Month: December 2022

“Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please.”

Your daily reminder that while Earth’s climate slides toward apocalypse, human society leans more dystopian (NBC New York):

Kelly Conlon and her daughter came to New York City the weekend after Thanksgiving as part of a Girl Scout field trip to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas Spectacular show. But while her daughter, other members of the Girl Scout troop and their mothers got to go enjoy the show, Conlon wasn’t allowed to do so.

That’s because to Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Conlon isn’t just any mom. They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby.

“It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker,” she told NBC New York. “I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf.”

She said she was asked her name and to produce identification.

“I believe they said that our recognition picked you up,” Conlon said.

Yes, YOU! Step out of line, please. MSG’s facial recognition software protocols flagged Conlon as an enemy.

“They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there,” said Conlon.

Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.

In its statement on the incident, MSG explained that attorneys pursuing active litigation against the firm are precluded from attending its events at any of its venues until the litigation is resolved.

Conlon says she practices in New Jersey and is not involved in any MSG lawsuits. No matter. Her firm is. And Sam Davis is striking back by “challenging MSG’s license with the State Liquor Authority,” the report continues:

“The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat,” said Davis. “Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd. The fact they’re using facial recognition to do this is frightening. It’s un-American to do this.”

Yeah, good luck with that move against a multi-billion dollar New York corporation.

Just days ago, I remarked, “When people ask if I had any reaction to the vaccines, I say no, except for minor irritation from the microchip. If they still complain if you wear a mask in stores, look around furtively and start babbling about gummint surveillance and defeating facial recognition. Fight crazy with crazy.”

It seems less funny this morning.

Also, “the climate clock is ticking.”

(h/t Rude Pundit)

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

“Introduction” silent on Willard Hotel “war rooms”

“Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee” in its 150+ pages contains much the January 6th Committee has shown us before, much of it transcripts from the public hearings. But a few items jump out.

The headline new revelation from the final January 6th Committee meeting Monday was a clip from testimony by trusted aide Hope Hicks in which she revealed that President Donald Trump refused requests to issue a statement before the Jan’ 6 rally for his followers to remain peaceful:

Hope Hicks texted Trump Campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley in the midst of the January 6th violence, explaining that she had “suggested … several times” on the preceding days (January 4th and January 5th) that President Trump publicly state that January 6th must remain peaceful and that he had refused her advice to do so.^[405]  Her recollection was that  Herschmann earlier advised President Trump to make a preemptive public statement in advance of January 6th calling for no violence that day.^[406]  No such statement was made.

The Hicks testimony likely buttresses the Committee’s case that the Department of Justice consider bringing charges against Trump for inciting an insurrection. Conviction under such a charge would prohibit Trump from holding any office of trust in the United States.

Another highlight from the Introduction is the weapons the Secret Service confiscated at the magnetometers (“mags”) Trump famously wanted removed. He knew people in the crowd were armed, as aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in June:

When we were in the off-stage announce area tent behind the stage, he was very concerned about the shot.  Meaning the photograph that we would get because the rally space wasn’t full.  One of the reasons, which I’ve previously stated, was because he wanted it to be full and for people to not feel excluded because they had come far to watch him at the rally.  And he felt the mags were at fault for not letting everybody in, but another leading reason and likely the primary reasons is because he wanted it full and he was angry that we weren’t letting people through the mags with weapons—what the Secret Service deemed as weapons, and are, are weapons.  But when we were in the off-stage announce tent, I was a part of a conversation, I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the President say something to the effect of, “I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons.  They’re not here to hurt me.  Take the F’ing mags away.  Let my people in.  They can march to the Capitol from here.  Let the people in.  Take the F’ing mags away.”^[426]

Perhaps for the benefit of insurrection apologists who say the Jan. 6 rioters were not armed, the Introduction itemizes what the Secret Service did catch at the mags:

