Month: August 2023

This piece in the Bulwark takes a look at the two main defenses that Trump’s lawyers are likely to employ when it comes to a trial. (If it comes to a trial.) I don'[t know if this is correct but it’s interesting. I suppose we are all going to get an education in conspiracy law before this is over:

Broken down into their component parts, the conspiracy counts allege that Trump and his co-conspirators

-used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislatures and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results;

-organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states to create the illusion that the election results were disputed in those states;

-attempted to use the power of the Department of Justice to conduct sham election-crime investigations and to inform certain state legislatures, falsely, that the DOJ had identified significant concerns about fraudulent activity that may have impacted the result of the election when, in fact, the DOJ had reached exactly the opposite conclusion;

-attempted to enlist the vice president to use his ceremonial role at the January 6, 2021 congressional certification proceedings to fraudulently alter the election results; and

-exploited a large, angry mob whom they had deceived into believing that the vice president could change the election results in order to obstruct and delay the certification of the election results.

It is crucial to understanding the indictment to observe that Smith has not charged Trump with separate criminal violations for each—or any—of the individual component parts listed above. He could have. For instance, the fake-electors scheme alone implicated a host of state and federal criminal statutes that could have been charged assuming, as the indictment strongly suggests, that Trump can be credibly linked to them.

But Smith went a different route. Rather than charging Trump with discrete crimes for specific acts, he charged Trump with broader conspiracies, using the specific acts as evidence of and support for the larger conspiracy charges.

Smith’s strategy makes sense. Since entering into a criminal conspiracy is by itself sufficient to support a criminal charge, the object of the conspiracy doesn’t have to be achieved.

That will shape the entire prosecution. For instance, while Trump attempted to coerce state legislatures to reverse the results of the election, he failed to convince them to do so. Similarly, he tried—but failed—to get the DOJ to send a letter to the states falsely claiming that it had determined that there had been significant election fraud. And Trump’s attempt to get Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his constitutional authority on January 6th also failed.

Fecklessness all around—yet all of these failures will be damning evidence against Trump at his trial on the conspiracy charges. It’s not so much what he accomplished (not much, unless you count undermining about half the nation’s belief in democracy). It’s more about what he tried to do. “But we couldn’t break into the vault” isn’t going to be much of a defense when you get caught robbing a bank.

THE NATURE OF SMITH’S CHARGES will also shape Trump’s defenses. Most of the political arguments made by Trump’s supporters in response to the indictment are just that: political, not legal, defenses. The claim that the indictment was designed to distract from “ongoing legal troubles” of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, for instance, may have ramifications for the 2024 presidential election, but it won’t mean anything in a criminal trial. The case will rise or fall on its merits, and Hunter Biden will have no role in it.

But Trump’s two stock legal defenses—that he sincerely believed he had won the 2020 election and that he relied on the advice of counsel in his post-election activities—will be very much in play.

Let’s take a look at how each of those defenses is likely to play out in court…

Convincing at least one juror that Trump sincerely believed he won the 2020 election could gain him some sympathy if the juror were already inclined to view him favorably and might even have won the day, at least partially, if each of the components of Smith’s conspiracy counts had been charged as standalone crimes. For instance, Trump’s attempts to convince state officials and legislators to revisit the election results in their respective states could be seen as an attempt to right a wrong, not to commit one, if Trump could convince jurors that he sincerely believed that there were substantial, outcome-determinative fraudulent votes to be found.

But Trump’s attempts to strong-arm state officials are not charged as standalone crimes. Rather, they are presented as examples of what lawyers refer to as “overt acts” taken by Trump and others in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the government. They are used to demonstrate that a conspiratorial agreement has advanced from mere talk to action, not to show that the conspirators committed additional crimes above and beyond the conspiracy itself.

Think, for instance, of a conspiracy to kidnap and hold a person for ransom. In furtherance of the scheme, the conspirators locate and rent a safe house, stock up to hold the hostage for a protracted period of time, buy ski masks, restraints and a telephone voice changer, and carefully observe the comings and goings in the target area. Not one of these acts taken in furtherance of the conspiracy is, standing alone, a crime. But individually and taken together, those overt acts are powerful evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

So it is with Trump. If he could convince a jury that he truly believed he had won the election, some of the overt acts alleged against him, standing alone, might look less sinister. But those acts do not stand alone. Rather, they are powerful evidence of the criminal conspiracy alleged in the indictment.

And while some of the overt acts alleged against Trump might look less damning if Trump could show he truly believed he won the election, others would not. Even a sincere, deeply held belief that the election had been stolen would not, for instance, give Trump license to participate in a fake-electors scheme. As I wrote over a year ago, none of Trump’s standard defenses can excuse this piece of dirty work. Trump can’t claim he didn’t know about it, and he can’t claim that forging election certificates and then attempting to pawn them off as official documents is just fine as long as you believe you won an election.

