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They Tried To Persuade Him That He Lost

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

He chose not to believe anyone who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear.

Ken Chesebro was one of those who were happy to give him what he wanted. And Trump listened:

Former Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro has been talking to all kinds of legal inquiries andit seems there’s always something new for him to say. Here’s one of the latest:

Before a group of supportive lawyers entered the Oval Office for a photo-op with then-President Donald Trump in December 2020, they were given a clear instruction, according to one attendee: Don’t get Trump’s hopes up about overturning the election.

One attorney, Jim Troupis, toed the line. He’d just finished leading Trump’s failed election challenge in Wisconsin, and bluntly told the president it was over in that state.

But when the conversation shifted to Arizona, attorney Kenneth Chesebro deviated from the plan. He told Trump he could still win – and explained how the “alternate electors” he helped assemble in Arizona and six other states gave Trump an opening to continue contesting the election until Congress certified the results on January 6, 2021.

Chesebro’s optimistic comments immediately created problems by apparently giving Trump renewed hope that he could still somehow stay in office. Former RNC chairman Reince Priebus left the meeting “extremely concerned” about the January 6 conversation. Priebus, a Wisconsin native who served as Trump’s first chief of staff, later warned Troupis and Chesebro not to tell anyone about what happened.

This dramatic account comes from Chesebro, who sat for an interview last week with Michigan state prosecutors investigating the fake electors plot. CNN has exclusively obtained audio of that interview, which includes previously unreported details about the pivotal Oval Office meeting.

The Michigan attorney general already charged the 16 Republican electors who cast sham ballots in Lansing, and CNN recently reported that the investigation is still ongoing. Fifteen of the electors pleaded not guilty; one got his charges dropped in a cooperation deal.

The “photo-op … gone south,” as Chesebro called the December 16, 2020, meeting, reveals a previously unknown instance of Trump hearing directly that he lost – which could factor into his federal election subversion trial. But it also highlights how others in Trump’s orbit leaned into his delusions and aided his quixotic effort to cling onto power…

“There was a conscious effort to deflect him from a sense of any possibility that he could pull out the election,” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors about the thinking going into the meet-and-greet with Trump. “…Our marching orders were: Don’t say anything that makes him feel more positive than the beginning of the meeting.’”

I’s unclear who gave the so-called “marching orders” to the group of pro-Trump attorneys.

Nonetheless, Chesebro told Trump he could still prevail in Arizona. He also spelled out the basics of the fake electors scheme, where Trump supporters in seven critical states cast faux ballots and signed phony certificates claiming they were the rightful electors.

“I ended up explaining that Arizona was still hypothetically possible — because the alternate electors had voted,” Chesebro told Michigan state investigators, later adding that this made it “clear (to Trump) in a way that maybe it hadn’t been before, that we had until January 6 to win.”

“And that, you know, created a real problem,” Chesebro added.

A source told CNN that a visibly angry Priebus, who arranged the photo-op for his home-state delegation, intervened to shut down the conversation after he saw Chesebro whispering to Trump about election procedures.

So I guess Trump is going to have to say that he was just listening to “his attorney”, Kenneth Chesebro, who told him he could win and we’re supposed to believe that it makes sense that he chose to believe every other legal and election adviser (except Giuliani and Sidney Powell)didn’t know what they were talking about.

I’m sure the cult will buy it. They believe everything he says. But it doesn’t seem to me that a jury, having taken an oath and been instructed by a judge, will see that as being reasonable. After all, this is the man who had been running the most powerful country in the world for four years. How is it possible that some obscure guy named Chesebro would be considered the expert when the entire DOJ, the Judiciary and his own white house counsel’s office made it very, very clear that he had lost the election and should concede?

But it does show one thing, doesn’t it? Trump knew about the alternate electors plot in December, didn’t he? And he embraced it.

Happy Hollandaise everybody! If you’ve a mind to throw something in the old stocking….