In addition to intelligence reports indicating potential violence at the Capitol, weapons and other prohibited items were being seized by police on the streets and by Secret Service at the magnetometers for the Ellipse speech.  Secret Service confiscated a haul of weapons from the 28,000 spectators who did pass through the magnetometers: 242 cannisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers.^[420]  And thousands of others purposely remained outside the magnetometers, or left their packs outside.^[421] 

Others brought firearms.  Three men in fatigues from Broward County, Florida brandished AR-15s in front of Metropolitan police officers on 14th Street and Independence Avenue on the morning of January 6th.^[422]  MPD advised over the radio that one individual was possibly armed with a “Glock” at 14th and Constitution Avenue, and another was possibly armed with a “rifle” at 15th and Constitution Avenue around 11:23 a.m.^[423]  The National Park Service detained an individual with a rifle between 12 and 1 p.m.^[424]  Almost all of this was known before Donald Trump took the stage at the Ellipse.

Note the use of “possibly” here. I hate it when Republicans use the word to modify “voter fraud” to imply “actually,” so will not let it go unmentioned here. Nonetheless.

Those confiscated weapons were just from the people willing to go through screening. Many others who remained outside the viewing area came prepared to assault the Capitol with a variety of manufactured and improvised weapons.

Another item of note is what is not in the Introduction. There is no mention of what went down at the Willard Hotel “war rooms.” Seth Abramson filed a string of reports on activities at two Willard “war rooms” shortly after Jan. 6 and into the summer of 2021. The Committee is fully aware of these events but makes no reference to them in the Introduction. A rogues’ gallery of potential suspects visited ahead of the riot on Jan. 6.

Perhaps we will learn more about the Willard when the full report posts on Wednesday.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Trump didn’t care for the criminal referral, not one bit. He’s very, very upset:

This is hilarious. First of all he hardly won convincingly even with the Senate filled with his henchmen. It was 57-43 to convict. Second, there is no “double jeopardy” with impeachment, Lol.

He continued:

Somebody needs to give him a bottle and put him to bed.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

In the J6 Committee executive summary they discuss that weird fi Trump had in the SUV when he tried to force the Secret Service to take him up to the Capitol:

Hutchinson testified that she first became aware of President Trump’s plans to attend Congress’s session to count votes on or about January 2nd. She learned this from a conversation with Giuliani:

“It’s going to be great. The President’s going to be there. He’s going to look powerful. He’s – he’s going to be with the members. He’s going to be with the Senators.”

Evidence also indicates that multiple members of the White House staff, including White House lawyers, were concerned about the President’s apparent intentions to go to the Capitol. After he exited the stage, President Trump entered the Presidential SUV and forcefully expressed his intention that Bobby Engel, the head of his Secret Service detail, direct the motorcade to the Capitol.

The Committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a “furious interaction” in the SUV. The vast majority of witnesses who have testified before the Select Committee about this topic, including multiple members of the Secret Service, a member of the Metropolitan police, and national security officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as “irate,” “furious,” “insistent,” “profane” and “heated.”

Hutchinson heard about the exchange second-hand and related what she heard in our June 28, 2022, hearing from Ornato (as did another witness, a White House employee with national security responsibilities, who shared that Ornato also recounted to him President Trump’s “irate” behavior in the Presidential vehicle.) Other members of the White House staff and Secret Service also heard about the exchange after the fact.

The White House employee with national security responsibilities gave this testimony:

Committee Staff: But it sounds like you recall some rumor or some discussion around the West Wing about the President’s anger about being told that he couldn’t go to the Capitol. Is that right?

Employee: So Mr. Ornato said that he was angry that he couldn’t go right away. In the days following that, I do remember, you know, again, hearing again how angry the President was when, you know, they were in the limo. But beyond specifics of that, that’s pretty much the extent of the cooler talk.

The Committee has regarded both Hutchinson and the corroborating testimony by the White House employee with national security responsibilities as earnest and has no reason to conclude that either had a reason to invent their accounts.

