They were still trying …
They knew a crime had been committed. Of course.
"what digby sez..."
Month: June 2022
Good lord…
The social media posts are of a distinct type. They hint darkly that the CIA or the FBI are behind mass shootings. They traffic in racist, sexist and homophobic tropes. They revel in the prospect of a “white boy summer.”
White nationalists and supremacists, on accounts often run by young men, are building thriving, macho communities across social media platforms like Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, evading detection with coded hashtags and innuendo.
Their snarky memes and trendy videos are riling up thousands of followers on divisive issues including abortion, guns, immigration and LGBTQ rights. The Department of Homeland Security warned Tuesday that such skewed framing of the subjects could drive extremists to violently attack public places across the U.S. in the coming months.
These type of threats and racist ideology have become so commonplace on social media that it’s nearly impossible for law enforcement to separate internet ramblings from dangerous, potentially violent people, Michael German, who infiltrated white supremacy groups as an FBI agent, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
“It seems intuitive that effective social media monitoring might provide clues to help law enforcement prevent attacks,” German said. “After all, the white supremacist attackers in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and El Paso all gained access to materials online and expressed their hateful, violent intentions on social media.”
But, he continued, “so many false alarms drown out threats.”
Think about the implications of that. It’s terrible, of course, that they are unable to track violent threats. But what’s really terrible that there are so many people who think like this! It’s horrifying.
I am seeing a whole lot of casual homophobia online lately the likes of which I haven’t seen in years. I have a feeling that’s where the focus is going and I don’t think people are ready for it.
Here I thought Trump was offended by drunkenness
One of the big myths about Donald Trump was he observed his older brother become and alcoholic and was so repulsed by it that he not only doesn’t drink himself he refuses to be associated with people who drink too much. This story about Rudy being bombed on election night explodes all that. So, like everything else, it was a lie.
Anyway, Rudy is lashing out:
“I am disgusted and outraged at the out right lie by Jason Miller and Bill Steppien. I was upset that they were not prepared for the massive cheating (as well as other lawyers around the President) I REFUSED all alcohol that evening. My favorite drink..Diet Pepsi,” Mr Giuliani said in a tweet on Tuesday morning. [He deleted it later]
“They have no case,” he told Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist who now hosts a show on Real America’s Voice. “This is a follow-up to Russian collusion, Ukrainian conversation – the millions of hours they’ve spent trying to find a crime on Donald Trump and can’t do it. They started this frame about five years ago.”
“It’s the same cast of characters, Bennie Thompson, and shifty [Adam Schiff], you see [Eric] Swalwell, not on the committee, but in the background,” he added. “The completely hysterical … Cheney, who has gone off her deep end.”
Mr Giuliani then demanded that the committee investigate the baseless conspiracy theory that rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police as she attempted to get through a barricaded door inside the US Capitol not far from lawmakers, was actually killed by Antifa.
“Five days after the riot, I submitted to the FBI unequivocal evidence that Antifa organized one of the main break-ins, that Antifa was involved in the killing of Ashli Babbitt, that the cops abandoned the position so that the people could go into the [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi office – cops abandoned it two minutes before,” Mr Giuliani said.
The drunk story isn’t actually news. It was reported earlier:
Rudy Giuliani was so drunk on election night that former President Donald Trump’s aides were concerned he’d accidentally smash valuable White House china, presidential biographer Michael Wolff told MSNBC.
Wolff described how on the night of November 3, 2020, the former New York City mayor was struggling to maintain his balance while trying to convince others that Trump had won re-election.
At one point, he was pulled aside into the White House’s china room by several aides of the former president, Raw Story reported. “And at that moment, Rudy was incredibly drunk, weaving this way and that way,” Wolff told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Friday afternoon.
“And the china, those place settings from every president are very valuable, and Trump’s aides were obviously, or rightfully, concerned about what Giuliani was saying to the president about the election, and giving him this misinformation,” Wolff continued. “But they were also concerned that he was going to break the china.”
He was literally reeling. Nonetheless he told Trump what he wanted to hear and Trump ignored everyone else and went out and said he’d won even though they had not counted most of the votes and none of the networks had called it. Drunk or not, Rudy was Trump’s most valued adviser through thick and thin.
Here are the comedians’ take on this:
Here’s something I wrote about Rudy a few years ago. He’s been reeling all over the world for years.
