The Spirit of $1.776 Billion

Donald Trump tried to sue the very government he allegedly leads for $10 billion, alleging that Internal Revenue Service allowed Trump's tax returns and the tax returns of his business to be leaked in 2020 - when he was also leading the government. In what is apparently a settlement out of court (you think?), Trump will not collect ten billion smackers for himself, but he will establish a $1.776 (get it?) billion slush fund to compensate Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. 2021, paying them for their legal fees and any wages lost as a result of their prosecutions and the time and money spent on their court cases.

The fund is likely to be used to cover the expenses of any Trump supporters who commit transgressions to display their allegiance to him and his schemes  So not only is Trump paying January 6 insurrectionists for committing violence and insurrection for him, he's planning to give out money to anyone who commits violence and insurrection in service to his regime.  Service includes harassing immigrants, intimidating voters, shutting down protests, and all sorts of storm trooper-redolent stuff. 

To think - you can get rich and get a pardon just by breaking the law for Donald John Trump himself!

And who's paying for all this?  We are! 

I wish I could start a slush fund to encourage the Democratic states to secede - a fund of, say, $1.861 billion!

The Gloves Come Off (Finally)

President Biden kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign with a speech near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to remind Americans who are angry at him for his support of Israel, his failure to bring satisfactory prosperity to the nation, and, worst of all, his corrupt acceptance of payments from foreign governments (oh, wait, that was Donald Trump!), of what happened three years ago this month.  He made it clear that the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 was part of an ongoing effort by Donald Trump to regain and hold onto power, even if it means neutralizing a few people - even law enforcement - to do it.

"For the first time on our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power in America - first time- smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police," Biden said. "Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Inside, they hunted for Speaker Pelosi [of] the House, was chanting, as they marched through and smashed windows, “Where’s Nancy?” Over 140 police officers were injured. Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day. And . . . because of Donald Trump’s lies, they died because these lies brought a mob to Washington."

It was a forceful and defiant speech.  The President doubled down three days later in a speech at Mother Emmanuel Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the 2015 racist shooting of black parishioners in a Bible study group.  There, President Biden reiterated his attack on Trump's accusations of a stolen election and remind people of his white-supremacist supporters and tendencies.  But the President has to keep up they attacks, and for one simple reason - they . . . work!  His earlier campaign speeches, in which he took pride in his record, sound like bragging.  And while it's not bragging if you can back it up - and he can - he can only back it up with statistics and figures, not how people feel about what he's done.  Neither statistics nor figures can move or inspire voters to come out to the polls.

Not surprisingly, Biden's speech in Pennsylvania got mocked by Fox News - not for its content, which Fox commentators likely found irrelevant - but for stumbling over his words and acting "confused," the result of a lifelong stammer that MAGA Republicans have used to depict Biden as too old and feeble to serve as President for four more years.  Meanwhile Trump, only three or four years younger than Biden but overweight and out of shape - and also prone to defecating in his pants more often than his supporters did on the Capitol Rotunda floor on January 6 - is held up by the MAGA crowd as the archetype of Kennedyesque vim and vigor because he's feisty and combative, and he also has all of his hair (which he sprays on regularly).

Sadly, I can't be certain that many people have been listening to Biden's speeches.  As today's music scene proves, you can offer something that sounds great, but who cares if not enough people are listening to it?  That's why Biden has to keep up this new attack.

Remember, when they go low . . . we kick 'em!  Eric Holder said that.  If we don't, those of us who oppose Trump will be sent to labor camps and/or executed.  I said that.   

No Pride

Enrique Tarrio, former (note former) leader of the Proud Boys, has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.  He did not command any insurrectionists in the field of battle, he did not set foot in Washington on that day, he did not commit an acts of violence, and he did not get away with covering his rear end when a jury of his apparent peers found him guilty.  

In fact, he was not in Washington on January 6, 2021 because he had been arrested just a few days earlier for vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a Washington, D.C. church with a historically black congregation.

So maybe there's hope that Donald Trump can be incarcerated before he gets into the Oval Office again.

The sentence, though not as stiff as it could have been, was pretty severe just the same, and it was a sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly.  Kelly is a member of the conservative  Federalist Society, he was appointed by Donald Trump in 2017, and he was confirmed by a Republican-majority Senate on a fast track.  And even he wouldn't show Tarrio any leniency.