A Secret Service agent who worked on one of the details in the White House and was present in the Ellipse motorcade had this comment:

Committee Staff: Ms. Hutchinson has suggested to the committee that you sympathized with her after her testimony, and believed her account. Is that accurate?

Special Agent: I have no – yeah, that’s accurate. I have no reason – I mean, we – we became friends. We worked – I worked every day with her for 6 months. Yeah, she became a friend of mine. We had a good working relationship. I have no reason – she’s never done me wrong. She’s never lied that I know of.

The Committee regarded those facts as important because they are relevant to President Trump’s intent on January 6th. There is no question from all the evidence assembled that President Trump did have that intent.

As it became clear that Donald Trump desired to travel to the Capitol on January 6th, a White House Security Official in the White House complex became very concerned about his intentions:

To be completely honest, we were all in a state of shock. . . . it just – one, I think the actual physical feasibility of doing it, and then also we all knew what that implicated and what that meant, that this was no longer a rally, that this was going to move to something else if he physically walked to the Capitol. I – I don’t know if you want to use the word “insurrection,” “coup,” whatever. We all knew that this would move from a normal, democratic, you know, public event into something else.

President Trump continued to push to travel to the Capitol even after his return to the White House, despite knowing that a riot was underway. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, spoke with President Trump about his desire to go to the Capitol after he returned to the White House from the Ellipse. “So to the best of my recollection, I recall him being – wanting to – saying that he wanted to physically walk and be a part of the march and then saying that he would ride the Beast if he needed to, ride in the Presidential limo.”

Later in the afternoon, Mark Meadows relayed to Cassidy Hutchinson that President Trump was still upset that he would not be able to go to the Capitol that day. As he told Hutchinson, “the President wasn’t happy that Bobby [Engel] didn’t pull it off for him and that Mark didn’t work hard enough to get the movement on the books.”

I will never understand this. Did he plan to lead them through the doors to confront Nancy and Mitch? That seems to be what Rudy Giuliani indicated to Cassidy Hutchinson, anyway.

Seriously, I’ve never really grokked what he had in mind that day unless Giuliani, who may know about Mussolini’s historic march into Rome, convinced him that he could lead the crowd into the US Capitol and seize the day, supposedly proving to all the members that he had the power and they could not oppose him. It’s ridiculous , of course. But it’s the only scenario that explains what Trump was up to.

The Committee seems to believe that this reveals Trump’s intent but I honestly don’t know what that was. Yes, it’s clear that he really wanted to do it but I don’t think anyone has yet figured out what he thought it would accomplish other than, as Giuliani said, making him look “strong.” Really? Was he that delusional? If so, it was a dereliction of duty on the part of every single member of the cabinet and every single Republican not to invoke the 25th Amendment on January 7th and get that lunatic out of the White House as soon as possible.

Instead, 147 Republicans in congress objected to the electoral college vote on the night of January 6th — after the insurrection. Every last one of them should have been kicked out of office as well. Sadly, we are now accepting that only the most irrational election deniers like Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano are beyond the pale. The rest of these people are still wandering the halls of congress as if what they did was just vote for another highway bill.

In fact, one of those who voted to overturn the election is probably going to be the next Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency. Moreover, it’s almost certain that the next GOP nominee will be an election denier at least to some degree. The whole party is infected with that poison and I don’t know if they will ever be able to purge it from their body politic.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Yesterday, at some point while Elon Musk was flying around the world to hobnob with his bud Jared Kushner at the World Cup, he seemed to have second thoughts about his twitter lunacy. He pulled back some of the authoritarian edicts he’d issued earlier in the week and put up a poll asking if he should step down from CEO, which he promised to adhere to. He lost, but we don’t know why he did it in the first place.

