339 search results for "certification"

Pence fully breaks with Trump on J6

Pence is cruisin’ for a bruisin’:

 Former Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday harshly criticized former President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, widening the rift between the two men as they prepare to battle over the Republican nomination in next year’s election.

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said during remarks at the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner attended by politicians and journalists. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Pence’s remarks were the sharpest condemnation yet from the once-loyal lieutenant who has often shied away from confronting his former boss. Trump has already declared his candidacy. Pence has not, but he’s been laying the groundwork to run.

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Trump pressured Pence to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory as he presided over the ceremonial certification of the results. Pence refused, and when rioters stormed the Capitol, some chanted that they wanted to “hang Mike Pence.”

The House committee that investigated the attack said in its final report that “the President of the United States had riled up a mob that hunted his own Vice President.”

With his remarks, Pence solidified his place in a broader debate within the Republican Party over how to view the attack. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for example, recently provided Tucker Carlson with an archive of security camera footage from Jan. 6, which the Fox News host has used to downplay the day’s events and promote conspiracy theories.

“Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace,” Pence said in his Gridiron Dinner remarks. “And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”

Trump, meanwhile, has continued to spread lies about his election loss. He’s even spoken in support of the rioters and said he would consider pardoning them if he was reelected.

Speeches at the Gridiron Dinner are usually humorous affairs, where politicians poke fun at each other, and Pence did plenty of that as well.

He joked that Trump’s ego was so fragile, he wanted his vice president to sing “Wind Beneath My Wings” — one of the lines is “did you ever know that you’re my hero?” — during their weekly lunches.

He took another shot at Trump over classified documents.

“I read that some of those classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago were actually stuck in the president’s Bible,” Pence said. “Which proves he had absolutely no idea they were there.”

I still don’t know what he thinks is his constituency. Anyone who hates Trump remembers his four long years of zombie-like boot licking and anyone who loves Trump remembers his “betrayal” by failing to carry out the coup. Is there more than a handful of people who don’t lean one way or another?

It took the GOP just 20 years

Here in North Carolina, this New York Times essay by Margaret Renkl strikes very close to home. Where Republicans are in charge, spite drives policy and rationality takes a holiday. Here or just west in Tennessee, blue cities have targets painted on them:

Last year, when Nashville’s Metro Council voted not to support the state’s bid for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, retaliation was widely understood to be inevitable, according to Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News.

Now we know what shape retaliation will take: Last week, on the first day of the new legislative session, Republicans in both the Tennessee House and Senate introduced legislation that would cut our Metro Council in half. (The bills ostensibly apply to all city governments with a legislative body larger than 20 members, but that’s just Nashville.) If passed, the law would overturn not only a 60-year history but also the will of the Nashville people, who voted in 2015 to keep its 40-member council intact.

The new bills set a “dangerous precedent,” according to the Democratic House caucus chair, John Ray Clemmons. “The G.O.P. supermajority’s continued efforts to overstep into local affairs and usurp the decision-making authority of local officials for the purpose of centralizing more and more power at the state level is concerning,” Mr. Clemmons told The Tennessean. “Ultimately, Nashville families know what’s best for Nashville.”

Remember that oft-quoted Jeffersonian maxim that “government closest to the people serves the people best”? That once was gospel for Republicans. As you’ve guessed, it was as deeply held as Rep. Elise Stefanik’s principles. Preemption is now in vogue where the GOP dominates state legislatures, Renkl observes:

There is, of course, a long history of legislative pre-emption in Tennessee. The tactic is also used by Democratic-controlled legislatures, but it is especially egregious in Southern states governed by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker here introduced a bill that would ban local governments from helping residents fund out-of-state abortions — a policy that members of Nashville’s council have already proposed.

It’s no surprise that the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement is also the party of undermining local governance. But it’s worse this year, or at least it feels worse this year, because this year Nashville voters can’t count on representation at the national level either.

The minoritarian design of the U.S. Senate and surgically precise House gerrymandering left in place by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) have seen to that. Thanks to that decision, Nashville finds its residents represented “by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.”

The GOP’s leveraging minority rule it has effectively engineered is now an issue not just in Nashville but among cities across the country where state capitols are MAGA-controlled.

Mark E. Green, an ardent Trump supporter who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes parts of Nashville, is a vocal election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the far-right flank of the party sought nominal justification to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Even after the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Green voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election. As Holly McCall, the editor in chief of the nonprofit news site the Tennessee Lookout, writes, such behavior from elected officials has “seeded our voting public with mistrust that continues to harm our democracy.”

But wrecking American democracy is not enough for the Dead Dog Party. Last fall Mr. Green flew to Brazil to do the same thing in that much more fragile democracy. In a trip paid for by the American Conservative Union, he met with Brazilian lawmakers pushing to change election laws. The meeting’s agenda: to discuss “voting integrity policies.” We know what happened next: Thanks in part to one of Nashville’s representatives in Congress, anti-democracy riots are now an American export.

Meanwhile, here at home, Mr. Green has just been named chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The Republican Party under George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 over false allegations that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Bush further claimed his goal was to plant and spread democracy across the Middle East, that it “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” Bush imagined a “global democratic revolution.” That pretense did not survive the occupation that spawned ISIS. It certainly did not survive the arrival of anti-democratic MAGA Republicanism roughly a decade later. That Republican Party now exports autocracy abroad and rebrands it as patriotism here at home.

Politico has some highlights of the January 6th transcripts that we didn’t hear about in the hearings. Good lord:

We’ve been combing through the transcripts for new details that weren’t previously aired during the committee’s widely watched public hearings or in its voluminous final report released last week. Here are some of the highlights:

Tarrio’s White House visit

The national chairman of the Proud Boys took a Dec. 12 tour of the White House, and alarm bells went off inside the Secret Service and among other security officials.

Trump deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato told the Jan. 6 committee last month that Robert Engel — the head of Trump’s Secret Service detail — flagged the visit for him as security officials wondered how they let him slip through the cracks.

“Why didn’t we pick up on his role/membership in the Proud Boys?” one official asked Engel, in an email Engel shared with Ornato.

Ornato said he would have shared these concerns with chief of staff Mark Meadows, though he couldn’t recall specifically whether he did.

The thrust of the messages was about potential negative media coverage if Tarrio’s visit had been discovered — which it wasn’t until days or weeks later, thanks to Tarrio’s social media posts.

Cleta Mitchell describes voters as an optional part of the presidential election process

As the select committee peppered her with questions about her relationship to John Eastman, Mitchell expounded at length about her view of voters’ role in the presidential election process.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution about allowing people, citizens to vote on electors,” she notes. “Now that is something that legislatures have over time decided they want to do. But in my view, according to the Constitution, that’s an advisory role that happens because the legislature has created a mechanism to conduct the election.”

Legislatures can “choose to use what the people have decided,” she added. “But that’s not in the Constitution.”

“Now, you may have a different view, but we’re lawyers and we’re both entitled to read the law in the way that we think is appropriate,” Mitchell continued. “And I don’t think people ought to be massacred or put in jail or disbarred because they have a different legal view than you do.”

Planning for violence

The Jan. 6 committee laid out a long string of evidence that agency officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service and the Justice Department were all discussing the possibility of large-scale violence on Jan. 6, some of it directed at the Capitol. Ornato also forwarded an article to Engel about the prospect of violence on Jan. 6

But Ornato said he didn’t recall seeing any of this chatter, despite being a point of contact for the security agencies involved, and he said he didn’t recall whether he read the article he sent.

Ornato also said he didn’t recall the content of a 12-minute call he had on Jan. 6 with Engel, who had been receiving updates about the security situation at the Ellipse, where Trump had begun delivering his speech.

It’s just kind of hard to believe that you don’t recall anything about a conversation when that was going on around the Ellipse and the White House that morning,” an unidentified committee investigator said.

“Sir, I don’t recall that conversation taking place,” Ornato replied.

The select committee homed in on what investigators described as discrepancies between Ornato’s memory of events inside the White House and what Engel told them in a mid-November interview.

Ornato said he didn’t remember discussing Trump’s desire to travel to the Capitol after his speech, and he recalled a quick pop-in to his office by Engel after Trump had returned to the White House.

