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Donald Trump may be spending his post-presidency golfing at Mar-a -Lago but he remains front and center in the hearts and minds of millions of Republican voters, as evidenced by the 46% who said in a new Suffolk University/ USA Today poll released over the weekend that they would join a Trump Party if he decided to split off from the GOP. A whopping 80% of Republican respondents said they support punishing any Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He is still their Dear Leader even in exile.

So the GOP still has a Trump problem. If it loses 20-30% of its voters, it will prove difficult to win any elections whether it’s called the Trump Patriot Party or the plain old GOP. That is because the polarization that powers the extreme right-wing under Trump depends upon having every last self-identified Republican vote their way. There are no more crossovers when it comes to Donald Trump.

This is the dilemma now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., finds himself trying to navigate as he tries to take back the Senate in 2022. So far, he’s tried to have it both ways. Perhaps he and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham are playing some elaborate game of “good cop-bad cop” with Graham ostentatiously currying Trump’s favor while McConnell writes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal desperately trying to assuage big money donors and appalled suburban voters with reassurances that the Republican establishment hasn’t gone completely mad.

It’s impossible to know how any of that will work out but whatever happens, the GOP is taking advantage of one major aspect of Trump’s legacy: The Big Lie. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 76% of Republicans still say they believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that Trump was the legitimate winner. Republican lawmakers in states across the country are now rushing to pass various draconian vote suppression schemes.

It’s not that they haven’t been doing that all along, of course. That’s conservative electoral strategy 101, about which I’ve written many times. Having lost the popular vote seven out of the last eight presidential elections, they know very well that they do not have the support of a majority of voters in the country. Now that Trump conveniently persuaded GOP voters that the presidential election was stolen from them in broad daylight, the opportunity to curb voting in some new and ingenious ways has presented itself and they are going for it.

So far this year at least 165 bills that would restrict voting access are being considered in state legislatures nationwide reports the Brennan Center for Justice. And the excuse Republicans are using is that they must do this to “restore trust” in the voting system — trust that was destroyed by the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his henchmen. What a neat trick. Apparently, the only way they can restore trust is to “fix” problems that don’t exist but which also happen to suppress Democratic votes.

Take Georgia, for instance, ground zero for Trump’s post-election machinations. According to the Brennan Center, the Republican legislature has proposed curtailing early voting — including on Sundays when historically Black churches have caravaned congregations in what is called “souls to the polls” — making drop boxes more onerous to access and requiring several new steps in order to vote by mail. One of the most counterintuitive restrictions is a new process that disallows dropping ballots off on Election Day and three days prior. It makes no sense. If you’ve forgotten to get your ballot in the mail you should be able to walk it in. What can possibly be a reasonable rationale against that?

You can see how important this issue is right now by the fact that this week’s CPAC conference is featuring seven panel discussions on “election protection” with names like “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” and “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” Here’s one of the featured speakers, a lawyer who secretly helped Trump behind the scenes:

.@CletaMitchell is a national election law expert who will share her on-the-ground experiences in #Georgia and the true facts about what happened on Nov 3rd and since then at #CPAC2021 in #Orlando. pic.twitter.com/xrL1DqHuFp

— CPAC (@CPAC) February 20, 2021

It goes without saying that the right-wing media continues to flog this lie but it is spread far and wide by the the major networks as well which continue to feature guests who find subtler ways to poison the public’s mind. Take Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La, on ABC’s “This Week” dodging the question in a different way, suggesting that the “real problem” is that the states didn’t follow their own laws in the election, as some of Trump’s bush league lawyers argued at the time before being shot down by every judge who heard them.

This version of the Big Lie is what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubbed “High Hawley-ism”, after the unctuous mewlings of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo, during the post-election period, which Hayes says is a trial balloon for GOP state legislators to unilaterally award electoral college votes to whomever they choose. You may recall that was what Trump was trying to do up until the very minute his rabid mob sacked the Capitol. Hayes wrote:

This dubious theory, that only state *legislatures* can make these kinds of changes also invites all kinds of mischief by federal judges to reach in and overrule state supreme courts. It didn’t work in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Further, as Scalia memorably noted there is no constitutional guarantee of the right to vote for president; we vote for electors. Every state with R control could pass a law awarding all state electors to the candidate that won the most counties and basically guarantee R victory.

As the New York Times reported at the time, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gave plenty of signals during the election campaign that they were amenable to this idea, making it clear that they believe state legislatures have the right to enact strict measures against (non-existent) voter fraud. As Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Times:

Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead up to elections. It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights, and they’re treating it like policy decisions.

That’s what Trump put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to do for him last fall, but the cards just didn’t fall his way enough to put it to use. Even so, the Big Lie about the stolen election has opened the door for a wave of voter suppression not seen in decades with a Supreme Court ready to rubber stamp it. It may end up being his greatest legacy.

Salon

This interview with Evangelical superstar preacher Eric Metaxas is mind-blowing. Seriously looney tunes, off the charts crazy:

The PR pitch was brazen: Eric Metaxas, it declared, is “America’s #1 Bad Christian.” The Christian writer and radio host has been promoting doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, including ata prayer rally he emceed on the National Mall in December. Metaxas has tweeted “martial rhetoric” in defense of former President Donald Trump, his publicist wrote cheerfully. He even appeared ina New York Times article about Christian extremism. Oh, and by the way, he has a new book out…

Metaxas sees himself and other evangelical Trump supporters as part of a long line of Christians who stood up against grave wrongdoings in history: William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist and evangelical; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian who was arrested and later hanged for his dissent against the Nazi regime. Metaxas has spent his career writing books about these figures and has a tendency to describe current events in dramatic historical terms. “If this isn’t our ‘Reichstag Fire’ I don’t know what is,” he tweeted on January 27, commenting on the Department of Homeland Security’s warnings about the potential for domestic terrorism following the Capitol attack. In 1933, Hitler’s government used a fire at the Reichstag, which housed the German Parliament, as a pretext to consolidate power and suppress dissent. Metaxas’s tweet suggested that he thought the Biden administration was using the Capitol attack to do the same.

President Joe Biden’s inauguration has not made Metaxas and the Trump supporters who agree with him go away. In fact, Metaxas has become only more vocal—and seemingly fearful—in recent weeks. He believes, without evidence, that there was significant fraud in the 2020 election. (Some three-quarters of Republicans agree, according to a December poll.) And like roughly one-third of registered voters, he doesn’t believe that Biden’s victory was legitimate. I wanted to understand why Metaxas, who lives in Manhattan and has spent much of his life among journalists and his fellow Yale graduates, has come to believe that he is righteous for questioning the 2020 election. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Emma Green: Do you see yourself as a rebel against elite consensus?

Eric Metaxas: I grew up in a working-class, immigrant environment. When I went to Yale, that was the first time I was among the so-called cultural elites. There really is a kind of enforced consensus. If you don’t think that way, you can quickly become persona non grata.

I wasn’t in D.C. for the Capitol riots. But I was blown away at how instantly anybody who supported Trump—which is, you know, half the country—was demonized as potential white domestic terrorists. I just thought, Holy cow. What am I, in Nazi Germany? This is really sick. That’s not what we do in America.

Green: You brought up Nazi Germany there, and I want to make sure I understand how you’re using the metaphor.

Metaxas: You have to forgive me. Part of the reason I bring up Germany, always, is because I spent a huge part of my life studying that period. I wrote a 600-page book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We can’t allow people to be silenced. People immediately say, “You bring up the Nazis? That’s out of bounds.” But it’s the principle of the thing. When you start pushing people around and telling them what they can say—and they better say, “Heil Hitler,” loudly—that should be a warning sign.

Green: Do you believe that Trump supporters are like Jews in Hitler’s Germany?

Metaxas: Now, Emma, you’re trying to get me to say something. That’s a good journalistic tactic. I can see the quote, right? That’s not really going to be helpful, because: Of course not.

The point is, in Germany, if you didn’t go along with the party line, you would be demonized. You would get in trouble. People just think, I hope I don’t get in trouble, so what do I have to say or not say to get in trouble? At that moment, you cease to be free.

We’re kind of getting there. Even a millimeter in that direction is too close for comfort for me.

Green: You have tweeted about the early actions of the Biden administration being similar to the Reichstag fire. You tweeted that—

Metaxas: No, no, no. The Capitol. I’m referring to that.

This event happens, and before the smoke clears, we are using the opportunity—and I’m not talking about the Biden administration; I’m talking about the Democratic establishment and the media—instantly seizing on it to demonize, in the harshest terms, anyone who would support Trump. That just blew my mind. I thought: You don’t do that in America. That’s what the Nazis did with the Reichstag fire. Before the smoke cleared, they had already figured out who they were going to blame.

