HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 17, 2022 (Sunday)

On July 18, 1863, at dusk, the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry of the U.S. Army charged the walls of Fort Wagner, a fortification on Morris Island off Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Because Fort Wagner covered the southern entrance to the harbor, it was key to enabling the U.S. government to take the city.
The 600 soldiers of the 54th made up the first Black regiment for the Union, organized after the Emancipation Proclamation called for the enlistment of African American soldiers. The 54th's leader was a Boston abolitionist from a leading family: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Shaw and his men had shipped out of Boston at the end of May 1863 for Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Union had gained an early foothold in its war to prevent the Confederates from dismembering the country. The men of the 54th knew they were not like other soldiers: they were symbols of how well Black men would fight for their country. This, in turn, would be a statement of whether Black men could truly be equal to white men under the country’s laws, once and for all, for in this era, fighting for the country gave men a key claim to citizenship.
The whole country was watching...and the soldiers knew it.
In the dark at Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts 54th proved that Black men were equal to any white men in the field. They fought with the determination that made African American regiments during the Civil War sustain higher losses than those of white regiments. The assault on the fort killed, wounded, or lost more than 250 of the 600 men and made the formerly enslaved Sergeant William Harvey Carney the first African American to be awarded a Medal of Honor. Badly wounded, Carney nonetheless defended the United States flag and carried it back to Union lines. United States soldiers did not take the fort that night, but no one could miss that Black men had proved themselves equal to their white comrades.
The Battle of Fort Wagner left 30 men of the 54th dead on the field—including Colonel Shaw—and hurt 24 more so badly they would later die from their wounds. Fifteen were captured; 52 were missing and presumed dead. Another 149 were wounded. Confederates intended to dishonor Colonel Shaw when they buried him in a mass grave with his men; instead, the family found it fitting.
In 2017 I had the chance to spend an evening in the house where the wounded soldiers of the 54th were taken after the battle.
It is a humbling thing to stand in that house that still looks so much as it did in 1863 and to realize that the men, carried hot and exhausted and bleeding and scared into it a century and a half before were just people like you and me, who did what they felt they had to in front of Fort Wagner, and then endured the boat ride back to Beaufort, and got carried up a flight of steps, and then lay on cots in small, crowded rooms, and hoped that what they had done was worth the horrific cost.
I am not one for ghosts, but I swear you could feel the blood in the floors.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 18, 2022 (Monday)

On Saturday, Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that yet another right-wing lawyer was urging former president Trump to overturn the election in late 2020. William J. Olson, who now represents MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist and key Trump ally, wrote to Trump on December 28. In his letter, he referred to a call between himself and Trump on the afternoon of Christmas Day and to a call between Trump and Mark Martin, the former chief justice for the state of North Carolina, who Olson said backed the filing of a lawsuit to withhold the certified votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because those states had changed their election procedures during the pandemic.
The case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, argued that those four states, whose voters had chosen Biden and whose electoral votes would give Biden the presidency, had violated the novel “independent state legislature doctrine,” which says state legislatures alone have the right to determine election procedures. This doctrine defies history by saying that when the Framers of the Constitution said that “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators,” they literally just meant the legislatures, without any check by the state constitutions or courts. This would enable a legislature to override the will of the people entirely, but, its adherents insist, that was the Framers’ plan.
In fact, the Framers were so leery of state legislatures’ oversight of elections that James Madison insisted on giving Congress the power to overrule them. Since the Civil War, until very recently, the word “legislatures” has been interpreted to mean the state government, so that a state’s legislature cannot, for example, act in ways that the state courts find violate the state constitution. But since the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, in which the Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court to stop a recount of the votes in four Florida counties when Chief Justice William Rehnquist suggested limits to the power of state judges, those interested in reducing the power of the voters in favor of the state legislatures have focused on honing this argument.
In his December letter, Olson maintained that the election had been stolen from Trump, and he insisted that “the very existence of our Constitutional Republic is slipping away.” Olson’s plan, which he called “Preserving Constitutional Order,” called for Trump to fire the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who had replaced William Barr when he resigned on December 23. Then, the document suggests, Trump could use “the powers of the Presidency…to ensure that the People receive a fair election count…. The media will call this martial law, but…that is ‘fake news,’” Olson wrote.
In other words, Olson called for Trump to dissolve the federal judiciary and for the president “armed with all of the executive power vested in the office of the presidency…to act decisively to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ the U.S. Constitution from threats, whether they be domestic, foreign, or both.”
This was noble language for an effort pushed by fringe theorists and rejected by state and federal courts, as well as by the Supreme Court, more than 60 times. But this new piece of evidence suggests just how deep the antidemocratic impulse in this country currently runs.
Now, of course, Trump’s allies appear to be concerned that the information turned up by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol shows them in a less noble light. Today Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX), formerly Trump’s White House physician and the man mentioned by the Oath Keepers on January 6, today tweeted: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the WITCH HUNT Committee of unselects needs to be DISSOLVED!” On January 6, a group text message among the Oath Keepers said of Jackson: “Needs protection. If anyone inside cover him. He has critical data to protect.”
Yesterday, Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of Rolling Stone reported that Trump says he wants to run again to avoid criminal indictments. They say the former president has spoken to at least four associates “about how when you are the president of the United States, it is tough for politically motivated prosecutors to ‘get to you.’... He says when [not if] he is president again, a new Republican administration will put a stop to the [Justice Department] investigation that he views as the Biden administration working to hit him with criminal charges—or even put him and his people in prison.”
Today, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis subpoenaed Trump ally Representative Jody Hice (R-GA) for testimony before the special grand jury in the investigation into the attempt to overturn the Georgia 2020 election results and declare that Trump had won the state’s electors. As a federal official, Hice has filed to move his case to federal court, where he will challenge it.
It’s important to remember that Republicans who were willing to sign on to Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy are attempting to enforce minority rule on the majority in the U.S. It is no accident that in the election of 1860, there was only one state whose legislature chose electors directly: the state of South Carolina. And as soon as those legislators realized that Abraham Lincoln had won the election, they promptly called for secession from the United States.
The extremism of today’s Republican Party shows most clearly in the party’s stance after the Supreme Court—itself packed with extremists by former president Trump and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
The overturning of settled law itself was radical. That it tries to strip away a constitutional right for the first time in our history is radical. And the way it is playing out demonstrates just how radical the current Republican Party is. The recent case in Ohio in which a 10-year-old rape victim could not obtain an abortion, horrific as it was, only started the firestorm, as Republican lawmakers first denied the case was real—it was—and then called for prosecuting the Indiana doctor who performed the procedure, which she did entirely legally.