“Mr. Engel, to share with you, testified that he was in your office in the West Wing when he was discussing expectation — setting expectations and discussing options about a subsequent move to the Capitol,” a committee interviewer told Ornato.

“Sir, I don’t recall that conversation happening in my office,” Ornato replied.

Ornato indicated he had been interviewed once by the Justice Department on Jan. 6 matters but hadn’t appeared before the grand jury. He also said that he spoke to Engel in real time during the live testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, and he said the two of them immediately said, “What is she talking about?”

Lawmakers on Signal

Hutchinson told the select committee that she was in touch with “dozens” of members of Congress via Signal, including GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The hidden hand of Dick Morris

Mitchell — a veteran of GOP campaigns — told the select committee she has represented the campaigns of Mark Meadows, Mike Lee and numerous other lawmakers before she became Trump’s lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

She is also the person who put Eastman on the radar of the Trump campaign and, ultimately, the president himself, proposing in early November 2020 that Eastman draft a paper articulating his belief that state legislatures — not voters — have unilateral authority to decide who should get their states’ presidential electors. That paper would later reach the Oval Office.

But in her own interview with the select committee, Mitchell revealed more details about why she turned to Eastman after a conversation with longtime political operative Dick Morris.

“I reached out to him because Dick Morris had called me. Dick Morris has been a client of mine, a friend of mine, and he called to ask me what I thought about the legislative prerogatives,” Mitchell said. “So I reached out to John about talking to Dick and also I thought he should write a memo, which he did. I don’t remember if he gave it to me or somebody else, but I think I ultimately received it.”

The meaning of “Ali Akbar’

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancee, professed ignorance of many of the events around Jan. 6. She told investigators she “didn’t know all of the ramifications or what the significance was” around the Jan. 6 electoral vote counting, and said she still “couldn’t explain [the certification challenges] to this day.”

Asked whether she knew Ali Akbar, another name for Ali Alexander, the far-right organizer of the ”Stop the Steal” movement, she first asked investigators: “Isn’t that what terrorists yell” before later adding: “I do not know anyone named Allah Akbar.”

Lindsey Graham makes an appearance

Trump-aligned attorney Christina Bobb recounted a conversation between attorney Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in which Graham sought out evidence of election fraud. Bobb recalled Graham saying in a Jan. 2, 2021 meeting to “just give me five dead voters; give me, you know, an example of illegals voting. Just give me a very small snapshot that I can take and champion.”

Vice President Mike Pence’s former aide Chris Hodgson also discussed Graham in his interview, noting that the senator was listed on a call log for Pence the day before Jan. 6, next to the words “express support.” Hodgson said he viewed the notation as an indication that Graham had expressed support for Pence’s plan to count the electoral votes certified by the states, declaring President Joe Biden the winner.

Trump Jr. and the Jan. 6 Meadows texts

The select committee has long highlighted the urgent texts Trump Jr. sent to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows amid the violence on Jan. 6, worrying that the attack would define his father’s legacy and urging a more forceful public response. But the panel never explained why Trump Jr. went through Meadows, rather than directly to his father, with those concerns. In his interview with the committee, Trump Jr. said the reason was logistical: He was traveling at the time, either en route to an airport or in one, and didn’t want to call his father directly.

“If I was in those areas, I wouldn’t want to have a conversation that way,” Trump Jr. said. His father, he added, doesn’t text or send emails, so reaching him that way wouldn’t have been an option.

Putting the Ray Epps conspiracies to bed

The select committee released a 97-page interview with Ray Epps — the subject of far-right conspiracy theories that said he was working with the FBI to get Trump supporters thrown in jail on Jan. 6 — that makes clear he’s not a government agent who played a role in igniting the attack on the Capitol. Epps, an Oath Keeper from Arizona, drew attention from Donald Trump himself after his far-right allies began circulating video of Epps on Jan. 5, telling people to go into the Capitol the next day.

Epps testified that he had no relationship with any law enforcement agency and no contacts with anyone at any of those agencies in the weeks leading up to and on Jan. 6.

New details on Meadows’ handling of documents

POLITICO first broke the news that Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, told the select committee her then-boss sometimes burned documents in his office fireplace during the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 — including at times after meeting with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). Hutchinson’s transcripts offer new details about what she says she witnessed.

It wasn’t just once, Hutchinson recalled. She saw Meadows burn papers after Perry’s visits “between two and four times.” Those meetings, she said, were about “election issues.”

Hutchinson also provided a lengthy description of a bizarre episode in which House Intelligence Committee Republican staffers trucked cartloads of documents to the White House and reviewed them in Meadows’ office for potential release. The timing and description of the episode tracks closely with Trump’s effort to declassify and expose records related to the FBI’s investigation of his campaign’s contacts with Russia, which Trump has long derided as a “witch hunt.”

The former Meadows aide described the unusual way the document review proceeded, noting that the files were brought to the White House from the Capitol and that Meadows kept the original documents in an office safe, closely guarding them and keeping their origins secret. Eventually, he would produce at least eight copies of the documents, with varying degrees of redaction, intending to supply at least two of them to conservative media allies.

Hutchinson noted that one set of documents was meant for House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy — but that the California Republican told her he wanted nothing to do with them. She said based on that conversation, she opted not to offer a set to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.

Transcripts also revealed Meadows’ Secret Service code name: “Leverage.”

25th Amendment talk

The select committee has released transcripts from several members of Trump’s Cabinet, mostly detailing the days immediately following the attack on Jan. 6, 2021. Most notable was the interview with former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who discussed efforts to persuade Trump or his allies to convene a Cabinet meeting in order to take potential steps to limit Trump’s actions in the final days of his administration. Scalia said he had spoken to other Cabinet members about what to do in the aftermath of the attack.

The panel spoke with Elaine Chao, Trump’s Transportation secretary and wife to McConnell, who resigned immediately after Jan. 6 and took a more muted view of the post-attack discussions. She said she didn’t recall her conversation with Scalia, but she agreed that Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 contributed to her decision to resign.

“I wish that he had acted differently,” Chao said of Trump.

There was little serious consideration of the 25th Amendment, according to the transcripts. Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told the panel why: Any genuine effort would take weeks, well beyond the end of Trump’s term, given that the procedure gives the president a chance to appeal.

Short said he received a call from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment, but he said he refused to connect the call to Pence because Short viewed it as a purely political move.

Hutchinson also said she received calls from members of Congress for status updates on discussions on invoking the 25th Amendment. Among those who reached out, she said, were Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), McCarthy and Reps. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and Mike Johnson (R-La.). Johnson’s office denied that he brought up the 25th Amendment or talked to Hutchinson during that time period.

Attorney-client relationships

Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who was a link between the president and some of his fringiest outside advisers, told the select committee that she had attorney-client relationships with four members of Congress over election-related matters. The four: Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

Trump allies feared legal repercussions for declaring themselves true electors

Federal prosecutors are eyeing the decisions of pro-Trump Republican activists in seven Biden-won states to design certificates that claimed they were the state’s duly qualified presidential electors. That false electors scheme was a central element of Trump’s bid to remain in power. But in two states — Pennsylvania and New Mexico — the electors insisted that the documents they signed included a caveat: Their status as true electors hinged on whether court rulings affected the outcome of the election.

That caveat may have saved them the legal scrutiny that’s been applied in other states. And now, thanks to the interview of former Trump campaign official Mike Roman, it’s clear why it happened.

Committee staffers read an email from Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro noting that in a conference call with Pennsylvania’s pro-Trump elector nominees, a concern was raised about the potential for legal exposure if they signed documents without any qualifiers. Chesebro apparently suggested using the caveat in other states as well, but only New Mexico followed suit.

Mundane moments as the Capitol assault began

The select committee transcripts are littered with personal stories about where witnesses were the moment rioters bashed their way into the Capitol. Two from Pence’s top aides stand out. His chief counsel, Greg Jacob, described being at the Capitol refectory on the first floor of the Senate, grabbing a coffee, when a nearby window was smashed in by a rioter with a police shield. That turned out to be Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy and the very first rioter to breach the building.

“There was no security that I could see down there, and the glass had shattered just down the hall from where we are, probably 60 feet away,” Jacob recalled.

Jacob said he quickly tapped out an email to attorney John Eastman — an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to stay in power — with whom he’d been feuding throughout the day. Jacob told the committee that to get back to Pence, who by then had left the Senate floor, he followed the military aide with the so-called nuclear football, a briefcase with the nuclear codes, convinced that she would be permitted to get close to the vice president.