Green: I just want to be clear about the metaphor here, because I think it matters. The attack on the Capitol was perpetrated by a group of people who had, in some cases, weapons, and who forcefully broke into the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes. I don’t think the argument is that anybody who voted for Trump anywhere in America is a violent white supremacist. I think the criticism has been about that act and the way in which President Trump, along with those who have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results, encouraged that act.

Metaxas: But it’s our right in America to do that—to question things. And when you are told that by doing that, you are contributing to violence, you are inciting violence—that, right there, is a red flag.

The media landscape was not what you just described. It was an absolute pile-on. You’d think somebody had clubbed a senator to death or something. I was just scratching my head, trying to make sense of whatever happened, if we even know what happened. There are enough questions that it’s so confusing. They were acting like people were shot.

Green: I want to stop you there, because a Capitol Police officer was beaten to death by protesters. He died of his injuries.

Metaxas: Look, I’m not a newshound. But I didn’t even seem to get clarity on who were the human beings that committed murder. I don’t know anybody who is pro-murder. What is there to be said except, obviously, we condemn it. Who the heck wouldn’t condemn that? Why would somebody harm a police officer? Even I can’t make sense of what’s going on. Who did this? Are they in jail? Is there a trial? Is it clear why they did that?

Green: I want to bring up something you said on your radio show in conversation with President Trump. You said you’d “be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us.” What did you mean by that? And would you still be willing—

Metaxas: I meant exactly what Nathan Hale meant when he said, “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.” When you believe liberty is being threatened; when you believe elections are being threatened; when you believe that any of these things are being threatened—people have died for these things. When you say something like that, what you’re saying is: I would, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or like Nathan Hale, stand up for what I think is right and true. I am not just going to go with the crowd.

The values that I get out of the Bible have led to American-style self-government and liberty and freedom for all. Of course I said I would be happy to die in that fight.

Green: When you said “that fight,” it seemed like you were referring to the fight to make sure President Trump would be inaugurated to a second term.

Metaxas: No, no, no, no, no. The fight to make sure that all Americans could say, whoever won, we know that really happened.

This is not about Trump. If he lost, good! The American people can elect their leaders. But if that’s not really clear, then you’re harming the whole fabric. I was really upset at how a lot of people just didn’t seem troubled by it. They would say things like, “Oh! There’s no evidence.” I’ve seen enough to make me think that a really thorough investigation is necessary. And that didn’t happen.

Green: But there were investigations into allegations of irregularities. Attorney General Bill Barr said the DOJ looked into all allegations of voter fraud, and they didn’t uncover anything on a scale that would change the outcome of the election. Republican officials at the state level—Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, for example—said things went according to plan.

Is that not persuasive to you? Do you believe President Trump was actually reelected?

Metaxas: I think it’s very possible he was reelected, yeah. And that sickens me, that I could even think that. I’ve seen enough to make me doubt that we had a fair election, that every person’s vote was counted the way it’s supposed to be counted.

I think a lot of people thought it was too much trouble to get into these weeds—“Let’s just let it ride and leave it alone.” And a lot of courts didn’t look at the evidence, because they made a call, which was actually a political call, to say, “We just don’t want to stick our necks out on this.”

Green: But many of the courts you’re talking about are ones where judges appointed by Trump were looking at the evidence. Why do you think even people who were vetted by President Trump’s team would make a political calculation that it wasn’t worthwhile to consider challenges of the highest order and seriousness in America, which is that our elections weren’t free and fair?

Metaxas: I’m not the sort of person who followed this the way you did. Most Americans have less time to follow it than I did. And so if there is the impression that some of what I’m saying is true, people need to deal with that. In America, we don’t push that stuff aside.

It gets even nuttier> It’s quite clear he believes Trump is a martyr, maybe even the second coming.

Green: Some people have argued that the reputation of Christianity has been damaged by evangelicals’ wide support of President Trump. I take it you don’t agree with that.

Metaxas: I think that’s preposterous! Of course not. That’s just such a silly thing. The idea that I’m supposed to bury all of my thoughts for the hope of perhaps persuading somebody in the future that Christianity is palatable or something—Christians have traditionally stood up for human rights! When you stand up against the slave trade, you become incredibly politically unpopular. I mean, Wilberforce was totally demonized in his day. But he was doing what he felt was the right thing. What kind of a Christian would he have been if he said, “Well, I don’t want to be divisive”?

Defending Trump, a blatant, unreconstructed racist and xenophobe, to Wilberforce who fought to end the slave trade in England is just:

I don’t have the energy to take apart his argument and I’m sure I don’t need to. It’s obvious that he’s completely deluded.

He’s also a violent asshole. Here’s footage of him sucker punching a protester in the back of the head at the White House RNC convention in August:

https://twitter.com/JustInTime_2020/status/1299365181898797058?s=20

They arrested the guy he punched.

Of course Palin is an idiot. That goes without saying. But this exchange with Piers Morgan in interesting because Morgan was once one of Trump’s strongest supporters:

Donald Trump’s 2nd impeachment trial is set to begin in the Senate today.

Trump’s close supporter @SarahPalinUSA maintains the former President only ever advised people to protest peacefully.

She says Trump never told people break laws and it’s convenient to blame Trump.

‘There were shenanigans, obviously.’

@SarahPalinUSA responds to @piersmorgan saying Joe Biden won the US Presidency by fair means.

She avoids answering whether she accepts Biden won legally.

Watch the interview👉

‘No one will convince me that there were not shenanigans going on.’

She cites ‘dead people who voted’ as so-called shenanigans but @piersmorgan says she’s talking nonsense and there is no evidence of voter fraud being upheld anywhere.

Originally tweeted by Good Morning Britain (@GMB) on February 9, 2021.

I think we’re going to see a lot this buck-passing during this impeachment trial. And this, by Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark makes a great point which Trump’s loyal minions should stop and think about:

There is something deeply, cosmically unfair about a group of elites force-feeding voters a lie about a stolen election, bilking them out of their money, demanding with the most overheated rhetoric that they “fight” to save the country—and then avoiding all responsibility while those people are hauled off to jail for doing what they’d been asked to do.

Look: The people in mobs are supposed to be held accountable for their actions. That’s the law. But there’s also a whole section of the law which realizes that the creation and instigation of a mob is, itself, a criminal action. And people who do that are supposed to be held to account, too. And the January 6 mob was no different. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”

The QAnon Shaman, of all people, seems to understand what’s happened here:

The so-called QAnon shaman who took part in the Capitol riots sporting face paint and a horned hat has indicated he is willing to testify.

Jacob Chansley’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, said he hadn’t spoken to any members of the Senate since announcing his offer, but it was important for senators to hear the voice of someone who was incited by Mr Trump.

Mr Watkins said his client was previously “horrendously smitten” by Mr Trump, but now felt let down by the former president’s refusal to grant him and others who participated in the insurrection a pardon.

“He felt like he was betrayed by the president,” the lawyer said.

I can understand why he would feel that way. Trump pardoned all of his criminal accomplices, but he didn’t pardon the people who stormed the Capitol on his behalf. They will probably do some time and will have records. Trump will be golfing in Mar a Lago and fundraising from his followers.

This is by another conservative lawyer, this one a founder of the Federalist Society, making the obvious argument:

Front and center in former President Donald Trump’s defense this week will be the argument that convicting him and disqualifying him from holding future office would violate his First Amendment rights—that it would essentially amount to punishing him for speaking his mind. His new lawyer, David Schoen, has warned that convicting Trump “is putting at risk any passionate political speaker, which is against everything we believe in in this country.”

That is wrong. Even if the First Amendment protected Trump from criminal and tort liability for his January 6 exhortation to the crowd that later stormed the Capitol, it has no bearing on whether Congress can convict and disqualify a president for misconduct that consisted, in part, of odious speech that rapidly and foreseeably resulted in deadly violence.

To start, let’s examine how breathtaking Trump’s argument is. His advocates are relying on the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that the First Amendment prohibits criminal liability for advocating violence that is not imminent. According to their theory, Congress could not impeach, convict, remove, or disqualify a president who, like Clarence Brandenburg, spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally in a white hood, advocated violence, used the N-word repeatedly in declaring that African Americans should be forcibly returned to Africa, and proclaimed that “the Jew” should be sent to Israel.

Nor, under Trump’s argument, could Congress use its powers if the same president burned an American flag on national television to demonstrate contempt for the country he or she had been chosen to lead. Nor could Congress use its powers if the same president wore a swastika while leading a Nazi march through a Jewish neighborhood.

