A former Trump White House official says he and right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon were actually behind the last-ditch coordinated effort by rogue Republicans in Congress to halt certification of the 2020 election results and keep President Donald Trump in power earlier this year, in a plan dubbed the “Green Bay Sweep.”
In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put the Green Bay Sweep in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.ADVERTISING
But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”
That commitment appeared as Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes reflecting that Joe Biden beat Trump. Sen. Cruz signed off on Gosar’s official objection to counting Arizona’s electoral ballots, an effort that was supported by dozens of other Trump loyalists.
Staffers for Cruz and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment. There’s no public indication whether the Jan. 6 Committee has sought testimony or documents from Sen. Cruz or Rep. Gosar. But the committee has only recently begun to seek evidence from fellow members of Congress who were involved in the general effort to keep Trump in the White House, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).
This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.
I guess a violent mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” could be considered “pressure.”
It’s astonishing how these guys are all so proud of their coup planning, writing books about it proclaiming their guilt to everyone who will listen. I suppose that those who simply aren’t delusional conspiracy theorists may just be doubling down to save face. But I think what’s most stunning about all of it is the fact that they are so confident that can act with total impunity.
They have no fear of accountability. None. Why is that?
Did Donald Trump plot coup strategy with his generals at the Willard hotel headquarters on January 6th? Was there any discussion of possible violence? The Guardian reports that the January 6th Committee thinks he may have:
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.
The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.
Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”
The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.
Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.
The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.
House investigators in recent months have pursued an initial investigation into Trump’s contacts with lieutenants at the Willard, issuing a flurry of subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to crucial witnesses, including Bannon and Eastman.
But Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.
I always come back to this passage from the Woodward and Costa book “Peril” and the January 5th exchange between Trump and Pence in which Trump, listening to the crowd outside the White House cheering for him, told Pence that he wanted him to let the House of Representatives decide the election. Pence responded that he didn’t have the authority and Trump gestured to the crowd outside the window and said to him, “Well, what if these people say you do?” As we know, Pence refused, but according to the book Trump later commented to others that there was a lot of anger “out there” and we all know what he said the next morning to his ecstatic and worshipful crowd.
Marcy Wheeler has some interesting ideas about how this may play out. She thinks Roger Stone may be the weak link — the same Roger Stone with very close connections to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
I don’t know what it all means, but if they are seriously contemplating a criminal referral to the DOJ for obstruction of congress by Trump this could be a key.
Again, I’m not getting too overheated about any of this. After all, Trump got away with multiple counts of obstruction of justice in the Russian probe, some so egregious they would make Richard Nixon blush — and we all watched it happen in real time. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes I believed it. I didn’t realize at the time that he could shoot someone of 5th Avenue and not get prosecuted but I’m afraid that’s true too.
The House Select Committee of investigation of the Jan. 6 attack placed Rep. Jim Jordan (R) of Ohio on notice Wednesday that it would like a few hours of his time. Maybe even 11?
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote to Jordan that the committee would like his “voluntary cooperation in advancing our investigation.” Why is already a matter of public record:
We understand that you had at least one and possibly multiple communications with President Trump on January 6th. We would like to discuss each such communication with you in detail. And we also wish to inquire about any communications you had on January 5th or 6th with those in the Willard War Room, the Trump legal team, White House personnel or others involved in organizing or planning the actions and strategies for January 6th.
What is needed here is a full accounting and timeline of who did what and when leading up to and the day of the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Jordan knows already that involves him.
Asking for Jordan’s cooperation is easy. Getting his cooperation is something else. As Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) noted last night on MSNBC, Jordan is already “moonwalking away” from testifying before the panel. It is not the first time, Swalwell said pointedly, that Jordan has been accused “of witnessing a crime and then not wanting to report it or help investigators.” (See Ohio State wrestlers’ allegations.)
When asked if he spoke with the president on Jan. 6 “before, during or after the Capitol was attacked,” Jordan famously stumbled through answering.