Some lawmakers went on to say they wanted legislation that would have prohibited the child from traveling across state lines to get medical treatment.
Since then, we have seen exactly what the 62% of Americans who supported Roe v. Wade said would happen: women are unable to get medical care after miscarriages, leaving them in pain, or with developing infections, or with dangerous blood loss. And yet, on Friday, by a 4-to-1 margin, delegates to the Republican Party convention in Idaho rejected an amendment to their platform that would have permitted an abortion to save the life of the mother. The platform considers any fertilized egg a person from the moment of fertilization, even before implantation, and criminalizes abortion from that moment on as murder. The delegates did agree to exempt miscarriage from criminalization.
In an echo of the past, they also declared that “Idaho has the sovereign authority to defy the federal judiciary should they once again propose the fiction that abortion is a federal constitutional right.”
For their part, Mothers Against Greg Abbott, a political action committee of Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans, has recorded a viral video suggesting that there is significant pushback from those who recognize the extremism of today’s Republican Party, embodied by those like the Texas governor.
“They say nothing changes in Texas politics until it does,” the video begins. Women call out the state’s failed electric grid, the removal of Black and Brown history from the classroom, the permitless and open carry laws that put guns on the streets, the $10,000 bounty for turning in anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion, the investigation of parents who seek gender-affirming care for transgender children as child abusers, the banning of books by Black and LGBTQ authors, and the deaths of loved ones after lawmakers lifted mask mandates during the worst pandemic in 100 years. “We want real change for Texas, now,” they say, “and we’re ready to fight.” “We live in suburbs, in big cities, and on farms and ranches,” they warn. “We are the Mothers Against Greg Abbott. Let’s make Texas a safe place where all families can thrive again.”

heh

MAGA

Mothers Against Greg Abbott

blue hats i hope

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 19, 2022 (Tuesday)

Last week, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that the U.S. Secret Service had erased text messages between agents on January 5 and January 6, 2021, during the time of the attack. Last Friday, July 15, the committee subpoenaed those records from the U.S. Secret Service.
Today, the Secret Service said it had only one new text to provide and that any other texts from its agents around January 6 have been deleted and cannot be recovered. Agents were supposedly told to upload their messages to an internal agency drive before a general reset of cell phones, but many did not do so. A Secret Service spokesperson said that the deletion was not on purpose, but the phone reset began on January 27, eleven days after Congress requested the information be preserved.
Because its agents protected then-president Trump and then–vice president Mike Pence on January 6, their text messages could provide important context for the events of that day including, for example, Pence’s apparent reluctance to get into a vehicle driven by a Secret Service agent, or why agents apparently permitted Trump to record a video outside the White House while the Capitol was under attack.
Like every other branch of government, the Secret Service is required to preserve its records. Today, the chief records officer of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Laurence Brewer, sent a letter to Damian Kokinda, the records officer of the Department of Homeland Security, about “the potential unauthorized deletion” of the texts. Brewer asked the Secret Service to investigate and to send all information about deleted records to NARA within 30 days.
While this seems a bit like locking the door after the horse has left the barn, let me just say that no one with any brains at all messes with archivists. That Secret Service members were willing to purge texts that they knew by law they had to preserve suggests that they calculated it would be better to face the fallout for deleting the texts than the fallout from whatever was in those texts.
In Georgia, legal filings today revealed that the 16 people who created a false slate of electors for Trump have been told they are targets of the grand jury’s investigation into the attempt to steal the 2020 election in that state. Those false electors are trying to quash subpoenas for their testimony, claiming the subpoenas are “unreasonable and oppressive.” Despite reports that a Trump campaign official urged them to operate in “complete secrecy,” they claim they did not know how “certain high level members of the Trump team” intended to use those false electors, and had provided the slate only in case the real slate of electors was rejected.
Thus, they say, they did nothing wrong. But they did sign their names to a document saying they were the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Georgia,” and they submitted that document to NARA (archivists, again).
In an interview today, Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos said that earlier this month (not a typo), Trump called him to ask him to decertify the 2020 election, a plan some Republicans in the legislature are backing. Vos notes that the legislature does not have the authority to “reclaim” electors. After Vos declined to join Trump’s effort, Trump posted a message saying: “The Democrats would like to sincerely thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs [Republicans in Name Only], for letting them get away with ‘murder.’ A Rigged & Stolen Election!”
On Thursday, the January 6 committee will hold another public hearing, this one in prime time. Today, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced he has Covid, so the vice chair, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), will run the hearing.
The topic will be Trump’s behavior on January 6, 2021—what he did do and what he didn’t—and former deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews are scheduled to testify. Both Pottinger and Matthews resigned immediately after January 6. Pottinger said that he decided to quit when he read Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet attacking Pence as not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” even while Pence’s life was in danger.
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified before the January 6 committee, has been formally censured by the Arizona Republican Party. Tonight, the chair of the party announced the censure over a number of “offenses." The censure called for voters to throw Bowers out of office.
While Trump’s people try to evade the law and establish minority rule, others are trying to change it to reflect the wishes of the majority of Americans.
Capitol Police today arrested 34 people, including 17 Democratic members of Congress, for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience as they protested in front of the Supreme Court in support of abortion rights. Sitting on the street, they were blocking traffic, so police immediately ordered them to leave. When they refused, they were arrested.
Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who at 76 has seen all this before, later said: “There is no democracy if women do not have control over their own bodies and decisions about their own health, including reproductive care. I have the privilege of representing a state where reproductive rights are respected and protected—the least I can do is put my body on the line for the 33 million women at risk of losing their rights. The Republican Party and the right-wing extremists behind this decision are not pro-life, but pro-controlling the bodies of women, girls, and any person who can become pregnant. Their ultimate goal is to institute a national ban on abortion. We will not let them win. We will be back."
On Friday, Lauren Robel, the former dean of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, filed a misconduct complaint with the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission against Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita. Rokita’s inflammatory statements about the physician who provided abortion care to the ten-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana to obtain an abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning Roe v. Wade, put her in danger. Rokita made baseless claims on the Fox News Channel that the physician had not reported the case properly as child abuse, and he began to investigate her medical license. In fact, the physician had reported the abuse as Indiana law required.
