772 search results for ""voter fraud""

According to this big NY Times tik-tok of the Trump post-election strategy, he just put his faith in the wrong people:

The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.

Please. Trump didn’t accept the results in 2016 when he won! He convened a “voter Fraud Commission” to prove that the popular vote had been stolen from him. Anyone who thought he would ever concede was a naive fool. And say what you will about Mitch McConnell, he is not that.

Jonathan Chait shows just how ridiculous it is:

His incentives clearly ran toward humoring Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election and downplaying the damage it would cause. As Robert Costa reported on November 9, McConnell’s calculus was driven entirely by his desire to win the Georgia special elections. McConnell believed “the base must be stoked,” which meant supporting Trump’s lies. McConnell’s posture at the time was that Trump was merely doing to Democrats what they had done to him: “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.” (In fact, Hillary Clinton conceded her defeat the morning after the vote.)

The Times does note that McConnell’s thinking about Trump’s autogolpe changed less because of any principled revulsion than because it became a liability rather than an asset in the Senate contest: “Perhaps most important in Mr. McConnell’s evolving calculus, internal polls were showing that the Republicans’ strongest argument in the Georgia runoffs was that a Republican-led Senate would be a necessary check on a new — and inevitable — Democratic administration.”

Everything in Trump’s history made it obvious he would provoke a crisis if defeated. McConnell chose to cooperate with Trump’s attack on the republic for the same reason he spent the previous four years cooperating with Trump: because it enhanced his own power.

McConnell has always fashioned himself the canniest man in Washington. His desire to broadcast his own savvy has frequently led him to counterproductively blurt out of his own cynicism. (McConnell has famously admitted that his goals under Obama were to deny the president bipartisan cover and make him a one-term president, quotes that Democrats later threw back in his face.) He simply cannot suppress his instinct to let everybody know how shrewdly he plays the game.

McConnell is now casting himself as a dupe because it is the only escape. He has been implicated in a historic crime.

McConnell played out the string until January 5th when he lost the Senate. Now, he’s running around trying to cover his tracks. The Grim Reaper knew exactly what he was doing.

One of the weirdest videos from January 6th is the one on which the “Shaman” takes over the dais in the Senate and leads the marauding rioters in a prayer. These people seemed like the least “Godly” people on earth:

This piece by Sarah Posner about the Religious Right’s participation in the Insurrection is enlightening:

The Jan. 6 Save America March, where then-President Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol, opened with a prayer. Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, called on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour.” Standing at the same podium where, an hour later, Trump would exhort the crowd to “fight like hell,” White called the election results into question, asking God to let the people “have the assurance of a fair and a just election.” Flanked by a row of American flags, White implored God to “let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, against justice, against peace, against righteousness be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”

Within hours, insurrectionists had surrounded the Capitol, beaten police, battered down barricades and doors, smashed windows and rampaged through the halls of the Capitol, breaching the Senate chamber. In video captured by The New Yorker, men ransacked the room, rifling through senators’ binders and papers, searching for evidence of what they claimed was treason. Then, standing on the rostrum where the president of the Senate presides, the group paused to pray “in Christ’s holy name.”

Men raised their arms in the air as millions of evangelical and charismatic parishioners do every Sunday and thanked God for allowing them “to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs.” They thanked God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.”

White evangelicals have been Trump’s most dedicated, unwavering base, standing by him through the cavalcade of abuses, failures and scandals that engulfed his campaigns and his presidency – from the “Access Hollywood” tape to his first impeachment to his efforts to overturn the election and incite the Capitol insurrection. This fervent relationship, which has survived the events of Jan. 6, is based on far more than a transactional handshake over judicial appointments and a crackdown on abortion and LGBTQ rights.

Trump’s White evangelical base has come to believe that God anointed him and that Trump’s placement of Christian-right ideologues in critical positions at federal agencies and in federal courts was the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation. Throughout Trump’s presidency, his political appointees implemented policies that stripped away reproductive and LGBTQ rights and tore down the separation of church and state in the name of protecting unfettered religious freedom for conservative Christians. After Joe Biden won the presidency, Trump administration loyalists launched their own Christian organization to “stop the steal,” in the ultimate act of loyalty to their divine leader.

Since even before Trump took office, his cry of “fake news” was embraced by GOP leaders and leaders on the Christian right, who reinforced their followers’ fealty by seeking to sequester them from reality and training them to dismiss any criticism of Trump as a witch hunt or a hoax. At the 2019 Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, held just months after special counsel Robert Mueller released his report on the Russia investigation, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the president’s critics of “Trump derangement syndrome,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, urged the audience to disregard mainstream news and turn instead to the “most important name in news” – “you and your circle of friends.”

