Tag Archives: Mike Pence

Tales From An Alternate Universe … I Wish

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, guns, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Rants, Social commentary

It doesn’t take a whole lot to raise my hackles and make me growl these days.  Here are just a few of the things that succeeded in doing both within about an hour yesterday … {this is the stuff ulcers are made of}

Say WHAT????

I want you all to hear this statement made by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem speaking of her grandchildren at the NRA convention yesterday … make sure you’re sitting down before you read it:

“Little Miss Addie, who is almost two, and Branch who’s just a few months old, they have brought us so much joy. They’ve brought us purpose. Now Addie, who you know — soon will need them, I wanna reassure you, she already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too. So the girl is set up.”

My jaw dropped and for just a second I thought I might be sick.  This is the governor, for Pete’s sake!!!  This is a ‘woman’ who claims to be ‘pro-life’!  Those grandchildren should be taken out of the care of this family and put into foster care anonymously in some other state!  I am enraged, incensed, and would happily rearrange this woman’s face for her if she were anywhere near me!  WHERE is the common sense?

Call yourself ‘pro-life’ and buy a two-year-old child a damn shotgun and a rifle???  👿

I knew there were a lot of truly deplorable people in the Republican Party these days, but this one takes the prize for the biggest deplorable in the basket — at least at this moment!

Is Mike Pence human???

Mike Pence also attended that same NRA convention where a number of attendees actually booed him … I’m not sure why, but one analyst believes it is because he has extricated himself from the Trump circus and Trump is still quite popular with the gun nuts.  At any rate … Pence has decided on a way to solve the problem of mass shootings in the U.S. without having to enact stricter gun laws.  Do tell?

“I believe the time has come to institute a federal death penalty statute, with accelerated appeal, to ensure that those who engage in mass shootings face execution in months, not years.” 

A number of problems with his “solution” … it only addresses the problem after-the-fact.  Most mass shooters realize they will likely not be alive at the end of the day, so the threat of execution is not going to be a deterrent – never has been, never will be.  And ‘execution’ is not something we should be striving to increase, but rather to put an end to!  Way to go, Mike … open mouth and stick your big, stinky foot into it.

More questions than answers

So, some 21-year-old racist punk Air National Guardsman turns out to be the leaker of national security secrets that’s had everyone up in arms about for days now.  He’s not even an interesting individual nor a particularly smart one, but my question is … WHY did someone at his low level on the totem pole even have access to such high-level security data???  Is the military really so lax with highly classified information that a punk kid can get it, spread it around to teenagers on a gaming platform, and it takes us days to figure out what happened???  Seriously?  And do they not perform background checks or other means of screening before allowing someone hands-on access to classified data?  This punk had a history of racist remarks and actions … shouldn’t have been hard to figure out he wasn’t exactly a fine, upstanding man.

As for the punk … my own thoughts are he committed treason and should go to prison for the rest of his life … he serves no earthly purpose and is going to be a pain in the arse for as long as he lives.  But no … they’ve charged him only with two counts under the Espionage Act.  One of the counts is unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information which “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation”.  The other count is the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material.

The two counts combined could carry a maximum sentence of 15 years, and if some Republican judge or governor has anything to say about it, he’ll get a pat on the back and a ticket to freedom!  He’ll be like Kyle Rittenhouse, invited onto Tucker Carlson’s show, invited to intern for Republicans in Congress, and praised by the likes of Marge Greene.  Grrrrrrrrrrrr …

Seems to me we have some serious security issues in our military.  Lots of questions are going to be asked and need to be answered in the coming weeks/months.

Is Greg Abbott human???

Oh, and last but not least … Daniel Perry, the man shot and killed BlackLivesMatter protestor Garrett Foster as he tried to run his vehicle into a crowd of peaceful protestors, may soon be pardoned by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.  He should never see the light of day again, for there can be no doubt that he had every intention of killing at least one Black person on that day, given his text messages.  Here is just a sample …

  • He compared the Black Lives Matter movement to a “zoo full of monkeys”
  • A friend texted Perry, “Can you catch me a negro daddy.” Perry responded, “That is what I am hoping.”
  • One message read, “might have to kill a few people on my way to work.”

And it goes on.  So, Governor Abbott wants to pardon this a-hole and let him walk free so that next time he kills 10 or 15 or 20 as he plows his car through a group of protestors???  YO, TEXANS!  Wake the hell up and vote this jerkface out of office!  He’s a disgrace to your state and a disgrace to you!

Another Call to Arms? I Hope NOT!

Posted on by under History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

It seems there is only one major thing in the news this weekend, the anticipated indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.  The potential indictment is a result of the $130,000 in hush money that Trump paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election to ensure her silence about their earlier affair.  I had not intended to write about this prematurely, until it actually comes to pass, but there is so much smoke blowing – toxic smoke – that I thought it required a bit of dissection.