Stay Sane, Stay Decent

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

I am offering this thoughtful piece on the sexual violence of October 7th by Jill Filipovic with a gift link because I really want you to be able to read the whole thing. There’s so much sturm und drang around this topic that it’s hard to ever find clarity. This is one of the rare articles that provides it without pandering, excusing or obfuscating the reality.

She discusses in detail how difficult it was to get reliable forensic evidence in the aftermath of the attack and explains why it was important, as a journalist, to wait for the facts. Reporting of sexual violence is war is always fraught and with all discussions of rape it’s important to be precise because so often the reflexive response is to dismiss it. But that’s not the whole story here:

But soon after the attacks, the evidence started to come in, and it took the form that evidence of wartime rape often does: accounts from survivors of the attacks, emergency responders, medical personnel, those who examined the bodies and journalists who were permitted to see some attack footage. Some of these accounts have been presented by organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. A Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children has been established in Israel […]

But even as evidence mounted, so did disbelief. On social media, accounts often flood mentions of Hamas’s gendered violence with arguments that no such thing happened, often insisting that the allegations were invented by the Israeli government as a pretext for war, are simply too unsubstantiated to be believed or pale in comparison with Palestinian suffering. Some of these accounts may be bots; others have hundreds of thousands of followers. […]

Denials and deflections have come from people with vast reach. Some work at prominent magazines; others run popular podcasts, YouTube channels and websites. These denials have migrated into global leftist discourse and seem intended to sow doubt or prompt wholesale dismissal of the subject.

You may find this surprising in the age of MeToo. But I can testify to the fact that it is absolutely true. She asks why anyone would doubt that sexual violence is part of war. After all, it’s been the case since the beginning of time. And she wonders, “does anyone really believe that, were it not for rape claims, Israel’s campaign in Gaza would be any less brutal,  let alone nonexistent?”

But that misses the point. For many denialists, truth doesn’t seem to be the goal; a monopoly on righteousness is.

From the earliest days after Oct. 7, individual supporters of all sides have disseminated and fallen for distortions and blatant fabrications. This war comes at a time of minimal global trust and maximal ability to seek out evidence that supports whatever theory suits one’s political context.

Reporting on the attacks and the war also produced genuine confusion. Muddying the picture even more were claims later modified by reputable journalistic outlets, which has only propelled conspiracy mongering and denialism. Further, while much of the obfuscation has been stoked by bad actors — be they hostile foreign governments, right-wing bigots or cynical left-wing activists — those atrociously dishonest messages are then amplified and repeated, even by no doubt well-meaning people who simply sympathize with a brutalized population.

She makes the obvious point that while these horrors are often part of war, that doesn’t make it legitimate. Also:

Some of those who deny or question allegations of Oct. 7 sexual abuse argue not only that those abuses may not have happened but also that giving credence to these claims is, in effect, justifying Israel’s war in Gaza — a theory weakened by the fact that the Israeli incursion began well before stories of sexual violence made very many headlines. It’s a profoundly morally bankrupt position, one that demands silencing the truth to achieve a desired end. It’s a means of undermining stories of violence that has worked throughout the ages, as women have been told to keep quiet for the cause or encouraged not to ruin a good man’s life or written largely out of history as inconvenient or even deserving victims of the good guys.

It’s exhausting having to argue such an obvious point with the rabid hawks. It’s profoundly depressing to have to make the same argument to members of the left who have never, up until now, taken that stance.

The horrors of this war do not have to be either/or. One can both face the mountain of evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and confront the staggering Palestinian death toll — people who were not mere collateral damage but individuals whose lives were brutally snatched away and many more who will carry this displacement and loss and trauma with them for the rest of their lives. One can seek to understand the context in which a group like Hamas comes to be and curb the impulse to recast openly misogynist fundamentalists into freedom fighters. One can hold deep contempt for this right-wing Israeli government and oppose this war with every bone in one’s body.