A few months later, amid Trump’s first impeachment hearings, then-Rep. Mark Meadows, who would go on to become Trump’s chief of staff, encouraged Christian-right activists at a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to counteract news reports by retweeting him and other Trump loyalists in Congress. He underlined the power of this alternative information system, claiming that recent tweets from himself and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio – who would later vote to overturn the results of November’s election – had received 163 million impressions, “more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”

Over the course of 2020, those circles of disinformation became infested with QAnon conspiracy theories about a satanic, child-sex-trafficking “deep state,” priming Trump’s White evangelical shock troops for his ultimate conspiratorial lie: that the election was stolen from him and that Biden’s victory was the result of fraud. As Trump and his legal team fanned out across the country’s courthouses and right-wing airwaves, insisting that they would prove voter fraud and reverse the results of the presidential election, Christian-right leaders and media picked up the rhetoric and ran with it. By Thanksgiving, the lie that the election had been stolen from Trump had become an article of faith.

Coverage of the Capitol insurrection has focused on such far-right instigators as the White supremacist Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, a militia group. But a reconstruction of the weeks leading up Jan. 6 shows how a Christian-right group formed to “stop the steal” worked to foment a bellicose Christian narrative in defense of Trump’s coup attempt and justify a holy war against an illegitimate state.

In late November, two federal workers, Arina Grossu – who had previously worked for the Christian-right advocacy group Family Research Council – and Rob Weaver, formed a new Christian right group, the Jericho March. The new group’s goal, according to a news release announcing its launch, was to “prayerfully protest and call on government officials to cast light on voter fraud, corruption, and suppression of the will of the American people in this election.” In fact, the Jericho March would help lay the groundwork for the insurrection.

There’s much more detail at the link.

The Christian Right’s devotion to Donald Trump says everything about who they really are. Even if you believe that it is a purely transactional relationship in which they got their anti-abortion judges in exchange for supporting him, it’s impossible to respect them as moral leaders. And frankly, I don’t think it had anything to do with judges. That kind of transaction doesn’t inspire the ecstatic support they give him. They are passionate about Donald Trump, the libertine, three-time married, pussy grabbing, profane, corrupt, vengeful monster. They seem to be more than fine with all of that.

This isn’t about Christianity, it’s about something much more primitive.

They ain’t done yet:

Donald Trump’s QAnon fans are not giving up hope that he will be reinstalled in the White House this year, with a new theory that has them planning on celebrating his inauguration on March 4th.j

According to a report from Vice, the latest theory being passed around by right-wing extremists is based upon writings from members of the fringe “sovereign citizen” movement and a unique interpretation of American history.

As the Vice report notes, “Sovereign citizens believe that a law enacted in 1871 secretly turned the U.S. into a corporation and did away with the American government of the founding fathers. The group also believes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold U.S. citizens out in 1933 when he ended the gold standard and replaced it by offering citizens as collateral to a group of shadowy foreign investors.”

“Over the weekend, QAnon groups on Gab and Telegram, where most QAnon supporters have found a home since they were kicked off Twitter and Parler was de-platformed, commenters have been sharing documents describing the 1871 act, claiming it proves that Trump will be sworn in on March 4,” the report states. “The source for this date is the fact that 1937 was also the year when inaugurations were changed from March 4 to Jan. 20 — to shorten the lame-duck period of outgoing presidents. QAnon followers believe that Trump will become the president of the original republic, and not the corporation that they believe the 1871 act created.”ADVERTISING

The belief that Trump might bolster the hopes of the QAnon followers who have been despondent that President Joe Biden wasn’t arrested on January 20th.

A deeper explanation of this latest theory — and its genesis — can be found below:

Some QAnon followers are borrowing discredited arguments from sovereign citizens in order to yet again move the goalposts. They're absurdly claiming Trump will be inaugurated on March 4, because the U.S. was "incorporated" in 1871 and all Amendments passed after that are invalid. pic.twitter.com/W0c8QqiOqu

— Travis View (@travis_view) January 24, 2021

This is how prophesy cults often work. For instance:

If the past has taught us anything it is that failed prophecies and frustrated predictions don’t always mark the beginning of the end for radical social movements.

In addition to being a historic event, one might be forgiven for thinking that the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris would sound the death knell of QAnon conspiracy theories. Now that Biden is actually president and QAnon predictions about Trump’s continuing hold on power have failed to come to fruition it would seem logical that they would pack up shop and admit that they were wrong. But if history has taught us anything it is that failed prophecies and frustrated predictions don’t always mark the beginning of the end for radical social movements. With apologies to Madonna, it’s prophets who are the mothers of reinvention.

In the early 19th century, New York farmer and Baptist preacher William Miller preached that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. His prophecy was based largely on his study of the biblical book of Daniel. His interpretation led him to conclude, initially at least, that Christ would return sometime between March 1843 and 1844. When March 1844 passed without the appearance of Christ and his angels in the sky, Miller picked another date —April 18, 1844—which also slid by without cosmic incident or divine intervention. A follower of Miller’s, Samuel Snow, proposed a third date in October, but the Day of Judgment had still not arrived. The Millerites were understandably disillusioned. One member, Henry Emmons, wrote that he had to be helped to his bedroom, where he lay “sick with disappointment.”