This afternoon, the House of Representatives passed a bill to protect gay marriage. The Respect for Marriage Act repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages. The 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges overrode DOMA, but in case this Supreme Court goes after Obergefell, as it has suggested it might do, members of the House want to make sure DOMA doesn’t again become the law of the land.
The bill passed by a vote of 267 to 157. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noticed something about the vote. Not surprisingly, all Democrats voted in favor. Also not surprisingly, 157 Republicans– 77% of the caucus– voted no. The surprise is that 47 Republicans joined the Democrats to vote yes on the measure, and another 7 did not vote. These Republicans were likely willing to vote in favor in part because the new law defers to states to permit them to deny same-sex marriage licenses– although it requires them to recognize marriages from other states– and Republicans tried hard to argue that such a measure was unnecessary.
But in the end, 54 Republicans were unwilling to go on record against gay marriage, which a whopping 70% of Americans—including 55% of Republicans, support.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 20, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee confirmed that the Trump administration’s attempt to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census was a strategy to skew population data to benefit Republicans. Trump had refused to turn over the documents, but the Biden administration agreed to allow the House committee to see them.
U.S. censuses, which are required every 10 years under our Constitution, have always counted “persons,” and both voting and public monies are proportioned according to those numbers. Under Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the Trump administration wanted to include a question about citizenship, and administration officials first suggested that they would count citizens, rather than legal residents and undocumented immigrants, for purposes of representation, and then said they needed citizenship information to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Opponents claimed the proposed new question was designed to scare immigrants, who tend to vote Democratic, away from being counted, which would have shifted representation and government monies toward Republicans.
A district court said Secretary Ross’s action was “arbitrary and capricious, based on a pretextual rationale, and violated certain provisions of the Census Act,” and the Supreme Court added that the administration’s claim to need citizenship information to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act was “contrived.” It blocked the administration from including that question on the census.
Now, we have documents showing that Ross and other Trump administration officials actively sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census in the hope that their erasure would also make legal immigrants avoid being counted, and thus cut representation for and funding to Democratic districts. One handwritten note suggests using the Voting Rights Act as cover.
This is a stark example of the dangers of turning our government over to an authoritarian leader who will use our fundamental governmental systems to draw power to himself. This census question had the potential to affect our governmental system profoundly. Even without the census question, the U.S. Census Bureau in March 2022 said a quality check revealed that Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, and Hispanic or Latino Americans were undercounted in 2020, while white inhabitants and Asian inhabitants were overcounted.
This is just the latest example of Trump and his allies trying to use our government to cement their power, among others that reached from Trump’s attempt to weaponize funds approved by Congress for Ukraine to fight off Russian incursions so as to damage likely Democratic opponent Joe Biden, to the January 6 attempt to stop Biden's certification as president-elect.
These attempts appear to have reached deep into the Secret Service as well, and today we learned that the Department of Homeland Security itself might have played along. Carol D. Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti of the Washington Post today reported that whistleblowers have revealed that DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, learned in February that nearly all text messages from around the time of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had been deleted from Secret Service agents’ cell phones but elected to keep that information from Congress. The inspector general’s office also declined to tell Congress that the Secret Service was refusing to turn over records from that period.
And yet, for all the efforts of officials in the Trump administration to seize power by compromising our national systems, a Trump-era White House aide who testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol claimed that it is he and his colleagues who are victims of a strong state. In a webcast after his testimony, Garrett Ziegler, an aide to trade advisor Peter Navarro who appears to have been the person who admitted Trump allies to the White House for the shocking meeting of December 18 where they discussed martial law, continued to claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
As for the January 6 committee: “They're Bolsheviks,” he said, in an echo of Republican rhetoric calling all opponents communists, "so, they probably do hate the American Founders and most White people in general. This is a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign. If you can't see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so, they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right?" He attacked the women who have cooperated with the committee with offensive language.
Meanwhile, the January 6 committee continues to bear down on the Trump administration. Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, and Paul Kane of the Washington Post reported tonight that at tomorrow night’s public hearing, the committee is planning to show outtakes from Trump’s reluctant video of January 7, when there was talk of removing him from office.
While the struggle between the Trump team and those trying to bring them to justice continues, President Biden is trying to move the country forward to address the existential crisis of climate change. Europe is suffering under a terrible heat wave; Britain has declared a climate emergency and, with airstrips softened by extreme heat, grounded the Royal Air Force; and 100 million Americans are under emergency heat warnings.
On Monday, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned world leaders gathered at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin, where they are gathered to advance multilateral climate negotiations: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction…. What troubles me most is that, in facing this global crisis, we are failing to work together as a multilateral community. Nations continue to play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for our collective future. We cannot continue this way,” he said. “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
In the U.S., the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision of the Supreme Court, weakening the ability of the government to shift the country toward clean energy by regulating carbon dioxide emissions, has limited the government’s ability to address climate change. So, too, has the insistence of Republican senators, as well as Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, that short-term economic interests outweigh the imperatives of climate change. Days ago, Manchin said he would not support new investment in clean energy out of concern over inflation. Without him, the Democrats' plans for addressing climate change through legislation can't move forward, since no Republicans are on board.
So President Biden is working around them. Today, he traveled to Somerset, Massachusetts, to reiterate that climate change is an emergency and to illustrate that combating it offers us a new, innovative economy. As National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy explained to reporters, until 2017, Somerset was the site of one of the biggest and oldest coal-fired power plants in New England. Now that plant will be making cable to anchor offshore wind turbines.
Hoping to bring that innovation to the nation more widely, Biden noted that extreme weather events—wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and floods—cost the U.S. $145 billion last year alone. They damage our economy and our national security. “As President, I have a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger,” he said today. “And that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger.”
Biden is planning to invest more than $2 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $385 million from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to help people cool their homes. In early June, Biden used the Defense Production Act to speed up the domestic manufacture of solar equipment. The bipartisan infrastructure law has added $3.1 billion to the mix to weatherize homes and make them more energy efficient, and the American Rescue Plan provided $16 billion to clean up methane leaking from capped oil wells, abandoned when they stopped making money.
Biden vowed that addressing the climate crisis would provide good manufacturing jobs, repair supply chains, and clean up the environment. He promised to use the power of the presidency to do what Congress currently is not. “[I]n the coming weeks, I’m going to use the power I have as President to turn these words into formal, official government actions through the appropriate proclamations, executive orders, and regulatory power that a President possesses,” he said.
