340 search results for "certification"

Speaking of accountability, Rep. Mo Brooks (R) of Alabama faces a lawsuit over his speech at the Trump rally ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection. He has tried to argue that the Department of Justice must handle his defense.

"The record indicates that Brooks’s appearance at the January 6 rally was campaign activity, and it is no part of the business of the United States to pick sides among candidates in federal elections," the new DOJ filing says.

— Carrie Johnson (@johnson_carrie) July 28, 2021

Justice doesn't resolve the question of whether Brooks incited the crowd that day but points out that "Under District of Columbia law, an employee who 'maliciously act[s] contrary to [his] employer’s interest' acts 'outside the scope of [his] employment.'"

— Carrie Johnson (@johnson_carrie) July 28, 2021

Marcy Wheeler explains:

Last night, DOJ refused to certify that Mo Brooks’ actions laid out in a lawsuit by Eric Swalwell were done in the course of his employment as a Congressman. To understand why, and why Brooks may have given DOJ an easy way to prosecute him in conjunction with January 6, you have to look at the sworn declaration Brooks submitted in support of a claim that his call on Trump rally attendees to “kick ass” was part of his duty as a Congressperson.

Broadly, the Swalwell lawsuit accuses Brooks of conspiring with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, and Rudy Giuliani to violate his civil rights by trying to prevent him from performing his official duties. One of the descriptions of the conspiracy is:

169. As described more fully in this Complaint, the Defendants, by force, intimidation, or threat, agreed and conspired among themselves and with others to prevent members of Congress, including the Plaintiff, and Vice President Mike Pence from counting the Electoral College Votes and certifying President Biden and Vice President Harris as the winners of the 2020 presidential election.

It alleges Brooks committed a number of overt acts, which include a series of Tweets that mirror and in one case anticipate the public claims the other alleged co-conspirators made, as well as his speech at the January 6 Trump rally where he incited listeners to “kick ass” to save the Republic.

Mo Brooks addressed the large crowd at the January 6 rally. He said “America is at risk unlike it has been in decades, and perhaps centuries.” He told the crowd to start “kicking ass,” and he spoke with reverence, at a purportedly peaceful demonstration, of how “our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives,” before shouting at the crowd “Are you willing to do the same?!” Brooks intended these words as a threat of violence or intimidation to block the certification vote from even occurring and/or to coerce members of Congress to disregard the results of the election.

The DOJ is not buying Brooks’ argument that he was just doing his job. Nope. Wheeler notes that Brooks’ “confession that he wrote the speech in his office, is also a sworn declaration that he violated campaign finance laws by using his office for campaign activities.”

Wheeler concludes:

DOJ’s declaration is not (just) an attempt to create space — by distinguishing campaign activities from official duties — between this and DOJ’s decision to substitute for Trump in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. It is an effort to preserve the principle that not just Congresspeople, but all Federal employees, may be charged and convicted of a conspiracy to obstruct the vote count, particularly for actions taken as part of campaign activities.

Brooks had best activate his GoFundMe page.

CNN:

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack will hear testimony Tuesday from four police officers who were on the frontlines that day as rioters supporting then-President Trump violently stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying President Biden’s electoral win.

The hearing will mark the first time the panel will have public testimony, and will kick-start its efforts to investigate the events on Jan. 6.

The four officers testifying are:

• DC Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges
• DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone
• Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn
• Capitol Police Officer Sgt. Aquilino Gonell

National security analyst Clint Watts just reminded MSNBC viewers that the real gaps in what we know about the Jan. 6 insurrection lie at the Department of Justice and congressional levels. Nonetheless, putting these four and their harrowing stories of assault and injury at the hands of insurrectionists squarely in the public eye again will help reframe the contested narrative the G.O.P. and former president have worked so hard to muddy since January.

Adding to the morning’s drama, the Department of Justice has notified former Trump administration officials that they may testify before the committee about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:

Witnesses can give “unrestricted testimony” to the House Oversight and Reform Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, the department said in a letter this week. Both panels are scrutinizing the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn the election in its final days and the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The decision runs counter to the views of former President Donald J. Trump, who has argued that his decisions and deliberations are protected by executive privilege. It also sets up a potential court battle if Mr. Trump sues in a bid to block any testimony.

That’s “potential” in quotes. Winning via litigation delays is classic Trump. He will sue.

Media critic Eric Boehlert worries that the national media will “both sides” the investigation and insist there exists a “cloud” over the investigation:

So many media players will not accept the obvious fact that most Republicans don’t want a faithful accounting of the insurrection and Trump’s role in it. Republicans aren’t using smoke and mirrors to disguise their true intentions either. As usual, they’re being upfront in pushing their un-democratic agenda.

It’s just that journalists don’t want to acknowledge the disturbing reality, that the party they so desperately want to portray as being a mainstream, center-right entity is doing everything possible to make sure the facts surrounding the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol — a riot launched in an effort to stop the certification of an American election — remain clouded for reasons of self-preservation.

This week, the heroes of January 6 will finally get the chance to tell their stories.

We owe it to each of them to listen. pic.twitter.com/hOmee1INNt

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 27, 2021

Sgt. Aquilino Gonell is already wiping away tears as he gives his opening statement. Nothing he’d seen as a U.S. soldier in Iraq had prepared him for what he experienced at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

It’s going to be a long day and a long investigation.

Trump’s narrative of January 6th has been all over the place. But he’s going back to his first instinct which is that it was a heroic, patriotic protest against the stealing of the election from America’s one true leader:

On Wednesday, The Washington Post published audio of an interview two Post reporters conducted in March with former president Donald Trump at his club in Florida. In it, he expresses obvious sympathy for the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a futile effort to derail the transition of presidential power.

It has been obvious since the day of the insurrection that Trump’s views of the rioters were not particularly hostile. A review of what he has said about the day since, though, makes that clear.

On Jan. 6, his comments to the rioters were generous and warm. For the final two weeks he was in office, his team managed one last burst of what has come to be known as Teleprompter Trump: Trump reading prepared remarks in an effort to establish a palatable narrative to which his team could point. Teleprompter Trump was usually contrasted with Twitter Trump, the Trump who posted unvarnished and honest opinions on social media, but there was no Twitter Trump after Jan. 6, because his accounts were shuttered out of concern that he’d foster more violence.

But since Jan. 20, Twitter Trump has reappeared in interviews, including with The Post’s team. And as the months have passed, Trump’s generous view of the rioters has become more obvious in his own telling — just as his party has similarly shifted toward increased support for those who engaged in political violence that day.

