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He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

House investigators will debut their first public hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection in prime time on Thursday, June 9 at 8 p.m. Eastern. Stand by for what the Party of Trump and their liege lord will do to distract public attention (NBC News):

“The committee will present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings, and provide the American people a summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” the panel said.

There will be visuals, surely. And a guest star, TBA. This is TV.

Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and his committee will be competing for eyeballs with infotainment.

CNN reported Thursday on a few among the flood of text messages received by then-chief of staff Mark Meadows as Donald Trump’s MAGA mob battled police defending the Capitol:

“He’s got to condem (sic) this shit. Asap,” Donald Trump Jr. texted at 2:53 p.m.

“POTUS needs to calm this shit down,” GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina wrote at 3:04 p.m.

“TELL THEM TO GO HOME !!!” former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus messaged at 3:09 p.m.

These urgent texts and more poured in while Donald J. Trump watched the battle on TV at the White House and did nothing. Rioters attacked the Capitol just after 1 p.m. Trump delayed issuing a statement calling off his supporters until 4:17 p.m. By then, several people were dead or dying.

One of the key questions the January 6 House committee is expected to raise in its June hearings is why Trump failed to publicly condemn the attack for hours, and whether that failure is proof of “dereliction of duty” and evidence that Trump tried to obstruct Congress’ certification of the election.

The Meadows texts show that even those closest to the former President believed he had the power to stop the violence in real time.

[…]

Seventeen months later, CNN spoke to more than a dozen people who had texted Meadows that day, including former White House officials, Republican members of Congress and political veterans. Without exception, each said they stood by their texts and that they believed Trump had the power and responsibility to try to stop the attack immediately.

Most who spoke with CNN would do so only anonymously.

Some said it was because of their jobs. Some said they were afraid Trump would be reelected. One said they just didn’t want to go through “the misery of being targeted by Trump supporters.”

The committee hopes to tell the Jan. 6 story, Axios reports, “in such a way that the American people understand the gravity of what happened — and the role former President Trump and his associates played in ginning up the mob that tried to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”

They will try. They’d best have hired media advisers.

Former congressman Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) told CNN’s Anderson Cooper this week he used his intelligence background and an analysis team he assembled to help the committee match anonymous phone numbers in collected texts to names and locations. The language from sitting and former members of Congress and connected Trump donors was so “horrific” and disconnected from reality that it scared him. It was “spiritual warfare coupled with QAnon-type of religiosity and types of conspircay theories” coming from people in high positions of power.

The committee’s goal will be to lay out a coherent narrative from incoherent ravings.

I’m not confident they can reach a lot of Americans living on Earth II.

Brynn Tannehill, a technical analyst with RAND tweeted this week:

I have a friend, whose husband is a retired Marine special forces guy. He spent better part of a year at the siege of Khe Sanh. After he retired, he was a police officer (SWAT) and medical first responder. He’s vaguely conservative on some things, but not nuts. 1/n

In his retirement, he still teaches police, SWAT teams, and first responders about dealing with ugly mass casualty events, including Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High Yield Explosives. He’s still part of the state volunteer emergency services. 2/n

This past week, he got asked to do a day of training for emergency medical services providers in a different county. Think even redder and more Trumpy than his already fairly conservative home town in a red state. 3/n

Part of his training (the briefing with PowerPoint) was discussing where mass casualty attacks come from, who does them, their tactics technics and procedures, and what sorts of injuries their mass casualty events produce. Basically, here’s what to expect. 4/n

For anyone who’s military, this should sound pretty boring and normal: it’s the intel briefing that everyone gets when discussing CONOPS.

Except, this crowd of “students” was having none of it.

Why? 5/n

Because this decorated combat vet who’s pro-police in in most cases had the temerity to show them the FBI statistics on the sources of domestic terrorism and mass casualty events: which is roughly 75% right wing, 18% religious, 4% left wing, and the rest other or N/A. 6/n

Under right wing he included things like neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the like.

The audience refused to believe.

“No! It’s Antifa!”

He pulled up the spreadsheets and stats on the FBI website.

They still wouldn’t believe him, even with FBI data collected un Trump. 7/n

Best of luck, Bennie. You’re going to need it.

(h/t JH)

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

A recent memo surfaced laying out the plan in full

More ridiculous maneuverings exposed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fantasy would then go like this, Chesebro wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But good old Mike doesn’t hold it against him

He’s as awful as we’ve always known:

Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.

Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.

It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.

The account of Mr. Trump’s comment was initially provided to the House committee by at least one witness, according to two people briefed on their work, as the panel develops a timeline of what the president was doing during the riot.

Another witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Meadows who was present in his office when he recounted Mr. Trump’s remarks, was asked by the committee about the account and confirmed it, according to the people familiar with the panel’s work. It was not immediately clear how much detailed information Ms. Hutchinson provided. She has cooperated with the committee in three separate interviews after receiving a subpoena.

A lawyer for Mr. Meadows said he has “every reason to believe” that the account of what Mr. Meadows said “is untrue.”

I think we have “every reason to believe” it is.

It’s a powerful bonding experience

If all politics is local, we really do have a problem. This story by ProPublica about one guy in Wisconsin shows that many of the battles we wage are going to happen on the ground. I hope progressives are getting prepared for this

Jay Stone grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago ward politics, the son of a longtime city alderman. But his own forays into politics left him distrustful of Chicago Democrats.

When he ran for alderman in 2003, he was crushed at the polls after party leaders sent city workers out to campaign against him. Even his own father didn’t endorse him.

Then when Stone sought the mayor’s office in 2010, he only mustered a few hundred of the 12,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. He filed a federal lawsuit over the requirement and lost.

His father, Bernard Stone, who held office for 38 years, once told the Chicago Tribune: “My son is very good at what he’s trained to do. And that’s not politics.”