“[W]hen it comes to fighting…climate change, I will not take no for an answer. I will do everything in my power to clean our air and water, protect our people’s health, to win the clean energy future,” he said. “We have an opportunity here.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 21, 2022 (Thursday)

Tonight’s public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol laid responsibility for the crisis at the Capitol on former president Trump.
The committee’s chair, Bennie Thompson (D-MS), is isolating with Covid, so Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) presided over the hearing. She began with a tribute to Representative Thompson. Scott Simon, the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition, noted that “the Democratic chair of the committee just gracefully, and with full confidence, turned over the running of tonight’s hearing to the vice-chair, who happens to be of another party, and they spoke with mutual trust and respect. That’s how it’s supposed to go.”
The representatives running the hearing were also from different parties, and they referred to each other during the evening not just as colleagues but as friends. With the focus tonight on Trump’s dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office, two representatives who are also veterans ran tonight’s hearing. Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA) spent 20 years as an officer of the U.S. Navy; Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) joined the U.S. Air Force in 2003 and continues to serve in the Air National Guard.
The committee focused on the 187 minutes—over three hours—between the end of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse in which he urged “an angry armed mob” to march on the Capitol, at a time when it was already under siege, to the moment when he finally told the mob to go home. Within 15 minutes of his speech, Trump had been informed that the Capitol was under attack, and the White House knew some of the rioters were armed. (This keeps tripping me up. If Secret Service agents knew there were weapons near the president, why on earth didn’t they lock the place down rather than let the president just go back to the residence?)
For the next 2.5 hours, Luria pointed out, Trump “did not call Vice President Pence, senior law enforcement officials, military leaders, or DC government officials.”
Instead, as the crisis unfolded, Trump watched coverage of the Capitol riot on the Fox News Channel in the White House dining room. The committee noted that there are no official records from that time. The call logs are blank. The presidential daily diary is blank. The White House photographer was told she couldn’t take pictures. Witnesses, though, have established that advisors, members of Congress, media personalities, and family members all begged him to call off the violent mob he had sent to the Capitol, but he refused. Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee that none of the White House staff wanted the riot to continue, wording that statement in such a way that he left the impression that the president himself did want it to.
Trump did not fail to act to end the siege, the committee said; he chose not to act. He let the violence continue because the armed mob was giving him what he wanted: the delaying of the electoral count. While he did not call law enforcement officers or other officials to restore order during those 187 minutes, he did talk to lawyer and loyalist Rudy Giuliani, and to senators to get them to slow down the counting of the electoral votes.
Not only did Trump not stop the violence, he tweeted out a link to his Ellipse speech at 1:49, just as police were declaring a riot at the Capitol. Then he “poured gasoline on the fire,” witnesses said, with his 2:24 tweet accusing Pence of cowardice, putting a target on his own vice president’s back, as the committee put it. That tweet led to an immediate escalation in the violence, and at 2:26, Pence had to be evacuated to an even more secure location. He came within forty feet of the rioters, and the situation was so dangerous that Secret Service agents were calling their families to say goodbye.
At 2:38, Trump responded to his advisors’ urging to call off his supporters by tweeting: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!” Rioters noted that he told them only to respect the police, not lawmakers, and that he did not tell them to go home. At that point, lawmakers were hiding in the House chamber with gas masks.
The hard fighting continued until 4:17, when Trump finally released the video telling the mob, “Go home, we love you, you’re very special.” The committee established that he released the video only after law enforcement was deployed and was gaining control of the Capitol, making it clear the violent insurrection would not succeed. And, as aides had been saying all day, as soon as Trump told the crowd to go home, it began to disperse. “That’s an order,” one rioter said, although fighting did continue for a while. At 6:01, Trump tweeted that the attackers were “great patriots.”
It was not until January 7, with talk of removing him from office swirling around the White House, that Trump issued a three-minute video saying that he was “outraged by the violence” and that anyone who had broken a law the day before would be prosecuted. He reassured the country that there would be an orderly transition of power. But outtakes from that taping show Ivanka coaching him and Trump saying he was still unwilling to give up the Big Lie. “I don’t want to say the election is over,” he said. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results.”
And, of course, Trump has never stopped insisting that he won the election and thus continues to threaten our democracy. As Kinzinger said, “The forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away. The militant, intolerant ideologies. The militias, the alienation and the disaffection. The weird fantasies and disinformation. They're all still out there. Ready to go."
In addition to bringing the story of Trump’s attempt to steal the election to its finale, the hearing seemed designed to loosen the loyalty of Trump supporters to the man who had, as Cheney said, taken advantage of their love of country to use them to overturn our democracy.
The committee contrasted Trump’s behavior with that of then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who were determined to resume the joint session and count the electoral votes. They also held up then–Vice President Pence as a model, showing him working to get the crisis under control even while being held in a secret location that looked much like a parking garage to stay out of the hands of the people calling for his death. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley told the committee that Pence was issuing orders to the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller. (Why were people following Pence’s orders?)
The committee’s witnesses tonight, former deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, were staunch Trump supporters who found the 2:24 tweet so offensive they resigned that night. The committee has heard almost exclusively from loyal Republicans, a strategy designed to undercut Trump’s cries that it is being run by Democrats. It also played several clips of McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blaming Trump for the insurrection (there is a barb for McCarthy because he has switched back to Trump’s support and turned against Cheney over it).
Outtakes of the January 7 video recording tonight punctured Trump’s image as a strong leader: he repeatedly mangles simple language and takes out the word “yesterday” because it is a “hard word for me.” He repeatedly hits the podium in frustration. CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins tweeted that multiple sources said it took Trump about an hour to record the three-minute video. His obstinacy made him look isolated and unreasonable; the outtakes made him seem pathetic and childish.
For all that, Trump fared better than Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), the first senator to say he would empower the House Trump loyalists by contesting some of the state votes, who famously raised a fist in solidarity with the protestors on the morning of January 6. The committee showed the image of Hawley raising his fist…and then showed footage of him running at top speed through the Capitol when the rioters broke in. Across the internet, users have been poking fun at Hawley, who has recently been on a crusade to launch what he calls an imperative “revival of strong and healthy manhood in America” and “traditional masculine virtues.” They have been posting pictures of the video to the theme from the running movie Chariots of Fire, for example, and pictures of running chickens. As journalist Adam Serwer tweeted, “Hawley riling up the mob and then fleeing in terror is an incredible political metaphor.”