This piece by William Cohan in Puck probably explains it:

Elon Musk just sold another chunk of Tesla stock, presumably to strengthen his position at Twitter. This is already a problem for Tesla shareholders, a big problem. Tesla stock is down a whopping 62 percent so far in 2022. So basically ever since Elon started his campaign for Twitter, which began in January with his first quiet purchases of Twitter stock, Tesla shareholders have been huge losers, even as Twitter’s shareholders, aside from Elon and those that rolled their Twitter stock into Elon’s private Twitter, such as Jack Dorsey and Prince Alwaleed, have been the big winners. Essentially Elon has transferred a bunch of his personal wealth via Tesla shareholders to many of the Twitter shareholders, or at least those who decided to take his generous offer of $54.20 in cash. 

To make matters worse, Elon keeps selling Tesla stock—even after he said he wouldn’t sell anymore stock (does this kind of thing interest the S.E.C.?)—presumably to get enough cash to either make the $600 million interest payment to the Twitter banks in April 2023 or to have the $6.5 billion in cash he would need to pay the Twitter banks out at 50 cents on the dollar. Regardless, not only has Twitter become an operational and financial disaster, Elon has managed to drag Tesla and the Tesla shareholders into the Twitter debacle as well, if for no other reason than it’s just not a good fact pattern when the C.E.O. and largest shareholder keeps selling stock even after he says he won’t sell any more stock. 

Some Tesla shareholders are already making clear their desire for Elon to return his focus back to Tesla, and give up his obsession with Twitter. And one other point, Elon seems to be asking investors in Twitter to pony up more equity for Twitter at the original purchase of $54.20 a share. Considering that the equity of Elon’s Twitter is probably zero at this point, or close to it, do I really need to say how insane it would be for those shareholders to pony up more money for this travesty of a deal? Does Elon really think anyone will sign up to put more money in this deal at the original price? My mind is blown.

What’s going on at both Tesla and Twitter shows explicitly the dangers of an absolute monarchy and what happens when corporate governance goes out the window. Neither company seems to have any independent leadership at either the management or the board levels; it’s all the Elon Musk show and it’s not a hit. It’s an unmitigated disaster if you ask me. When we are supposed to be living in an age where ESG is all the rage on Wall Street and in boardrooms, the governance snafus at both Tesla and Twitter prove definitely that we’re not, and that something is very wrong in situations like Tesla, Twitter, Snap (down 82 percent this year) and Meta (down 64 percent year-to-date), where one person controls the fate of tens of thousands of others, without any carburetor on their behavior. If I were a shareholder of Twitter, Tesla, Snap or Meta, I’d be mighty pissed right now.

There is some talk that he got some angry whispers in his ear on his little visit to the middle east from some of his Saudi twitter investors but we don’t know that. The Tesla stuff is informed speculation that I think is probably correct. The shareholders aren’t going to sit still for his hijinks forever.

He hasn’t commented on the poll today. He’s released a bunch more “twitter files” gobbldygook which has the wingnuts all aflutter about the CIA, Big Media and Big Tech conspiring to keep their hero Donald Trump out of the White House by suppressing Nazis, Russians and Hunter’s dick. Yeah, whatever. (Note that Musk hanging out with Trump’s son-in-law and a bunch of Saudi big shots doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.)

I think Musk actually may be realizing that his massive fortune could be at stake here. We just watched FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried go down hard so it can happen. He may just decide he needs to mind the real store and put someone who has some experience with this particular field to run twitter. We’ll see.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

There was some news made at this one too:

The NY Times:

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and what led up to it revealed recorded testimony from two witnesses interviewed in the late stages of the committee’s work, both of them close advisers to President Donald J. Trump who described conversations with him before and after Jan. 6.

Hope Hicks, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump in two different stints of his presidency as well as in his 2016 campaign, recalled her growing concern after the November 2020 election that “we were damaging his legacy.”

She raised this with Mr. Trump, who, she said then told her “something along the lines of, you know, nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.”

At another point, the committee asked her about a text exchange in which she told a colleague that Mr. Trump had refused to issue a statement urging people against violence in the lead-up to Jan. 6.