These supposed limitations on Congress’s powers are not merely contrary to common sense; they are without any basis in law. Courts have held that none of those activities can constitutionally be criminalized. But as the University of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman exhaustively demonstrated in The Atlantic in 2019, the impeachment, conviction, removal, and disqualification powers of Congress do not require that the president, or any other federal official, has committed a crime. The phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution declares impeachment, conviction, removal, and disqualification to remedy, dates back to 1386. As the nation’s Founders knew, that term had been used repeatedly for four centuries to remove and disqualify officials for heinous conduct that was committed while in office but was not a crime.

For example, in a celebrated instance, Massachusetts removed its chief justice in 1774 for accepting a royal salary—an act that was politically disloyal, but not a crime. In 1788, James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention that abusing the pardon power—also not a crime—would be impeachable. In “Federalist No. 65,” Alexander Hamilton likewise wrote that “the abuse or violation of the public trust” would be impeachable.

And, in the more than two centuries since the Constitution was ratified, multiple officials have been impeached, convicted, removed, and disqualified for official conduct that was heinous but not criminal. Indeed, President Andrew Johnson was impeached, and President Richard Nixon would have been impeached and convicted, on certain counts that did not allege a crime. So while the First Amendment might protect a former president from criminal and tort liability for his speech, that same speech can still demonstrate his “abuse or violation of the public trust,” warranting conviction and disqualification by the Senate.

But there is yet another reason why the First Amendment is no defense against impeachment, and that is that a central object of the Constitution was to restrain a government leader who was a “demagogue.” And essential to being a demagogue is engaging in “passionate political” speech.

In the first Federalist Paper, Hamilton wrote, “History will teach us … that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” And he reiterated in “Federalist No. 85,” the last Federalist Paper, that a core aim of the Constitution was to prevent “the military despotism of a victorious demagogue.”

Madison began drafting the Bill of Rights within months of the publication of Federalist No. 85. In what became the First Amendment, Madison built and expanded on the protections already established in English common law. Nothing in that tradition, or in the congressional or ratifying debates on the Bill of Rights, suggested that protections for free speech precluded impeaching, convicting, removing, and disqualifying a senior public official who engaged in the very demagoguery the Constitution was designed to safeguard against.

Accordingly, although the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech limits the scope of permissible criminal prosecutions and tort suits, it does not limit any of the separate removal and disqualification powers conferred by the Constitution. The most frequently used of these powers is the president’s right to remove senior executive officers—that is, those with administrative or policy-making authority.

Every president has exercised this power, often in response to political speech in a policy statement the official had made that would be protected by the First Amendment from criminal and tort liability. No one would argue that a president cannot remove a senior executive officer for that officer’s expression of political views, much less for odious expression that rapidly and foreseeably led to lethal violence.

First Amendment freedom of speech likewise does not limit the Senate’s historic role in the confirmation of senior federal officers. It’s never been suggested—nor could it plausibly be—that the Senate cannot refuse to confirm an executive-branch nominee on the grounds that the nominee previously made odious and dangerous statements. But under the view of Trump and his advocates, if such individuals made such statements after being confirmed, Congress could not use its impeachment and conviction powers to remove and disqualify them.

How could the First Amendment permit the Senate to decline to confirm a senior officer based on prior, odious, dangerous speech but then preclude it from removing or disqualifying the same official for making the same (or worse) statements while in office?

There is no serious risk that Congress will abuse its removal and disqualification authority, particularly in the case of presidents. Presidential impeachments are exceptionally rare events, and in the 230 years of American history, none has yet resulted in a Senate conviction. That history confirms that Hamilton was correct when he predicted in “Federalist No. 66” that the requirement that two-thirds of the Senate support conviction would ensure that “the security to innocence … will be as complete as itself can desire.” Congress plainly understands the gravity of its powers in this area and does not easily or lightly exercise them.

Consider that, on December 6, 2017, a resolution was introduced in the House to impeach then President Trump. The resolution was based on his reference to “very fine people” in connection with the by-then-concluded violence in Charlottesville, and other statements the resolution characterized as conveying various forms of bigotry. The House rejected consideration of that resolution on the same day by voting 364–58 to table it. We would have voted with the majority, as those statements did not cause violence or spark an attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power.

At least four things distinguish Trump’s January 6 address. First, it was made to a mob that he had called to Washington, D.C., and then instructed to march to the Capitol.

Second, he used words that foreseeably could cause and rapidly did cause violence, including “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” His speech resulted in our nation’s first non-peaceful transfer of power in modern times.

Third, Trump, during his remarks, repeated lies he had been promoting for weeks about nonexistent voter fraud. Even the First Amendment does not protect “knowing lies” that cause foreseeable violence that interferes with government functions and personnel from criminal or civil liability.

Fourth, Trump’s speech was part of a course of conduct to override the 2020 presidential election results outside the court system. That course of conduct included attempts to extort Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” approximately 12,000 more Trump votes, to intimidate Vice President Mike Pence to violate the Constitution and refuse to count Biden electoral votes from six states, and to misuse the Department of Justice to subvert Georgia’s election results.

There is no legal or other basis for inventing unfounded obstacles to conviction and disqualification by Congress of a president for such demagoguery and other misconduct. To the contrary, there are important reasons not to disable Congress in that way. History shows that republics can perish when they give a potential authoritarian a pass without serious consequences. As the wise Justice Robert Jackson explained in his famous dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.”

To protect our republic, the Senate may and should convict and disqualify a president whose official misconduct included odious speech that rapidly and foreseeably caused lethal violence.

I guess the Senators will mostly ignore this. In fact, you have this sad creature Lindsey Graham going on TV making inane comments like this:

 ‘What Democrats have done is basically declared war on the presidency itself. You can’t get a traffic ticket based on what they used to impeach President Trump. They’re going to destroy the presidency itself.”

One might say that his Dear Leader already went a long way toward doing doing that.

Trump’s attorneys say he had nothing to do with inciting the insurrection on January 6th:

“The words of President Trump’s January 6 speech speak for themselves. President Trump did not direct anyone to commit lawless actions, and the claim that he could be responsible if a small group of criminals (who had come to the capital of their own accord armed and ready for a fight) completely misunderstood him, were so enamored with him and inspired by his words that they left his speech early, and then walked a mile and a half away to ‘imminently’ do the opposite of what he had just asked for, is simply absurd.”

The WaPo’s Philip Bump brings up something I haven’t heard before that refutes that fact:

That’s the crux of the argument. But the flaw is obvious: The “criminals” who stormed the Capitol did not come to the capital entirely of their own accord. They came, according to all available evidence, because Trump highlighted Jan. 6 as a date on which pressure would be applied on Congress to overturn the results of the election. They came that day because Trump asked them to and they interfered with the effort to finalize the 2020 election because that was what Trump wanted them to do.

The evidence reflects this. On Sunday, The Washington Post walked through evidence collected by federal investigators in which those involved in storming the Capitol linked their actions to Trump’s desires. Others had said as much to media outlets before their arrests. But what the existing evidentiary record shows is that attention turned to the 6th only after Trump highlighted it. It wasn’t just that people came that day because of Trump, it’s that the day didn’t become a focus of attention until Trump highlighted it.AD

On Dec. 14, members of the electoral college met in all 50 states to formally cast their votes for president, confirming Joe Biden’s win. What was scheduled to happen Jan. 6 was simply that Congress would count those votes, a formality that in elections past attracted little attention. This year, though, there were rumblings that Republican elected officials would oppose the counting of the electoral votes, claiming that irregularities had marred the vote counting. On Dec. 17, Trump highlighted one such objection by retweeting a One America News story about a plan by then-Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) to object.

It’s possible that Trump learned about the vote-counting only because he saw an ad created by the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans. That ad aired Dec. 10 and prominently featured then-Vice President Mike Pence’s role in confirming the final electoral-vote count. Trump was reportedly furious when he saw the spot and was soon insisting that Pence could simply stand in the way of the final vote counting. (He couldn’t.)

Trump’s first tweet about a rally or event Jan. 6 came on Dec. 19. He shared a news story on Twitter about false claims of fraud being presented by a member of his administration, then telling his millions of followers that there would be a “big protest in D.C. on January 6th.”

“Be there,” he added, “will be wild!”

Over the next few weeks, he kept up the drumbeat: Big rally Jan. 6, up to the people to stop the finalization of the election.

On Dec. 26, he lashed out at the Justice Department for not reinforcing his false claims about voter fraud.

“They should be ashamed,” he said on Twitter. “History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.

A review of charging documents compiled by the department doesn’t indicate that any of those arrested in the storming of the Capitol had identified Jan. 6 as a date for travel to D.C. In fact, several of the documents show that plans changed only after Trump identified the date.