Jay Stone’s training was in hypnotherapy, and he eventually walked away from Chicago politics, carving out a living using hypnosis to help people with anxiety, weight gain, nicotine addiction and other issues. Only in retirement, and after a move to Wisconsin, did he finally find his political niche.

In 2020, Stone played a crucial, if little-known, role in making Wisconsin a hotbed of conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the state’s 10 electoral votes from then-President Donald Trump. The outcry emanating from Wisconsin has cast Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a force of untoward political influence and helped create a backlash against using private grants, including large donations from Zuckerberg, to assist election officials across the country.

In Wisconsin, Stone has finally been embraced politically, by activists and politicians who, like him, didn’t approve of the so-called “Zuckerbucks” or of big-city Democratic mayors. They, too, are unhappy with the way the 2020 presidential election was run in Wisconsin and how it turned out. And they, too, show no inclination of giving up, even when their claims have been rejected and other Republicans have told them it’s time to move on.

“The best part of getting involved in politics in Wisconsin is the wonderful people I’ve been meeting,” Stone said in an interview. “They’re just a great group of men and women that I admire and respect.”

[Do not underestimate the power of community in fueling all this grievance. people bond ofverthis stuff. And they are having fun doing it.]

The questioning of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin continues thanks to Stone and others who have emerged to take on outsize roles after the election. Among them: a retired travel industry executive who has alleged voter fraud at nursing homes. Ten alternate GOP electors who signed documents to try to subvert the certification of Biden’s election. And some state legislators who are still looking for ways to hand the state to Trump, a year and a half after the election.

Stone hasn’t garnered much public attention, but records indicate that in the summer of 2020 he was the first person to complain to state authorities about grant money accepted by local election officials. The funds were earmarked for face masks, shields and other safety supplies, as well as hazard pay, larger voting facilities, vote-by-mail processing, drop boxes and educational outreach about absentee voting.

Stone, however, saw the election funding, which came from a Chicago nonprofit, as a way to sway the election for Biden by helping bring more Democratic-leaning voters to the polls in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected Stone’s claim last year, on the grounds that he didn’t live in any of the cities he mentioned and that the complaint did not allege any violations that the commission had the authority to investigate. A separate complaint Stone filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which he objects to the Zuckerberg money, has not been resolved.

Nonetheless, the idea that the election was somehow rigged lives on.

Chief among the election deniers is Michael Gableman, who served on the state Supreme Court for a decade. A Trump ally, Gableman was named as special counsel by the GOP-controlled State Assembly to investigate the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Not only did Gableman give Stone’s accusations a platform, he took them even further. In his review for the Assembly, Gableman labeled the grants a form of bribery.

Gableman expressed his admiration for Stone during a March interview on the “Tucker Carlson Today” show, which streams online.

It’s “a private citizen, a guy named Jay Stone, who really deserves a lot of credit,” Gableman said, referring to questions about the election grants.

“He saw all of this coming,” Gableman said. “And he’s not a lawyer. I don’t know what his particular training is — he’s trained in the medical field. He filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission back in August of 2020, well before the election. And he foresaw all of this, he foresaw the partisan nature of all of the Zuckerberg money and all of the Zuckerberg people coming in to influence the election.”

Gableman, who has not responded to requests for an interview, had hired Stone as a paid consultant for his review by the time he appeared on Carlson’s show.

But that’s not the only thing keeping Stone from a quiet retirement in Pleasant Prairie, not far from the Illinois border, where he grows his own fruits and vegetables and heats his home only with firewood. Once again, he’s got his eyes on political office. This time he’s running for the Wisconsin State Senate.

He could very easily win and you know what a guy like him will do with that power.

Read on. It’s a fascinating look at the post-democracy American right.

Subversion is the long game

The whole country has its eyes on Georgia this week in anticipation of the big Republican primary showdown between Gov. Brian Kemp and former President Donald Trump. Trump isn’t actually in the race, of course but he might as well be. He reportedly harangued former Sen. David Perdue to run in an effort to vanquish Trump’s hated enemy Kemp, who refused to help the then-president overturn the 2020 election.

Likewise, Trump has energetically endorsed Rep. Jody Hice to replace Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who famously released the recording of a phone call from Trump in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” the necessary votes to hand him the state’s electoral votes. The most recent polling has Raffensperger and Hice likely headed to a runoff — but Kemp is probably heading for a landslide victory. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, is scheduled to show up at a rally for Kemp on Monday, in one of the biggest signs of a permanent Trump-Pence split. 

Trump is predicted to have at least one winner on the day: Former football star Herschel Walker will be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Raphael Warnock. There are so many questions about Walker’s fitness that he is far from guaranteed to win in the fall. So Trump is looking at a possible 2022 shutout in the vital swing state of Georgia.

But so what? All that means is that Trump’s followers may love him but they don’t think they have to follow his recommendations for other offices. If it’s supposed to signal that the rest of the party will then reject his anti-democratic agenda, there is no evidence they have any intention of doing that.

Let’s face facts: They don’t want to. It’s their best (and perhaps only) path to victory.

Apparently, early voting is very heavy for the Georgia primary, and many in the media see that as proof that concerns over the vote-suppression legislation enacted by Republicans was overblown.

Voting is surging in Georgia despite Democratic claims that a new election law would make it harder to cast a ballot, via @amyegardner and @mrbrownsirhttps://t.co/btiJJOYakq

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 21, 2022

Perhaps the voters of Georgia have accepted that they have to jump through ridiculous hoops to exercise their right to vote and are determined not to let it stop them. That certainly doesn’t make it right, especially since there was no reason to enact any of those restrictions in the first place. It’s important to note that laws against mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes are only a small part of the assault on democracy Republicans have been conducting for the past year and a half. Those things are unfair, of course, but voters can at least overcome them with effort. The even more serious problem is election subversion.

