Month: June 2022

(Don LaFontaine voice): In a world where more voters are registered independents….

My friend Chris Reeves at Daily Kos hosts a long-running Saturday column called Nuts & Bolts on campaign tech. Many activists (especially noobs) convince themselves that winning political races is mostly about having the right messaging and strategy. They neglect the basic mechanics needed to make a campaign go. I’m going to share something on that in a moment.

As I’ve said before, winning races in your head is like bringing sports visualization to the Olympics and thinking you’ll be competitive when you show up with no conditioning and no skills. Thus, my nuts-and-bolts For The Win guide for county chairs linked at the bottom.

Many women became politically engaged for the first time after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Some quickly found themselves involved in local Democratic committees and chairing them in short order. These are predominantly unpaid, time-intensive, and thankless gigs. Even more so in red counties.

A new county chair from one of North Carolina’s largest counties who contacted me recently. Exactly my target audience. One year in with little political experience, she heard about my guide from a county chairs’ forum and came looking for help.

In addition to sending her my guide, I sent a spreadsheet showing her how unaffiliated voters (independents) in each precinct voted in the last general election.

Every election, candidates ask me how I think UNAffiliated voters will “break” D or R. Can’t say. But it’s easier to estimate how they will break in November based on how they did break in the last election. Not individually, of course; the ballot is still secret. But with some basic simplifying assumptions and North Carolina’s near-unique free FTP access to state election data, one can tease out how UNAs voted in aggregate in every precinct. In a state where UNAs are now the largest group of voters, it’s a clue to precincts where the pickins is good and where they are not.

It’s becoming clear that this tool (based on the 2020 presidential race) is more useful in larger counties than smaller, redder ones. Here’s what precincts look like in her large red county that went 61% for Trump (county and precinct labels omitted):

Overall in this county (pop. over 200k), 44% of UNAs voted D. Statewide, it was 42%. In my blue county (pop. 270k), 56% of UNAs voted D. In my precinct, 81% of UNAs voted D.

I emphasize: this is an estimate. Turnout totals and Biden/Trump vote totals won’t always correspond. Some voters leave races blank; third-party voters may have crossed over. Data entry errors may have occurred.

Even in smaller, redder counties, it’s a clue to the lay of the land, if disheartening. Example (pop. under 100k) from a county that voted 66% for Trump :

When in a majority of precincts, not even all your registered Democrats vote Democrat, there’s a helluva hill to climb. Still, losing by less in redder counties can mean winning statewide contests. Good to know where you stand.

I’m still working this out.

3-Tier Unaffiliated Targeting Strategy

I envision a 3-tiered strategy for targeting UNAffiliated voters for November 2022 in conjunction with VoteBuilder. Unaffiliateds who pulled a D ballot in a primary represent just over 5% of all registered UNAs. ALL registered Democrats plus 5% of UNAs falls a bit shy of 50%+1. (Tier % determined by candidate.)

Tier 1: Any UNA (with a voting history) in a precinct with an UNA split 60%(?) or higher in 2020.
GOTV only. Use VoteBuilder to find UNAs with voting histories.

Tier 2:  Any UNA (with a voting history, newly registered, or newly re-registered former R) in a precinct with an UNA split between 40%(?) and 60%(?) in 2020.
ID (VoteBuilder) / persuasion / GOTV

Tier 3:  Any 4×4 UNA that pulled a D ballot in last two primaries (2020, 2022) in a precinct with an UNA split below 40%(?) in 2020.
ID (VoteBuilder)  / persuasion / GOTV 

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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

Brush-tailed possums

I didn’t even know these guys existed!

Recently, a student at Australia’s University of Newcastle learned more than just what was on the syllabus that day.

She learned that she was being watched from above.

Evidently, a local possum had somehow gained entrance to the college building’s ceiling space and was now dropping in to check out her class.

“This is a picture of a cheeky possum watching the students during lectures,” she told The Dodo. “This guy comes here often.”

And she wasn’t kidding.

After her husband posted the photo to Reddit, a number of fellow University of Newcastle students chimed in to say that encounters with local wildlife aren’t uncommon.

The university’s Callaghan Campus is situated in a natural area, and is home to dozens native species — including brush-tailed possums, like this guy. School officials wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’re committed to ensuring ecological sustainability and safeguarding these precious ecosystems,” The University of Newcastle wrote.

Most of the time, these possums are seen hanging around the campus outdoors, and mainly at night.

