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It’s no secret that former President Donald Trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election if he lost. He had set up the scenario for months, even declaring at one point that the only way the Democrats could win the election was by stealing it. He’d done the same in 2016, telling his cheering crowd that he would only accept the results of the election if he won, and as it turned out, he didn’t even accept that – insisting that Hillary Clinton stole the popular vote. Trump then formed an “election integrity commission” to investigate voter fraud in the election he won. (That commission was eventually abandoned after they were unable to find any proof of voter fraud.)

The election hysteria in 2020 over mail-in votes and Trump’s ludicrous contention that any votes counted after midnight on Election Day were illegitimate would have been easy enough to just chalk up to Trump being a sore loser had January 6th not happened. But the Big Lie was adopted by the GOP establishment for their own cynical, political reasons and Republicans continue to prop it up to this day. That has made it impossible to ignore and requires the attention of everyone who still values democracy and the rule of law. Clearly, we have not seen the end of this.

Just this week, we learned that the coup attempt engineered by Trump and his cronies was much more serious than the silly clown show run by the looney lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani or Trump’s breathless fulminating about his “landslide” win being stolen from him. It turns out that the most alarming threat came from within the government itself and, had it succeeded, would have been the gravest constitutional crisis since the civil war.

According to notes turned over to the House Oversight Committee last week, after Attorney General Bill Barr left the Justice Department (DOJ) in late December of 2020, Trump pressured the Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to declare that “the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.” In other words, Trump wanted the DOJ to back his Big Lie despite both Barr and Rosen telling him there was no fraud. (Trump even proclaimed, “you guys may not be following the Internet the way I do.”) David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official, told the Washington Post:

“These notes reveal that a sitting president, defeated in a free and fair election, personally and repeatedly pressured Justice Department leaders to help him foment a coup in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power. And that should shock the conscience of every American, regardless of political persuasion.”

But it gets even worse.

ABC News published a draft of a letter prepared by a Trump loyalist in the DOJ named Jeffrey Clark, a faceless GOP lawyer who had previously worked in the Bush administration and had been the head of the DOJ’s civil division since September of 2020. On the same day that Trump was leaning on the acting AG to declare the election was “corrupt,” Clark circulated a letter addressed to Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp and state legislative leaders, dishonestly claiming that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.” The letter recommended that the Georgia legislature “convene in special session so that its legislators are in a position to take additional testimony, receive new evidence, and deliberate on the matter.” Clark suggested in this letter that the legislature could refuse to accept the outcome of the election and select electors for Trump instead. This was the essence of the coup plot. According to NBC News, Clark had drafted similar letters to all six states that Trump was contending had been stolen: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia.

Thankfully, Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue, who recorded these events and turned his notes over to Congress, rejected Clark’s outrageous attempts to overturn the election. But that was still not the end of it.

The New York Times reported last January that Trump had been introduced to Clark by a Pennsylvania politician who assured him that Clark was on the team. When Rosen rejected Clark’s attempt to use the DOJ to foment a coup by enlisting Trump loyalists in the state legislatures, Clark went directly to Trump. The president subsequently threatened to replace Rosen with Clark. He even convened what was described as a bizarre “Apprentice-like meeting” with the two men in the White House that lasted for hours. Evidently, Trump was only dissuaded from doing it when he was told that the entire top leadership of the DOJ would resign if he did. According to the Times, Trump worried that mass resignations would distract from his election fraud claims.

It’s easy to say now that “the system worked” but it was a very close thing, entirely dependent on the good faith actions of certain members of the government. What if Trump had gone ahead and made Clark the acting Attorney General and he had sent those letters to the state legislature basically giving a green light from the DOJ to overturn the election results and illegitimately put Trump back in the White House? It’s clear they were serious about doing it and even clearer that this inane notion of state electors constitutionally rejecting the will of the voters has seriously gained currency on the right. This is not the last we will hear of it.

And what of this man Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s willing accomplice in the attempted coup? Is there any accountability for him? Apparently not. He landed a cushy job as Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative-libertarian law firm. The conservative legal establishment takes care of its own — even when they plot to overthrow the government.

