Skip to content

Month: August 2023

The Devil’s in details down in Georgia

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 24, 2023

This one’s been off my radar

Jan. 7, 2021 security still from Coffee County, GA elections office (via AP).

The insurrectionist-in-chief plans to proudly turn himself in today for booking in Atlanta. Donald Trump, the ever-blustery showman and former president, has scheduled the media circus in primetime for maximum television ratings.

Receiving less coverage is the multi-state plot to access voting software included in Fulton County District Attorney Fanu Willis’ indictment. Ben Clements and Susan Greenhalgh take up the story for Slate.

“There have been multiple accounts of Trump supporters unlawfully accessing voting systems to copy proprietary vote-recording and vote-counting software in Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These reports spurred criminal investigations in their respective states, but until Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed charges last week, none of these probes had tied the crimes back to Trump’s coordinated, multipronged plot to stay in power,” the pair explain.

Willis includes the software heist in her racketeering indictment. The irony is that it was uncovered not by state or federal authorities but by the nonprofit “Coalition for Good Governance, in connection with a civil lawsuit that has been ongoing since 2017.” The group turned up evidence that Sydney Powell “allegedly funded and directed the January 2021 theft in Coffee County as part of a multistate contract to take copies of voting software—in not just Georgia, but also Michigan and Nevada.”

Clements and Greenhalgh lay out the plot that forced the resignation of Coffee County election supervisor, Misty Hampton (since indicted):

Following Hampton’s resignation, her successor, James Barnes, reported “alarming” irregularities in the Coffee elections office to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The secretary’s office told Barnes it would investigate. But according to Barnes, no one followed up.

Shortly after he took office, Barnes found that he couldn’t access the county’s election management server because the password had been changed without authorization from, or knowledge of, Raffensperger’s office. The secretary’s technicians were unable to access the election server and were forced to replace it, but (according to Barnes) they did not investigate further. In August 2021, Barnes wrote a memo to the secretary of state detailing further security concerns he’d observed in the Coffee office when he was first hired, including the disquieting fact that the faceplates of some of the vote tabulators had been removed.

Although the secretary’s investigators had open investigations into other incidents in Coffee County, an investigation summary filed in September 2021 seems to show that, despite these multiple red flags, none of these issues were examined by the secretary’s investigators. In fact, in late April 2022, even after evidence of the breach had been provided, the secretary of state’s chief operating officer, Gabe Sterling, derisively denied that the breach had occurred. And when questioned by a reporter, Raffensperger provided conflicting answers as to when his office first learned of the software breaches.

Clements and Greenhalgh insist:

There is still no indication that the federal government is investigating the multistate plot to take voting software. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations is still slow-walking the investigation and has not held anyone accountable. And the Georgia secretary of state is still downplaying and dismissing the significance of the software theft.

I’m in no position to opine on the alleged vulnerabilities of the software itself. But I will note that just because a skilled hacker, given access to the machines, enough of them, with enough time, and undetected, could, in theory, manipulate election results, does not mean it is likely to happen or has happened or is widespread.

But if Powell and others did indeed conspire to access election equipment in multiple states, they should face prosecution in each and every one.

What happened in Milwaukee last night?

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 24, 2023

This ↓↓↓

And this:

It may not have been Biden’s first campaign ad, but it was well-placed.

“The first ad that is part of the campaign is focused on the economy and seeks to contrast Biden’s record with former President Trump and the ‘MAGA agenda.’” The Hill reported Monday.

These were placed all around Milwaukee, reports People:

“Dark Brandon,” President Joe Biden‘s satirical alter-ego, is making a bold appearance on the day of the first 2024 Republican debate — not only on billboards in Milwaukee, where eight GOP candidates are set to take the stage on Wednesday evening, but in a digital ad on FoxNews.com.