Politico reported in August that Jordan had at least two calls with Trump that day. One of those occurred during the attack.
Jordan later denied speaking to Trump during the attack while in a House Rules Committee meeting. When pressed, Jordan tried to change the subject. He was not under oath (IIRC).
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who previously said he didn’t know if he spoke with President Trump before, during, or after the 1/6 insurrection:
In his calls that day, was Jordan coordinating with Trump on ways to stop the electoral vote certification? Was he pleading with Trump, as others in Congress did, for him to call off his supporters? However Jordan answers, he will face the wrath of Trump and the MAGA faithful. That, he will never do voluntarily.
The chances that Jordan will cooperate are slim. (I first mistyped “slime.”) Will he defy a subpoena? He will try. His allegiance to Trump is all-consuming. If he does appear as a witness, under oath, we can expect his usual theatrics, shouting and filibustering. He’ll turn his testimony into a televised circus.
I had to have some fun with that last night:
Whenever @Jim_Jordan performs a tantrum for the cameras, I want to ask #Trump what Axel Foley asked Victor Maitland in #BeverlyHillsCop:
Failure to issue an official report on the events of Jan. 6 will leave Trump and MAGA-world to rewrite their own history.
I’m looking forward to purchasing the official House report on the Jan. 6 insurrection. It would not be the first time in my lifetime such a report was necessary.
Just Security on Tuesday offered an expanded explanation for the military’s hours-long delay in deploying the National Guard to put down the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Officials worried that the outgoing president might with a tweet repurpose the troops to support the insurrection and stop certification of Joe Biden’s win (and Donald Trump’s loss).
The delay was not just about the optics of or bureaucratic bungling of any troop deployment:
According to a report released last month, Christopher Miller, who served as acting Secretary of the Defense on Jan. 6, told the Department’s inspector general that he feared “if we put U.S. military personnel on the Capitol, I would have created the greatest Constitutional crisis probably since the Civil War.” In congressional testimony, he said he was also cognizant of “fears that the President would invoke the Insurrection Act to politicize the military in an anti-democratic manner” and that “factored into my decisions regarding the appropriate and limited use of our Armed Forces to support civilian law enforcement during the Electoral College certification.”
“General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as former CIA Director and at the time Secretary of State Mike Pompeo” feared that with troops in place Donald Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down congressional counting of electoral votes.
The top officials’ fears were warranted: Donald Trump, his close aides and a segment of Republican political figures had openly discussed the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act or using the military to prevent the transfer of power on the basis of false claims that the election was “stolen.” But the Pentagon’s actions with respect to the National Guard suggest a scenario in which, on the basis of such concerns, a potentially profound crisis of command may have played out on Jan. 6.
Close observers of the events of Jan. 6 have mainly posited two reasons for the delay in mobilizing the Guard. The first explanation is one of bureaucratic failures or managerial weaknesses in the military’s procedures that day. A second explanation is that the military was deliberately serving Trump’s effort to interfere with the election by withholding assistance.
We identify a third explanation: that senior military officials constrained the mobilization and deployment of the National Guard to avoid injecting federal troops that could have been re-missioned by the President to advance his attempt to hold onto power.
Obi-Wan Kenobi wanted to avoid “any Imperial entanglements.” Milley wanted to avoid a Trumpish “Reichstag moment.” Make that Trumpstag moment. Donald plasters his name on everything.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix add:
What was at stake was the prospect of an illegal order from the President and thwarting a potential scheme to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Ultimately, the outcome of the Pentagon’s decisions may have been best for the nation, even if it extended the period of time during which Congress was in harm’s way.
The report provides multiple citations in which Trump toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act as a tool for quelling street protests over police violence and/or for demonstrating his power. Trump and multiple supporters in his orbit reinforced the idea of invokingmartial law should he lose the election.
Those events plus post-election personnel changes at the Pentagon added fuel to rumors that Trump might be putting loyalists in place to carry out orders for a military deployment to keep himself in power.
