Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

With Republicans going insane, it’s an important backstop

This article from the indispensable Bolts Magazine about the assault on the ballot in red states is well worth reading:

The resounding defeat of Ohio’s Issue 1, a constitutional amendment that would have undercut direct democracy in the state, received wall-to-wall coverage last week because it salvaged the prospect that Ohioans may adopt a ballot measure protecting abortion rights in November. 

Abortion advocates rejoiced, but for some organizers watching around the country, the result was especially exhilarating because it spoke to the fight they’re going through in their own backyards to defend direct democracy.

South Dakotans last year defeated an amendment similar to Ohio’s, which came on the heels of initiatives to increase the minimum wage and legalize cannabis and would have kneecapped a measure to expand Medicaid. In Arkansas, the GOP repeatedly asked voters to limit the initiative process but lost repeatedly at the polls; this year, they adopted new restrictions anyway. Idaho organizers in 2018 expanded Medicaid through a ballot measure, and the GOP keeps trying to make initiatives harder ever since.

Anti-initiative proposals just keep popping up in many other places, including Arizona, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah. And they reemerge even after they’re defeated, forcing proponents of direct democracy to dedicate capacity and resources to protecting the rules of engagement—and to constantly look over their shoulder.

Bolts this week gathered three organizers who have fought this dynamic in each of three states that are undergoing this dynamic: Ohio, Arkansas, and Idaho. Their meeting sparked a wide-ranging conversation about their shared frustrations and strategies.

Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, was active in the campaign to defeat Issue 1 this summer. Kwami Abdul-Bey, elections coordinator at the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, helped form a coalition to defeat a similar measure in Arkansas last year. As the co-founder of Reclaim Idaho, Luke Mayville launched the initiative to expand Medicaid in 2018 and he has since organized to defend the initiative process in Idaho. 

In a conversation that took place days after Ohio’s election, they took stock of the fights they are  embroiled in together and discussed what explains their convergence. “Oligarchic agendas,” Mayville said, “have everything to gain from shutting down the initiative process.” They’ve each worked separately to protect initiatives in their states, but the attacks they faced and the lessons they learned are similar, and they shared organizing and messaging tips with one another.

“This is a great group to be talking to,” Lewis said. “Because they’re not doing this in one state, they do these things repeatedly in different states, so why shouldn’t we strategize?” 

Read on for the interviews. They are inspiring.

As a Californian I have had mixed feelings about ballot measures. Our direct democracy provisions originated as a response to dominance by elite interests many decades ago but developed into an easily gamed system by those very same interests. But it’s nonetheless necessary and still often useful since it’s often the only way to counter anti-democratic moves by autocratic interests within the government. More power to those who are fighting for democracy.

this is concerning

Via Salon:

On May 11, 2023, the federal public health emergency declaration for COVID-19 came to an end. Only a few months later, and cases are already starting to surge across the country again . This decision was made despite emerging science surrounding long COVID – a condition in which symptoms of the disease linger for months or even years. While the general public ignores and downplays the risk of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, long COVID may well prove to be one of the biggest health problems of the 21st Century, presenting a real risk that a secondary pandemic of chronic illness will be overlooked.

While things seem to be getting back to normal for most people, those with long COVID are still suffering – and this suffering will likely continue on indefinitely if nothing is done to change course.

As previously reported by Salon, an alarming scientific pattern is revealing itself across intersecting areas of research, which suggests that long COVID could be linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s – having to do with the misfolding of alpha-synuclein proteins in the human nervous system. This misfolding is possibly triggered by an initial COVID infection and can lead to unwanted accumulation of alpha-synuclein and the formation of Lewy bodies, resulting in neurological disorders.

It’s imperative that we follow this trail of science all the way through to the end. We can hope it’s disproved, but ignoring it will leave us headed in the direction of disaster: debilitating, chronic, irreversible health conditions — or what some are calling a “mass-disabling event.”

However, as a result of the Public Health Emergency Act expiring, COVID research and tracking has become more difficult. Coverage for tests, contact tracing, research funding, data reporting – it’s all been thrown out the window, along with what little COVID precaution was left. Yet every COVID infection still puts an individual at risk of developing long COVID – which, according to the data, is increasingly likely among the less vaccinated and the more times you’ve contracted the virus.