Short recalled a similar experience, except he was one floor lower than Jacob, getting lunch from the Senate carryout.

“You’re in line waiting for a cheeseburger when all hell breaks loose,” a committee staffer noted during Short’s interview.

Short said he sprinted back to Pence’s location as rioters began to enter the building. “I never got my cheeseburger,” he noted.

The most hostile Jan. 6 interview

Rep.-elect Max Miller’s (R-Ohio) interview with the Jan. 6 select committee was notable if only for the outright hostility he and his lawyer displayed for the panel.

Even other witnesses who had little regard for the committee largely played nice in their interviews. But Miller and his attorney repeatedly derided the panel’s investigators, objected to even basic, foundational questions and openly attacked the committee as an illegitimate “show” rather than a serious probe.

“It’s a simple question,” an unidentified committee interviewer said, at one point, after Miller’s attorney objected to a question about how often Miller interacted with Trump during the months before Jan. 6. “No one is trying to do a perjury trap.”

Later, Miller’s attorney Larry Zukerman attacked the committee investigator for “putting on a show for the congresswoman and the congressman” — a reference to Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who had dialed into the call.

“You know, this is all pomp and circumstance here that will eventually lead to nothing,” Zukerman said.

Eventually, the repeated insults provoke Kinzinger to chime in, accusing Miller’s attorney of being the one trying to “put on a show.” He then inadvertently referred to the committee as “the prosecution,” prompting a sharp response from Miller, who said he viewed Cheney’s presence in the interview as “trying to intimidate me because I knocked your buddy off the block” — a reference to his primary victory over Cheney ally Anthony Gonzalez earlier this year.

Fuentes was eyed by criminal investigators

Nick Fuentes made headlines when Trump hosted him as a dinner guest in November, but the select committee had long eyed him as figure of interest for the role his “Groyper” movement played in the attack on the Capitol. Groypers are the followers of the white nationalist Fuentes, and several of them have been charged for playing leading roles on Jan. 6. Fuentes didn’t go into the Capitol but was outside as rioters clashed with police, and he later described the scene as “awesome.”

In his February deposition, Fuentes pleaded the Fifth, and his attorney informed the select committee that the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. had labeled him a “subject and possibly a target” of an ongoing criminal probe.

Dan Quayle, the conscience

The former vice president was more ubiquitous than previously known in his effort to advise figures around Trump about how to handle his efforts to subvert the election.

Quayle, notably, advised Pence not to attempt to overturn the election results on Jan. 6 and rather to perform the traditional, constitutionally required task of counting electoral votes certified by the states. But in a transcript of Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien’s interview, Quayle emerged yet again. He was among the voices, O’Brien noted, telling him not to resign, as Republican mainstays fretted about potential chaos in the closing days of Trump’s administration.

Drama among the organizers of the Jan. 6 rally

The select committee transcripts lay bare the open hostility between different factions of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” allies.

Guilfoyle was feuding with GOP fundraiser Caroline Wren. White House adviser Max Miller said Katrina Pierson exaggerated her influence. Pierson advised Trump to keep “psychos” off the rally stage, saying he shouldn’t give speaking slots to Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn.

“You’re done for life with me because I won’t pay you a $60,000 speaking fee for an event you aren’t speaking at?” Wren said to Guilfoyle, per select committee records. “That’s fucking insane.”

Deals to shield evidence from DOJ

The Jan. 6 select committee indicated in numerous interviews with defendants — some awaiting sentencing for storming the Capitol — that it had agreed not to share any evidence it obtained during its interview with the Justice Department, unless that evidence described additional crimes or the committee suspected perjury.

Those promises at least partially explain the panel’s fraught relationship with the Justice Department that became a theme throughout the latter half of its investigation, with the department repeatedly trying to obtain witness transcripts, only to be rebuffed by the panel until mid-December.

Lofgren beefs with Tarrio

When Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio submitted to a deposition — just weeks before he was charged for his role in the events of Jan. 6 — Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) used the moment to pop in for a quick confrontation.

She pointed to something called “Tarrio’s Telegram,” in which Tarrio printed a picture of Lofgren with a caption that apparently called her the c-word, saying she was “blind in one eye.”

“I’m wondering what you meant by that,” she asked Tarrio.

Tarrio said he didn’t recall posting the item. Lofgren then left the deposition as quickly as she arrived.

The issue popped up again, when a committee staffer squarely asked Tarrio whether he called Lofgren the c-word, prompting his lawyer, Dan Hull, to pop in and question the relevance of the questioning.

“That’s a word that’s been around since the 1300s in London. It’s not a particularly nice word for a lot of people, but —”

“You know the history of that word?” a committee staffer replied.

“Unfortunately, I do,” Hull said.

Yeah …

It’s almost too much disgusting, immoral, illegal behavior in one place. What are they going to do with all this stuff?

The most flagrant case in US history

This case took place after the election. It was a conspiracy designed to award the presidency to the person who didn’t win:

On December 14, 2020, Republican operatives in at least five states—each of which had already officially certified Joe Biden as the winner—forged and submitted to Congress and the National Archives fake Electoral College certificates purporting to certify Donald Trump, not Biden, as the “duly elected” winner. The left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight first blew the whistle on the fake elector scheme in March 2021, but it wasn’t until Rachel Maddow devoted a series of shows to it in January 2022 that it really captured public attention.

The fake electors were hardly the worst of what Trump visited on us. For sheer journalistic sex appeal, a scheme by a bunch of unknown, bumbling state functionaries to phony up some documents just can’t compete with a president siccing an armed mob on the Capitol. But the fake elector scandal, while not the most shocking of Trump’s predations, has long looked like the straightest route to cracking open the entire 2020 election scheme, and to getting Donald Trump indicted and convicted of a crime (at least until the Mar-a-Lago stolen documents scandal was revealed, but that’s another story). If Trump was a knowing participant in the scheme (more on that later), his reasons for doing so would make absolutely no difference. Even if he really, truly believed the election was stolen, it would not be a defense to criminal charges for participating in a fraudulent scheme to submit forged documents as the official results of state presidential elections. To the contrary, his belief that he was stealing back a stolen election would be highly incriminating proof of his motive, not a defense.

Contrast that, for instance, with a potential charge that Trump tried to corruptly alter the result in Georgia in his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. When Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the Georgia election, was he asking him to legitimately root out and disqualify votes that he honestly believed were fraudulent, or was he asking him to manufacture votes?

In the real world of courts, unanimous juries and proof beyond a reasonable doubt, showing that Trump was “only” asking Raffensperger to root out and disqualify illegally cast votes would be, if not a defense, then at least a complication. It would give Trump’s lawyers something to work with. And while I don’t think Trump gave a damn whether or not there actually were illegal votes in Georgia—Trump operates in a fact-free, amoral universe that makes it pointless, if not impossible to try to discern what he “really believed”—there’s enough in the transcript of the call to make that argument to a jury.

Same with a charge that Trump incited the January 6th insurrection. Trump has so far not been directly linked to the violence perpetrated in the Capitol attack. Yes, he sent an armed mob to the Capitol and told them to fight like hell to take back the country. But his defense team will argue that Trump was using permissible, albeit very strong political speech to exhort his followers to send a loud, angry message to Congress, not to physically attack it. And, again, there’s arguably enough weasel-wording in Trump’s January 6th speech to convince at least a single juror to give Trump the benefit of the doubt for burying the word “peacefully” in the middle of his otherwise incendiary speech.

It’s one thing to believe the obvious: that Trump was acting like a mob boss, sending coded signals that his gangland cronies fully understood. It’s another thing to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt to the satisfaction of every one of twelve randomly selected jurors. Again, it’s complicated. And prosecutors hate complicated.

Not so the fake elector scheme.

If it can be proved that Trump intentionally participated in the scheme to try to pass off forged documents as official state documents, and then use the phony documents to overturn an election, it wouldn’t make any difference why he did so. The act of participating in the scheme, in and of itself, regardless of his purported reasons for doing so, would still run afoul of all kinds of state and federal criminal laws.

The path to prosecuting Trump for the fake elector scheme—either as a standalone crime or as a crucial element of a larger conspiracy to overturn the results of a presidential election—became much clearer last week with the publication of the  final report of the House January 6th Committee.