A statement of facts related to the arrest of Karl Dresch, for example, alleges that Dresch had posted information on Facebook focused on Jan. 6 by “no later than December 16, 2020” — before Trump’s first tweet about the rally. But the alleged Dec. 16 post from Dresch appears to have been simply “Stop the Steal,” a phrase broadly related to Trump’s false fraud claims. Four days later, after Trump identified the 6th as a target date, Dresch allegedly posted about it: “7-4-1776 = 1-6-2021.”

An indictment charging members of a self-described militia group in Ohio in connection with the violence shows a similar shift. Jessica Watkins allegedly told an acquaintance Nov. 9 that, “I need you fighting fit by innaugeration [sic],” suggesting an emphasis on Jan. 20. By Dec. 29, the focus shifted to the 6th: “Trump wants all able bodied Patriots to come.”

A number of others arrested in connection with their alleged involvement in the storming of the Capitol similarly announced plans to attend only after Trump had emphasized the date.

Kenneth Grayson allegedly wrote Dec. 23 that he would be “there for the greatest celebration of all time after Pence leads the Senate flip!!”

That same day, Ronald Sandlin allegedly posed a question to his Facebook friends: “Who is going to Washington D.C. on the 6th of January? I’m going to be there to show support for our president and to do my part to stop the steal and stand behind Trump when he decides to cross the rubicon.” He later organized a GoFundMe fundraiser to pay for people to attend.

Gina Bisignano allegedly replied to a Trump Facebook post calling for people to come on Jan. 6 with “I’ll be there.”

Other timelines are less clear. A witness who spoke with the FBI alleged that Jacob Lewis had said to “watch what happens to the Capitol on the 6th.” The alleged conversation took place in December 2020, suggesting that it may have followed Trump’s initial focus on the date. Albert Ciarpelli allegedly told the FBI that he made plans to travel to Washington after seeing television ads promoting the rally that day, although it’s unclear when the ad aired.

But this highlights another important point: Organizations focused on promoting rallies in Washington on Jan. 6 began to do so only after Trump’s initial tweet.

On Dec. 13, for example, the website for the group Stop the Steal was promoting a rally in Washington held the day before. It wasn’t until Dec. 20 that the main page of the site promoted the Jan. 6 event. The day prior, its website showed no information about a rally in Washington.

On Jan. 2, Trump retweeted a message promoting the rally near the White House, organized by an activist associated with the website TrumpMarch.com. It had put together a bus tour in November and early December to champion Trump’s false claims about the election. As of Dec. 18, the day of Trump’s first tweet, the site was still promoting the end of that tour. By Dec. 23, it had shifted to a bus tour ending in D.C. on Jan. 6.

It’s important to note, as journalist Marcy Wheeler did Monday, that those already arrested by federal agents probably are among those least likely to have been part of coordinated plans to commit acts of violence Jan. 6. They were, instead, people who promoted their involvement in the attempted insurrection on Facebook, where acquaintances could see — and report — their boasts. There may be others who’d focused on overrunning the Capitol on Jan. 6 even before Trump first elevated the day in that Dec. 17 tweet.

Of course, it’s not likely that the Capitol could have been overrun were there not a crowd of thousands pushing against the inadequate barriers that had been constructed around the building. It probably required a large mass of people to work, a large mass that was there because Trump had demanded that it be.

It is true that some of those present at the Capitol were not inspired by Trump’s speech that morning. In the criminal complaint targeting Garret Miller, the FBI claims that Miller had written on Facebook that “we where [sic] going in. … No matter what. … Decided before the trump speech.”

The first alleged mention of the day came Jan. 2, when the FBI indicates that Miller wrote on Facebook that he was “about to drive across the country for this trump s—.”

The prior afternoon, Trump had again tweeted an explicit call for attendance that day.

“The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

He brought them all to Washington on that specific day, reiterated his Big Lie that the election was stolen and told them to march to the Capitol where a joint session of congress was certifying the presidential election to “Stop The Steal.”

What more do we need to know?

Perry Bacon at 538 answers that question. You’ll never guess who it is:

In his inaugural address, President Biden described America as in the midst of an “uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” His invocation of a civil war and the American Civil War was provocative. It was also accurate. There is no formal definition of an uncivil war, but America is increasingly split between members of two political parties that hate each other.

In the same speech, Biden warned of the dangers of “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” This too was accurate. Biden was delivering his address exactly two weeks after a group of supporters of then-President Trump, riled up by his false claims about voter fraud, stormed the Capitol to try to overturn the results of a free and fair election, an act of political extremism and domestic terrorism carried out by at least some people who believe in white supremacy.

Biden didn’t explicitly say that the extremism, domestic terrorism and white supremacy is largely coming from one side of the uncivil war. But that’s the reality. In America’s uncivil war, both sides may hate the other, but one side — conservatives and Republicans — is more hostile and aggressive, increasingly willing to engage in anti-democratic and even violent attacks on their perceived enemies.

The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats:

<blockquote>Republican officials at the state level have engaged in a sustained campaign to make it harder for liberal-leaning constituencies, particularly Black people, to vote.</blockquote>

<blockquote>GOP officials have used aggressive gerrymandering and attempted to manipulate the census-taking process to ensure GOP control of state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives, even if Democrats are winning more votes.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Trump supporters and conservatives have threatened not only to physically destroy institutions they view as hostile to conservative causes, such as CNN, but to kill or injure prominent Democratic politicians, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And, in attempts to intimidate liberal protesters, these conservatives sometimes show up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations wearing military gear and brandishing extensive weaponry.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Trump, conservative lawyers and most Republican members of Congress tried to disqualify the election results in some swing states, which would have in effect invalidated the votes of millions of Americans, particularly Black people and residents of large urban areas. And, as mentioned earlier, that effort culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.</blockquote>

<blockquote>State-level Republican officials have tried to criminalize the types of protests organized by liberals who support Black Lives Matter and oppose the expansion of oil and gas pipelines. In fact, conservative lawmakers in Missouri and other states are considering provisions that would limit legal liability for people who drive into protesters blocking traffic.</blockquote>

<blockquote>State-level GOP officials have limited cities and other localities from enacting policies meant to reduce the spread of COVID-19, essentially preventing elected officials in cities (usually Democrats) from taking measures to save the lives of their constituents.</blockquote>

<blockquote>GOP officials at the state level are engaged in a broader effort to preempt laws passed in Democratic cities, meaning that mostly white GOP state legislators elected in conservative, rural areas are often determining education, economic and other policies for heavily Democratic cities with large numbers of people of color.</blockquote>

We could also compile a long list of anti-democratic and hostile actions taken by Trump himself against Democrats. At the top of that list would be his attempt to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing it would investigate the Biden family — essentially a scheme for Trump to use the power of his office to tilt the upcoming presidential election in his favor.

It’s important to be specific here, however. Many of the most aggressive actions against liberals have been taken not by Republican voters but largely by Republican officials, particularly at the state level.

“Many Republicans do not accept Democratic governance as a legitimate outcome” of elections, said Thomas Zimmer, a history professor at Georgetown University who is writing a book about political divides in America. “America is nearing a crisis of democratic legitimacy because one side is trying to erect one-party minority rule.”

Gretchen Helmke, a political scientist at the University of Rochester who studies the state of democratic governments around the world, said, “There is a marked asymmetry between the two parties,” with Republicans more engaged in “playing constitutional hardball and taking actions that are still within the letter of the law but [that] may violate the spirit of the law or common-sense ideas about fairness and political equality.”

Those types of actions are much harder to find on the Democratic side. There is no campaign by Democratic elected officials to disenfranchise white evangelical Christians, a constituency that overwhelmingly backs GOP candidates, just as Black voters overwhelmingly back Democratic candidates. There was no widespread, systematic attempt by Democratic officials four years ago to disqualify the votes that elected Trump or to spur Democratic voters to attack the Capitol to prevent the certification of his presidency. While the left-wing antifa movement has violent tendencies, it isn’t an organized group — nor is it aligned with Biden or Democrats. And at least right now, national security experts describe right-wing violence as a much bigger danger in America than any violent behavior from the left. In an October 2020 report, the Department of Homeland Security called violent white supremacists the “most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”

And, of course, Democrats did not embrace an anti-democratic figure like Trump as their standard-bearer. There are no Democratic politicians in Congress implying that conservative politicians are such dangers to the country that they should be killed.

He follows up with these quotes from various academics, all of which are somewheat alarming:

“The GOP is a counter-majoritarian party now, every week it becomes less like a ‘normal’ party,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who has written extensively about the radicalization of the Republican Party. “The GOP has to make it harder to vote and harder to understand what the party is all about. Those are two parts of the same project. And it can’t treat its white supremacist and violent wings as extremists who should be isolated because it needs them. They provide motor and momentum.”