What Trump has said

Jan. 6, 2:12 p.m. Rioters enter the Capitol.

2:24 p.m. Shortly after Fox News airs an interview with a Trump supporter expressing frustration about Vice President Pence’s decision not to intervene in the certification of the electoral vote, Trump tweets:“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

2:24 p.m.

Around 2:30 p.m. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called Trump to ask him to tell the rioters to leave the building. After Trump first tried to blame antifa — perhaps based on a Washington Examiner report — McCarthy insisted that they were Trump supporters. This is how Trump reportedly responded:

l“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

2:38 p.m. Trump tweets.“Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

3:13 p.m. Trump tweets again.“I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”

4:17 p.m. After recording a few versions of comments, the White House releases a video of Trump in which he addresses the rioters.“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt. It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened where they could take it away from all of us — from me, from you, from our country. This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace.”

6:01 p.m. Trump closes out the day with another tweet, even as the Capitol is still not entirely cleared.“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”Police radio communications synchronized with hours of footage show how failures of planning and preparation left police at the Capitol severely disadvantaged. (The Washington Post)

Jan. 7. The day after the riot, the White House released another video in which Trump read from scripted remarks.

“I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol,” he said. “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem. I immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the building and expel the intruders.” (The Post’s Philip Rucker reports that this is not true.) “America is, and must always be, a nation of law and order. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.

“To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction: You do not represent our country, and to those who broke the law: You will pay,” Trump continued. “We have just been through an intense election and emotions are high, but now tempers must be cooled and calm restored. We must get on with the business of America.”

For the first time, he acknowledged that he would be leaving office.

“Congress has certified the results,” he said. “A new administration will be inaugurated on January 20th. My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.”

Jan. 12. Trump reads a statement about the violence from a teleprompter during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Millions of our citizens watched on Wednesday as a mob stormed the Capitol and trashed the halls of government,” he said. “As I have consistently said throughout my administration, we believe in respecting America’s history and traditions, not tearing them down. We believe in the rule of law, not in violence or rioting.”

He later added that “now is the time for our nation to heal, and it’s time for peace and for calm.”

Jan. 19. During his farewell address, he again spoke about the Capitol from prepared remarks.“All Americans were horrified by the assault on our Capitol. Political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans. It can never be tolerated. Now more than ever, we must unify around our shared values and rise above the partisan rancor, and forge our common destiny.”Body-camera video shows former NYPD cop attack police during Capitol riot, DOJ saysD.C. Police body-camera footage shows Marine veteran and retired NYPD officer Thomas Webster scream profanities and attack officers during the Jan. 6 riot. (U.S. Attorney’s Office)

Late March. During an interview with The Post’s Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, Trump describes the events of the day.

“It was a loving crowd, too, by the way,” he said of the crowd at his speech, many of whom then walked to the Capitol. He described the subsequent actions as “too bad.”

“They were ushered in by the police,” he then claimed. “I mean, in all fairness — the Capitol Police were ushering people in. The Capitol Police were very friendly. You know, they were hugging and kissing.”

“Personally,” he later added, “what I wanted is what they wanted. They showed up just to show support” for his false claims about election fraud.

July 7. At a news conference at his private club in Bedminster, N.J., Trump announced a long-shot lawsuit targeting social media companies for banning him from their platforms. A reporter asked about the Capitol riot.

“That whole event, unfortunate event just went through Congress and a report was issued and my name wasn’t even mentioned,” Trump said, referring to a bipartisan Senate report in which his name was mentioned but which avoided looking directly at Trump’s role. “And I appreciate that. I was surprised frankly because I would have assumed that they would have come up with their typically biased, at least on the Democrat side, statement. The report came out as you saw it two weeks ago. My name wasn’t even mentioned, that was an unfortunate event.

“I say though, however, people are being treated unbelievably unfairly,” he continued. “When you look at people in prison and nothing happens to antifa and they burned down cities and killed people. There were no guns in the Capitol except for the gun that shot Ashli Babbitt. And nobody knows who that [man was]. If that were the opposite way, that man would be all over, he would be the most well-known and I believe I can say man, because I believe I know exactly who it is. But he would be the most well known person in this country, in the world. But the person that shot Ashli Babbitt right through the head, just boom. There was no reason for that.”https://7d37f014c6299ab1a6b0140356a4cef4.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Babbitt was shot in the shoulder as she tried to enter an area of the Capitol used to evacuate lawmakers.The Post obtained video showing the chaotic moment before 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot as rioters rushed toward the Speaker’s Lobby. (Joyce Lee/The Washington Post)

July 11. Trump addresses the events of Jan. 6 during an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo.

“You had over a million people there, which the press doesn’t like to report at all, because it shows too much — too much activity, too much — too much spirit and faith and love,” Trump said, although the reason the media doesn’t report that there were 1 million people at the rally is because there were not 1 million people at the rally.

“There was such love at that rally,” Trump continued. “You had over a million people there. They were there for one reason, the rigged election. They felt the election was rigged. That’s why they were there. And they were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable. And I mentioned the word love. The love — the love in the air, I have never seen anything like it.”

Later, he again lamented the death of Babbitt.

“Who is the person that shot an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman, right in the head?” Trump asked. (Babbitt was shot in the shoulder.) “And there’s no repercussions.”

“You have people with no guns that walked down. And, frankly, the doors were open,” he said at another point, adding that it was “also a lovefest between the police, the Capitol Police, and the people that walked down to the Capitol.”

Those who had been arrested, Trump said, were “military people, and they’re police officers, and they’re construction workers. And they’re tremendous, in many cases, tremendous people, tremendous people.”

He expressed disappointment that so many of these tremendous people were “currently incarcerated,” which, he said, was “not right” — a somewhat different message than when in January he told the rioters, “You will pay.”

It’s exactly the same pattern as the “Very Fine People” in Charlottesville debacle. He says what he really thinks, gets blowback and some staffer writes him a conciliatory speechy, then he turns around and says what he really thinks again.

He’s a child. His instinct is to side with anyone who be believes is on his side, no matter the reason. Then he gets chastised and makes a perfunctory gesture to appease the critics. Then he doubles down on support for his supporters.

The Big Lie has now taken on a life of its own. It’s not going anywhere. And the question will be if they are able to turn January 6th into a patriotic day of remembrance.