Adding to the Pentagon’s concerns is the revelation from a Jan. 5 email sent by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “said that the National Guard would be present to ‘protect pro Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby.”
A clash between counter-protesters and Trump supporters on Jan. 6 could have been the trigger Trump’s stubby finger was itching to pull to invoke some form of martial law. But counter-protesters largely stayed away.
Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix conclude with the hope that there should be a complete compilation of the events of Jan. 6, and the actions and thoughts of the major players:
It is important for many reasons to get to the truth of what happened inside the Department of Defense in the runup to and on Jan. 6. One reason is to ensure accountability of those most responsible for the attempt to interfere with the transfer of power.
In the absence of such clarity, Trump recently highlighted his having told Miller to prepare 10,000 troops for Jan. 6 – as though such an account would be exculpatory for the former president. In his “History Tour” with conservative media personality Bill O’Reilly earlier this month, Trump said, “I asked the Secretary of Defense, I said, I think you should recommend to Nancy Pelosi and to Congress, because they are the ones that control it, I would like to recommend 10,000 National Guardsmen.” (The side reference to Pelosi has been well and repeatedlydebunked.) “That undercuts the entire premise that Donald Trump instigated the Capitol attacks,” said O’Reilly in a subsequent video production.
It would be a cruel and strange twist if the mystery about actions taken by senior Pentagon officials to avoid Trump’s use of the military in his bid to hang onto power became a cornerstone of Trump’s defense for his actions that day.
The House Jan. 6 panel plans weeks of public hearings on the events of that day. In the end, there should be a full report published. Failure to do so will allow Trump and MAGA-world to write one instead, even if not in print.
Matthew Greene, 34, of Syracuse on Wednesday became the first Proud Boy member to plead guilty to “obstructing Congress and conspiring to obstruct law enforcement.” According to court accounts, he pushed past police lines during the Jan. 6 riot but never entered the Capitol building. Greene helped program handheld radios for the Proud Boys the night before:
After the riot, Greene bragged that “we took the capital,” and then ordered over 2,000 rounds of assault-rifle ammunition and a gas mask, according to court records. In encrypted conversations with other Proud Boys, he said they had to “take back our country,” and “stand together now or end up in the gulag separately,” according to court records. He downplayed his association with the group to the FBI, prosecutors said, while telling members to be on guard for law enforcement.
His attorney claims Greene has changed his tune about affiliating with the Proud Boys. Has Donald Trump?
What happened to Greene’s stockpile of ammo?
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:
The NY Times reported yesterday that the January 6th Committee is considering sending a criminal referral of Donald Trump to the Justice department.
According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.
I hadn’t heard about the wire fraud case, although that makes sense. (I would imagine it will be hard to prove they didn’t know their claims were not true.) But if I may toot my own horn, I can say I was aware for a while of the possibility of an obstruction case and wrote about just last week:
[W]e are seeing the contours of what the January 6th Committee may be leading up to: a criminal referral of Donald Trump for obstruction. Liz Cheney spelled it out on Monday during the Committee hearing to hold Meadows in contempt of congress:
Hours passed without necessary action by the President. These privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes. And Mr. Meadows’ testimony will bear on another key question before this Committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceedings to count electoral votes?
Journalist Marcy Wheeler explains that this seems to be following the same legal framework the DOJ is using to prosecute the most serious January 6th rioters. She writes, “Liz Cheney was stating that Trump’s actions on January 6 may demonstrate that he, along with hundreds of people he incited, had deliberately attempted to prevent the vote count.”
The language Cheney used tracks closely with those other cases, which is a clue that this is how they may be seeing this case going forward. The courts have so far been amenable to this interpretation of the law 18 USC 1512(c)(2) which makes it illegal to obstruct an official proceeding. Whether that holds up through the inevitable appeals process is yet to be determined, but when you look at the evidence it’s clear that Donald Trump spent weeks planning to do just that and when his followers resorted to violence to accomplish it, he sat on his hands for hours and watched them do it.