First, let me just say that while his affair with Ms. Daniels and then his attempt to pay more money than most of us will ever see in one place at one time to buy her silence are terrible.  The affair itself is an indicator of a person without morals or values, the hush money may be a violation of Federal Election Commission rules.  That is not for us to decide.  That said, it is interesting and disappointing that this is the first potential indictment Trump will face, for while it is terrible, there are numerous other crimes he has committed that are far more horrible on a far larger scale.  I would much rather see pending indictments for his role in plotting the attempted coup on January 6th 2021, and for his theft of classified documents upon leaving the White House, and for his recorded effort to coerce Georgia officials to change the vote count.  These are all definite crimes that there is no doubt he committed.  And those may yet come, however first there is this case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

The rhetoric surrounding the case is what’s keeping it in the headlines.  Here are a few examples:

  • “The idea of indicting a president of the United States is deeply troubling to me as it is to tens of millions of Americans – and particularly happening in what appears to be a politically charged environment in New York where the attorney general and other elected officials literally campaigned on a pledge to prosecute the former president.” – Former VP Mike Pence who was the main target of the January 6th insurrection
    • I would respond to Mr. Pence that as a citizen, it is ‘deeply troubling’ to have had a president who lied to us, cheated us, and conned us for four years!
  • “This is unAmerican and the radical Left has reached a dangerous new low of Third World countries. Knowing they cannot beat President Trump [sic] at the ballot box the Radical Left will now follow the lead of Socialist dictators and reportedly arrest President Trump [sic], the leading Republican candidate for President of the United States.” – Representative Elise Stefanik (New York)
  • “This is a personal sexual situation. What about Bill Clinton? That wasn’t worse? This guy allegedly – and I’m telling you it’s untrue. As his personal friend, I’m going to tell you categorically she’s lying. Categorically. And I know I say that all the time. I can tell you personally why I know that. She’s a damn liar! Manhattan has suffered unbelievable levels of crime under this incompetent and communist – this Soros paid for piece of I don’t know what.” – Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani
  • “If the Manhattan DA indicts President Trump, he will ultimately win even bigger than he is already going to win. And those Republicans that stand by and cheer for his persecution or do nothing to stop it will be exposed to the people and will be remembered, scorned, and punished by the base. President Trump did nothing wrong and has always fought for the American people, and we all know it, which is why we love him.” Representative Marge Greene (Georgia)

And then, as if the voices weren’t already causing our ears to ring and making us feel ill, Kevin McCarthy steps in and says …

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump. I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

This from the man who is the leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, hired to represent the people of this nation, not to defend a lying criminal!  Thus far, all his ‘investigations’ have been a waste of taxpayer dollars, as this one will be also.  I guess he needs to do this to stay on the good side of Trump, though.

But the one thing that concerns me most over this is the potential for violence.  All the above voices are enough to bring out the die-hard trumpists, but to throw a can of fuel on the fire, Trump himself had to jump into the fray with one of his ALL CAPS rants that is eerily reminiscent of his “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” on December 19th, 2020 …

“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

We saw the results on January 6th of his tweet, and my concern is that we will see similar results this week when and if he is indicted in Manhattan.  Mind you, that is NOT a reason for the prosecution to back off, not a reason for any of the cases against Trump to be halted or slowed, but it is a very real possibility that must be considered.

And it is being considered.  I understand that meetings have been going on throughout the week among city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in New York City about security preparations for a possible indictment of Trump.  Let us hope that lessons were learned by the events of January 6th and that law enforcement will be far better prepared this time.

While there may be an indictment, and there may be a fine, I do not operate under any illusions that Trump will be arrested or see the inside of a jail cell, so you can put that dream to bed right now.  Again, this is not even the most important case pending against him … I almost think this is something of a trial balloon, testing the waters for future cases on more important issues.

Did he really say that?

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

I well remember the time my young son, who had been outdoors playing with his sister and the neighborhood kids, came running into the house, breathless, saying, “Mom … whatever they say I did, I didn’t do it!” That was in the 1970s, long before I ever heard of Donald Trump, but the refusal to accept any responsibility for anything is the same. This latest attempt by the former guy to blame others for his lies and the consequences of those lies is jaw-dropping, even though we should be used to it by now. See what our friend Keith has to say about it …

musingsofanoldfart

From the mouth (or fingers) of a person who is well known and documented from multiple sources for presenting untruthful statements, yet one more statement is making the rounds this morning. S.V. Date wrote an article in the HuffPost called “Trump Blames Mike Pence For Jan. 6 Violence For Not Going Along With His Coup Attempt.” The article can be linked to below, but here are the first two paragraphs.