From midnight on Wednesday until 11:59 p.m., the internet meme-turned-campaign tool will have prime placement on Fox News’ website with a pro-choice ad touting Biden’s mission to defend abortion rights, one year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“I think it fits both the president’s ethos of going everywhere and not writing off any voters,” Rob Flaherty, Biden’s 2024 deputy campaign manager, tells People. “It also speaks to the sort of strided, swaggy Dark Brandon personality of, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go on Fox News and talk about protecting and restoring Roe.'”

The contrast between Biden and the Republican field and their supporters’ dishonesty are there for anyone whose eyeballs are not filled with kool-aid.

Roy Edroso watched as much of the “presidential” debate as he could stand (if you’re into that sort of thing). The GOP’s ads, he observes, “look like something out of a neurological experiment.”

Edroso summarizes in one line: “There is one thing that I’m pretty sure won’t change after I leave: I don’t think anyone, even the screamers, even the crazy people, expects to see a president come out of this.”

They’re trying to sell Joe Biden as cold and lacking empathy? What?

Published by digby on August 23, 2023

This new talking point is just plain weird. It’s all over Fox News that Biden doesn’t care about the Maui fire victims:

Okaaaay:

For some weird reason, the fact that Biden stopped to talk to a dog handler and pat the dog is being portrayed as more evidence of his cold indifference to suffering. Whatever.

This is clearly an official talking point that’s coming out of Republican circles following the old Karl Rove strategy of “attack your enemy’s strength” as they did with John Kerry. But that was attacking him for something he’d done long in the past that couldn’t be verified. This is something that’s happening in real time.

Not that it will stop them. They have realized that they can say anything — up is down and black is white — and their audience will believe them because they see nothing else. And if they do happen to see something that refutes the MAGA media, they just think it’s fake news.

And honestly, the right is so performative now that it’s really all just a big game show to them. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. All that matters is if it owns the libs. I don’t think the rest of the country is on board with that though. At least I hope not.

Also this:

“Joe Biden just fell asleep in the middle of his meeting with victims of the Maui fires”

— Text posted on social media with an edited video featuring President Biden, Aug. 22, 2023

Attacks on President Biden’s age and overall mental and physical fitness are far from new.

This latest example — a moment clipped from the live coverage of the president’s Monday visit to Lahaina, Hawaii, by Gray Television-owned Hawaii News Now — shows how the internet can be used to amplify, escalate and manipulate a moving image.

The Facts

An isolated 32-second clip, posted and reposted by several accounts, seemingly showed an octogenarian president, head tilted down, struggling to stay awake at an event as community leaders expressed the pain felt by Lahaina residents reeling from a deadly wildfire.

It was a viral moment, thanks to shares from notables like Fox News host Sean Hannity, Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.) and others, who framed the clip as yet another example of Biden demonstrating that an old and tired president was unable to lead the country through moments of crisis, as he was once again caught nodding off by roving news cameras.

Though misleading and lacking context, these posts didn’t make use of video editing tricks; instead, they relied on selective isolation.

The outright manipulation comes in the form of an even shorter version, cut down to 12 seconds. The edited video featured in a post by Matt Wallace, a conservative influencer with more than a million followers, shares the same markings found in the longer viral version and sourced to a Hawaii News Now broadcast. However, it slices and dices through the moment — cutting away from Biden right at the moment he nods his head while gazing down, clearly awake. This catchier edit of “sleepy” Biden gained more traction, racking up over 12 million views. That reach was extended through shares by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a right-wing House freshman, as well as others.

The moment in full, of course, paints a different picture. It shows a somber Biden, reacting when directly addressed, tilting his head down and nodding as the speaker continues to illustrate the challenges facing a devastated Lahaina community. At the 19:30 mark of this higher-quality C-SPAN feed of the same camera angle, viewers can see fuller detail — and get a better look at Biden’s gaze, which remains clear and wide-eyed.

The Pinocchio Test

This is a classic case of manipulated video. Anyone who shared it earns Four Pinocchios.