Marcy was on to this very early when she saw that the DOJ was using this somewhat novel approach to the January 6th prosecutions. As of today, we’ve seen the cases of four more defendants charged under this law pass muster in the courts.
I bring all this up because I think it shows that there is value in the kind of work we do here. Blogs like Marcy’s, or some of the newsletters, epidemiology twitter feeds etc, which are densely reported, provide highly detailed analyses of the important issues of our day while many magazines and websites give us deeply reported stories that illuminate our society. Needless to say, the mainstream news is the main source of information we get about the government and politicians. I read them all. And I think those of us who write daily, following the news cycle, riding the zeitgeist as we do while devoting the time to delve into the details, have a unique capacity to find the threads that bind all this together and synthesize them into an evolving story of our time.
If you come by here every few days, you’re going to get a pretty good snapshot of what’s going on in our political world from a progressive perspective.
If you think this is still a valuable part of your media diet and would like to help us keep the lights on here, you can hit one of the buttons below or use the address on the sidebar. I can’t tell you how much your support means to me. That after all these years, people still come by here to see what we have to say is truly gratifying. As long as you show up, we’ll still be here.
I read this piece on Insider this morning about the Democrats loss of rural support and how they need to “show up”, which is no doubt true — margins matter. But it also says that Democrats have to concentrate on “kitchen table issues” that will materially help these rural voters in their real lives instead of all the supposedly abstract stuff they don’t care about.
I won’t go into all the studies which show that this is not the reason those voters have rejected the Democratic Party. They reject the Democrats is because they are hostile to the people who make up the Democratic coalition: people of color, feminists, LGBT folks, immigrants, city people in general. That is a very difficult problem since these rural voters require that politicians crudely insult the Democratic base in order to win their favor and that is a zero sum game.
And about those kitchen table issues? Yeah … every Republican in the congress and one Democrat from one of the most rural states in America reject the Build Back Better plan which will bring more material benefit to rural voters than any legislation since the New Deal. They believe their voters will punish them for voting for it. (Not to say they won’t take credit for the projects it brings. They are already touting the infrastructure projects they didn’t vote for.)
If you’ve been reading Hullabaloo for a while, you know that we’ve spilled oceans of digital ink on that subject and have featured the ideas and critiques of dozens, if not hundreds, of scholars, experts, analysts and gadflies (like me…) It’s been one of the most important and confounding topics of our political era and I don’t think anyone’s figured out the answer. But we’ll keep asking the questions.
Anyway, everyone is expecting a blow out in 2022. That would follow historical midterm trends and the polling a year out says that nothing is different this time. The pandemic is making everyone sour and that often leads to a “throw the bums out” mentality. The media isn’t helping.
However, I’m not so sure it’s going to go that way. Our era is defined by negative partisanship much, much more than “kitchen table issues” and Republicans know that. Mitch McConnell even announced the other day that they would offer no agenda for the 2022 election. They believe they don’t need one. But he has a problem and it may end up costing him the big landslide he thinks is on its way.
Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.
Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.
Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: An enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve…
Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme.
Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.
A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.
Republicans have an orange chaos agent in their midst and he is likely going to define the election far more than rural broadband or child tax credits as sad as that might be. Democrats should be prepared to exploit that situation and I hope they are.
We’ll be following all this very closely here at Hullabaloo. My great morning man Tom Sullivan has his eye on the states and I’ll be watching the right wing. We’ll all keep our eye on the media. So stay tuned!