You would think that three false prophecies, collectively known as the Great Disappointment, would be the end of the Millerites. To be sure, some members did leave to join the Shakers, but others began to reinterpret the prophecies about the end of days. One group began to argue that they were only partly wrong. The prophecies weren’t about the Second Coming and end of the world but, rather, about the cleansing of a heavenly sanctuary. It wasn’t an earthly event, it was a heavenly one, and this explained why, to us mere humans, it might appear that nothing had happened. It was out of this group that the Seventh Day Adventist Church arose. Today the Seventh Day Adventist Church has between 20-25 million members. They are, according to Christianity Today, “the fifth largest Christian communion worldwide.”

Update: John Amato caught a new Q defender on Fox News

Monday night, Tucker Carlson went on a rant about how the Democratic Party is trying to “control your thinking” because they are denouncing the insane QAnon conspiracies, and nobody is stopping them.

The Fox News host played a series of clips from other cable networks discussing the disaster caused by these conspiracy theory nuts. Trump used QAnon crazies to promote his failed presidency and his crazy voter fraud lies. As long as the QAnons were defending him, Trump was happy to give constant retweets of their preposterous ideas.

Carlson focused on a Tom Friedman quote when he said that QAnon conspiracy theorists were “frightening.”

Tucker agreed, “And he’s right. but not, as usual, as he thinks.”

Tucker claims that society is profoundly “changing right before our eyes” and the proof is in the denouncing of a batsh*t crazy Republican conspiracy theory movement.

“The threat is from an idea. It’s called Qanon,” Carlson said.

Tucker tells his rubes that if he doesn’t defend QAnon, then tyranny will prevail over our democracy.

This republic from its inception aspired to be a place where all are “created equal.” The United States has struggled for its entire history to live up to that vision. The founders envisioned a republic built on popular sovereignty, a rejection of vestigial feudalism still hanging on in Europe (and elsewhere). Of course, the phrase used at the time was “all men are created equal,” and that meant something. There were influential women such as Elizabeth Willing Powel at the founding of the republic, of course, but it was still a man’s world, a white man’s world.

Dark bargains surrounding the status of darker-skinned people enslaved to enrichen white men of the South were required to gain southern ratification of the 1787 constitution. As our quadrennial headaches over the Electoral College remind us, those artifacts are with us still. Struggles to throw off the legacy of slavery and to make those two words, created equal, more than florid prose are, in plainer language, about who counts.

Since 1787, one group of Americans after the next has had to fight to have fellow Americans and the government acknowledge that they count.

Indeed, this year began with the first sacking of the Capitol since The War of 1812. The violent insurrection was incited by a sitting president and carried out by a mob of supporters convinced that the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump count more than the 81 million who voted for Joe Biden. In swing state after swing state, Trump and his Keystone Cops team of attorneys argued that the votes of millions of Americans should not count at all.

Virtually any struggle for power or recognition of unrealized equal-ness is at its core an argument over who counts and who does not. Even if never stated in terms so blunt. Although, the legal wrangling over the last year over whom to count in the decennial census was as blunt as it gets. In the census, count means count. Literally.

When Reconstruction failed after the Civil War, emancipated slaves faced another century of repression, lynching, and denial of basic protections that were theirs by rights. Even a half-century after the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, white America resists acknowledging that Black Americans count, or matter, not only as citizens but as human beings.

Suffragettes fought for over 70 years to have their voices count at the ballot box. The Nineteenth Amendment added to the Constitution in 1920 granted them the right to vote but full autonomy and equality in the workplace and on the street remains elusive.

Whether the issue is LGBTQ rights, womens’ rights, immigration, photo ID, gerrymandering and the myth of voter fraud, our conservative antagonists frame counter-arguments in terms that let them avoid publicly addressing this fundamental question: Who counts?

Digby on Sunday cited Jonathan Chait’s column about the indignant response on the right to President Biden’s inaugural “renunciation of racism and violent white-supremacist terrorism.” Figures such as Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson do not identify as white supremacists. But, Digby observed, their anger at Biden’s condemning white supremacy outs them as identifying with it. Because as Chait concludes, “Carlson, MacDonald and Paul heard Biden denounce white supremacy, and decided he was talking about them.”

Notice how often right-wing pundits and politicians name-check “Real Americans.” Native-born, straight white people who live in rural, red states and vote Republican are Real Americans. White blue-collar workers and farmers who vote Republican are Real Americans. White evangelical Christians who vote Republican are Real Americans. White Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and rifle-toting militia members are Real Americans. Scan the MAGA crowds at Trump rallies or the faces of the extremists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

What conservatives mean by Real Americans is this: city-dwellers, Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, liberals … anyone not falling under the general categories in the paragraph above Do Not Count. They are lessers, lower-caste, second-class citizens at best, and most definitely not “created equal.” To them.

Real Americans count. All others count less. Two-hundred forty-five years after the Declaration, this country still struggles to rise above ancient feudal impulses to become the country of equals its founders imagined. Joe Biden embraces that vision. His conservative critics reject it. They insist they count more.

They are prepared to overthrow the republic to keep it that way.