On Monday night, there was a brief moment of serious consternation at the news that the Department of Justice (DOJ), under Attorney General Merrick Garland, had declined to prosecute former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for lying to Congress after the department’s Inspector General forwarded a serious referral presenting evidence that Ross had lied. The next day, the Associated Press, which published the report, issued a correction to say that it was actually the William Barr Justice Department that had issued the declination, not Garland which was a welcome relief for those who have been growing more and more concerned about whether there will be any real accountability for the Trump administration’s lawlessness. After what he did with Roger Stone, no one expected William Barr’s Justice Department to hold any Trump crony accountable. It remains to be seen if Garland will reverse that decision — but he certainly should.

Garland did announce some good news on Monday, however, formally reversing many decades of DOJ policy when he announced that, with some limited exceptions, the department would prohibit the seizure of journalists’ records in leak investigations. This is a power that was egregiously abused in the last administration but was used liberally by administrations of both parties. Getting rid of it is a good step.

Garland’s other recent decision to double the size of the voting rights enforcement staff to vigorously combat efforts to restrict ballot access and prosecute those who threaten or harm election workers was also very welcome. Unless and until the filibuster fetishists in the U.S. Senate agree to pass new voting rights legislation, these will be the only tools the federal government will have to protect the electoral system.

And the decision to reinstate the moratorium on federal executions, which Trump and Barr had dropped after almost two decades so they could go on a killing spree in the last year of Trump’s term, is another huge step back from the moral abyss.

But there is reason to be worried about Garland’s DOJ still.

The decision to support Trump’s claim that he was performing his official duty when he demeaned and degraded E. Jean Carroll’s integrity and her physical appearance as he denied her accusation that he’d raped her in a department store dressing room before he was president was inexplicable. This claim of immunity because he was doing his job is based upon a law that holds that an individual government employee cannot be held personally liable for what he or she does in the course of their duties. It’s ridiculous that anyone would agree that being a disgusting boor is in the presidential job description, but it’s even more worrisome that this concept is now being taken up by at least one of his henchmen and it could have very far-reaching consequences.

Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks is now citing the same immunity in a lawsuit brought against him for helping to incite the January 6th insurrection. Brooks stood on the stage at the “Stop the Steal” rally and proclaimed that was the day “American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” He says he was just performing his official duty, under the same legal theory that Trump used to excuse his crude defamation of E. Jean Carroll, a claim excoriated by Donald Ayer, deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, and Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week exhorting the Attorney General not to accept Brooks’ claim:

It is difficult to imagine an act that falls farther outside the scope of a sitting congressman’s official duties than what he is accused of doing: helping to provoke a crowd to lay siege on the center of our federal government, putting his fellow members at risk of physical harm and ultimately disrupting the vital constitutional process of certifying presidential election results…Certification that Mr. Brooks acted within the scope of his job would leave the United States government defending the right of its elected representatives to foment insurrection against itself.

They point out that if Garland grants this certification, then it is only a matter of time before Trump himself claims it in one of the many legal cases pending such as the one in Georgia in which he is being investigated for pressuring election officials to “find” the votes he needed to win the electoral college, in which case it will be the law of the land that politicians are immune from any legal accountability for attempting a coup. Or as Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe wrote in a piece making a similar argument, “to embrace that proposition is to embrace the quintessential dictatorial premise that the chief executive is the state.” 

I have never been very optimistic that there would be any legal accountability for important Republicans, particularly Donald Trump. For quite some time there has been a widespread understanding in the political establishment that even in the face of outright criminal behavior, it would be dangerous to “lock up” high-level members of the government because it would start a cycle of retaliation. This idea certainly informed the Obama administration which made the decision not to “look in the rearview mirror” on the torture policies of the Bush administration. But as former congresswoman Elizabeth Holzman, D-NY, pointed out in a recent interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, it wasn’t always so.

During Watergate, a large number of high-level administration officials went to jail. The attorney general himself (and a close personal friend of the president) did 19 months in federal prison after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. (The perjury charge, by the way, was for lying to Congress, which is what former Trump Cabinet member Wilbur Ross is accused of doing.)

I might have held out some hope that Congress would have been able to at least get to the bottom of the events of January 6th since it was such a grievous assault on the constitution and a physical attack on the capitol itself. However, the Republicans’ rejection of the eminently fair Bipartisan Commission proved that they will obstruct any attempt to seriously investigate. With this week’s appointment of at least four GOP supporters of both Donald Trump and the insurrection itself to the House select congressional committee, it’s not looking very promising. One of them, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, was obviously chosen for his penchant for histrionics in committee hearings which virtually guarantees that he and his cohorts will be playing to the audience of one, holed up in one of his presidential palaces in exile.

Meanwhile, the DOJ is dutifully prosecuting the actual insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, so there is that. People are going to do time for what they did that day and you can’t help but think of the words of Donald Trump himself who told journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker: “Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted.” Of course, it was. But it looks like they’re the only ones who will have to pay a price for it.

Back in 2016, candidate Donald Trump made it very clear that as president he would not hesitate to order the military to torture prisoners. On March 3rd of that year, in a presidential primary debate, Fox News anchor Brett Baier noted that over 100 foreign policy experts had signed an open letter refusing to support him because his “expansive use of torture” is inexcusable, declaring that the military would refuse because they have been trained to refuse illegal orders.

Baier asked Trump, “so what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?”

“They won’t refuse,” Trump arrogantly replied. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.”

He went on to rant about terrorists “chopping off heads” and how he would go beyond waterboarding, ending with this:

And — and — and — I’m a leader. I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.

He walked back his comment the next day with a perfunctory statement promising not to give an illegal order but it was clear that he was utterly ignorant of the president’s constitutional limits and saw himself as a would-be dictator. And throughout his presidency, he said over and over again that he had the power to do anything he chose, parroting what one of his flunkies told him about “Article II” of the constitution:

Nobody took him very seriously, to be sure, because it was ridiculous. And with the exception of regularly firing members of his administration, until the final year of his term, he tended to push the boundaries of his power mostly by breaking long-standing norms and corruptly abusing his office for political and financial gain which he did frequently. But as he faced re-election in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which he had no idea how to handle, and the humiliating prospect of losing re-election (along with the legal protections the office gave him) it’s clear that the people around him started to get worried that he was going to use his very robust and clearly delineated powers as Commander in Chief for political purposes.