Think of it this way. You may be absolutely convinced that a charge on your credit card isn’t yours, but you can’t hack into the bank’s server to remove it. You may know with all your heart that your neighbor took your Rolex, but you can’t break into his house in the middle of the night to retrieve it (just ask O.J. Simpson about that one). You may hold it as an article of near-religious faith that the government is tyrannical, but you can’t blow up the federal building.

Believing you have a legitimate gripe—even if you’re right about it—doesn’t give you license to commit crimes. As the indictment concedes, Trump had a right, “like every American,” to speak publicly about the election “and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.”

But he didn’t have the right to attempt to redress that supposed grievance by defrauding the government and attempting to obstruct one of our democracy’s most sacred official proceedings.

TO SEE WHY TRUMP’S OTHER MAINSTAY DEFENSE—claiming he relied on the advice of counsel—won’t work this time around, ask yourself this: What legal advice did Trump supposedly rely upon, and from whom did he receive it?

There are only two potential areas of legal advice that could be advanced on Trump’s behalf in any meaningful sense: (1) that there was a level of fraud in the election that determined its outcome; and (2) that the vice president had the constitutional authority to reject the certified election results and throw the election to state legislatures who could overturn it in Trump’s favor.

How is Trump to convince a jury that he relied on such legal advice? If Trump doesn’t testify—which seems near-certain—who will supply the evidence of this? The attorneys on whom he might claim to have relied—Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell—are unlikely to testify because they are either named or unnamed co-conspirators with potential criminal liability of their own. If any of them do testify, they risk being exposed as liars and frauds who can be torn to shreds on the witness stand.

The attorneys who will testify, on the other hand, are credible professionals—many of whom, like Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone, were appointed by Trump himself—who will establish that Trump did not rely on the advice of counsel. Based on what they told the House January 6th Committee, we know they will testify that they advised Trump that they had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, and that the vice president did not have constitutional authority to reject singlehandedly the slates of electors that had been officially certified.

Trump didn’t rely on the advice of counsel, he rejected it. He then went and sought out a cohort of kooks and shameless conspiracy nuts who would say whatever he wanted to hear. That’s not reliance on the advice of counsel, that’s the opposite: that’s the client advising the lawyer of what he wants to hear.

Even so, suppose for a moment that Trump could convince a juror or two that he actually had relied on the advice of counsel. That still wouldn’t excuse the “use of deceit to get state officials to subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes,” the use of “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to “organize fraudulent states of electors and cause them to transmit false certificates to Congress,” the “attempt to leverage the Justice Department to use deceit to get state officials to replace legitimate electors and electoral votes with [Trump’s],” or the “exploitation of the violence and chaos at the Capitol” on January 6th—all as alleged in the indictment.

TRUMP AND HIS ATTORNEYS obviously know that neither a supposedly sincere belief that the election was stolen nor the claim that he relied on the advice of counsel will be an effective defense if it comes down to a criminal trial.

Trump’s ultimate defense will have nothing to do with the facts, the law or the judicial system.

It will revolve around only one thing: getting re-elected so that Trump can either pardon himself or, more likely, rely on a carefully chosen attorney general to drop the charges.

They will do everything in their power to delay the trial until after the election. It’s his best play. And I will not be surprised if he succeeds. So regardless of what happens with the trial, the most important thing is to ensure he does not become president again. Indeed, that it’s even possible at this point is jarring and disorienting.

The fact that Republican voters are eager to do that proves that it’s a cult. It ‘s not as if they don’t have other people who could do the job. There is a boatload of challengers and others who would run if he wasn’t in the race. This loyalty to him and his lies has nothing to do with politics. It’s a mass delusion. Jim Jones on steroids. And it’s profoundly dangerous.

Sadly, he’s been proven right

The NY Times used to keep a running tally of his lies but I think it just became too hard after a while, but there is still analysis:

Running through the indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was a consistent theme: He is an inveterate and knowing liar.

The indictment laid out how, in the two months after Election Day, Mr. Trump “spread lies” about widespread election fraud even though he “knew that they were false.”

Mr. Trump “deliberately disregarded the truth” and relentlessly disseminated them anyway at a “prolific” pace, the indictment continued, “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Of course, Mr. Trump has never been known for fealty to truth.

Throughout his careers in business and politics, he has sought to bend reality to his own needs, with lies ranging from relatively small ones, like claiming he was of Swedish and not German descent when trying to rent to Jewish tenants in New York City, to proclaiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it.

By and large, this trait has served him well, helping him bluster and bluff his way through bankruptcies and then to the White House and through crises once he was there: personal scandals, two impeachments and a special counsel’s investigation when he was in office.

But now he is being held to account in a way he never has been before for what a new special counsel, Jack Smith, is asserting was a campaign of falsehoods that undermined the foundations of democracy.

Already, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies are setting out the early stages of a legal strategy to counter the accusations, saying that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights are under attack. They say Mr. Trump had every right to express views about election fraud that they say he believed, and still believes, to be true, and that the actions he took or proposed after the election were based on legal advice.

The indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs.

While a judge and jury will ultimately decide how much weight to give each, Mr. Trump and his allies were already on the offensive after the indictment.

“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.

“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had “every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.”

Representative Gary Palmer of Alabama, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, called the indictment a “criminalization of disinformation and misinformation, which raises serious concerns about the public’s right to speak openly in opposition to policies they oppose.”

Legal experts were skeptical about the strength of those claims as a defense. They pointed out that the indictment said on its second page that all Americans had the right to say what they wanted about the election — even if it was false. But, the indictment asserts, it is illegal to use those false claims to engage in criminal conduct, the experts said.

An individual’s free-speech rights essentially end as soon as those words become evidence of criminality, they said. In the case of the indictment against Mr. Trump, the prosecutors argue that Mr. Trump used his statements to persuade others to engage in criminal conduct with him, like signing fake slates of electors or pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay Electoral College certification of President Biden’s victory.

According to the indictment, Mr. Trump “knowingly” used “false claims of election fraud” to try to “convince the vice president to accept the defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than counting them.”

The indictment goes on to say that when those efforts failed, Mr. Trump turned to using the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse “to pressure the vice president to fraudulently alter the election results.”

Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and a lead federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Enron, said that it “won’t work legally but it will have some appeal politically, which is why he is pushing it

“There is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speaking,” Mr. Buell said.

Referring to both public and private remarks, Mr. Buell said that “there is no First Amendment privilege for giving directions or suggestions to other people to engage in illegal acts.”

Referring to the fictional television mafia boss Tony Soprano, Mr. Buell added, “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the First Amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.”

For decades, Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and exaggerations was well known in New York City. He was so distrusted by Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s that one of the mayor’s deputies, Alair Townsend, famously quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.”

Mr. Trump spoke with journalists by phone while pretending to be a spokesman representing himself, in order to leak information about his business or his personal life. He claimed to have dated women who denied being involved with him. He claimed that he lived on the 66th through 68th floors of Trump Tower, which in fact has only 58 floors.

I just saw that 69% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen on the basis of no evidence and just his word. His willingness to repeatedly and relentlessly lie is his superpower.

“Hand-counting is typically expensive, inaccurate and impractical”

When fantasy runs into reality

“An Arizona county has decided not to hand-count its ballots in next year’s presidential race, after discovering that it would cost more than a million dollars and leave it with inaccurate results.” https://t.co/ahfUoLZGHs

— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽💡🔭🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) August 3, 2023

NBC News:

Some conservatives, including allies of former President Donald Trump, have pushed hand-counting ballots as a way to ensure the accuracy of election results. But Mohave County’s experience punctures that talking point, showing that hand-counting is typically expensive, inaccurate and impractical.

In short, hand-counting ballots isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Mohave County, home to an estimated 220,000 people in the northwestern corner of Arizona, is one of a handful of U.S. counties that has considered hand-counting ballots, thanks in part to election conspiracy theories that have driven distrust in ballot tabulators.

After the 2020 election, the Arizona state Senate authorized a controversial hand-count audit of two races. The audit took months and cost millions, and — by its leadership’s own account in text messages obtained by The Arizona Republic — failed to result in an accurate count.

Oh, right. Sure. That’s what the “experts” said, think MAGA conspiracy theorists.

Estimated cost for conducting a full hand count after a limited test run: $1,108,486.

“That’s larger than my budget for the whole year, to run the whole election for the whole year!” Elections Director Allen Tempert said.

Likely MAGA response: So?

Trump’s defenders slink to the occasion

Donald Trump will be arraigned in a Washington, D.C. court this afternoon on charges spelled out in the indictment a federal grand jury handed down on Tuesday. He and his defenders will googolplex down on lies and distortions about those charges. First up from his defense team is that Trump is being prosecuted for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. That is not a legal defense, but a political one for consumption and repetition by his supporters. They will do both.

The former president’s alleged crimes are spelled out on the cover page of the grand jury’s indictment: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant. And in paragraph four (pg. 2). And at the top of page 3 (COUNT ONE). And at the top of pages 43, 44 and 45 (COUNTS TWO, THREE and FOUR). Chapter and verse.

Conspiracy to defraud the United States; two counts of conspiracy to obstruct and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding; and a conspiracy against “the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured … by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is, Trump is charged with a sweeping conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.

Trump is not charged with lying, although lie he did, repeatedly, knowingly, purposefully in furtherance of the alleged conspiracies.

Now let the gaslighting begin … um, continue. Trump teed up the stolen election lie long before November 3, 2020.

What special counsel Jack Smith spells out in the indictment is how Trump, never “known for fealty to truth,” as Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman put it, spewed lies for months following the 2020 election he lost.

The Lie is Trump’s hammer, the favorite tool in his toolbox. “Truthful hyperbole” is his euphemism (itself a lie). “My leverage came from confirming an impression [my marks] were already predisposed to believe,” Trump explains in “The Art of the Deal.” In this case, he and his followers wished to believe The Lie that he actually had won.