This guy…

Stephanopoulos immediately kicked off Sunday’s This Week interview with Paul by asking him a “threshold” question about the results of the election, wondering aloud if he accepted that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate and “not stolen,” something former President Donald Trump and his allies have baselessly insisted and which eventually resulted in an insurrectionist riot.

“Well, what I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court,” the Kentucky lawmaker deflected. “Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, a procedural way of not hearing it.”

As Paul said there was “still a chance” that some cases challenging states’ voting laws or alleging irregularities could make their way to the Supreme Court, the ABC moderator pushed back to point out that Republicans’ election challenges have been laughed out of court.

“I have to stop you there,” Stephanoulous noted. “No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results.”

The Republican senator contended that the majority of Republican voters believe that “we do need to look at election integrity,” prompting Stephanopoulos to claim that those voters agree with Paul “because they were fed a ‘big lie’ by President Trump and his supporters.”

Cornered on the issue, and still refusing to admit that the election was not “stolen,” Paul then framed the argument as a partisan and ideological issue, complaining that “people coming from the liberal side” immediately “say everything’s a lie instead of saying there’s two sides to everything.”

Stephanopoulos, meanwhile, again explained that Trump falsely claimed the “election was stolen” when, in fact, it wasn’t. Furthermore, as the ABC host stated, Trump’s own attorney general and Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would impact the election’s results.

“I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say ‘there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.’ Let’s have an open debate this is a free country,” Paul grumbled in response.

The Trump-boosting senator went on to dismiss former Attorney General William Barr’s declaration about the lack of evidence of voter fraud, claiming it was just a “pronouncement.” From there, he complained that the media is unfair to Republicans and says they are “all liars.”

“There are two sides to every story,” he blared.

“Sir, there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state,” Stephanopoulos shot back.

“There are two sides to every story,” Paul wailed. “George, you’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar!”

“There are not two sides to facts,” the ABC anchor retorted.

Stephanopoulos would then circle back to the original question about whether Paul felt the election was stolen or not, something Paul still refused to answer.

“I think there was great deal of evidence of fraud and changing of the election laws illegally,” he asserted. “A thorough investigation is warranted.”

He’s a liar. Even Chris Christie agrees:

“This election was not stolen … there were no type of irregularities that would have changed the result in one state,” Chris Christie says, adding that Republicans making the claim are trying to score "political points” with people Trump “lied to.” https://t.co/w9SFw2wgzB pic.twitter.com/mrxpbIcoxY

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 24, 2021

The desperation was so extreme I’m beginning to wonder if there aren’t other, unknown, reasons Trump needed to stay in power. The insurrection was the most extreme, of course. But he really pulled out all the stops even before then:

The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr. […]

When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.

Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.

(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)

Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

We came this close to another Saturday NIght Massacre. And yet, the Republican are all sticking with this monster. Lindsey Graham has practically declared him Republican leader for life

Be sure to read Tom’s commentary on this story, below. It’s spot on.

By the way, this was a Trump guy through and through.:

According to federal court filings, Clark also served as one of the lead attorneys for Trump in the suit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who accuses him of defamation. Trump has denied Carroll’s claim that he raped her in a Manhattan department store decades ago.

The Justice Department made the controversial move in September to defend Trump in the lawsuit, which was filed against him in his personal capacity, saying Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States.” Clark appears to have signed off personally on the decision for the DOJ to intervene, according to the court documents. Carroll wrote on Twitter Friday of Clark, “This is the chump who filed the DOJ case against me, saying it was the President’s job to slander women. The Trump Presidency was corrupt right down to the core of its spleen.”

How many of these people are burrowed into the Department of Justice I wonder? And can Garland get them out. Will he try?

With a Democrat in the White House, Republicans pretend to care about deficits again, writes Catherine Rampell. “It’s almost like clockwork.”

Just as predictably, they care about bipartisanship. Will Democrats “work across the aisle” for the American people, etc.?

Edward-Isaac Dovere explores at The Atlantic how Joe Biden expects to manage his base’s expectations while getting his legislative initiatives passed with or without the cooperation of Republicans:

The success of Biden’s agenda will of course depend on Congress, which is starting off the year having to finish Trump’s second impeachment. “We have to see the Senate as it is”—narrowly divided, with the Democrats’ majority dependent on moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia—“not as we want it to be,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. He was in the House at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency; he’s part of a generation of senators who were not in the chamber the last time Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and have a different understanding of party politics than their predecessors did. “While I’m sure that Biden is going to want to spend some time trying to explore whether there’s bipartisan buy-in for his priorities, we all have to be willing to take no for an answer.”

[…]

“There’s a consensus that one of the mistakes of ’09 was playing footsie for a long time with Republicans who never had any intent to actually get to yes,” Murphy added. “And the dynamics in the Republican caucus have gotten worse since then, not better.”

If Dovere’s information is right, Biden has little interest in the kind of “performative bipartisanship” of the Obama years:

Biden doesn’t want Democrats to go it alone without first trying to make a deal. If the GOP is seriously interested in uniting the country, he will eagerly engage. But if they use calmer rhetoric as a feint for obstruction, he is prepared to call that out.

