Month: June 2022

The chutzpah knows no bounds

John Durham tried a Washington lawyer for allegedly lying to the FBI by saying he wasn’t working for his client Hillary Clinton when he came in with a tip about some communication between Russia and Trump. As you have heard, the jury acquitted that lawyer this week. But according to Bill Barr, the point was never really to prove a case in a court of law — it was to “expose” Hillary Clinton. In other words, Bill Barr and John Durham used the DOJ for political purposes the very thing they accuse Hillary Clinton of doing.

You cannot make this shit up:

Barr: I’m very proud of Durham and I do take responsibility for his appointment. pic.twitter.com/odKy2FaqKG

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 1, 2022

In case you were wondering, Barr is lying there. The FBI had already opened the Russia investigation before this ever happened. So he’s going on Fox to perpetuate the lie even though the case he is talking about actually revealed the opposite.

That man was the Attorney General of the United States, the most powerful law enforcement job in the country, twice.

Here’s an analysis of the current Republican establishment from a charter member of the Reagan establishment:

A couple of weeks ago, looking at the Republican primaries so far this year, Tim Miller discerned the rise of “the new MAGA establishment”:

But across the GOP landscape another trend is beginning to surface: the power of the new MAGA establishment.

The MAGA establishment is the collection of old guard GOP consultants who submitted to Trumpism, conservative media outlets, and Trump hangers-on who are using their power to try to guide that party towards candidates who are loyal to Trump and squashing two other types of candidates: 1) those who dared oppose him, and 2) the anti-establishment MAGA wild cards they can no longer control. . . .

Some pundits will want to glean something about the power of Trump himself from his endorsement scorecard (he dropped the Idaho governor race with the Pennsylvania Senate outcome still too close to call), but that misses the point.

Trump has consolidated power to such a degree that he wins even by losing, and while his endorsement faxes might not always yield winners, the new MAGA establishment is undefeated in determining who must be made a loser.

Since Miller wrote those words, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger won in Georgia, which would seem to cut against his arguments. But leaving aside the fact that two swallows do not a summer make, the fact is that while both had directly challenged Trump on his Big Lie about the 2020 election, they also both conspicuously professed broader loyalty to Trump’s policies—and even to some degree to Trump himself going forward.

More broadly, if one looks at the Republican party around the country, at both the grassroots and elite levels, there’s not really much question that the new MAGA establishment now rules the GOP roost.

What does this mean?

For guidance, let’s take a quick look back at history—at the last time a new Republican establishment replaced an older one.

I arrived in Washington in the summer of 1985, a young(ish) Reaganite, a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, one of a band of insurgents eager to take on not just the left, but also the old Republican Nixon-Ford establishment. And for several years, I and my comrades continued to believe we were “insurgents.” But we weren’t.

It’s now blindingly obvious that the Reagan insurgency was so successful, so quickly, that by the late 1980s we’d completed a transition from one Republican establishment to another. By the time Ronald Reagan left office, there was no question that the Reagan insurgency had become the Reagan establishment.

And this group, this new establishment, dominated the Republican party at all levels for the next three decades.

When one establishment replaces another, not everything changes. Quite the contrary. The victory of a new establishment within a party (or in a movement) is marked by lots of assimilation, lots of accommodation, and lots of maneuvering as parts of the old establishment find their place in the new.

So plenty of Nixon-Ford Republicans did fine in the years of Reaganite dominance. Take George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for example. And plenty of early- or true-believing Reaganites didn’t do particularly well for themselves. Being an OG Reaganite was not a guarantee of victory in Republican primaries and the most true-blue Reaganite policies didn’t always prevail. But you couldn’t survive in Republican politics if you were anti-Reaganite.

This is what it means to be a dominant establishment.

Politicians who were still suspicious of Reagan’s worldview had to adjust on some key things. They had to silently put their Ford Republican past behind them. They had to sign on to Team Reagan.

Which is how George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole—neither of them original Reaganites—won the next three Republican nominations after Reagan departed. Bush ran in 1988 as Reagan’s vice president. He had become pro-life. He spoke no more of “voodoo economics.”

Even more telling: In the run-up to the 1996 campaign, Dole, looking to navigate the new GOP waters, volunteered, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that’s what you want.”

Looking back, it’s clear: Elected officials already in place when Reagan prevailed changed their positions to accommodate the new regime. New leaders emerged, surfing the wave of Reaganism. And entirely new ecosystems of both media and donors arose in Reagan’s wake. By which point we Reaganites were the new establishment. Even as they—by which I mean, “we”—continued to indulge the idea that we were somehow still insurgents, fighting against some entrenched and powerful other.

If you want to understand what an “establishment” is in politics, it is this: A collection of people, institutions, and ideas which are not all powerful but are dominant to the point of being all-encompassing. The establishment can be, every once in a while, circumvented or leapfrogged. But it cannot be successfully opposed. Which is why the Reagan legacy remained in firm control of the GOP for 28 years after Reagan had left office.