It was perfectly legitimate for him to disagree with the Pentagon about policy and direct them to follow his orders despite their resistance. But he began to delve into areas of military justice and discipline, following the advice of Fox News pundits who convinced him that accused and convicted war criminals were being persecuted for doing the kind of dirty work Trump had advocated in his 2016 campaign. He intervened in one trial and pardoned some others. When the Navy tried to keep one of the accused from retaining his Navy Seal designation, Trump insisted he be allowed to keep it and the Navy Secretary was fired when he protested the interference.

In June of 2020, Trump was incensed by the George Floyd protests and was demanding that the active-duty military intervene to quell them. And it was at this point, according to several new books about the final year of the Trump administration, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff started to get nervous, particularly its chairman, General Mark Milley, who had been involved in the notorious clearing of Lafayette Square that culminated in Trump’s infamous photo-op with a Bible. Milley eventually publicly apologized for allowing himself to be used as a political prop. What we didn’t know until now was that the discussions that happened around those protests awakened the Pentagon leadership that Trump was becoming unhinged. As the presidential campaign heated up and they saw that he was setting the table to call the election illegitimate if he lost and contest the results regardless of the circumstances, they became alarmed. When Trump fired Esper the day after the election and installed some of his most notorious henchmen in the Pentagon, it’s safe to say that the top levels of the military’s hair were collectively on fire.

According to the latest book by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig called “I Alone Can Fix It,” as the surreal post-election period dragged on with the administration refusing to cooperate in the transition and Trump becoming more and more desperate, Milley and the others apparently saw the potential for street clashes between Trump’s “brownshirts” (as he called them) and police leading to Trump declaring an insurrection and demanding the use of the active-duty military to step in. He seems to have feared this is what would lead to a “Reichstag Fire” moment in which Trump would somehow attempt to stay in power. He and the senior brass even put together a sort of “Saturday Night Massacre” style plan to resign one by one should Trump attempt it. They were all spooked by what they were seeing.

Clearly Milley has been cooperating with all these authors and has portrayed himself as a hero who saved the Republic which does seem overblown. And it’s very unnerving to see a general in this position, working with others to thwart the will of the civilian leadership. That is NOT how it’s supposed to work. In fact, it’s yet another very important norm that seems to have been broken and it’s a very important one. But Trump’s behavior in the post-election period has been insane by any measure and while he was still in office, he was listening to people like Michael Flynn who was telling him that he could declare martial law and the military could seize the voting machines and run new elections, so there is no doubt we are lucky this didn’t turn out a lot worse than it did.

And it wasn’t just Milley and brass who were paranoid about what was happening. In “I Alone Can Fix It” a chilling anecdote shows that Vice President Mike Pence was just as nervous.

On January 6th, his Secret Service detail wanted to drive him off the Capitol grounds and he refused saying to his top agent Tim Giebels, “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.” The book goes on to describe the man in charge of the Secret Service’s movements telling Pence’s national security adviser, Gen. Keith Kellogg, they planned to move Pence to Joint Base Andrews. Kellogg told him not to do it saying, “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.”

There are a number of ways to interpret that but MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said on Thursday, “someone familiar with this reporting tells me that Pence feared a conspiracy. He feared that the Secret Service would aid Trump in his ultimate aims that day.” Considering everything that had been going on, all of which Pence was no doubt aware, that would not have been a ridiculous suspicion. After all, if they could have gotten Pence out of town they would have thwarted the certification of the electoral college vote at least for that day. Who knows what would have followed? (And what does this say about the Secret Service?)

We all saw a lot of this as it unfolded in real-time. And we certainly suspected that this sort of thing was happening behind the scenes. These accounts, no matter how self-serving they might be, show that whatever suspicions anyone had were more than justified. 

Salon

I have very mixed emotions about these comments about Trump and a coup by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because I really worry about civilian control and this was a very dicey situation that exposes some serious dangers. (But then, what didn’t during the Trump administration?) Everything Trump did was a destabilizing and threatening.

And as Parker Molloy points out in this tweet thread, there was a whole lot of weird stuff going on that made a lot of us lose sleep at night during that period:

Trump weighs in with a lengthy statement about General Milley: “Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of ‘coup,’ and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley”

1. Lost the election by a pretty sizable margin despite efforts to sabotage the USPS
2. Spent the time between election and certification trying to strongarm officials into changing the vote totals
3. Tried to recruit “alternate” electors to override the states’ votes

4. Installed loyalists at DOD and State
5. Filed all manner of absurd lawsuits hoping that judges he appointed would award him the election in return
6. Called on his supporters to go to DC on 1/6 to urge Congress to throw out the votes

Coup. It was all part of a coup attempt.

It wasn’t just 1/6. It never was. And it wasn’t just Trump. It was the entire GOP. Why do you think so many were hesitant to say Biden won? Because they wanted to see if Trump’s coup attempt was successful.

It’s why you had people like Pompeo saying stuff like this AFTER TRUMP LOST: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”

I’m sick of people downplaying this. “Oh, it was just tourists in the capitol. Big deal.” No, that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the scariest part. That was the last-ditch attempt to stop Congress from counting the EVs. The coup was everything that happened between the election and 1/20

THAT is why it’s beyond unsettling that so many of the Sunday shows keep inviting the people who refused to acknowledge Biden won on. They were part of it. They weren’t just trying to spare Trump hurt feelings, they were sitting back and seeing how it played out.

The safeguards *barely* held. And ever since the election, the GOP has been doing *everything it can* to ensure that next time they won’t hold. Too many in media still treat all of this like it’s totally normal. It’s not.

It’s absolutely infuriating to have been proven right at every turn just for the people who’ve been so consistently wrong to continue to be taken seriously and put on TV to insist that everyone’s overreacting.

Originally tweeted by Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) on July 15, 2021.

We got lucky. And we know now (and really, we knew then) that it was a close thing. I have serious doubts that out luck will hold out again if the Republicans are allowed to do this again. They have tasted the heady nectar of violence and illegitimate power. I’m afraid there will be no going back, at least not for a good while.

There are no YouGov polls to reference from ahead of April 12, 1861. No internet or computers, save in alternate history. The divide in the states then was generally among those free and slave. We know how that worked out.

If the country was ever as united as its name boasts, it was perhaps during World War II, twenty years short of a century ago. Then, the enemy was external. Times change.

A YouGov survey of “a representative sample of Americans and an expert sample of political scientists” conducted for Bright Line Watch reveals that “Americans have reasons to worry about the state of their democracy.” But you did not need a poll for that.