She said that she had raised it with another top adviser, Eric Herschmann, who said that he had made the same recommendation directly to the president and that Mr. Trump had again refused to warn against violence. A person with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be named to avoid publicly contradicting Ms. Hicks said that the timing of their discussion was not the lead-up to the riot but the day it was taking place, and that Mr. Herschmann had been referencing his efforts to get Mr. Trump to disavow the violence.

At another point, the committee played testimony of former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who described telling Mr. Trump that Jan. 6 was a “terrible day.”

She recalled him responding, “No. People are upset. They are very upset.”

Of course he was egging them on. He did it in public when he tweeted out that Pence had betrayed the country even as the thugs were trashing the Capitol.

This was the whole reason for the meeting:

The Committee released the 154 page Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee. You can read it here.

The 1,000 page full report is expected on Wednesday. Stay tuned.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

*scroll down for newer posts

Happy Hanukkah everybody. This is one of those years when Christmas and Hanukkah are at the same time and it couldn’t be better timing. We are living through a scary resurgence of antisemitism in America and I think we all need to think about how that can happen in 2022.

I guess we shouldn’t be too shocked, considering history. But I truly thought that the horrors of WW2 had finally shaken the mass consciousness of the world on this one and human kind had more or less moved past it. It certainly had not been prevalent in my lifetime but here we are again, dealing with crude antisemitism every day. Of course, this is just the latest horror in the right’s open re-embrace of crude xenophobia,racism and homophobia.

The events of the past few years in this regard have truly been shocking, especially when combined with our fetish for guns and a resurgent violent right wing. As some of us predicted, this is what Trump meant when he said he wanted to make America great again.

I wish I could say that I thought this was a passing paroxysm simply caused by the stresses of the pandemic and Trump’s chaotic reign. Sadly, I don’t. This is a global movement and it’s been gaining steam. We must pay attention.

We were on to this development pretty early, posting frequently about the radicalization of the right wing and the danger it presents to the country and the world. I wish I could say it’s gotten better over the two decades I’ve been covering it but I can’t. It’s maturing and I’m very worried that if it isn’t driven back now, we may find ourselves in a very bad place before long.

Having said all that, I’m encouraged that the center and the left have not been asleep at the wheel and seem to be more engaged than I’ve seen them in many moons. Just today we are seeing the January 6th Committee presenting its final report, pushing hard to hold Trump and his cronies accountable, something I would not have bet would happen a few years back. (I used to call them the “don’t make trouble” caucus after a classic old Yiddish joke.) Instead they have embraced the “good trouble” creed of the late John Lewis lately. That is what’s needed now, more than ever.

Anyway, this should be a happy time for all of us, secular and religious alike. I hope you will all have the opportunity to take a breath and rest for a bit even as the political world remains in turmoil and flux. We will be here following the story as usual because that’s what we do, day in and day out.

If you’d like to help us keep the lights on here at Hullabaloo as we document these very interesting times, we’d be most appreciative. You can do so using the address on the left sidebar or the buttons below.

And thank you very much for your support. It means the world, it really does.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

It’s not good news but he couldn’t be happier

Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he’s rapidly turning into a sad and pathetic figure. According to this report in the Washington Post, the former president tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver “affirmations” and cheer him up. One former adviser characterized his new life as sad, saying he wanted to replicate the grandeur of the White House but it’s more like “a Barbie Dream House miniature.” Ouch.

This is not a picture of someone gearing up for an arduous presidential campaign. It’s a picture of an old man trying to grapple with the fact that he’s retired and doesn’t have much of a purpose anymore.

To say that his campaign rollout has been a disaster is an understatement. In fact, it hasn’t been a rollout at all. There have been no campaign appearances or rallies, no speeches, no interviews, no book tour — none of the things you’d expect any declared candidate to do in the early phases of the campaign. Last week, Trump teased a “big announcement” that turned out to be another one of his tawdry grifts, selling NFT trading cards. As far as we can tell, he’s just been playing golf and showing up in the dining room each night to receive obligatory applause from his paying guests.