Until Trump.

We are now six years into the Trump era and one clearly sees—in the donor and media ecosystems, in the new ideologies (however poorly grounded and tendentious), in the odd combination of orthodoxies that an establishment can enforce and the flexibility it can grant itself—that a new MAGA establishment has been created.

Do not count on it going away soon.

It may not last as long as the Reaganite establishment. That establishment was built on the foundations of a large-scale win over a sitting president, followed by a massive re-election victory, followed by the election of Reagan’s vice president, followed by a victory in the Cold War which had been set in motion by Reagan’s policies, followed by one of the largest expansions of peace and prosperity in America’s history.

The Trump establishment obviously has no such claims. Instead, Trump’s claim on the party centers around failures. He beat a weak Democratic candidate in 2016 while losing the popular vote. He lost the popular vote by an even bigger margin in 2020, as he became the first sitting president to lose re-election in 30 years. His hold over the party is based not on expansion, but on contraction: He has whittled the party base down to a demographic nub—but it is a nub which is in thrall to him precisely because of its sense of grievance.

It certainly seems as though the Reagan establishment based on political success, foreign policy, and economic recovery should prove more durable than Trump’s rump establishment based on cultural grievance. And maybe that will be the case. But maybe not.

Trumpism has tapped into some deep strains in American history and life. It would be foolish to assume that it can now be wished away. If it had been strangled in the cradle—either in 2016, or during the first term, or even after January 6th, 2021—then the story might be different. But it wasn’t. And so it isn’t.

In 1954, Winston Churchill looked back at 1919 and said, “If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!’”

And so in 2016, and throughout Trump’s first terms—especially at the times of the impeachments, and after January 6th—when asked to repudiate Trumpism, everybody in Republican and conservative circles turned up their hands and said, “How shocking!”

Which means that there is no Trump “fever” that is going to break, because Trumpism is now not a fever. It is an entrenched, all-encompassing fact of Republican and conservative life; one that is likely to be with us for quite a while. Trump may personally fade, but Trumpism is here to stay, for the foreseeable future.

Which means that authoritarianism—with inflections, or at least overtones, of fascism—will be here for a while, too. With an infrastructure, with a popular base, and with elite enablers. In other words: With its own establishment.

Obviously anything that can be done to weaken Trumpism’s hold on the Republican party would be good. But this chipping away will be gradual and will most likely take time. We’re more likely to have some Republican Brezhnevs and Andropovs before we get a GOP Gorbachev.

The old Republican Reaganite conservative establishment has, unfortunately, been replaced by a new MAGA establishment. The question is whether on the other side of the aisle a new vigorous, hard-headed, liberal establishment can be born. If this is not to be what Gramsci called a time of monsters, it needs to be born quickly.

I never thought I’d be posting Bill Kristol’s thoughts approvingly, but when he’s right he’s right. One thing he doesn’t discuss but I think is relevant, is that the two GOP establishments were both led by entertainers who created a cult of personality. Apparently, that’s a requirement on the right. The other side has a bit of this — Obama certainly had an ecstatic following, at least in the beginning. But they don’t seem to need it quite as much. I can’t say whether that’s a weakness or a strength.

American oligarchs have evolved little since 1860

Defunding public schools has been a project of the right for at least 70 years, says Dr. Nancy MacLean, professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.“

That’s just one goal of the libertarian Koch network that has worked behind the scenes for decades. MacLean appeared on the Gaslit Nation podcast published this week.

Host Sarah Kendzior provided some pull quotes via Twitter:

“Trump’s presidency was the culmination of the capture of the GOP by a far-right network of donors brought together by the Koch Brothers and the hundreds of organizations they fund.”

“The Federalist Society has captured our courts. Six SCOTUS justices have ties to it; some are there illegitimately. 7 of 8 Senators who voted against certifying Biden as POTUS had been generously funded by the Koch donor networks. This is the product of decades of investment.”

“They are using a stealth strategy to rewrite the rules of governance, up to and including the constitution, in order to enable the kind of government that prevailed in the US at the turn of the 20th century.”

“They want to operate in the dark. The more sunlight we bring to this, the more we understand it — journalists, activists, people in the trenches — the better off we are. Because this is a stealth operation to implement a transformative agenda dating back to the 1980s.”

“If you look up the 1980 platform of the libertarian party, you get an idea of what the Kochs want. No postal service, no national parks, no public schools — no basic public services. Government can have only three things: armies, courts, and police to control the social order.”

Link to that 1980 platform here.

“The Koch network realized after watching Reagan that they can’t rely on elected officials. Officials want to be popular and will back off from the most extreme agendas in order to win. That is why they turned to stealth tactics — gerrymandering, propaganda, voter suppression.”

The Kochs’ goal became to game the system for the elite few against the majority of public opinion. [timestamp 32:00]

“The goal of this far-right network was to insulate elected officials from the reaction of the public. The ultimate way of insulating them is to rewrite the constitution.”