But he’d been robbed. He repeated that lie widely in the months following the election, the indictment states. “If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it,” write Schmidt and Haberman. Trump needed his followers to believe it so he could use them in a last-ditch effort to retain power. He and his co-conspirators would use the lies to coerce Republican electors in states he lost into submitting fraudulent elector documents to the government. They hoped thereby to gin up “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect” (para. 54).

“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures,” the Smith indictment states.

Trump is not charged with lying. He is charged with not stopping at lying.

No they f**king do not, @NYT. What the hell is going on with your headline writers? This is borderline Breitbart garbage. This is as irresponsible a headline as you've run–and you've been pulling some doozies lately. Seriously–who's writing this? pic.twitter.com/J3Zy9wE7af

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) August 3, 2023

Trump defenders’ lies about his lies are just getting warmed up.

Defense attorney John Lauro called the indictment “an attack on free speech and political advocacy” in an interview with CNN. The indictment, he said, is “an effort to not only criminalize, but also to censor free speech” from Trump.

The New York Times offers more:

“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.

“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.

Lauro claims Trump was only “relying on the advice of an attorney, John Eastman.” Eastman, one of the principal architects of the “fake” electoral votes scheme (para. 59), is the designated scapegoat.

Like Trump himself, his defense team is counting on his cult members not reading the actual indictment, and on the few who do not believing a word of it. They hope now to, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recommended, “flood the zone with shit” and somehow derail Trump’s prosecution and conviction. Meantime, Trump will attempt to win reelection to the Oval Office next year in a second last-ditch effort. To evade punishment for convictions and federal prosecution in outstanding cases, he’ll pardon himself for the former and quash the latter.

Pushing back on his defense’s narratives with facts won’t be effective. Establishing a simple, repeatable counter-message might.

“The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as ‘Trump lied; democracy nearly died,’ ” writes Ed Kilgore.

The meta-theme of Trump’s reelection campaign might be described as “Vote for me and I’ll pardon me.”

Oh how sad…

Politico reports:

Michigan’s Republican party is broke. Minnesota’s was, until recently, down to $53.81 in the bank. And in Colorado, the GOP is facing eviction from its office this month because it can’t make rent.

Around the nation, state Republican party apparatuses — once bastions of competency that helped produce statehouse takeovers — have become shells of their former machines amid infighting and a lack of organization.

Current and former officials at the heart of the matter blame twin forces for it: The rise of insurgent pro-Donald Trump activists capturing party leadership posts, combined with the ever-rising influence of super PACs.

“It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money — the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus — don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,” said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.

Among some state GOP officials, the mood is grim. One Michigan Republican operative, who was granted anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by the state party to comment, said of that state party: “They’re just in as bad a place as a political party can be. They’re broke…Their chair can’t even admit she lost a race. It’s defunct.”

The demise of the GOP state parties could have a profound impact on the 2024 election. Operatives fear that hollowed out outfits in key battlegrounds could leave the party vulnerable, especially as Democrats are focusing more on state legislative races. Traditionally, state parties perform the basic blocking and tackling of politics, from get out the vote programs to building data in municipal elections.

But not all Republicans are concerned. In fact, some argue that modern politics in the age of super PAC make state parties relics of the past.

“In this modern Super PAC era, the state parties just don’t really matter,” said a national Republican operative who works on Senate races, granted anonymity to speak about internal political dynamics. “There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bullshit about the parties being weak…. At the end of the day, the Michigan GOP being a train wreck is not going to have any real impact on whether or not we win Michigan.”

Still, even that operative noted that weak state parties could have damaging effects in lower-profile state races. And others see potentially sweeping consequences up and down the ballot next year.

Democrats, for one, say they see an opening and are now doubling efforts to win back state legislatures.

“It means Republicans have enormous missed opportunities for early organizing and investing in a strong ground game,” said Jessica Post, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, whose efforts to defend and make inroads in statehouses saw its best in a presidential midterm since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s era, creating three Democratic trifectas and losing no Democratic majorities.

[…]

Perhaps no state provides as great a microcosm of the current political moment as Michigan. There, the state party has been caught in infighting between Kristina Karamo, the party’s new chair and a failed 2022 secretary of state candidate, and Matt DePerno, the GOP’s 2022 attorney general candidate whom Karamo defeated for party chair.

There have been multiple physical altercations at party meetings in the state as tension boils over about the direction of the party. A proxy fight between the two sides over control of a county party has spilled out into court. The Michigan GOP appears to be flat broke as well, with a bit under $147,000 in its federal campaign coffers as of the end of June.

“Everything has fallen off a cliff,” said Jason Watts, a one-time local party leader who was ousted from his post after criticizing Trump and party Covid protocol in 2021. He added that the state party has been reduced to “basically” a “UPS Store P.O. box and an email blast account.”

