pence and Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany—and because it’s closed to the press.
Thomas’ wife, conservative lobbyist Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of a group that will soon appear before the Supreme Court to argue it should abolish universities’ affirmative action policies, sparking calls for the justice to recuse himself from the case.
New emailspublished Friday by watchdog group American Oversight also raised concern, as Ginni Thomas told DeSantis’ office her husband “has been in contact with [DeSantis] too on various things of late”—after Florida was one of the states behind a lawsuit the Supreme Court heard on the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandates.
It’s not that we haven’t always known that the Court was a political institution. But this kind of blatant political activity in a time of intense polarization would have made the Court leery of losing the respect of half the public, which would result in a loss of legitimacy. This group has realized they don’t need legitimacy. They have power either way.
The protests, which are being investigated by police for criminal activity and have brought parts of the capital Ottowa to a standstill, have been praised by Donald Trump whilst he simultaneously criticizes Trudeau.
“The Freedom Convoy is peacefully protesting the harsh policies of far-left lunatic Justin Trudeau, who has destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates,” said Trump in a statement. He did not comment on reports that Freedom Convoy members had been arrested for causing mischief to property, carrying a weapon to a public meeting, and issuing threats on social media while in Ottawa.
“Our goal is to end the demonstration,” Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly said Friday morning according to Global News Canada, noting that the protests have led to “a lot of unacceptable and unlawful activities.”
Up to 400 additional trucks are expected to try to enter the city this weekend, to join the 50-60 that have been camped in Canada’s capital for days, along with another 1000 to 2000 people on foot, say reports.
There were also reports of hundreds of trucks blocking the border in Alberta, earlier this week.Lars Hagberg/AFP/Getty Images
Trump added that “the Freedom Convoy could be coming to DC with American Truckers who want to protest Biden’s ridiculous COVID policies.”
Canada has some of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the world, with 82% of citizens over the age of five vaccinated, according to the Canadian government.
The Freedom Convoy has raised C$10m ($7.9m) on GoFundMe. But the fundraising site is now withholding funds due to reports of the group committing violence across Canada.
He’s inciting American truckers to do the same thing in Washington DC. I’m not sure what they would be protesting since there are no government vaccine mandates for private employers but maybe he can persuade them to storm another government building.
Here’s the story of the GoFundMe and it isn’t pretty. As of this morning they are refunding all of the money collected.
Donald Trump is endorsing the Ottawa convoy, calling Justin Trudeau a “far left lunatic who has destroyed Canada,” and backing an attempt to bring a similar truck protest to DC
I’ve spent almost 30 years involved with, studying and writing about the Canadian non-profit and charitable sector. Not only is the interference by Trump and his flunkies unprecedented, the campaign’s donation pattern is wholly unreliable.
To any knowledgeable observer just looking at the data itself, the irregularities are a five-alarm fire.
The convoy campaign, organized by a previously obscure Canadian group, now ranks as the eighth-largest in GoFundMe’s 12-year history. It joins the pantheon of fundraisers supporting the family of George Floyd, victims of the Parkland (Marjory Stoneman Douglas) and Pulse shootings, Time’s Up (related to #MeToo) and major American COVID-19 relief projects.
“The irregularities of this campaign are a five-alarm fire,” writes @garossino for @natobserver about the #GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the #Ottawa #trucker protest. #cdnpoli
At the time of its suspension, the convoy campaign had racked up approximately $10.1 million in just over two weeks.
Any Canadian fundraiser will tell you this number is impossible to achieve organically within Canada. This group is not a registered charity, non-profit or even a trucking organization. Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly is on record saying there is significant influence and money pouring in from the United States.
GoFundMe did not independently verify donor identities and accepted foreign funds for a campaign that had as one objective the dissolution of Parliament — just months after a free and fair election, in which 60 per cent of the electorate voted for parties supporting vaccine mandates.
As the CBC has reported on January 28, at least a third of the donor identities were anonymous or faked. Donations were made in the names of Justin Trudeau and Theresa Tam.
Indeed, one fake donation was made in the name of this publication’s columnist, Max Fawcett. There are certain to be many more. These are just the identities that can be verified as fake.
For more direct Canadian context, the 2018 fund for the Humboldt Broncos also ranks in the top 10. That effort raised $15 million from 142,000 donors in 80 countries, reflecting broad international support for the bereaved families.