At the end of the hearing, Cheney praised the witnesses, especially the women. She offered special thanks to Cassidy Hutchinson, who “knew all along that she would be attacked by President Trump, and by the 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old men who hide behind executive privilege,” but had courage to testify nonetheless. Cheney mentioned the female witnesses by name, saying they were “an inspiration to American women and to American girls.”
Cheney then spoke to Trump supporters, reminding them that the testimony had come from Republicans who supported Trump. She played the recently discovered audio clip of Trump confidant Stephen K. Bannon on October 31, 2020, four days before the election, explaining with laughter that Trump would simply declare victory even if he lost. Cheney explained to supporters that they had been set up.
Flattering them, she said Trump knew he could convince his supporters that the election was stolen because he knew they loved their country and that they would put their lives at stake for it, “preying on their patriotism…on their sense of justice.” “On January 6th, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution.”
Speaking especially to the American women whose votes will be key to the upcoming election, she noted that the room in which they were meeting was where the committee on women’s suffrage met in 1918. We… “have a solemn obligation not to idly squander what so many Americans have fought and died for.”
Cheney noted that the hearings have brought new information. "Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued, and the dam has begun to break,” she said. The committee will hold more public hearings in September.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 22, 2022 (Friday)

Too much posting after 3 a.m. this week, and I'm going to go to bed and see if I can catch up.
I love that this bridge exists in the twenty-first century. It always makes me imagine I'm paddling about 150 years back in time, and that just on the other side of this bridge there will be piles of sawdust, teams of horses pulling wagons stacked with logs, and the old mill, still sawing wood.
Drifting to a dreamy place seems like an excellent image for tonight.
I'll see you tomorrow.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 23, 2022 (Saturday)

Thursday’s public hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol brought to its logical conclusion the story of Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy. After four years of destroying democratic norms and gathering power into his own hands, the former president tried to overturn the will of the voters. Trump was attacking the fundamental concept on which this nation rests: that we have a right to consent to the government under which we live.
Far from rejecting the idea of minority rule after seeing where it led, Republican Party lawmakers have doubled down.
They have embraced the idea that state legislatures should dominate our political system, and so in 2021, at least 19 states passed 34 laws to restrict access to voting. On June 24, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, the Supreme Court said that the federal government did not have the power, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to protect the constitutional right to abortion, bringing the other rights that amendment protects into question. When Democrats set out to protect some of those rights through federal legislation, Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly voted to oppose such laws.
In the House, Republicans voted against federal protection of an individual’s right to choose whether to continue or end a pregnancy and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide abortion services: 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 99% of House Republicans.
They voted against the right to use contraception: 195 out of 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 96% of House Republicans.
They voted against marriage equality: 157 out of 204 Republicans voted no; 7 didn’t vote. That’s 77% of House Republicans.
They voted against a bill guaranteeing a woman’s right to travel across state lines to obtain abortion services: 205 out of 208 Republicans voted no; 3 didn’t vote. That’s 97% of House Republicans.
Sixty-two percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Seventy percent support gay marriage. More than 90% of Americans believe birth control should be legal. I can’t find polling on whether Americans support the idea of women being able to cross state lines without restrictions, but one would hope that concept is also popular. And yet, Republican lawmakers are comfortable standing firmly against the firm will of the people. The laws protecting these rights passed through the House thanks to overwhelming Democratic support but will have trouble getting past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
When he took office, Democratic president Joe Biden recognized that his role in this moment was to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government.
Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party.
Biden has defended democracy across the globe, accomplishing more in foreign diplomacy than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Less than a year after the former president threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pulled together the NATO countries, as well as allies around the world, to stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The new strength of NATO prompted Sweden and Finland to join the organization, and earlier this month, NATO ambassadors signed protocols for their admission. This is the most significant expansion of NATO in 30 years.
That strength helped to hammer out a deal between Russia and Ukraine with Turkey and the United Nations yesterday to enable Ukraine to export 22 million tons of grain and Russia to export grain and fertilizer to developing countries that were facing famine because of Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports. An advisor to the Ukrainian government called the agreement “a major win for Ukraine.” When a Russian attack on the Ukrainian port of Odesa today put that agreement under threat, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink called the attack “outrageous.”
Biden has also defended democracy at home, using the power of the federal government to strengthen the ability of working Americans to support their families. As soon as Biden took office, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to rebuild the economy. It worked. The U.S. has added 10 million new jobs since Biden took office, and unemployment has fallen to 3.6%. That strong economy has meant higher tax revenues that, combined with the end of pandemic spending, have resulted in the budget deficit (the amount by which the government is operating in the red each year and thus adding to the national debt) dropping considerably during his term.
The strong economy has also led to roaring inflation, fed in part by supply chain issues and high gas prices. During the pandemic, as Americans turned to ordering online at the same time that factories closed down, shipping prices went through the roof. In the past year or so, outdated infrastructure at U.S. ports has slowed down turnaround while a shortage of truckers has slowed domestic supply chains. Biden’s administration worked to untangle the mess at ports by getting commitments from businesses and labor to extend hours, and launched new programs to increase the number of truckers in the country.
While oil companies are privately held and thus have no obligation to lower their prices rather than pocket the record profits they have enjoyed over the past year, Biden has nonetheless tried to ease gas prices by releasing oil from the strategic reserve and by urging allies to produce more oil for release onto the world market. Gas prices have declined for the past month and now average $4.41 a gallon, down from a high of more than $5 last month.
Last month, on June 25, Biden signed into law the first major gun safety bill in almost 30 years, having pulled together the necessary votes despite the opposition of the National Rifle Association. On July 21, he signed the bipartisan FORMULA (which stands for “Fixing Our Regulatory Mayhem Upsetting Little Americans”—I’m not kidding) Act to drop tariffs on baby formula for the rest of the year to make it easier to get that vital product in the wake of the closure of the Sturgis, Michigan, Abbott Nutrition plant for contamination, which created a national shortage. The Biden administration has also organized 53 flights of formula into the country, amounting to more than 61 million 8-ounce bottles.
While we have heard a lot about Biden’s inability to pass the Build Back Better part of his infrastructure plan because of the refusal of Republicans and Democratic senator Joe Manchin (WV) to get on board, Biden nonetheless shepherded a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill through this partisan Congress, investing in roads, bridges, public transportation, clean energy, and broadband. Last Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that 1 million households have signed up for credits to enable them to get broadband internet, a program financed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Love or hate what Biden has done, he has managed to pull a wide range of countries together to stand against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian attack in Ukraine, and he has managed get through a terribly divided Congress laws to make the lives of the majority better, even while Republicans are rejecting the idea that the government should reflect the will of the majority. That is no small feat.