That is such an obvious point I can’t believe anyone has to say it out loud. But it must be said out loud, I guess. What I’m seeing unfold on social media on both sides, admittedly at least partly fueled by malicious propaganda and fake news bots, is a modern version of what unfolded after 9/11, when so many people lost their moorings and gave in to blood lust and vengeance.

There is no excuse for October 7th and there is no excuse for the massive slaughter taking place in Gaza. It’s not hard to acknowledge that, it really isn’t.

These excerpts don’t do the piece justice and I urge you to click on the gift link above to read the whole thing. It’s very nuanced and filled with important facts and analyses that need to be understood if we are to try to understand this horrific event without losing ourselves.

It’s that time, folks. If you like to throw something in the old stocking, I’d be grateful:


Your Daily Dose Of Hopium

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

I suspect you haven’t heard about this. The only hysterical headlines are the ones that show Biden losing.

Ok, so what about those battleground states everyone was shrieking about the other day based on one poll?

Oh.

And then there’s this:

This is good too:

I’m not saying these things mean any more than anything else going into the election year. We don’t know what is really going to motivate people next November. But there’s no reason to discount them either. Let’s just say that there is a lot of information out there and there’s no reason to fall into a doom spiral just because the media likes to play up the negative Biden stories.

It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! If you’ve of a mind…

Ho Ho Ho! Here We Go!

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

An election year like no other

If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future.

Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more.

She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being.

This issue is not going away. We have just seen a vivid example of how seriously these zealots take “exemptions.” It reminds me of something I wrote many years ago here on this blog about that issue (back when the Democrats were still saying that Roe was inviolable and it was important to meet the zealots half way.) I highlighted the comments of one anti-abortion extremist in South Dakota named Bill Napoli:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.  

I wondered:

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?  

From the moment I saw that I realized that there would be no exceptions to their draconian bans. They would always find a way to say that the women didn’t qualify.

This fight isn’t over folks. They’ve now got it going on in all 50 states, which was something they always saw as a transitional move. There would be battles going on all over the place and they figured they would eventually move to a national ban down the road.

But they didn’t count on the backlash which has been overwhelming. But it’s going to take sustained effort to beat these people back. They are patient and they play the long game.

Well, we’ve been fighting that same good fight here at Hullabaloo for over 20 years now and we’re not going to stop now.

If you value the work we do here to expose the right’s ongoing assault on women’s rights I hope you will consider throwing some support this way as we go into this monumentally important election year. I think we are all going to need each other even more over this next year.

Thanks again for hanging in with me all this time. It’s the passion of my life and I know how lucky I am to be able to do it. It wouldn’t be possible without you, my faithful readers. It means the world to me.

cheers,
digby

If you have a mind to help us keep the light on for another year, you can do so below or at the snail mail address on the left.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!

*keep scrolling for fresh opinions 😉

Where’s Hunter?

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public?

Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason!

The Democrats are backing him:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.”

“I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.”

The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden.

“We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said.

Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit:

Lol. Here’s how that ended:

Hunter Biden did the right thing. He presented himself but refused to submit himself to their secret inquisition which they are guaranteed to mischaracterize as they’ve done all the others.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, if you’re of a mind ….


Impeach Madness

Published by digby on December 13, 2023

Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry”

I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though.

They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code. They also needed to get to the bottom of that UFO thing and it’s vitally important that they obtain Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. They’ve got a lot on their plates.

But nothing has been more important than the investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the alleged corruption that supposedly took place among Biden family members when Biden was vice president and out of office. Today is the big day when they plan to vote for an official impeachment inquiry into these charges. Then they plan to recess and go home for the holidays. They’re all worn out.