And if the Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election continue to push their claims of voter fraud, or if any are found to have had more direct involvement in the attack on the Capitol, that will change Democrats’ negotiating strategy, too. “There are so many moving parts to this that we still do not yet know in terms of people’s involvement,” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware told me, after reflecting on her own traumatic experience in the riot. “I am a believer in healing, but I know that in order to get there, we have to go through it, not around it.”

Cynical progressive observers I know worry Biden has not absorbed the lessons of the Obama years and expect to see their hopes for progress dashed against Republican obstructionism. The proof will be in the doing, but these are signals that those lessons indeed have been learned.

“If Republican senators hold those bills up by filibustering,” Dovere writes, “Democrats would accuse them of standing in the way of helping Americans, or standing in the way of voting rights. Ending the filibuster would then be an easier sell.” Even “radical extremist” David Brooks thinks that if “Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.”

Sally Kohn was on MSNBC’s “The Beat” Friday night snickering about Newt Gingrich calling out Biden’s team as radical extremists because Republicans have trouble tagging Biden himself with that charge. Voters will need reminding who the real radicals are.

Perhaps someone could assemble clips of prominent Republicans making the “radicals” claim and “smash cut” to MAGA forces storming the Capitol and fighting police. The latter won’t be hard to find.

Osita Nwanevu, staff wrtiter at The New Republic , explored the history of bipartisanship in a long tweet thread on Friday.

https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1352707809046126594?s=20

A 1968 New York Times editorial stated, “Except in time of war…history suggests that self conscious bipartisanship does not work very well in this country…a peacetime coalition could only serve to blur the lines of responsibility.” It was a long and winding road from there to here that I invite you to read yourself.

Once the immediate past occupant had flown the Oval Office, it was inevitable that more shoes would drop. With lifts. The New York Times reported Friday night that in his desperation to overturn his election loss by any means necessary, Donald Trump schemed with a Department of Justice attorney to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general. They planned to replace Rosen with said attorney, Jeffrey Clark, who might then exert enough pressure on Georgia lawmakers that they would overturn the state’s presidential election results to Trump’s advantage.

Confronted on a conference call with the prospect of Rosen’s ouster, department officials agreed they would resign, the Times reports in a story based on four former Trump officials who requested anonymity:

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

Clark cited privilege in not commenting, but claims his advice was consistent with law. The Times lays out the timeline behind development of a plan driven, by pressure from Trump, for the department to find “rampant election fraud” that was not there. Clark believed it was and that the department should inform Georgia officials it was investigating Georgia election when it wasn’t.

What ultimately evolved required some Olympics-level chutzpah:

Mr. Rosen and [deputy attorney general, Richard P.] Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

It would be another Saturday Night Massacre and invite not only mass resignations at the department “but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans” and undermine Trump’s efforts to stay in office. After hours of discussion with a team of lawyers, Trump ultimately relented.

The Trump presidency ended after months of denial that he had lost the election decisively, after months of baseless accusations that he had been robbed, and after Trump’s incitement of an insurrection by MAGA/QAnon conspiracy theorists and white nationalists that ended in the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

After Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, many let out a sigh of relief that democracy had survived a near-extinction-level event. Biden’s team has chops. They believe in governing. News hounds not having to watch for the latest atrocious Trump tweet could go the sleep early again. Dr. Fauci’s mood improved. Still, the Friday Night News Dump is forever.

It is exhausting even writing again about Trump’s bottomless pit of unprincipled neediness. Yet as expected, shoes like the Clark Affair will keep dropping in Imelda Marcos quantities for weeks, months, or years. Investigations will begin. Some will stall. Few will go to trial. Trump will retaliate against former officials who speaks out publicly. Any accountability coming his way will be a fraction of what he and his family business deserve. Historians will be analyzing this period for centuries.

Trump is gum on the soles of the republic.

The latest from Jonathan Swan on the Final Days is juicy. It’s about the breakdown in the relationship between Trump and Pence:

“The end is coming, Donald.”

The male voice in the TV ad boomed through the White House residence during “Fox & Friends” commercial breaks. Over and over and over. “The end is coming, Donald. … On Jan. 6, Mike Pence will put the nail in your political coffin.“

The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump PAC dedicated to pissing off the president with viral commercials, was back in his head with their voodoo.

President Trump, furious, told his vice president to send the Lincoln Project gang a cease-and-desist letter. In reality, this would only have further delighted Trump’s tormentors and provided ammo for another ad. Marc Short, chief of staff to Mike Pence, consulted officials on the Trump campaign. Their advice: Just ignore it.

The idea for the ad had popped into Steve Schmidt’s head when he woke onthe morning of Dec. 2. Schmidt was a former Republican strategist who had renounced the party and dedicated himself to its destruction after Trump’s ascent.