Whether it will be enough to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government is up to us.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 24, 2022 (Sunday)

On Friday, Axios began to publish a deeply researched and important series by Jonathan Swan, explaining that if former president Trump retakes power, he and allies like his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), and head of Trump’s social media network Devin Nunes are determined to purge our nonpartisan civil service and replace it with loyalists. In a normal administration, a new president gets to replace around 4000 political appointees, but most government employees are in positions designed to be nonpartisan. Trump’s team wants to gut this system and put in place people loyal to him and his agenda.
When he campaigned for the presidency, Trump promised to “drain the swamp” of officeholders who, he suggested, were just sucking tax dollars. Once in office, though, Trump grew increasingly angry at the civil servants who continued to investigate his campaign’s ties to Russia, insisting that figures like former FBI director Robert Mueller and former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election, were Democrats who wanted to hound him from office. (They were, in fact, Republicans.)
Trump’s first impeachment trial inflamed his fury at those he considered disloyal. The day after Republican senators acquitted him on February 6, 2020, he fired two key impeachment witnesses: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top expert on Ukraine at the National Security Council. Ironically, Vindman had testified in the impeachment hearings that he had reassured his father, who had lived in the Soviet Union and was worried about Vindman’s testifying against the president, not to worry because in America, “right matters.” Trump fired Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, at the same time, although he had nothing to do with the impeachment.*
A Trump advisor told CNN the firings were intended to demonstrate that disloyalty to the president would not be tolerated.
Within days, Trump had put fierce loyalist John McEntee in charge of the White House office of personnel, urging him to ferret out anyone insufficiently loyal and to make sure the White House hired only true believers. McEntee had been Trump’s personal aide until he failed a security clearance background check and it turned out he was under investigation for financial crimes; then–White House chief of staff John Kelly fired him, and Trump promptly transferred McEntee to his reelection campaign. On February 13, 2020, though, Trump suddenly put McEntee, who had no experience in personnel or significant government work, in charge of the hiring of the 4000 political appointees and gave him extraordinary power.
Trump also wanted to purge the 50,000 nonpartisan civil servants who are hired for their skills, rather than politics. But since 1883, those jobs have been protected from exactly the sort of political purge Trump and McEntee wanted to execute.
A policy researcher who came to Trump’s Domestic Policy Council from the Heritage Foundation, James Sherk, found that employees who work in “a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” job can be exempted from civil service protections.
On October 21, 2020, Trump signed an executive order creating a new category of public servant who could be hired by agency heads without having to go through the merit-based system in place since 1883, and could be fired at will. This new “Schedule F” would once again allow presidents to appoint cronies to office, while firing those insufficiently loyal. One Trump loyalist at the Office of Management and Budget identified 88% of his agency as moveable to Schedule F.
Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order on January 22, 2021, just two days after taking office.
According to Swan, Trump has not forgotten the plan. Since the January 6 insurrection, he has called those former colleagues who did not support his coup “ungrateful” and “treasonous.” In a new administration, he would insist on people who had “courage,” and would reinstate the Schedule F plan in order to purge the career civil service of all employees he believes insufficiently loyal to him.
The idea of reducing our professional civil service to those who offer loyalty to a single leader is yet another fundamental attack on democracy.
Democracy depends on a nonpartisan group of functionaries who are loyal not to a single strongman but to the state itself. Loyalty to the country, rather than to a single leader, means those bureaucrats follow the law and have an interest in protecting the government. It is the weight of that loyalty that managed to stop Trump from becoming a dictator. He was thwarted by what he called the “Deep State,” people who were loyal not to him personally but to America and our laws. That loyalty was bipartisan.
Authoritarian figures expect loyalty to themselves alone, rather than to a nonpartisan government. To get that loyalty, they turn to staffers who are loyal because they are not qualified or talented enough to rise to power in a nonpartisan system. They are loyal to their boss because they could not make it in a true meritocracy, and at some level they know that (even if they insist they are disliked for their politics).
Between 1829 and 1881, all but the very highest positions throughout the government were filled by the president on the recommendations of officials in his party, so every change of administration meant weeks of office seekers hounding the president. After the Civil War, the numbers of federal jobs climbed, until by 1884 there were 131,000 people on the federal payroll. Assignment of these jobs was based not on the applicants’ skills, but on their promise to bring in votes or money for their party. Once a man scored a government job, he was expected to return part of his salary to the party’s war chest for the next election.
And then, on July 2, 1881, a man who had expected a government job and didn’t get it retaliated for his disappointment by shooting the president, President James A. Garfield, in the back as he walked up the stairs of a train station in Washington, D.C. The assassin expected that Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, would reward him with a job.
Horrified, Americans recognized that a government that was for sale by the political party in charge created men who saw government only as a way to make money and were willing to tear the entire system down to get their cut. Even though they hoped no one else would go so far as Garfield’s assassin did, they could see that such a system attracted those who could not get a decent job on their actual merits.
So in 1883, Congress passed and President Arthur signed An Act To Regulate and Improve the Civil Service of the United States, more popularly known as the Pendleton Civil Service Act. It guaranteed the government would have skilled workers by requiring applicants for positions to pass entrance exams, and then protected them from being fired by an incoming president of the opposite party. At first, only a few jobs were covered, but presidents expanded the system quickly. Our government employees became highly qualified, and loyal to the country rather than to a president.
That seems likely to change if Trump gets back into office.
**CORRECTED ON JULY 26: Colonel Yevgeny Vindman’s legal counsel Eugene Fidell and Mark Zaid wrote to clarify and correct my statement here. They write: “Like his twin Alex, Col. Yevgeny Vindman was fired from the Trump National Security Council. Both brothers had reported President Trump’s improper phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General later determined that Col. Yevgeny Vindman was fired and subjected to other serious retaliation for doing so and for holding the line on misconduct by senior Trump administration officials.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 25, 2022 (Monday)

President Joe Biden’s doctor says the president’s symptoms from Covid have "almost completely resolved.” The president spoke to two different groups today, virtually, and those two speeches indicated both that the January 6 hearings have weakened Trump and that Biden continues to try to rebuild the American middle class.