While Michigan may be the most vivid example of a GOP state party in decline, GOP officials say it’s far from alone.

In Pennsylvania, the state party sold its headquarters last year, sparking concern among some Republicans in the state about its finances. The Democratic state party’s main PAC also outraised its equivalent nearly two-to-one in 2022. One plugged-in Pennsylvania Republican said that the hard-right activists who have won state committee seats in recent years aren’t able to tap wealthy friends for cash in the same way the party’s more establishment-minded foot soldiers in the past could.

“The state committee members are more and more pro-Trump,” the person said. “But they don’t have the money.”

Earlier this spring in Colorado, the state GOP didn’t pay a single employee — if it had any at all — for the first time in 20 years, according to The Colorado Sun. It had just $158,000 banked in its federal account as of last month.

In a statement to POLITICO, Colorado GOP state party Chair Dave Williams, who ran on a 2020 election denial platform, said the party “has sufficient funds to finance its current operations and will have the necessary capital for the 2024 election cycle.” He said the “establishment” had “fleeced donors by the millions and created donor fatigue with their failed strategies and historic losses in Colorado.”

In deep-blue Massachusetts, where moderate Republican governors have reigned for the better part of the last 30 years, a hard-right push by a pro-Trump state committee chair destroyed the state GOP’s ability to recruit mainstream candidates and sent donors fleeing, bankrupting the party and costing Republicans their last two statewide offices. The party has now racked up more than $400,000 in debts to vendors and has less than $70,000 between its state and federal campaign accounts to pay it with.

“It’s rebuilding the trust with the donors that takes some time. You can’t just do it overnight,” Amy Carnevale, an establishment Republican who ousted the former Trump-allied state party chair in January, said in an interview. “These donors don’t want to see their money going to campaigns that have no chance of winning and ideologies that just don’t fly.”

Such a shame. And according to the article it really is happening all over the country. The GOP is eating itself alive.

It couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of authoritarian monsters…

Ed Kilgore thinks the exposure of Trump’s lies in a trial might just penetrate more of the public’s consciousness. I’m not too optimistic but if it’s even a possibility, it’s a good thing:

When indicting a former president of the United States in the middle of his attempt to once again rule, you can’t just think about the laws, in their majestic complexity, that are being violated. Special counsel Jack Smith clearly understands the “court of public opinion” will have the final say on Donald Trump’s conduct, if only because he will pardon himself if the public disregards his malfeasance and returns him to the White House.

So in the indictment he secured involving Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat, Smith has pulled together a vast array of evidence on an extraordinary series of events with a reasonably simple theme: Trump’s self-conscious lies about what happened in that election.

Trump lied about the outcome; lied about a host of made-up fraud claims; lied about the authorized agents for certifying the results; lied about the identity of legitimate electors; lied about the vice-president’s powers in counting electoral votes; and, worst of all, lied to the crowd on January 6 that subsequently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the election of his successor to the presidency.

Three of the four counts in the indictment allege Trump orchestrated a conspiracy, underlying the premeditated nature of his attempts to fraudulently interfere with the election and thus rob Joe Biden and his voters of their rights. Aside from the telltale moments that Trump betrayed self-awareness that he was lying through his teeth (most notably telling Mike Pence on January 1 “You’re too honest” when the vice-president denied he had the power to reject and accept electors at will), he was told over and over and over again by those he relied on for information that his general and specific claims about the election were lies.

Now to those of us who have been consciously or unconsciously fact-checking Trump for years, his incorrigible, incessant, and world-class mendacity is hardly breaking news. But to a depressing extent, his lies about 2020 remain credible to a broad swath of Americans, undermining faith in the institutions that supervise elections in a way that threatens democracy no matter what happens to Trump and his political career. But Smith’s prosecution of Trump in pursuance of this indictment will force a reckoning in great detail with the fundamental character trait that underlies all the other forms of his misconduct. So in addition to stitching together a strong criminal case covering an array of unfortunate events over an extended period of time, this indictment will lay the groundwork for public acceptance of a subsequent verdict against Trump, at least at a significantly greater level than we can currently expect.

The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as “Trump lied; democracy nearly died.” If nothing else, the former president’s power to bamboozle people could suffer a major blow as the facts of this case roll out.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

How Fox News is taking it:

Donald Trump’s third indictment this year—which charged that the former president illegally tried to overturn the 2020 election—was apparently so unremarkable to The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld that the Fox News personality couldn’t help but draw several crude doodles while the news was first announced.

He instead claimed that he couldn’t “take seriously” the charges, which accuse Trump of conspiring to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official government proceeding, and to deprive people of their civil rights.

Fox News reporter David Spunt, reading from the 45-page indictment, explained the charges to those on The Five.

After Katie Pavlich and Jesse Watters weighed in, Dana Perino turned to Gutfeld to see if he had any thoughts on the historic news.

“I don’t know. What do you think of my sketches?” replied the Gutfeld! host while showing his drawings to the camera. “Usually when I’m bored, I’ll draw men in hats. I’m sure there’s a psychiatrist out there that can tell me what’s wrong with me.”