But random pop-ins from above during classes certainly aren’t unheard of.

The student from this most recent sighting didn’t seem too bothered to find herself being watched by the furry class-crasher. And why would she be?

“Nobody is scared because these creatures are friendly,” she said.

What are the wingnuts talking about today?

MSNBC’s Ben Collins writes it up:

For those asking how the extremist forums/chats are looking 12 hours after the 1/6 hearings.Users are aware the hearings broke through to “normies,” but they’re not worried about it. Far-right extremist spaces have moved onto full-time anti-trans panic. It has consumed them.

Some Telegrams have just uploaded Tucker’s show and pointed to him. But they’re still in that cognitive dissonance dance: was 1/6 a riot put on by the feds, or a regular protest by “J6 prisoners” who must be freed? After 18 months, extremists comfortably live in that limbo.

The difference is now, fealty to Donald Trump isn’t the primary goal of extremists anymore.The culture war is now the main goal. The main target is the LGBTQ+ community, specifically trans people. They simply want a fight, and are looking for whoever will start it fastest.

The 1/6 riots were planned on TheDonald. Users posted maps of the Capitol.

But the top post on TheDonald today is a DeSantis quote. “You have to stand in that fire and you fight back.” Trump’s face is everywhere, but he’s not their world anymore—even on a site named after him.

If you think that’s just fringe, think again. Here’s the latest from Trump 2.0. He is 100% riding the trans-panic wave:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested Wednesday that he might urge the state’s child protective services to investigate parents who take their children to drag shows.

When asked by reporters whether he would support proposed legislation from a Florida state representative that would punish parents who take their children to such performances, the governor said he has asked his staff to look into the idea.

“We have child protective statutes on the books,” the governor said. “We have laws against child endangerment.”

“It used to be kids would be off-limits. Used to be everybody agreed with that,” DeSantis continued. “Now it just seems like there’s a concerted effort to be exposing kids more and more to things that are not age appropriate.”

The debate over whether minors should be allowed to watch drag performances began Saturday after videos showing young children attending a Dallas drag show, and tipping performers with cash, emerged on social media.

The event, “Drag the Kids to Pride Drag Show” — which was held at the gay bar Mr. Misster — was advertised as a “family friendly spin off” of the bar’s “Champagne Drag Brunch” show.

Note that the offending event wasn’t even in Florida. It was in Texas. I’m sure Greg Abbot will jump on the bandwagon too in good time. Tight now he’s doing everything he can to avoid responsibility for allowing 19 little kids and 2 teachers from being mowed down in their classrooms with an AR-15. But he’ll get to it.

Update: There are still “hardcore” true believers. Lol:

Last night on OAN (wait for it): pic.twitter.com/bzyOxD1fs5

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) June 10, 2022

The latest inflation numbers

Economist Justin Wolfers had this analysis today. Oy:

A lot of the pain that people feel reflects forces that are real, but unlikely to persist. So headline inflation is partly driven by a 10.1% rise in food prices (11.9% for “food at home” which is prices at the grocery store), and a whopping 34.6% rise in energy (mostly gas)

But what’s more worrying is persistent inflationary pressure. This report tells a pessimistic story of a broader rise in prices, and the shift in price pressures from goods (which reflects many pandemic-related pressures) to services (where inflation was yet to really emerge).

An ounce of perspective. This report tell us about May. Future inflationary pressure depends on things like wage pressure (which has cooled somewhat), productivity growth (where I can be optimistic), and re-normalization of supply side (where recent news is good, but fragile).

There’s little evidence (yet) that a 1970s style wage-price spiral is underway. There’s reason to be optimistic that many goods prices will actually fall. And while energy prices have risen, once they stop rising, they’ll stop contributing to inflation.

I think Adam summarizes the underlying dynamics — and why they might change — as well as anyone.

Inflation is supply chain improvements and weakening goods demand vs energy prices and strength in services. I expect the former to win out soon, but we don't know when.

— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) June 10, 2022

Comparisons of the current inflationary moment to the Great Inflation are inapt. The “Great Inflation” ran from 1965 to 1982 and was spurred along by policy. The “covid spike” has so far run from 2021 to mid 2022, is driven by a pandemic, and the Fed has signaled it’ll fight.

Ben’s graph (below) points to the optimistic reading: Core inflation, while high, may actually be trending down. When thinking about the future, that’s the more relevant index. We just wish it were more obviously trending down, and doing so faster.