First, in a speech to the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, Biden called out Trump directly for his inaction on January 6 as “brave law enforcement officers” dealt with “medieval hell for three hours, dripping in blood, surrounded by carnage, face to face with a crazed mob that believed the lies of the defeated president.” "You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-cop," Biden told them. "You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy. You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-American."
There are signs that the public hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol have weakened the former president, and it appears that Biden is reminding law enforcement, which has been blaringly quiet about condemning the attacks on officers on January 6, on which side real Americans should stand. At least 19 current or former officers have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol.
While all the public hearings have been damning, last Thursday’s look at Trump’s actions on January 6 seems to have turned some of his former enablers into deer in the headlights. One of the shocking pieces of that evidence was Trump’s changes to the speech prepared for him on January 7. Today Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA) provided an image of those edits, showing that Trump cut out the words: “I am directing the Department of Justice to ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We must send a clear message—not with mercy but with JUSTICE. Legal consequences must be swift and firm.” He also cut out the line directed at the rioters: “I want to be very clear you do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.”
What was left was a speech that could have been sympathetically interpreted as an attack on the “Antifa” fighters on whom Trump tried to pin the insurrection, especially when Trump refused to say the election was over. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted that the video of Trump editing the speech as he tried to deliver it didn’t “sound like someone who truly believes he won the election. Trump is calmly making deliberate, strategic choices about what to say & what not to say. And prosecutors can ask jurors to draw that inference.”
That brazenness appears to have shocked those who had previously tried to look away. “No matter your views of the Jan. 6 special committee, the facts it is laying out in hearings are sobering,” wrote the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal on Friday. “The most horrifying to date came Thursday in a hearing on President Trump’s conduct as the riot raged and he sat watching TV, posting inflammatory tweets and refusing to send help.”
Trump’s star appears to be dimming, and there are more clouds on the horizon. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of the January 6 committee, said yesterday that the committee is hoping to talk with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who has been associated with the attempt to overturn the election. And today we learned that Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, testified last week before the federal grand jury investigating the attack. Short told ABC News that “if the mob had gotten closer to the Vice President…there would have been a massacre in the Capitol that day.”
Americans are sliding away from Trump, as well as from the extremism of the Republican Party, creating a problem for the Republican lawmakers who want to continue to appeal to their extremist base while also seeming to stay within the bounds of normal politics.
In Florida, Republican lawmakers stood adamant against Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and yet now are claiming credit for the money it has brought to the state. In Ohio, news broke today that Republican candidate for the Senate J.D. Vance last September told an audience at a Christian high school that people nowadays get divorced too easily—although divorce rates are actually at a 50-year low—and that they should stay in bad marriages, even violent ones, for the sake of the children. As gun safety advocate Shannon Watts pointed out, this theory is at odds with the reality that “[e]ach month, 70 women are fatally shot by intimate partners in the US, and 1 million women alive today have been shot or shot at by intimate partners.”
And news broke today that Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who voted last week against the Respect for Marriage Act protecting gay marriage, this weekend attended his son’s wedding to another man. His spokesperson said the congressman and his wife were “thrilled to attend and celebrate their son’s marriage.”
With Trump and his allies weakening, it appears former supporters are looking for other candidates to take his place before 2024. The Wall Street Journal editorial board praised then–vice president Mike Pence’s behavior on January 6. Pence was set to speak in Washington, D.C., tonight at the Heritage Foundation a day before Trump returns to the city to give what his allies insist is a policy speech. (Trump’s team has hinted that that policy focuses on “law and order,” which is fully in keeping with his authoritarian messaging in the past, and which Biden just undercut.) But storms kept Pence out of Washington, and his speech will be rescheduled, giving him the last word after the former president.
Meanwhile, the Fox and Friends show on the Fox News Channel highlighted today that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is polling higher than the former president in all age groupings, earning them an angry rebuke from Trump. On his social media network, he insisted that the hosts had botched his poll numbers on purpose, and accused the show of having gone to the “dark side.”
In his other speech today, to business CEOs and labor leaders, President Biden talked about the importance of passing the new Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act, a bill that would spend $52 billion to encourage the manufacture of semiconductor chips in the U.S. Chips are imperative to many of the products we use, including cars, medical equipment, and computers, and bringing their manufacture back home would help rebuild the domestic economy and fix supply chains. It would also help America stand against other nations, especially China, in the race for new technologies. The CHIPS measure has bipartisan support and appears to have a chance of passing the Senate, giving Biden another victory in his attempt to move the country forward into a new era.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 26, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today began with Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater at the New York Times reporting on previously undisclosed emails from the weeks before the January 6 insurrection, in which advisors openly referred to the slates of alternative electors they had prodded supporters to produce as “fake.”
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Arizona lawyer Jack Wilenchik wrote on December 8, 2020, to Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn. Later, Wilenchik suggested that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes.” He then added a smiley face.
Wilenchik also said he and Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward had discussed keeping the plan quiet so that “we can can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it,” and that Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) had asked him to testify at a Senate hearing put together by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI).
The emails appear to show connections between Epshteyn and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as well as Epshteyn and John Eastman, the author of the memo calling for alternate slates of electors. Further, they show that Mike Roman, who was director of Election Day operations for Trump’s campaign, organized ways to overturn the election. Epshteyn and Roman corresponded with Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis and Bruce Marks, deputy director of Election Day campaign operations Gary Michael Brown, and Christina Bobb then at One America News Network.
In an echo of the shadow operation Guiliani ran to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden, those trying to overturn the election did not share their conversations with the White House legal counsel’s office, whose lawyers had made it clear there was no evidence for any of their accusations of a stolen election. Haberman and Broadwater remind readers that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has established that Trump knew about the plan to create fake electors. So, too, did Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel. In Pennsylvania, the point person to organize fake electors was Doug Mastriano, who is now the Republican nominee for governor.
On Twitter, lawyer George Conway wrote: “If you had asked me to hypothesize, for illustrative purposes, a set of emails that prosecutors would find helpful in proving a fake-elector fraud conspiracy, I would not have come up with anything nearly as incriminating as the emails that the Times just reported on today.”