The illustration at the top shows the results of one of Bright Line’s questions asked only of the general public: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?” They asked the question of respondents in the states of the proposed regional unions.

Note that their national sample was heavily Democrat.

Bright Line comments:

As in our previous report, we caution that this survey item reflects initial reactions by respondents about an issue that they are very unlikely to have considered carefully. Secession is a genuinely radical proposition and expressions of support in a survey may map only loosely onto willingness to act toward that end. We include the question because it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions). 

… As in the previous survey, levels of expressed support for secession are arrestingly high, with 37% of respondents overall indicating willingness to secede. Within each region, the dominant partisan group is most supportive of secession. Republicans are most secessionist in the South and Mountain regions whereas it is Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast. In the narrowly divided Heartland region, it is partisan independents who find the idea most attractive. 

These patterns are consistent from our January/February survey, but the changes since then are troubling. Our previous survey was fielded just weeks after the January 6 uprising. By this summer, we anticipated, political tempers may have cooled — not necessarily as a result of any great reconciliation but perhaps from sheer exhaustion after the relentless drama of Trump. For instance, the historian Heather Cox Richardson posited that sustained consideration of the Big Lie narrative would diminish political ardor among Trump supporters, which she related to waning popular support for secession in the Confederacy during the spring of 1861. 

Yet rather than support for secession diminishing over the past six months, as we expected, it rose in every region and among nearly every partisan group. The jump is most dramatic where support was already highest (and has the greatest historical precedent) — among Republicans in the South, where secession support leapt from 50% in January/February to 66% in June. Support among Republicans in the Mountain region increased as well, by 7 points, from 36% to 43%. Among Democrats in the West, a near-majority of 47% (up 6 points) supports a schism, as do 39% (up 5 points) in Northeast. Support jumped 9 points among independents in the Heartland as well, reaching 43%. Even subordinate partisan groups appear to find secession more appealing now than they did last winter, though only increases for Democrats in the South, Heartland, and Mountain regions are statistically discernible at the 0.05 significance level. The broad and increasing willingness of respondents to embrace these alternatives is a cause for concern.

Other key findings:

• Constitutional hardball politics like gerrymandering, packing the Supreme Court or blocking Court nominees, voter suppression, abolishing the filibuster, adding new states to the union, or refusing to certify election results enjoy little support among the public and, with few exceptions, among experts. However, these strategies appear to go unpunished by voters when used by elites.
• Experts expect these tactics to be used more frequently in the years ahead, rating extreme partisan gerrymandering a near certainty; obstruction of Supreme Court nominations highly likely; and refusal to certify popular vote totals as a likely outcome as well. By contrast, the experts place low probability on hardball tactics that are more favored by Democrats, such as adding states to the union, abolishing the filibuster, or packing the Supreme Court.
• Among the electoral reform proposals recently adopted or currently under consideration in the states, experts perceive grave threats from bills that encroach on the political independence of local election officials and that restrict mail voting.
• Exposure to information about the official audit in Maricopa County, Arizona more than doubled confidence in the vote count in Republicans, suggesting that information about standard processes intended to verify the results of elections can be reassuring to skeptical members of the public. Surprisingly, exposure to news about the partisan “audit” there also increased confidence among Republicans somewhat, though this effect seems unlikely to persist when the supposed results of that process are announced.
• The legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and Donald Trump’s actions afterward remain central to how Americans assess political candidates. In the past six months, Democrats and Republicans have not budged in how they reward or punish prospective candidates for voting to certify the election and for Trump’s impeachment. Independents did shift in favor of candidates who supported the certification of the 2020 vote and who supported transportation infrastructure spending.
• Experts rate Donald Trump’s continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election as highly abnormal and important.

Again, it’s not that people are actively considering breaking up the union. But asked to consider it, they will. Let’s see where people are again in a few months after child care tax credits start rolling in today.

This is where the Big Lie gets real:

The 2020 election is by far the #1 topic of Trump’s current dishonesty. But he’s also doing more and more lying about what happened at the Capitol on January 6. https://t.co/cGR59vILQz

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 12, 2021

Yep.

More from the Washington Post:

Former President Trump failed to secure a second term in office via lawsuits contesting the Nov. 3 election, a Capitol riot by his supporters or all this whacked-out chatter about “reinstatement.” Yet that doesn’t mean that he can’t still act out one of the rituals of his years in office.

Like gabbing his way through opposition-free interviews with Fox News hosts.

“Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo activated this particular time machine, showing how little concern her network has for documented reality that grinds against the Trump agenda. The two chitchatted for nearly a half-hour, with Bartiromo guiding the conversation to the former president’s safe, conspiratorial spaces. She has experience in this, of course: Just weeks after the 2020 election, Bartiromo hosted Trump in the midst of his legal challenges to Joe Biden’s victory, which had been confirmed by the data folks at Fox News itself. In that session, she propelled Trump’s fantasies about a stolen election.

The backlash over such moments appears to have unsettled Bartiromo, given the gripe that she articulated in Sunday’s “interview” with Trump: “Today, we are facing a situation where you’re not even allowed to discuss any of this. You get attacked on social media if you raise any irregularities,” she said.

Or: You get attacked on social media when you let the president continue lying with impunity. Here are some examples from Sunday’s episode:

1) “And what it is, is, they’re taking away your freedom of speech. They are taking away your right to speak.”

The Skinny: Here, Trump was referencing the tech giants Twitter, Facebook and Google — a trio that he sued last week for alleged “censorship.” Social media companies may, indeed, boot people from their platforms. Those people, of course, are free to exercise their free-speech rights elsewhere, including the nearest street corner. Folks with a high-school-level civics education know all that

2) “But when you say they work with government, they work with Democrats within government and, frankly, outside of government. They work with the Democrats. It’s a Democrat machine. It should be a campaign contribution, the largest ever made.”

The Skinny: The argument that Big Tech is a Democratic monolith runs into some static when considering that Facebook has long functioned as a springboard for right-wing disinformation.

3) “I had suggested to the secretary of defense, perhaps we should have 10,000 National Guardsmen standing by. And he reported that, as you know, but I — we should have — and he was turned down. I said, it’s subject to Congress. They run it. Nancy Pelosi runs it.”

The Skinny: Powerful though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be, she cannot deploy the D.C. National Guard, whose own website states, “The D.C. National Guard is the only National Guard unit, out of all of the 54 states and territories, which reports only to the President.”

4) “We won this election in a landslide. We got 12 million more votes, Maria.”