In April of 2021, the New York Times’ Nate Cohn sounded the alarm:

Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.

The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote. Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain.

This has been happening all over the country, but the media has been strangely lackadaisical about reporting it. So it’s hard to grasp just how successful Republicans have been at putting these new laws in place, or where the greatest threat of the next coup will come from. This past weekend, the New York Times ran an important front-page story pulling together all the threads of this story from across the nation. It’s very sobering.

Their report found that “at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,” which adds up to 44% of all elected Republicans in state houses across the nine states where the election was the closest. The damning statistics keep coming: about 23% of Republican legislators “took steps to delay the vote count or overturn the election,” 11% supported sending alternate slates of Trump electors, 7% were in favor of “decertification” of the election after the fact (which is not possible) and 24% voted for “audits” of election results, to be conducted by blatantly partisan outside firms.

The Times notes that some Republicans have resisted all this, and that many of the craziest schemes have not been enacted. But their analysis concludes that in all the battleground states, groundwork has been laid for more robust interference with election results. It’s clear that this is now on the GOP agenda, and in close elections we will see Republicans seek the advantage through creating chaos and uncertainty, potentially creating circumstances that could invalidate or overturn the will of the voters:

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in deciding whom to endorse in state legislative races, he is looking for candidates who want state legislatures to have a say in naming presidential electors — a position that could let politicians short-circuit the democratic process and override the popular vote.

Republicans in Pennsylvania just nominated a far-right extremist and 2020 election denier for governor, who promises that if elected he will make sure that the GOP-majority legislature has the final word on which candidate is certified as the winner of the state’s electoral votes. Unless the Congress gets off the dime and passes some reform to the Electoral Count Act, it seems more likely than not that some swing-state Republican governor is going to try this.

Back in 2000, Republicans first got a taste of how to use the levers of local political power, combined with a partisan Supreme Court majority, to declare themselves the winner in a close election. (The “independent state legislature doctrine” that underlies this plotting was first raised in Bush v. Gore by the conservative justices.) The GOP no longer has even the slightest concern about the legitimacy conferred by a popular-vote victory, since it’s only won one in the last 30 years.

Trump may have turbocharged the Republicans’ anti-democratic strategy with his Big Lie, but the party is smoothly adjusting itself to the idea that the norms and traditions that kept power-hungry politicians from exploiting the flaws in the system, for fear of the people losing faith in democracy, are no longer necessary. That stuff is for losers, and they simply don’t care about any of it anymore. 

They did make it harder to cast a ballot but perhaps the voters of Georgia have accepted that they have to jump through ridiculous hoops to exercise their right to vote and are determined not to let it stop them? That certainly doesn’t make it right, especially since there was no reason to do it in the first place. But it’s important to note that these laws against mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes as they’ve enacted in Georgia are only a small part of the assault on democracy the GOP has been conducting for the past year and a half. They are unfair but voters can at least overcome them with effort. The even more serious problem is election subversion.

In April of 2021, the NY Times’s Nate Cohn sounded the alarm, writing:

Beyond any provisions on voting itself, the new Georgia election law risks making election subversion easier. It creates new avenues for partisan interference in election administration. This includes allowing the state elections board, now newly controlled by appointees of the Republican State Legislature, to appoint a single person to take control of typically bipartisan county election boards, which have important power over vote counting and voter eligibility.

The law also gives the Legislature the authority to appoint the chair of the state election board and two more of its five voting members, allowing it to appoint a majority of the board. It strips the secretary of state of the chair and a vote. Even without this law, there would still be a risk of election subversion: Election officials and administrators all over the country possess important powers, including certification of election results, that could be abused in pursuit of partisan gain.

This has been happening all over the country but the news media has been strangely lackadaisical about reporting it so it’s hard to grasp just how successful they’ve been at putting these new laws into place and where the greatest threats of the next coup will come from. This past weekend, the NY Times did an important front page story pulling together all the threads of this story from across the nation. It’s very sobering.

They found that “at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election” which adds up to nearly half (44%) of all Republicans in state houses across the nine states where the election was the closest.

-23% of them “took steps to delay the vote count or overturn the election by supporting lawsuits or by signing letters to Congress or former Vice President Mike Pence.”

-11% of them supported sending alternate electors to overturn the election.

-7% were in favor of “decertification” of the election long after the fact.

-24% voted for an “audit” of the election results, what the Times calls a “gateway” to further actions.

The Times notes that there has been resistance from some Republicans and that many of their craziest schemes have not been enacted. But their analysis looks at all the battleground states and the groundwork has been laid. It’s clear that this is now on the GOP agenda and in the case of close elections we will see more of this by Republicans who see the advantage in creating chaos and uncertainty, potentially creating the circumstances that could overturn the will of the voters.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in deciding whom to endorse in state legislative races, he is looking for candidates who want state legislatures to have a say in naming presidential electors — a position that could let politicians short-circuit the democratic process and override the popular vote.

Republicans in Pennsylvania just nominated a far-right extremist and 2020 election denier for governor who promises that if he’s elected he will ensure that the GOP legislature will have the final word on which candidate the state will certify to have won the presidential election. Unless the US Congress gets off the dime and passes some kind of electoral count act reform, it seems more likely than not that he or some other swing state Republican governor is going to try this.

Back in 2000 Republicans first got a sense of how to use the levers of local political power combined with the help of a partisan Supreme Court majority to declare themselves the winner in a close election. (The “independent state legislature doctrine” that underlies this plotting was first raised in Bush v Gore by the far right justices.) The Party certainly no longer has even the slightest concern about the legitimacy conferred by a popular vote victory since they have only won one in the last 30 years.