Until the publication of the report, there were arguably two open questions: (1) How high in the levels of Trump world did the scheme go? And (2), could at least some of the perpetrators assert a credible defense that they understood it was just a contingency plan to have electors in place in the event that the courts or state legislatures determined that Trump, not Biden, was the winner in one or more of the five states?

The report answered both questions. (1) The scheme went all the way to the top, right up to Trump himself. And (2), while some of the lower-level participants in the scheme—most likely some of the state-level GOP operatives who actually signed the phony certificates—may have been duped into believing that that it was a contingency plan, the higher ups who created and executed the scheme knew better.

They knew it was an action plan.

[…]

According to the report, by December 8, 2020—less than three weeks after Chesebro first laid the groundwork for the scheme in a November 18 memo—“President Trump had decided to pursue the fake elector plan and was driving it.” By mid-December, Trump had enlisted the assistance of RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in the scheme, worked with Rudy Giuliani on its implementation, and been informed that litigation would be filed in four states “to create a pretext to claim that it was still possible for the fake electors to be authorized retroactively.”

So it appears that the previously missing link—the link between the fake elector scheme and Trump himself—is no longer missing. Trump not only “participated” in the fake elector scheme, he orchestrated it.

With Trump’s knowing participation seemingly clear, the only remaining question appears to be whether the perpetrators can credibly soft-sell the scheme as merely a contingency plan, not an action plan to overturn an election.

They can’t.

The report makes it plain that plan was never to collect the signatures, file them away, and only pull them out in the unlikely event that a court or state legislature reversed the results of one or more of the elections in the five states. The plan was to use the fake certificates affirmatively:

This effort was aimed directly at the President of the Senate (which, under the Constitution, is the Vice President) in his role at the joint session of Congress on January 6th. President Trump and his advisors wanted Vice President Pence to disregard real electoral college votes for former Vice President Biden, in favor of these fake competing electoral slates.

According to the report, public comments made by Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Miller on December 14 suggesting that the phony certificates were merely “contingent” were window dressing: “That pretense was dropped in short order.” In fact, Team Trump was actively plotting to execute a strategy, designed largely by Eastman, to use the slates of fake electors as a pretext to prevent or delay certification of Biden’s election.

Nobody on the leadership team was mincing words: A December 13 memo from Chesebro to Rudy Giuliani suggested that while presiding over the counting Vice President Pence could toss out Biden’s actual electoral votes for any state where Trump had fake electors “because there are two slates of votes.”

And nobody was waiting for a court order that they knew would never come.

If there were ever any doubt about that, of course, it is dispelled by the fact that the schemers not only planned to use the phony certificates affirmatively, they did use them affirmatively, albeit ineptly.

Ever incompetent in executing even the most clerical, ministerial tasks, Team Trump orchestrated not only a massive fraud, but a comedy of errors.

The phony certifications from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania failed to meet the requirements of federal law because they bore no state seal and no evidence that the required state officials had delivered them. The submissions from Georgia, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania lacked the required approval of the governors of those states. Other fake Trump electors failed to follow state rules specifying where they were required to meet, but nevertheless certified that they had done so.

The comedy of errors morphed into outright farce with Team Trump’s frantic, buffoonish, last-minute efforts to get them to the church on time.

By early January, the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin had not yet arrived in Washington, and Team Trump freaked out. They arranged to fly the certificates to Washington for hand delivery to the Vice President. Or, in the undying words of a Wisconsin Republican Party official, “Freaking Trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President [i.e., Pence].”

Speaking of freaking Trump idiots, enter Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson stage right. Johnson, implored by the Trump campaign’s lead attorney in Wisconsin to assign a staffer “to get a document on Wisconsin electors to you [for] the VP immediately,” accommodated by putting not just some staffer, but his chief of staff on the job. That plan died a humiliating death when an aid to Pence brushed off Johnson’s request, bluntly telling Johnson’s chief of staff “Do not give that to him [the Vice President].”

Suffice it to say that none of this activity was triggered by a court or legislative order to the effect that Trump, not Biden, had won any of the five states. That never happened. Anywhere.

So the “it was just a contingency plan” defense is a non-starter.

It’s all up to Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors now. Let’s hope they look very closely at this fraudulent gambit and throw the book at the guilty parties if they have the goods. This is ridiculous. Republicans screeching “voter fraud” perpetrating this crime isn’t something that should just be let go.

And it’s also up to the American voters. It was insane that so many of them voted for him in 2020 after four years of chaos and incompetence, but they did. That’s why I’m not sanguine that they won’t do it again. I mean, what more did they need to know? I suppose that some of them may fall away now with some asshole alternatives presenting themselves, but there are many Americans who simply love the guy and can’t be moved away from him because that would be admitting they were wrong about him in the first place. Not bloody likely.

Happy Hollandaise will continue through the end of the year so if you are still of a mind to throw some support this way you can do so with the buttons below or the address on the left sidebar. And thank you!!!

Did the Willard Hotel get memory-holed?

Been watching for mention in the J6 reporting and transcripts of the connection between the Willard Hotel war rooms and the January 6th insurrection. There is still a lot to review in the new transcripts, but so far it has been mighty slim.

The Willard “has been asked to provide information for us,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson told Dana Bash in January, but there is precious little so far to indicate what, if anything, his team obtained. There are only two mentions of the Willard Hotel in the J6 final report (pg. 518).

The J6 committeee lacked the power to immunize the players who strategized there on behalf of Donald Trump, as Jennifer Rubin notes:

The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?

Clearly, Rep. Liz Cheney went gunning for the president who hijacked her party. The 845-page report has a heavy focus on the godfather behind the insurrection, as Mary Wheeler finds, but leaves out a lot Jack Smith will want to examine:

Some of those blind spots were created by the limits on the Committee’s investigative authorities, some were created by the Committee’s (perhaps resultant) limited understanding of the attack.

To demonstrate those blind spots, I wanted to show what the report includes in the body of the report about December 27 (some of these may be out of order and I need to clean it up, but this will be a useful demonstration). Here are things that happened on December 27, 2020:

• Bernie Kerik publicly attacks Pat Toomey for opposing fraud (the Report ties this attacks to physical threats against officials opposed to Trump’s fraud)
• Mark Meadows continues to pressure Georgia
• Doug Mastriano speaks to Trump and feeds members of Congress bullshit
• Trump attempts to get Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue to endorse his fraud message and — failing that — threatens to replace Rosen
• With Trump’s blessing, Louie Gohmert files suit against Mike Pence
• Trump pardons Stone and they talk about January 6
• Trump gets more involved in planning January 6, which leads to a plan to have his supporters march on the Capitol and then a plan for him to march
• The FBI creates a system to collect threats related to the “election certification” on January 6 by using a tag, “CERTUNREST

Some of these events (such as the Louie Gohmert lawsuit) were obviously in the work before December 27, but this provides a good read of where the parallel strands of the attack were on that particular day.

But given what we know, the far most important event of the day was the increased involvement by the White House in January 6. This was the moment the plans for January 6 started becoming a plan for a coup.

Without the communications of many of the key players outside the White House and Congress, we still do not know. But the Washington Post in October 2021 had this to report about the team assembled at the Willard to help Trump:

They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Also among those present at the Willard were Boris Epshteyn, much mentioned in the report as a member of Giuliani’s legal team; Russell J. Ramsland Jr., who filed a “a grossly inaccurate affidavit” [pg. 228] regarding Dominion voting machines and voting irregularities in Antrim Co., Michigan; Christina Bobb of One America News Network, made more famous for certifying Trump had returned all the stolen federal documents at Mar-a-Lago; and Philip Luelsdorff, reportedly director of Business Development for 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP), a fascist paramilitary security group.

Luelsdorff’s witness testimony was released on Dec. 21, but he makes no appearance in the final report, having refused under the Fifth Amendment to answer any questions or produce documents.

Jack Smith has his work cut out.

If you’d like to slip a little something into the Hullabaloo stocking to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can hit one of the buttons below. Happy Hollandaise!

In calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, LBJ was summoning what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. He was asking – no, he was demanding – that we transcend bigotry and make good at last upon the promises we made to each other in declaring our nationhood and professing our love of liberty. The political process responded, as it should when big ideas come along, to ride the current of history.
– Gerald Ford, speaking at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in 1997.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
– Donald Trump, announcing his run for president in 2015.