And this too:

There are no limits on social media.

“Trump is just the maitre’d”

Published by digby on August 23, 2023

The last time Trump skipped a debate was January 28, 2016. Remember this?

Those were the days. I’m going to guess that won’t happen this time. Ron DeSantis has been admonished not to go after Trump and instead take on Vivek Ramaswamy and he’s already sinking like a rock in the polls. Chris Christie will likely be the lone Trump critic and he’ll probably be pretty harsh. But what difference does it make? This debate is basically a death watch pageant to determine who will be in position to step in if Trump is unable to run?

Nothing will ever beat this moment, however.

He’s so dignified.

The good news for Trump lovers is that he’ll be with Tucker Carlson on his Xitter show:


The interview between Carlson and Trumpalmost didn’t happen, according to two people familiar with its planning.The men had been talking informally for two months about possibly setting up an event to draw attention away from the Fox-hosted debate.

But Carlson was scheduled to be out of the country this week for interviews with Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban and with Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, making it difficult to schedule the interview.

Trump had been going back and forth about whether he would show up onstage for the Wednesday RNC debate, or any other. He had dined with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and the network’s president, Jay Wallace, at his Bedminster Club earlier this summer and left them with the impression that he may participate in the event,according to three people familiar with the dinner.

But Trump has long complained that the network appears to have turned on him,with Foxgiving at-times favorable coverage to rivals such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch has encouraged Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to enter the primary.

Two weeks ago, Trump and Carlson fixed a date for the interview andCarlson’s team made the last-minute decision to “bang it out” right before heading to Europe, according to someone familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Carlson began posting his shows to his account on Twitter in June.Elon Musk, X’s owner, has been personally involved in developing features that Carlson’steam believes will make their videos more accessible, including making it possible to play X videos on television sets using Apple’s Airplay feature,according to a person close to Carlson.Carlson’s team also pushed X to develop a “picture in picture” feature that allows users to continue watching an X video while using other features on their phone, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump did not want it to become public that he had taped the interview and instructed his team to keep it a secret, advisers said. Trump’s team tried to keep signaling he might still attend the Fox debate, with aides refusing to confirm he was considering sitting for a Carlson interview that he had already recorded. Even then, he kept polling people on whether he should attend the debate.

For its part, Carlson’s team did not see the Bedminster sit-down as a guarantee that Trump wouldn’t also decide to attend the debate this week.

Trump did not officially tell RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel of his decision to not appear onstage until Sunday, even after word of the Carlson interview had become public. Trump toldMcDaniel that the decision was not meant to spite her, according to people familiar with his calls.

Trump told advisers he didn’t want Carlson’s interview to appear on X because it is a competitor to Truth Social, Trump’s social media network. But Carlson and his team have been building a relationship with Musk for months and told Trump that they did not think Trump’s own platform had the necessary reach.

Carlson has echoed and amplified Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, while also advancing a theory that the “Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

But Trump has long accepted a level of criticism from Carlson that he didn’t from most of the other Fox hosts, according to people familiar with the dynamic between the two men.

While at Fox, Carlson interviewed Trump multiple times but maintained a more independent posture than some of his fellow hosts, such as Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro.

After Carlson’s texts excoriating Trump were released as part of Dominion’s litigation against Fox, Carlsonattempted to assure the former president that he had been blowing off steam afterhaving been misled by Trump aides.

In one such incident, Carlson had to correct an error in a segment about dead people supposedlyvoting in the 2020 election in Georgia. The information had come to one of Carlson’s producers from a Trump aide purporting to have proof of voting irregularities in the state, and has been widely debunked. Carlson railed privately against the unreliability of the information peddled by Trump’s team.

But Carlson’s show has always carried enough Trump-friendly commentaryto remain in the former president’s good graces.