Looking at inflation over three months to smooth out the monthly volatility, prices are rising faster now than at any point last year.
Bit of a different story on "core" inflation (excluding food and energy), which is running below last year's peak. pic.twitter.com/KoPP5YWOkT

— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) June 10, 2022

The really important question about our current inflationary moment is its persistence. Will it last? Will it gain its own momentum?

No monthly number tells us much about this, but each passing month of data adds another reason to worry.

The really difficult thing to remember (from a policy perspective) is that the past really can’t provide much guidance. This is still a pandemic-wracked economy trying to get back on its feet and back to normal. The usual rules of the road don’t really apply.

Truth is, few (if any) economists understand how pandemic-stricken economies really work. We’ve spent our lives studying economies populated by healthy people with smoothly functioning supply sides.

Originally tweeted by Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) on June 10, 2022.

They “counterprogrammed”

Philip Bump watched so we didn’t have to. My God, this is bad:

Fox News didn’t need to announce that it wasn’t going to cover Thursday night’s prime-time hearing from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The network has been all-but-completely ignoring the subject for 17 months; skipping this hearing was a continuation of a pattern, not a break from one. But it nonetheless announced that coverage would be shunted to Fox Business and the network’s streaming platform, and it shrugged at the various scoldings that followed.

When 8 p.m. Eastern rolled around, though, it became clear that the network wasn’t simply going to not cover the hearing. Instead, it began more than two hours of commercial-free rebuttal. It didn’t simply cover other things, it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.

Part of that was probably timing. The hearing began just as Tucker Carlson’s show kicked off, and few people in America have been more energetically engaged than Carlson in casting the Jan. 6 riot as not worthy of discussion. Or as largely innocuous, save for some vandalism. Or maybe it’s a government false flag aimed at casting Republicans as racists or something. Rhetorical consistency is not Carlson’s strength, but that is happily for him not a limitation for his job.

So Carlson began by crowing about Fox’s decision to stand apart from its competitors.

“The whole thing is insulting. In fact, it’s deranged,” Carlson said. “And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we’re not going to help them do it.”

Yes, God forbid that Fox News should air an hour of propaganda or dishonesty. Carlson didn’t articulate the purported lies, which he couldn’t have, because the hearing hadn’t actually begun by that point. But it didn’t matter, because his audience wasn’t hearing the evidence from the hearing anyway. Was it a lie when the hearing showed William P. Barr, Trump’s ever-loyal attorney general, describing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as nonsense? Doesn’t matter, just wave it all away as untrustworthy without actually explaining what was said and why it couldn’t be trusted.

How did Carlson’s show go? He transitioned quickly into his frustration that the committee wasn’t addressing the real questions, in his estimation.

“What did happen, exactly, on Jan. 6? What’s the truth of that day?” Carlson said. “Well, that’s still unknown. From the extensive video we have of Jan. 6, it’s clear that some in the crowd, more than a few, were encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol. To commit felonies.”

And here we go. You may recall that Carlson spent numerous episodes last year claiming that the riot was a function of FBI instigators, people easily identified as such thanks to their appearing as unindicted co-conspirators in federal charging documents. But that was nonsense: Both because FBI embeds wouldn’t be identified in that way and because some of those co-conspirators were easily identifiable. One was obviously the wife of a man charged for his role in the riot; when Carlson later hosted the couple so that they could complain about their persecution, no one mentioned that Carlson had previously called the woman a secret federal agent. Carlson, of course, never corrected his falsehood.

If you’re wondering whether Carlson would have the temerity to reintroduce his most infamous allegation about the insurrection, he did.

“In the case of a man called Ray Epps, we know his name, but they’ve never been charged,” Carlson said of the people in the crowd allegedly instigating violence. Epps didn’t actually do that; he was on video the night before saying that people should go into the Capitol the following day — but he didn’t urge the Capitol breach on Jan. 6 itself. Thanks to an article from a right-wing website run by a former Trump administration official who left his position after being linked to white nationalists, Epps became a target of rabid attacks from Carlson and others that alleged he was a federal agent. He wasn’t. But, months after that became clear, here’s Carlson trying to imply that Epps was some nefarious figure, even comparing Epps — who isn’t known to have broken any laws — with the Michigan gubernatorial candidate arrested this week for his alleged role in the Capitol riot.