Trump may have turbo-charged the Republican’s anti-democratic strategy with his Big Lie but it’s not hard to see that the Party is quite smoothly adjusting itself to the idea that the norms and traditions that kept power hungry politicians from exploiting the flaws in the system for fear of the people losing faith in democracy or looking illegitimate in their eyes are no longer necessary. They simply don’t care about any of that anymore.

Salon

How they converged with the citizen insurrectionists

Here's video of Marjorie Taylor Greene at the White House in late Dec 2020 saying she had a "great planning session for our January 6th objection. We aren't going to let this election be stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats. President Trump won by a landslide." Expel Greene now. pic.twitter.com/oogwe20Z8K

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) January 28, 2021

We know what Trump and his flunkies were planning to overturn the 2020 election. And the DOJ prosecutions are also showing how outside groups and militias were making plans for the insurrection. This is a good piece from the AP showing how members of congress were also plotting:

Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House. Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing.

Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states.

Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote. “I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.”

The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.

It’s a connection that members of the House Jan. 6 committee are making explicit as they prepare to launch public hearings in June. The Republicans plotting with Trump and the rioters who attacked the Capitol were aligned in their goals, if not the mob’s violent tactics, creating a convergence that nearly upended the nation’s peaceful transfer of power.

“It appears that a significant number of House members and a few senators had more than just a passing role in what went on,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, told The Associated Press last week.

Since launching its investigation last summer, the Jan. 6 panel has been slowly gaining new details about what lawmakers said and did in the weeks before the insurrection. Members have asked three GOP lawmakers — Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — to testify voluntarily. All have refused. Other lawmakers could be called in the coming days. So far, the Jan. 6 committee has refrained from issuing subpoenas to lawmakers, fearing the repercussions of such an extraordinary step. But the lack of cooperation from lawmakers hasn’t prevented the panel from obtaining new information about their actions.

The latest court document, submitted in response to a lawsuit from Meadows, contained excerpts from just a handful of the more than 930 interviews the Jan. 6 panel has conducted. It includes information on several high-level meetings nearly a dozen House Republicans attended where Trump’s allies flirted with ways to give him another term.

Among the ideas: naming fake slates of electors in seven swing states, declaring martial law and seizing voting machines. The efforts started in the weeks after The Associated Press declared Biden president-elect.

In early December 2020, several lawmakers attended a meeting in the White House counsel’s office where attorneys for the president advised them that a plan to put up an alternate slate of electors declaring Trump the winner was not “legally sound.” One lawmaker, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, pushed back on that position. So did GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House.

Despite the warning from the counsel’s office, Trump’s allies moved forward. On Dec. 14, 2020, as rightly chosen Democratic electors in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met at their seat of state government to cast their votes, the fake electors gathered as well.

They declared themselves the rightful electors and submitted false Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the true winner of the presidential election in their states.Those certificates from the “alternate electors” were then sent to Congress, where they were ignored.

The majority of the lawmakers have since denied their involvement in these efforts.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia testified in a hearing in April that she does not recall conversations she had with the White House or the texts she sent to Meadows about Trump invoking martial law.

Gohmert told AP he also does not recall being involved and that he is not sure he could be helpful to the committee’s investigation. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia played down his actions, saying it is routine for members of the president’s party to be going in and out of the White House to speak about a number of topics. Hice is now running for secretary of state in Georgia, a position responsible for the state’s elections.

Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona didn’t deny his public efforts to challenge the election results but called recent reports about his deep involvement untrue. In a statement Saturday, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona reiterated his “serious” concerns about the 2020 election. “Discussions about the Electoral Count Act were appropriate, necessary and warranted,” he added. Requests for comment from the other lawmakers were not immediately returned.

Less than a week later after the early December meeting at the White House, another plan emerged. In a meeting with House Freedom Caucus members and Trump White House officials, the discussion turned to the decisive action they believed that Pence could take on Jan. 6. Those in attendance virtually and in-person, according to committee testimony, were Hice, Biggs, Gosar, Reps. Perry, Gaetz, Jordan, Gohmert, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Debbie Lesko of Arizona, and Greene, then a congresswoman-elect.

“What was the conversation like?” the committee asked Hutchinson, who was a frequent presence in the meetings that took place in December 2020 and January 2021. “They felt that he had the authority to, pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the states,” Hutchinson said, referring to Pence. When asked if any of the lawmakers disagreed with the idea that the vice president had such authority, Hutchinson said there was no objection from any of the Republican lawmakers.

In another meeting about Pence’s potential role, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis were joined again by Perry and Jordan as well as Greene and Lauren Boebert, a Republican who had also just been elected to the House from Colorado.

Communication between lawmakers and the White House didn’t let up as Jan. 6 drew closer. The day after Christmas — more than two months after the election was called for Biden — Perry texted Meadows with a countdown. “11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration,” the text read. “We gotta get going!” Perry urged Meadows to call Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general who championed Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump.

Clark clashed with Justice Department superiors over his plan to send a letter to Georgia and other battleground states questioning the election results and urging their state legislatures to investigate. It all culminated in a dramatic White House meeting at which Trump considered elevating Clark to attorney general, only to back down after top Justice Department officials made clear they would resign.

Pressure from lawmakers and the White House on the Justice Department is among several areas of inquiry in the Jan. 6 investigation. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the panel from Maryland, has hinted there are more revelations to come. “As the mob smashed our windows, bloodied our police and stormed the Capitol, Trump and his accomplices plotted to destroy Biden’s majority in the electoral college and overthrow our constitutional order,” Raskin tweeted last week.

When the results of the panel’s investigation come out, Raskin predicted, “America will see how the coup and insurrection converged.”

And unfortunately, they will also see that there is no accountability, Republican voters are cheering them on for an encore and our cultural cynicism will grow even further.