The impeachment was inevitable. The leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, demanded it and when he says jump they start leap frogging over each other. And it’s put the new Speaker in what should be an extremely uncomfortable position, although it won’t be, because he’s totally shameless. Having even just recently been reported to have said that he didn’t think impeachment should be on the agenda, he has completely reversed course and has authorized this vote to launch a formal inquiry. That is in glaring contradiction with many statements he made arguing against the impeachments of Donald Trump:

When confronted with his blatant hypocrisy by Fox’s Bret Baier, he explained that this is totally different because that was a sham and this totally isn’t. Except, of course, it totally is.

There’s not been even one shred of evidence that ties Joe Biden into any corruption. In fact, it’s gotten so ludicrous that Oversight Committee Chair, James Comer has been out there waving around copies of checks from Hunter and Biden’s brother James that he says proves Biden was on the take when in reality they were loan repayments. Hunter’s supposedly nefarious checks were in the amount of $1380 a month for a car payment reimbursement. It’s become that absurd.

Tim Burchett, R-TN., appeared on CNN earlier this week to spread the salacious details that were included in the recent felony indictment of Hunter Biden for paying his taxes late and insisted that one of the proofs of his corruption was the fact that his only qualifications for the jobs he held were “hookers and crack cocaine” saying “the guy is bad news.” (In fact Hunter Biden was much more qualified than either Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner who worked in the White House and then cashed in immediately to the tune of billions of dollars from foreign governments the minute they left the White House.)

I’m not going to go into all the reasons why the Ukraine business is completely nonsensical again. It’s ridiculous and even the Republicans must know it since they’re focusing more on silly things like Hunter paying back his father for covering his car payments for a few months. And while it looked for a while as if the so-called moderates were prepared to vote against the inquiry, the fact that the White House is not rushing to help the Republicans with this bogus inquiry has provided them with the lame excuse they’ve been looking for to appease the rabid MAGA horde so Speaker Johnson says that he’s pretty sure he has the votes. We’ll see later today if he is right. And we’ll also see whether those Republican House members who came from districts Biden won are as self-destructive as they appear to be.

Even Fox isn’t all in on this one:

This Biden impeachment is not popular. According to a new Morning Consult poll support for it has collapsed among Independents. (Needless to say, the vast majority of Democrats oppose it and a similar number of Republicans support it.) Apparently aware of this, Mike Johnson has been careful to hedge his bets saying, “We’re not going to prejudge the outcome of this because we can’t because again it’s not a political calculation.”

Nobody believes that. Certainly nobody should believe it:

That’s the kind of public comments that cost former Speaker Kevin McCarthy his first shot at the job back in 2015. But these days, Republicans announcing they are using the tools of government to attack their enemies is considered smart politics among their voters so announcing it isn’t a problem.

Here’s the Chairman of the Oversight Committee, the man who is quarterbacking this Impeachment “inquiry” admitting that he had his mind made up months ago:

Some Democrats aren’t afraid to tell it like it is with these people. Jasmine Crockett of Texas had the Republicans calling for the smelling salts when she appeared on the Charlamagne The God podcast (you know how delicate they are) and told it like it is:

You know, when I sit there, the Oversight Committee is where all the drama is. This is where the impeachment inquiry is. And, you know, it’s insulting that we have idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan. I mean, you just name all of the nonsense Republicans.

And they sit on this committee, and they sit there so high and mighty. And they talk noise constantly and they’re like, “Oh, the Biden crime family.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry. Have you met the Trumps?!”

It’s insulting to the American people that these kooks have hijacked the the American government with a tiny majority and instead of negotiating in good faith to fund the government or provide needed aid to Ukraine and other priorities, they’re about to put on another of their embarrassing little freak shows for the entertainment of the Fox News audience and Donald Trump. “Nonsense Republicans” is right.

Salon

It’s Happy Hollandaise time, if you’re of a mind ….


All The President’s Cell Phones

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 13, 2023

Follow the data

White House photo via Flickr.

Take good news where you find it.

Politico:

Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election.

In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit.

The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Expert 3 “specifically identified the periods of time during which the defendant’s phone was unlocked and the Twitter application was open on January 6.” 