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Around this time one year ago, Donald Trump was leaning heavily on the Justice Department (DOJ) to help him overturn the presidential election. According to notes taken by top DOJ official Richard Donoghue, after attorney general Bill Barr had abruptly skedaddled out of town before the proverbial manure hit the fan, the president called up the newly installed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and told him “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”
That Nixonian “request” was denied by Rosen, since it would have been a bald-faced lie but as we later learned, the White House was also plotting with an obscure DOJ lawyer named Jeffrey Clark to put the heat on Rosen to squeeze state election officials in states Trump claimed without evidence had been stolen from him. Rosen was told that Trump planned for Clark to replace him if he didn’t comply but Rosen resisted and Trump backed off after his own White House counsel convinced him that there would be mass resignations at the DOJ if he followed through. Other than one congressman from Pennsylvania, a Republican by the name of Scott Perry who had reportedly called up Donoghue to threaten him into doing Clark’s bidding, until now we didn’t know exactly who the “R. Congressmen” were. Now The New York Times reports that Trump’s accomplices were none other than the members of the House’s far-right Freedom Caucus.
The Times names Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, Louis Gohmert of Texas, Mo Brooks of Alabama and Pennsylvania’s Perry, who is described by the Times as the coordinator of the plans to replace the attorney general with the compliant Clark. They all worked closely with one of the original founders of the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, the former North Carolina congressman who served as Trump’s chief of staff.
The Times reports on a previously unknown meeting that took place shortly after the election which included Jordan, Perry and Meadows along with White House adviser Stephen Miller, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Jordan claims it was purely a media strategy meeting. But when it comes to The Big Lie, that amounts to a strategy to overturn the election. Everything flowed from that. These Freedom Caucus members were all over TV spreading falsehoods about voter fraud. They pressured Republican officials and ran around chasing rumors of foreign interference. And after Barr announced that the DOJ had found no evidence of fraud, they smeared the FBI and the DOJ in the press. That’s when they turned their full attention to overturning the election, focusing on January 6th.
Gohmert sued vice president Mike Pence to force him to nullify the election. (The case was thrown out of court.) Perry forwarded a letter from some Pennsylvania state legislators to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader in the House, asking them to delay the certification which they had no authority to do.
And they met personally with the president to make plans to “stop the sedition.”
And now we know from the Times’ reporting that the PowerPoint coup plot was forwarded to Meadows by none other than Jim Jordan — who Trump awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom after the insurrection. (That would be the same Jim Jordan who Kevin McCarthy had the chutzpah to attempt to install on the Jan. 6th Committee.)
The “R. Congressmen” were up to their necks in coup plots. But that’s not surprising. If anyone had told me five years ago that we’d have an attempted coup in America I would have assumed that the Freedom Caucus would be involved. They’ve been practicing for years on their own party.
When the Freedom Caucus was formed in 2015, Mark Meadows was one of its founding members. So was Mick Mulvaney, another former Trump chief of staff, and current Florida Governor Ron Desantis among others, like Jordan. They presented themselves as dedicated to fiscal conservatism and re-establishing congressional prerogatives but from the start it was clear that their prime directive was to make the GOP leadership miserable and drive Democrats to drink.
Meadows went even beyond the caucus at times, unintentionally showing the way forward. He challenged then House Speaker John Boehner’s leadership by deploying an obscure procedure that hadn’t been used since 1910. It failed, but it riled up the right-wing media and the base in a way that only Trump has since mastered. With their in-your-face extremism they managed to create so much chaos in the GOP caucus that House Speaker John Boehner was eventually forced out.
They refused to vote for his assumed successor, Kevin McCarthy of California, helping to doom his candidacy and instead they got Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, an up and coming conservative superstar who had run for Vice President on the ticket with Mitt Romney in 2012. Ryan was considered one of their own at the time, although he wasn’t a formal member of the Freedom Caucus. But that didn’t really work out all that well either. They made Ryan’s life hell too and he ended up quitting politics altogether in 2018.
The truth is that the Freedom Caucus has been running the House Republican caucus in a reign of terror for over half a decade now and if they manage to take the majority in 2022, Kevin McCarthy is likely to have a big fight on his hands. He’s never been one of them and despite his desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Trump, the Freedom Caucus is going to want to put a homeboy in charge for real. That person is almost surely going to be Jim Jordan, the man who helped Mark Meadows plot the attempted coup.