It remains unclear whether certain COVID variants have greater potential to cause long COVID, but what is clear is that long haulers (people with long COVID) often report symptoms that line up with what those going through the prodromal (subclinical) phases of various brain diseases describe – meaning that long COVID patients are quite possibly experiencing the early stages of neurodegeneration.

The article is quite long and if you’re following this I highly recommend that you read it. This information is starting to surface all over the place and it’s quite concerning. Don[t throw those masks away. You may need them.

I don’t understand why Georgia makes the names of jurors public but they really shouldn’t. Transparency is one thing. This is not that, especially in high profile cases. It’s reckless:

Names, photographs, social media profiles and even the home addresses purportedly belonging to members of the Fulton County grand jury that this week voted to indict former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants are circulating on social media – with experts saying that some anonymous users are calling for violence against them.

CNN cannot independently verify if the photographs, social media accounts and the homes addresses being posted actually belong to the grand jurors.

However, the names being circulated on these sites appear to match the names of at least 13 of the 26 grand jurors that served on the panel in Fulton County. It’s unclear if those names are the actual grand jurors or just people with the same name. Some addresses appear to be wrong.

Unlike the federal system, when someone is indicted in Fulton County, the indictment includes the names of all the grand jurors who served on the 26-member panel that handed up the charges. However, the indictment, which is a public record that’s available on the court website, does not include their addresses or any other personally identifiable information.

Also, on some forums, users are posting multiple social media profiles of different people who have the same name as some of the grand jurors.

This creates an additional layer of risk, Daniel J. Jones, the president of Advance Democracy, a non-profit organization that conducts public-interest investigations and monitors extremism online, told CNN. The posting of social media profiles and home addresses of people who happen to share the name of a grand juror increases their risk of harassment and other forms of harm, he said.

CNN is not naming the websites where these details are being posted, but they range from a major social media profile, to pro-Trump forums, to sites that have previously been linked to violent extremist attacks.

CNN has reached out to the Fulton County sheriff’s office for comment.

In one instance, one pro-Trump personality shared screenshots with his more than 2 million followers showing what were purportedly the social media profiles of the grand jurors. That post has since been removed.

The same personality previously promoted Pizzagate, an infamous conspiracy theory that led to an armed man firing an assault rifle at a Washington, DC, pizza parlor in 2016, who claimed he was attempting to find and rescue child sex slaves that he believed were being held at the restaurant. That belief allegedly based on his reading of an online conspiracy theory that falsely connected Hillary Clinton’s campaign adviser to the pizzeria through coded messages in his leaked emails.

Some of the posts baselessly accused District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, of stacking the grand jury with left-wing activists. The politics and voting history of potential grand jurors were not discussed during the selection process last month, which occurred mostly in open court and was observed by CNN and other reporters at the courthouse.

Ben Decker, the CEO of Memetica, a threat intelligence company, told CNN Wednesday, “Many of the platforms where these discussions are taking place have a long history of being linked to violent extremism, including a slate of mass shootings and politically-motivated acts of violence like the Capitol insurrection.”

So far, none of the grand jurors in Fulton County have publicly spoken about the high-profile case.

The panel of Atlanta-area residents was sworn in earlier this summer and voted on routine indictments in gun and drug cases – before Willis brought them the Trump case on Monday. They spent roughly 10 hours behind closed doors, hearing testimony presented by prosecutors and from key witnesses, including Georgia’s former lieutenant governor and two former state lawmakers, before approving the historic indictment.

The Atlanta Police Department is supporting the Fulton County sheriff’s office regarding potential safety issues to the grand jurors.

APD spokeswoman Chata Spikes told CNN that the sheriff’s office is the lead agency, but the police department is able and willing to help if needed.

A law enforcement source with knowledge of the security situation told CNN that the jurors are being “doxxed” and their safety is a main concern right now.

“We are in a situation where people are being threatened to be killed for doing their civic duty. It is an unfortunate reality that, as part of Georgia law, their names are made public, but that’s what we’re dealing with,” the source told CNN.

The source said it will be up to the sheriff’s office to initiate “directed patrols” to protect the jurors and alert the individual police departments about specific threats.

The source said there may be a statement later Thursday from the sheriff’s office related to juror safety.

Meanwhile:

“You are in our sights, we want to kill you.”