This was a party in Jerusalem in 2018:
I think he’s just a plain old liar, but that’s just me
There is a lot of talk about the legal concept of Willful Blindness as it applies to Donald Trump. Personally, I think the Big Lie and attempted coup and he knew exactly what he was doing. Trump knows he can make his cult members believe anything and he thought if he could persuade them he actually won they would exert enough pressure (one way or another) on officials to overturn the election. He knew he lost he just thought he could stage a coup and take power anyway.
However, from a legal standpoint, the concept of willful blindness to the facts is useful if anyone ever wants to hold him accountable for his crimes. Here’s a short primer on how it’s used.
The doctrine of willful blindness is a concept in criminal law—generally in the white-collar context—that serves as a substitute for an otherwise necessary mens rea element, such as knowledge. That is, where it exists, it imputes (or supports an inference of) knowledge to the defendant or serves as a substitute for actual knowledge. It is, in effect, constructive knowledge.
Willful blindness is generally defined as an attempt to avoid liability for a wrongful act by intentionally failing to make reasonable inquiry when faced with the suspicion or awareness of the high likelihood of wrongdoing. It is a deliberate attempt to keep one’s “head in the sand” when faced with information or facts that create a suspicion or awareness that there is a likelihood of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court observed in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A., that “[t]he traditional rationale for th[e] doctrine is that defendants who behave in [a willfully ignorant] manner are just as culpable as those who have actual knowledge.” The Ninth Circuit, in a seminal willful blindness case, explained that “[t]he substantive justification for the rule is that deliberate ignorance and positive knowledge are equally culpable.”
Use of the doctrine in the criminal justice system is controversial and expands the scope of criminal liability. Many have questioned the underlying normative justification for the the so-called “equal culpability thesis.” Regardless, it has been endorsed by the Supreme Court and some version of the doctrine has been employed by all of the federal courts of appeal to some degree.
How is Willful Blindness Established?
Willful blindness is established where a defendant purposefully avoided knowledge of illegal activities despite being aware of the high possibility of illegal conduct. Where it applies, the doctrine provides that an individual who deliberately ensures that they do not learn the specifics of wrongful acts, despite suspecting otherwise, is as culpable as an individual who is fully aware of the illegal activity.
A finding of willful blindness may establish the mental culpability (the “mens rea” element) required to convict a defendant of a crime. Establishing willful blindness in effect negates the defense that the defendant lacked the required intent to commit the crime. Additionally, willful blindness negates the defense that the defendant was unaware that they were committing the crime.
It’s hard to see how Trump wasn’t at least guilty of this.
And it’s still working
Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this. It’s hard not to be insulting. But I’m afraid these people are in the grips of cultlike behavior and it isn’t pretty:
Former President Donald Trump has made the “stolen” 2020 election the centerpiece of his post-White House political life. Virtually every statement he sends out invokes the false theme.
The polling shows it has been effective, not just with the crowd that stormed the Capitol on his behalf on Jan. 6, 2021, but with members of the Republican Party almost a year and a half later.
The multiple recounts and audits that confirmed Joe Biden’s win have changed little. With remarkable consistency, a scant one-quarter of Republican voters tell pollsters that Biden won legitimately. That was the view they shared in the spring of 2021, and the fraction remains about the same today.
Roughly 70% of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner. Surveys by different pollsters show virtually the same results, with the exception of a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll that dropped it to 61%.
The people around Trump may have known he was lying, as we learned yesterday, but they didn’t speak out at the time and now the GOP is completely brainwashed.
Focus groups have shown that Trump supporters weren’t swayed by specific pieces of evidence that rebutted his claims.
Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law, has conducted regular focus groups with fans of Trump.”For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought,” Longwell wrote April 18 for The Atlantic. “They know something nefarious occurred, but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.”
Trump, Longwell wrote, primed his backers to disbelieve the official results. Months before the vote, he linked mail-in ballots to fraud. On Election Night in many states, mail-in results come later than in-person tabulations. Longwell said that timing raised suspicions.”A woman from Georgia told me, ‘When I went to bed, Trump was so in the lead and then (I got) up and he’s not in the lead. I mean, that’s crazy,’” Longwell said.
Personal experience also reinforced belief. Political scientist Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins University told us that maps of the election results show that many Republican voters live in communities that are almost entirely red.“It seems ludicrous to them that Biden could have won, because they’ve never heard of a single person who voted for him,” Mason said.