These people have been fighting a guerilla war against their own party for years and were the perfect choice to be Trump’s personal henchmen. In many ways they paved the way for his mafioso style of governance. And you can bet that as Trump goes around the country wreaking revenge on all those who betrayed him over the next few years, the Freedom Caucus will be right there with him. When it comes to stabbing fellow Republicans in the back, they are professionals.
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Some of the most pungent commentary about January 6th these days is coming from … right wingers. Yes, it’s from the vanishingly small number who haven’t been completely absorbed by the Trump borg, but these are still right wingers, not “Never Trumpers” who appear regularly on MSNBC.
Here’s National Review’s Kevin Williamson on Sean Hannity:
“Why make such a big deal about January 6? Sean Hannity, radio host and off-the-books Donald Trump adviser, demands to know. After all, Hannity points out, there have been scores of riots, some of them deadly, over the past couple of years. Why fixate on that one?” he asked. “Sean Hannity apparently believes that he has the dumbest audience in America. The sacking of the Capitol on January 6 by a gang of enraged Trump acolytes acting on the president’s complaint that the election had been stolen from him is different from other riots because of its particular political character. Stealing Nikes is one thing, and stealing the presidency is another. Hannity knows this. Most of you know this.”
Williamson noted the difference between a murder and an assassination.
“There were 21,570 homicides in the United States in 2020. If one of the victims had been the president of the United States, we would have made a pretty big deal about it. It would have been on the news. There might have been congressional hearings. Why? If we take Sean Hannity’s view, then we should treat such a murder as one murder among the thousands of murders the United States sees in a typical year.”
Email messages sent by Fox News personalities to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows illustrate Williamson’s point. The emails were released by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Even Sean Hannity knows this is a problem. That is why he — along with fellow Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade — texted Trump’s chief of staff to ask the president to try to put a stop to the riot,” he wrote. “It is strange that these people, who today insist that Trump had nothing to do with the violent events in question, believed at the time that he was in a position to stop them. (Incidentally, isn’t it at least a little improper for hosts on a so-called news network to be acting in such an advisory capacity? Didn’t CNN dump Chris Cuomo for precisely that — advising the New York governor?)”
Williamson argued that Hannity’s position was not only unethical, but so absurd that it deserved mockery.
“What has been clear to some of us for a long time — and what is becoming more difficult to deny every day — is that the events of January 6 were part of an attempted coup d’état, one that proceeded on two fronts: As the rioters occupied the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College votes, Trump’s legal minions sought madly for some pretext upon which to nullify the election. Meanwhile, Trump allies occupying several points on the far-right tail of the bell curve of glue-sniffing madness hatched all kinds of supplementary schemes, some of them involving the military,” he wrote. “A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.”
That last is truly the point. Yes, you can argue that violence of any kind is wrong and that riots are particularly bad. But those are things that happen commonly in our society. They even happen after football games, fergawdsakes! What doesn’t happen is an angry mob storming the US Capitol during a joint session of congress to stop the certification the presidential election. In fact, this was a first! And that they did it at the behest of a president who lied to them and a partisan media that backed him up is a particularly heinous political act.
Maybe Sean Hannity is too dumb or deluded to know that. But I doubt it.
Satellite imagery of Russian troop buildup at the Ukraine border.
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …” — Winston Churchill
One thing there is to say about the people attempting to end this almost 250-year experiment in democratic self-rule: They are tenacious. Koch Brothers tenacious. George W. Bush wanting to be a “war president” tenacious. Benghazi tenacious. Coup-plotter tenacious.
The New York Times front-pages a story of how Trump loyalists fought not just to spread Trump’s stolen-election lie, but to press at anywhere they thought a soft spot in government where they might gain some advantage in Trump retaining power beyond January 20, 2021. Or else to throw sand into the gears.