Even after Carlson’s texts became public in March, Trump signaled that he was happy with Carlson’s special that was running on the network’s digital streaming service. The program argued that the Jan. 6 attack was not a “deadly insurrection” and that the violence of the day had been overblown. Multiple people have been convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack. Four people in the crowd died, a Capitol Police officer died after being beaten by rioters and four Capitol Police officers who served on Jan. 6 died by suicide in the days and months after.

Trump shared an article about Carlson’s special and wrote, “he doesn’t hate me, or at least, not anymore!”

Soon after, Carlson invited Trump to come on his Foxshow and Trump agreed. Carlson and his production team traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida to conduct the interview. “For a man who is caricatured as an extremist,” Carlson said of Trump, in his introduction to the interview, “we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise.”

After Fox canceled Carlson’s show, the network’s ratings took a hit. In the four weeks before Carlson’s exit, Fox averaged 2.6 million viewers in prime time; in the four weeks after, Fox averaged just 1.6 million — still at the top in cable news but down 39 percent. The network has recovered some of those viewers with a new prime-time lineup, which has boosted its average total viewers in prime time to 2.2 million.

Trump has complained to his aides that Carlson was not friendly enough to him at times during his presidency. But he also maintained a respect for Carlson’s high ratings, later telling advisers he couldn’t believe Fox fired Carlson.

Fox has not yet released Carlson from his contract, which expires in December 2024. The company has informed Carlson he is in breach of his contract by releasing videos on X. Carlson’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, has in turn accused Fox of violating Carlson’s right to freely express his views on current events.

The two men don’t have additional events planned together. While Carlson is at work trying to stand up a new company, rebuilding studios in Maine and Florida, he wants to maintain some distance from Trump, whose false denial of the results of the 2020 election frustrated Carlson and helped make Fox the target of costly legal battles.

But Carlson continues to enjoy Trump’s company, to a point. “Do I like Trump? I love him. But there are many levels to Trump,” Carlson told his authorized biographer Chadwick Moore. “He was a completely ineffectual president. He couldn’t manage my household. He’s not a manager, and that’s very frustrating to watch.”

“But Trump on the level of guy? To have dinner with Trump is one of the great joys in the world. If you were to assemble a list of people to have dinner with, Trump would be in the top spot,” Carlson said.

“In the end, Trump is just the maitre’d, a wonderful host. Funny, outrageous, absolutely on his own planet.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not really a compliment. Not that Trump cares. He just wants to stick it to Fox and going on Tucker to be broadcast during the debate is the perfect way to do it.

Dr. Trump is on call

Published by digby on August 23, 2023

Republicans trust their doctors to make health recommendations. That’s good…

But nearly 75% of Republicans trust Donald Trump to make health recommendations. They trust him over the CDC.

Here’s where we are. Trump pushed Operation Warp Speed and took the vaccine but he isn’t allowed to take credit for it because his people have been brainwashed against them:

America’s growing anti-vaxx crisis has been laid bare in a national poll that shows huge chunks of the country believe in conspiracy theories about safe shots. 

One-quarter of adults said they believe the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism – a widely studied and discredited claim that emerged in the 1990s.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) poll also found that a third of adults believe that the Covid shots caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people.

The vaccine-skeptical movement across the country intensified after the Covid pandemic, linked to pushback against Covid vaccine mandates and increased misinformation as people spent more time online.

A good quarter of our countrymen are completely addled by conspiracy theories enabled by leaders like Donald Trump. I feel sorry for their children.

Go after his business, fergawdsakes!

Published by digby on August 23, 2023

Former president Donald Trump won’t be appearing at tonight’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee Wisconsin. He says he has no need to participate because he’s so far ahead in the polls. And he’s right. He’s also very busy. He needs to get ready to be arrested on Thursday when he turns himself in for booking at the Fulton County jail. He’s got a lot on his plate. It will be interesting to see if any of the challengers will summon up the nerve to attack Trump for failing to show up or go after him for his legal problems.