“Donald Trump, whose coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, put his vice president’s life at risk as a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, on Monday blamed Mike Pence for the violence that day because he didn’t go along with the scheme.

‘Had he sent the votes back to the legislators, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6,’ the former president told reporters on a flight to an Iowa campaign stop. ‘So in many ways, you…

View original post 307 more words

NOBODY Is Above The Law!!!!

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2024, Law and justice, Political commentary

In light of the numerous times in the past decade that the people of the United States have narrowly avoided losing our democratic foundation, culminating with the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, one would think the priority at this point would be to reinforce the intent of the Constitution by bringing to justice those who attempted to undermine it.  Or, put more simply, to figure out who was behind the plot to overthrow our votes, our elected officials, and punish them, or at the very least ensure they NEVER hold public office again!  However, more than two years later, we are still watching the stupid gamesmanship, seeing people refuse to honour subpoenas, and claim that they are “above the law”.  Make no mistake … NOBODY … NOBODY IS ABOVE THE LAW in the United States!

Those of you who watched the January 6th Committee hearings may remember seeing Judge J. Michael Luttig testify before the committee.  His role was that he had advised then-Vice President Mike Pence that he had no right to refuse to certify the election under law.  Fortunately for us all, Pence heeded Judge Luttig’s advice two years ago.  However today, Pence has been served a subpoena by Special Counsel Jack Smith – a subpoena which he is refusing to honour.  Once again, Judge Luttig has some very wise advice for Mr. Pence, but will he listen?  Here is Judge Luttig’s advice to Pence …

Mike Pence’s Dangerous Ploy

24 February

Judge J. Michael Luttig

Former Vice President Mike Pence recently announced he would challenge Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena for him to appear before a grand jury in Washington as part of the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the related Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Pence claimed that “the Biden D.O.J. subpoena” was “unconstitutional” and “unprecedented.” He added, “For me, this is a moment where you have to decide where you stand, and I stand on the Constitution of the United States.” Mr. Pence vowed to take his fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

A politician should be careful what he wishes for — no more so than when he’s a possible presidential candidate who would have the Supreme Court decide a constitutional case that could undermine his viability in an upcoming campaign.

The former vice president should not want the embarrassing spectacle of the Supreme Court compelling him to appear before a grand jury in Washington just when he’s starting his campaign for the presidency; recall the unanimous Supreme Court ruling that ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the fatally damning Oval Office tapes. That has to be an uncomfortable prospect for Mr. Pence, not to mention a potentially damaging one for a man who — at least as of today — is considered by many of us across the political spectrum to be a profile in courage for his refusal to join in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election in the face of Donald Trump’s demands. And to be clear, Mr. Pence’s decision to brand the Department of Justice’s perfectly legitimate subpoena as unconstitutional is a far cry from the constitutionally hallowed ground on which he stood on Jan. 6.

Injecting campaign-style politics into the criminal investigatory process with his rhetorical characterization of Mr. Smith’s subpoena as a “Biden D.O.J. subpoena,” Mr. Pence is trying to score points with voters who want to see President Biden unseated in 2024. Well enough. That’s what politicians do. But Jack Smith’s subpoena was neither politically motivated nor designed to strengthen President Biden’s political hand in 2024. Thus the jarring dissonance between the subpoena and Mr. Pence’s characterization of it. It is Mr. Pence who has chosen to politicize the subpoena, not the D.O.J.

As to the merits of his claim, The New York Times and other news media have reported that Mr. Pence plans to argue that when he presided over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 as president of the Senate, he was effectively a legislator and therefore entitled to the privileges and protections of the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause. That clause is intended to protect members of Congress from questioning and testifying about official legislative acts. Should the courts support his claim, Mr. Pence would not be required to comply with Mr. Smith’s subpoena. Mr. Pence may also be under the impression that the legal fight over his claim will confound the courts, consuming months, if not longer, before he receives the verdict — but it’s unclear what he hopes to gain from the delay. One would have thought Mr. Pence would have seized the propitious opportunity afforded him by Mr. Smith, most likely weeks or months before he even decides whether he will run for the presidency.

If Mr. Pence’s lawyers or advisers have told him that it will take the federal courts months and months or longer to decide his claim and that he will never have to testify before the grand jury, they are mistaken. We can expect the federal courts to make short shrift of this “Hail Mary” claim, and Mr. Pence doesn’t have a chance in the world of winning his case in any federal court and avoiding testifying before the grand jury.

Inasmuch as Mr. Pence’s claim is novel and an unsettled question in constitutional law, it is only novel and unsettled because there has never been a time in our country’s history where it was thought imperative for someone in a vice president’s position, or his lawyer, to conjure the argument. In other words, Mr. Pence’s claim is the proverbial invention of the mother of necessity if ever there was one.