If progress sometimes depends on successfully appealing to “the better angels of our nature” of kindness, compassion and a sense of equality to extend rights, respect and aid to those less privileged, then regressive and oppressive forces often rely on the worse demons of our nature, appealing to fear, anxiety, greed, bigotry, jealousy, spite and the urge to domineer others. Unfortunately, for decades, U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party have stood for plutocracy and bigotry. Meanwhile, their authoritarian strain has grown stronger, to the point that a significant faction is threatening democracy itself in the United States. The most popular political figures for the conservative base are those who give them permission to deny reality and to behave awfully toward their fellow Americans.

Donald Trump remains a prime example. Although some conservatives and Republicans have tried to disown him, he’s no aberration, and instead acts firmly in the conservative tradition. (See the post linked above for more, and also for “conservative” versus “Republican”; this post will treat the terms pretty interchangeably unless the distinction matters.) Trump is just less stealthy and more likely to say the quiet parts out loud, lumbering and lashing out as the monster from the conservative id. A bully and a bullshitter, he heavily traffics in spite, and the conservative base loves him for it. He stands for power and privilege over merit, in many noxious flavors – plutocracy, bigotry, self-aggrandizement, political party over country, and authoritarianism over empiricism. He wants to be praised even when he does a poor job, wants his ass kissed at all times, and denies any reality he doesn’t like. A few key incidents exemplify his rotten character and the destructive traits he’s encouraged in his supporters, from the rabid fans to the more quietly complicit.

Trump’s 2015 announcement of his presidential run put his bigotry front and center, a longstanding personal trait and a central part of his appeal to his voters. Sean Spicer’s first press conference for Trump occurred shortly after Trump’s inauguration, which drew a much smaller crowd than Obama’s. Spicer aggressively lied to please Trump’s ego, falsely claiming that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” It was a bizarre performance. Trump wanted everyone to accept and repeat his obvious lie, kissing his ass as he was used to, and like other sycophants, Spicer was happy to feed Trump’s vanity. That spectacle was appalling enough on its own, but it’s particularly remarkable that Trump and Spicer apparently, delusionally, thought they could bully the press into playing along. (Afterward, Trump campaign strategist Kellyanne Conway infamously denied that Spicer was lying, but was instead offering “alternative facts.”) Anyone who wasn’t already alarmed by Trump and his cronies should have been by that incident. (Anyone who cheered it was troubling.)

In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, causing billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration’s response was underwhelming, but Trump bragged about what a “great job” he had done, sought praise, blithely compared the disaster’s death count to other disasters, and complained about any criticism. In 2019, Trump tweeted about Puerto Rico as if was another country instead of a territory of the United States, lied about the aid given to it, and fought against giving any more aid, even though it was sorely needed. In this case, Trump’s fixation on vanity over reality had more dire consequences than the Spicer press conference. The same was certainly true the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the global COVID-19 pandemic; a Lancet study released in February 2021 concluded that the U.S. could have avoided a staggering 40% of its COVID-19 deaths.

Conservatives and Republicans largely haven’t cared about Trump’s broken promises and lack of accomplishments, and signaled this attitude even before the election. A June 2016 article in The Washington Post found that “Many of Trump’s fans don’t actually think he will build a wall — and they don’t care if he doesn’t.” Trump’s aspirations, and anger directed at people they hated, were enough for them. Trump himself might have wanted a wall, but was too lazy to actually do the work to get one. (One that didn’t fall over or wasn’t easily scalable, anyway.) His supporters apparently – shockingly – haven’t even cared if Trump’s negligence and the conservative noise machine’s persistently anti-science, anti-vaccine messages have made them sick or even killed them. The data show that “pro-Trump counties continue to suffer far higher COVID death tolls.” When the Republican Party was first being called an “authoritarian death cult,” it might have been slight hyperbole, but sadly, the pandemic showed the label was dismayingly accurate. After seeing everything Trump and his administration did and failed to do, more Americans voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. The most accurate statement Trump has probably ever made was him bragging in 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.”

One of the most telling incidents about Trump, conservatives and the Republican Party was the October 2016 leaking of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape with Trump bragging about his fame allowing him to sexually assault women and get away with it. (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”) The tape should have sunk his campaign, and some conservatives and Republicans condemned Trump, but the majority of them (including some critics) still voted for him in 2016. (Conservative claims of higher moral values than their political opponents have always been bullshit, of course.) Trump apologized when the tape came out, but by November 2017, he started pretending that the tape was a fake and it wasn’t him. This is batshit crazy stuff (as several people pointed out), or more to the point, it’s authoritarian behavior – Trump once again telling those surrounding him that he wants them to kiss his ass, deny objective reality, and agree with a lie favoring him.

One of Trump’s favorite terms is “fake news” – which, of course, means true stories that Trump doesn’t like. It’s hard to quantify to what degree Trump’s fans believe him when he claims news is “fake,” just as it was hard to tell how many of Rush Limbaugh’s listeners believed the constant lies he told, or to what degree Fox News viewers or other heavy consumers of conservative media believe its coordinated propaganda. Many obviously do believe whatever lies they’re told, including lies about accurate reporting. But Trump, Limbaugh, and many other conservative figures have always sold both a sense of superiority and one of persecution to their followers; their pitch is that they’re much better than their chosen political opponents, who not only treat them terribly unfairly but are a grave threat to the righteous conservative faithful and thus the country. Limbaugh’s legacy wasn’t just lies, it was his nastiness, an approach that Ann Coulter, Trump, Tucker Carlson and countless conservative commentators and grifters have used for decades. When Trump calls something “fake news,” it’s not an empirical assessment of accuracy; it’s the assertion of an authoritarian leader. He’s not simply lying or bullshitting; he’s essentially saying “I know you hate these people and I do, too.” He’s giving his followers permission to hate others, and to reject reality. The professional conservative operatives know that Trump’s “fake news” attacks are bullshit, but view them as useful. Within the conservative base, some of them likely know deep down if not consciously that Trump is lying but don’t really care. He lets them pretend; he lets them wallow in gleeful spite. To quote a 2020 post:

The conservative base does not hate many of their fellow Americans because they believe false things. They believe false things because they hate many of their fellow Americans. This is one of many reasons conventional fact-checking does not work on them.

The white supremacist group the Proud Boys was excited after the first 2020 presidential debate when Trump wouldn’t outright condemn them and instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” They viewed it as an endorsement and encouragement. More mainstream Trump supporters hold less extreme views, but the core dynamic and Trump’s primary appeal remains similar: he encourages the worse demons of their nature, giving them permission to behave horribly toward their fellow Americans and to deny any realities they don’t like.

These dynamics became the most dangerous to date with Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, and with the resulting insurrection attempt on January 6th, 2021. It’s not possible to discuss the insurrection in depth here (check out Digby’s extensive archives on the subject), but the House select committee hearings and other reports have established (among other things) that Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the election outcome long before his actual loss, plotted ways to overturn the election, knew that he had lost, collected roughly a quarter of billion dollars to fight the election results, encouraged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, approved of their violence, and didn’t care if people died, including his own vice president. (Of course, people did die as a result of the insurrection.) If ever the actions of a president were cause for removal from office and other consequences, this was it – trying by multiple means, including violence, to overturn a fair election. Likewise, if ever there was a political morality test “gimme,” this was it – condemn the insurrection, stand for democracy, put the country’s well-being above other interests, and hold the transgressors responsible. This was a moment for even hyperpartisan hacks to drop their habitual bullshit and heed the better angels of their nature.