This was the totally normal, not-at-all terrifying voicemail that a Donald Trump supporter left for Judge Tanya Chutkan, the U.S. District Court judge in Washington who is presiding over one of the former president’s indictment cases.

A Texas woman was arrested Wednesday for making this threatening call to Chutkan. Abigail Jo Shry called Chutkan’s chambers on August 5, two days after Trump was indicted in Washington, D.C., for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Shry called Chutkan, who is Black, a “stupid slave” and said the judge would be “targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.” Shry warned that “if Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”

When she was arrested, Shry admitted that she had also threatened to kill Texas Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who is also Black.

That’s Trump pouting about his unflattering pictures. He’s not doing well.

But he is strategic in one way. He’getting his racist base riled up about the Atlanta indictment” Huffington Post:

Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin said she believes Donald Trump intentionally used the word “riggers” as a racial dog whistle following his Georgia indictment.

Hours after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis released the racketeering indictment charging Trump and 18 allies in a conspiracy to change Georgia’s 2020 election results, Trump raged against the case on his Truth Social platform.

The former president claimed to have evidence that would lead to a “complete EXONERATION of him and his allies, adding: “They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”

Many of his supporters quickly began using the term on far-right social media sites, some in a derogatory manner alluding to the racist slur.

Keith Boykin, a former White House aide to Bill Clinton, accused Trump of thinly veiled racism, writing on social media: “He wrote ‘RIGGERS’ but what know what he really meant.”

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Griffin agreed with that assessment.

“With Trump, you don’t need to look for a dog whistle — it’s a bullhorn when it comes to race,” she said. “And I do think that’s deliberate.”

Griffin pointed to the “slanderous attacks” Trump has leveled against Willis, who is Black, adding that “he’s not really hiding that he’s going to lean into that element.”

She also pointed to the demographics in the Atlanta courtroom where a grand jury returned the indictment earlier this week.

“It was a lot of Black men and women who were serving in that courtroom,” Griffin said. “The fact that he’s introducing race into this prosecution surprises me. It’s disgusting. It’s textbook Donald Trump.”

Racist abuse targeting Willis has escalated across right-wing platforms since the charges were revealed on Monday night. According to The Guardian, several Gab posts included images of nooses and gallows, and called for Willis and grand jurors in the case to be hanged.

I knew the minute I read it exactly what he was up to. His followers caught it too, you know they did.

New polling on the Trump indictments:

In a week where former President Donald Trump was indicted for a fourth time, a majority (63%) of Americans say that the charges approved by a grand jury in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state are serious (47%) or somewhat serious (16%), according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.

Trump’s latest indictment was handed up on Monday in Fulton County and charges him and 18 others in what District Attorney Fani Willis alleged was a “criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results.”

Trump maintains he did nothing wrong and has claimed the four cases against him are politically motivated and “un-American,” which prosecutors deny. He has pleaded not guilty to his three previous indictments but has not yet appeared in court in Georgia.

The public’s view on the gravity of Trump’s latest charges is similar to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in early August right after Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in the nation’s capital on charges related to Jan. 6 and efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

That poll found that 65% of Americans thought Trump’s federal indictment was serious or somewhat serious.

Only a quarter of adults say the indictment this week is not too serious (10%) or not serious at all (15%). Earlier in August, a similar number (24%) said Trump’s Jan.6-related charges were not serious.

A plurality of Americans — 49% — think Trump should have been charged with a crime in the Georgia case, while 32% do not think he should have been. Fifty percent of Americans say Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, while 33% don’t think he should, per the ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.

At the same time, a plurality (49%) think that the charges in Georgia against Trump are politically motivated, while 35% think they are not. All of these findings are similar to the poll taken right after Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment.

What? Only 35% think they’re not politically motivated? So a bunch of Dems and Indies believe that Jack Smith is doing this for political reasons? Not good …

This really floors me:

Biden and Trump’s favorability ratings both stand at 31%, and most Americans view both Biden (54%) and Trump (55%) unfavorably.

Biden’s just as unpopular as the guy who incited a violent insurrection, was impeached twice, and found liable for sexual assault and just got his 4th felony indictment for a total of 91 charges? This is even as we have the lowest unemployment in 60 years and inflation has dropped to normal levels after the pandemic emergency? Why, because he’s old?

This country is ridiculous.