Political scientist Alexander Theodoridis, associate director of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst poll, said partisan polarization makes agreement on the election results even harder to achieve.”Partisans view the other side as morally bankrupt and capable of anything,” Theodoridis said. “This makes it nearly impossible to correct even the most egregious pieces of misinformation.”
Not only does accurate information fail to persuade, Longwell said the effort can backfire.”A woman from Arizona told me, ‘I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t,’” Longwell said.
I’m sorry, that is just daft.
But maybe there are just some people who are subject to cult-like thinking and when a demagogue like Trump comes along they can’t resist? Check out this story about Ginni Thomas’s history with cults:
In the 1980s, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas had a moment of clarity: She realized she had fallen in with a group she considered “a cult” and sought to be “deprogrammed” from it, she said in decades-old remarks obtained by NBC News.
Thomas’ involvement with Lifespring, an organization advertising training seminars purporting to help participants unlock almost superhuman potential, left her wondering what it was about herself that allowed her to be drawn in. Her successful deprogramming — considered a controversial tactic — led her to become a vigorous anti-cult crusader. For years, she was deeply involved with the nation’s largest anti-cult organization, assisting in setting up workshops for congressional staffers to combat groups like Lifespring.
“When you come away from a cult, you’ve got to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it,” Thomas told attendees at a 1986 Cult Awareness Network panel in Kansas City, Missouri. “And kind of the other angle is getting a sense of yourself and what was it that made you get into that group. And what open questions are there that still need to be answered.”
It appears she didn’t answer any of these open questions. She is clearly in the grip of the Trump cult.
Two debunked conspiracies Thomas referenced in the aftermath of the 2020 election were first embraced and promoted by QAnon adherents. One theory involves claims that Democrats and other election officials were being arrested and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba as the votes were still being counted. Another is the idea that then-President Donald Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track voter fraud — a claim both false and implausible. Still, QAnon followers spread both claims online following the November 3 vote, and references appear in QAnon-connected videos, social media posts and message boards.
“I don’t know how anybody would go for that — again,” said Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh- based lawyer who for more than a decade specialized in suing cults, of the conspiracies Thomas referred to in her text messages.
“Here is Ginni Thomas sort of getting sucked into the basically equivalent of a cult again,” said one person involved with a 1988 anti-cult briefing for congressional staffers Thomas helped organize, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution
Maybe the openness to cults never really goes away. Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics has been disputed by recent scholars but there is an element of truth in it. While cult’s of personality are not confined to the right, this combination of cult worship and paranoia does seem to be a specific characteristic of the wingnuts. What’s still shocking is how many of them there are.
An accounting is not holding the guilty to account
As refreshing as it is to see Democrats assembling a public accounting of the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, an accounting is not the same as holding people accountable. What we see in sworn statements of Trump associates who might have blown the whistle on the coup plot are attempts to wash their hands of responsibility.
Dahlia Lithwick’s distaste for former attorney general Bill Barr’s chuckles is palpable:
Former Attorney General Bill Barr was having a rollicking good time in his taped deposition that was played before the Jan. 6 committee. He used words like “rubbish” and “nonsense” and “bullshit” and “garbage” and “crazy” and “annoying” and “idiotic” and “stupid” to describe, frequently with a wide smile, how fundamentally silly Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being stolen really were. Indeed, in clips of his testimony played during the committee’s second hearing on Monday, Barr essentially told us that he departed his post as the AG, because at some point he realized that the former president could no longer be reasoned with.
[…]
It’s so strange because what Barr was describing is neither “silly” nor “bullshit” nor “nonsense.” He is instead describing a claim about election fraud that was being weaponized to thwart the orderly transfer of power. Barr waited to let us all know in part because this was all a bit of a joke, until after he was subpoenaed to testify before the committee.
Barr was hardly alone. A string of Trump campaign and White House lieutenants from “Team Normal” stood by and watched as their boss and his boot-licking crazies tossed lit matches onto the Constitution. Only now are they willing to speak out, under oath, in attempts to launder their reputations.
As disturbing as the Republicans’ lack of scruples is Democrats’ lack of recognition, even now, of how far the country has slid toward autocracy on their watch. Jamelle Bouie calls out the leadership gerontocracy that hasn’t the chops to meet the moment. Indeed, they don’t even see the moment:
What’s missing from party leaders, an absence that is endlessly frustrating to younger liberals, is any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink. Despite mounting threats to the right to vote, the right to an abortion and the ability of the federal government to act proactively in the public interest, senior Democrats continue to act as if American politics is back to business as usual.