Via a new convention of the states.

Convention of States President Mark Meckler, MacLean says, once declared their goal is to reverse 100 years of progressivism. [timestamp 36:35]

I’m just getting around to “reading” Heather Cox Richardson’s “How the South Won the Civil War” (2020). Much so far is a reiteration of the broad strokes of Reconstruction. Deliberately painted by Richardson, the parallels to today are striking.

The arguments from conservatives have not changed. Their attitudes have not changed. The poor are lazy. They are inferior, the takers. The rich are nature’s intended masters, the makers. Allow the underclass to obtain power and they will simply redistribute wealth from the natural aristocracy. The oligarchs never believed in democracy or “created equal.”

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life…It constitutes the very mudsill of society,” said Sen. James Henry Hammond, Democrat of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate prior to the Civil War.

Post-Civil War, elites put in place institutional barriers to democratic partitpation by people they considered lessers. That agenda is being reinforced 160 years later.

Regression is their program. They have evolved little since 1860.

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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.

Tulsa shooting is the nation’s 233rd mass shooting in 2022, per Gun Violence Archive

Four more dead, plus the shooter. Multiple wounded. No known motive.

But there was a target Wednesday afternoon: the second floor of St. Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Capt. Richard Meulenberg of the Tulsa Police Department told the Washington Post the gunman’s were not random or indescriminate. The shooter, still unidentified along with his victims, “had purpose” and “intent.” Just what is unclear. He took his own life as police arrived.

The shooter, aged 35-40, carried and fired both a rifle and a handgun.

Associated Press:

Police Capt. Richard Meulenberg also said multiple people were wounded and that the medical complex was a “catastrophic scene.” The exact number of wounded was not immediately available.

Police and hospital officials said they were not ready to identify the dead.

St. Francis Health System locked down its campus Wednesday afternoon because of the situation at the Natalie Medical Building. The Natalie building houses an outpatient surgery center and a breast health center. Dalgleish said an orthopedic clinic also is located on the second floor where officers discovered the shooter and several victims.

Once, such spree shootings were a way to gain notoriety. A gunman would take out as many random people as possible before suicide by cop or by putting a round in his own ear. (Almost uniquely his.)

My baby said, I was crazy
My mama called me lazy
I was gonna show ’em all this time

Researchers Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, began studying mass shooters, looking for patterns. Social contagion is a risk. They sketched out a profile for Politico:

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

POLITICO: You’ve written about how mass shootings are always acts of violent suicide. Do people realize this is what’s happening in mass shootings?

Peterson: I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.

It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides. But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.

For younger shooters, says Petersen, there is often some form of announcement or outreach prior to the shooting.

If you’re saying, “I want to shoot the school tomorrow,” you are also saying, “I don’t care if I live or die.” You’re also saying, “I’m completely hopeless,” and you’re putting it out there for people to see because part of you wants to be stopped.

As for these attacks being a way to gain notoriety in death, I’m doubtful that is an incentive anymore. Perhaps mass-shooters are slow to notice that with the frequency of these attacks, a mass murderer no longer gets even 15 minutes. Who can name three recent mass shooters?

After decades of having studies blocked by the gun lobby, the Centers for Disease Control just last year received funding to track gun violence as a public health risk.

About time. We seem to have an epidemic.

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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.

I’ve been writing about gun violence, the messages used to sell guns and actions activists have been taking to prevent gun deaths for over 15 years. After the Uvalde shooting I went back to revisit to see what I’ve learned and what I think will happen next. I also want to point to some good gun law changes we have made and some messages we can spread about them.

The Republicans will push to get more guns in schools following the Uvalde shooting. This is the “do something” that the Republicans can get behind. It builds on the premise that people with guns in school will be able to gun down an active shooter before they kill kids.*

Guns are NOT a passive defensive tool like a bullet proof vest. They won’t stop a bullet coming at you. Guns are an active, offensive weapon. This active, offensive role of the “virtuous person with a gun” is what appeals to men who want to actively respond to threats to their property and their families. For them it’s not good enough to passively stop bullets, they want an active component that stops/kills the person who is the threat.

*Of the nearly 200 Post-identified incidents of school gunfire, only once before this week has a resource officer gunned down an active shooter.

Scarred by School Shootings, March 25, 2018 Washington Post 

In Florida the NRA super lobbyist Marion Hammer used this understanding of the desire for action to give parents an active, offensive response to gun violence by pushing legislation that allocated massive amounts of money for more people with guns in schools–even though there was no evidence that they were effective.