Look who thinks she’s going to be president:

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is looking at potential opportunities for higher office, including in the Senate or a potential second Trump administration.

Greene has emerged as a key ally to both former President Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published Wednesday, Greene didn’t rule out running for U.S. Senate in 2026, telling the outlet, “I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not.”

-She added: “I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s Cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?”
-Greene said would “very, very heavily” consider being Trump’s running mate if asked, saying it would be “an honor.”
-The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Greene, who was first elected in 2020 and has transitioned from a leadership antagonist to a vocal McCarthy advocate, was kicked out of the right-wing Freedom Caucus last month amid growing divisions within the group over style and substance.

-She has maintained her close affinity with Trump, rushing to his defense over the various federal and state indictments he has faced in recent months.
-Former Trump aide Steve Bannon said in January that Greene “sees herself on the short list for Trump’s VP,” quipping: “when MTG looks in the mirror she sees a potential president smiling back.”

I wish I believed it was impossible … but I don’t. We are in a crazy, political era and I’m afraid that all bets are off.

Here’s your future president just three years ago when she first discovered politics:

Such a stable genius.

You know he would

J.V. Last considers how Donald Trump might stage his booking in Atlanta:

From the time of his (latest) indictment, Donald Trump has 10 days to surrender himself to the authorities in Fulton County. The clock started running on August 14.

Ten days takes us to August 24.

You know what’s happening on August 23?

It would not surprise me—at all—if Trump chooses to surrender himself on August 23. He’d then take over the entire news cycle that day with its wall-to-wall coverage of the fingerprinting and mugshot.

And then Trump goes straight from the jail to a giant Trump rally that runs—and here I’m just spitballing—from 8-11pm ET.

He would absolutely do that. It’s his style up one side and down the other.

The entire Republican debate would be swamped. The candidates on the stage would have extra pressure to light themselves on fire in order to break through. And the second-day stories would be about how Trump schlonged Fox and the rest of the field.

Trump isn’t smart, but he is cunning and he understands both power and weakness. And he sees the same things we’re all seeing.

Trump did it to the Prime Minister of Montenegro. He’d do it to his GOP rivals in a heartbeat.

https://twitter.com/SteveKopack/status/867758571882258432?s=20

Buckle up

“You could see this one coming a mile off,” snarked Charlie Pierce (Washington Post):

A federal appeals court said Wednesday that it would restrict access to a widely used abortion medication after finding that the federal government did not follow the proper process when it loosened regulations in 2016 to make the pill more easily available.

Food and Drug Administration decisions to allow the drug mifepristone to be taken later in pregnancy, be mailed directly to patients and be prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor were not lawful, a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled.

Mifepristone will remain available while the Department of Justice appeals the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“You damn bet it will,” Pierce continued. “Right into the lap of Justice Sam Alito, who will undoubtedly find some obscure codicil in the Code of Hammurabi to justify upholding the ruling of the 5th Circuit, which is the Uruk-Hai to Alito’s Saruman anyway. All the lawyers seeking to ban the drug will need to do is talk very fast and use the word ‘abortifacient’ a lot. And the ducks will all be marching in formation.”

“Sooner or later, some loaded court will declare all contraceptives to be ‘abortifacients,'” Pierce adds, “and that will be the final end for a protected right of privacy.”

The three judges on the 5th Circuit “were appointed by Republican presidents. During oral arguments in May, the trio indicated a willingness to restrict access to the drug,” reports The Hill. “Medication abortion currently accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the White House stands behind the FDA’s decision. Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement to that effect. That’s nice, but not very comforting for women watching their options for self-determination slip away.

We’ve seen that radicalized MAGA Republican pols, to date anyway, are not particularly attuned to public opinion on such matters. They’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. It remains to be seen if the Roberts Court has ears to hear what voters in Kansas, Ohio and several other states said with their votes so loudly so recently.

The Hill again:

Some conservative groups are pleading with candidates to abandon extreme positions, reports The Hill’s Nathaniel Weixel. The goal of a national abortion ban remains remote, they argue, and the aim is to win elections nationwide next year and then to continue working on restricting abortions in the states. The upshot is a “circular firing squad” among right-leaning groups and candidates, according to Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.  

[…]

Republican leaders in the nation’s capital have attempted to move beyond the abortion issue, but state conservatives want to keep abortion in the national spotlight. Senate Republicans believe conservative anti-abortion moves by state legislatures and governors could backfire and wind up boosting Democratic candidates in Arizona, Montana, Nevada and Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio.  