Gutfeld then dismissed the indictment, which was handed down by a Washington, D.C. grand jury hearing evidence brought forward by Special Counsel Jack Smith, as “lawfare.”

“We are not supposed to understand this. This is supposed to be out of our hands, out of our control,” he said before making the case that Trump is essentially being picked on by the Department of Justice.

“Trump is probably one of the most consequential leaders of our lifetime. He was outside the box. He didn’t play well with others—others being insiders,” he said.

“This is the payback. He is not one of the kids. He is not one of them. He is the outsider. So this is just payback and it’s going to elevate him even more. And,” Gutfeld complained, “it’s just not as fun as the other topics we were going to do.”

Instead, the Fox host was itching to discuss accusations that there is a man in a bear suit in a Chinese zoo.

Towards the end of the broadcast, Gutfeld said that it’s difficult for him to take the indictment seriously—even though it states that the conspiracies Trump perpetrated “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

“Any sensible American…should take what’s happening very seriously. It should anger them,” Gutfeld said, clearly taking the side of Trump supporters by making such a distinction. “But the actual charges you can’t take seriously. They are feelings masquerading as facts. They’re opinions trying to be passed off as crimes. It’s garbage dressed up with a legal thesaurus.”

What a guy. How about some threats?

You have another thing. Greg said it. This is like lawfare, they call it. Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen, Jessica. Enough is enough.

This is the establishment terrified of Donald Trump’s reelection because of all the money that’s going to dry up and all the influence. And you know what? They’re terrified of the payback. And that’s what this is about.

And what happens if you trigger a reelection by Donald Trump and he gets in there? You think he’s not going to go after the Bidens? He might go after Dr. Jill at this point, after you’ve been rummaging through Melania’s underwear drawer, turning his life upside down. Payback is going to be a you know what. And you guys started it. 

Or this:

MARK LEVIN (HOST): They drop indictments like it’s no big deal. They interfere with the presidential election. They want to decide who the Republican nominee is going to be. And if I hear one more time, “Every time he’s indicted, his polls go up.” — With Republicans! But he still has to run in a general election. And trust me when I tell you — Look around you. There’s a lot of stupid people who vote in the general election. Look around you. There’s a lot of stupid out there. This is a war against the country. That’s exactly what it is. Jack Smith has destroyed our electoral system. That’s what he’s accomplished. I’ll say it. Nobody else will. Jack Smith has destroyed our electoral system.

It seems like only yesterday that Rupert was reportedly done with Trump. I guess the network didn’t circulate that memo.

If you wonder how it is that Republicans can be living in an alternate universe, this is it. And all these Fox News hosts know that they are lying to the audience because they know that’s what their audience wants to hear. It’s a malignant feedback loop.

Obviously we need to concentrate on the real crimes: Hunter Biden’s nude pictures and late tax filing.

Honestly, it’s hard to believe anyone could have the nerve but they are shameless. So incredibly shameless.

He seems happy. They must have had a good take last night.

The twice impeached, thrice indicted former president has been rejected by almost his entire cabinet

They worked with him. They know him. They do not want him to be president ever again:

Donald Trump may have put them in the most powerful and prestigious jobs many will ever hold, but few who worked in his Cabinet are rushing to endorse him in his bid to return to the White House.

NBC News reached out to 44 of the dozens of people who served in Trump’s Cabinet over his term in office. Most declined to comment or ignored the requests. A total of four have said publicly they support his run for re-election. Several have been coy about where they stand, stopping short of endorsing Trump with the GOP primary race underway. Then there are those who outright oppose his bid for the GOP nomination or are adamant that they don’t want him back in power.

“I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News. Asked how he would vote if the general election pits Trump against President Joe Biden, a Democrat, Barr said: “I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.”

The Trump campaign declined to comment beyond pointing to three former Cabinet members as people to contact — one of whom has endorsed Trump and two others who, when asked, didn’t commit to endorsing him at this time.

A president’s Cabinet gets a unique window into his priorities, temperament and managerial style. Tasked with running the administration day-to-day, Cabinet members see first-hand the impact of policies he touted on the campaign trail and put forward in office. They sit with him in regular meetings at the White House, listen to him vent and act as surrogates, crisscrossing the country to amplify his message.

“I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.”

FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL BILL BARR ON A POSSIBLE TRUMP V BIDEN ELECTION

As president, Trump for the most part didn’t seem to either prize or develop the reciprocal loyalty that might have turned his Cabinet into a campaign asset that would help validate his contention that his was a hugely successful presidency.

“They’re not friends; they’re not hanging on forever,” Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said of Trump’s Cabinet members. “They’re going to skip out, or he’s going to push them out in some instances.”

Those backing Trump’s bid for another term include former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker; Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff; former budget chief Russell Vought; and former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell, who in June tweeted “Trump 2024” above a tweet from Trump’s main GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

A spokesman for Meadows said he “fully” supports Trump, while Vought tweeted in May that Trump “is the only person I trust to take a wrecking ball to the Deep State.”