Could Trump get a similar sentence if convicted of insurrection?  Cross your fingers.  

A Proven Conspiracy Theory

As soon as I'm finished talking about new charges in the old indictment of Donald Trump, Jack Smith comes along and issues a new indictment. 

Smith indicted Trump on four counts concerning attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election: conspiracy to defraud the United States by lying about the election being stolen, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding by schmeing with his underlings to place the electoral vote count for President and Vice President in dispute and approve Trump electors over Biden electors, obstruction of an official proceeding by trying to get Vice President Mike Pence to suspend the electoral vote count for ten days, and conspiracy against rights by trying to nullify the votes of millions of Americans.

Who needs Fani Willis?

Dude, this case is so easy for Smith, who's promised a speedy trail,  to prove, he can have the trial wrapped up before Easter, and Easter falls in March in 2024. He won't have trouble finding witnesses.  The grand jury in Washington, D.C. have identified several. 

Once this trial is done, Smith can take all the time he needs to prosecute the Mar-a-Lago documents trial even in the middle of a presidential election campaign.  Because Trump will be in jail already because of this case.   

Elmer F****d

E. Stewart Rhodes - the E is for "Elmer" - was found guilty of seditious conspiracy in directing his militia group the Oath Keepers in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Also found guilty of the same charge was Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keepers in Florida.  Three other defendants -  I could look up their names, but who cares? - were found guilty of similar felony charges.

A charge such as seditious conspiracy is very difficult to prove, but the Justice Department pulled it off.  

"Today the jury returned a verdict convicting all defendants of criminal conduct, including two Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy against the United States," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said. "The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021. The prosecutors and agents on this case worked tirelessly, with extraordinary skill, and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice."

And with the subsequent termination of an appellate court three-judge panel of the special master appointed to look at the documents Donald Trump stole and brought to Mar-a-Lago - Garland and special counsel are certain to go after bigger fish - that is, Trump himself. 😃

As for Elmer, he's going to jail for a long, long time.

Master of Deception

Donald Trump is very good at getting people to pay attention to him.  He's also good at getting people to believe him.  He was just able to convince a federal judge - a judge who probably didn't need much convincing, since he appointed her himself - to grant a special master to look at the documents the FBI retrieved from Mar-a-Lago, slowing down the Justice Department's investigation of the matter and possibly stopping it altogether.   And at his first rally since his house-cum-resort was searched, he managed to convince his supporters of other insistences.

He convinced them that President Biden is the true enemy of the state, calling his September 1 address "vicious, hateful, and divisive," before saying vicious, hateful, and divisive things about the FBI and the Justice Department.  Trump has also called for his own reinstatement into the Presidency.

When President Biden called Trump supporters "semi-fascists," many mainstream Republicans and even some centrist Democrats thought he'd gone too far.  Then Trump, at his Pennsylvnaia rally, featured as a special guest a woman who runs a support group and raises legal-defense funds for January 6 insurrectionists.  She's trying to get "justice" for her nephew who took part in the insurrection and who dresses like Hitler to show his admiration for the Fuhrer.  He was convicted on his cations in May, and he'll be sentenced later this month.

U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Ca), a member of the January 6 select committee, said it best.  "Being a supporter of Adolf Hitler does put you in the Fascist category; there is no semi about it. I do think this is troubling."

Some people think that Biden set a trap for Trump by goading the one-time New York real estate developer into proving Biden's point that MAGA Republicans are dangerously extreme and extremely dangerous.  I don't think Biden is that clever. But Trump has shown his eagerness to be part of the nation's current political debate, much to the chagrin of Republicans who wish in vain that he would go away.   

Watergate - Fifty Years

By all accounts, Richard Nixon knew nothing about the planned break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington before the operation was executed - and thwarted - on Saturday, June 17, 1972.  When told about it, President Nixon is said to have thrown an ashtray across the Oval Office and called the burglary "the dumbest thing I've ever heard of." 

But - and you knew this was coming - Nixon oversaw "dirty trick" operations against the Democrats that were far better planned and far more successful, having already knocked Maine senator Ed Muskie out of the 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and assured himself of getting the arch-liberal South Dakota senator George McGovern as his general election opponent, and once Watergate blew, he needed to cover up the burglars' connection to the White House to control the damage.  And of course, the cover-up was worse than the crime.  As for the investigation itself . . . there are documentarians who can explain it and put it into perspective far better than I can in a silly blog.