This morning I watched a GOP pollster, Kristen Soltis Anderson, tell the CNN audience that voters don’t care about this assault on our democracy because they only care about their own lives. She told Brian Stelter that the media should be talking about so much and they should focus instead on immigration, crime and “making ends meet.” In other words, the Republican agenda.

I’m sure that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy would like that too. But even if the media and the Democrats take this ridiculously patronizing advise, I hope they remember that Donald Trump won’t let 2020 go. It’s probably not a good idea to leave that field open to him.

It was always cynical opportunism

t’s been a big couple of weeks in Republican Party inside gossip. Newly leaked audio tapes and text messages illustrate the utter hypocrisy of virtually everyone in the party. But it’s not as if we didn’t know that about them already, just as we already knew about their utter cowardice and cynicism. That, too, has been on full display ever since Donald Trump won the nomination for president six years ago. But considering the stakes now, the cravenness of their opportunism can still shock even after all of this time.

In their new book, “This Will Not Pass,” New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns reveal both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to be even more nihilistic than we knew. Most people seem to think that because they said to various parties in the aftermath of January 6th that they were appalled by the events of that day and that they were done with Trump that they were showing what they truly believed. Upon reflection, it seems more likely to me that they simply thought that the American people would be so upset by the insurrection and Trump’s incitement that they would turn on him and so they assumed that was the smart place to be. But when it became evident that their voters were actually supportive of the assault and more devoted to Donald Trump than ever, they changed their minds. Why should we assume that they were telling the truth at any point in that series of events, private or public? They lie about everything, just like Trump.Advertisement:

And it’s not as if that’s the first time we’ve seen this dynamic.

Going all the way back to Trump’s dissing of GOP Senator John McCain to the Access Hollywood tape to talking about the size of his manhood in a presidential debate, the 2016 campaign laid out the template for Donald Trump behaving in insanely inappropriate ways, Republicans deciding it was the smart move to distance themselves from him only to find out that their voters loved every minute of it. By the time he was done he had created a situation in which millions of people were taking snake oil cures in the middle of a deadly pandemic and storming the Capitol, threatening to hang the vice president. Republican leaders and elected officials thought that was the end and it wasn’t. Trump famously said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters and he was right.

If GOP establishment figures like McCarthy and McConnell had truly felt that what Trump did was egregious, and deep in their hearts wanted him gone, they could have led instead of followed. After all, it would have only taken 10 more Senators to vote to impeach Trump to prevent him from running again. From what we’re seeing in this latest reporting, they didn’t even try.

There have been examples of principled Republicans, however, they just aren’t in Washington.

As we saw during the post-election period, state and local officials around the country actually put up a fight. (It was lucky they did, too.) The battle is ongoing with state parties still facing tremendous pressure from Trump and his followers and while it’s hard to determine their real motives there are some outside groups still invested in the party who are also pushing back.

The Times reported on Thursday that the Michigan GOP is involved in a serious battle between Trumper extremists and the old guard which is unwilling to go along with the anointment of 2020 election deniers to the ballot for the offices of Secretary of State and Attorney General. According to the Times:

This week, Tony Daunt, powerful figure in Michigan politics with close ties to the influential donor network of the DeVos family, resigned from the G.O.P.’s state committee in a blistering letter, calling Mr. Trump “a deranged narcissist.” Major donors to the state party indicated that they would direct their money elsewhere. And one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal defenders in the State Legislature was kicked out of the House Republican caucus…

“Rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser,” Mr. Daunt wrote in his resignation letter, “far too many Republican ‘leaders’ have decided that encouraging his delusional lies — and, even worse — cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring their continued hold on power, general election consequences be damned.

The whole state party is in turmoil and nobody knows how it’s going to end in November. But at least they’re trying.

In neighboring Wisconsin, the Trump faction continues to argue for “de-certification” of the 2020 election with a GOP “investigation” released in early March advancing the argument that the state legislature could do it even though there was no mechanism for overturning the election. Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos rejected the idea saying that it’s “legally impossible” and tried to disband the so-called investigation. Trump intervened, implicitly threatening to back Vos’s primary challenger if he didn’t keep the investigation funded because it’s continuing to beat the Big Lie drum. So he took the path of least resistance and kept the office going, adding to the $680,000 of taxpayer money that’s already been wasted.

According to Vice news, this whole issue has made the Wisconsin GOP melt down, with the state establishment and Trumpers going at it constantly. Nobody knows how this one will turn out either, but you can be sure that if Trump’s people prevail, the 2024 election will be a three-ring circus.Advertisement:

In Ohio, you have the fierce fighting among all the primary candidates, all of whom spent months attempting to curry favor with Trump. J.D. Vance was the big winner there with the venerable right-wing group the Club for Growth backing his rival and spending a lot of money attacking Vance for not being Trumpy enough. It didn’t work. Trump’s endorsement vaulted him to the lead in the polls. Rolling Stone reported that Trump was persuaded to pick Vance largely on the basis of crude sexual gossip from Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson about the head of Club for Growth David McIntosh. Perhaps the Club for Growth should have appealed to the voters on principle — they used to have them — instead of playing this game and they might at least have come out of this with some dignity intact. Nonetheless, they did try to go up against Trump, however ineffectively.

Other battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania also have their own internal fights between the establishment and the Big Liars. Unlike what we see in DC, there are at least some Republican attempts to stop the Trump train still happening around the country. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look very promising. It appears that job is going to be left for the Democrats to do in the fall — and that’s a terrifying subject for another day.

Salon

It’s all out there

I’ve lost count of how many books have been published at this point about Donald Trump’s final days, but I’m glad that the staggered release of them has helped to keep the event fresh in people’s minds as each one offers up something that we didn’t know before. With the January 6th Committee selectively leaking information and the prospect of public hearings at some point in the near future, it’s still possible that the whole thing won’t be completely swept under the rug before the election in the fall.