The Skinny: Have a look at the transcript from this moment:TRUMP: We won this election in a landslide. We got 12 million more votes, Maria …BARTIROMO: Yes.TRUMP: … 12 million more than I got the last time …BARTIROMO: Yes.TRUMP: … the last time I won. This was a rigged election. And the people aren’t standing for it. So, we will go forward.

5) “We were very disappointed by the Supreme Court, because they didn’t have the courage to take it up. They didn’t want anything to do with it.”

The Skinny: Some context here — the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was among approximately 60 losses in court for Trump and his allies in the period between the Nov. 3 election and the mid-December counting of the electoral college votes.

6) “In fact, they just came out with a report in Congress, and they didn’t mention my name, literally.”

The Skinny: The Senate last month released a report on official failures relating to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There are more than 40 mentions of Trump in the document, including this one, on p. 26: “Following the states’ certification, President Trump continued to assert that the election was stolen from him.”

7) “I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They’re protecting that person. I have heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat.”

The Skinny: Ashli Babbitt is the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was killed as she attempted to jump through a broken doorway in a Capitol hallway. As described in a Justice Department news release, Babbitt was “among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside ‘Speaker’s Lobby,’ which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the [U.S. Capitol Police] was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways,” reads the Justice Department release. The document identifies the person “involved” in Babbitt’s shooting as a “U.S. Capitol Police officer.”

8) “There was also a lovefest between the police, the Capitol Police, and the people that walked down to the Capitol.”

The Skinny: “You’re gonna die tonight,” screamed one of the rioters at a police officer in a video recently released by the FBI. From a CBS News report: “The Justice Department said at least 165 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including more than 50 who were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”

9) “If they’re going to do this very partisan investigation, because they couldn’t get support to do a straight investigation, a big part of that investigation is the reason that people went to Washington. And that’s because of the fraudulent presidential election of 2020. And that has to be a part of it.”

The Skinny: Have a look at the transcript surrounding this fraudulent remark by Trump:

TRUMP: If they’re going to do this very partisan investigation, because they couldn’t get support to do a straight investigation, a big part of that investigation is the reason that people went to Washington.And that’s because of the fraudulent presidential election of 2020. And that has to be a part of it.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

TRUMP: And everybody that got there, I think, on the one side, those people want to talk about the reason they were there, because, to me, that’s the biggest crime of all.We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election. And that’s why you had over a million people march to Washington.

BARTIROMO: Yes.

10) “We had a corrupt election. We had a rigged election. We had a stolen election. And that’s why you had over a million people march to Washington.”

The Skinny: About 30,000 people were expected to rally at Trump’s Jan. 6 speech.

There are more of these examples, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen demonstrated on his Twitter account.

After six years of protracted network sycophancy, there should be little that’s shocking about a top Fox Newser laying out the welcome mat for Trump’s mendacity. Yet somehow there is. Across the network’s programming over the past six months, we’ve heard complaints about how the mainstream media doesn’t sufficiently press President Biden or his spokespeople on the controversies of the day. And the same network permits Trump a platform to repeat his well-rehearsed myths without intervention.

That institutional deference may well undergo a test in a couple of years, as Republican presidential contenders start pressuring Fox News for airtime. Will the network perform similar propaganda services for the entire GOP 2024 field, or just for Trump?

Bartiromo’s case, moreover, is peculiar in this regard: Her “big lie” activities late last year landed her prime real estate in the defamation lawsuits from two voting firms — Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems — seeking damages from Fox News for its numerous broadcasts linking the companies to a corrupt election.

The Smartmatic complaint even names Bartiromo herself as a defendant, and it includes extensive documentation showing how the host used her program in the weeks after the election to launder the baseless charges of Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, lawyers working to further Trump’s claims about the election. Dominion’s suit levels a similar allegation: “Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Sean Hannity also continued hosting Powell and Giuliani, giving them a platform to widely disseminate and repeat their lies about Dominion to a national (and, indeed, a global) audience, and embracing those lies as their own by endorsing and repeating them.”

Fox News has mustered vigorous defenses of its programming in both cases, stating in its Dominion response that it must cover both sides of a story. Okay, but both complaints present weighty defamation claims backed up by pages and pages of transcripts.

So Bartiromo has continued indulging the “big lie,” only now without mentioning the companies that have advanced defamation claims against her and Fox News.

Here’s another excerpt of the new Michael Bender book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election. I think the big revelation here is that Kushner has bailed and Don Jr. is now Trump’s top family adviser. Junior must be so happy:

On the morning of Nov. 7, 2020, the Saturday after the presidential election, President Donald Trump had just approached the tee box at the seventh hole of his golf course in Sterling, Va., when an aide’s phone rang with news from Jared Kushner : All of the major media outlets, including Fox News, were about to call the presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump had tweeted on the way to the course that he’d won “BY A LOT!” But he displayed none of that all-caps energy as he pressed the phone to his ear. Wearing a dark pullover and slacks with white golf shoes and a matching MAGA cap, Mr. Trump calmly listened to his son-in-law as he strolled across the manicured grass under a clear blue sky. He hung up, nonchalantly handed the phone back to an aide and finished the final 12 holes, as more than a dozen golf carts filled with government aides and Secret Service agents trailed behind him.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mr. Trump told a group of supporters on Nov. 7. ‘It’s not over yet.’

When Mr. Trump finally pulled up to the clubhouse in his customized cart—complete with a presidential seal stitched into the seat—club members cheered him on the back patio. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Trump told them. “It’s not over yet.”

But the election was, in fact, over. What wasn’t finished was the term he’d won four years earlier, and on Nov. 7, one of the most pressing questions for staffers was how to fill his calendar. “Let’s do all the things we didn’t get to do because of all of the distractions, and have fun,” Hope Hicks, a longtime Trump aide, said to the president’s team gathered inside campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Trump had won far more votes than his team projected, with surprising support from Black and Hispanic men. He was immediately the runaway favorite for the party’s 2024 nomination, and Ms. Hicks was expressing that vibe with her suggestion for a jaunty curtain call. But around the table in a glass-encased conference room, the eldest Trump sons channeled their father’s reaction. “What you’re talking about isn’t even an option,” responded Donald Trump, Jr., who had called into the meeting. “It’s a nonstarter,” Eric Trump added.

Ms. Hicks wasn’t an outlier, however. After the election was called, Trump World mostly assumed that the president would behave rationally at the end of the day. Vice President Mike Pence and Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, both met with Mr. Trump in early November and separately told others that he just needed space to process the loss. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a senior adviser, left some White House officials with the hope her father would invite Mr. Biden to the West Wing.