I can, however, say this - though President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after Nixon's resignation, Nixon still lost the Presidency and was publicly shamed, making the return to respectability as an elder statesman a long and arduous one - and it's said that he had great remorse for what he did in the last days of his administration.  Nixon hardly got away with anything he did wrong.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, not only escaped punishment for his crimes as President, he's been escaping crimes he committed as a private citizen all of his life.  And the January 6 insurrection - the select committee hearings for which resume in the House today - had hardly diminished his power; rather, it's enhanced it, like a severe summer thunderstorm.  Even as the House 1/6 select committee lays out a compelling narrative of Trump and how he planned to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans are nominating Trump toadies to run for governorships or secretaryships of state, who hope to get elected and control the means of counting votes in the 2024 election to ensure a Trump victory even against the will of the people.

Donald Trump learned something invaluable for his own survival - as long as you have a devoted fan base on your side, nothing you do can bring you down, and nothing anyone else does to you can stop you.  Richard Nixon wasn't that type of politician.  Also, Trump was a celebrity businessman who took his cue from celebrity entertainers on how to survive when he realized that any press - even bad press - is good press.  Nixon was too thin-skinned to let bad press roll off his back.  

Now would be a good time for America to learn the lessons of Watergate before Trump gets away with hijacking our democracy.  Because once he does hijack it, it's game over. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part Two

Yesterday's January 6 hearing produced a new term - "team normal."

A hybrid of taped and live testimony centered on the comments of former Attorney General William Barr, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, former U.S. Attorney for Northern District of Georgia Byung Jin Pak, Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who represented George W. Bush on the 2000 Florida vote recount), and former Republican Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, who all looked into claims f afraid from Donald Trump at one time or another.  Among those testifying, Barr and Pak were Trump appointees, and Stepien joined the Trump 2020 presidential campaign late in the game to improve Trump's poll numbers against Biden.  All of them came to the conclusion that there was no fraud and that Trump. assuming he really believes he defeated Biden in the presidential election, doesn't know what he's talking about when he claims fraud.  These Trump aides and appointees were called "team normal" because they looked at the accusations of fraud objectively and thoroughly and ultimately told Trump what he didn't want to hear.  But "team normal" last to the crazies - including an inebriated Rudolph Giuliani - advising Trump.

Well, we all knew that.  We also knew, as former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt testified yesterday, that once Biden won Arizona, there was no way Trump could win nationally.  So there were no bombshells today?  Well, there was this one.  January 6 Senior Investigative Counsel Amanda Wick revealed, in a pre-taped explanation, that Trump raised a quarter of a billion dollars off the lie that there was voter fraud and said it was going to fight voter fraud.  Instead, it went to conservative activist groups engaged in anything but that.

Everyone is calling yesterday a horrible day for Donald Trump.  But it was also a horrible day for President Biden - the Dow fell 876 points over worries of inflation and a possible recession.  To those worried that Trump might try to steal the 2024 presidential election - he actually might win it fair and square.

The danger on the rocks has surely not passed. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part One

I think it's fair to say that the House January 6 select committee's televised hearings stormed out of the gate the other night. 

The committee showed new footage of the insurrection from that day, putting it into proper context and outlining a basic narrative that subsequent hearings will follow.  In addition, ranking Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming laid out a blunt, outlined seven-point plan Trump had to keep the Presidency despite his loss to Joe Biden.  It reads as follows:

• President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
• President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
• President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
• President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
• President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
• President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
• As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

The facts as Cheney and Democratic Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi presented them certainly ft this narrative like a velvet glove.  And then came the iron fists: Former Attorney General William Barr insists that Trump lost the election fair and square, and Ivanka Trump, Donald's pseudo-attractive daughter, agrees with Barr!

Fleshing all of this out was testimony from Capitol Policewoman Caroline Edwards, who recalled the violence at the insurrection and explained how she was pushed back with brute force and blacked out momentarily before resuming her efforts to hold back the mob.  Even more devastating was the testimony from British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was making a film about the polarization of American politics and filming leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers involved plotting the takeover of the Capitol - on the night of January 5! - thus belying the idea that this "demonstration" was "spontaneous." 