CBS News had identified that other individual (“Individual 1” in the indictment) as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Is it getting hot in there, Donald?

The filing is the latest glimpse into the extraordinary evidence Smith has amassed in his probe, including testimony from dozens of Trump’s closest aides and advisers, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Prosecutors obtained a search warrant to access Trump’s Twitter data in January and ultimately obtained a massive cache of data culled from Trump’s account, including location data.

However, the prosecution filing stops short of claiming that the experts will be able to prove that activity on the phones directly involved Trump. Trump’s phones were routinely managed by others, including his social media manager, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

CBS News adds background:

Internal White House records from Jan. 6 turned over to the now-defunct House select committee last year showed a gap in Trump’s official phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was under assault, according to documents obtained by CBS News’ chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa and The Washington Post’s associate editor Bob Woodward.

Costa and Woodward reported last year that the lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes — from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. — on Jan. 6, 2021, meant that there was no record of the calls made during the height of the breach. 

Eleven pages of records were turned over by the National Archives last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack as part of the panel’s past investigation that included examining whether or not the former president used “burner phones” while in office. 

In response to Costa and Woodward’s reporting last year, Trump said, “I have no idea what a burner phone is. To the best of my knowledge, I have never even heard the term,” and a Trump spokesperson said at the time that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved.

John Bolton, his former national security adviser, asserted in an interview later — after CBS News and Washington Post reported that he recalled Trump using the term “burner phones” in several discussions — that Trump was aware of its meaning.

Counting on Trump for the truth is a fool’s errand. He only blurts out the truth by accident or as catnip for his cult. As with being a dictator in a second term. But only on Day 1, right?

Happy Hollandaise everyone!


The New Feudalism

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 13, 2023

Driving America into the ditch

Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral.

Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.”

“But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.”

But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L. Bok resigned.

No longer a university spokesman, Bok penned a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed in response. Inquirer columnist Will Bunch directed readers to one passage in particular.

“It’s the academic equivalent of Ike warning us about the military-industrial complex — and here it’s the undue influence of billionaire donors. Here’s the money shot .” (I’m using Bunch’s highlights):

On all these issues, universities need to be very careful of the influence of money, especially one like Penn, which has a business school with a brand larger than that of the university itself. And I say that as both a Wharton graduate and someone who understands that contributions play a critical role in everything from lifesaving medical research to scholarships for kids like I once was.

But donors should not be able to decide campus policies or determine what is taught, and for sure there should not be a hidden quota system that ensures privileged children a coveted place at elite schools.

For nearly all of the 19 years I served on Penn’s board, I felt like there was a very broad, largely unspoken consensus on the roles of the various university constituencies: the board, donors, alumni, faculty, and administration.

Once I concluded that this longtime consensus had evaporated, I determined that I should step off the board and leave it to others to find a new path forward.

“The culture wars can be brutal,” Bok added, recounting the “violent threats,” street confrontations, “robot-generated emails,” and more unpleasantness that came his way.

But let’s consider Bok’s remarks in the context of the 2024 elections. The Republican presidential frontrunner — himself an alleged billionaire — faces multiple felony trials, including for attempting the overthrow of the government. Donald Trump yearns to be a dictator, to “prosecute enemies and release insurrectionists, and sic troops on protesters,” Bunch writes, while claiming it’s Joe Biden who is the dictator.

“There hasn’t been this much projection since the golden age of drive-in movies,” Bunch insists.

Trump’s MAGA base yearns for a strongman and for retribution for wrongs real and imagined. Trump backers in billionaire-financed think tanks drool over the prospect of turning the entire federal bureaucracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if not of the billionaire class itself, led by a “Red Caesar.” The business class longs to finish shredding the social safety net and return the working class to neo-serfdom. The lot of them have already abandoned democracy in word and deed.