Schmidt was also a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which counted amongst its activists lawyer George Conway, a prolific troller of Trump on Twitter and the husband of former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

“There’s zero fucking chance Trump knows what happens on Jan. 6,” Schmidt told ex-GOP strategist Rick Wilson and other Lincoln Project members on a team conference call at 11 a.m. later that morning. “Oh my God,” Wilson responded, bursting into laughter. “There’s no way he does.”

By law, on Jan. 6, the House and Senate would meet in a joint session of Congress to formally count the results of the Electoral College, and it would be the vice president’s job, in his role as president of the Senate, to declare Joe Biden the winner.

By that afternoon, the Lincoln Project had finalized a 70-word script and shipped it to their lawyers. A cut of the commercial was ready early the next day, and by Dec. 10 the 38-second spot would hit the air. They made a cheap booking for Fox News shows running in the D.C. market.

Their target audience of one lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

After the Electoral College met on Dec. 14 to affirm Biden’s victory, some West Wing officials hoped the president would finally acknowledge reality. Short knew that if he didn’t, it was only a matter of time before Trump set his sights on Pence.

Trump had been fed more and more disinformation that the vice president had the power to reengineer the Electoral College vote. With a last gasp, he seized this confected idea and blew life into it.

Pence, who had dutifully defended Trump during the countless scandals of the past four years, had done his part to support Trump’s election fraud challenges while keeping a distance from the more outlandish conspiracies pushed by the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and crackpots who had the president’s ear.

But it was increasingly clear that Trump was going to test the most loyal foot soldier in his inner circle on Jan. 6, when the Constitution required the vice president to preside over a joint session of Congress to certify the Electoral College results.

By Christmas, Trump had made it clear to Pence that he wanted him to object. Pence demurred, explaining that the vice president’s role in the process was largely ceremonial but that his general counsel Greg Jacob would look into it.

Trump’s outside lawyers were filling his mind with junk legal theories about Pence’s constitutional authorities. One of those lawyers was Mark Martin, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court who’d become dean of the law school at Regent University in Virginia Beach. Trump urged Pence to listen to Martin during a three-way conference call.

Also involved was White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was publicly claiming Pence could stand in the way of Biden taking office. This was what Trump wanted to hear, and it turned him ever harder against the vice president and the legal sticklers on his staff.

Short responded dryly to Navarro’s claims, telling the Wall Street Journal: “Peter Navarro is many things. He is not a constitutional scholar.”

The battle for control of the president’s mind and a parallel struggle over the Constitution brought out warriors on both sides of this unprecedented theater of war inside the White House.

It brought out, too, a healthy dose of prayer for celestial counsel and wisdom from the deeply religious vice president and his senior team as they struggled through the mess. Some of them would soon find themselves in the crosshairs of Trump’s disciples.

After Navarro convinced Trump that Short had turned Pence against him, Trump told aides Short was no longer welcome in the West Wing. Pence’s team, meanwhile, was aggravated that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared to do little to stop the flow of bad information to the president. Rather than act as gatekeeper, Meadows seemed to find ever more crazies to stick in front of the president.

Then, on Dec. 28, Trump ally Congressman Louie Gohmert sued Pence in federal court as part of a bizarre and futile bid to force him to discard Biden’s electors.

Pence’s office suspected that Trump himself had encouraged Gohmert. Days later, Trump called Pence to express surprise after learning that his own Justice Department had intervened in the vice president’s defense.

On a couple of occasions, Short approached Meadows to ask for his advice. Trump’s pressure campaign was growing more desperate, spilling into public view, and the vice-president’s office wanted Meadows’ help in heading off a foreseeable but mounting disaster. Meadows sheepishly responded that expectations for Pence had grown high. He said they needed to “figure that out.” He seemed reluctant to rein things in.

Trump’s floundering campaign to overturn the results of Nov. 3had reached its most obsessive stage. The president’s viewfinder was the same one that had served him well in his days as a combative and flamboyant New York property developer: The deal is the steal and the steal is the deal. If you’re not with me, you’re against me.

In his final weeks, the president had increasingly come to view his inner circle of loyalists as a bunch of weaklings and quitters.

The mild-mannered White House counsel Pat Cipollone, a voice of restraint in the Oval Office and the architect of Trump’s impeachment defense last year, was routinely finding himself in animated debates with the president.

Attorney General Bill Barr, long regarded as the most loyal member of the Cabinet, had left after refusing to endorse Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

On the evening of Jan. 4, with only two days until the votes for Biden were certified, Trump had another stab at changing the vice president’s mind, wheeling in yet another of his outside experts.

“You know Mike, he’s a really respected constitutional lawyer,” the president insisted from behind the Resolute Desk. “You should really hear him out.”

Trump was referring to John Eastman, a conservative attorney and one of several fringe voices claiming that the vice president had the power to derail the Electoral College certification process.

Outside on the South Lawn, Marine One hummed, waiting to take the president to Joint Base Andrews. From there, Air Force One would whisk him to Georgia to rally for the following day’s Senate runoff elections.