Any protections the former vice president is entitled to under the “speech and debate” clause will be few in number and limited in scope. There are relatively few circumstances in which a former vice president would be entitled to constitutional protection for his conversations related to his ceremonial and ministerial roles of presiding over the electoral vote count. What Mr. Smith wants to know about are Mr. Pence’s communications and interactions with Mr. Trump before, and perhaps during, the vote count, which are entirely fair game for a grand jury investigating possible crimes against the United States.

Whatever the courts may or may not find the scope of any protection to be, they will unquestionably hold that Mr. Pence is nonetheless required to testify in response to Mr. Smith’s subpoena. Even if a vice president has speech or debate clause protections, they will yield to a federal subpoena to appear before the grand jury. This is especially true where, as here, a vice president seeks to protect his conversations with a president who himself is under federal criminal investigation for obstructing the very official proceedings in which the special counsel is interested.

Mr. Pence and his inner circle should be under no illusion that the lower federal courts will take their time dispensing with this claim. The courts quickly disposed of Senator Lindsey Graham’s speech or debate clause claim, requiring him to testify before the grand jury empaneled in Fulton County, Ga. — and his claim was far stronger than Mr. Pence’s. In the unlikely event that Mr. Pence’s claim were to make it to the Supreme Court, it, too, could be expected to take swift action.

Mr. Pence undoubtedly has some of the finest lawyers in the country helping him navigate this treacherous path forward, and they will certainly earn their hefty fees. But in cases like this, the best lawyers earn their pay less when they advise and argue their clients’ cases in public than when they elegantly choreograph the perfect exit in private — before their clients get the day in court they wished for.

Mr. Pence’s lawyers would be well advised to have Jack Smith’s phone number on speed dial and call him before he calls them. The special counsel will be waiting, though not nearly as long as Mr. Pence’s lawyers may be thinking. No prosecutor, least of all Mr. Smith, will abide this political ploy for long. And Mr. Pence shouldn’t let this dangerous tactic play out for long. If he does, it will be more than he wished for.

It is a time-tested axiom in the law never to ask questions you don’t know the answer to. This should apply to politicians in spades. But the die has been cast by the former vice president. The only question now is not whether he will have to testify before the grand jury, but how soon. The special counsel is in the driver’s seat, and the timing of Mr. Pence’s appearance before the grand jury is largely in his hands. Mr. Smith will bide his time for only so long.

Will He Or Won’t He? Should He Or Shouldn’t He?

Posted on by under Election 2020, Election 2024, History, Law and justice, Political commentary

The great debate these days seems to be over whether Attorney General Merrick Garland will, or should, charge Donald Trump for crimes committed while in office.  You all know my opinion:  charge him, convict him, put him in a cell and throw away the key!  But, there is more to consider and political author/journalist Bill Press assesses it in his latest column …

To charge or not to charge?

Bill Press, 28 July, 2022

To charge or not to charge?

For months in Washington – whether over breakfast at the Four Seasons, lunch at The Palm, or dinner at Café Milano – the only topic of conversation has been: What’s Merrick Garland up to? Is the Justice Department conducting its own investigation of possible criminal activity related to Jan. 6? And, if so, how high would it go? All the way to Trump? Why hasn’t he already filed charges? Or is Garland, afraid of making the department look political, just holding back and leaving it up to Congress?

Nobody knew. And Garland only deepened the mystery with his sphinx-like pronouncement that “no person,” not even a former president, is “above the law.”

This week, we finally got some answers. Washington’s sleepy, summertime media exploded with first, the rumor, then confirmation, that none other than Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, and Greg Jacob, Pence’s former chief counsel, had met with a federal grand jury looking into possible criminal charges related to the failed insurrection of Jan. 6.

Now we know for sure: The Justice Department, having already filed charges against more than 855 people who took part in the violent assault on the Capitol, is moving up the chain of command – is already inside the White House – investigating who in the top tier of the Trump administration is responsible for summoning and inciting the mob. And we know that the DOJ was, in fact, conducting its own investigation even before receiving any request to do so from the January 6 Select Committee. That’s big news.

But that news has also re-ignited another old debate in Washington: No matter how outrageous his conduct before, during, and after Jan. 6, should Merrick Garland even file charges against Donald Trump? Many leading attorneys, including CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, with whom I usually agree on everything, have urged Garland not to act. Their arguments are wide-ranging: that such a case is complicated and might not succeed; that prosecuting a former president’s never been done before in this country; that that’s how autocracies work, not democracies; and that charging Trump with a crime will only give him another opportunity to paint himself as a political victim in a trial that could drag on for years.