“I’ve seen his willingness up close & behind closed doors,” Vought added. “My friend & former boss is going to finish what he started.”

Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration, now chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank staffed by a number of Trump allies and former administration officials. McMahon, through an institute spokesman, did not respond to NBC News’s inquiry about whom she plans to endorse.

The upper reaches of Trump’s government were something of a revolving door during his four-year term. In some cases, he jettisoned Cabinet members he deemed disloyal or incompetent; in others, the Cabinet members left him over policy disputes. Two resigned at the bitter end in disapproval of his actions during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

A Brookings Institution analysis of Cabinet members directly in the presidential line of succession showed that turnover in Trump’s final year in office — when he was running for re-election — dwarfed that of every president since Ronald Reagan.

Those who’ve not endorsed Trump at this point include his former secretary of state and CIA director, Mike Pompeo; a former defense secretary, Pat Shanahan; one former chief of staff, John Kelly; and two of his directors of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire and Dan Coats.

Another former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, is among those who wants Trump defeated in the GOP primaries.

“I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee,” Mulvaney said. “I think he’s the Republican who is most likely to lose in a general election, of all our leading candidates. If anyone can lose to Joe Biden, it would be him.”

Former defense secretary Mark Esper told CNN in an interview earlier this month that he doesn’t plan on endorsing anyone and believes Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.”

Two former Cabinet members are now running against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination: former Vice President Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Coats said he is backing Pence.

“I think he has all the qualities to be a great president,” said Coats, a former Republican senator from Pence’s home state of Indiana. “I know it’s a steep climb for him, but I think the steps he has taken now show the integrity of who he is and his qualifications.”

A number of Cabinet members contacted by NBC News either declined comment or did not respond. That in itself is a source of frustration for some anti-Trump advocates, who would like to see more people who’ve worked closely with Trump speak candidly about the experience.

“Incredibly, this guy [Trump] and this movement are not just alive, they’re thriving,” said Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official and fierce critic of the ex-president. “And that is really alarming to me. There’s an obligation for folks to paint a clear-eyed picture of what this means.”

In some cases, former officials publicly broke with Trump years ago, and there has been no sign that relations have thawed.

Elaine Chao, Trump’s former transportation secretary, resigned in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot. Trump has derisively referred to her as “Coco Chao” and she, in turn, has condemned his rhetoric.

“When I was young, some people deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name,” Chao has said. “Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation. He doesn’t seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans.”

Through a spokesman, Chao did not respond to requests for comment. She is married to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. When NBC News asked McConnell in the Capitol last week if his wife would weigh in on the 2024 presidential race, he listened to the question, smiled and then walked onto the Senate floor without answering.

Rex Tillerson, a former secretary of state, declined comment through a spokeswoman. He ran afoul of Trump early in the term. In a meeting in the summer of 2017, Tillerson privately referred to Trump as a “moron,” NBC News reported at the time. Trump ousted Tillerson the following year.

James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, has been searing in his criticism of his former boss, though he declined to comment when asked if he supports Trump’s candidacy. In a statement to Politico after the Jan. 6 attack, Mattis said that the U.S. would overcome “this stain,” while Trump “will deservedly be left a man without a country.” (As for Trump, he’s described Mattis as “the world’s most overrated general.”)

A few ex-Cabinet members have publicly spoken of Trump in admiring terms, though they haven’t gone so far as to endorse his presidential bid.

“There are probably some uneasy with what they saw,” said Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University. “But for many others, especially given the DeSantis factor, they are hedging their bets,” he added, referring to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s struggling campaign. “They are waiting to see how the field unfolds before jumping behind one campaign. The lack of stability in this primary — especially with Trump’s legal problems — will result in caution.”

Ben Carson, Trump’s former housing director, said in a statement to NBC that “Donald Trump is my friend and would make a fantastic president, and if I have an announcement to make about 2024, I’ll look forward to doing so in an appropriate way.”

Ryan Zinke, who served as Trump’s interior secretary and now is a Republican congressman from Montana, did not directly answer when asked by NBC News if he is endorsing Trump. He said his focus now is on Congress.

“I think the president is on glide slope right now, but he’s got some hurdles,” Zinke said of Trump. “From an individual who worked for him, I know he’s tough. They’re throwing everything at him, and he’s got some significant hurdles ahead. I take the indictment seriously, I think everyone should. So he’s got some tough hurdles before him, but I tell you what, there’s only one Donald J. Trump.”

Kelly Craft, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, could not be reached for comment. In her unsuccessful campaign for governor of Kentucky this year, Trump endorsed her rival for the Republican nomination, Daniel Cameron.

Craft highlighted her ties to Trump during the campaign. Yet she has made a campaign donation to at least one of Trump’s rivals — Pence, whose campaign said it had gotten a donation from Craft. Federal campaign finance records show the amount to be $6,600

I would guess that none of these people are the least bit surprised that he has been indicted for trying to overthrow our democracy.