This is not someone gearing up for an arduous presidential campaign. It’s more like a retired guy who plays a lot of golf, trying to grapple with the fact that he doesn’t have much of a purpose anymore.

To say that his campaign rollout has been a disaster is an understatement. In fact, it hasn’t been a rollout at all. There have been no campaign appearances or rallies, no speeches, no interviews, no book tour — none of the things you’d expect any declared candidate to do in the early phases of the campaign. Last week, Trump teased a “big announcement” that turned out to be another one of his tawdry grifts, selling NFT trading cards. As far as we can tell, he’s just been playing golf and showing up in the dining room each night to receive obligatory applause from his paying guests.

Meanwhile, there’s a new circus ringmaster in town: Elon Musk, the second richest man in the world, who’s been sucking up all the outrage oxygen by banning people left and right (but mostly left) from Twitter in the name of free speech. The right-wingers are very excited — or at least they were before Musk ran one of his patented “polls” asking whether he should step down as Twitter boss, and a clear majority of users voted yes. While Musk is jetting off to Qatar to watch Sunday’s World Cup final with Jared Kushner and some Saudi pals, Trump is yelling at the clouds and nobody even notices.

But I’ve learned never to count Donald Trump out. When it comes to getting attention, he has a special set of skills. He may be a bit rusty but he’s about to get a big boost without having to lift a finger. On Monday, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection will hold its last hearing before the Republicans take over next month and dissolve the entire operation. Members are reportedly preparing to refer former Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. So he’s been ranting all weekend on his tiny social media platform:

They say that the Unselect Committee of Democrats, Misfits, and Thugs, without any representation from Republicans in good standing, is getting ready to recommend Criminal Charges to the highly partisan, political, and Corrupt ‘Justice’ Department for the “PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICLY” speech I made on January 6th.This speech and my actions were mild & loving, especially when compared to Democrats wild spewing of HATE. Why didn’t they investigate massive Election Fraud or send in the Troops? SCAM!

That particular tantrum was in response to news reports on Saturday that the panel will vote to refer charges for Trump for violating “18 U.S.C. 2383, insurrection; 18 U.S.C. 1512(c), obstruction of an official proceeding; and 18 U.S.C. 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States government.” Just as Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, he will be the first ex-president ever to be referred for criminal conduct by the Congress. What a legacy.

The Justice Department has no obligation to do anything with the coming referral, but is already conducting its own investigation, now led by special counsel Jack Smith, whose team will no doubt be very anxious to see the report and all its underlying evidence, which the committee plans to release by Wednesday. You never know what they might have turned up that the DOJ doesn’t know about.

Trump is lashing out to get attention from his followers as much as anything else. He knows that portraying himself as the victim of government persecution usually provokes sympathy from the right-wing media and some quick cash in the campaign coffers. I think he’s still convinced that the government will never actually indict him — and he may be right. Right now, however, he needs to be back in the spotlight — and in that respect, this criminal referral is just what the doctor ordered.

His cronies may not be so lucky. The committee is said to be contemplating referring several GOP members of Congress who were involved in the attempted coup plot to the House Ethics Committee and some of Trump’s lawyers may be referred to various bar associations. Quite a few of these people are also under investigation by the Justice Department.

Trump’s just getting started, however. After he Supreme Court finally cleared the way for the House Ways and Means Committee to obtain Trump’s tax returns, members finally have them. According to the New York Times, that committee will meet on Tuesday for a closed-door discussion on what to do with them, and let us fervently hope its members vote to release them to the public. Every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns and since Trump is still the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, this is likely the only chance the public will ever get to see them.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that his “GREAT COMPANY” has great assets and little debt but is “very strong on deductions and depreciation” promising that we will “see these numbers very soon but not all from the tax returns which show very little.” Have any of his supporters asked themselves why he took the case all the way to the Supreme Court twice to stop Congress from seeing his tax returns if he had nothing to hide?