Over the course of the hour, there were no commercials, nor were there commercials in Sean Hannity’s hour that began at 9 p.m. No reason was given for this, although Carlson did mention that unusual pattern toward the end of his show. Why not air commercials? Well, one reason would be to keep people glued to Fox News — and therefore not changing the channel to a network that was showing the hearing.

For much of the show, the hearing was shown on-screen as Carlson and his guests spoke over it. Often, the view was not of the committee members, witnesses or the video display at the front of the hearing room. Instead it was often a shot of the audience. One NBC News producer went back after the fact and synced Carlson’s show with what was being shown in the hearing room. During footage showing rioters breaking into the Capitol, Fox switched to the camera showing the audience. When the hearing showed information that didn’t need sound, Fox more than once cut away from it.

Not having commercials meant having more guests. And what a lineup! A who’s who of the Carlsonverse. The Federalist’s Sean Davis. Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Fox News’s favorite Democrat. Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition, recently back from Hungary. Michael Tracey. And, at the end of the hour, Darren Beattie — the guy booted from the Trump administration who wrote that first Ray Epps story.

Beattie encouraged viewers to have their friends go to his website and read his allegations about a federal false-flag operation.

“Tell them to look you in the eye and say that the feds weren’t involved in this,” Beattie said. “It’s a clear hoax. We know what’s happened, but there’s unfinished business and we need to expose the feds for what they’ve done.”

You get the gist. They didn’t ignore the hearings, which would have been a blessing considering what they did do. And they didn’t offer point by point rebuttals of the points made in the hearing either. They instead offered a full-blown Russia media-style propaganda program.

I think this may be the boldest step the network has yet taken away from anything one could call “news.” They even gave up advertising revenue for it. It’s purely a political propaganda operation now. Nothing more.

The framers’ biggest mistake

Kate Shaw has an important piece in The Atlantic about one of the major structural problems facing our democracy. The right has figured out that they can manipulate it and it’s not going to be the last time they attempt to do it:

Many Americans understand that the country’s anachronistic system of presidential selection, part constitutional and part statutory, can sometimes produce a winner who does not receive the most votes nationwide. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 3 million, but lost in the Electoral College 304–227. Sixteen years earlier, Al Gore won 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush nationwide, but Bush prevailed in the Electoral College 271–266 after the Supreme Court functionally awarded him Florida’s electoral votes. And even without Trump’s machinations, the 2020 election came dangerously close to producing yet again a president who did not win the national popular vote. Joe Biden won approximately 7 million more votes than Trump, and prevailed in the Electoral College 306–232, but just 44,000 additional Trump votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin could have resulted in a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. If that had happened, the House, voting by state delegation, would almost certainly have anointed Trump president despite his second popular-vote loss.

But there’s a problem with the Electoral College that’s distinct from the fact that it sometimes selects a winner who does not receive the most votes nationwide, and from the way it creates a political process that overvalues the concerns of voters in an arbitrary subset of states, increasing polarization, dysfunction, and division. (I elaborate on these dynamics in a recent essay in the Michigan Law Review, as does Jesse Wegman in the book that’s the subject of my essay, Let the People Pick the President.) The problem is this: The Electoral College today is dangerously susceptible to manipulation. Indeed, as 2020 showed, the complex process through which a candidate becomes president contains a number of postelection opportunities to contest or undermine the results of an election—and to do so for reasons purportedly having to do with law and legal process.

Consider the Trump campaign’s many lawsuits designed to delay state certification beyond the “safe harbor” deadline created by the Electoral Count Act, after which a state’s slate of electors is no longer deemed conclusive in the event of a dispute. Or Trump supporters’ efforts to disrupt the statutorily required meetings at which each state’s electors actually cast their votes, and the attempts of ersatz “Trump electors” to lay the groundwork for later challenges to official state slates. Trump also personally pressured state election officials to change election results by “finding” enough additional votes that he would be entitled to all of the state’s electoral votes. Trump loyalists in the Department of Justice, and Trump supporters such as Ginni Thomas, sought to push state legislatures to take the radical step of throwing out state returns on the basis of spurious fraud claims and appointing Trump electors themselves. Trump and at least one of his attorneys sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes from a number of states in which Biden received more votes, pointing to the vice president’s central role in “counting” electoral votes in the last stage of the Electoral College process created by the Twelfth Amendment. When that failed, what became the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an effort to disrupt that final event in the Electoral College timeline.