The best is yet to come.  Over the course of more televised hearings this month, the January 6 committee will offer greater details of how that day played out - the better to place the blame for the insurrection squarely on Trump.  Republicans - and Trump - are already calling this a partisan witch hunt, insisting that it's better to investigate the root causes of January 6 by looking into electoral irregularities involving vote-by-mail practices as a result of the pandemic - irregularities  that didn't exist - and questions into Speaker Pelosi's role in beefing up security for the electoral vote count.  Liz Cheney, for one, isn't having any of that.  As she said the other night at the first hearing, when she said her fellow Republicans were "defending the indefensible":

"There will come a day when Donald Trump will be gone. But your dishonor will remain."

Will any of this matter? We'll see.

Showtime

The January 6 select committee in the House of Representatives holds its first prime-time hearings tonight one every cable news channel.  (You wiseacres who point out that Fox News isn't airing them can shut up and sit down now; Fox News is a news channel like TLC - formerly The Learning Channel - is still an educational channel.)  Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (below) and his colleagues will go through a carefully structured, chronologically linear, explanatory narrative to show how Trump and his minions coordinated with the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and orchestrated the effort to block Joe Biden from assuming the Presidency.

Alas, I don't think it will matter much.  People's attention and concerns have long since shifted elsewhere, and at least a third of the country and at most half of it thinks the election was stolen.  If the Justice Department is working on this case at all, they're at least as far along as the January 6 committee is, and anyway Merrick Garland doesn't need much convincing.  But then, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe these televised hearings will make a difference. We shall see.    

Bannon Slammed

The January 6 select committee means business.  And the House of Representatives this past week ratified some of the committee's really mean business when it voted to hold the really mean Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to honor a congressional subpoena and testify before the January 6 select committee. 

Bannon will fight this, of course, citing executive and attorney-client privilege for his counsel to Trump, even though Trump is no longer President and Bannon is not an attorney and was not a White House staff member in early January 2021.  In the meantime, he loves the attention he's getting, convinced, like Trump himself and the many obnoxious celebrities that the equally obnoxious Trump emulated, that any press - even bad press - is good press.  And if he goes to jail for contempt of Congress, he'll likely paint  himself as martyr to the cause to secure a white-supremacist America for all time, trying every trick except a hunger strike to publicize his plight.

Except that Bannon could go to jail for more than just contempt of Congress.  Representative Liz Cheney, the ranking Republican on the January 6 select committee, has suggested that Bannon might have planned the insurrection or at least have been instrumental in the planning, and she wouldn't make that charge if she didn't think it was legitimate.  And the committee is working with other witnesses behind the scenes who could corroborate such an accusation.

But first comes the contempt of Congress charge.  Now it's up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide on whether to follow up on Congress's act. 

Trump: The Hunted

The U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is really getting into high gear now.  The panel requested records from four key witnesses and demanded their testimony by the middle of October.  They are former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, former top White House strategist Steve Bannon, former Trump deputy chief of staff and director of social media Dan Scavino, and former Pentagon official and Trump loyalist Kashyap Patel.  Meadows and Bannon are wanted for their direct communications with Trump and with state and local pro-Trump officials plotting to undermine election results throughout the country to stop Joe Biden's installation in the Presidency.  Scavino is wanted for having been present "during a discussion of how to convince members of Congress not to certify the election for Joe Biden," while Patel is a person of interest regarding his participation in "discussions among senior Pentagon officials prior to and on January 6, 2021, regarding 'security at the Capitol.'" 

The select committee isn't working its way to the top in investigating the effort to stop a Biden Presidency and stage a coup; it's starting there.  Going after the four most important players in this attempted coup is the fastest way to get to the truth and the surest way to prevent Bannon, Meadows, Scavino and Patel from stalling. The sooner the mostly Democratic committee, which includes two Republicans, Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger (below) and Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, gets to the bottom of this, the better, because it could save our democracy in the absence of federal voting-rights legislation by retarding Trumpism.