The GOP is playing with fire. Backlash to Trump in 2018 and 2020 rained on the GOP’s parades. Backlash to the Dobbs decision in 2022 turned their midterm red tsunami into a ripple. It’s not that they are slow learners as much as conservative muscle memory for doubling/tripling/quadrupling down has more influence over the GOP. Democracies depend on the consent of the governed. MAGA Republicans are building a Margaret Atwood-inspired autocracy.

Chastity belts are considered inventions of myth, and museum specimens believed created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “curiosities for the prurient, or as jokes for the tasteless.” 

That perfectly describes the immediate past occupant of the White House as well as his reputation as a business genius and champion of Christians. Seventy-four million Americans voted for him in 2020.

The throwback right won’t stop at Dobbs, or at statewide abortion bans, or at banning mifepristone. They’ll move on to chasity belts. Invest in a startup now.

True the Vote finally gets cornered

Texas vote suppression and bullshit artist organization True the Vote is in trouble down in Georgia. These guys have been around for quite a while (I wrote about them for years — here’s one from 2012) but they went mainstream when Trump and his “rigged” mantra came along. They teamed up with the convicted felon and propagandist Dinesh D’Souza for the movie “2,000 Mules” which Trump claims proves his 2020 fraud accusations.

Anyway, it appears they messed with the wrong people. JV Last at the Bulwark has the story:

There’s another 2020 election case percolating in Fulton County: The Georgia State Election Board is suing True the Vote—the group whose “data” makes up the lion’s share of Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules nonsense.

It’s a pretty wild example of FAFO.

The short version: True the Vote is a Texas-based group, which filed a complaint with Georgia’s State Election Board alleging fraud in the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Georgia State Election Board (we’ll just call it the SEB from here on out) investigated this complaint and found no fraud. So it asked True the Vote to share its evidence.

True the Vote’s response was:

The long version of the story is even crazier.

So it’s November 30, 2021, the heady days of #StopTheSteal, a time when anything—even the restoration of Trump to the White House—seemed possible.

That’s when True the Vote submitted its election fraud complaints to SEB as part of the lead-up to the creation of D’Souza’s 2000 Mules cash bonanza.

The complaint was wild stuff. Not just “Hey, maybe shady things happened here?” We’re talking tin-foil hat, “We have the alien autopsy tapes, dammit!”

Here are some selections from the True the Vote complaint:

-“Following a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta, True the Vote obtained [data] . . . which revealed concerning patterns of behavior consistent with reports made to our organization.”

-“True the Vote’s contracted team of researchers and investigators spoke with several individuals regarding personal knowledge, methods, and organizations involved in ballot trafficking in Georgia.”

-“John Doe described a network of non-governmental organizations . . . that worked together to facilitate a ballot trafficking scheme in Georgia.”

-“Curiously, a change in behavior seemed to occur on or around December 23, 2020, the day after Arizona authorities announced that fingerprints on absentee ballot envelopes helped uncover an illegal ballot harvesting scheme in that state. After that announcement, individuals depositing ballots into drop boxes in Georgia are seen wearing blue surgical gloves. They often put them on just before picking up their stacks of ballots and remove them as they exist the drop box area.”

Explosive stuff! Yet when SEB began investigating the complaint, it could find no supporting evidence. On April 21, 2022—just a few weeks before 2000 Mules debuted—SEB sent True the Vote a subpoena requesting some of the documentation the group claimed to have.

For example:

-What evidence was in the group’s “detailed account” of all that ballot harvesting?
-Who were the group’s “researchers and investigators” and how could they be contacted?
-Who were the witnesses? How could SEB interview them? Did True the Vote have sworn statements from them? Recordings of their interviews? Copies of documents they provided?
-Where was John Doe? Were there transcripts of his testimony?

Pretty standard-issue stuff. If you file a complaint making the sort of assertions and allegations True the Vote did, you kind of have to expect the presiding agency to come back and ask for your documentation when it does its investigation.

Instead, True the Vote asked SEB to stop investigating.

No, really. On May 5, True the Vote said—through the group’s lawyer, obviously—that instead of providing the evidence it claimed it had, it would prefer to withdraw its complaint.