Bok has only gotten a foretaste of what’s in store when Movement Authoritarians drive the country into a ditch. Elon Musk’s Cybertruck illustrates.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone!


Rigged!

Published by digby on December 12, 2023

Trump accuses DeSantis of trying to steal Iowa

Ed Kilgore has the story:

Donald Trump famously likes to allege voter fraud against Democrats; it was the centerpiece of his “stolen election” claims in 2020 and in turn became the centerpiece of his campaign of retribution in 2024. But it’s been a while since he’s accused fellow Republicans of “rigging” elections … nearly eight years, to be exact, since he accused 2016 Iowa Caucus winner Ted Cruz of stealing that contest via false rumors his campaign allegedly spread about Ben Carson dropping out (it was a complicated conspiracy theory, to be sure).

Though the odds of Trump losing Iowa this year are very low, his campaign issued a statement on Friday accusing Ron DeSantis, his most formidable opponent in the state (per the polling averages), of trying to steal this one:

Safe and secure elections are the bedrock of our democracy, and either the DeSantises are purposefully spreading false information or they are too uninformed about the Iowa Caucus to properly educate caucus-goers on how to participate in the process. These people have no idea what they’re doing and are simply engaging in play-pretend politics. …

The DeSantises specifically said they were calling on their campaign coalition groups of out-of-state, non-Iowa residents to illegally “descend on the caucus” and try to cast a vote.

The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the Caucus through fraud.

The backstory of this charge is pretty clear; it stems from a joint appearance DeSantis and his wife, Casey, made on Fox News on December 8, as the Washington Post reported:

Casey DeSantis, who often joins her husband on the campaign trail, has been promoting a “Mamas for DeSantis” 2024 coalition. She said on Fox News that “we’re asking all of these moms and grandmoms to come, from wherever it might be — North Carolina, South Carolina — and to descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”

With Ron DeSantis sitting silently beside her, Casey DeSantis added, “Because you do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus.” She said that people should come “let their voice be heard in support of Ron DeSantis,” the Republican governor of Florida.

This remark turned a lot of heads, and not just at Mar-a-Lago. Was it possible Casey DeSantis had spent months traipsing across Iowa without understanding there’s a strict residency requirement (not just Iowa or county residence, but precinct residence) for caucusing?

The Iowa Republican Party quickly put out a tweet clarifying the rules:

And then a rapidly backpedaling DeSantis campaign issued its own clarification via the candidate himself in informal remarks to the press.

“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”

So the official line from Team DeSantis is that Casey was simply and innocently encouraging “moms and grandmoms” from everywhere to buy plane tickets to Des Moines in order to whoop it up for Ron on Caucus Night. T

It may seem ridiculous for Trump to accuse the DeSantis campaign of trying to rig an election in which he’s polling at 30 points ahead but remember, he convened a commission to study alleged voter fraud in the 2016 campaign that he won! He also insisted that Ted Cruz had stolen the Iowa caucus during that campaign as well. He says it prophylactically, just in case, as he did in both of his presidential campaigns and is doing again this time. He also does it after the fact when he loses even if it’s just in the popular vote which doesn’t even count. He just does it, no matter what.

Now ask yourself why his ecstatic cult doesn’t see it? Why would any adult not think there’s something off about the fact that the man is incapable of ever admitting that he lost ? Doesn’t it occur to them that there is something very, very weird about all that?

Yeah, never mind. You’re right. They don’t care.

Lindsey Graham Is One Rude Dude

Published by digby on December 12, 2023

I don’t know if Lindsey Graham has ever been more inappropriate or more fatuous than he’s being now. Ukrainian president Zelensky went up to Capitol Hill where he was treated very disrespectfully by the House and lectured by Graham in the Senate:

“The key is to get the commander in chief involved in the negotiations. Sen. Murphy — I have no confidence he’s ever going to get a deal we can live with, because he’s worried about selling it to the left,” Graham said. “The commander in chief — if there’s a deal to be made — is going to have to get involved in the negotiations. It’s his job above all others.”