And while the January 6 committee goes after Trumpism, New York State Attorney General Letitia James is going after Trump.  James has warned that Trump Organization must hand over relevant documents subpoenaed by her office in its case against Trump's company.  A judge has followed suit and demanded that the company comply by this Thursday.    
While James may have the luxury of her time in her pursuit - for now, at least - the January 6 committee in the House has an expiration date of January 3, 2023, with no chance of a renewal thanks to the all-but-inevitable Republican takeover of the House expected in the 2022 midterms, infrastructure legislation. or no infrastructure legislation.  Once Kevin McCarthy is sworn in as House Speaker, the committee will be gone, and so will Kinzinger and Cheney. 

See You In September

We haven't heard that much from the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, mainly because the U.S. House of Representatives is in recess, but committee members are preparing to go full tilt boogie when the committee reconvenes after Labor Day.

Select committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has already vowed to issue subpoenas to all of the relevant parties in this investigation, and the one public hearing the committee has so far featured powerful testimony from Capitol police officers, one of whom is an immigrant, on the ugliness and the bigotry they faced from the insurrectionists.   Don't confuse the quiet from the committee for crickets.  They'll be back in September, and they're going to be gearing up to get to the bottom of what happened. 

Hawley New Year

It didn't take long for events to dictate that 2021 is going to be another bad year.  As if the slowdown in distributing COVID vaccines (which wipes out the optimism their arrival heralded) and the prospect of war with Iran weren't enough, we now have to deal with something most of us - including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell - had hoped to avoid.

U.S. Senator Joshua Hawley (R-MO), who celebrated his forty-first birthday on New Year's Eve, has announced that, on Wednesday, January 6,  when a U.S. Representative objects to a state's electoral college results favoring President-elect Joe Biden when the votes are counted before a joint session of Congress, he, Hawley, will support the objection - which will force a two-hour debate on whether or not to accept the results from said state before the vote count can continue.  Hawley has said that, so far, he plans to challenge Pennsylvania's results, but he's left open the possibility of endorsing as many as six challenges to a given state's Electoral College results, which would likely force Congress going into the wee small hours of Thursday, January 7.  Eleven more Senate Republicans plan to join him.

Hawley says he's doing this to call to attention the widespread concerns of voter fraud and of the failure of states to follow their own election laws, but no one is buying it.  The only widespread concerns of election integrity only exist in the minds of Donald Trump and all those, including Hawley, who curry favor with him. Hawley is either thinking of his re-election chances in 2024 or a possible presidential bid that year.  He wants Trump to have his back.  And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who didn't want his caucus to endorse a challenge to Biden's win, has lost control of that caucus so much that he caved and told Republican senators to vote their own conscience. 

This stunt will yet further undermine faith in electoral democracy among Americans and set a precedent for future attempts by the Republican Party to overturn the will of the voters.  As for the chances of overturning the election to put Trump back in office . . .  well, in the incoming 117th Congress, and each chamber has to decide individually the validity of a state's electoral vote result one way of the other.  Both chambers have to agree to toss out challenged electoral ballots.  With a Democratic majority  in the House and 48 Democratic senators plus a few Republicans in both chambers who won't go along with Trump's or Hawley's charade, the Biden electoral votes should be accepted and that will be the end of it.  But with so many Republicans forced to go on record as supporting or opposing Trump, it is possible, however unlikely, that every House and Senate Republican will vote to support Trump out of fear of being primaried in a future election by Trump supporters and fear of the power Trump may have within the GOP after he "retires" to Mar-a-Lago.

We can probably count on Mitch McConnell and less extreme GOP senators like Ben Sasse and Susan Collins to support the Biden electoral slates.  After all, they just got re-elected, they won't be up again until 2026, and McConnell, who's beginning his seventh term in the Senate today, probably doesn't care about what happens to him anymore, just like he stopped caring about the country long ago.  Add Mitt Romney to that corner, too.  In the House, you can add Illinois' Republican House member Adam Kinzinger.  But given all of the chaos and disorder Wednesday's electoral vote count in Congress is expected to generate (did I happen to mention the planned Trump rally for January 6 outside the Capitol?), it's likely that many members of Congress will be wearing masks not out of COVID concerns but because they're ashamed to show their faces in public.

As for me, I'll probably just sleep through it. 

Well, maybe, but one thing could keep me up at night in the days leading up to Wednesday.  The same people who assure us that Trump can't overturn the 2020 election are the same people who said that he couldn't win the 2016 election.