Here are some I wrote back in 2018-19
Lawmakers Determined To Get Guns In Schools
Why Are School Boards Putting More Guns In Schools?
Florida House To Vote On Giving More Teachers Guns, Just Days After Armed Teacher Injured Child

The strategy was that when the money was provided, the local school board would take it. They also put in rules like, “If you don’t take the money for these armed people, you can’t use it for something else.” So Florida had school board meetings with board members saying, “We have to have SROs.” If the parents said, “We don’t WANT SROs! They don’t work! They put minority kids in jail!” The board response was, “Well, then we’ll have to arm teachers.” When the teachers and parents said, “We don’t want armed teachers!” The Board said, “All the other school districts get money for “safety” and we have to use it this way. If we don’t. we’ll miss out. Do you want YOUR kids to die? Better safe than sorry!”

At the time I wrote and suggested all the ways to stop arming teachers, like the costs of insurance, the problems with training teachers, the liability to the district when there was a negligent discharge of a gun. But time and time again it was the allocation of money that won. That, and a concerted effort to push a narrative that was not supported by reality. A narrative that non-coincidently supported more guns in schools.

These armed teachers or other adults were sold an active surrogate who would respond as a stereotypical male parent would. Meaning the stand-in parent wouldn’t just die to protect their child, they would also kill the person hurting their child. The stereotypical male parent operates under the idea that you must stop the threat with the same deadly force the threat was using. This flies in the face of the facts since, the majority of school shootings were stopped by unarmed people tackling the shooter. This strategy also had the primary benefit to the gun lobby of selling more guns.

I’m basing this on having listened to dozens of town hall and school board meetings, following multiple state gun legislation hearings, reading the great work of Mike Spies on Marion Hammer and the NRA, lurking in concealed gun carrying forum and talking to gun rights activists.

I watched hours of Florida legislation hearings. I saw how slogans overpowered reality. Myths and wishful thinking won the day when it came to getting more armed people in schools. HOWEVER, I also saw some good, effective laws get passed. David Hogg was on Joy Reid talking about what they did to pass one set of good laws. Red Flag laws.

Gun laws work! @DavidHogg w @JoyAnnReid on working to get a red flag law passed.
"Because of the laws that we created we disarmed somebody who threaten to kill my own mother, through a court order with a right to due process." It's been used nearly 6,000 times since.#RedFlagLaws pic.twitter.com/Y3AvJ5ZHWp

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) May 31, 2022

With the Uvalde shooting we know that the police didn’t respond quickly enough. We now know that the School Resource Officer (SRO) wasn’t there. But even with armed people there, they can’t respond fast enough, especially if someone gets the drop on them. The Washington Post article points out that most school shootings happen quickly.

The Post analysis found that gun violence has occurred in at least 68 schools that employed a police officer or security guard. In all but a few of those incidents, the shootings ended before law enforcement of any kind interceded — often because the gunfire lasted only a few seconds. 

Scarred by School Shootings, March 25, 2018 Washington Post 

The “more guns in schools” people want to kill the perpetrators before they can kill kids & teachers. But that is rare. Since they can’t do that, their next goal is to minimizing the number of dead. And they believe that using a gun to kill the shooter is the only way to stop them. But based on the facts, the majority of school shootings were stopped by unarmed people tackling the shooter.

I wrote a piece about this, Keep Praising Unarmed Good Guys Who Tackle Shooters, featuring James Shaw, who tackled a shooter at the Waffle House in 2018 in Nashville, Tennessee and Jason Seaman, science teacher & school football coach who ‘immediately ran up to the un-named student, swatted the boy’s cocked gun out of his hand before tackling him” in Indiana, Noblesville West Middle School in 2018.

Here’s a short video I made about how student Jon Meis tackled a shooter at the Seattle Pacific University in 2015. The shooter killed Paul Lee, 19 and injured Sarah Williams. He is serving 112 years in prison.

This myth that people will guns is the only way to stop shooters persists because of the power of a slogan and the psychology of the people wanting a solution that offers them the hope that a teacher or other adult responsible will take action that is not just defensive, but offensive. They will run toward the shooting to kill the shooter before more can be killed. JUST LIKE the parent imagines he would in the same situation.

I expect the same push for guns in school will happen now, even though the evidence clearly isn’t there. They will using the line, “If that Uvalde SRO cop was there, like they were supposed to be, he would have stopped him!” They will point to the times that after the killing was done, cops finally killed the shooter. They will say armed guards are “deterrents,” even though this isn’t supported, They use flawed data about defensive gun use to say guns are deterrents and to get rid of “gun free zones”**

They will use the same discredited arguments this time and move the battle to the school district meetings where school board members will not want to oppose any measures, especially if the legislation gives out money for more cops, guards and teachers with guns in the schools. As I said, I watched hours of these school board meetings and the false data got thrown up constantly. Now with Moms Demand Action in America there were occasionally people there to debunk the bad data. But the guns everywhere people have lots of SLOGANS. NEVER discount the power of slogans. 

(Speaking of slogans. What is OUR best slogan? Don’t give me a modified version of their slogans showing they are wrong. I teach people to NOT repeat the other sides’ taking points!