And the false identities are not the only abnormality. Most of the top 10 campaigns fall under two categories: American COVID relief efforts or victim support for traumatic violent events of national scale, such as the Humboldt accident, George Floyd’s murder or the Parkland, Las Vegas and Pulse Nightclub shootings.
In cases where there has been a political facet to a successful campaign, it has been of vastly higher profile, with established organizational capacity and public participation on a mass scale.
The Time’s Up campaign was linked to the #MeToo movement and the 2017 Women’s March, which attracted three to five million marchers across the U.S. An estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans marched in support of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. The March For Our Lives, organized by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Fla., attracted an estimated 1.2 million to two million marchers. The Pulse Nightclub shooting inspired massive recognition and is memorialized at Pride parades, which attract millions of participants annually across the United States and Canada.
Indeed, the advance billing of the protest was impressive, as when former NHL legend Theo Fleury told Fox News that 50,000 trucks and 1.4 million Canadians would participate in the rally.
By comparison, police estimates put the Ottawa convoy demonstration somewhat lower, at between 8,000 and 15,000, with just a few hundred commercial haulers.
By mid-week, fewer than 300 demonstrators remained on the ground.
On Friday a lawsuit against the “Freedom Convoy” was filed by Ottawa citizens seeking damages for emotional distress caused by the incessant noise of truck horns. Tellingly, a mere sixty trucks parked in the protest area are named in the suit.
Which may explain the necessity of constant noise and stunts to keep media from noticing how few Canadians are actually involved.
This is not George Floyd, the Parkland school shooting, or the Women’s March.
For all the Sturm und Drang, the convoy is an extraordinarily weak national turnout in a country where 500,000 showed up to a climate march in Montreal. Or even 60,000 to a marijuana celebration in Vancouver. Absent the trucks, which are really just big, noisy props, it was essentially a national anti-vax rally, which has now turned so dangerous that police are afraid to break it up.
The low turnout is even more surprising in the midst of massive American promotion by those in the Trump orbit, Fox News, Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn, Joe Rogan and many others. It’s been relentlessly promoted on social media by, among others, Rebel Media and Pizzagate alumnus Jack Posobiec. With his 1.6 million followers, Posobiec, the Roger Stone acolyte, is widely regarded as the voice of Trump’s id.
With all this in mind, this exercise has the hallmarks of an op, complete with the potential for wire fraud and money laundering, and possibly a dry run for an American uprising.
Given the convoy project’s stated objective of overturning the results of a free and fair election through the dissolution of Parliament, a thorough investigation of the GoFundMe campaign is now a matter of urgent national security importance.
The time for answers and accountability is right now.
The Canadian truckers “Freedom Convoy” protest over a Covid vaccination mandate has gone on all week. Ottowa residents are fed up, writes Ian Austen for the New York Times:
“I’m receiving hundreds — and I’m not exaggerating — hundreds of emails telling me: ‘I went out to get groceries, I got yelled at, I got harassed. I got followed down the street, I’m so afraid that I can’t go out,’” Catherine McKenney, the city councilor for the area, told me on Thursday afternoon. “The residents in this downtown have just been completely abandoned during a national crisis and an occupation of our city. And there just is no urgency from the federal government, provincial government and, quite frankly, even our own police.”
[…]
“The horn blaring is really meant to terrorize this community — and it’s working,” said Mx. McKenney, who will be running for mayor later this year.
Three women were celebrated by the neighborhood as local heroes of sorts when they stood in the path of a heavy truck lumbering down their street in Centretown, responding to each blast of a truck horn by turning their thumbs down.
The truckers have pissed off GoFundMe too. “We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” the crowdfunding site messaged Friday in explaining it was taking down the truckers’ page for violating its terms of service.
GoFundMe says it will withhold millions of dollars raised for Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates, citing police reports of violence.
The Freedom Convoy has been rallying since last weekend, and more protests are expected in Toronto and Ottawa.
In a statement, the crowdfunding website said it would withhold the donations already made, and refund donors who fill out a request form.
Conservatives have reacted with fury after GoFundMe canceled a fundraiser for Canadian truckers protesting against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate and said it would refund all contributions.