Earlier, Short had told Meadows that Pence would agree to meet with Eastman before the Jan. 6 joint session, but that he didn’t want a “cast of characters” like Giuliani to attend. Meadows agreed and Giuliani was proscribed, for that meeting at least.

Now Eastman was seated in front of Trump — along with Pence and several other senior officials. Pence patiently and deliberately cross-examined Eastman about his legal theory, which effectively argued the vice president had unilateral authority to send electors back to state legislatures if they believed there was unconstitutional fraud.

One example cited was from 1801, when Thomas Jefferson counted electors from Georgia in his favor after the certificate he was presented with was defective.

But the theory was bunk, in Team Pence’s firm view. Nobody had disputed that Jefferson had won Georgia, and the 12th Amendment passed three years later made the entire precedent moot. Moreover, in 1887, the Electoral Count Act was passed to clarify this even further.

If Thomas Jefferson could do it, then Mike Pence could do it, the fringe advisers were telling the president. But Pence’s own legal advisers were telling him those ideas were rubbish, and that there were 150 years of legal precedent to say so.

Eastman cited another example from 1961, when Hawaii sent multiple slates of electors to Congress due to a late recount that flipped the state’s narrow margin from red to blue. In this instance, unlike in 2020, both slates were certified, and no one objected to Nixon magnanimously counting the Democratic electors for John F. Kennedy, who was the clear winner.

In essence, Pence’s staff believed Eastman was advocating for a maximalist position that no serious conservative could support — the monarchical idea that one man could overturn a U.S. election. Eastman disputed this characterization, telling Axios that he was simply advocating for Pence to delay the certification for a few days so that state legislatures could review the election.

Trump would not give up. Later that night in a rally in Dalton, Georgia,ahead of the Senate runoffs, he told a crowd of rowdy supporters: “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you … He’s a great guy. Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much.”

Across the state in the small town of Milner, Pence told his own crowd gathered in a church: “I promise you, come this Wednesday, we’ll have our day in Congress, we’ll hear the objections, we’ll hear the evidence.”

Trump called Pence late morning on Jan. 6 to take one last shot at bullying the vice president into objecting to the certification of Biden’s victory.

As Pence rode to the U.S. Capitol to preside over the joint session of Congress, Trump addressed his fateful rally at the Ellipse. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … He has the absolute right to do it,” Trump said.

“All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” Trump declared as he whipped up the crowd. “After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you,” Trump shouted — falsely as it turned out, as he had no intention of marching with the mob.

He amped things up a bit more in what many now point to as evidence of incitement: “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

While Trump was speaking, Pence released a long statement acknowledging the inevitable: He did not have the constitutional authority to carry out Trump’s wishes. And he would uphold his oath.

Then the pro-Trump mob took off to breach the Capitol, hell-bent on blocking the vote. As they ransacked the building, some rioters were heard chanting: “Hang Mike Pence!”

Pence and his family were evacuated from the Senate chamber and taken to a secure site, where the vice president remained for hours. Trump, sequestered in his private dining room to watch the TV coverage, placed no calls to check on Pence’s safety.

As late as 2:42 p.m., the president was still tweeting abuse against the man who had pledged his loyalty more strenuously than any other politician over the past four years. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump announced on Twitter, shortly before Twitter threw him off.

Some Republican allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would not speak to Trump again after what unfolded at the Capitol. McConnell would point the finger at Trump.

But not Pence. After all the bullying, the abuse, the Twitter tirades, the calls to violence, Pence assessed his options. He’d stood with Trump — not complaining, not explaining — through the four years. He was a vehement conservative, more ideologue than transactional. He’d broken with Trump on this one matter — the sanctity of democratically held elections — and he still had other fish to fry.

Five days later, Pence broke the silence, meeting again with Trump on Jan. 11 in the Oval Office. They’d visit again in person on Jan. 14 and on a call on Jan. 15. But on the eve of the transfer of power, Pence’s team made clear he’d not be able to attend Trump’s final sendoff at Joint Base Andrews, choosing instead to attend Biden’s swearing in.

Many believe Pence intends to run for president in 2024. He is likely to preserve his bridge to Trump beyond Jan. 20, at least long enough to understand whether it’s needed — or not.

Pence is on a rehabilitation tour and many members of the press are all too ready to help him with that. Beware. He is Trump’s number one collaborator, never forget it.

He and his friend Pat Cipollone seen to have decided to try anyway. The latest Final Days dispatch from Jonathan Swan shows him as some kind of hero fighting to contain Trump during the Black Lives Matter protests, which is really rich. And it actually makes him look worse. If the account is true, he knew how nuts Trump was and didn’t say anything about it. And then he wrote that bizarre sycophantic resignation letter to boot.