And there will almost certainly be a next time.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently reported on all the Big Money Republicans who are backing the “Stop the Steal” movement around the country. (It’s the usual suspects, proving once again that they are no more driven by principle and ideology than the average MAGA-hatted Trump fan.) She mentioned this in passing:

Few people noticed at the time, but in … Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

Jeffrey Clark was no rogue. He was doing a dry run for a coup long in the making.

Salon

My god:

On Tuesday, ABC News reported that Jeffrey Bossert Clark—the Justice Department official who spearheaded an effort to overturn the 2020 election—sought to convince the Georgia General Assembly to throw out the actual results of the race and award its electoral votes to Donald Trump instead. In a draft letter, sent last December, Clark alleged that mass voter fraud had compromised the legitimacy of Georgia’s election, in which Joe Biden narrowly prevailed. As a remedy, Clark, speaking on behalf of the Justice Department, advised the state legislature to call itself into a special session, investigate the alleged fraud, and appoint “a separate slate of electors” who would cast their votes for Trump. Clark’s superiors ultimately quashed this attempt to nullify millions of valid votes.

This scheme marked just one of Clark’s several desperate, last-minute maneuvers to overturn the election. But none of these well-documented, corrupt, anti-democratic plots seems to have hurt his career prospects. To the contrary, after leaving the Justice Department, Clark landed a position as Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative-libertarian law firm that battles “the administrative state.” (Its latest actions: supporting a law professor who refuses to get the COVID vaccine and opposing the federal eviction moratorium.) Clark’s transition back into the conservative legal movement illustrates once again that there have been virtually no professional consequences for the many Republican attorneys who tried to steal the election for Trump.ADVERTISEMENT

Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers. He clerked for Judge Danny Boggs, a hard-right Ronald Reagan nominee, and worked at the big law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Naturally, he joined the Federalist Society, frequently participating in the organization’s events and serving as chair of its environmental law and property rights practice group for seven years. Clark also taught at George Mason University School of Law (now Antonin Scalia Law School), a hub of conservative-libertarian legal studies lavishly funded by the Koch brothers. When he entered Trump’s Justice Department in 2018, he served as assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division; in that position, he sought to weaken federal environmental protections, freeing polluters to disregard long-standing regulations.

So far, par for the course. But Clark took a turn in the final months of the Trump administration, when he ascended to acting Assistant Attorney General of DOJ’s Civil Division. In the wake of the 2020 election, Clark latched onto the lie that mass voter fraud had tainted the results, and that Trump was the true victor. He scrambled to throw the Justice Department behind Trump’s machinations to toss out millions of votes and seize an unearned second term. Documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform show Clark urging the Justice Department to investigate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia. (In one email, Clark noted that he was on the phone with a pro-Trump activist who claimed to have filmed proof of voter fraud in Atlanta. The alleged video evidence never materialized.) He also pressured U.S. Attorney BJay Pak to probe these nonsensical allegations, leading Pak to resign abruptly.

Moreover, Clark appears to have been involved in the campaign for the Justice Department to sue ​​Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit would’ve asked the Supreme Court to nullify the election results in each state and award their electors to Trump rather than Biden. It included claims—made infamous by Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” litigation—that Dominion Voting Systems somehow facilitated voter fraud.Until he launched a direct assault on American democracy, Clark’s résumé looked much like that of countless conservative lawyers.

When these efforts failed, Clark launched a conspiracy to oust acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who declined to facilitate his various plots. Trump and Clark devised a plan: The president would fire Rosen and elevate Clark as acting attorney general; Clark would then inject the Justice Department into Trump’s mad dash to overturn the election. (Recently released contemporaneous notes confirm that the president considered putting Clark in charge of the entire agency.) This coup only failed when DOJ officials threatened to resign en masse upon Rosen’s termination.