The stated reason for True the Vote’s attempt to withdraw its complaint was that the group could not reveal any information about the many people it had spoken with because the group had “pledged confidentiality” to them and these people had “come forward at risk to their personal safety and security.”

SEB’s response is priceless:

Your main objection is that your client’s “pledged confidentiality” regarding certain information sought in the subpoena. You do not specify a basis for this objection, and do not state that it is based on some legally cognizable principle or privilege. Your letter also refers to a general “risk to [your clients’] personal safety and security to varying degrees” . . . but do not provide information or context to explain this basis . . .

Without more, I do not believe there is grounds for a protective order.

You see what’s going on, yes? You have a a bunch of bullshit artists on the make for fun and profit running into a phalanx of lawyers who aren’t willing to let them simply walk away from their BS as though nothing had happened.

[…]

More than a year later, True the Vote still hasn’t complied with SEB’s subpoena, which is what led to the lawsuit. From the complaint:

After multiple good faith efforts by the SEB and its counsel to obtain the requested information and documents, True the Vote continues to indifferently vacillate between statements of assured compliance and blanket refusals, leaving the SEB with no recourse but to report, per the foregoing statute, such conduct to this Court and seek an immediate remedy.

The entire True the Vote business reminds me of my favorite part of the latest Trump indictment. It’s the moment on page 26 when Trump lawyer Ray Stallings Smith testifies before the Georgia State Senate on December 3, 2020 and starts saying . . . all sorts of crazy stuff. Here’s the indictment’s summation of Smith’s testimony:

1. That 2,506 felons voted illegally in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
2. That 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote before their seventeenth birthday prior to the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
3. That at least 2,423 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who were not listed as registered to vote;
4. That 1,043 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who had illegally registered to vote using a post office box;
5. That 10,315 or more dead people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia;
6. That Fulton County election workers at State Farm Arena ordered poll watchers and members of the media to leave the tabulation area on the night of November 3, 2020, and continued to operate after ordering everyone to leave.

Ray Stallings Smith wasn’t on local radio or shooting the breeze with Hannity. He was testifying before one house of the Georgia legislature. And he’s a lawyer. And he just . . . made all of this stuff up.

It’s like these #StopTheSteal people thought they were in a legal Rumspringa, where formal complaints could be filed and testimony could be given and there would be no consequences.

Or maybe the better analogy is that they deluded themselves into believing that the real world functions with the same level of accountability as Twitter.

You’re testifying before a committee? Shitpost away, bro.

You’re submitting a formal complaint? Tell them your sister’s uncle’s boyfriend’s mom said she saw a guy with blue hands stuffing the ballot box next to the 31 Flavors. You can delete the post if you get too much blowback and you’ll get so many new followers by trolling the cucks at the State Election Board. Those squares have to play by the old rules. Suckers!

The right has been claiming voter fraud for decades. Groups like this institutionalized it. Trump the narcissist who can’t ever admit he lost anything was their perfect messenger. The Big Lie was the natural consequence. Now we’ll see if there might be another consequence to this craven, dishonest, strategy.

I don’t think so

The NY Times:

Early in the scrum of the 2016 presidential campaign, the political strategist Rick Wilson bumped into an old boss and strongly advised him not to cast his lot with Donald J. Trump. No good would come of it.

“Even if he wins, he’s going to destroy you,” Mr. Wilson remembered telling Rudolph W. Giuliani. “This guy’s going to humiliate you.”

Mr. Wilson recalled being dismissed as a provincial Floridian unable to understand the bond between two New Yorkers — outer-borough strivers who walked the Manhattan streets with proprietary airs and were now within grasp of once-unimaginable power.

“He’s going to take care of me,” Mr. Wilson said Mr. Giuliani would tell those around him. A cabinet post, probably. Maybe secretary of state.

Never happened. Instead, Mr. Giuliani became Mr. Trump’s secretary of aggression and blind allegiance: his attack dog, legal adviser, unindicted co-conspirator — and now, co-defendant in a criminal conspiracy case.

The two friends from New York, along with 17 others, were indicted Monday in Georgia in a broad racketeering case centered on the sobering charge that they illegally plotted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of its loser, Mr. Trump. Adding to the ignominy for Mr. Giuliani, 79, is that he was once an innovative prosecutor who specialized in federal racketeering cases.