Just after Christmas last year an unidentified number on the phone of the Justice Department’s Richard P. Donoghue turned out to be Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican. Perry had “compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations that the department needed to vet.” He was yet another obscure but loyal foot soldier pressing the president’s case with anyone who might listen and among a half dozen doing so:
The lawmakers — all of them members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — worked closely with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, whose central role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a democratic election is coming into focus as the congressional investigation into Jan. 6 gains traction.
The men were not alone in their efforts — most Republican lawmakers fell in line behind Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud, at least rhetorically — but this circle moved well beyond words and into action. They bombarded the Justice Department with dubious claims of voting irregularities. They pressured members of state legislatures to conduct audits that would cast doubt on the election results. They plotted to disrupt the certification on Jan. 6 of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Other names are more familiar: Jordan, Biggs, Gosar, Goehmert, Brooks.
Congressional Republicans have fought the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation at every turn, but it is increasingly clear that Mr. Trump relied on the lawmakers to help his attempts to retain power. When Justice Department officials said they could not find evidence of widespread fraud, Mr. Trump was unconcerned: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” he said, according to Mr. Donoghue’s notes of the call.
The rest of the article chronicles steps the group took along with Trump’s dye-drenched attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and Team Kraken, to prepare for the final Jan. 6 standoff that ended in riot, mayhem and death and injury at the U.S. Capitol.
Pain-in-the-ass caucus
But even with Watergate-level legal pressures mounting against them, and especially against Freedom Caucus founder and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus is not hunkering down. It is doubling down, looking to expand into the states, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is making headlines in Washington today, but he’s also looking to make a mark on state legislatures, including Georgia’s, with the launch of the State Freedom Caucus Network.
The network will be an extension of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of conservative House members that Meadows once chaired, which has successfully moved the House GOP agenda to the right since it was founded in 2015.
The network will be supported by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Washington-based non-profit founded by former Sen. Jim DeMint, where Meadows has been a senior partner since leaving the White House earlier this year.
Also on the CPI staff with Meadows is Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican attorney who helped Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Meadows, we know, was on the infamous Jan. 2 Trump call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win there from November. Trump (and perhaps Meadows as well) is under criminal investigation for election interference over that call to Georgia. Meadows is hardly backing off or avoiding Georgia. He spoke before about 200 at the State Freedom Caucus Network kickoff dinner in Atlanta on Tuesday.
DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and Heritage Foundation president, is probably best known in politics for his espousal of “constitutional conservatism,” that absolutist precursor to Trumpism which held that any means were justified to preserve the eternal policy preferences of the divinely inspired Founders.
The State Freedom Caucus Network will start initially with affiliates in 22 states from Connecticut to Alaska, with representatives attending a gala kickoff dinner in Atlanta. Its stated purpose is to organize “principled, America-First conservatives” to focus on “election integrity, critical race theory, school choice, vaccine mandates, and police reform,” issues where “our nation’s most important battles are taking place in state legislatures.” An unstated purpose is to encourage such pain-in-the-ass tactics as legislative hostage-taking, disruption of routine governing practices, and shakedowns of the “Republican establishment,” while serving as outposts for Trump’s efforts to get back to the White House by book or by crook.
This new organization, which will likely spread to other states soon, will help ensure that Republicans state elected officials can’t get away with simply tugging the forelock to Trump and then getting along with their regular business back home. MAGA agitation is a permanent revolution with foot soldiers wherever cultural resentment and political opportunism meet.
Look, normal is gone and any semblance of it is not coming back soon. Thinking back on the Churchill quote that came to mind this morning (at the top), it is not clear to me whether “We” is those who retain a commitment to democracy or those in Trump’s camp who seem bent on ending it. Perhaps both. Whether the coming political war is civil or Civil remains to be seen. But the “Russians” are clearly massing at the border and prepared for a long fight whether the rest of us want it or not. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. If Democrats and you cannot find the stomach to fight it, pack your bags.