He is, quite simply, a traitor. There’s really no other way to describe him. And yet he’s a member in good standing of the Republican establishment, even as some of the Trump stalwarts like Bill Barr checked out when Trump’s shenanigans became too much for them. There is no accountability for people like Clarke and that is a very serious problem. He will be there the next time. And there will be a next time.

No, not New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He’s done. Elizabeth Spiers’s New York Times epitaph for his career reads in brief: “Mr. Cuomo is not a nice guy” whose daughters “don’t appear to loathe him.”

Cuomo just another in a long line of political jerks and bullies. We have seen his kind before and will again. But Donald Trump and his cult are threats to the republic if not to western democracy. Trump’s political career cannot end soon enough. It’s the waiting as his zombie cult shambles relentlessly toward autocracy that’s nerve-wracking.

Emails from December 28, 2020 reveal Jeffrey Clark, then acting head of the Department of Justice civil rights division, attempting to coax department higher-ups to place the department’s thumb on the election to overturn Trump’s November loss to Joe Biden. Clark sent a draft letter to then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue urging Georgia’s governor to call a special legislative session to investigate Trump’s fraud claims (ABC News):

“The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States,” the draft letter said. “The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”

The draft letter states: “While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.”

In other words, urging Georgia Republicans to overturn the presidential results there.

The DOJ provided the emails to the House Oversight Committee investigating events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, the DOJ investigator general is investigating whether any department officials took actions to overturn the election results.

The Department had uncovered no evidence of “irregularities,” and Attorney General William Barr had said as much publicly. Neither had an historic audit of the Georgia results completed in mid-November. But Trump and loyalists such as Clark would not accept the loss, graciously or otherwise.

Clark attached the draft letter in an email to Rosen and Donoghue telling them “I think we should get it out as soon as possible.”

“Personally, I see no valid downsides to sending out the letter,” Clark wrote. “I put it together quickly and would want to do a formal cite check before sending but I don’t think we should let unnecessary moss grow on this.”

Donoghue responded that issuing the letter was “not even within the realm of possibility,” citing Barr’s prior statements. Rosen also dismissed the draft as a non-starter.

The New York Times revealed in January that Clark then devised a plan with Trump to oust Rosen and install Clark to “wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.” Department officials threatened to resign en masse if Trump fired Rosen. Trump relented only after a White House meeting “two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show ‘The Apprentice.’”

As the House begins its investigation into events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, it is clearer still that Trump and his allies will go to any length and corrupt any democratic process to ensure Republicans control the outcome of future presidential elections. The groundwork for seizing control of the Electoral College process from the voters is happening in various Republican-controlled states now.

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer followed the dark money behind the drawn-out, privately funded election audit in Arizona. The goal (as I’ve written for a decade) is not to uncover the truth, but to obscure it in the way voter fraud fraudsters travel the country flinging figurative smoke bombs into news rooms to create in the public’s mind the impression of fire, somewhere, where there is none.

Mayer writes:

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

As with previous decades of voter fraud promotion, the goal of promoting election audits is to support legislation to disenfranchise voters who do not vote Republican. Only now, by monkey-wrenching the vote count directly.

Watch the Chris Hayes monologue from Tuesday.

Due process for Trump and his cohort, of course, but can we speed it up?

When they show you who they are, etc.

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker reporting unmasks the dark money behind efforts to undermine faith in the American democratic process via endless audits of the 2020 election results. Many of the usual players, naturally, including the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Über-rich, right-wing “reactionaries” long to restore themselves to their rightful place in the firmament. As rulers.

As Greg Sargent notes, actually finding voter fraud unicorns is no longer their goal:

Instead, those making such accusations need to create just enough confusion to enable well-placed Republicans to say the actual outcome of a given election is fundamentally unknowable. The coin of the realm is not concocted proof; it’s manufactured uncertainty. This is what will lay the groundwork for attempting to overturn a future election.

As I have said for years, listen carefully for the weasel words in voting malfeasance stories circulated on the right. This or that perceived election discrepancy might be, may be, could be, possibly, or is potentially fraud. Precious few actuallies, with the notable exception of Bladen County, NC. Thus did a federal district judge dismiss as worthless Rudy Giuliani’s binderful of affidavits from people who saw something they thought meant something about which they knew nothing.