“Hopelessness is the gun industry’s killer accomplice.”- CKS

I constantly hear media people say “Nothing has changed.” meaning they aren’t seeing the changes that WE on the left want–like assault weapon bans at the national level. Sadly, the gun lobby did get the change they wanted, more guns in schools by allocating money to those programs. They also made it easier for people to GET guns with permitless carry in multiple states. (BTW, STOP calling it “Constitutional Carry. that’s the name they like!”)

So, if they will support legislations to get more guns in schools following the Uvalde shooting, EVEN IN THE FACE OF ITS INEFFECTIVENESS, we need to keep pushing against it, showing it’s a lie. AND, we also need to push for OUR gun safety programs that ARE effective, that HAVE passed.

I’m going to end this piece with the full 7 minute clip of David Hogg on the Reid Out with Joy Reid. You can see that while she is focusing on the, “nothing has been changed” part of the story, David talks about the good changes that were made. They passed age limits for assault weapons and Red Flag laws in Florida. Those laws work. Let’s make them happen nationwide.

Don’t give up hope. Organize.

They’re being trained to create chaos

The Republicans are plotting to turn our elections into Trumpian circuses:

Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.

The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.

Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”https://player.simplecast.com/e7b8bddc-0397-4831-8ac0-e8c1bbb75ae6?dark=false

Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.

Democrat Janice Winfrey, who serves as the clerk, would be bound to pick names from the list submitted by the party under a local law intended to ensure bipartisan representation and an unbiased team of precinct workers.

Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, an self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.

On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.

POLITICO obtained about a dozen recordings from people who were invited to listen to the meetings. Seifried referred POLITICO’s requests for comment to the RNC. Griffin, through the Thomas More Society, which runs Amistad, did not return repeated calls and texts to spokesperson Tom Ciesielka.

A spokesperson for the RNC said the party is attempting to rectify an imbalance in favor of Democratic election workers in large urban areas, particularly Detroit, a city that votes reliably Democratic by more than 90 percent. Just 170 of more than 5,400 Detroit election officials were Republicans in 2020, according to the RNC.

“Democrats have had a monopoly on poll watching for 40 years, and it speaks volumes that they’re terrified of an even playing field,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick. “The RNC is focused on training volunteers to take part in the election process because polling shows that American voters want bipartisan poll-watching to ensure transparency and security at the ballot box.”

In the introduction graphic on his training presentation, Seifried says the RNC’s goal is to “make it easy to vote and HARD TO CHEAT.”

But election watchdog groups and legal experts say many of these recruits are answering the RNC’s call because they falsely believe fraud was committed in the 2020 election, so installing them as the supposedly unbiased officials who oversee voting at the precinct level could create chaos in such heavily Democratic precincts.

There is little doubt that the bigger strategy is to create enough chaos and disruption in states with GOP legislatures that they will take over the electoral process and install their own electors. It will be challenged in the courts but I think it’s entirely possible that the Supremes will take a case and validate this whole “independent state legislature doctrine.”

Read the whole Politico article. This is a serious strategy and they are putting some real money and organizational heft behind this.

Strategist Cornell Belcher argues that the Dems need to engage the culture war

Will the moms lead us?

Crises and events have controlled the Biden White House — instead of the White House controlling them. 

That’s the big conclusion from the reporting by NBC’s Carol E. Lee, Peter Nicholas, Kristen Welker and Courtney Kube on a president and team who are frustrated they can’t catch a break; annoyed that they weren’t told sooner about things like the baby-formula shortage; and angry the president’s low approval ratings rival Donald Trump’s.

And it raises the question: Instead of constantly playing defense, why isn’t the White House going on offense?

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher proposes one place where Biden and Democrats can take the fight to Republicans, rather than the other way around. 

Make the upcoming elections about “the angry mom” — on issues like gun violence and abortion. 

“If this is not the year of the angry mom, I don’t know what’s going to be the year of the angry mom, right?” Belcher said on “Meet the Press” last Sunday. 

He continued, “I think there’s an opportunity for Democrats — if Democrats make this election about anything except what’s happening in our schools, and what’s happening, sort of, these mass shootings, and a woman’s right to take care of her body.”

When your traditional plays are failing to score points — whether it’s on the economy, immigration, or the legislative effort formerly known as “Build Back Better” — it’s time to draw up some new plays.   

And speaking of new plays and “the angry mom,” check out this new ad by Democrat Stacey Abrams in Georgia’s gubernatorial race. 

“For years, Brian Kemp has taken Georgia backwards. He put us backwards on guns and law enforcement — and made it easier for criminals to carry guns in public. He rolled back women’s rights, vowing to make abortion a crime with 10 years in prison,” the Abrams ad goes. 

Maybe some of those resistance groups can be mobilized? I don’t know. It seems like it’s getting pretty late. Still, with guns and abortion going to the top of the list maybe it will just happen spontaneously. I hope so.