A few days ago, Politico’s Kyle Cheney posted a useful overview of just some of what we have learned so far. We know that Trump went to great lengths in the days and weeks after the election to bully, coerce, strong arm and intimidate local and state officials in all the battleground states to illegally overturn the election results. He pushed the Department of Justice to declare the election results were tainted and only moved on when it became clear that they would all resign in protest if he installed a willing toady who would carry it out. And his legal team of fringe weirdos led by Rudy Giuliani descended upon courthouses in the targeted states with wild accusations of voter fraud that were all denied, many of them by judges Trump himself appointed.

Throughout this period, various conspiracy nuts, hucksters, crackpots and grifters were running in and out of the White House with ludicrous schemes, pushing conspiracy theories. On Tuesday, CNN published texts from one of them, an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania named Scott Perry, a former Army General like fellow weirdo Michael Flynn who was heavily involved in all aspects of the attempted coup. Among Perry’s texts were messages to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows accusing CIA director Gina Haspel of being in cahoots with “the Brits” to manipulate the voting machines and telling him the “DNI needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at CIA – and their National Endowment for Democracy. ” (How many of these kooky Generals are there?)

When none of Giuliani’s legal claims came to fruition, Trump enlisted the help of a legal quack named John Eastman who devised a plan to have Republican-run states send alternate slates of electors and then have Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes from those states to dishonestly invoke the “contingent election process” which would result in Trump being elected because there are currently more GOP state delegations than Democratic ones.

And that’s just for starters.

January 6th Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md, has said in recent days that “six of the most chilling words in U.S. history” were from Mike Pence, as first reported by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker in their book “I Alone Can Fix It.”

“I’m not getting in that car.”

Moments after Pence was whisked into an underground parking garage to escape the rioters and the Secret Service wanted to take him out of the building, he refused. The book quotes him saying this to Tim Giebels, his lead special agent:

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car.If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

According to the Washington Post, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short tried to say that he just didn’t want global adversaries to see the image of him driving away from the Capitol but that doesn’t explain why he would imply that he didn’t trust the Secret Service. At the same time, his national security adviser, Keith Kellogg, who was in the White House talking to a Secret Service agent named Tony Ornato who was so close to Trump that he had been given a White House adviser role, an unprecedented step for anyone from that agency, which is supposed to be non-partisan. Ornato said they were going to move Pence to Andrews Air Force base to which Kellog replied, “You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”Advertisement:

Raskin believes, and it seems pretty obvious, that they wanted to get him out of there so he couldn’t do that job, which was to oversee the certification of the electoral college votes.

If that doesn’t add up to an attempted coup, I don’t know what does.

The latest book, “This Will Pass” by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, has not been released yet and with the exception of a couple of previewed excerpts, they have been promoting the book by releasing audiotapes of the Republican leadership in the days after the January 6th insurrection. These recordings, which have been dribbled out on a daily basis are perversely damaging to the House Minority Leader and hopeful next Speaker, not because they show him backing the coup attempt but rather the opposite. In today’s GOP, if you are shown to have had the least bit of conscience and concern about what took place on January 6th, you are considered to be untrustworthy (or “untrustable” as McCarthy once famously said.)

These audio recordings of calls with House GOP leadership reveal McCarthy being horrified by Trump’s behavior to the point at which he even said “I’ve had it with this guy” and indicated that he thought Trump should resign rather than be impeached. He also had grave concerns about the behavior of members of his own caucus, even wishing that Twitter would ban some of them from posting.

Martin and Burns also report that late on January 6th Mitch McConnell said he was “exhilarated” because he assumed the insurrection meant the final ending of the Trump phenomenon. He told Martin that Trump “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, it couldn’t have happened at a better time.” He even asked him if he’d heard anything about the 25th Amendment.

How this plays out politically is anyone’s guess but what it does show is that the GOP leadership knew exactly what Trump did that day and there was a moment in time when they thought it was the end of him — and they were happy about it.

That didn’t last, of course.

We don’t know if there will be any more details to come out in reporting or any more shoes to drop in the investigation or the upcoming hearings that will change the trajectory of the upcoming election. But there shouldn’t have to be. We know everything we need to know. There can be no more doubt in anyone’s mind who is paying attention that a coup was plotted and very nearly successful. The only question is if enough people care that American democracy is on life support to keep the people who planned it (or stood by while it was happening) from regaining power in spite of it.

Update —Oh my:

“Kevin McCarthy is a puppet of the Dem Party” pic.twitter.com/oNUExc5qL0

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 27, 2022

Salon

“If they ever get out we have a problem”

Do Republicans really have a problem if they are revealed to have been plotting a military coup after January 6th? I doubt it. Nobody cares. The only thing that matters is Mickey Mouse grooming Huey, Dewey and Louie, gas prices, CRT and wearing masks.

Anyway, we did see some new texts to and from Mark Meadows today which will make interesting historical artifacts:

CNN has obtained 2,319 text messages that former President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent and received between Election Day 2020 and President Joe Biden’s January 20, 2021 inauguration.The vast trove of texts offers the most revealing picture to date of how Trump’s inner circle, supporters and Republican lawmakers worked behind the scenes to try to overturn the election results and then reacted to the violence that effort unleashed at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.The logs, which Meadows selectively provided to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, show how the former chief of staff was at the nexus of sprawling conspiracy theories baselessly claiming the election had been stolen. They also demonstrate how he played a key role in the attempts to stop Biden’s certification on January 6.

The never-before-seen texts include messages from Trump’s family — daughter Ivanka Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and son Donald Trump Jr. — as well as White House and campaign officials, Cabinet members, Republican Party leaders, January 6 rally organizers, Rudy Giuliani, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, Sean Hannity and other Fox hosts. There are also text exchanges with more than 40 current and former Republican members of Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mo Brooks of Alabama and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

The texts include everything from plans to fight the election results to surprising and unexpected reactions on January 6 from some of Trump’s staunchest allies. At 2:28 p.m., Greene, the conservative firebrand who had helped to plan the congressional objections that day, texted Meadows with an urgent plea for help as the violence was unfolding at the Capitol.