What matters to these saboteurs, Sargent writes, is the “manufacturing of fake reasons to keep alive baseless impressions of uncertainty, in the full knowledge that they are manufactured.” This is a dry run for 2022 and 2024, for “inventing new ways to say an outcome is unknowable, which would then justify efforts to resolve the outcome in some other way.”

This from people who know a zygote is a baby.

This week, neo-fascist Tucker Carlson is stroking the ego of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán in Budapest. “On paper,” writes Heather Cox Richardson, “Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by the prime minister.” That is where America’s kookocracy hopes to take this country:

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012, his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to take power.

Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

Just as they pretend now to support this country’s founding documents and principles.

Currently, political patterns in America look much like those Orbán used to gather power into his own hands. Republican-dominated legislatures are passing new measures to suppress the vote, aided by the Big Lie that former president Trump did not lose the 2020 election. Trump and his supporters are focusing on the so-called “forensic audit” of Maricopa County in Arizona, paid for and conducted by Trump loyalists who insist that Trump actually won despite the repeated investigations that have proved the election was clean.

For Carlson to broadcast from Hungary at this time, says Richardson, seems to be “a deliberate demonstration of the Trump Republicans’ plans for our future.”

When they show you who they are….

Margaret Carlson’s piece about the newly released documents from the DOJ gets to the truth of what they mean:

According to documents that the Justice Department has now turned over to Congress, and that were made public for the first time on Friday, Trump called to discuss his phony voter fraud claims, as if the very political William Barr hadn’t conceded, on his way out the door, that despite looking, he’d found none.

When reminded of that by Rosen, and of the fact Justice couldn’t change an election anyway, Trump said not to worry. All he needed was just one word from him: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me.”

So many had already left so much to Trump and the country has paid so dearly for it. We don’t have the notes yet but imagine earlier calls to DOJ, then staffed by Trump appointees keeping his tax returns secret, despite a legitimate request from the House Ways and Means committee and a law that says the returns “shall” be provided.

The wheels of Justice grind, but slowly and in the next 72 hours, Congress should have what Trump managed to cover up since he came down the golden escalator in 2016.

Thankfully, Rosen, the last of Trump’s AGs and one with a spine missing in his predecessors, immediately and repeatedly denied the president’s request. Trump pressed on. With all his recounts, audits and court cases, he said, Rosen was missing the forest of legality for the truth on Twitter:

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” he warned, adding that officials who say “the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt.” Oh, puppet.

[…]

The newly released notes of the call, taken by Rosen’s deputy, are a roadmap to Trump’s twisted thinking. The president cited “allies” who would help him once he got Justice to sign on to his racket, including Rep. Jim Jordan who is so slavishly beholden to Trump that he voted to keep Congress from certifying the election even after the Jan 6 violence.

Jordan wasn’t alone. A majority of House Republicans and their leadership stood by the Big Lie. The initial shock and revulsion of Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell quickly softened into acceptance. McCarthy blew up the Jan. 6 committee, pulling all his appointees when Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wouldn’t seat Jordan, conceding that his party’s official position is to defend Trump’s conduct at all costs and not to investigate anything at all.

In case the acting AG didn’t understand the stakes back in December, Trump used his “people tell me” tack. “Thousands of people” called, complaining to him about the election, the inaction of DOJ, and how none of them “trust the FBI.” Other “people” say how great Jeff Clark is, as in the acting chief of the civil division who supported all things Trump. People wanted Trump to “replace DOJ leadership” with him. A week after the call, Rosen and his deputy would have to defend their jobs against Clark in a meeting in the Oval Office.

Of course, no 2020 Trump call would have been complete without a demand or plea to “figure out what to do” with Hunter Biden, on the grounds that “people will criticize the D.O.J. if he’s not investigated for real.”