Democratic leaders including the president continue to play at bipartisanship with adversaries “in the grip of a cult of personality marked by conspiratorial thinking and an open contempt for electoral democracy.” President Joe Biden compliments Senate Minority Leader Mitch “The Grim Reaper” McConnell as a “man of your word” and a “man of honor.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi quotes Ronald Reagan approvingly and recommends his party return to a time when it “cared about a woman’s right to choose” and “cared about the environment.”
In Jefferson Cowie’s “The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics,” the historian suggests that the period from the New Deal to the 1970s was not a transformation, but an aberration.
The Great Depression and World War II may have “forced clear realignments of American politics and class relations,” Cowie writes, “but those changes were less the linear triumph of the welfare state than the product of very specific, and short-lived, historical circumstances.”
If this is true — if the New Deal was the product of highly contingent circumstances unlikely to be repeated either now or in the future — then the challenge for those committed to the notion of a government that protects and expands the collective economic rights of the American people is to forge a new vision for what that might be. “The path forward is not clear,” Cowie writes, “but whatever successful incarnation of a liberal ‘social imaginary’ might follow will not look like the New Deal, and it might best to free ourselves from the notion that it will.”
I think you can apply a similar “great exception” analysis to the decades of institutional stability and orderly partisan competition that shaped the current generation of Democratic leaders, including the president and many of his closest allies.
Old dogs and new tricks, as it were. Biden, Pelosi, Feinstein and others came of age during the calm at the center of the hurricane. Seeing the far eye wall approaching, they lack a sense of the political danger about to befall them and us. “Even the authoritarianism on display in the Republican Party,” writes Bouie, “has antecedents in the behavior of Southern political elites at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.”
As Nancy MacLean detailed in “Democracy in Chains,” the remnant of the southern planter class, economic royalists and academic libertarians, undertook affecting a restoration of elite dominance beginning in the late 1940s. Their goal: to save capitalism from democracy. They want to roll back the 20th century and have been patient about achieving it.
“Liberty,” as despotic capitalism understands, it is the freedom to amass great wealth unfettered by any social contract, whatever the cost to the liberties of anyone who might make claims on “makers.” They mean to hobble, if not dismantle, what we recognize as the more equal America the Bidens and Pelosis knew growing up and the rest of us saw made more inclusive from the 1950s onward.
MAGA and the entire Republican Party fell in line behind a would-be autocrat. A president plotted an auto-coup. The right has abandoned democracy and set about neutralizing it. Ron DeSantis wants to be president of a country that resembles Pinochet’s Chile.
“Millions of Democratic voters can see and feel that American politics has changed in profound ways since at least the 1990s, and they want their leaders to act, and react, accordingly,” Bouie concludes.
Republicans who did not actively participate stood by as a coup unfolded. Democrats are living in the past as tempest bears down.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
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When police call out your name
The Pride festival last weekend in Coeur d’Alene. Idaho included music, dancing, food and children playing amidst clouds of bubbles. Anti-hate researcher David Neiwert, staff writer at Daily Kos, came to watch for Nazis:
Drawn by a loud campaign of vicious rhetoric by far-right extremists depicting the organizers as “groomers,” pedophiles, and satanists, a motley crew of white supremacists, “Patriots,” Christian nationalists, and hate preachers circulated around the lakeside city park where the event was held. Some entered the event and mingled menacingly. At least three of them carried AR-15s.
Their intentions weren’t entirely clear until late in the day, when police, a block away from the park entrance, pulled over a U-Haul van full of men—all 31 of them members of the explicitly fascist Patriot Front organization from around the country, faces covered with white masks and dressed in the group’s uniform. According to Coeur d’Alene police, the men planned to start a riot at the Pride event and then continue the rampage into the city’s downtown.
[…]
Among the men arrested was 23-year-old Thomas Rousseau of Grapevine, Texas, the youthful founder of Patriot Front, which itself is the offspring of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America whose contingent Rousseau helped organize for the August 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among the men he admitted to the group was James Alex Fields, who subsequently plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and maiming dozens.
A local citizen witnessed the group looking like “a small army” loading into the back of the van and phoned police. Hate groups hate being arrested and unmasked almost as much as they hate the people they hate:
“For many in the neo-Nazi and extreme-right communities, few punishments carry as much weight as being identified and held accountable for their online activities and racist activism,” writes Mack Lamoureux at Vice News.