I’m sure we’ll hear something about Hunter Biden since this will be broadcast on Fox and they apparently have some sort of contractual obligation to discuss the “Biden Crime Family” every ten minutes or so. I expect the candidates will all be eager to participate. The question really is whether any of the challengers will take the opportunity to tell the audience about the “Trump Crime Family’s” global pay-to-play operation.

I’m not expecting much but it’s possible that Chris Christie could bring up Jared Kushner’s $2 billion payoff from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. He’s done it before. But I haven’t heard anything about the Trump family started hosting the Saudi backed LIV golf tournament or the very lucrative agreement with a Saudi real estate company for a Trump hotel in Oman in the early months after Trump was sent packing back to Mar-a-Lago. Considering all the hand-wringing over Hunter’s laptop you’d think someone in that group of misfits would see it as a useful criticism of the front runner.

What we do have are these preposterous declarations from Donald Trump’s number two son, Eric:

It’s a struggle not to laugh hysterically at that bold-faced lie. Trump refused to divest his businesses as other high office-holders have done, and instead ran his business out of the White House. According to Forbes Magazine, he left office $2.4 billion richer than when he went in:

If not for the pandemic, there would have been even more. Trump’s business was hauling in about $650 million annually during the first three years of his presidency. But in 2020, revenues plunged to an estimated $450 million as Covid infected the business. “It’s hurting me, and it’s hurting Hilton, and it’s hurting all of the great hotel chains all over the world,” Trump said in a March 2020 press conference at the White House. “It’s hurting everybody. I mean, there are very few businesses that are doing well now.”  

That couldn’t have been a motivation for him refusing to admit that the crisis was as bad as experts were saying or pushing for normality even as tens of thousands were dying each week, could it? Who could ever suspect such a thing?

Most of Trump’s profits during that period came from his hotels and clubs where people were paying vast sums for access and foreign governments lavishly lined Trump’s pockets. The NY Times reported last fall that the governments of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China spent millions at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC “at crucial times in 2017 and 2018 for those countries’ relations with the United States.” They added that “Republican lobbyists working on behalf of these countries — some operating without registering as foreign agents, as required by law — spent tens of thousands more at the Trump hotel during the same periods.”

He promoted his properties every chance he got, spending one out of every three days at one of them. He even announced that he was hosting the G7 meeting at his Doral Country Club at one point and only backed down when some of the people he counted on to bail him out of his impeachment were unhappy with the arrangement.

It wasn’t just foreign governments that lined Trump’s pockets. American taxpayers did too. Eric Trump, acting as spokesman for the Trump Organization had assured the media that the company had only charged the government the actual cost of any lodging and amenities:

If my father travels, they [Secret Service agents] stay at our properties free — meaning, like cost for housekeeping. The government actually spends, meaning it saves a fortune because if they were to go to a hotel across the street, they’d be charging them $500 a night, whereas, you know we charge them, like $50,

He lied. The (Democratic)House Oversight Committee released records showing that the government had spent more than $1.4 million for Secret Service to stay at Trump properties since 2017 and had charged as much as $1,185 per night for hotel rooms used by agents.

This week Eric Trump once again demanded that the American people believe him or their lying eyes, asserting that the Trump family was scrupulous about avoiding conflict of interest despite mountains of evidence to the contrary:

The Trump organization is on record returning $151,470  to the federal treasury in 2018, $191,000 in 2019 and $105,465  in 2020 ostensibly representing all the “profits” they received from foreign governments. It’s a joke. There was no public record provided to back up the amounts and when the House Oversight Committee investigated it was clear the “donations” represented a very small percentage of the take. Maybe it was just the Margarita bill.

It’s even questionable if he donated his last year’s 400k presidential salary to the government as he’d done in the three previous years (and bragged about incessantly.) It’s totally believable that he decided to keep the 2020 salary after everything that happened after the election.