“The GOP has radicalized (and is still radicalizing) on its willingness to break democratic norms and subvert or eliminate political institutions. Don’t expect restraint where you’ve seen it in the past,” said Charlotte Hill, a Ph.D. candidate at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducts research on election and voting laws.

Because of this deep conservative antipathy for the liberal version of America, Joanne Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, has compared the state of America today to the 1850s, right before the U.S. Civil War.

“Mass violence in Congress seemed possible in 1850. Now, 171 years later, it’s in the national mindscape once again. And for good reason. The echoes of 1850 are striking. We’re at a moment of extreme polarization when outcomes matter, sometimes profoundly,” Freeman wrote in a recent essay in The New York Times.

“The Republicans,” she continued, “whose ironclad grip on the Senate has dominated the federal government, feel entitled to that power and increasingly threatened; they know they’re swimming against the demographic tide in a diversifying nation. They have proven themselves ready and eager for minority rule; voter suppression — centered on people of color — is on the rise and has been for some time. And some of them are willing to protect what they deem right with threats of violence.”

He points out that most Republicans aren’t participating in acts of violence. Which is true. But they sure don[‘t seem to be bothered by it either.

Susan Hyde, a political scientist at University of California, Berkeley, who studies democracy and democratic backsliding both in the U.S. and abroad, said that Republican voters tolerated the party’s anti-democratic tendencies because the party’s elites signaled that it was OK to do so. “Republican politicians have been lying to their own voters, and they need to stop doing that if we are going to have peace,” said Hyde, who was referring specifically to the false belief among a large bloc of Republican voters that Trump won the election.

Meanwhile, Democrats are aggressively trying to enact what Bacon calls an “equality agenda” and are being ungracious with people who oppose it by referring to them in derisive terms.

Of course, some conservative behavior, like trying to make it harder for Black people to vote, probably should be both shamed and called out as racist. That said, it’s important to understand that some liberal and Democratic policies will require conservative Christians in particular to live in a changed America that they simply do not wish to live in. And the liberal focus on ideas like systemic racism and white supremacy has left many conservatives feeling that their individual behaviors and choices are being unfairly cast as racist.

Conservatives “are reacting to something real,” said Zimmer. “Their version of ‘Real America’ — a white, Christian America — is under threat. Republicans are convinced they are waging a noble war against the demise of ‘Real America.’ Conservatives think their backs are against the wall.”

It isn’t. The world is changing. It always has. And human civilization relies on people’s ability to adapt and evolve.

More pertinently, they are not being asked to give up anything but intolerance for sharing this country with people who are not like them and giving everyone an equal shake which used to be one of the bedrock American ideals, even if we never lived up to it.

“[On the left] there is a demand for more redistribution and laws and programs that help some people and not others,” said Vasabjit Banerjee, a political scientist at Mississippi State University who studies political conflicts. For example, he described Black Lives Matter as a “form of status redistribution,” that might be threatening to non-Black Americans because the movement’s goal is to, in effect, make Black people truly “full citizens” in America, equal to white Americans.

Reflecting on the actions of both sides, you can see why conservative attacks on liberals are much more problematic than the inverse. And that’s why it is hard to imagine Biden being able to unify America or end this uncivil war — his side is not the one feeling most aggrieved and taking anti-democratic, even violent, measures to win.

In his inaugural speech, Biden said, “We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”

He didn’t quite say why we had learned that democracy is precious, why it is fragile, or who or what it had prevailed against. But the reality is that some Republicans in America are so intent on defeating liberals that they are willing to erode America’s democracy, or even end it, along the way to victory.

No doubt about it.

Once again, Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech illuminates the problem:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.

It’s their way or the highway. Always has been.

Vote suppression is as vote suppression does.

Voter turnout in 2020 was historic and secure, with fraud all but nonexistent. That outcome was driven in part by massive expansion in voting by mail in the middle of a deadly pandemic. The Brennan Center reports that states across the country have since launched a backlash against voting:

In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020).

But well-run and fair elections in Georgia produced results not to Republicans’ liking. “So now, Georgia Republicans want to cook the rules,” the Washington Post Editorial Board writes. Fair is on the chopping block in over half the states. “Republicans have concluded that if they cannot win a fair election, they must make elections less fair.” But then, they concluded that decades ago.

The spate of new bills would “end no-excuse absentee voting, ban ballot drop boxes and restrict automatic voter registration.” That is on top of the bill introduced last week to require those voting by mail to provide copies of their IDs both when applying for absentee ballots and with their submission (emphasis mine):

Nothing in the 2020 election experience suggests that wide-scale use of mail-in ballots, the provision of drop boxes or the rollout of automatic voter registration pose major risks to voting integrity. Indeed, automatic voter registration programs are designed to increase the accuracy of voter registration lists. No conceivable public purpose is served by making it harder to register. Meanwhile, the crackdown on mail-in ballots reflects the fact that large numbers of Democrats shifted to absentee voting in 2020.

After last month’s deadly MAGA insurrection failed to overturn the results of the last election, rigging the next one through legislative process must seem like statesman restraint. To someone somewhere.

The Editorial Board reasons:

U.S. democracy needs an overhaul — not to restrict voting but to shut down politicians who seek to tilt the rules at the people’s expense. Using their power over federal elections, Democrats and any Republicans of conscience in Congress must make such an overhaul a top priority in the coming months. Fortunately, Democrats have an appealing bill ready to go that they have been crafting for years. The For the People Act would require automatic voter registration, which could add 50 million people to electoral rolls while improving their quality. It would mandate bipartisan redistricting commissions for congressional maps, ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections. The bill would ensure access to early and mail-in voting and restore voting rights to people with prior criminal convictions. And it would create a public financing system for political campaigns, amplifying the power of small contributions with matching funds for candidates who decide to participate.

Not to mention the vulnerability of the Electoral College process to manipulation by politicians long after Election Day.

Automatic voter registration is of particular interest. Finding the unregistered is perhaps the Holy Grail of turnout activism. Just in North Carolina at one point recently there were a million more DMV customers than registered voters. But DMV records are not publicly accessible for cross-matching and commercial databases for doing so are not cheap. Thus, inviting people to vote who do not appear in voter registration records is a feat of costly data crunching unavailable to grassroots activists. No doubt Republican politicians prefer it that way. Automatic voter registration would make my day more than theirs.

So the Republicans now want to strip Ilhan Omar of her committee assignments. Of course they do:

House GOP lawmakers are seeking this week to oust Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from her committee assignments as Democrats push for similar action against embattled Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Fox News has learned.

The House is set to consider a measure this week that calls for Taylor Greene, a controversial first-term lawmaker known for his support of the QAnon conspiracy theory, from her assignment on the Education and Labor Committee.

A proposed GOP-backed amendment to that measure calls for Omar, frequently identified as a member of the “Squad” of progressive Democrats, to be removed from her committee assignments “in light of conduct she has exhibited,” Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pergram reported. In the amendment, Republicans argue that Omar has made anti-Semitic comments that are grounds for dismissal.

Reps. Brian Babin (R-TX), Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Jody Hice (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Ronny Jackson (R-TX) sponsored the proposed amendment.

Omar’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In Feb. 2019, Omar triggered an uproar after she wrote, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” in response to a tweet referencing House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s pledge to take “action” against her over her criticism of Israel. Later, Omar suggested that American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, was paying politicians to take a favorable stance toward Israel.

Omar’s remarks drew bipartisan criticism in Congress. She later apologized and thanked colleagues for “educating [her] on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.”

The Republican-backed effort to remove Omar from committee assignments took shape as lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle scrutinized Taylor Greene over her past and recent actions. A separate House effort seeks to remove Taylor Greene from office entirely.

Sure, they’re exactly the same so Republicans have a point, right? Omar said something that was seen as having anti-Semitic overtones for which she apologized and said she had learned from the experience.

Here’s the bill of indictment against Greene:

PolitiFact took a closer look at Greene’s promotion of conspiracy theories over the years.

Election fraud

Greene promoted baseless conspiracy theories that widespread voter fraud helped put Joe Biden in the White House, often on Twitter.

“We aren’t going to let Democrats STEAL this election,” she tweeted Nov. 4. “Stop the steal!” she tweeted the next day.

Over the next two months, and in spite of Twitter warning labels, Greene continued to tweet about voter fraud allegations, with the word “fraud” appearing 26 times.

“Without the widespread voter fraud, out-of-state voters, mail-in ballots from dead people, and ‘discovery’ of hidden ballots, we all know that President Trump wins our state in a landslide,” she said in a Dec. 14 statement. (Pants on Fire!)