“I think it’s going to be scary for him,” said Mr. Wilson, a former Republican who worked as an adviser to Mr. Giuliani a quarter-century ago and is a leading conservative critic of Mr. Trump. “The justice system is ringing his bell and calling him to account.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani responded to his indictment by calling it “just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling regime.” The Georgia case, he added in his prepared statement, “ is an affront to American democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system.”

On Monday night, as the grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., prepared to hand up the 41-count indictment, Mr. Giuliani could be seen on his nightly livestream show, “America’s Mayor Live,” watching a broadcast of the goings-on at the Atlanta courthouse, making sardonic comments and trying to appear unfazed.

“He’s the consummate happy warrior,” Ted Goodman, Mr. Giuliani’s political adviser, maintained.

Still, the criminal indictment of Mr. Giuliani, his first, marks the lowest point so far in his yearslong reputational tumble. Once heralded as a fearless lawman, game-changing New York City mayor and Sept. 11 hero, he is now defined by a subservience to the 45th president that sometimes veered into buffoonery.

Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mr. Giuliani when he was the United States attorney in Manhattan, is among a legion of former colleagues who struggle to reconcile the Rudys of then and now.

“I found him to be an inspiring leader,” recalled Mr. Richman, now a professor at Columbia Law School. “He was very focused on the law, committed to what the right thing was — and doing it.”

He said that while Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, from 1994 through 2001, had its highs and lows, “he rose to the occasion on Sept. 11th,” reassuring New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

Now?

“In his sad commitment to be relevant, he has thrown himself in with a crew where facts and the law are either irrelevant or there to be twisted,” Mr. Richman said. “It’s the thirst for relevance. The thirst to be in the mix.”

It’s pathetic and incredibly destructive.

In my m ind he was always an asshole and hasn’t really changed all that much except to the extent he’s older and drunker than he used to be. The article describes him becoming “a defender so ferocious that some wondered about his mental well-being.” Yeah, no kidding.

Mr. Giuliani’s pattern of curious legal interpretations, provocative statements and odd behavior kept him in an often unflattering spotlight.

One example: He was duped into appearing in the Sacha Baron Cohen satire “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which the president’s personal lawyer is seen putting his hands down his pants while reclining on the bed of a young actress posing as a reporter. He later said he was tucking in his shirt after removing a microphone.

All mere prologue.

On Election Night 2020, with Mr. Trump’s chances fading by the hour, the president nevertheless declared victory, while also alleging electoral fraud, egged on by a conspiracy-focused Mr. Giuliani. Later, in testifying before the congressional commission investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump aides described Mr. Giuliani as having been highly intoxicated that night, a description he has rejected.

Several days later, on Nov. 12, Mr. Trump’s election lawyers advised the president that they could find no evidence of election fraud, notwithstanding what he had been asserting publicly. But Mr. Giuliani prevailed again, this time by sharing the specious theory that Dominion voting machines had converted thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes, and by encouraging the president to file a lawsuit in Georgia.

Mr. Giuliani’s actions from this point on are detailed in Monday night’s indictment, which echoes the federal indictment filed earlier this month, in which Mr. Trump was charged with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election and Mr. Giuliani appears as unindicted “Co-Conspirator 1.”

The most recent indictment describes, step by frantic step, how Mr. Giuliani possessed a bullheaded determination to prove against all evidence that the election had been stolen, leading a supposedly “elite” team of lawyers that filed dozens of legal challenges across the country and hitting the road with outlandish theories.

Each step, the indictment said, constituted “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy” — legal terminology no doubt acutely familiar to the former federal prosecutor.

He had plenty of experience with conspiracies. Maybe it makes sense that he would automatically help organize one.

He is a clown now. And he’s also apparently almost broke and looking for help to pay his bills. But he is relevant if that’s what he wants. He’s very, very relevant.

Here he is last night on Newsmax:

Giuliani: Fani Willis is a politician, not a lawyer. Not an honest honorable lawyer. This is ridiculous application of the racketeering statute. There's probably no one that knows it better than I do… If she worked for me, I would’ve fired her. pic.twitter.com/KoKL3dVvwk

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 16, 2023

Actually, the man who wrote the indictment is a nationally recognized expert on the RICO statute. Rudy hasn’t prosecuted a case since the 1980s.