Axios reports that Trump’s Republican henchmen in the House are plotting to release their own rebuttal report from the “shadow” Jan. 6 committee, which has never done anything until now. It consists of the five Republican members who voted to overturn the election on Jan. 6, whom Speaker Nancy Pelosi later refused to seat on the real committee. This pseudo-panel is led by Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who says the report will “focus on security failures” which they claim the select committee didn’t bother to investigate. (In fact, it did, and those findings will be included in the final report.)

It may seem astonishing that Donald Trump could actually benefit from all these political, legal and financial troubles bearing down on him all at once, but that’s how it is. He badly needs a reboot of his campaign rollout and this is exactly the sort of boost that could get the media talking about him again and get his followers re-engaged. For him it’s always been about attention, and he’s never much cared what kind. So what if he’s the first former president in U.S. history to be referred for possible federal prosecution? That just makes him even more special than he already is! Perversely enough, this could be the start of Trump’s latest comeback. 

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Born a slave, not a person

Some of our fellow citizens would rather schoolchildren celebrate U.S. successes in their American history and shun learning from our mistakes. That’s the impression left by the GOP’s contrived controversy over critical race theory that, post election, seems less a controversy du jour.

Dahlia Lithwick includes in her Slate offering this morning extracts from a recent speech given by Judge Robert L. Wilkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The occasion was the unveiling ceremony for the judge’s portrait in October.

“What struck me most about Wilkins’ speech,” Lithwick writes, “was that he used it to detail a sometimes submerged narrative about the complicated meaning of freedom: He told the story of his own family’s long journey through U.S. constitutional history, a very different encounter with the Framers’ ideas about freedom and justice.”

Wilkins’ genealogy traced back multiple generations to sometime around 1810 when his great-great-great-great grandmother, Edie Saulsbury, was born during the presidency of James Madison, “considered by many the father of our Constitution.” Edie was born a slave, “and thus was not even considered a ‘person’ within the meaning of Madison’s Constitution.”

Lithwick publishes some of his reflections on how the Constitution impacted their lives:

My maternal grandmother, Marcella Hayes, was with us during my investiture to become a District Court Judge. She has now gone on to glory. She was a documenter of our family history, and I inherited that habit from her. Inspired by my Grannyma, I have traced the maternal side of my family back six generations, to my great-great-great-great grandmother, Edie Saulsbury. Edie was born sometime around 1810, when James Madison, considered by many the father of our Constitution, was President of these United States. She was born into slavery, and thus was not even considered a “person” within the meaning of Madison’s Constitution. She was impregnated by a white man at the tender age of 16, where the legal system did not even define the rape of a Black woman by a white man as a crime, did not allow a Black person to testify in court against the white person anyway, and made it a crime punishable by 30 lashes on the bare back for a Black person to raise a hand against a white person, even to defend oneself from being ravished. Edie gave birth to that child, a boy named Alexander, who would endure a life of slavery. She would later give birth to 12 more children, conceived with my fourth great grandfather, a man named David, who was enslaved and belonged to a neighboring family.

My father, John Wilkins, passed away almost 40 years ago. But he is here through me and my brother Larry, and through my many cousins and other relatives on the Wilkins side here today. I have also been able to trace my paternal side back six generations. My paternal grandfather’s name was Rev. George R. Wilkins. His maternal grandfather, my great-great grandfather, was named George Richardson. George Richardson was born in 1848, and, when asked, during the 1900 census, he reported to the census taker that he was born in South Carolina, his mother was born in South Carolina, but that his father was born “at sea.” Think about that: The most plausible explanation for this series of events is that George Richardson’s father, my great- great-great grandfather, was born aboard a slave ship. That would also mean that—six generations back—my fourth great grandmother delivered my third great grandfather in the filthy bowels of a slave vessel. I have not yet been able to determine my fourth great grandmother‘s name, but for the moment, let’s call her Nancy. George Richardson named one of his daughters Nancy, so perhaps he did so in honor of his grandma.