“It was a #StolenElection. Trump won,” she tweeted on Christmas Day. (Nope)

“202,377 more votes cast than voters voting in Pennsylvania!” she said Dec. 29. (Wrong.)

In January, Twitter temporarily banned Greene for violating its misinformation policy after she floated more baseless claims about voter fraud in Georgia. That’s because there is no credible evidence that fraud affected the outcome of the election.

Still, Greene’s false voter fraud narrative found a home on friendly TV networks like Newsmax and One America News.

“I know we’re not a blue state. I know for a fact that President Trump won here in Georgia. I feel it 1,000%,” she said on OANN Jan. 19, the day before Biden’s inauguration. (Pants on Fire!)

At a Trump rally Jan. 4, Greene said she refused to “certify fraudulent electoral college votes” for Biden.QAnon

Greene has made several statements that indicate her support of the vast pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

QAnon claims public figures like Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey are Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. The theory is based on posts from Q, an anonymous internet persona who claims to be a government insider with information on a “deep state” plot to work against Trump. QAnon supporters believe that top military generals convinced Trump to run for president in 2016 to bring the cabal of pedophiles to justice.

“Have you guys been following 4chan, Q — any of that stuff?” Greene says at the start of a video from November 2017. “I don’t know who Q is, but I’m just going to tell you about it because I think it’s something worth listening to and paying attention to.”

Over 30 minutes, Greene lays out several tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

“There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” she said.

QAnon evolved from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory about child sex trafficking and prominent Democrats — another conspiracy theory Greene promoted.

NBC News reported in August that, prior to running for office, Greene wrote dozens of articles as a “correspondent” for a now-defunct conspiracy news site called American Truth Seekers.

In a November 2017 article, Greene linked to a WikiLeaks-promoted website containing stolen documents that she said indicated Pizzagate was real.

Greene has also promoted conspiracy theories closely associated with QAnon and Pizzagate, including a bogus narrative documented by the liberal research group Media Matters that holds Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin sexually assaulted a young girl as part of a gruesome ritual.

In 2019, Greene speculated that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a body double — another popular conspiracy theory among QAnon supporters.

In a February 2019 video published by a pro-Trump website on Facebook, a caller asked Greene if she’d seen a video of Ginsburg walking through Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Here’s the exchange:

Caller: “This woman has been drawn over for how many years, and all of a sudden she’s walking straight upright like it’s a whole new person. Do you believe that is Ruth?”

Host: “It’s almost like a body double like Hillary Clinton. Yeah, like a body double for Hillary Clinton. So it’s interesting.”

Greene: “I do not believe that was Ruth, no. I don’t think so.”Mass shootings

On several occasions, Greene has endorsed or entertained “false flag” conspiracy theories, which say that some major news events, such as mass shootings, were staged or planned for a political purpose.

In one American Truth Seekers article published in October 2017, Greene ruminated on whether the Las Vegas massacre that killed 58 concert-goers was orchestrated as part of a plot to dismantle Second Amendment rights.

“The Second Amendment is under attack. At least I believe it is, and I believe gun control will be the controlled reaction to the horror that unfolded over a week ago at the Route 91 Harvest Festival,” she wrote. “Now there is another source that says that could be the very motive of the Las Vegas Massacre.”

The theory was bogus; the FBI found no motive for the mass shooting, and there is no evidence it was a coordinated plot to reform federal firearm laws. But it wasn’t the last time Greene floated a false flag conspiracy theory.

In a May 2018 Facebook post, Greene shared a Fox News article about the pension of Scot Peterson, a former Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s deputy who was fired for his response during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. A few commenters floated a theory that the shooting was orchestrated.

“It’s called a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting,” one user wrote.

“Exactly,” Greene replied.

In another reply to a comment on the post, Greene said Peterson was “paid to do what he did and keep his mouth shut!” (The post has since been deleted.)

The Parkland shooting killed 17 people. The shooting was not a false flag event, and those who survived are not “crisis actors.” We awarded that conspiracy theory and related smears against the Parkland students our 2018 Lie of the Year.

But in another now-deleted Facebook post published in December 2018, Greene floated an alternative theory about Democrats’ motivations for supporting gun restrictions: “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”Other conspiracies

Greene has also promoted bogus claims about 9/11, laser beams and forest fires.

In a 2018 video, Greene speaks to the conservative American Priority Conference. During the event, she floats a conspiracy theory about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying:

“Barack Obama becomes president in 2008, OK? By that time in our American history, we had had George Bush for eight years … we had witnessed 9/11, the terrorist attack in New York and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and the so-called plane that Crashed into the Pentagon. It’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon, but anyways, I won’t — I’m not going to dive into the 9/11 conspiracy.”

American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 64 people on board and 125 inside the building. There is visual evidence of the plane hitting the Pentagon, as well as the aftermath.

In the same video, Greene promoted another baseless conspiracy theory that the Obama administration hired MS-13 gang members to assassinate Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in Washington in 2016.

“What else did he do? OK, we got the Iran deal. We got the launch of ISIS and we have the open borders. Oh, open borders. MS-13, everyone. Under Obama came MS-13. There’s a lot to that.

“You have to understand, there’s — they have very good — they had very good relationships with MS-13. MS-13 was basically like, they were the kind of the henchmen of the Obama administration. They did a lot of the dirty work. Seth Rich, Seth Rich was murdered by two MS-13 gang members. That’s what I mean by dirty work, OK?”

While his murder remains unsolved, Rich was killed in what authorities believe was a botched robbery attempt. There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories alleging foul play — including claims that the Clintons had him killed. Rich’s family has settled a lawsuit against Fox News, which ran with the false story.

Greene has promoted other bogus theories that accuse high-profile Democrats of being complicit in murder. In a September 2017 article on American Truth Seekers, Greene aired the decades-old conspiracy theory that Bill and Hillary Clinton have killed many of their political enemies. Fact-checkers have been debunking this for years.

Some conspiracy theories Greene has supported are further out there — literally.

In a now-deleted November 2018 Facebook post that Media Matters referenced, she wrote that a laser beam from space may have started the Camp wildfire in California. The bogus claim was popular among supporters of QAnon.

“Space solar generators collect the suns energy and then beam it back to Earth to a transmitter to convert to electricity. The idea is clean energy to replace coal and oil, I’m sure they wouldn’t ever miss a transmitter receiving station right??!!” she wrote. “What would that look like anyway? A laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess.”

But sure, that comment by Omar is pretty much exactly the same as what this raving lunatic has said. Fair’s fair.

The president’s TV Impeachment lawyer is planning to defend him both on the grounds that the impeachment is illegitimate because Mitch McConnell wouldn’t take it up until he was out of office. But it’s clear they are also preparing to defend him on the basis of the First Amendment saying he had a right to lie about the election results, just like any other guy on the street.

Ok. But here’s a nice rundown on what he actually did after the election:

From November through January 6, Trump engaged in an aggressive, meritless quest to hang on to power.

Even before election day, there were many earlier indications that Trump would not go gently into a post-presidency. He spent months laying the groundwork for delegitimizing the election in case he lost. In September, he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

By election night he was upfront about his intentions. As it began to look like he would lose, he put the country on notice: “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said in a televised speech shortly before 2:30 a.m. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election—frankly, we did win this election.”

That was the beginning of the big election lie that led thousands of Trump supporters to breach the U.S. Capitol in a failed quest to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Without the lie, perpetuated by Trump and his acolytes, there would have been no insurrection. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick would still be alive.

Just as soon as the media called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump and his lawyers whipped up false claims about election fraud in hopes of stopping the states from certifying Biden’s election. Trump wheeled out White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to accuse the Democrats of “welcoming fraud” in a spectacle that was so embarrassing Fox News cut away from it.

There was no substance to any of it. Trump’s campaign lawyers went on to lose dozens of cases in court. Even Bill Barr, his strongly supportive attorney general, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. (At odds with Trump on this issue, Barr announced his resignation even though he had just a little more than a month left to serve.)

Still, Trump pressed on with his longshot bid to wipe out election results in the swing states.

Remember the lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court by the attorney general of Texas, seeking to nullify 20 million votes in four states, thereby throwing the election to Trump? The lawsuit that 18 other state attorneys general supported? It was “secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House,” the New York Times has reported. Filed on December 7, the suit absurdly claimed that it was statistically impossible for Trump to have lost the election:

<blockquote>The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.</blockquote>

White House staff—which is to say, paid government employees—pushed that preposterous statistical fabrication, too. And Trump’s White House pressured members of Congress—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy—into signing an amicus brief supporting the bogus case. Two thirds of the Republicans in the House would do so. An array of longtime conservative grassroots leaders enlisted in the effort as well. These swamp creatures—including Tony Perkins, Al Regnery, Tom Fitton, Becky Norton Dunlop, Brent Bozell, and Gary Bauer—falsely and bizarrely stated: “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

When the Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit on December 11, Trump still did not concede.