The fundraising effort had raised C$10 million—around $7.9 million—and C$1 million had already been distributed to the organizers of the so-called Freedom Convoy before GoFundMe took the decision to stop the fundraiser.
Citing “donor feedback,” the crowdfunding site issued a correction early today, saying it would “refund all contributions directly: donors do not need to submit a request.”
But the rage engines had already fired up.
Ezra Levant, publisher of Canadian right-wing news site Rebel News, tweeted: “At the request of Trudeau, @GoFundMe has just stolen $9,000,000 from the truckers. Rather than automatically refunding it to the donors, they say they’re going to give it to groups of their own choosing. What a windfall for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood!”
Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson retweeted Levant, commenting: “This is far worse than mere theft. Government-sanctioned appropriation from citizens funding lawful opposition. This sets a very very dark precedent.”
Government-sanctioned appropriation?
Donald Trump Jr. wants U.S. attorneys general to investigate GoFundMe.
He wasn’t alone in suggesting investigations. Tom Fitton, president of conservative activist group Judicial Watch, tweeted: “State attorney generals and other relevant state officials should examine @GoFundMe’s $9 million shell game that victimized the Canadian truckers and their supporters who gave money in good faith.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is late to the outrage party. She posted a video (somewhere) this morning (after the automatic refund announcement) in which she calls GoFundMe “corporate communists.” Twice, for emphasis. “They should seriously be arrested.”
Greene is just “seriously” stringing together words off the refrigerator magnet set she got from Newt Gingrich.
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N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein tweeted the news last night.
BREAKING: Fantastic news for voters and the health of our democracy — the NC Supreme Court just struck down the legislative and congressional maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The maps violate a voter's fundamental right to vote.
Arguments in the redistricting case before the North Carolina Supreme Court just days earlier gave observers the impression a majority of justices were not buying what Republicans’ attorneys were selling. With new filing opening fast approaching, the court made quick work of 4-3 ruling split along party lines (WRAL):
The maps outlining congressional and legislative districts in the state strongly favored the GOP, with the party expected to win 10 or 11 of the 14 U.S. House seats up for grabs. The maps, drawn by the legislature’s GOP majority, also gave Republicans a better chance of securing veto-proof majorities in the state House and Senate.
“When a districting plan systematically makes it harder for one group of voters to elect a governing majority than another group of voters of equal size, the General Assembly unconstitutionally infringes upon that voter’s fundamental right to vote,” the four registered Democrats on the state Supreme Court wrote in their order.
The court ruled that Republicans must submit new voting maps to a lower court by 5 p.m. Feb. 18. The maps must then be approved by a three-judge panel by noon on Feb. 23. If the new legislative and congressional boundaries are not submitted in time, the judges would be tasked with selecting a plan.
We’ve been here before multiple times since 2011. Courts reject the GOP gerrymander. Republicans make a minor tweak and resubmit the Plan B maps they likely had in a drawer. Courts push back again. In past cases, there was more time for stalling. But with primaries ahead, not this time.
Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, dissented, saying voters and lawmakers should be the ones to reign in partisan redistricting. His GOP colleagues, Justice Phil Berger Jr.—the son of Senate leader Phil Berger, who was also named in the lawsuit—and Justice Tamara Barringer, also opposed the court’s decision.
“Unless and until the people alter the law to either limit or prohibit the practice of partisan gerrymandering, this Court is without any satisfactory or manageable legal standard and thus must refuse to resolve such a claim,” Newby wrote.
I must admit, Newby had a point. To a point. The majority opinion argued that by its reasoning the state constitution’s protections require fair districts under “the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause, and the freedom of assembly clause of the North Carolina Constitution.” But it was unclear about what constitutes fair.
The majority wrote, “When, on the basis of partisanship, the General Assembly enacts a districting plan that diminishes or dilutes a voter’s opportunity to aggregate with likeminded voters to elect a governing majority-that is, when a districting plan systematically makes it harder for one group of voters to elect a governing majority than another group of voters of equal size-the General Assembly unconstitutionally infringes upon that voter’s fundamental right to vote.”