Consider for a moment the circumstances under which those two of my fourth-great grandmothers, Edie and Nancy, lived and brought children into this world. Circumstances of kidnapping, coercion, abuse and despair. And all that vile treatment was absolutely legal. All of it was condoned and facilitated by Madison’s Constitution.

A lasting irony then is that many among the federal judiciary today view “how Madison and the other founding fathers interpreted the meaning of the words in our Constitution as infallible,” Wilkins observes:

Those founding fathers drafted a Constitution that denied the humanity of Edie and Nancy; it didn’t even consider them to be “persons”, and you want to tell me that the only way to properly interpret the Constitution is to endorse and adopt their value system without question? That might honor Madison, but it dishonors Edie and Nancy. I cannot stand for that; but more importantly, no one should.

Yet many on the highest court in the land firmly and proudly stand on it.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.

Nothing will be settled this week

ICYMI: “The Select Committee will hold a business meeting on Monday, December 19th at 1:00pm.”

What the January 6th Committee does later today will not settle anything. Whether the rule of law still pertains in this country (if ever it did) or survives as an even more hollowed-out, two-tiered mockery of justice still hangs in the balance.

Associated Press:

The House Jan. 6 committee is wrapping up its investigation of the violent 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection, with lawmakers expected to cap one of the most exhaustive and aggressive congressional probes in memory with an extraordinary recommendation: The Justice Department should consider criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

At a final meeting on Monday, the panel’s seven Democrats and two Republicans are poised to recommend criminal charges against Trump and potentially against associates and staff who helped him launch a multifaceted pressure campaign to try to overturn the 2020 election.

While a criminal referral is mostly symbolic, with the Justice Department ultimately deciding whether to prosecute Trump or others, it is a decisive end to a probe that had an almost singular focus from the start.

To wit, a failed coup by plotters inside the White House and in Congress, backed by outside Republican operatives and by thousands of rioting MAGA foot soldiers, QAnon fanatics, and organized militia.

The committee’s final report is due Wednesday and is expected to be roughly 1,000 pages.

Trump’s defenders will not be idol idle, writes Heather Cox Richardson. They plan to issue their own counter-report to deflect attention from the committee’s conclusions. Theirs will claim the January 6th Committee “never dealt with the serious issues” of security lapses. “The committee report is expected to discuss security failures,” Richardson writes:

One of the authors of this Republican “shadow” report is Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), himself implicated in the attempt to overturn the election. Another is Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), whom Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) called out in October 2021 for falsely representing himself as the ranking member of the actual January 6th committee.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned the January 6th committee to preserve all its materials. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) seemed unimpressed. Not only does the committee have to preserve all its materials by law, but it intends to make its material available to the public. “He’s the public. If he wants access to it, all he has to do is go online and he’ll have it,” he told [Axios reporter Andrew] Solender.

The Cold War was metaphor for the West’s standoff against Communism in the 20th century. In this second Gilded Age, a second Cold War settles in like Ukrainian defenders against Russian invaders for a harsh winter. Supporters of democratic governance face a long struggle against oligarchs and would-be autocrats who would use fantastic wealth and reactionary populism to drive this nation towards, if not open fascism, a mockery of its once lofty ideals.

It seems clear now that oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel finance Republicans in the short term not simply for tax cuts, subsidies, and deregulation. They share a common enemy: democracy itself. They mean to rule.

Today’s events on Capitol Hill are just another skirmish.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” New York Young Republican Club’s (NYYRC) president Gavin Wax told supporters at its annual gala in Manhattan on Dec. 10.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House official and Donald Trump Jr. attended:

Republicans publicly lauded members in attendance from an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

This is going to be a long, cold war.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.