When the Electoral College met on December 14 and confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, Trump did not concede, either.

Instead, he kept grasping and clawing for more options. His efforts to overturn the election results were so many and so varied that by mid-December, journalists had run out of clichés to describe them: “last-gasp,” “last-ditch,” “eleventh-hour,” and “hail Mary” had all been burned through.

At that point, only one more deadline was left.

January 6, the date scheduled for the constitutionally required congressional “counting” of the Electoral College votes. It was supposed to be a mere formality—but as the final procedural step before the new president was sworn in, Trump and his supporters seized it as their last chance to alter the outcome, by any disruption necessary. His efforts, and those of his allies, began to converge on that date.

On December 27, Trump began promoting a January 6 gathering in Washington—what would eventually serve as the staging point for his rally-turned-mob:

On December 30, Sen. Josh Hawley said that he would object to the certification of Electoral College votes on January 6. Three days later, Sen. Ted Cruz and a batch of other Republicans also said they would object.

In Georgia, where incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were campaigning to retain their Senate seats in a pair of run-off races that would determine the balance of power in the chamber, Trump hijacked the spotlight for his own means.

In public, he repeatedly berated Georgia officials over their handling of the election. Behind the scenes, he squeezed them to change the results of the presidential election with the aim of blocking Biden’s election from being certified by Congress on January 6. Trump pressed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to use the state legislature to overturn Biden’s win in the Peach State. Trump called Georgia’s elections investigator and told him to “find the fraud.” When no one bit, Trump then directly called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on January 2 and told him to “find” the precise number of votes Trump needed to win the state or else there would be “a big risk to you.”

Meanwhile, lawyers and organizations working on Trump’s behalf, such as Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and an activist outfit called Women for America First, enthusiastically promoted Trump’s baseless claims with splashy events designed to garner grassroots support for Trump’s cause.

Militia groups started raising money and organizing to take mass action on January 6.

Trump returned to Georgia on January 4 for a final campaign rally for the senators and told the crowd he would stop Biden from becoming president.

“They’re not going to take this White House,” Trump said. “We’re going to fight like hell, I’ll tell you right now.”

Earlier that day, Loeffler and Perdue both revealed that they would join Hawley and Cruz in objecting to Biden’s certification on January 6, which jazzed the crowd. Trump welcomed newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to the stage. Known for embracing all manner of bigoted and delusional conspiracy theories, Greene said said she was “so fired up” that Loeffler agreed to object. “We have to save America and stop socialism. . . . We’re going to fight for President Trump on January 6! God bless, Georgia, God bless America—let’s do this!”

On January 5, Loeffler and Perdue ended their campaigns in failure. But Trump’s campaign was just about to reach its bloody climax.

At his January 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse by the White House, Trump’s tough talk became explicit marching orders. Trump falsely suggested to the rallygoers that he would accompany them to the Capitol, giving them the full impression that he shared their goal of physically descending on Congress to prevent the certification of Biden’s election. His apologists have made much of his one remark about “peacefully and patriotically” marching to the Capitol. But that line must be looked at in the context of the rest of his speech. He said:

<blockquote>We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.</blockquote>

And:

<blockquote>We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will ‘Stop the Steal’. . . . You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. . . . We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.</blockquote>

And:

<blockquote>Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. . . . We are going to the Capitol, and we are going to try and give—the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote, but we are going to try—give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re try—going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.</blockquote>

And then the mob came.

The Washington Post reported that “as senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who—safely ensconced in the West Wing—was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their pleas.”

While the violence unfolded, Trump didn’t send help to protect Congress. He remained focused on pushing Republican members of Congress to object to or delay the vote count, dialing the phone in hopes of finding another recruit for his cause.

It wasn’t until long after the windows had been smashed and the blood had been spilled that Trump issued any kind of public statement about the shocking scene that had unfolded. In an awkward, short video shot in the Rose Garden, he didn’t manage to unequivocally condemn the violence; rather, he bathed the insurrectionists with warm words in support of their shared cause.

“This was a fraudulent election, but we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home, we love you, you’re very special, you’ve seen what happens, you’ve seen 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.”

Trump’s team asserts that at no time did Trump try to subvert the election results. Oh my goodness did they open up can of worms there. Just the stuff in Georgia alone, documented on tape is enough. But he also had Rudy calling Tommy Tuberville while the riot was happening to get him to object to the results. The way we know this is because he got the wrong number and called Mike Lee instead and left a voice mail. We have heard the voice mail.

Good lord. This last Axios insider account of one of the White House meetings about how to overturn the election is just mind-boggling:

Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.

“How the hell did Sidney get in the building?” White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president. 

President Trump’s private schedule hadn’t included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they’d come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.

As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who’d been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.

The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.

Herschmann took a seat in a yellow chair close to the doorway. Powell, Flynn, Newman and Byrne sat in a row before the Resolute Desk, facing the president.

For weeks now, ever since Rudy Giuliani had commandeered Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the election, outsiders had been coming out of the woodwork to feed the president wild allegations of voter fraud based on highly dubious sources. 

Trump was no longer focused on any semblance of a governing agenda, instead spending his days taking phone calls and meetings from anyone armed with conspiracy theories about the election. For the White House staff, it was an unending sea of garbage churned up by the bottom feeders.

Powell began this meeting with the same baseless claim that now has her facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit: She told the president thatDominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.

[Note: In response to a request for comment, Powell said in an emailed statement to Axios: “I will not publicly discuss my private meetings with the President of the United States. I believe those meetings are privileged and confidential under executive privilege and under rules of the legal profession. I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.”]

Powell waved an affidavit from the pile of papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela.

She proposed declaring a national security emergency, grantingher and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.

“Hold on a minute, Sidney,” Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. “You’re part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?”

Giuliani’s legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.

“It’s foreign interference,” Powell insisted, then added: “Rudy hasn’t understood what this case is about until just now.”

In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. “Get Pat down here immediately!” Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, “Who are you?”

The meeting was already getting heated.

White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell’s allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.

But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.

Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: “So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?”

As for Powell’s larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign’s lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.

By now, people were yelling and cursing.

The room was starting to fill up. Trump’s personal assistant summoned White House staff secretary Derek Lyons to join the meeting and asked him to bring a copy of a 2018 executive order that the Powell group kept citing as the key to victory. Lyons agreed with Cipollone and the other officials that Powell’s theories were nonsensical.

It was now four against four.

Flynn went berserk. The former three-star general, whom Trump had fired as his first national security after he was caught lying to the FBI (and later pardoned), stood up and turned from the Resolute Desk to face Herschmann.

“You’re quitting! You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” he exploded at the senior adviser. Flynn then turned to the president, and implored: “Sir, we need fighters.”

Herschmann ignored Flynn at first and continued to probe Powell’s pitch with questions about the underlying evidence. “All you do is promise, but never deliver,” he said to her sharply.

Flynn was ranting, seemingly infuriated about anyone challenging Powell, who had represented him in his recent legal battles.

Finally Herschmann had enough. “Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?” he shot back at Flynn. “If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down.” Flynn sat back down.

The meeting had come entirely off the rails.

Byrne, backing up Flynn, told Trump the White House lawyers didn’t care about him and were being obstructive. “Sir, we’re both entrepreneurs, and we both built businesses,” the former Overstock CEO told Trump. “We know that there are times you have to be creative and take different steps.”

This was a remarkable level of personal familiarity, given it was the first time Byrne had met the president. All the stanchions and buffers between the White House and the outside world had crumbled.

Byrne kept attacking the senior White House staff in front of Trump. “They’ve already abandoned you,” he told the president aggressively. Periodically duringthe meeting Flynn or Byrne challenged Trump’s top staff — portraying them as disloyal: So do you think the president won or not?

At one point, with Flynn shouting, Byrne raised his hand to talk. He stood up and turned around to face Herschmann. “You’re a quitter,” he said. “You’ve been interfering with everything. You’ve been cutting us off.”

“Do you even know who the fuck I am, you idiot?” Herschmann snapped back.

“Yeah, you’re Patrick Cipollone,” Byrne said.

“Wrong! Wrong, you idiot!”

The staff were now on their feet, standing behind one of the couches and facing the Powell crew at the Resolute Desk. Cipollone stood to Herschmann’s left. Lyons, on his last day onthe job, stood to Herschmann’s right.