But to Newby’s point, in a state with (currently) 2.5 million registered Democrats, 2.2. million Republicans, and 2.5 million Unaffiliateds (Independents), what constitutes “likeminded voters”? There is not “one group” here and “another group” there. There are three. How does one draw maps to fairly represent the interests of a third of state voters who, by their lack of party affiliation, have no discernable political “mind.” The major patterns of aggregation for Unaffiliateds are racial and ethnic, and those are crude instruments. But the Republicans used them and local voting patterns to advantage their third.
Naturally, the Republican minority argues that the court is overreaching its authority by meddling in the legislature’s business. Only the voters in the unfairly drawn districts can remedy unfairly drawn districts by voting in unfair elections. The Democratic majority argues (indirectly) that separation of powers arguments do not trump the state constitution’s protections of individual rights.
“The U.S. Supreme Court said it’s up to state courts to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and that’s exactly what the North Carolina Supreme Court has done,” said Elisabeth Theodore of the law firm Arnold & Porter. “The court’s direction is clear: The General Assembly must stop cheating and draw fair new maps so that North Carolinians can have a fair say in who governs them.”
But fair to whom and how? To be continued.
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The Zoo Knoxville African lion cubs names have been chosen, Maji and Anga! The names are Swahili in origin, Maji for the male meaning water and Anga for the female translating to sky. These little ones just turned a month old and are growing up so fast. This week they began visits to the Valley of the Kings for howdy with their parents.
The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
They wrote it and they signed it. Afterwards they said they didn’t mean to excuse the violent insurrectionists when they said Cheney and Kinzinger’s participation in the January 6th Committee was “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
But the censure, which was carefully negotiated in private among party members, made no such distinction. It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.
I think trying to appease the Orange Julius Caesar has finally fried their brains.
Meanwhile, down in Florida, we have Mike Pence trying mightily to walk the GOP tightrope without falling to his political death:
Good luck to him. The Federalist Society members didn’t exactly launch into ecstatic applause although they did stand at the end of his speech. But he said it and it’s out there.
So let the games begin. So far Dear Leader must be in his bed eating his feelings because we haven’t seen a response just yet.
Paths to power and winning electionsinside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years.
Why it matters: Fourteen of the Republican Party’s top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 — the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.
What we found: Those sources — whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans — described a clear shift in the party’s power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.
Axios granted them anonymity so they could speak with a degree of candor that’s not possible on the record because of personal and business relationships. Here’s what they told us:
Who had the power:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
The NRA
The Koch network
Heritage Action
The Drudge Report
National Review
Conservative movement groups such as Tea Party Express, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.
Who has power now:
Donald Trump
Tucker Carlson
Family and former aides to Trump
Fox News
Club for Growth
Daily Wire
Breitbart News
Online influencers including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
Steve Bannon
Susan B. Anthony List
Between the lines: Most of these changes weren’t gradual. They were triggered by the shockwave of 2016.
Much of the institutional GOP worked against Trump in 2016. Much of the heft they believed their endorsements carried evaporated as voters saw in real-time how Trump had little need for them and ultimately obliterated them.
Said one top consultant: “You wouldn’t know that these groups were paper tigers — unless you ever ran against one of them.”
Uh huh. That sounds like a Trumper, alright.
This may be more or less tru but I suspect it’s more of an addition than a replacement. Consider this:
In the immediate aftermath of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia governorship victory last week, many pundits credited an uprising against critical race theory as the key to the former Carlyle Group executive’s electoral success. But hardly anyone is talking about how critical race theory has largely been an “astroturf” issue created by GOP operatives with a backlash funded by billionaire donors.
The anti-CRT movement has descended with a vengeance this year into suburban school board meetings and Fox News programming. And while the movement may present itself with a local face, many of its most effective advocacy groups are propped up by wealthy, well-connected backers—right down to its connections to the billionaire Koch family.
The Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups which operate at local levels across the country but bear ties to ideological right-wing aristocrats and political operatives. Their backers include former officials in Donald Trump’s administration, an executive at a notorious D.C. lobbying firm, as well as Koch entities and The Federalist Society.
Don’t count out the old guard. They are survivors.
And the new guard? They are organized around the Big Lie and Donald Trump. Period. Will that last? I don’t know. We’ll have to see if they have the same ability to keep their eyes on the prize as their elders do.