A recent memo surfaced laying out the plan in full

More ridiculous maneuverings exposed:

One of the still-murky aspects of Jan. 6 and its preparation has to do with the effort to pressure Mike Pence into unilaterally throwing out elector slates from states that Trump lost.

A newly released memo, unveiled by the Jan. 6 Committee last week in a lawsuit against John Eastman, adds more detail to what Trump’s legal team had in mind for Pence.

The memo comes in the form of a Dec. 13, 2020 email — flagged by Politico — from attorney Kenneth Chesebro to Rudy Giuliani.

Chesebro told Giuliani in the message that he was sending “some quick notes on strategy” along after he had lost a more extensive memo “due to a reboot on the hotel computer.”

What follows is a multi-page plan for how Pence was to conduct himself before Jan. 6 and on the day of, and what the consequences of the plan for Pence may have been. Even if the effort failed to install Trump for a second term, Chesebro wrote, “much will still have been accomplished in riveting public attention on election abuses, and building momentum to prevent similar abuses in the future.”

Chesebro, an appellate attorney with a Harvard Law pedigree, reportedly joined the Trump legal team in November 2020, after sending memos to attorneys working to subvert the election which advocated for the use of “alternate electors.”

Per the plan, swing states that Biden won were supposed to submit pro-Trump electors — a key part of a broader plan to subvert the election results by presenting Pence on Jan. 6 with a supposed choice between competing interpretations of who swing states selected for president.

By submitting those alternate slates of electors, Chesebro wrote, states would give whoever was in charge of the process the authority not only to “open” and “count” the electoral votes, but to “mak[e] judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.”

From there, key Senate Republicans were supposed to hold high-profile hearings from Jan. 3 to Jan. 5 about allegations of “widespread violations of law” in the election. Chesebro referenced one hearing scheduled by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during that week.

On Jan. 6 itself, Pence was to immediately announce that, as a candidate running for office, he had a “conflict of interest” and thereby recuse himself from counting the votes. The responsibility for counting the votes would then fall to the president pro tempore of the Senate — at that time, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

The fantasy would then go like this, Chesebro wrote:

“He then opens the two envelopes from Arizona, and announced that he cannot and will not, at least as of that date, count any electoral votes from Arizona because there are two slates of votes, and it is clear that the Arizona courts did not give a full and fair opportunity for review of election irregularities, in violation of due process.”

The same process would play out for other contested swing states that Trump lost.

Grassley, on Jan. 5, briefly stoked confusion by announcing that he, and not Pence, would count the Electoral College votes in the election. It’s not clear if that episode was related to Chesebro’s plan.

Chesebro is ambiguous on what would happen after Jan. 6. He recognized in the memo that the plan would stoke chaos, writing that the Supreme Court would likely need to find a way to “bring an end to a huge political crisis.” Chesebro is silent on who created that “huge political crisis,” but dresses up much of the argument in appeals to constitutional originalism, asserting that this is all in line with the Framer’s intent and, specifically, their “emphasis on honorable behavior and circumspection.”

But apart from recognizing that the Supreme Court would likely have to step in to resolve the ensuing crisis, Chesebro wrote that any outcome would essentially be acceptable.

“In terms of Republicans having leverage on Jan. 6 to force closer reexamination of what happened in this election, a defensible interpretation may be all that’s needed, because the Supreme Court might decline to reverse, based on the ‘political question’ doctrine, and even if did reverse, that would come only after a number of additional days of delay which itself would ensure closer attention to the voluminous evidence of electoral abuses,” he wrote.

First, there was no voluminous evidence of electoral abuses. I don’t know if this Harvard educated appellate lawyer is brain damaged, delusional or just a conniving liar (I lean toward the latter) but that unequivocal fact was true then and remains true now.

They anticipated a “huge political crisis” but were counting on the Supreme Court to rule in their favor. Sure the opposition would take to the streets, there would have been protests and probably riots. But what then? Sadly, I suspect that the political establishment and the media would have settled fairly quickly into the reality of our new authoritarian government empowered by a coup because the US has the most powerful military in the world and the richest economy and everyone would decide that it was too risky to resist. We did a little dry run of this in 2000, after all. Would the left have taken up arms? How would they have resisted? I just can’t see it.

Maybe I’m wrong and just don’t have the imagination to see another outcome if they had succeeded. I hope so. Because I think there’s every possibility that they will try this again.

They said it was a proven witch hunt. But it was no such thing.

Follow up on the post below, here’s yet more proof that the hysterical right wing response to their Dear Leader being a corrupt dupe for foreign interests. Remember the “unmasking scandal?” Nunes’ “midnight ride”?

Well:

Among the many GOP efforts to counterprogram the Russia investigation with thinly constructed conspiracy theories, one of the most persistent ones was the so-called unmasking of Michael Flynn.

The idea was that Obama administration officials deliberately targeted Trump associates — and particularly Flynn — by requesting the disclosure of their names in intelligence reports before Trump took office, doing so for political purposes. This fed into long-running allegations of the government “spying” on Trump, who chose Flynn as his national security adviser.