It was a failed coup. There never was a doubt. But these notes of Trump threatening, cajoling and harassing the DOJ to back up his lies make it clearer than ever.

I’m putting this here because I think it’s important that this is documented and saved. It says everything about the GOP in 2021.

They are crudely, boldly, openly engaged in propaganda and whitewashing of criminal, insurrectionist behavior for political gain:

In the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald J. Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office.

By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Mr. Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of the party had already begun to rewrite history, describing the Capitol riot as a peaceful protest and comparing the invading mob to a “normal tourist visit,” as one congressman put it.

This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which those accused of rioting were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.

Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.

This rendering of events — together with new evidence that Mr. Trump had counted on allies in Congress to help him use a baseless allegation of corruption to overturn the election — pointed to what some democracy experts see as a dangerous new sign in American politics: Even with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, many Republicans have little intention of abandoning the prevarication that was a hallmark of his presidency.

Rather, as the country struggles with the consequences of Mr. Trump’s assault on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections, leaders of his party — who, unlike the former president, have not lost their political or rhetorical platforms — are signaling their willingness to continue, look past or even expand his assault on the facts for political gain.

The phenomenon is not uniquely American.

“This is happening all over the place — it is so much linked to the democratic backsliding and rising of authoritarian movements,” said Laura Thornton, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It’s about the same sort of post-truth world. You can just repeat a lie over and over and, because there’s so little trust, people will believe it.”

Behind the Republican embrace of disinformation is a calculus of both ambition and self-preservation. With members of the select committee hinting that they could subpoena Trump aides, allies on Capitol Hill and perhaps Mr. Trump himself, the counterfactual counterattack could pre-emptively undercut an investigation of the riot.

As videos shown during the hearing gave harrowing new reminders of the day’s violence, leading House Republicans claimed that Ms. Pelosi — a target of the mob — had been warned about the violence in advance but failed to prevent it.

From his private club in New Jersey, Mr. Trump suggested that Ms. Pelosi should “investigate herself,” yet again falsely insinuating that antifa and Black Lives Matter — not his followers — caused the destruction on Jan. 6 and that a democratically decided election had been stolen from him.

All the while, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican, who once led his party in condemning both the riot and Mr. Trump’s role in it, made no visible attempt to stop the flood of fabrications, telling reporters he had not watched the hearing and had little new to say about the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.

House Republicans’ desire to bury the attack on their own workplace has created a dysfunctional governing atmosphere. Ms. Pelosi has increasingly treated them as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust, and has expressed deep disdain for Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, whom she called a “moron” this past week.

“Anytime you mention his name, you’re not getting an answer from me,” she told reporters. “Don’t waste my time.”

Almost as soon as the police retook control on Jan. 6, hard-core defenders of Mr. Trump in Congress began recasting the gruesome scenes of violence that left five people dead.

Mr. McCarthy, the California Republican, responded differently at first: He angrily demanded that Mr. Trump stop the rioters, according to an account he gave fellow Republicans at the time. A week later, as the House moved to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said that “the president bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters” and called for a fact-finding commission.

But in the months since, that early resolve has given way to an out-and-out intent to bury the attack. Mr. McCarthy, who is trying to win back the majority in 2022, moved quickly to patch things up with Mr. Trump, gave latitude to far-right members of his caucus and worked furiously to block the creation of an independent 9/11-style commission.

This past week, just before the officers began to deliver anguished testimony about the brutality they had endured, Mr. McCarthy repeatedly laid blame not with Mr. Trump, the rioters or those who had fueled doubts about the election outcome, but with Ms. Pelosi, one of the invading mob’s chief targets.

“If there is a responsibility for this Capitol, on this side, it rests with the speaker,” Mr. McCarthy said.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the recently selected House conference chairwoman, went even further, saying Ms. Pelosi “bears responsibility” as speaker “for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6” and deriding her as “an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”

Ms. Pelosi is not responsible for the security of Congress; that job falls to the Capitol Police, a force that the speaker only indirectly influences. Republicans have made no similar attempt to blame Mr. McConnell, who shared control of the Capitol at the time.