And so the question of the day has become: To charge or not to charge? Frankly, I can’t even believe we’re having this debate. It’s a no-brainer. Of course, Donald Trump should be charged with crimes he committed as president. There’s no good argument for not doing so.

Granted, this would be the first time a former president faced criminal charges. But why? Because we’ve never had a president like Donald Trump before. No other American president tried to bribe the president of another country; refused to accept, and then tried to overturn, the outcome of an election; asked a state official to “discover” 11,000 more votes; encouraged his lawyers to create slates of fake electors; summoned a mob of supporters to Washington and, knowing they were armed, directed them to storm the Capitol and prevent Congress and his vice president from carrying out their constitutional responsibilities.

Plus, the evidence is clear. Trump is guilty as sin. The January 6 Committee has made the case. Trump’s guilty of violating the law against rebellion and insurrection. S2383 strictly prohibits anyone who “incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto.” That’s exactly what Trump did leading up to Jan. 6.

And, among other possible charges, Trump’s guilty of obstructing justice, according to which it’s a crime “to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding or attempt to do so.” Which is exactly what Trump did on Jan. 6.

There’s also the matter of fairness. There were two different sets of players on Jan. 6: those who carried out the attack, and those who planned and organized it. It would be a gross miscarriage of justice for the DOJ to prosecute only the members of the mob, and not the man who sent them.

Finally, it’s important to hold Trump responsible in order to send a message: In this great country, anybody has the right to complain about the outcome of an election. But nobody has the right to overturn the government and destroy our democracy in order to stay in office. That’s an attack on the United States of America.

For those reasons, Merrick Garland must file criminal charges against Donald Trump. The sooner, the better.

Republican Voices of Experience Speak Loudly

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary

It’s one thing for someone like me, a mere political observer, to say that Donald Trump must be prosecuted for his crimes, particularly the crime of inciting an attempted coup to overturn an election, to kill the voices of We the People.  You and I can say it all we want, but our words carry little or no weight with the courts or the Department of Justice, the people who really matter.  However, when former Justice Department officials who served in Republican administrations say it, then it carries weight and significance.

The following article, published in The Atlantic, was penned by the trio of Donald Ayer, Stuart M. Gerson, and Dennis Aftergut.  Ayer and Gerson worked in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Gerson also briefly served as the acting attorney general under President Bill Clinton, while Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and former chief assistant city attorney for San Francisco.  Their words are powerful and I hope that those who need to listen … are listening.

The DOJ Must Prosecute Trump

The January 6 committee has provided overwhelming evidence that the former president was not some bit player along for the ride, but the central driver of a nefarious plot.

By Donald Ayer, Stuart Gerson, and Dennis Aftergut

After seven hearings held by the January 6 committee thus far this summer, doubts as to who is responsible have been resolved. The evidence is now overwhelming that Donald Trump was the driving force behind a massive criminal conspiracy to interfere with the official January 6 congressional proceeding and to defraud the United States of a fair election outcome.

The evidence is clearer and more robust than we as former federal prosecutors—two of us as Department of Justice officials in Republican administrations—thought possible before the hearings began. Trump was not just a willing beneficiary of a complex plot in which others played most of the primary roles. While in office, he himself was the principal actor in nearly all of its phases, personally executing key parts of most of its elements and aware of or involved in its worst features, including the use of violence on Capitol Hill. Most remarkably, he did so over vehement objections raised at every turn, even by his sycophantic and loyal handpicked team. This was Trump’s project all along.

Everyone knew before the hearings began that we were dealing with perhaps the gravest imaginable offense against the nation short of secession—a serious nationwide effort pursued at multiple levels to overturn the unambiguous outcome of a national election. We all knew as well that efforts were and are unfolding nationwide to change laws and undermine electoral processes with the specific objective of succeeding at the same project in 2024 and after. But each hearing has sharpened our understanding that Donald Trump himself is the one who made it happen.

As former prosecutors, we recognize the legitimacy of concerns that electoral winners prosecuting their defeated opponents may look like something out of a banana republic rather than the United States of America; that doing so might be viewed as opening the door to prosecutorial retaliation by future presidential winners; and that, in the case of this former president, it might lead to civil unrest.

But given the record now before us, all of these considerations must give way to the urgency of achieving a public reckoning for Donald Trump. The damage to America’s future that would be inflicted by giving him a pass far outweighs the risks of prosecuting him.

The committee’s evidence to date establishes multiple significant points for prosecutors. (A comprehensive summary of the evidence—offense by offense—is available at Just Security’s “Criminal Evidence Tracker.”)