The South Carolina Republican, who has been part of border discussions in recent weeks, also complained that Murphy has been “very unhelpful” and that his “attitude about what’s going on is off base.” 

“We’re not holding the border hostage. We’re trying to protect the American people,” Graham said. 

Murphy declined to comment directly on Graham’s remarks, saying only that, “You’ll have to ask Sen. Graham about that.” 

Murphy and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) have kept up discussions toward a possible deal, but one does not appear imminent. Lankford told reporters Monday that he did not foresee an agreement being reached before the end of the week, and that because the House is scheduled to adjourn then for the Christmas break, the talks will be kicked into January. 

Discussions in recent days have centered between Lankford, Murphy, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and, most recently, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients. 

“We continue to make progress. We’ve made serious proposals that put us outside of our Democratic comfort zone. We need Republicans to stretch, and if they do, we can get there,” the Connecticut Democrat said. “There’s been significant back-and-forth.” 

Graham just wants to make Biden personally capitulate to a draconian border compromise so he can split the Democratic party which is already split on aid to Israel and Ukraine. He’s not even being subtle about it. It’s a very sticky wicket and I can’t predict how it’s going to come out.

But that’s politics. The rudeness of cornering Zelensky with this monumental drivel is outrageous:

Graham’s comments also came after he explained that he asked the final question to Zelensky during his meeting with senators Tuesday morning. As part of that question, Graham told the Ukrainian president that he feared he was being “used” by Democrats. 

“I like him and I admire him,’ Graham told reporters. “I said, ‘You’ve done everything anybody can ask of you. This is not your problem here. You didn’t make this problem. It will affect you and affect the whole world, but policy choices matter.’ 

“They made policy choices for three years to lead to a nightmare on the border. They need to change their policy choices,” he continued.

Graham added that his stance was only bolstered by recent comments made by FBI Director Christopher Wray that he sees “blinking red lights everywhere I turn” that could portend a possible major terror attack in the U.S. 

“I told President Zelensky my No. 1 obligation is to secure my country as well as help yours, and I feel like my country’s border policies are an immediate threat to the safety of the American people,” he said. 

Yeah. Comparing the perennial American problem of immigration with the invasion of Ukraine is insulting to everyone concerned. When Mexico starts lobbing missiles into Washington DC maybe it might make sense.

It’s just stupid MAGA BS and Graham knows better. But to spout this silly propaganda at the Ukrainian president is just embarrassing.

The ramifications of this are huge. Former Estonian President Toomas Ilves was on deadline White House earlier today and he said in response to Ali Velshi’s question about Russian expansion due to this resurgent threat to NATO which had receded when we mercifully voted out Orange Julius Caesar:

I would say that until recently people in this part of the world were not so concerned because we had complete and utter with in NATO and the United States. now recent developments and some of the rhetoric coming out in the presidential debates that we were watching closely and some of the statements of various senators, makes us rethink this. You know, just today or yesterday, here on the border with Russia, across from Estonia, the government of Russia put up a big billboard with a bear saying “Russia Knows No Borders.” That’s a pretty clear message there.

Yes, it’s a pretty clear message.

Now if the US thinks it makes sense in a global economy and an existential threat of climate change to abruptly withdraw from the world and stop being a guarantor of military help for our allies, I am skeptical that anyone has thought that through and understands what that would mean for America’s own security. But I would certainly hope that if they do this that our military spending will be slashed to bone as well. If all we need is a defensive force to ensure that our own homeland is secure then there is no need at all for all that.

On the other hand, our new possible Emperor, Donald Trump, has promised to build us an impenetrable dome above the whole country and I’d guess that will cost some money. But Trump will just handle that like he always does. He just won’t pay.

I shouldn’t joke about this. You don’t have to go back very far in history to see that the combination of a divided left and a fanatical right generally leads to no good. This situation is no good.