Neiwert’s account concludes:
One of the veterans of the anti-Nazi battles of the 1980s in Coeur d’Alene, Tony Stewart, praised the zero-tolerance message sent by Saturday’s arrests. Stewart was a cofounder of the local Human Rights Task Force that responded to the Aryan Nations menace.
“I hope the message going out today is, ‘If you’re going to commit a crime as a hate group, don’t come here. You’re not going to find a receptive audience here,’” Stewart said.
I tell ya, brownshirts these days.
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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com
You’re not a hero is you’re still pushing the coup
This piece by Tim Miller about Bill Stepian is brutal — but true. I’m glad they’re speaking out now but anyone who is still profiting from the Big Lie as Stepian is is not worthy of our respect:
Donald Trump’s campaign manager is convinced he was one of the normal ones.
Day two of the January 6th Committee’s public hearings focused on demonstrating that Trump and his inner circle knew that they were perpetrating a fraud on the public. They proved that not only was there no evidence to back up the claims undergirding the Big Lie, but that Trump and his team knew there was no evidence, but proceeded forward in their attempt to overturn the election result anyway.
During this testimony an internal division emerged within the Trump team. Group A—we’ll call them the Ultra-Coup crowd—was led by an “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani (redundant?) and his crack(en) team of legal eagles and pillow profiteers. Much ink has already been spilled in these pages about those traitorous twits.
But today’s testimony came from Group B, which was made-up of the actual political and legal professionals around Trump who knew full well that he had lost, told him as much, and then tried to slowly back away from the runaway dumpster fire to the extent that was practicable.
This group was represented by Trump’s deadbeat dad spokesperson Jason Miller, Jivanka, and his 5th campaign manager, Bill Stepien. Stepien dubbed this group “Team Normal” during his testimony.
I didn’t mind being categorized. There were two groups. We called them kind of my team and Rudy’s team. I-I- didn’t mind being characterized as being part of team normal as reporters kind of started to do around that point in time. I said hours ago, early on, that I’ve been doing this for a long time. Twenty-five years and I’ve spanned political ideologies from Trump to McCain to Bush to Christie. I can work under a lot of circumstances for a lot of varied candidates and politicians but, a situation where—I think along the way, I’ve built up a pretty good—I hope—reputation for being honest and professional. I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time that led to me stepping away.
Team Normal. How about that for some self-flattery.
Bill Stepien spent 5 years watching Donald Trump’s cruelty, pathological duplicity, irrationality, narcissistic personality disorder, buffoonery, and criminality. After that half-decade of evidence, this “professional” decided to accept a role as the campaign manager for Trump’s flagging re-election campaign.
And he didn’t just take some arm’s length consultancy providing powerpoint decks from the comfort of a Cape May beach house. He chose to sit in the big-boy chair as the man-child responsible for getting Trump four more years in power.
When he made that decision, at some level he knew—because we all knew, because Trump told us—that were his boss to lose, he wouldn’t go quietly into the night. He knew that Trump would go all manner of lengths to keep his grip on power, democracy be damned.
And yet on election night 2020, as this fate was coming to pass, Bill Stepien testified that he advised the president to give a measured statement about how it’s “too early to tell.” He wanted Trump to be dignified about how the team was “proud of the race we ran” and close by offering that he would have “more to say” after the votes came in.
LOLOLOL
Are you shitting me, Bill?
You thought Donald J. Trump was going to be gracious?
That was never going to happen. Anyone who is not either a pea-brained imbecile or a Rudy-amount-of-scotches into the bag knew it could never happen.
So after Trump rejected Stepien’s “advice” and went in front of the cameras to allege a “fraud on the American public,” what did Stepien do?
During videotaped testimony to the January 6 Committee, Bill said that in the days after the election he “stepped away” from the crazy because he is “honest,” and thus couldn’t be a part of it.
I found Stepien’s testimony interesting as I didn’t recall Trump’s campaign manager distancing himself from the claims of fraud during the fraught days following the election. So what did “stepping away” entail, exactly, for Stepien?
Did he resign in protest? Did he go to the press with all the evidence that his boss was deluded? Did he call cabinet officials to tell them to consider the 25th Amendment? Did he go to Congress, like Chris Krebs? Did he testify against his boss at the impeachment hearings?
No. No. No. Nope. Uh-uh.
Bill and “Team Normal” did their stepping away “behind the scenes,” as Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reported. Stepien “didn’t want it widely known” that he disagreed with the party line.