The big question remains as to why they would have ever agreed to work for him in the first place. Who didn’t know that he was a monster?

It’s ultimately up to the American people

During the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump repeatedly said that the electoral process was rigged. After losing the Iowa primary caucus he declared that Sen Ted Cruz had stolen it and tweeted, “based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” That was just the beginning. Throughout the general election campaign he refused to say if he would accept the results , even in a televised presidential debate in October. He finally told his followers that he would accept the vote count — but only if he won — and they responded with rapturous adulation. Even when he won the electoral college he refused to accept the popular vote results and formed a commission to prove that the numbers were fraudulent. (It came up empty, of course.)

So, it was no surprise that he spent most of the 2020 election casting aspersions on mail-in voting and planting the suspicion that the election was going to be stolen from him.

remember: https://t.co/EXTyrCfGAt

— bread, ribs, $100 bills (@no_cut_card) August 1, 2023

It’s not like he kept it a secret. We always knew he would never accept the results of an election unless he was the victor. So when he came before the cameras in the wee hours after election day 2020, as the votes were still being counted, and declared that there was something wrong with the election and that he won in a landslide, it was almost anti-climactic.

What followed, however, was anything but predictable. We knew he would whine and cry and declare the election was rigged but I don’t think anyone knew how far he would go to manipulate the system and break the law to stay in office anyway.

Yesterday, Donald Trump was indicted by the Special Counsel investigating the January 6th insurrection on four felony charges: obstruction of an official proceeding (the certification of the presidential election on January 6th), and conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to deny voting rights.

If you wonder what the significance of this indictment might be in contrast to the other cases pending in various venues throughout the country, Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC:

This is a momentous legal event. It’s the most significant legal event of our lifetimes, one of the most significant legal events ever in the history of this country. It is up there with Marbury vs Madison, Brown vs Board of Education, Dred Scott as a defining case for the times… This indictment lays out a case that a guy who was president of the United States while he was president of the US leveraged his office, used his power to thwart the will of the people in the most solemn thing they do in our country, vote… this is the biggest constitutional crime in our history.

He was the only one indicted but six unnamed co-conspirators are accused of helping him do it, five of them lawyers and one a political operative. The five lawyers are assumed to be Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro. The identity of the political operative remains obscure.

Those of us who followed the January 6th Committee hearings and read its final report are familiar with the narrative laid out in the indictment. Trump and his henchmen cooked up several different plots to pressure local Republican election officials to change the vote count in his favor, create a fake set of electors from the close swing states, have the Justice Department send out letters erroneously suggesting the feds had found fraud and then strong arm the Vice President to defy the Constitution and refuse to count the legitimate electoral votes on January 6th.

The indictment has a few new details, such as the fact that even after the violence, as the congress was preparing to reconvene to certify the election near midnight, one of Trump’s co-conspirators emailed the Vice President, saying “I implore you to consider on more relatively minor violation [of the ECA] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount o illegal activity that has occurred here.” After the violent insurrection in which Trump’s inflamed followers stormed the capitol during a joint session and chanted “hang Mike Pence” this person (assumed to be conservative constitutional scholar John Eastman) had the audacity to beg the VP to knowingly break the law — but just a little bit. (That plan, incidentally, was also pushed hard by Senator Ted Cruz.)

The assumption among the TV lawyers is that the co-conspirators were not indicted in order to move the case along more quickly and that some of them may well be indicted separately or are cooperating with the investigation. Giuliani appeared on television last night to defend his honor:

Rudy Giuliani on Trump: "I cooperated against him? Like hell I did." pic.twitter.com/Uhe5Z2OV6L

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 2, 2023

To be honest, Giuliani may not even know that he cooperated. He’s pretty far gone.

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth that federal trials aren’t televised and demands that someone do something about it so that the nation can watch the most important political trial in our history. That seems like an excellent idea but apparently it would come down to a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The good news is that we did have an excellent presentation of the facts and the narrative from the January 6th public hearings so it’s not as if we are fully dependent upon the press to report them from the court room.

Regardless of the outcome of this trial, even if they manage to get it done before the election next year, I think we may have to face a disappointing truth. In a normal, healthy democracy a candidate in this much trouble would drop out of the race, either because of a need to focus on the legal problems, pressure from the party or perhaps even a sense of shame. None of that applies to Donald Trump, the front runner for the Republican nomination who has vowed to stay in the race no matter what. Judging by the initial commentary from the right wing media, these charges aren’t going to make a bit of difference.

In the end, we are dealing with a great irony. Donald Trump is under indictment for trying to steal an election but he may very well be given absolution for his crimes by the free and fair electoral system he has demeaned and degraded ever since he entered politics. The half of the country that still believes in democracy and rule of law will be hard pressed to keep the faith if that happens. What would be the point?

Salon