We knew before that this theory had fallen apart. We now know just how spectacularly.

BuzzFeed News late Tuesday revealed a previously top-secret Justice Department report which details the findings of a review ordered by Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr. The report is a resounding rejection of the conspiracy theories, which were seeded and fertilized throughout Trump’s four years in office by Trump allies and GOP members of Congress.

Essentially, the idea was the Obama officials might have sought the identity of Flynn in intelligence detailing his December 2016 calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then leaked details for political purposes. (Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about these calls.) And there were valid questions early on about the Obama administration’s use of unmasking, as we wrote in 2017.

But the allegations almost always went beyond the known facts. And now the Justice Department report affirms the allegations went way beyond what actually happened, too.

In his newly revealed report from September 2020, then-U. S. Attorney John Bash found “no unmasking requests made before Election Day that sought the identity of an apparent associate of the Trump campaign.” He said much the same about the transition period between Election Day 2016 and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

“I … examined whether any senior officials had obtained General Flynn’s identity in connection with those communications through an unmasking request made during the transition period,” Bash wrote. “The answer is no.”

“According to the FBI, the Bureau did not disseminate an intelligence report discussing those communications and containing masked [U.S. person identity information] for General Flynn before President Trump’s inauguration,” Bash wrote. “For that reason, the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request.”

Bash said the FBI’s version “is consistent with my review of unmasking records, which did not reveal any unmasking request corresponding to a report discussing those communications.”

Bash’s big conclusion: “I have not found evidence that senior U.S. officials unmasked the identities of U.S. persons contained in intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 election period or the ensuing transition period.”

Flynn’s contact with Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Jan. 12, 2017. In the call, the two discussed sanctions, a discussion that might have run afoul of an unenforced federal law called the Logan Act. But later speaking to the FBI, Flynn denied having discussed sanctions. He pleaded guilty to that offense, but Barr’s DOJ later made the extraordinary decision to try to have the case dismissed, and a lame-duck Trump pardoned Flynn.

Bash’s report comes after we already knew his review had resulted in no criminal charges. The Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky and Shane Harris reported in October 2020 that the review had quietly concluded. Now we know it didn’t just come up shy of chargeable crimes; it also found virtually nothing to substantiate the various claims made by Trump and his allies.

And that’s pretty far afield from how this was often pitched on the right. Often, it wasn’t just “this seems fishy”; it was that “this is a proven scandal.”

Following Ignatius’s report, a Bloomberg News columnist reported in April 2017 that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice had requested unmaskings in intelligence reports related to Trump’s campaign and transition period. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declared it to be a “smoking gun” and claimed it amounted to “spying on Trump campaign.”

Smoking gun found! Obama pal and noted dissembler Susan Rice said to have been spying on Trump campaign.
https://t.co/SHJ41vhQu7

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 3, 2017

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board went so far as to declare that “Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.”

Rice didn’t do herself many favors by making some confusing comments about the matter. But even at the time, it was apparent that there were actually plenty of reasons for to believe this was business-as-usual for someone in her position.

The conspiracy theory simmered for a couple years, until Republican senators in the 2020 election year released a list of Obama administration officials who had allegedly requested Flynn’s unmasking — information that had been provided by then-Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist.

And again, plenty on the right, despite the dearth of any truly damning information, skipped right over any plausible alternative explanations for how Flynn’s name would’ve become known. They did so even as The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima broke the news that Flynn’s name had never been masked in the first place. They did so even as one of their own, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), asked why Grenell’s list conspicuously “did not contain a record showing who unmasked General Flynn’s identity for his phone call with Ambassador Kislyak.”

Conservative journalist John Solomon declared that a “crime is certain to have been committed.” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham wagered that such information had definitely been illegally leaked to the media. Paul again invoked the smoking gun: “We sort of have the smoking gun because we now have the declassified document with Joe Biden’s name on it.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) called it “bigger than Watergate.”

Bash’s report finds not only that there was no inappropriate unmasking, but also that the claims about all those Obama officials supposedly requesting unmaskings in Grenell’s report were badly overcooked.

“Most critically, all but one of the requests that listed a senior official as an authorized recipient of General Flynn’s identity were made by an intelligence professional to prepare for a briefing of the official, not at the direction of the official,” Bash wrote, adding: “Nothing about the content suggests that officials were seeking derogatory information about General Flynn or were otherwise inappropriately targeting him.”

So that’s that. A complete and total sham. It didn’t happen. They are lawyers. What else is new?

Durham’s flop gives the right wing a big sad

Donald Trump has made no secret of his deep and abiding belief in vengeance as a philosophical principle. From his earliest days as a celebrity businessman in New York, Trump has made it clear that if he believes someone has wronged him he must retaliate. In “Think Big,” his 2009 book of business advice, he spells it out:

 I love getting even when I get screwed by someone. … Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder. You do it not only to get the person who messed with you but also to show the others who are watching what will happen to them if they mess with you. If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.