So in other words, “Team Normal” wasn’t functionally any different from the “Ultra-Krakens.” They just didn’t want to get their hands dirty. They had professional reputations to keep.
Because Fortune 500 companies don’t hire demented loons spittling at the cameras outside a landscaping business. But they might still bring on a “normal” “professional” who sat in silence as the world burned. He’s a team player!
“Team Normal” is the latest example of a delusion that was ingrained deep within the Republican ruling class during the Trump era. It was filled with, as I categorized them in Why We Did It, “messiahs” and “junior messiahs” who told themselves they were one of the good ones, trying to nudge things in the right direction—from the inside. In this perverted mindset, the crazier things got, the more it proved that their nudging would be needed the next time things got out of hand. And so they soldiered on. Again and again and again.
But the story the messiahs are telling themselves ain’t the truth. They weren’t nudging Trump along with them, Trump was nudging them along with him. They were dupes being used to provide cover for the crazy anytime the Wall Street Journal came calling.
Bill Stepien wasn’t on “Team Normal.” He was on “Team Coup.” After the election he just decided to move back to the jump seats rather than keep riding shotgun, so as to protect his career.
If you need anymore evidence this is the case, do you know what job Bill Stepien took, after the crazy he presided over had passed?
Stepien is now consulting for Harriet Hageman, the fellow confederate, who was a former Never Trumper but who is now primarying Liz Cheney for the crime of speaking truths that she, and Stepien both know.
In Stepien’s view the bad actor that needed to be punished wasn’t Rudy and the rest of Team Crazy. It was Liz Cheney, for holding his manhood cheap, and saying publicly everything he knew to be true in private. For being not only on Team Normal, but on Team Courage and Team Democracy.
He’s still working with clients who are pushing the Big Lie, not just to win an election, but for Donald Trump’s express purpose of punishing anyone who spoke out against him. Trump has given money from his vast Big Lie war chest to Liz Cheney’s opponent. And she is paying Bill Stepian to help her smear Cheney. Please.
Will they look at Trump’s “willful blindness”?
McQuade and Joyce Vance, also a former U.S. attorney and an NBC News legal analyst, said prosecutors could make use of a legal concept known as deliberate ignorance, or willful blindness, in which a judge can instruct a jury that it can find that a defendant acted knowingly if the defendant was aware of a high probability that something was true but deliberately avoided learning the truth.
“A person cannot ignore a probability that a fact is true,” McQuade said.
There is just no doubt anymore that plenty of people told him personally that the election was not stolen. He refused to listen:
Or was he?
U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker regularly praises police officers. But was Walker in law enforcement himself?
In at least three speeches delivered before he entered politics, Walker claimed he was, the AJC’s Shannon McCaffrey reports.
“I worked in law enforcement,so I had a gun. I put this gun in my holster and I said, ‘I’m gonna kill this dude,’” Walker said at a 2013 suicide prevention event for the U.S. Army. (Walker was describing a 2001 incident when he took his gun to pursue a man who was late delivering a car. That incident, Walker said, led him to seek mental health treatment.)
In a 2017 speech, Walker got more specific. “I work with the Cobb County Police Department, and I’ve been in criminal justice all my life,” he said.
Later, in 2019, he said he was an FBI agent. “I spent time at Quantico at the FBI training school. Y’all didn’t know I was an agent?” he said at a speech to soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington.
And he also once told Irving, Tex. police he was “a certified peace officer,” according to a 2000 police report involving a conflict with an intoxicated man.
So, what’s the real story? Walker’s campaign said he majored in criminal justice during his time at the University of Georgia and was an honorary deputy in Cobb County along with three other Georgia counties. (They did not specify which ones.)
The Cobb County Police Department said they have no record of involvement with Walker. The Cobb sheriff’s office could not immediately say if he was an honorary deputy or not.
But former DeKalb County District Attorney J. Tom Morgan said even if he was, that would give him no law enforcement authority. “It’s like a junior ranger badge,” he said.
Morgan said that many sheriffs in Georgia stopped handing out such honors amid concern that people would use the paperwork to impersonate police officers, a felony in Georgia.
Walker was also never an FBI agent, which would require a minimum of a bachelor’s degree. Walker left UGA before earning his degree…
The idea that this guy could beat the excellent Raphael Warnock has me sick to my stomach. Trump sure knows how to pick ’em.
Walker’s direct relationship with law enforcement has not always been smooth. In September 2001, he threatened a shootout with officers responding to a domestic disturbance at his Texas home, according to a police report.