Put plainly, for a candidate determined to win at all costs, the Electoral College was central to a postelection strategy designed to convert loss into victory. Last night’s opening hearings of the January 6 committee made clear that Trump and his advisers were well aware no good-faith legal basis existed to dispute the election’s results. In a nationwide popular vote, a deficit of 7 million votes would have been impossible to challenge using ostensibly lawful means; the fact of the Electoral College meant that flipping a few close states, or coercing the vice president into throwing out those states’ votes,  would have been enough to change the election’s outcome.

It also seems likely that the very existence of the Electoral College made the public more susceptible to Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy—or at least lulled the public for a time into believing there was nothing wildly wrong with a process in which a defeated candidate exploited pressure points in an attempt to cling to power. Americans are, after all, acclimated to an undemocratic system of presidential selection; perhaps that primed the public to respond in muted ways to Trump’s blatantly antidemocratic moves.

Commonplace political rhetoric about presidential elections suggests as much, framing elections more as complex logic games than crucial acts of self-governance. We discuss “paths to 270”; we contemplate the prospect of things like “running up the score in Broward County.”

It is tempting to dismiss the events of January 6 as largely about Donald Trump rather than our system more broadly. And certainly, any electoral system can be targeted by an autocrat determined to hang on to power. But the Electoral College both provided numerous points of entry and brought the country dangerously close to an actual successful coup.

A genuine bipartisan legislative effort is now under way to reform some of the aspects of the Electoral Count Act that Trump sought to exploit in 2020, as well as to address a number of other vulnerabilities of our electoral system. But at the moment, insufficient attention is being paid to the Electoral College itself. One of the goals of these hearings should be to communicate to the public just how dangerous an institution the Electoral College is—and perhaps to galvanize a serious effort to change it.

Jamelle Bouie added some astute comments on twitter:

this is a terrific piece and i want to make one quick observation

it’s not just that the multi-stage nature of the electoral college means that it can be manipulated and subverted, but that the very possibility of winning the election without winning the vote is an inducement to try to subvert the electoral college.

put a little differently, i don’t think it is a coincidence that the first president to try this in earnest was also the second president in two decades to win the white house without winning the popular vote.

the extent to which winning without winning becomes a normal part of american presidential politics can’t help but influence bad actors, who might look at a narrow defeat and say, “there’s no reason i can’t manipulate the rules to make that go the other way”

as it stands, the electoral college is basically incentivizing the GOP to reject the idea, entirely, that you should even try to win the most votes, or that winning the most votes has any connection to political legitimacy. “we’re a republic, not a democracy,” after all. 5/5

Originally tweeted by b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) on June 10, 2022.

Years ago I was at a meeting of some Dem big shots who were thinking of hiring me for a job. (The funding fell apart — thank God.) They asked me what I thought was the biggest structural problem in our system and what I would change if I had the chance. I said, the Electoral College and they all scoffed. “Oh please, it’s just pro-forma.” This was after 2000.

Yeah. How’s that working out for us?

A big orange baby has a tantrum

That’s the question the January 6th Committee is asking

Thursday night’s public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee made one thing very clear: Donald Trump is personally in the crosshairs. They are coming for him with receipts, in the form of testimony from some of his closest aides and allies. The committee seems prepared to destroy any pretense that Trump was a casual bystander to the insurrection. In fact, its members are building a case that he actively encouraged it, and that by refusing to take action for many hours that day, he was an actual accomplice.

The committee plans to going to knock down the Big Lie by answering a big legal and moral question: Did Trump know he had lost the election? The answer is clear: Yes, he did. Everyone around him told him so. His former aide and current associate Jason Miller testified that their own number-crunchers told him he had lost. Attorney General Bill Barr told him that spreading the lie that the election was stolen was “bullshit.” His own daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified that she believed what Barr said. And we learned all of this from hearing their very own words in videotaped testimony, which made it all the more powerful.

In her opening statement, committee vice chair Liz Cheney laid out the whole case.

Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.

That seven-part plan forms the basis for the committee hearings yet to come. The next one, scheduled for Monday, June 13, at 10 a.m. Eastern time, will demonstrate that “Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information” even though he knew that he had lost the election. Most of us already know that, of course. But it will be very helpful to have his own allies make that case.

The following hearing, now set for Wednesday, June 15, will delve into the second part of the plot, which was aimed at influencing the Department of Justice and replacing anyone who refused to back Trump’s phony claims of election fraud with those who would. Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his then-deputy Richard Donohue, both of whom were Trump appointees, will be testifying.