But Mr. Trump wasn’t interested in taking a bow. The decision from his team to give him space only created an opening for outside advisers like Rudy Giuliani, and behind the scenes, Mr. Trump was frantically moving personnel in and out of the administration.

[…]

It goes on to relay the bogus Bill Barr hagiography around election fraud, which we’ve already seen.

By then, the president was personally phoning U.S. attorneys—against Justice Department protocol—urging them to focus on election fraud. He’d replaced a lineup of veteran defense and intelligence officials with inexperienced loyalists hungry to appease the boss. Gen. Mark Milley asked some Pentagon officials whether the new hires had ties to neo-Nazi groups.

“The crazies have taken over,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned a colleague. Privately, the nation’s top diplomat worried that foreign adversaries might try to exploit the domestic instability. He conveyed concern to others that Mr. Trump might be more willing to engage in an international conflict to strengthen his political argument for remaining in office. Mr. Pompeo organized a daily call with Gen. Milley and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.

Pompeo and Meadows will deny this, no doubt. And Trump will pretend to believe them. But in the back of his mind, he will know …

By January, Mr. Trump’s attention had turned to his vice president, who was responsible for presiding over the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election. The two men had debated for weeks whether Mr. Pence could reject the results.

But the vice president wasn’t practiced in confronting Mr. Trump. The only example some administration officials could remember was in 2018, when Mr. Pence’s political committee hired Corey Lewandowski, the president’s ubiquitous adviser. Mr. Trump was holding a newspaper article about the hiring and said it made him look weak, like his team was abandoning him as he was probed for his campaign’s role in Russian election meddling. He crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president. “So disloyal,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Pence lost it. Mr. Kushner had asked him to hire Mr. Lewandowski, and he had discussed the plan with Mr. Trump over lunch. Mr. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr. Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. “We walked you through every detail of this,” Mr. Pence snarled. “We did this for you—as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.”

In case you were wondering:

NEW

"The story written by third-rate reporter Michael Bender, that Mike Pence and I had a big fight over Corey Lewandowski, is totally false. No such fight ever happened, it is fiction as are so many others stories written in the vast number of books coming out about me." pic.twitter.com/53ZyphxC06

— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) July 9, 2021

No way was Trump going to stand for any story that refutes the idea that Pence was his quivering lapdog both in public and in private. In fact, it’s essential to his story about the Big Lie — Pence wouldn’t do as he was told on January 6th so everything that happened was his fault.

Three years later, the moment seemed to call for another get-your-facts-straight lesson from Mr. Pence. But the vice president’s team believed he’d been clear with the president that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to overturn the vote. “Anything you give us, we’ll review,” Mr. Pence told the president during a meeting on Jan. 5. “But I don’t see how it’s possible.” Mr. Trump later insisted that his vice president never told him no.

That night, after meeting with Mr. Pence, the president summoned aides into the Oval Office. He opened the door to the colonnade and told staff to sit and listen to his supporters celebrating near the Ellipse, the site of the Save America rally the following day. As aides shivered in the wintry breeze that filled the room, Mr. Trump signed a stack of legislation and bobbed his head to the classic rock blaring outside—precisely the kind of music he’d play ahead of his rallies.

Mr. Trump praised his supporters’ energy and asked his team if the following day would be peaceful. “Don’t forget,” Mr. Trump told them, “these people are fired up.”

He knew. He wanted it. He refused to stop it:

Initially, Mr. Trump seemed to be enjoying the melee. Heartened to see his supporters fighting so vigorously on his behalf, he ignored the public and private pleas from advisers who begged him to quell the riots. Terrified Republican lawmakers called White House aides and the president’s children for help. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser twice personally implored Mr. Meadows to intervene. Mr. Trump didn’t call off the intruders until almost 4:30 p.m. “Go home—we love you, you’re very special,” Mr. Trump said in a social media video, but he didn’t denounce the violence.

This part is interesting because it tracks with every Trump scandal since he came down the escalator:

The backlash against Mr. Trump was immediate. He was suspended from Twitter and Facebook the next day. A flood of White House officials resigned. The House impeached him on Jan. 13 for inciting an insurrection—becoming the only president to be impeached twice—in a bipartisan vote that included support from 10 Republicans. Top Republicans both inside and outside of Trump World believed that the man who had positioned himself as the party’s kingmaker—potentially for the next decade—was now finished.

But days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed that he maintained high levels of support inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him found themselves the target of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders made plans to visit him at Mar-a-Lago—a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.

Nothing will change this, that’s obvious. What could it be? They could find watch on tape laughing with K Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about what a bunch of morons his followers are and how he took them for every penny they had and they would just say it’s fake. He could drop his pants on live TV and run around in circles screaming “Look at my winky!!!” and they’d cheer. Their support is impermeable and every cynical opportunist on the right has decided to try to exploit that for political power and financial gain.

They are not afraid. They are complicit.

Bender interviewed Trump at Mar-a-lago and found a somewhat disoriented and depressed Trump. He wondered if he should run again due to his advanced age and weight. (?) He “found relief in acting as the restaurant maitre d:

Slowly, he found relief in the new routine. He golfed every day and reveled in the attention during the dinner hour at the club. “Did you have the meat or the fish? Was it good?” he asked guests. He lost some weight, and a warm tone had reappeared in his face. He’d just finished golfing with PGA player Ernie Els when I arrived and took a call from Sean Hannity during our interview. Shockingly, he said he was glad to be off Twitter. His prewritten statements, now issued via emails, were “much more elegant.” “It’s really better than Twitter,” Mr. Trump told me. “I didn’t realize you can spend a lot of time on this. Now I actually have time to make phone calls, and do other things and read papers that I wouldn’t read.”

He reads stories about himself, period. Always has. And, like Chauncey Gardner, he likes to watch TV.

Here’s the shadow cabinet. Oh god…

He’d reorganized his inner circle of political advisers. Donald Trump, Jr., replaced Mr. Kushner as the top family adviser. Mr. Trump became less reliant on his final campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and elevated Susie Wiles, who oversaw both Trump victories in Florida. He was in constant contact with Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Rick Scott, the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate races in 2022.