First, contrary to speculation that Trump may have genuinely believed he won the election, and thus in his own mind was seeking rough justice in trying to change the outcome, the committee has demonstrated repeatedly that he knew beyond all doubt that he had lost fair and square. Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr told the president that claims of widespread voter fraud were “bullshit.” Numerous reinforcements of that message were delivered by many others, including Barr’s successor, former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen; former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue; and multiple Trump-campaign officials.

Second, Trump’s involvement in carrying out the scheme was systematic, expansive, and extraordinarily personal. As if to illustrate how personal his intervention was (and is), Republican Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair and the representative from Wyoming, dropped a bombshell at the end of Tuesday’s hearing: Sometime since the previous hearing on June 28, Trump himself had contacted a witness, something that his lawyers certainly could have told him could easily lead to charges of witness tampering. Cheney announced that the committee has notified the Justice Department of Trump’s latest misconduct.

The committee’s previous hearings showed that in the months after the 2020 election, Trump himself—not some aide or lawyer or other ally—tried to interfere with the state vote-counting processes. Among the most memorable incidents was his 67-minute January 2 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger asking him to “find” 11,780 nonexistent votes, creating a Trump win. Trump himself also called to try to influence the state’s chief elections investigator, Frances Watson, and spoke with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to urge him to call a special legislative session to appoint alternative electors.

There is also evidence that Trump spoke with Republican Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler after he had declined repeated calls from Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, two Trump-campaign attorneys, to bring the legislature into session to decertify the state’s election results. And Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, also a Republican, both testified that Trump phoned them in December to ask for their help in implementing the infamous bogus-elector scheme. (John Eastman, another Trump lawyer, and Giuliani were also involved with those calls.)

Trump tried persistently to obtain the help of the Department of Justice in creating a false public impression that the election had been fraudulent. After he failed in mid-December to persuade Bill Barr to assert election fraud, Trump called Rosen, Barr’s successor, nearly every day in the same pursuit. And when this effort too failed, at a White House meeting on January 3, he undertook to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a second-tier DOJ official whom Trump had spoken with personally and found more compliant. This effort failed only when Donoghue and Rosen told Trump that the entire department’s leadership would resign if Clark were installed.

Crucial to the whole plot, of course, was the unlawful scheme to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting or delaying the electoral count. Multiple witnesses testified about being present to hear Trump’s “heated” call with Pence on the morning of January 6. One witness said that Trump called Pence a “wimp.” Ivanka Trump testified that she had never previously heard her father treat Pence that way, and she told another witness that Trump had used the “P-word” to denigrate the vice president’s manhood.

Ample evidence has also shown Trump well knew that Pence could not properly do as Trump urged. Mike Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, testified that Trump was present at a January 4 White House meeting where John Eastman admitted the unlawfulness of his and Trump’s plan to have the vice president not certify the electoral count two days later.

A third significant point for prosecutors is that the hearings have put into sharp focus Trump’s personal involvement and advance knowledge of the dangerous circumstances surrounding the January 6 insurrection. Cassidy Hutchinson, who was the principal aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified that she overheard Trump complain just before his January 6 speech on the Ellipse that supporters were not being allowed into the security area for his speech while armed, and thus were staying outside. She recalled Trump asking to have the magnetometers removed, saying that he did not care if attendees were armed, because “they’re not here to hurt me.”

Hutchinson also testified that Trump expected to go to the Capitol after his speech and was angry when the Secret Service denied his request to do so, testimony that others have corroborated. He wanted to be part of and lead an armed mob aimed, at minimum, at intimidating Congress and Mike Pence. That is significant evidence demonstrating criminal intent in connection with the crime of inciting an insurrection. Told that the mob had threatened to hang the vice president, Trump apparently responded that he “deserves” it.

Finally, the committee has persuasively established that Trump continued to facilitate the insurrection, even after he returned to the White House once the Secret Service refused to take him to Capitol Hill. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that during the violence, Pence called him to request the National Guard to restore order; Trump made no such call. In fact, Trump did nothing for more than three hours to quell the insurrectionists.

To the contrary, Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews testified that by tweeting that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” to overturn the election, Trump was “pouring gasoline on the fire.”

All of that was enough to show Trump’s personal leadership of the Big Lie effort and his complicity in the violence of January 6. But in addition, at Tuesday’s hearing, the committee focused attention on Trump’s December 19 tweet inviting his supporters to a “big protest in D.C. on January 6th.” He added, “Be there, will be wild!” The committee showed evidence of communications among the militant Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters hours after the tweet demonstrating that it was the signal that prompted previously unaligned groups to cooperate in developing military-style operational tactics for the violent Capitol invasion.

In assessing the importance and priority to be given to a DOJ decision to prosecute, the Justice Department Manual lists three factors with special relevance here: “the nature and seriousness of the offense,” “the deterrent effect of the prosecution,” and “the person’s culpability in connection with the offense.”