All that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t include Trump pressuring foreign governments to change laws to benefit his properties, Don Jr being received in India like a visiting potentate to sell access and condos, Trump’s Indonesian resort project getting backing from Chinese investors and on and on. The level of blatant corruption by the Trump family is mind-boggling.

For reasons that have never been clear, nobody ever seemed that interested in this story despite the full bore press against Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the family’s global charity and Biden’s son’s banal influence peddling. If any Republican candidate wants to open up a new line of criticism of Donald Trump that one’s ripe. Considering the GOP’s Hunter obsession, maybe the Democrats should give it a whirl as well.

Salon

Nothing will move them

Published by digby on August 23, 2023

This is just sad:

When Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee began a push in April to address public safety, his family was grieving the loss of two close friends, both educators killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian school.

His call for millions of dollars to harden school security was embraced by Republicans in the legislature, who flanked him during a formal announcement.

But days later, when Mr. Lee, a Republican, decided to go further and ask for an order of protection law that could temporarily restrict an individual’s access to firearms, he stood alone for the announcement. The legislature would wrap up its work by the end of the month without taking a vote to pass it.

Now, Mr. Lee has summoned lawmakers back to Nashville on Monday for a special session on public safety that could include consideration of a limited version of the law. But without the support of most in his own party, that measure appears, once again, destined for failure, underscoring the power dynamics of a Republican supermajority driven by a right-wing base hardened against any potential infringement on gun ownership.

They won’t even go for a temporary restriction on firearms. They’ll agree to fund more mental health, toughencriminal penalties for threats of mass violence, target juvenile crime and incentivize he safe storage of firearms. But they will NOT do anything a outy the guns. Nothing. But at least they’ve found a way to put more Black kids in jail so that’s good.

This sickness lies at the heart of what can only be described as America’s rapid decline. We are a very irrational people in general but this is insane.

“Well, how did I get here?”

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 23, 2023

It’s not just a “Once in a Lifetime” question

“Huh, I wonder what happened in 1980?” Dissent magazine’s Matthew Sitman snarked on Tuesday. He referred to a chart posted by David Leonhardt.

“Reaganland” author Rick Perlstein replied, “Folks stopped getting a free ride. Now only can enjoy long life if they honor the natural order of things as dictated (if religious) by the Almighty; or (if secular) the almighty market. Or else, they had it coming. Order having been restored, conservatives are satisfied now…”

But not really. Not until they’ve fully restored the monarchy on these shores. Barring that, reinstated feudalism will suffice. Surely the peasants will rejoice.

Leonhardt has been working on “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.” The book that analyzes how over the last half-century “our society has abandoned working-class people – of all races – in crucial ways. Their incomes have stagnated, as has their life expectancy. They no longer trust either political party or other institutions. They are frustrated, with good reason.”

He explains:

My basic argument is that the past century has seen a struggle between democratic capitalism and rough-and-tumble capitalism. Democratic capitalism respects both the power and the weaknesses of the free market. Rough-and-tumble capitalism keeps taxes low and regulation light.

I like the term “democratic capitalism” because it captures the symbiotic relationship between the two ideas under the best of circumstances. Democratic governance prevents the excesses of capitalism, while rising living standards foster the good will on which democracy depends.

Democracy can strengthen capitalism, and capitalism can strengthen democracy.

If you’re tempted to give up on our political system as hopelessly rigged, I would urge you not to be. Every successful political movement of the past century did not give up on the political system. It set out to change that system.

Except it was the changes wrought by the Civil Rights and liberalizing movements of the 1960s that provoked the last half-century of conservative backlash.

“Not one step back,” insists Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign. Arrayed against him are well-financed, rough-and-tumble capitalists determined to restore “the natural order of things” in which (at a minimum) their economic, political, and cultural supremacy is unchallenged once more.

With apologies to the bishop, the natural order of things is two steps forward, one step back. See chart at top.

My God, what have we done?