Anyway, Emptywheel dispatches him smartly:

Among the things Bill Barr did in his second tour as Attorney General were to:

Make speeches arguing that progressive politics were a threat to the nation

Spend months prioritizing the criminalization of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, even as his own department showed that right wing terrorism was a far more serious problem and the Boogaloos were deliberately attempting to launch false flag operations pinned on Antifa

Repeatedly claim mail-in ballots were prone to fraud in defiance of the evidence, a key part of Trump’s later attempts to undermine the outcome of the election

Treat overt threats against a judge from the Proud Boys as a technicality unworthy of a sentencing enhancement

Continue a policy of disciplining, firing, or criminalizing Department personnel who investigated Trump and his associates

Even at a time Barr admitted he was unfamiliar with the evidence — and persistently throughout his tenure — undermine the premise and conduct of the Russian investigation, appointing at least three US Attorneys to undermine the investigation

Dedicate department personnel to chase conspiracy theories spun by Sidney Powell in a failed attempt to undermine a legitimate prosecution

Not only provide Rudy Giuliani direct access to the Department, but (by all appearances) undermine criminal charges against him for influence peddling involving now-sanctioned Russian agents

In short, over an extended period, Bill Barr laid the groundwork for the two-month effort to undermine the election that culminated in a coup attempt. The outcome of Barr’s actions — the disparate treatment by the department of Trump supporters, the empowerment of right wing terrorists, the continued influence of Powell and Rudy —  was foreseeable. Nevertheless, Barr persisted with those policies that laid the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection.

In spite of that record, Barr continues to find journalists willing to spin a fairytale completely inconsistent with this record, one of Barr standing up to Trump as he pursued this path.

Consider this account of Bill Barr’s decision to quit from Jonathan Swan.

It provides a dramatic account of how Barr denounced Trump’s conspiracy theories — all rooted in claims about the delayed counting of mail-in ballots that Barr had stoked for months.

The president’s theories about a stolen election, Barr told Trump, were “bullshit.”

White House counsel Pat Cipollone and a few other aides in the room were shocked Barr had come out and said it — although they knew it was true.

It describes Barr’s frustration with Trump’s demands about the Durham investigation without mentioning that Barr repeatedly fed those expectations.

He was sick of Trump making public statements and having others do so to whip up pressure against U.S. Attorney John Durham to bring more prosecutions or to put out a report on the Russia investigation before the election.

It also allows Barr to call Rudy and Sidney “clownish,” without mentioning that those very same clowns had gotten Barr to squander the credibility of DOJ on similarly outlandish conspiracy theories, including but not limited to the Mike Flynn prosecution.

For good measure, the attorney general threw in a warning that the new legal team Trump was betting his future on was “clownish.”

[snip]

The president had become too manic for even his most loyal allies, listening increasingly to the conspiracy theorists who echoed his own views and offered an illusion, an alternate reality.

[snip]

But Barr’s respite ended after Election Day, as Trump teamed up with an array of conspiracy theorists to amplify preposterous theories of election interference, arguing that Biden and the Chinese Communist Party, among others, had stolen the election from him.

It presents the conflict over using the military to quell summer protests, without mentioning Barr’s own role in militarizing the response (to say nothing of treating BLM more harshly than right wing terrorists).

By the late summer of 2020, Trump and Barr were regularly skirmishing over how to handle the rising Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd while in police custody. As the national movement unfurled, some protests had given way to violence and looting. Trump wanted the U.S. government to crack down hard on the unrest.

The president wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military into U.S. cities. He wanted troops in the street.

[snip]

Besides, Barr asked, what was the endgame for adding the military to the mix? Federal forces could end up stranded in a city like Portland indefinitely.

Trump grew more and more frustrated, but Barr pushed back harder, standing his ground in front of everyone in the room. He was ready, willing and able to be strong, he said. But, he added, we also have to be thoughtful.

In short, this dramatic profile presents a fictional character, wise old Attorney General Bill Barr, who stood up against the President’s worst instincts, wisely resisting the urge to politicize investigations, trump up claims of voter fraud, chase the theories of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and back a violent crackdown against Trump’s opponents.

Except that profile is entirely fictional. That Bill Barr is a myth carefully crafted with the help of obliging reporters.

The reality is that over two years of not just tolerating these efforts, but usually taking affirmative steps to foster them, Billy Barr helped to create this monster, even though he was one of the people with the obligation to stop it.

With his corruption as Attorney General Bill Barr fostered this monster. He should get no credit for skipping out before the predictable outcomes of his own actions blew up on January 6.

You can replace Barr’s name in this story w/ any cabinet mbr w/ #NatSec responsibility. It happened over & over. In 2017, we assumed he could be contained. By 2020, it was obvious he could not. Barr & others should have told the public how dire the situation was b/f the election. https://t.co/bcvFQFMCCe

— Elizabeth Neumann (@NeuSummits) January 18, 2021

He knew and he went along. And, as you can see from Marcy Wheeler’s concise indictment, he was eagerly carrying out his own and Trump’s agenda.

That guy helped Trump evade political responsibility for what he did in 2016 when he mischaracterized the Mueller Report. And from there it was off to the races. He must never be allowed to whitewash his legacy.

Barr one said, “History is written by the winners.” He won’t be one of them. He will be remembered as one of American history’s greatest losers: a Trump collaborator.