Outside the Justice Department, meanwhile, a group of conservative lawmakers gathered to accuse prosecutors of mistreating the more than 500 people accused in the Jan. 6 riot.

Encouraged by Mr. Trump, they also echoed far-right portrayals of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot trying to break into the House chamber, as a patriotic martyr whose killing by the police was premeditated.

As if to show how anti-democratic episodes are ping-ponging around the globe, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June seized on Ms. Babbitt’s killing — calling it an “assassination” — to deflect questions about his own country’s jailing of political prisoners.

Some senior Republicans insist that warnings of a whitewash are overwrought.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to be successful erasing what happened,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “Everybody saw it with their own eyes and the nation saw it on television.”

For Mr. Cornyn and other lawmakers, continuing to talk about the attack is clearly an electoral loser at a time when they are trying to retake majorities in Congress and avoid Mr. Trump’s ire.

Most Republican lawmakers instead simply try to say nothing at all, declining even to recount the day’s events, let alone rebuke members of their party for spreading falsehoods or muddying the waters.

Asked how he would describe the riot, in which a hostile crowd demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, his brother, Representative Greg Pence of Indiana, responded curtly, “I don’t describe it.”

Yet the silence of party stalwarts, including nearly all of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the attack and the Republican senators who voted to convict him, has created an information void that hard-right allies of Mr. Trump have readily filled. And they have found receptive audiences in a media environment replete with echo chambers and amplifying algorithms.

In a July poll by CBS News, narrow majorities of Trump voters said they would describe the attack as an example of “patriotism” or “defending freedom.”

That silence follows a familiar pattern: Rather than refute false allegations about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud, many leading Republicans have simply tolerated extremist misinformation.

Perhaps no one’s silence has been more significant than that of Mr. McConnell, who criticized Mr. Trump and his party in the immediate aftermath of the attack, denouncing it as a “failed insurrection” fueled by the former president’s lies.

Since Mr. Trump’s impeachment acquittal by the Senate in February, when Mr. McConnell declared him “practically and morally responsible,” the minority leader has all but refused to discuss Jan. 6.

The quiet acquiescence of party leaders has effectively left Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois as the only two Republicans still willing to speak out against a majority of their party.

“Clearly there were security failings at the Capitol, but there was a mob that tried to prevent us from carrying out our constitutional duty,” Ms. Cheney said in an interview. “It’s very hard for me to understand why any member of Congress of either party would want to whitewash that.”

Ms. Cheney has already paid a price: Republicans ousted her this spring from their No. 3 leadership position, replacing her with Ms. Stefanik.

Now, House hard-liners want to expel her and Mr. Kinzinger from the Republican conference altogether, portraying them as “snitches” and “spies” in league with Democrats.

The message is clear: Adherence to facts cannot overcome adherence to the party line.

Authoritarianism? Where?

“Say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me … Donald Trump to the Acting Attorney General 12/27/20

It’s more and more obvious every day that Trump was knowingly trying to engineer a coup. He was working night and day to persuade people to do what he knew was illegal and unconstitutional:

President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times.

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

The notes connect Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress with his campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to help undermine, or even nullify, the election results.

I have a feeling we only know the tip of the iceberg about what all those hacks he inserted into the pentagon in the final days were up to.

He had been told many, many times that the president is not supposed to interfere in DOJ business and he just didn’t care.

President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue. The people familiar with the conversations spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal and political issues that are not yet public.

Rosen told few people about the phone calls, even in his inner circle. But there are notes of some of the calls that were written by a top aide to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, who was present for some of the conversations, these people said.

Donoghue’s notes could be turned over to Congress in a matter of days, they added, if Trump does not file papers in court seeking to block such a handover. In addition, both Rosen and Donoghue could be questioned about the conversations by congressional committees examining Trump’s actions in the days after the election.

The Justice Department recently notified Rosen, Donoghue and others who were serving there during the end of Trump’s presidency that the agency would not seek to invoke executive privilege if they are asked about their contacts with the president during that period.