Trump was behind the desk, watching the show. He briefly left the meeting to wander into his private dining room.

The usually mild-mannered Lyons blasted the Powell set: “You’ve brought 60 cases. And you’ve lost every case you’ve had!”

Trump came back into the Oval Office from the dining room to rejoin the meeting. Lyons pointed out to Powell that their incompetence went beyond their lawsuits being thrown out for standing. “You somehow managed to misspell the word ‘District’ three different ways in your suits,” he said pointedly.

In a Georgia case, the Powell team had misidentified the court on the first page of their filing as “THE UNITED STATES DISTRICCT COURT, NORTHERN DISTRCOICT OF GEORGIA.” And they had identified the Michigan court as the “EASTERN DISTRCT OF MICHIGAN.”

These were sloppy spelling errors. But given that these lawsuits aimed to overturn a presidential election, the court nomenclature should have been pristine.

Powell, Flynn and Byrne began attacking Lyons as they renewed their argument to Trump: There they go again, they want to focus on the insignificant details instead of fighting for you.

Trump replied, “No, no, he’s right. That was very embarrassing. That shouldn’t have happened.”

The Powell team needed to regroup. They shifted to a new grievance to turn the conversation away from their embarrassing errors. Powell insisted that they hadn’t “lost” the 60-odd court cases, since the cases were mostly dismissed for lack of standing and they had never had the chance to present their evidence.

Every judge is corrupt, she claimed. We can’t rely on them. The White House lawyers couldn’t believe what they were hearing. “That’s your argument?” a stunned Herschmann said. “Even the judges we appointed? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Powell had more to say. She and Flynn began trashing the FBI as well, and the Justice Department under Attorney General Bill Barr, telling Trump that neither could be trusted. Both institutions, they said, were corrupt, and Trump needed to fire the leadership and get in new people he could trust.

Cipollone, standing his ground amidst this mishmash of conspiracies, said they were totally wrong. He aggressively defended the DOJ and the FBI, saying they had looked into every major claim of fraud that had been reported.

Flynn and Powell had long nursed their antipathy to the FBI and Justice. Flynn had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation but withdrew the plea after hiring Powell as his lawyer in June 2019.

The two alleged the FBI had entrapped Flynn and failed to disclose exculpatory evidence, known as Brady material, as required by law. They had found an ally in Barr, a fierce critic of the Russia investigation who finally directed the DOJ to drop Flynn’s case.

Herschmann, known inside the White House as a defender of Barr and the DOJ, went off on Flynn again: “Listen, the same people that you’re trashing, if they didn’t produce the Brady material to Sidney, your ass would still be in jail!”

It was no longer technically true that Flynn would be in jail, as he had received a post-election pardon from Trump. But Flynn was furious. “Don’t mention my case,” he roared. Herschmann responded, “Where do you think Sidney got this information? Where do you think it came from? From the exact same people in the Department of Justice that you’re now saying are corrupt.”

Byrne, wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: “I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation.”

Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. “What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?” Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.

Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.

He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They’re saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let’s give this a shot.

The words “martial law” were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.

But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.

Powell was arguing that they couldn’t get a judge to enforce any subpoena to hand over the voting machines because all the judges were corrupt. She and her group repeatedly referred to the National Emergencies Act and a Trump executive order from 2018 that was designed to clear the way for the government to sanction foreign actors interfering in U.S. elections.

These laws were, in the view of Powell, Flynn and the others, the key to unlocking extraordinary powers for Trump to stay in office beyond Jan. 20.

Their theory was that because foreign enemies had stolen the election, all bets were off and Trump could use the full force of the United States government to go after Dominion.

It was remarkable that the presidency had deteriorated to such an extent that this fight in the Oval Office between senior White House officials and radical conspiracists was even taking place.

“How exactly are you going to do this?” an exasperated Herschmann asked again, later in the conversation. Newman again cited the 2018 executive order, which prompted Herschmann to question out loud whether she was even a lawyer.

Then Byrne chimed in: “There are guys with big guns and badges who can get these things.” Herschmann couldn’t believe it. “What are you, three years old?” he asked.

Lyons, the staff secretary, told the president that the executive order Powell and Flynn were citing did not give him the authority they claimed it did to seize voting machines. Morgan, the campaign lawyer, also expressed skepticism about their idea of invoking national security emergency powers.

To help adjudicate, Trump then patched in the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, on speakerphone. Trump’s personal assistant brought O’Brien into the call with no explanation of what madness would await him.

O’Brien said very little in the short time he was on the call but intervened at one point to say he saw no evidence to support Powell’s notion of declaring a national security emergency to seize voting machines. There was so much fiery crosstalk it was hard for anyone on the telephone to follow the conversation.

Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell’s theories, but he said, “At least she’s out there fighting.”

The discussion shifted from Dominion voting machines to a conversation about appointing Powell as a special counsel inside the government to investigate voter fraud. She wanted a top secret security clearance and access to confidential voter information.

Lyons told Trump he couldn’t appoint Powell as a special counsel at the Justice Department because this was an attorney general appointment. Lyons, Cipollone and Herschmann — in fact the entire senior White House staff who were aware of this idea — were all vehemently opposed to Powell becoming a special counsel anywhere in the government.

By this point Trump had also patched into the call his personal lawyer Giuliani and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Meadows indicated that he was trying to wrap his mind around what exactly Powell’s role would entail. He told Powell she would have to fill out the SF-86 questionnaire before starting as special counsel.

This was seen as a delaying tactic. The sense in the room was that Trump might actually greenlight this extraordinary proposal.

At its essence, the Powell crew’s argument to the president was this: We have the real information. These people — your White House staff — don’t believe in the truth. They’re liars and quitters. They’re not willing to fight for you because they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Put us in charge. Let us take control of everything. We’ll prove to you that what we’re saying is right. We won’t quit, we’ll fight. We’re willing to fight for the presidency.

On some level, this argument was music to Trump’s ears. He was desperate. Powell and her team were the only people willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that a path to stay in power in the White House remained.

The Oval Office portion of the meeting had dragged on for nearly three hours, creeping beyond 9 p.m. The arguments became so heated that even Giuliani — still on the phone — at one point told everyone to calm down. One participant later recalled: “When Rudy’s the voice of reason, you know the meeting’s not going well.”

Giuliani told Trump he was going to come over to the White House. The president, having forgotten about the others on the line, hung up and cut multiple people off the call.

Herschmann, Cipollone and Lyons left the Oval Office, but soon discovered that the Powell entourage had made their way to the president’s residence. They followed them upstairs, to the Yellow Oval Room, Trump’s living room, where they were joined by Giuliani and Meadows.

Trump sat beside Powell in armchairs facing the door, separated by a round, wooden antique table. Giuliani sat in an armchair to the right of them, while Byrne and Meadows sat on a couch. Byrne wolfed down pigs in a blanket and little meatballs on toothpicks that staff had set on the coffee table.

Herschmann was primed to brawl and ready to dump on Powell. It had been a long day.

“Rudy,” he said, turning to Giuliani, “Sidney was just in the Oval telling the president you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Right, Sidney?” He turned to Powell: “Why don’t you tell Rudy to his face?”

“Eric, really it’s not appropriate,” Trump replied curtly. 

“What’s not appropriate?” Herschmann shot back. Turning to Powell, he said, “Why don’t you repeat to Rudy what you just told the president in the Oval Office — that he has no idea about the case and that he only just began to understand it a few hours ago.”

Three days later, Giuliani would publicly distance himself from Powell, telling Newsmax that Powell did not represent the president, and that “whatever she’s talking about, it’s her own opinions.”

It didn’t take long for the yelling to start up again. They were now in hour four of a meeting unprecedented even by the deranged standards of the final days of the Trump presidency. 

Now it was Meadows’ turn, blasting Flynn for trashing him and accusing him of being a quitter. “Don’t you dare challenge me about whether I’m being supportive of the president and working hard,” Meadows shouted, reminding Flynn that he’d defended him during his legal troubles.

Trump and Cipollone, who frequently butted heads, went at it too, over whether the administration had the authority to do what Powell was proposing.

Powell kept asserting throughout the night that she had — or would soon produce — the evidence needed to prove foreign interference. She kept insisting that Trump had the legal authority he needed to seize voting machines. But she did not have the goods.

Powell at one point turned to Lyons and demanded, “Why are you speaking? Are you still employed here?” The staff secretary, who had already resigned, laughed and joked, “Well I guess I’m here until midnight.”

It was after midnight by the time the White House officials had finally said their piece. They left that night fully prepared for the mad possibility Trump might still name Sidney Powell special counsel. You have our advice, they told the president before walking out. You decide who to listen to.