Americans as a whole responded better than Republicans. A 2021 Monmouth poll found that 72% of respondents thought “riot” was an appropriate description of the January 6th events, and 56% thought that “insurrection” was appropriate. But 33% also felt it was a “legitimate protest.” That’s a minority, thankfully, but a significant, disturbing minority. Many conservative commentators have tried to downplay the extremism and danger of the insurrection. A December 2021 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll showed that Republicans as a whole likewise downplayed the violence and danger of the insurrection compared to their fellow Americans. Congressional Democrats impeached Donald Trump for a second time for his “incitement of insurrection,” but despite all the evidence, only 10 House Republicans voted for impeachment and 197 voted against. In the Senate, only 7 Republicans voted for conviction and 43 voted for acquittal, so the two-thirds majority required for conviction was not reached. As they often have for decades, Republicans put their party before their country. Adding to those damning actions, in early 2022, the Republican National Committee censured Republican U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House’s January 6th committee, claiming that they had (emphasis added) “been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.” (Some Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, did object to the censure.) Not content with that degree of Orwellian doublespeak, the RNC also declared that the January 6th insurrection represented “legitimate political discourse.” Trump loyalist and Republican Senator Josh Hawley defended the RNC, saying, “Listen, whatever you think about the RNC vote, it reflects the view of most Republican voters.” If so, we need to question if the majority of Republican voters support democracy and accountability for trying to overthrow it – and if the answer to the second part is “no,” then the answer to the first part is realistically “no” as well, despite any lip service to the contrary. The overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans have failed their country on both counts.

The recent midterm elections offered concerning developments, but also some bright spots. It bears mentioning that good people do exist who identify as conservatives, whether we call them due process conservatives or something else, even if they’re significantly outnumbered in the U.S. conservative movement and in the Republican Party. It’s heartening that in the midterm elections, Republican candidates who were election deniers, touting Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from him, often did not do well. ‘Election deniers running for secretary of state were the election’s biggest losers,’ and election denial hurt the Republican Party overall. Those losses were aided by self-described conservatives and Republicans.

Still, it’s very troubling that the Republicans ran 291 election deniers, and 170 of them won. And roughly 70% or Republicans believe Trump’s Big Lie. A huge portion of one of America’s two major political parties believes a significant, dangerous falsehood (or pretends to). Republicans were building an “army” to overturn election results by “challeng[ing] voters at Democratic-majority polling places,” which in actual practice has often meant harassment. In Cochise County, Arizona, Republican officials refused to certify the 2022 midterm election results “despite no evidence of anything wrong with the count” simply because they didn’t like Democrats winning some top races. Interestingly, holding out had the potential to backfire on them, because if all 47,000 plus county votes were thrown out, some elections would flip to Democrats. Weeks later, the officials finally complied with a court order and certified the election. (The Republicans might still face criminal charges for their breach of duty.) This is sore loser behavior, childish, petulant, entitled and dangerous.

More alarming, as of May 2022, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, “nearly 400 [voter-]restrictive bills had been introduced in legislatures nationwide,” and the chief cause seems to be “white racial resentment.” And the conservative-dominated Supreme Court recently heard arguments for Moore v. Harper, a North Carolina gerrymandering case. Conservatives – backed by plenty of dark money – are pushing an “independent state legislature theory,” which means state legislatures could ignore state courts and their own state constitutions, allowing them to rig elections in their favor. It’s a batshit theory with “exceedingly thin” evidence, but the North Carolina state legislature is controlled by Republicans, so they think this will solidify their domination even further. They’re far from alone; Pennsylvania Republicans have worked to rig the courts to bypass judges who might uphold fair elections instead of favoring Republicans. Similarly, Republican candidate for Wisconsin governor, Tim Michels, vowed that if he won in the 2022 midterms, Republicans would “never lose another election.” Michels thankfully lost, but democracy itself shouldn’t be imperiled every election.

Conservative opposition to fair play is nothing new. To look just at this past decade, after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, some Republicans discussed changing their approach, given that demographic trends did not favor them. Any such renouncing of the evils of plutocracy, bigotry or unfair play was thrown out, however, when a perfect storm of factors and an outdated, idiotic electoral system allowed Donald Trump to be elected president in 2016 over Hillary Clinton despite losing the popular vote. Republicans, who had engaged in unprecedented obstructionism in blocking judicial nominees under Obama, were happy to turn around and appoint as many conservative and far-right judges as they could, including stealing two supreme court seats. (They also came up with self-congratulatory, alternative realities of those events to justify their actions.)

This general, dishonorable approach is not likely to change, regardless of the Republican leadership. Now that Trump apparently cost Republicans victories in the midterms, some Republicans have suggested moving past him, but we’ve seen this dance before; they’re sure to embrace him again if he wins the nomination for 2024, or happily go with Ron DeSantis and his similarly awful policies and comparable cult of personality. (On the PBS NewsHour on 12/16/22, conservative commentator David Brooks cited a USA Today poll saying that, “by 2-1 margins, [Republican voters] want Trumpism, his approach, but they don’t want Donald Trump.” Notice Brooks trying to distance Trump from conservatism, too.) Trump is horrible, but he’s symptomatic of a much deeper rot in American conservatism and the Republican Party. If current trends continue, any candidate who promises power and sells spite is likely to do well.

If major Republican nominees for the 2024 elections aren’t reality-deniers, bigots or authoritarians, it’ll be a relief, albeit clearing an awfully low bar. Even when conservatives and Republicans don’t directly imperil democracy, when they get in power, unfortunately, things typically get much worse for the vast majority of Americans; the system is increasingly rigged against them. The George W. Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 primarily benefitted the most wealthy Americans, as intended, just as Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in the 1980s were. The Trump tax cuts were similarly plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money. Conservative economic policies, whether they’re called supply-side, trickle-down, Reaganomics or something else, have never delivered, as decades of evidence show. It strains credulity to pretend that conservatives actually believe that their policies work for anyone other than the rich. (It also would be nice if mainstream political coverage more prominently covered the actual consequences of policies, considered the corruption angle, and didn’t pretend that conservatives really believe the bullshit they spout.) But on this subject and many others, conservatives and Republicans publicly deny reality. It’s rarely as blatant as denying an election, but it’s still harmful.

It’s not as if conservatives’ awful economic and fiscal policies are an outlier, either, or that their echo chamber is something new. In 2010, self-described libertarian Julian Sanchez wrote several posts bemoaning “epistemic closure” in conservative discourse, for example, sticking with Fox News and rejecting information from mainstream, credible outlets like The New York Times, even among supposed conservative elites. A few conservatives agreed with Sanchez whereas many others didn’t, and either didn’t really understand or truly engage with the critique. Sanchez’ take was welcome but utterly unsurprising for anyone who followed conservative media (including the blogosphere) in previous years. (For a more detailed look at conservative policies, see a 2018 post, “What’s to Be Done About Conservatives?”) Trump supporters merely continued the epistemic closure trend, living in “an alternative universe” and loving his rage and rejection of any media outlet he didn’t like.

So where do we go from here? Although it’s heartening that American democracy has survived the 2020 elections, the 2021 insurrection, and the 2022 midterm elections, it shouldn’t be at risk in every election. And the country’s well-being shouldn’t be imperiled every time conservatives gain power, even if they abide by election results. We can always expect conservatives to try to rebrand themselves as they’ve done frequently, and trying to call mainstream American conservatism “Trumpism” as if it’s some new aberration and not the continuation of past awfulness is just the latest example. The Democratic Party has plenty of problems we’ve discussed before and will again, but the Republican Party is almost completely toxic and corrupt, and now often explicitly antidemocratic. It needs to lose for about 20 years before its leaders consider changing their approach. Unfortunately, even that won’t be sufficient, because conservative billionaires, think tanks and dark money organizations are always playing a long game to make the U.S. more conservative, including overturning laws and principles that most citizens quite reasonably believe long settled. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s decision to ignore precedent and sound medical practice to overturn Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years is the most glaring recent example, but it’s hardly the only one, nor is it likely to be the last one.

I’m not sure a conservatism exists that is truly beneficent, helping the majority of people, and better than other political philosophies, but it does seem that as an ideology, or as actually practiced by real people, conservatism has less harmful strains than the current ascendant one. The people critiqued in this post don’t need to be this horrible; it’s a choice. U.S. conservatism focuses on fighting for power and privilege; it believes in bullying to defeat merit, and sometimes democracy itself. It is almost always plutocratic, often bigoted, and sometimes authoritarian (which intertwines quite naturally and toxically with the first two). To reference two older posts, in terms of “The Four Types of Conservatives,” the Sober Adults are in ever shorter supply, and the Reckless Addicts, Proud Zealots, and Stealthy Extremists have even more power. Conjunctions of stupid, evil and crazy have become increasingly common. Meanwhile, liberals and other nonconservatives cannot directly fix conservatism or the Republican Party, either (despite occasional pundit whining that somehow they should). Conservatives have to do that themselves. In the meantime, it’s the job of everyone else to hold conservatives accountable, keep them out of power (through democratic means, naturally), and work for a fairer and more functional system.