This MSNBC report from the RNC confab this week lays out their essential problem. And they are all too cowardly and/or craven to do anything about it:
None of the officials assembled here for the Republican National Committee’s winter meetings are writing off former President Donald Trump. They all recognize his singular hold over the party’s electoral base.
But a distinct chasm is emerging between Trump’s obsessions and the issues many GOP operatives consider crucial to winning the midterm elections in November. Republican candidates need to make voters’ concerns a central focus, as opposed to Trump’s day-to-day attacks, RNC members suggested this week.
Few will put it quite so bluntly; they are loath to antagonize Trump and possibly drive off his hard-core followers. Yet in interviews, party officials showed little appetite for organizing the GOP around Trump’s grievances.
A winning message would emphasize inflation and parental rights, they said — not the 2020 election, which Trump falsely insists he won. Strengthening the party would require opening it up to new voters — not punishing Republicans who have disagreed with Trump, they added.
The sentiments echo those of local GOP leaders, who said late last year that they were ready to move beyond the 2020 election, even if Trump wasn’t. They wanted to put issues like border security, the Afghanistan troop withdrawal and education front and center.
Uh huh. Hows that working out?
A goal of the RNC winter meetings, members said, was for Republicans to project “unity.” Yet Trump remains a source of division that has spilled into the party’s gathering. One of his allies, RNC member David Bossie of Maryland, submitted a symbolic resolution that would call upon congressional Republicans to expel Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., from the House GOP conference. Both voted last year to impeach Trump.
The resolution was watered down to a censure Thursday amid criticism from some members that it undercut efforts to show the party tolerated dissenting views.
Ya think?
Good luck with that. The GOP is organized around the Big Lie and as long as Trump is still a living God for tens of millions of Republicans it’s going to remain that way. And the fact is that the Republican party doesn’t tolerate dissenting views when it comes to the Dear Leader. And they just proved it.
I’m glad Cheney and Kinsinger are speaking out. But they aren’t heroes. There is only one way to deal with what is happening to the GOP:
False. In a democracy organized into two parties, when one devolves to fascism, those who hate this should be partisans of the party that embraces pluralism and democracy. Or else surrender to fascism. (This is what we call liberals "not taking their own side in an argument.") https://t.co/NV57H6VVzt
Cheney doesn’t have a home in the Democratic Party because she is an extreme right winger. But she could certainly leave the Party and become an Independent, as could Kinsinger. She might even get a few Democratic votes based upon her bold opposition to the GOP. But remaining in a fascist party in the hopes of outlasting the fascism is really just a way of enabling it.
You have to watch this to see what the most popular celebrity host in right wing media is feeding his thirsty audience:
The world is being ruined by all the bitches bent on destroying that necessary “creative masculine energy.”
There are an awful lot of contemptible leaders in corporate America, maybe most of them. But only a certain kind of CEO ever gets fired. It’s not the weak ones. The guys who do what they’re told, issue the cringy statements, and let the HR department run everything tend to keep their jobs till retirement.
People like that just want to get it over with, and cash out. They won’t take risks. They’d don’t dare to build anything new. They’re just caretakers. If their dignity is the price of job security, they’re happy to pay it.
More than at any time in our history, America is run by people like this. It’s only the strong who are punished.
Strong leaders tend to be abrasive. They’re arrogant. Sometimes they’re what we now call “abusive.” They ignore convention. They say outrageous things. They don’t blend in with groups. Often, they alienate the more sensitive types around them.
They don’t have maternal instincts.
A lot of modern people are put off by strong leaders. But you need them.
Creative masculine energy is the essential quality in any civilization. It’s how we got civilization in the first place.
But increasingly, boisterous masculinity is systematically suppressed to make way for a timid caretaker class, people who think the whole point of society is to get to zero covid infections, or eliminate all traffic deaths. Those sound like virtuous goals, but in fact they’re signifiers of decline. Not dying can never be the whole point. If it is, you’re already dead.
Two and a half years ago, Special Counsel Robert Muller submitted his report in which he declared that Donald Trump did not engage in a criminal conspiracy with agents of the Russian government who had interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Numerous members of Trump’s campaign were indicted on various related and unrelated charges, but the special prosecutors were never able to gather enough evidence of a conspiracy. While Trump had behaved in extremely suspicious ways, investigators simply couldn’t prove that he knew what the Russian government was doing.