On the first point, it is hard to imagine an offense that would more urgently call for criminal accountability by federal prosecution than a concerted and nearly successful effort to overthrow the result of a presidential election. It is an offense against the entire nation, by which Trump sought to reverse a 235-year-old constitutional tradition of presidential power transferring lawfully and peacefully.

The fact that a related state grand-jury investigation is proceeding in Fulton County, Georgia, relating to the part of the plot aimed at the Georgia vote count and certification process does not alter or lessen the urgency of this federal interest. Separate state and federal prosecutions can and should proceed when federal interests are as strong or stronger than the local interest.

Nor can there be any doubt about the crucial need to deter future attempts to overthrow the government. For the past 18 months, and presently, Trump himself and his supporters have been engaged in concerted efforts across the country to prepare for a similar, but better-planned, effort to overcome the minority status of Trump’s support and put him back in the White House. Moreover, if the efforts of the former president and his supporters garner a pass from the federal authorities, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, Trump will not be the only one ready to play this game for another round.

As many have pointed out, deterrence requires that the quest for accountability succeed in achieving a conviction before a jury—here most likely made up of citizens of the District of Columbia. And the Department’s regulations make the odds of the prosecution’s success an important consideration in determining whether to go forward. In the case of a person who has made a career out of escaping the consequences of his misconduct, this is no small issue for the attorney general to take into account.

But as former prosecutors, we have faith that the evidence of personal culpability is so overwhelming that the case can be made to the satisfaction of such a jury. One of us—Gerson—has tried many difficult cases before D.C. juries with success. As a defendant, Donald Trump would open the door to all sorts of things that wouldn’t come into a normal trial, and the prosecutor could have a field day in argument about how this would-be tyrant tried to overthrow the government that has kept our nation free for two and a quarter centuries. Bottom line: Given what is at stake, even with the risk of a hung jury—leaving room for a second trial—there is no realistic alternative but to go forward.

Any argument that Donald Trump lacked provable criminal intent is contradicted by the facts elicited by the January 6 committee. And the tradition of not prosecuting a former president must yield to the manifest need to protect our constitutional form of government and to ensure that the violent effort to overthrow it is never repeated.

A Convenient Erasure

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary

On January 6th 2021, once the violent rioters had breached the U.S. Capitol and were calling to “Hang Mike Pence”, the Secret Service attempted to take then-VP Pence to a ‘secure location’.  Pence refused, saying “I’m not getting in the car,” which Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of the January 6th Investigative Committee, calls the “six most chilling words of this entire thing I’ve seen so far.”  Why?  Because if Pence had gotten into the car and been whisked away to safety, he would not have been at the Capitol later that night to certify the results of the 2020 election and I honestly don’t know where we would be today.

Until recently, I had assumed that the Secret Service was just intent on doing their job, protecting Vice-President Pence’s life.  I’m not a conspiracy theorist, don’t see evil lurking around every corner, so it never occurred to me that perhaps that was another part of the nefarious plan to overthrow the election results.  But sharper minds than mine began putting pieces of the puzzle together and asking questions.

The Secret Service is under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and answers to the DHS Office of the Inspector General, which had requested records of electronic communications from the Secret Service between January 5th and January 6th, 2021.  But guess what?  Those records – specifically those records – seem to have been erased!  We are told that the agents’ texts were erased as part of a ‘device replacement program’, after the inspector general had requested them as part of his inquiry into the events of that day.  How very damn convenient.  Sorry, folks, I’m not buying it, and neither is Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6th committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.

“It’s concerning.  It’s important for us to get as much information about how this discrepancy occurred.”

Stay tuned, for this one isn’t going to be easily swept under the rug.

They Are NOT Heroes

Posted on by under Election 2020, History, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

Suddenly I’m hearing Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Ivanka Trump, and others referred to as ‘heroes’.  I don’t see it that way at all.  At some point, they did step up to the plate and do their job for We the People, but for years before that, decades in the case of Ivanka, they failed.  Instead they licked the boots and played “yes-man”, enabling a lunatic who was intent on turning the United States into his own personal playground.  I am not alone in my view of these and other people, for yesterday Frank Bruni wrote of them in his column in the New York Times …

Don’t Let Bill Barr and Ivanka Trump Visit the Reputation Laundromat

June 16, 2022

By Frank Bruni

The Jan. 6 committee’s televised hearings are many things: the coalescence of scattered revelations into a clearer, cleaner narrative; an unblinking appraisal of the madness of King Donald; an opportunity for Americans to reflect on how close things came, and might yet come, to falling apart.

But for Bill Barr, Bill Stepien, Ivanka Trump and others, they are also something else — something we should not be taken in by.