After his former attorney general, Bill Barr, pompously mischaracterized Robert Mueller’s report as exonerating the president of any possible criminal behavior in the Russia probe, Trump and his toadies made it clear that they planned to do just that. For weeks they pushed their mantra that the Russia investigation had been a Deep State plot in collusion with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to smear Trump without a shred of evidence. Recall this famous Trump exhortation:

Trump no doubt believed that the FBI was out to get him because he believed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) was loyal to Obama and Clinton rather than him. That’s just how he thinks. And those around him who had been infected with various strains of Fox News brain rot also were convinced that Clinton had somehow been let off easy while the DOJ was relentlessly hounding Trump for no reason. It didn’t take long for Barr to assign the “oranges” investigation to the U.S. Attorney from Connecticut, John Durham, best known for organized crime cases and an investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program that ended in no accountability for those responsible.

That torture investigation began under Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who tasked Durham with looking into the destruction of CIA tapes of “interrogation” sessions. Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, then expanded Durham’s mandate to examine CIA torture allegations. The political establishment and the press saw that bipartisan trust as evidence of Durham’s integrity but that investigation was actually a cover-up, which was partially discovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee. They even made a movie about it.

After being appointed to look into the origins of the Russia probe Durham’s reputation for integrity unraveled within months when Durham (and Barr) decided to break DOJ protocol and contradict a new inspector general’s report finding that the FBI acted appropriately in opening the inquiry into whether the Trump campaign was involved in the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 election. The New York Times reported at the time that even Durham’s allies were surprised because “they found it out of character for him to intervene in such a high-profile way in an open case.” As the Times observed:

Mr. Durham’s decision to speak out seemed to supply political fuel to Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly blasted the Russia inquiry as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” 

In fact, that was the point of the investigation, which is still ongoing after three years. Durham’s probe has been political from the start, as much a partisan PR stunt as an investigation, with Barr finally appointing Durham as a Special Counsel on his way out the door to ensure that it would continue under the new administration. It’s really just a pathetic attempt to provide the Fox News audience with their own version of “it’s Mueller time” that so enthralled the Trump resistance in the early years of the administration.

Durham’s actual results are embarrassing. 

Aside from one lame guilty plea from an FBI agent who admitted to changing an email, the entire investigation has been pegged to the case he brought against an attorney who worked for a firm that was employed by the Clinton campaign named Michael Sussman. Durham had been hinting broadly in all the court filings for the last six months that he had the goods to prove that Clinton was behind the Russia investigation. (Talk about red meat for the slavering Fox fans!) At one point he even seemed to suggest that Clinton had somehow spied on the Trump White House which was ridiculous on its face and proven to be untrue, needless to say. But it kept the right-wing fever swamp beside themselves with excitement for months Durham was promising that Trump’s revenge would be very sweet indeed. Not only would the Russia investigation’s origins be shown to have been wrongly predicated, they might just get to “lock her up” at long last.

But two weeks ago the trial against Michael Sussman began and it was clear from the start that Durham had wildly over-promised.

The prosecution’s case rested on the single charge that Sussman lied to the FBI when he brought them a tip and said he was not representing the Clinton campaign. They did not come close to proving that, and as it unfolded it was obvious that the whole thing was silly in any case since the FBI had already been looking into the matter at the time. On Tuesday, Sussman was acquitted after a short jury deliberation.

Naturally, the inevitable collective primal scream from the sore-loser right was deafening. Trump took to his Truth Social account and wailed:

Our Legal System is CORRUPT, our Judges (and Justices!) are highly partisan, compromised or just plain scared, our Borders are OPEN, our Elections are Rigged, Inflation is RAMPANT, gas prices and food costs are “through the roof,” our Military “Leadership” Woke, our Country is going to HELL and Michael Sussman is not guilty. How’s everything else doing? Enjoy your day!!!

His defenders were no less hysterical:

It is an existential threat to justice and the rule of law in America that trials of national political import are held in a city whose partisan juries will jail any innocent Republican and free any guilty Democrat.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 31, 2022

Fox News really running with the crooked biased jury as the reason John Durham didn't get a guilty verdict.

Kayleigh McEnany: "Prosecutors were frustrated that they would not get a fair shake here. I think this does raise questions on how fair a shake you will be given in DC…" pic.twitter.com/hgITof947A

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 31, 2022

They should all buck up. John Durham isn’t through yet. He may never be through. His investigation has already gone on a year longer than Mueller and there’s no indication that he plans to quit. And there’s no indication that Attorney General Merrick Garland is prepared to get rid of him for cause. He’s got one more case coming up in the fall against a researcher who is also accused of lying to the FBI about something arcane and irrelevant. And this one concerns the infamous Steele Dossier! I can hear the champagne bottles prematurely popping already. 

Salon