That posture — which the letter to Rosen calls a departure from normal agency practice — means that individuals who are questioned by Congress would not have to say the conversations with the president were off-limits. They would be able to share details that give a firsthand account of Trump’s frantic attempts to overturn the 2020 election and involve the Justice Department in that effort.

That is a big deal. I have no doubt that some of these people will say it anyway. And this will be a very clear test as to whether those involved are committed to their oaths to the constitution or to Donald Trump because even if they did not respond to his insane entreaties to overturn the election, if they refuse to testify about what happened they are protecting him from accountability for what he did.

… on OAN:

When the hearing began at 9:30 a.m., OAN ran a segment about crime in Chicago instead.The channel showed about 20 seconds of the hearing at 10:05 a.m., but the anchor talked over the testimony and didn’t explain why US Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell looked so emotional.

Then the anchor, apparently reading an outdated script in the teleprompter, said that Cheney was “expected to speak in her opening statements,” fifteen minutes after Cheney had spoken. OAN did not show what Cheney said. Instead, the channel re-aired an old report about tension between Cheney and other Republican lawmakers.

That mistake summed up OAN’s approach to the hearing overall: Pretending that it wasn’t happening the way it was.The 12 p.m. hour began with an anchor reading another outdated script about Trump: “The 45th president says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is spending too much time and money on the highly partisan January 6 commission.”

OAN didn’t show any clips of the officers’ gripping accounts — or of DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone repeatedly calling the attackers “terrorists.”

But the producers made sure to break into a taped business report about Tesla’s record profits at 12:55 in order to air another GOP press conference.”Lawmakers are speaking regarding the treatment of those that have been arrested as of their actions after January 6,” the anchor said, mangling her words.A

t the press conference, far-right lawmakers bashed the Department of Justice and defended riot suspects they depicted as “political prisoners.” The on-screen banner referenced “JAN. 6 PROTESTERS” rather than accused criminals.The press conference was interrupted by protesters who blew whistles and held up signs. One America News moved onto a segment about voter fraud allegations in Georgia. Other stories in the anti-Democrat news wheel on Tuesday were titled “Delaware Democrats facing accusations of racism, violence” and “N.J. congressional candidate targets Pelosi and Andy Kim.”

One America News president Charles Herring did not respond to requests for comment about his channel’s coverage.

It seems like an obscure. channel. It’s gone from my cable line-up after having been on it for years. (We still have Newsmax, which is almost as bad.) But apparently, a whole lot of Trump fans are tuning in:

OAN is not nationally rated by Nielsen, which is often a sign that a channel is relatively obscure to news consumers. However, data from set-top-boxes and other sources showed a big uptick in viewership after Trump lost the election last November.

I wonder if they’ll show this testimony:

In a long rambling answer, Jim Jordan admits he talked to Trump on January 6th. When asked what they discussed, Jordan changes the subject to the Speaker and security posture pic.twitter.com/n6sLuudNoX

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2021

Liz Cheney told “Good Morning America” Tuesday that Jordan may be called to testify. 

He’s somebody who was involved in a number of meetings in the lead-up to what happened on 6 January, involved in planning for 6 January, certainly for the objections that day, as he said publicly, so he may well be a material witness.

He will lie, of course. Or put on some kind of silly show saying that his discussions with Donald Trump are “privileged”, which they are not. But they must call him anyway. He’s not nearly as slick as he thinks he is.

Just in case you doubt that the “voter fraud” BS is nothing but crude, rank racism, here is the evidence:

And views follow a similar pattern in relation to constituent voter groups. People who perceive widespread election fraud attribute more of it to Black communities (a group that largely votes Dem) than White communities (a group that largely votes Rep). pic.twitter.com/7XZ9ltpQb5

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) July 21, 2021

Only a quarter of these MAGA extremists even have the presence of mind to lie and say they think white people are the cheaters. They are so comfortable in their racism that they just say it out loud.

These attitudes represent tens of millions of our fellow Americans.