“Mark I was just told there is an active shooter on the first floor of the Capitol Please tell the President to calm people This isn’t the way to solve anything,” Greene wrote. Meadows does not appear to reply.

“Mark: he needs to stop this, now. Can I do anything to help?” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting White House chief of staff, texted Meadows.”It’s really bad up here on the hill. They have breached the Capitol,” Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk wrote.”The president needs to stop this ASAP,” texted GOP Rep. William Timmons of South Carolina.”POTUS is engaging,” Meadows sent in response to Loudermilk. “We are doing it,” he texted to Timmons.”Thanks. This doesn’t help our cause,” Loudermilk replied.Shortly after, Donald Trump Jr. weighed in: “This his(sic) one you go to the mattresses on. They will try to fuck his entire legacy on this if it gets worse.””TELL THEM TO GO HOME !!!” texted Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Heated rhetoric and conspiracy theories

The text messages CNN obtained begin on Election Day, November 3, 2020. Even before the election was called, Meadows was inundated with conspiracy theories about election fraud, strategies to challenge the results and pleas for Trump to keep fighting. The messages — from GOP activists, donors, Republican members of Congress and state party officials — appear to act as an echo chamber affirming Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen. For months leading up to Election Day, Trump had claimed the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged.

Previously disclosed text messages showed that former Trump administration Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., each texted Meadows on November 4 and 5 with ideas for overturning the election.On November 7, hours before the election was called, Perry texted Meadows again: “We have the data driven program that can clearly show where the fraud was committed. This is the silver bullet.”While Perry has previously denied CNN reporting about his text messages to Meadows, CNN has confirmed it’s his cell phone and he signed this text, “Rick Perry,” including his number.

Other texts, however, include hints of doubt expressed by members of Trump’s team and even Meadows himself about the veracity of conspiracy theories being spread by Trump’s “kraken” team — outside attorneys working for Trump that included Giuliani and Sidney Powell.Some key congressional allies who worked with Trump’s campaign initially in its efforts to overturn the election, such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, ultimately soured on the approach as the January 6 congressional certification neared, CNN previously reported.The texts also show how Trump allies were quick to deflect responsibility for the January 6 attack. Shortly after pro-Trump rioters breached the Capitol, one of his top aides began crafting a counter-narrative.

At 3:45 p.m., Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller suggested to Meadows and Trump aide Dan Scavino that Trump should tweet: “Call me crazy, but ideas for two tweets from POTUS: 1) Bad apples, likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count. Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now! 2) The fake news media who encouraged this summer s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions. This isn’t who we are! Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the consequences!”Trump’s allies in Congress appeared to get the message. At 3:52 p.m., Greene told Meadows: “Mark we don’t think these attackers are our people. We think they are Antifa. Dressed like Trump supporters.”Five minutes later, Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, texted Meadows: “Cap Police told me last night they’d been warned that today there’d be a lot of Antifa dressed in red Trump shirts & hats & would likely get violent.”In the 16 months since January 6, hundreds of indictments have shown nearly all of those who breached the Capitol were in fact pro-Trump supporters.

While Greene was alarmed on January 6, by the next day she was apologizing that the efforts to block Biden’s certification had failed.”Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked. I don’t think that President Trump caused the attack on the Capitol. It’s not his fault,” she wrote the morning of January 7. “Absolutely no excuse and I fully denounce all of it, but after shut downs all year and a stolen election, people are saying that they have no other choice.”Meadows replied, “Thanks Marjorie.”

But guess what? Within a few days she was pushing a military coup:

By January 17, Greene was suggesting ways to keep Trump in office, telling Meadows there were several Republicans in Congress who still wanted the then-President to declare martial law, which had been raised in a heated Oval Office meeting a month earlier.

Greene texted: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall (sic) law. I don’t know on those things. I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next. Please tell him to declassify as much as possible so we can go after Biden and anyone else!”

That’s right. Members of congress were discussing the possibility of a military coup. That’s what “Marshall” law would have meant in that context. These were elected officials who took an oath to defend the constitution.

Just spoke with someone close to House conservatives, who has seen some of the group chats from late 2020 and early 2021. Cringed at the MTG texts. Said the group chats were, and remain, "stupid" and "everybody texted too much" in them. "If they ever get out, we have a problem."

— Robert Costa (@costareports) April 25, 2022

But you knew that

I’ve had some distractions the past week and haven’t had a real chance to delve into the Mike Lee-Chip Roy coup planning as deeply as I’d like. Looking it all over this morning it seems clear to me that the fatuous defense that Lee and Roy were just trying to get the facts and then backed off is bullshit. This piece is from Amanda Carpenter at the Bulwark:

Senator Mike Lee’s defenders insist his repeated texts to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows offering his guidance on the proper constitutional process to overturn the 2020 election results prove his honor. Never mind that the basis for overturning the election wasn’t anything more than Donald Trump’s desire to do so. Details, schmetails!

Let’s bat the argument around, though. The texts show Lee was eager to assist Trump in challenging the election—to the point of Lee texting Meadows dozens of times, begging “please tell me what I should be saying” and offering his advice about what should be done. (Pour one out for his Article One Project.) Specifically, these texts and Lee’s other on-the-record statements show he was consistent in advocating that the only way, according to the Constitution, to change the outcome was for state legislatures to appoint alternate slates of electors for Congress to accept on Jan. 6. Lee spent much time and effort insisting on this. But, the state legislatures did not. So Lee did not raise any objections on January 6th and voted to certify Joe Biden as president. And, for this Lee is supposed to be some kind of hero.