This isn’t the cheeriest post, but hope still exists. The midterm election presented some encouraging results. And in August in conservative Kansas, 59% of voters “rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment . . . that would have said there was no right to an abortion in the state,” in a sharp rebuke of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The pandemic exposed how many workplace practices and other rules are bullshit, even if many labor and human rights fights still need to be won. It’s also easy to forget about some lasting social progress. Support for same-sex marriage now stands at 71%, up from a mere 27% in 1996. That is truly extraordinary. Some of that is the result of positive peer pressure, but it also shows how people’s fears can evaporate when they’re shown to be ridiculous, and how powerful it can be to recognize others’ humanity. Conservatives are attacking LGBTQ rights and need to be defeated, but U.S. society as a whole is increasingly not with them.

Abraham Lincoln ended his 1861 first inaugural address, after several states had seceded from the Union but before the Civil War officially started, on a conciliatory, optimistic note. He soon faced a more open and much more deadly conflict than we currently do. But it still seems that the best way to fight our worse demons as a nation is by investing in our better angels.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

A very Republican solution

A reader sent former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper a response letter from Ohio state Rep. Ninon Vitale (R). The reader wrote Vitale to oppose a bill in the state House.

Pepper explains, “You see, once again, Republicans have been pushing: 1) to add even more limits to the use of voter drop boxes; 2) to further limit early voting, both in person and by mail; and 3) to add a strict photo ID law, something Ohio has never had.”

Vitale’s response references the founders and argues, not in so many words, that we should not encourage voting by people who would elect people such as himself.

Behold:

Pepper explains how awkward the pending bill must be for its sponsors. Republicans have for years overseen Ohio elections and bragged about what a fine job they’ve done:

Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s own website and press releases tout Ohio as “one of the nation’s leaders in secure, accurate and accessible elections.”

In Ohio, they’ve assured us, it’s “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”  Ohio “got it right,” LaRose said in an ad after 2020, while (misleadingly) suggesting other states did not.

So why push for yet another bill to fix what ain’t broke? Because, says Pepper, “the measures they push always have a disproportionate impact on Democratic voters—and Black voters in particular.”

“Do we want uninformed or unserious people voting because the founding fathers of this country did not?”

TPM’s publishing Mark Meadows‘s emails this week reveals a plethora of unserious members of Congress belonging to an unserious political party that is egregiously unserious about their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” nor about bearing “true faith and allegiance to the same.” Never mind Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) announcement that his delegation’s first act in 2023 will be to read aloud the constitution they don’t take seriously (and never did).

The emails from the Crackpot Caucus are rife with bogus information from conspiracy websites and recommendations for mounting a bloodless(?) red, white and blue coup.

Vice News:

South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman, for example, called for “invoking Marshall [sic] Law!” in a Jan. 17 text to Meadows, three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Texas Rep. Brian Babin, meanwhile, told Meadows on Nov. 6 that “when we lose Trump we lose our Republic.”

[…]

North Carolina Rep. Ted Budd, for example, voted to deny certification of Pennsylvania and Arizona’s electoral votes. Budd reportedly texted Meadows on Nov. 7 alleging ties between Dominion and liberal billionaire George Soros, the target of a plethora of right-wing conspiracy theories. “Praying for your health!” Budd told Meadows. “FYI Dominion Voting Systems is owned by State Street Capital, which are Carlyle (Rubenstein alums), Rubenstein is a longtime co-investor with Soros Capital.”

It’s been said before that these clowns are some of the most un-self-aware politicians this country has seen. God help us survive them. If we took their advice, they would be the very people to discourage from voting. But discouraging people from voting is un-American, isn’t it?

Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking, you can do so here or at the address on the left sidebar.

This is, quite simply, lunacy. Instead of paying college educated, trained teachers a living wage they are turning the profession into a minimum wage level job.

This will really be the end of us No other country so devalues education that they are abusing their teachers, requiring superstitious nonsense, myth and legend to be taught instead of real information. The American right wants people to be stupid:

In response to Oklahoma’s continued teacher shortage, lawmakers passed a measure that no longer requires educators to have a college degree in order to teach permanently in public schools.

All a prospective educator needs now is a high school diploma and “distinguished qualifications” in their field to make them eligible to teach full time in K-12 classrooms. Those people don’t have to work toward a teaching certificate or take college classes, and legislators gave local districts latitude to determine what meets the “distinguished qualifications” threshold.

Supporters claim the law will make it easier for doctors, lawyers and other trained professionals to enter the teacher pipeline, but critics say those aren’t the people applying to teach. Public school watchdogs say they’re hearing of superintendents and school boards so desperate that they’re hiring people with high school diplomas.

Bryan Duke, interim dean at the University of Central Oklahoma’s college of education, said while the so-called adjunct teachers have previously been permitted, until this year lawmakers limited how long they could be in a classroom.

He said lawmakers promised the changes would draw highly-trained professionals, but based on conversations with district leaders, he said “that is not what we’re seeing.”

“We’ll just say that I’m not aware of those qualifications,” Duke said. “And, I certainly doubt that most folks would have those qualifications.”

The State Department of Education reported that Oklahoma districts have alrady hired 370 non-certified adjunct teachers for full-time positions since the new law took effect July 1. Where they’re working and their qualifications were not clear.

State Rep. Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, the House author, said the bill “epitomizes local control” because school boards get to determine who is qualified. He does not dispute the law technically requires only a high school diploma, but questioned whether anyone is “abusing it.”

He said Oklahoma has a teacher shortage, and legislators must do everything they can to give districts as many options as possible to create the best learning environment for children.

“I would push back on anyone that says that just because someone doesn’t have some letters next to their name that they’re less intelligent than someone else,” Hilbert said. “Some of the smartest people I know, their highest level of education is high school. And if they’ve got a career of experience and excellence in their field, perhaps they do have some expertise that they can bring.”

State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister, though, appeared stunned when she learned during an interview that lawmakers had stripped the college degree requirement for permanent teachers. She whispered “Oh my God!” under her breath.

She called the change “worrisome,” and said Oklahoma parents expect and deserve a college-educated teacher for their child.

Educating is a science, and students benefit from college-trained graduates who have the practice and expertise in helping students lift outcomes, particularly in reading, she said.

“Overall, we shouldn’t be watering down standards in something so very important individually for students and for our collective workforce in the state,” Hofmeister said. “I am worried that we have pushed legislation to a place where it is answering a temporary emergency need that is actually creating a standard of normalcy, and that is not good for our state.”

Oklahoma already is grappling with disappointing student outcomes compared to other states. Recent data from the National Assessment of Education Progress showed Oklahoma student scores in reading and math dropped more than most other states during the pandemic, according an October analysis from Oklahoma Watch.

Hofmeister said when someone enters school having previously owned a Hallmark store, they don’t have the experience and training to step into a second-grade class.

“There are some who really seem to think that what is happening in school is a lot of babysitting,” Hofmeister said, “and it’s not. Kids don’t get back these days. They need to be spent with those who have the expertise to deliver an excellent education, and we have to do more.”

Kevin Kumashiro, an education policy expert, said Oklahoma is the first state he’s heard of that requires no college education. He said in an email there is a nationwide trend to expand eligibility for teaching to individuals who have not completed college or a teacher-preparation program, but other states still require at least some college education.

Arizona, for instance, requires teachers only have a high school diploma, but they must be enrolled in college. Idaho requires a college degree for most educators, but allows work experience to substitute for people interested in teaching CareerTech-related programs. Florida, meanwhile, has expanded its “Troops to Teaching” program by requiring teachers have about two years of college plus four years of military service, Kumashiro said.

“The teacher-shortage crisis is fueling such moves to require less and less preparation in order to become a teacher,” he said.

State Sen. Jessica Garvin, R-Duncan, who authored the law, said her bill was never intended to address Oklahoma’s teacher shortage, and argued that districts have theoretically been able to hire high school graduates even before her law eliminated restrictions on the number of hours adjuncts could teach.

A mother of two public school children, Garvin said it’s “extremely frustrating” that people are insisting her bill lessens teaching requirements.

“If anything, in my opinion this increases or enhances the requirements,” Garvin said.