Trump went on to spend his entire term committing overt acts of corruption, combining his business with his duties and openly defying all ethical restrictions against conflicts of interest. He blatantly obstructed justice many times and was even impeached for abusing his power by attempting to sabotage his political rival’s presidential campaign. He broke the law repeatedly and got away with it every time.
So why wouldn’t he engage in a conspiracy to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power and overturn the election he lost?
That is exactly what has come into focus this week as one revelation after the other implicating him in such a conspiracy is reported. And it’s also become clear that there were many people who were aware of what Trump and his co-conspirators were doing, yet none of them sounded the alarm. I don’t know if that makes them accomplices in a legal sense but it certainly makes them shamefully unethical.
All week, I’ve been writing about the latest developments, from the contemptible comments Trump made at his rally last weekend — dangling pardons to insurrectionists and summoning the mob to take to the streets if anyone tries to hold him legally accountable for his criminal acts — to the reports that he had contemplated issuing Executive Orders to seize the voting machines. Every day brings new details, each one more stunning than the last.
To recap the week: We learned that Trump had asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr to have the Department of Justice seize the voting machines in states in which he thought he could overturn the results. Luckily, he was told that would be illegal. It was then revealed that his former National Security Adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.), and his lawyer, Sidney Powell, had tried to persuade him to order the Pentagon to seize the voting machines in those same states and that he directed his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to get the Department of Homeland Security to do it. He was talked out of this each time, but it took a massive effort to get him to back off of these daft plans.
On Thursday the Washington Post reported that there was yet another plot brewing around the same time — and it’s just as nuts as the others:
The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued, which was circulated among Trump allies.
The “next steps” were almost certainly the seizing of the voting machines.
This is the same day Flynn and Powell sneaked into the White House to argue that Trump should issue a national security Executive Order that would activate the military to seize the voting machines. Whether any of this was connected with that or if it was a separate plot is unknown but suffice to say that there were multiple people involved in trying to get those voting machines and this certainly appears to have been yet another attempt.
This memo arguing to deploy the NSA to sift through electronic communications involved some new people who have not previously been identified, including a former Trump National Security Council member by the name of Rich Higgins. You may have heard of Higgins — he was the guy who was forced out for making the charge that globalists, Islamists, and other forces within the government were subverting President Trump’s agenda. The plot also involved a lawyer for the Army who not very convincingly claimed to the Post that he knew nothing about any of it and a former Republican candidate for Congress from Virginia.
Keep in mind that one of the live theories that was floating around at the time was “Italygate,” which held that an Italian defense contractor and the CIA had penetrated the voting machines and changed the votes from Trump to Biden. (You may recall that at one point Sidney Powell called up the Pentagon and demanded that they send in a special forces crew to rescue CIA director Gina Haspel whom she said had been taken into custody while on a covert operation to destroy the evidence. I’m not kidding.)
Needless to say, using the NSA for this purpose is completely outrageous not to mention illegal. There’s no indication that Trump himself was involved in this particular plot although he was certainly on board with the voting machine seizure idea, so who knows? But according to the Post, there were other high-level government officials who definitely knew about it. Republicans Sens. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia M. Lummis of Wyoming were all invited to a meeting at the Trump Hotel by Mr. My Pillow, Mike Lindell, where the conspiracy theory that there was foreign interference in the election and the notion of seizing the machines came up again. After that meeting, Cramer and Johnson were sent a copy of that memo outlining the use of the NSA to search for evidence. Apparently, GOP members of the House were briefed on all of this as well.
We already knew that the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had tried to enlist the DOJ to investigate this inane “Italygate” conspiracy theory and it was previously reported that GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina “vetted” the fraud claims, even going so far as to call people around the country to verify them. In fact, it’s fair to assume that most of the GOP members of Congress were aware of the machinations that were happening in and around the White House because it’s so crazy that word almost certainly got around. Quite a few were being heavily lobbied by the president and Rudy Giuliani to object to the count on January 6th.
Not one of them spoke up and alerted the public about what was going on. Cramer is the first to go on the record at all and it took him well over a year to do it. They all knew that Donald Trump was plotting a coup and they said nothing. Again, I don’t know if it’s illegal for an elected official to stand by passively as someone plots to overthrow the government but I know it should be.