Slow clap.

Because what if GOP-controlled state legislatures in the swing states Biden won had decided to appoint Trump electors based on whatever Cheetos-dust some drive-by gang of Cyber Ninjas sniffed and got high on while seizing Dominion Voting machines? Well, as Lee wrote Meadows on January 3: “Everything changes, of course, if the swing states submit competing slates of electors pursuant to state law.”

Got that? Everything changes. If state-level Republicans had been okay with overturning the election results, then Lee was okay with it, too.

In interviews with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa for their book Peril, which came out in September 2021, Lee depicted himself as someone who, through December 2020, “never wavered” from the view that Congress had no role in messing with Electoral College votes.

The story goes that someone “directed” him to speak with John Eastman around Christmastime. Soon, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz started looking at other options to challenge the election results, and Lee didn’t go along with their plans.Then, on January 2, in Woodward and Costa’s account, Lee was “shocked” to receive a memo from Eastman. The memo—the short, two-page version, not the six-page version Eastman later developed—outlined a scenario where “7 states have transmitted dual slates of electors to the President of the Senate.”

It’s conceivable Lee was shocked that Eastman wanted the president of the Senate, Mike Pence, to play such a prominent role on Jan. 6th. But the idea of alternate electors is one that Lee knew plenty about—because he and his friends had been talking about it quite a bit.

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Some relevant texts to keep in mind:

Lee writing to Meadows on November 9, 2020: “​​We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”

On November 23, Lee told Meadows that Eastman has “really interesting research,” indicating that he was familiar with Eastman and respected his analysis. (By this point, Eastman was apparently just starting to work with Trump’s political-legal team. He had not yet written his infamous memos or represented Trump in a rejected Supreme Court motion, but had sent out plenty of tweets insinuating that Democrats had by various means stolen the 2020 election from Trump.)

On December 8, Lee texted Meadows: “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.”

Lee was on board with Kraken lady, coup memo man, and an alternate elector plot. Check, check, check.

The “CPI” Lee mentioned is presumably the Conservative Partnership Institute. Its leaders, and a who’s-who list of other prominent Lee allies in the conservative movement, issued an open letter on December 10 that said:

The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states—as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups—violated the Constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories.

There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.

Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean Electoral College slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states.

Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the U.S. Constitution. [Emphasis added.]

Notice the key line: “State legislatures in the battleground states . . . should . . . appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.”

This is what the activist conservatives in Lee’s circle were loudly, openly demanding. They publicly endorsed a scheme to, through the power of state legislatures, convert Biden’s electors into Trump electors. All without any of the evidence of voter fraud Lee spent two months searching to find.

And we are now supposed to believe that Lee was shocked that his buddies who were willing to throw an election based on butt-dials from Rudy Giuliani would bypass the state legislatures to make up even phonier slates of electors?

That’s a story worth hearing. We deserve more explanation about all paths pursued to install alternate electors. Lee should, under oath, tell it to the Jan. 6th Committee.

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What’s amazing is how desperately Lee was still trying to make Trump’s dream of flipping the election come true as late as January 4, 2021.

That day he attended Trump’s rally in Georgia to help “Stop the Steal” Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler get elected. There, he also met with Trump’s legal team. According to Peril, Lee told Trump’s lawyers that they should be making their case in courts and state legislatures, not to members of Congress.

And the newly released texts show Lee wrote to Meadows a lot between January 3 and January 4. He firmly insisted to Meadows that he was helping Trump and was very upset that people were saying otherwise. For his trouble, Trump depicted Lee as someone who wasn’t really a team player.

At the event, Trump said: “Mike Lee is here, too. But I’m a little angry at him today. . . . I just want Mike Lee to listen to this, what I’m talking [about], because you know what, we need his vote.”

Lee texted Meadows: “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him. To have him take a shot at me like that in such a public setting without even asking me about it is pretty discouraging.”

Meadows said “sorry” to Lee and Lee, in his response, remained eager as ever to show how loyal he remained to the cause:

It’s not your fault. But I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend, and this won’t make it any easier, especially if others now think I’m doing this because he went after me. This just makes it a lot more complicated. And it was complicated already. We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.

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How was it that as late as January 4 Lee was still “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend”? Remember, by January 4, the election was decided. Trump had lost dozens of court cases. The states had certified the elections on December 14. It was over. And still, Lee was working his butt off trying to find any flimsy veneer of constitutionality for Trump’s bogus claims.

And what did Lee mean when he wrote “it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote”? Did he mean that if Republican state legislators in, say, Pennsylvania and Arizona got together informally and put their name on a something—nothing binding, just a “statement,” maybe jotted on a bar napkin or the back of an envelope—Lee would consider that sufficient excuse for Congress to reject those states’ official, certified results? Keep in mind that a key suggestion in John Eastman’s short memo was to find a way to “give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors, if they had not already done so.”

In short: Lee outlined paths for Trump nuts to reverse the election. But, after giving these clowns all his attention, time, and effort, he didn’t, in the end, like how the Trump nuts tried to reverse the election. His disagreement was about tactics, not the mission. But his error was accepting the mission at all.

And somehow Lee’s defenders look at this and say, “BOOM! Hands clean.”

He is a perfect avatar of the mainstream of the Republican Party:

Share @HeathMayo disappointment & disgust with Mike Lee. But I have different conclusion. I don’t think he was ever conservative or dedicated to Constitution. It was what he needed to say to win in Utah. It was about power. He would have been a Trotskyite if Trotsky was in power. https://t.co/IHyODE5v6g

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) April 16, 2022

So true. You don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a few years. It just means you never held them deeply. They were marketing slogans, not values. https://t.co/Hw2A3JTJ59

— Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) April 16, 2022

They don’t believe in anything, that much is clear. It’s pure tribalism at this point.