She said she doesn’t believe her bill takes away the college-degree requirement, but said Oklahoma needs to have a broader conversation about who would be a good fit in public schools. She said there should be many paths to the classroom and someone who brings many years of real-world experience, but no college education, could be a better educator than someone just starting out.

“I’m not saying that this makes it OK for people to lessen any sort of stipulations that they would tend to hire someone with in the event that they needed a teacher, but what I am saying is we’ve got to get away from this mentality that the only way you can have a successful career is to go to college because that’s not true,” Garvin said.

She said she’s heard from a number of school districts that have told her they’re using her law to hire people with college degrees, but who hold no teaching certification. She said she doesn’t know any school districts that have changed their requirements “to not hire someone with a bachelor’s degree.”

“That’s just a blatant lie,” Garvin said. “That’s very misleading. … And, quite frankly, if a school district is hiring someone who’s not qualified to be in a classroom then they need to be voted out of the school board or the superintendent needs to be fired. I mean that’s just asinine.”

Katherine Bishop, president of Oklahoma Education Association, said she can’t even think of a word to illustrate how “highly disappointed” she is with the new law.

She said lawmakers never revealed that the law would allow the permanent hiring of unprepared and “unqualified teachers” with only high school degrees. They said the law was targeted at professionals with college degrees who couldn’t pass the teaching certification test, she said.

“I am offended as a professional that we would even think that this was OK,” Bishop said. “Our students, their education, deserve better than that. And our taxpayers should be appalled, to be honest with you, that a person that just graduated high school could then be a teacher.”

Bishop called the law “a slap” in the face to educators who worked hard to get certified and said the law is an example of how not to address a teacher shortage.

Professional Oklahoma Educators, which also advocates for teachers, and Oklahoma State School Boards Association did not respond to requests for comment.

“School unions criticize any legislation or policy that threatens their monopoly over kids,” said Kate Vesper, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kevin Stitt, in an email.

Stitt and lawmakers will continue “to deliver new and innovative ways” to make it easier to recruit and retain more teachers, she said, and included the law as an example of Stitt’s efforts to do that.

“Getting a four-year degree at a university should not be the only route to become a teacher,” she said.

The new law makes it easier for industry professionals such as farmers, ranchers, accountants, pilots and bankers to teach, she said.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s secretary of education and soon-to-be state superintendent, said Oklahomans have talked about the desire to get more teachers into the classroom.

He said the law provides more options, more competition and a broader applicant pool for school districts. It also provides more pathways for talented people to come into the classroom. He said there are Fortune 500 CEOs who never graduated from college.

“I don’t think that a sheet of paper necessarily makes them a better teacher,” Walters said. “Having our certificate doesn’t magically make you a better teacher. There’s real life experiences that are important in being an effective teacher in the classroom.”

Not have “letter next to your name” doesn’t make you a great teacher but not having them makes you an unqualified one. It’s ridiculous.

Those poor kids …

How they plan to discredit the January 6th Committee and protect Donald Trump

Greg Sargent is right about this:

As Republicans prepare to take over the House, they clearly see oneof their highest missions as transformingthe lower chamber into Donald Trump’s 24/7 personal shield against accountability. They are signaling plans for “investigations” next year designed chiefly to discredit revelations about Trump’s effort to destroy U.S. democracy.

Democrats can get ready for this now. The Jan. 6 select committee probing Trump’s insurrection can release the maximum amount of investigative material before Republicans take over next month, making it harder for them to distort its findings. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a committee member, told me: “Releasing all of it is important.”

Just how important was emphasized thisweek, when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tipped his hand about GOP strategy in a way that passed largely unnoticed. In a letter dripping with a contrived, ominous tone, the man who hopes to be speaker instructed committee chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) to “preserve all records collected and transcripts of testimony taken,” suggesting Republicans intend to scrutinize those findings in the majority.

The letter made news, even though the committee is already required by law to preserve all records and transcripts. The GOP majority will have access to all those records no matter what the committee publicly releases.

But buried in the letter is a cryptic reference with ugly implications for what’s to come. McCarthy wrote that Republicans want those materials preserved “with an eye toward encouraged enforcement of 18 USC 1001,” with no further comment.

What does that mean? Well, that statute criminalizes lying to Congress. From that, I think, we can glean what might beone of the House GOP’s coming schemes: Dig through transcripts and other material to twist committee findings into “proof” that key elements of the anti-Trump testimony were deceptive, or even perjury.

That could function as a pretext to haul witnesses back for another grilling from Republicans. This would be deliberate spectacle: By publicly flogging witnesses who most damaged Trump, Republicans would provide grist for right-wing media to claim the most damning revelations had been decisively discredited, no matter what the facts show.

NYU law professor Ryan Goodman, who has closely tracked the Jan. 6 investigation, agrees Republicans have tipped their hand. “They appear to be devising a tactic to try to undermine testimony, to the end of satisfying Trump and the far-right parts of the party,” Goodman told me.

As Goodman noted, Republicans don’t even have to grill witnesses again (which could backfire with sympathetic ones such as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson). They could simply cherry-pick from full transcripts in ways designed to distort their actual testimony.

“There’s no reason to think they will faithfully examine the transcripts,” Goodman said. “They’ll quite likely selectively use quotes just to create the appearance of contradictions or false statements.”

Of course, there’s plenty of devastating witness testimony to try to distort. Former Justice Department officials testified that Trump pressured them to manufacture the appearance of fraud. State officials testified that Trump pushed them to corruptly help subvert his loss.

And former White House lawyers and aides testified that Trump pressured his vice president to obstruct the election’s certification in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. They also recounted fearing Trump had incited the mob to finish that job through violence, and that Trump deliberately did nothing when the mob attacked.

To see why targeting all this is critical for Republicans, note that one of those witnesses, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in connection with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Trump’s 2020 insurrection efforts.

That investigation is now being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith.As Goodman notes, McCarthy’s hint that Republicans will “reveal” that Jan. 6 witnesses perjured themselves shows how they’ll try to counter the special counsel’s investigation, which is plainly growing more serious.

“Whether intentional or not,” Goodman told me, “these efforts could muddy the waters of the special counsel’s investigation, at a minimum in the mind of the public.”

They want to verbally beat the shit out of Cassidy Hutchinson. That is their plan. I hope she calls up Hillary Clinton to get pointers on how to withstand their special brand of asinine grilling. I think she’s up for it, don’t you?

The NY Times with a scoop today:

The Justice Department is seeking to question former Vice President Mike Pence as a witness in connection with its criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Pence, according to people familiar with his thinking, is open to considering the request, recognizing that the Justice Department’s criminal investigation is different from the inquiry by the House Jan. 6 committee, whose overtures he has flatly rejected.

Complicating the situation is whether Mr. Trump would try to invoke executive privilege to stop him or limit his testimony, a step that he has taken with limited success so far with other former officials.

Mr. Pence was present for some of the critical moments in which Mr. Trump and his allies schemed to keep him in office and block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. An agreement for him to cooperate would be the latest remarkable twist in an investigation that is already fraught with legal and political consequences, involving a former president who is now a declared candidate to return to the White House — and whose potential rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination include Mr. Pence.

Thomas Windom, one of the lead investigators examining the efforts to overturn the election, reached out to Mr. Pence’s team in the weeks before Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed a special counsel on Friday to oversee the Jan. 6 investigation and a separate inquiry into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. Mr. Garland has said that the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, will not slow the investigation.

Officials at the Justice Department declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Pence also declined to comment.

The discussions about questioning Mr. Pence are said to be in their early stages. Mr. Pence has not been subpoenaed, and the process could take months, because Mr. Trump can seek to block, or slow, his testimony by trying to invoke executive privilege.

One would hope that any patriotic citizen, much less a man running for president, would not hesitate to cooperate with the Department of Justice. But Pence has kind of a funny history on all of this:

In response to Pence’s sanctimonious statements on his book tour, Trump posts this clip of Pence on J4: “I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities. Come this Wed, we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the objections. We’ll hear the evidence.” pic.twitter.com/S09InVMibq

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 23, 2022

Yep, he said that. He went along all the way up to the line and it was only then that he backed off. He came very close to doing it and I suspect that if it hadn’t all fallen on his shoulders he would have happily gone along. He is not a hero.