They are a trip to the reputation laundromat (or perhaps, for this crowd, the reputation dry cleaner). Donald Trump’s onetime acolytes are trying to expunge the stain of their sycophancy. And they’re betting that in a country and era of fickle attention spans and feeble memories, they’ll have more luck with that spot than Lady Macbeth did with hers.

Early this week, the committee showed testimony by Barr, the former attorney general, that he told Trump again and again that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election fairly and definitively. It showed testimony by Stepien, who was Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, that he was among a group of aides — “Team Normal,” he called them — who pushed back against Rudy Giuliani’s hallucinatory insistence that the election was being stolen.

And last week, of course, was Ivanka Trump’s star turn. That’s when we saw her testimony: that she said a big no to the Big Lie.

But her, Barr’s and Stepien’s words don’t amount to moral reckonings. They reflect professional calculations.

Team Normal? If you were still working for Trump by the fourth year of his presidency, there was nothing normal about you. If you served that campaign, during which Trump repeatedly telegraphed his intention to declare any result other than victory an illegitimate one, there was nothing normal about you. If you’d taken the measure of the man before Election Day 2020 and decided, yes, he’s fit to lead America, good for this country and worthy of my efforts and energies on his behalf, there was nothing normal about you.

And if, in the weeks after Election Day, you finally stopped abetting his delusions, midwifing his megalomania and whispering sweet reassurances in his ear, you weren’t returning to normal. You were simply cutting your losses. It was time to hitch your wagon to a sturdier, steadier horse, to find another patron and another payday.

Stepien, as my colleague Michelle Cottle wrote in The Times on Tuesday, “slunk away, coat collar flipped up and hat brim pulled low in the hopes that no one would notice him fleeing the spiraling freak show to which he had sold his services and his soul.”

Susan Glasser, in The New Yorker, also had it right. Reflecting on how Stepien and Barr are now styling themselves (and being showcased) as blunt tellers of Trump-foiling truths, Glasser wrote on Monday evening that they are “not only Trump’s accusers but also first-class enablers of Trump and his lies — until Trump finally found a lie too big for them to enable. Even when it came to their qualms about Trump’s ‘rigged election’ crusade, their outrage came conveniently after the fact, not when it might have made a difference.”

Amen. We can be grateful that Barr and Stepien didn’t travel the final autocratic mile with Trump and not discount their disgraceful road to that point. We can remember how Barr, in advance of Robert Mueller’s report, released a toned-down summary of it that was clearly meant to dull its impact.

We can remember that before Mike Pence patriotically refused Trump’s order not to certify the election results, he pathetically performed the role of Trump’s evangelical beard. And don’t get me started on Ivanka. I’ve spent ample time in her temple of self-celebration, as have others. She and her husband, Jared Kushner, will always do what’s profitable for them, and if that occasionally intersects with the public interest, well, accidents happen. We can think a word of thanks without uttering a syllable of praise.

There were Republicans who took a chance on Trump at the start and got out fast, accepting that either he’d fooled them or they’d kidded themselves. There were Republicans who signaled that much was amiss. Those who didn’t — including Pence, Mike Pompeo and others with presidential aspirations in 2024 — forfeited the moral high ground and can’t credibly reclaim it now.

Nor can they pretend that they were anything other than transaction-minded actors in the most transactional administration I’ve observed. When they benefited from their proximity to Trump, they held their noses, bit their tongues and cuddled close. It’s possible they persuaded themselves that his flaws weren’t so different from any other vain leader’s, that politics is invariably messy and that their compromises were “normal” ones. That’s awfully convenient. And utterly absurd.

Texas Paul REACTS to New Leaked Eastman Emails Outlining Coup Attempt

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Law and justice, Political commentary, Re-blogs, voting rights

I had never heard of ‘Texas Paul’ until I saw this video Scottie posted last night. He sums up all the major events perpetrated by Trump & his cronies that very nearly overturned our government from November 2020 ’til January 2021, the failed coup that nearly succeeded, and he does so in a clear, understandable way that … well, take a look for yourself …

Scottie's Playtime

Please watch this!  I know some people wont like his style of talking, but he is clear easy to follow on the methodical way Eastman and tRump tried to get the states to throw out the voters electors to install fake ones.  Even just to sow doubt.  I know everything he says, I have read it many times in documents and reports.  But his easy way of putting it together and laying it out is a great listen.   We need to get people to understand how close the coup came and how deeply so many people were involved.   If you think that DeathSantis or Ted Cruz or any Republican wouldn’t try this if they got the presidency you are mistaken.  This is the Republican goal.   Well I can only ask you to listen and share.  Hugs

Newly leaked emails show Trump Attorney John Eastman urging Republican legislators in Pennsylvania to…

View original post 41 more words