There will likely be a fourth hearing on Thursday, June 16, and two more the following week, with the final hearing again scheduled in prime time, probably on June 23. These hearings will presumably cover the rest of the seven-point plot in considerable detail. We didn’t hear an explicit summary on Thursday, but a committee source outlined it to CNN this way:

1. President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
2. President Trump corruptly planned to replace the acting attorney general, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
3. President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the law.
4. President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
5. President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
6. President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the U.S. Capitol.
7. As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

When the committee gets to the third point, the pressure campaign on Mike Pence pressure, I assume that will include all the material on attorney John Eastman, the mastermind of that particular scheme. In whichever hearing addresses the fourth point, pressure on state election officials and state legislators, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is reportedly set to testify.

It seems likely that the final prime-time hearing will offer new details on points six and seven, building the legal and moral case that Trump was responsible for summoning the “violent mob” and unleashing them on the Capitol, and exploring what actually happened during the many hours when Trump was watching the violence at the Capitol and did nothing to stop it.

The second half of Thursday’s hearing focused on the crucial role in the assault played by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. In videotaped statements, members who said that Trump’s “stand by” comment in a 2020 presidential debate greatly increased recruitment, and that they immediately began planning to come to Washington on Jan. 6 after Trump put out the call in his infamous tweet of Dec. 19, 2020: “Be there, will be wild!” Nick Quested, a British documentary filmmaker who was embedded with the Proud Boys before and during the Jan. 6 events, testified last night that he filmed a meeting between Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers in a parking garage on the night of Jan. 5, although he could not hear what they said to each other. 

On the morning of the 6th, members of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers had assembled at the Capitol long before Trump told his rally audience at the Ellipse to march to the Capitol and pressure “weak” Republicans (including Pence) to overturn the election. It was apparently Proud Boys who first broke through police lines and smashed windows at the Capitol building in what was clearly a fully formed plan.

It makes you wonder: Did Trump know in advance that the Proud Boys would try to enter the Capitol? Just this week, we learned that he had been talking about leading a march on the Capitol for two weeks but the Secret Service had rebuffed the request. There was no permit for such a march, which was one reason there was such a light police presence at the Capitol, even though Trump allies were posting about it all over social media. Once the insurrection was underway we know that Trump refused to do anything to stop it, and Cheney said on Thursday night that he also “placed no call to any element of the U.S. government to instruct the Capitol to be defended.” (Several such calls were made by Pence, on the other hand.)

While we don’t have the full picture yet — the committee plans to cover this in a future hearing — we know that Trump said some curious things during that 187-minute interval when he refused to call off the mob. One of the most startling moments in the hearing was footage of a rioter reading Trump’s tweet condemning Pence through a megaphone, followed by the crowd chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”

According to one witness, he apparently responded to that chant this way:

That sounds curiously like what Trump reportedly said to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, when McCarthy begged him to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” On the night of Jan. 5, when Pence told Trump that he had no authority to overturn the election, Trump was listening to the raucous crowd gathered outside the White House and asked the vice president, “What if these people say you do?” 

Committee chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told CNN’s Jake Tapper that they have evidence that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were in contact with people in “Trump’s orbit,” which raises the proverbial question made famous in Watergate: What did the president know and when did he know it?

Donald Trump staged a coup attempt, and Republican officials have known this from the beginning. But after a brief moment of common sense and decency, they reverted to type and excused it, defended it and even endorsed it. I’m sure most of them are so far gone that nothing will move them at this point. But if there is even one of them with a conscience, Liz Cheney’s words had to wound them deeply:

Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

Stay tuned. Last night was just the preview. The plan to overthrow a legal election will be revealed in even greater detail over the rest of this month. It’s even worse than we knew.

Salon

He fiddled (with his remote) as his cult tried to burn down the country

We will learn more as subsequent Jan. 6 hearings roll out more damning facts from that day and before. There is an hours-long gap in White House phone records from the day of the Trump insurrection, although we know Donald Trump watched the violence on TV and made and received calls during that time.

We knew much of this before last night’s live Jan. 6 committee hearing. But last night, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) made clearer that as leaders huddled inside the Capitol and White House staff begged him to act, this is what Donald Trump did for hours as the Capitol was under attack: nothing.

“Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the United States government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” Cheney said. “He did not call his secretary of defense on January 6. He did not talk to his attorney general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day. And he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets. Vice President Pence did each of those things.” 

Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was more concerned about controlling the narrative that Trump had lost control to Pence.

It gets worse. It will get worse still.

As will the pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland and his department to bring charges against those who planned the coup attempt and provoked the deadly riot.

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Liz Cheney for the prosecution

“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Thursday during the first of six planned televised hearings by House Jan. 6 investigators. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Cheney made clear that after the riot, several Republicans asked then-President Donald Trump for pardons. Cheney named Rep. Scott Perry of California who has refused to cooperate in the investigation.

“Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election,” Cheney added. Those others will be bracing for their names to be revealed.

Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) called the hearing to order and advised his audience that Jan. 6 was “the culmination of an attempted coup” by Pres. Donald Trump, a “last stand — his most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.” He’d lost the 2020 election. Video testimony to come would show he knew it, yet continued to spread the lie that the election had been stolen.

“He lost in the courts, just as he did at the ballot box. And in this country, that’s the end of the line,” Thompson said. “But for Donald Trump, that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election.”

Trump himself was at the center of the plot.

“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said.

Two story lines emerged during thw two-hour, prime time hearing. One of duty, sacrifice, and honor as U.S. Capitol and D.C. police tried to fend off a violent mob of Trump supporters led by the Proud Boys. Some of the injured officers, their spouses, and widows watched more harrowing hand-to-hand combat footage, mostly from body cameras, than we had seen before.

Dana Milbank writes (Washington Post):

The other was a tale of brutality and deceit by Trump and a small band of loyalists. They knew he had lost, and yet, as Cheney put it, “Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”

In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearing, Cheney spoke of former White House officials’ testimony about Trump’s bloodthirstiness toward his own vice president. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, quote, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence, quote, ‘deserves it.’ ”

Cheney presented a prosecutor’s opening argument with deliberateness and precision. For posterity. She has all but ended her political career in the Republican Party by participating in this investigation of Trump and his attempted coup. She means her exit to leave a bruising mark.

After playing a tape of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner dismissing White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s warning of potential violence as “whining,” Cheney addressed the oath to protect and defend the Constitution taken by members of Congress and the executive branch.

“We don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party,” she said, pointedly, for her Republican colleagues. “We take our oath to defend the United States Constitution, and that oath must mean something.”

A timestamped, 10-minute video demostrated that the Jan. 6 insurrection was not simply a rally that got out of hand. Hundreds of Proud Boys were approaching the Capitol perimeter a half hour before Trump began his speech. Before he finished, the mob led by the Proud Boy vanguard had already breached barriers on the Capitol grounds.

In dramatic live testimony, Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards told the panel she had been knocked unconscious when the mob egged on by Proud Boy Joseph Biggs breached bike rack barriers at the edge of the Capitol gounds. Recovering herself, she rushed to rejoin the reforming police line, describing it as “an absolute war zone” like “something out of the movies.” 

ABC News:

“There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. You know, they had, I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell.”

“It was carnage,” she continued. “It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw, never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”

Cheney: "You were knocked unconscious, is that right?"

Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards: "Yes, ma'am."

"But then when you regained consciousness, even with the injuries, you returned to duty, is that right?"

"Yes, ma'am…I tried to hold the line at Senate steps." pic.twitter.com/LoOVsUGTy7

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) June 10, 2022

In laying out what some of the remaining hearings will reveal, the committee made clear it was laying groundwork for criminal cases by the Justice Department. We will have to wait for closing arguments.

Mens Rea

Perhaps the most damning piece of Jan. 6 conspiracy evidence Thursday night was not presented by the House January 6th Commmittee. Fox News had made clear it would not carry the House hearing along with other major networks. But in a desparate attempt to keep its audience from seeing any of the prime time presentation of evidence, Fox News ran its shows for two hours commercial free during the hearing.

“It didn’t simply cover other things,” writes Philip Bump, “it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.”

Tucker Carlson’s hour ended with guest Darren Beattie, former Rep. Matt Gaetz staffer and former Trump speech writer. He was fired from the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad after attending a white nationalist conference. Beattie alleged that the Jan. 6 attack as a false-flag operation by the federal government.

Fox News didn't take the hearings live. Instead, Tucker Carlson hosted Darren Beattie. During the attack on January 6, here's what Beattie was tweeting. https://t.co/LU0FZvlW9O

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) June 10, 2022

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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