His advisers have pushed him to carefully cultivate his political power and delay deciding whether to run again in 2024 until after the midterms. Still, Mr. Trump has followed the chatter like a day trader monitoring his portfolio. When Ron DeSantis performed well in a straw poll of an obscure gathering of conservatives last month, Mr. Trump asked advisers whether the Florida governor would challenge him in a primary if he were to run. (The majority opinion was yes.) And he said on Fox News last week that he’d decided whether to run in 2024 but wouldn’t reveal the verdict.

There is no doubt in my mind that his plan is to run to avenge The Big Lie, now that the GOP is wiring the electoral college for him. Anything can happen, of course. He is elderly. But assuming he can, he will.

On June 26, Mr. Trump held his first rally since Jan. 6, drawing thousands to the Lorain County fairgrounds near Cleveland. The event was to support Max Miller, a former aide who has waged a primary challenge against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who supported impeachment charges. But Mr. Trump spent much of his 90-minute speech fixated on the 2020 results.

Mr. Trump’s new team could only shrug their shoulders. They, too, will give him space to process the loss, with the hope that he’ll find some measure of closure. His political future may depend on it. “He’ll never move on, but at least it won’t be half of his speech at some point,” one Trump aide said.

“We won the election twice,” Mr. Trump said in Ohio. “And it’s possible that we’ll have to win it a third time.”

He is a very sick man.

Donald Trump held another rally over the July 4 holiday weekend and made a little news. He brought up the Manhattan district attorney’s felony indictment of his company and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, by playing dumb about the law and making clear that he believes that important people like him shouldn’t have to pay taxes. This is no surprise. When he was confronted by Hillary Clinton in a 2016 presidential debate for failing to pay his taxes, he said, “That makes me smart.”

Whether any of that will ever add up to Trump himself being charged with anything is an extreme long shot, but he certainly doesn’t make it easy on his lawyers or, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, his henchmen. Nonetheless, he has a lot of them — henchmen that is.  And a good many new recruits appear to be running for office in 2022.

The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner did a rundown of some early-bird campaigns around the country and Trump loyalists are on the move. She wrote about one candidate for Arizona secretary of state, GOP State Rep. Mark Finchem, who told a  QAnon-friendly talk show that he believes it’s possible that the bogus “audit” of the 2020 presidential ballots will result in overturning the results of the last election. And there is Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, an evangelical pastor who was elected to Congress as a hardcore Christian conservative but has now been converted to full-time Big Lie purveyor. Donald Trump has enthusiastically endorsed Hice’s primary challenge to his nemesis, current Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who famously refused to help Trump steal the election in 2020.

Then there are the average citizens who’ve been moved to primary Republicans through Trump loyalty. Virginia House of Delegates candidate Wren Williams defeated a longtime incumbent solely because the latter said he’d seen no evidence of fraud in 2020. Then there’s Mellissa Carone of Michigan, the former temp worker for Dominion Voting Systems who appeared disoriented or perhaps inebriated at a hearing alongside Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, making claims so outlandish that she became the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Of course she’s now running for a State House seat. How could she not?

These are just a few of the Trump Republicans who are running for state office on the Big Lie platform. If they win, their primary goal will be to change elections systems in their states to ensure that legislators will no longer be hampered by all those inconvenient laws that stand in the way of overturning election results that don’t reflect the will of Real America. You know, Trump voters.

Gardner reports:

While most of these campaigns are in their early stages, the embrace of Trump’s claims is already widespread on the trail and in candidates’ messages to voters. The trend provides fresh evidence of Trump’s continued grip on the GOP, reflecting how a movement inspired by his claims and centered on overturning a democratic election has gained currency in the party since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

This, as I’ve written before, is the new Republican organizing principle. And it’s not confined to state offices. It’s early yet, but there are signs that Big Lie candidates will on the ballot for the U.S. House and Senate all over the country as well, in many cases running to take down Republican incumbents.

Obviously, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is at the top of the hit list. Another is Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, once considered a rising star in the Republican Party, and now a prime Trump target. The race to unseat him is crowded, with all the candidates elbowing each other out of the way to prove just how energetically they can lick Trump’s boots. Trump has endorsed a political novice named Max Miller. who the Daily Beast describes as “a 32-year-old former White House aide with a thin résumé and a rap sheet that includes multiple charges … for assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.” 

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington was among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January (and it was she who revealed that Trump told House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that he “didn’t care as much about the election” as the rioters did). She faces a primary challenge by a military veteran named Joe Kent, who says all incumbents who refused to challenge the Electoral College certification should be run out of office.

Senate races appear to be organizing along similar lines. Trump has already endorsed a primary challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who committed the unpardonable sin of voting to convict in his second impeachment trial. And Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma is shocked, I tell you, shocked, that the chairman of the Oklahoma GOP has endorsed his primary challenger, which he claims is unprecedented (and is indeed highly unusual). What is the reason for this break with party norms? Lankford failed to object to the certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6.

I’m sure there are governor’s races which will be fought on the same basis. I’m not entirely sure exactly why this is happening, but Allen West, the former Florida congressman, former Texas Republican Party chairman and former Army officer (who was forced to retire over the abuse of an Iraqi policeman) is challenging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has practically handcuffed himself to Trump’s border wall as a symbol of his loyalty. Presumably West is going to run as the One True Texas Trumper, but it’s hard to see how he can be any more unctuous and sycophantic than Abbott.

Trump, meanwhile, is said to be focused almost exclusively on the Big Lie, clearly unable to deal with the fact that he lost in 2020 and bent on revenge for his humiliation. But that’s also his ticket to the 2024 election, and he isn’t confining himself to fantasies about “audits” and pyrrhic recount victories. He’s made the decision to portray Jan. 6 as his movement’s crucible.

Up until now it’s only been the fringiest of the fringe, like Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who declare that the insurrectionists who have been arrested are being persecuted for their political beliefs. Only the most extreme elements have suggested, for instance, that Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit was murdered in cold blood without cause. Trump has now brought these ideas into the mainstream. At his rally in Florida, he said:

How come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6? By the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? We all saw the hand. We saw the gun. … Now they don’t want to give the name, It’s got to be released.

Trump is literally normalizing the insurrection and turning those who participated into heroes and martyrs. And all those sycophantic candidates who are running on the Big Lie platform will follow his lead and say the same things. 

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, the tweet that finally got Trump banned from twitter made clear that he saw it this way from the very beginning:

“Remember this day forever.”

Donald Trump’s tweet on the evening of January 6 — hours after the Capitol riot. 

The most damning tweet of all? pic.twitter.com/PKU0rqVIBl

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) February 9, 2021

Salon