The heat is turning up on anyone who left fingerprints on the failed Jan. 6th coup plot. By now, the guilty and the merely nervous are likely gaming out three or four options. Link arms in a wall of silence (or plead the Fifth) hoping to stymie investigators until Republicans can retake the House in 2022 and quash investigations; keep their heads down and hope to escape notice; cooperate with investigators and hope to escape accountability; or mount a second attempt at electing Donald Trump in 2024 through election-rigging in the states.
All of those are in play. Trump confidants Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, John Eastman, and Jeffrey Clark are going the wall-of-silence route. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows is trying to both cooperate and not cooperate. Hundreds of unnamed witnesses have already provided depositions to the Jan. 6 committee led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). The evidence the committee has already must be voluminous and potentially damning.
Matt Ford of The New Republic considers what is happening outside the Beltway where Trump World is running amuck with or without Trump:
The New York Timesreported recently that pro-Trump loyalists who believe the election was stolen have been running for the thousands of local offices that keep the democratic machinery running, sometimes without facing challengers or serious opposition. A November survey by NPR found that only 36 percent of Republicans think that elections are fairly administered and that 38 percent of them won’t believe the 2024 election results if their preferred candidate loses. As a result, some of them appear to be taking that belief to its logical conclusion and taking over their local election boards.
Trump himself is also working to tilt election administration in key states in his favor. In Georgia, where Republican governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger spurned Trump’s calls to block certification or “find votes” in 2020, the former president is backing primary challengers who supported his false voter-fraud claims last year. Axios reported last week that Trump is also trying to remake Michigan’s GOP legislative majority in his image while backing sympathetic candidates for secretary of state offices in key battleground states. If his preferred candidates prevail, it will significantly raise the likelihood that Trump and his allies will overturn or compromise the results next time.
There are more subtle perils that are no less insidious. Conservative politicians and pundits have slowly shifted from denouncing the January 6 rioters to describing them in more sympathetic terms. Some of them are sending unmistakable signals that political violence may be justified in the near-future to their supporters and listeners. And I noted last week that proposals to install Trump as House speaker if Republicans retake the chamber in next year’s midterms could have catastrophic implications for how the 2024 presidential election is conducted.
The PowerPoint plotters may have been crackpots, Dana Milbank acknowledges, but next time they might not be as slapdash in their planning. “They had the will, and possibly the means, to overthrow the 2020 election, but the would-be coup was attempted by clowns: Sidney “Kraken” Powell, the MyPillow guy, Rudy Giuliani of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and now one Jovan Hutton Pulitzer,” Milbank writes. He describes Pulitzer’s adventures in failed inventions and archaeological crackpottery in several paragraphs, citing a supposed Roman sword found in Nova Scotia that Pulitzer asserts possesses “magical” magnetic properties.
It’s tempting to dismiss charlatans such as Pulitzer, and Trump aides such as Meadows who relied on crackpots. But it’s little comfort that democracy was saved only by the bumbling of the coup plotters.
Next time, we may not be so lucky. And if you don’t think that’s a real threat, I’d like to sell you an ancient Roman sword I found near Halifax.
Stockton and Lawrence (and many other MAGAs) may have sincerely believed Trump’s “steal” bullshit, just as they believed his Russia hoax and Covid hoax claims, just as True the Vote and others believe hundreds of thousands of Them vote illegally, vote twice, and impersonate dead people every election. It’s crazy, but it’s not simply a strategem for all of them. But what Jan. 6 proved was that gathering thousands of pissed-off conspiracy theorists in one place is highly combustible. Throw on accelerant in the form of speeches exhorting them to “fight like hell” and add a spark — send them marching to the U.S. Capitol — and what did they think would happen?
Those who spent hours suggesting options for retaining power to Trump in the Oval Office or in the office of Mark Meadows knew exactly what might happen. They assembled the fuel, threw on accelerant, applied the spark, and fanned the flames. Trump sat watching it all on television, doing nothing.
Trump believes his own bullshit and is unbalanced besides. He has no qualms about turning the country into his own fiefdom, if he can. Next time, the direct plotters will be more methodical about it. And those whose political careers (and freedom) are in jeopardy today will help.
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