Trump covered his tracks

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 23, 2023

Thickly but not well enough

Amanda Marcotte comments on the Roger Stone video that “The Beat with Ari Melber” on MSNBC has been reporting on this week. The show ran excerpts of video of Stone shot by Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen for “A Storm Foretold.” 

The clips provide further proof that the Trump plot to overturn the election did not arise from a “sincere” belief that the election was “stolen.”

Marcotte writes:

The video captures Stone’s aggravation at finding he’s been barred from speaking at Trump’s January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. 

“I don’t understand how they want us to lead the march but can’t even tell us where to go,” Stone whines, adding that he’s not speaking directly to Rudy Giuliani or the rest of Trump’s inner circle. He complains that it’s “very clear that I was never on their list.”

“It’s just childish and it’s amateurish. That’s why they lost. They don’t know what they’re doing,” he snipes. 

Here is the clip:

Marcotte, however, focuses on Stone’s comments that contradict the narrative that the Jan. 6 march to the Capitol was spontaneous:

On MSNBC and elsewhere, the coverage has been focused on Stone’s admission that Trump lost, adding to the already large pile of evidence that Trump and his co-conspirators never believed the Big Lie. But what struck me in that clip is the part right before it, where Stone indicates he’s expected to “lead the march” but that the team directly around Trump has gone incommunicado. Despite Stone’s claims that this is “amateurish,” it actually suggests Trump and his lawyers were being quite savvy. Cutting off contact in the days before the riot means no traceable communications between them and the people who were going to storm the Capitol that day. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of the various investigations into January 6 is nailing down Trump’s role in the violence. On one hand, it’s obvious that the riot was integral to Trump’s “fake electors” plot. He and his co-conspirators wanted to exploit the chaos to argue for substituting fake votes for real ones. He behaved all day like he expected it and his public communications, while draped in plausible deniability, also communicated his expectations of violence to his followers. Plus, as White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified during the House hearings about January 6, Trump seemed to have planned to join up with the rioters, and was only thwarted by Secret Service not driving him to the Capitol as he demanded. 

On the other hand, no one has turned up any evidence that Trump directly communicated his wishes for a violent insurrection to groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, who took it upon themselves to lead the charge. All the evidence shows is him riling people up with speeches and tweets, and simply trusting his followers would know what he wanted. Alas, without that direct communication, special prosecutor Jack Smith can’t make insurrection charges stick in court, which is likely why he’s avoided filing them. 

A lifetime of avoiding writing things down, of not using email, of speaking in code, and of keeping his inner circle small served to keep Trump out of jail. But he courted disaster in seeking the White House: too many courtiers.

Even then, Trump managed to insulate himself behind layers of intermediaries, especially between himself and those planning to assault the Capitol. “That way, if the insurrection failed, he could plead ignorance of the riot’s planning,” Marcotte suggests.

So rather than charge Trump with insurrection, Smith had to Eliot-Ness a Trump indictment on “conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.“

This Stone video is some of the best evidence yet that Trump and his gang both knew that the Capitol riot was coming, but also that they couldn’t risk directly communicating with the people leading the charge. As Stone’s comments indicate, the downside of this “no direct communication” policy was that Trump and his legal team were taking a gamble, hoping that Trump’s followers could take a hint. Unfortunately, it seems that their big bet worked out in most ways. The rioters obviously picked up what Trump was putting down and didn’t need explicit commands. Trump has been able to muddy the waters around the question of his responsibility for the riot, to the point where he can’t be charged for inciting it, even though we all know that’s what he did. And so far, he’s been able to keep questions about his eligibility to run at bay, though hopefully this effort to legally bar him will gain momentum.

Meaning, these efforts:

Trump ineligible to run for any office, scholars argue

Trump ineligible to run for office, more experts agree

They may yet keep Trump from running in 2024. But they’ll cue up yet another constitutional crisis for us to weather, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig told MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace on Tuesday. May we be successful.