Then the January 6th committee released footage from their interview with former acting defense secretary and Trump loyalist Christopher MIller, who took office on November 9, 2020, after Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper. In the clip, Miller contradicted a statement Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows made on the Fox News Channel in February 2021. Meadows claimed that Trump had ordered 10,000 troops to be ready on January 6. Miller said he had received no such order.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden continues to try to break Trump’s support. Biden’s predecessor was in Washington today and was expected to lay the groundwork for a “law and order” campaign. In the end, it turned out he mostly rehashed his disproven claims about the 2020 election, but he did promise to execute drug dealers and put homeless people in camps on the outskirts of cities.
Biden responded by taking the fight right to Trump and the right wing: “Here’s something else wrong with the ex-president’s record on crime,” Biden tweeted; “he opposes action on assault weapons. These military-style weapons kill cops—and they kill school kids. We need to stop selling them in America.” Yesterday he warned law enforcement that supporting insurrection was anti-cop and anti-American; today he is expanding that to support for assault-type weapons, an argument that resonates after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 376 law enforcement officers declined to confront an 18-year-old gunman equipped with AR-15 style rifles.
While Biden is trying to break Trump supporters away from the former president, the American right wing is doubling down on authoritarianism.
On July 15 the European Commission announced that it would sue Hungary over an anti-LGBTQ law and its refusal to renew the license of a broadcaster critical of the government, and today one of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán’s longtime advisors resigned over what she called his recent “pure Nazi” speech about “mixed-race” nations. "I don't know how you didn't notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels," she wrote. And yet, Orbán is still scheduled to speak next month at the August 4 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas.
Finally, the day ended with a blockbuster story from Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, and Spencer S. Hsu at the Washington Post. Basing their story on conversations with four sources, they reported that the Department of Justice is investigating former president Trump as part of its criminal investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The Department of Justice has already charged more than 850 people in the events surrounding Trump’s attempt to remain in power, but there has been much speculation over whether Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department were willing to let the former president skate free. There are two possible avenues of criminal prosecutions on the table. One is that Trump participated in the attempt to delay or obstruct an official proceeding, which is the crime for which other participants in the events of January 6 have been indicted. The other is the fraud of setting up the fake electors from the states.
Conversations with their sources, who have shared the questions they have been asked, have led the Washington Post reporters to conclude that Trump is, in fact, under criminal investigation. Prosecutors are asking questions about the former president and members of his inner circle, about their meetings to overturn the election. And, in April, Justice Department investigators got the phone records of Trump administration officials, including Meadows, which means they convinced a judge they had good reason to look at them.
Attorney General Garland has said he would “pursue justice without fear or favor.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 27, 2022 (Wednesday)

President Biden tested negative for coronavirus today and is back at work in public. He used the opportunity to reiterate the importance of vaccines (in a way that certainly irritated the former president, who always hated the idea he was weak or sick):
"When my predecessor got COVID,” Biden said, “he had to get helicoptered to Walter Reed Medical Center. He was severely ill. Thankfully, he recovered. When I got COVID, I worked from upstairs of the White House… for the five-day period. The difference is vaccinations, of course, but also three new tools, free to all and widely available. You don't need to be president to get these tools to use for your defense. In fact, the same booster shots, the same at-home tests, the same treatment that I got is available to you."
Today was a huge day in the Senate.
First, the Senate passed the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) bill, which appropriates $280 billion to speed up the manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. and to invest in scientific research and development in computers, artificial intelligence, and so on. The pandemic made it clear that permitting chip manufacturing to migrate to Asia left the U.S. at a disadvantage when supply chains are disrupted. Chip shortages caused shortages of a wide range of products that use electronics, and the shortages have been key in driving up the prices that are feeding inflation.
The investment will boost manufacturing and scientific industries, providing good jobs. It appropriates $52 billion in subsidies and tax credits for chip manufacturing and $200 billion for research and development. It includes workforce training and educational emphasis on computer training, and it sanctions China for human rights and cybersecurity offenses. The measure passed the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote of 64 to 33, giving it the 60 votes it needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Seventeen Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the bill, either because they are worried about competing with China or because they are eager to increase production in the U.S.
The bill was a top priority for the Biden administration, and it looks as if the House will pass it and send it to the president’s desk.
Negotiations over the bill have been going on since May and appeared to be on track until the end of June, when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) threatened to pull all Republican support for it unless Democrats abandoned the idea of passing provisions for lower drug prices, taxes on the very wealthy, and climate proposals through a procedure called reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered.
That issue appeared solved on July 15, when Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) indicated he would not support either climate measures or tax changes until the newest inflation numbers were released. Senator Todd Young (R-IN), a co-sponsor of the bill with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) whipped Republicans to get the necessary votes, and today, McConnell voted in favor of the CHIPS bill.
Later today, Manchin released a statement announcing that he and Schumer had reached an agreement on a new piece of legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Framing the legislation largely as designed to address the deficit, Manchin’s statement also addressed the issues of taxes and climate change.
“Tax fairness is vital to our nation’s economic future,” he wrote, and it is “wrong that some of America’s largest companies pay nothing in taxes while freely enjoying the benefits of our nation’s military security, infrastructure and rule of law. It is commonsense that a domestic corporate minimum tax of 15 percent be applied only to billion-dollar companies or larger ensuring that America’s largest businesses are no longer able to operate for free in our economy.” He also spoke out against the carried interest loophole, which permits investment managers to take their compensation as capital gains rather than income, giving them a much lower tax rate. (Researchers suggest this could yield as much as $18 billion a year to the Treasury.)
Details on the new measure are still emerging, but it appears to be a $739 billion bill that includes price reforms for certain prescription drugs, lower premiums under the Affordable Care Act, money for the IRS to enforce tax laws, a corporate minimum tax, $369 billion of investment in climate and energy, and dramatic investment in reducing the deficit. There are no new taxes on families making less than $400,000 a year.
Manchin went out of his way to insist that Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan was dead and this was the new way forward. It seems likely Manchin was signaling to his red state constituents that he had not signed on to a program Democrats like, but there is much here that sounds like Biden, especially the tax plan. What is notably missing is investment in the social infrastructure of our nation that largely impacts women: childcare and eldercare.
After the Democratic senators were briefed on the proposal, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii said the measure would be “by far, the biggest climate action in human history. Nearly $370 billion in tax incentives, grants, and other investments in clean energy, clean transportation, energy storage, home electrification, climate-smart agriculture, and clean manufacturing makes this a real climate bill. The planet is on fire. Emissions reductions are the main thing. This is enormous progress. Let’s get it done.”
Biden immediately endorsed the measure. “This afternoon, I spoke with Senators Schumer and Manchin and offered my support for the agreement they have reached on a bill to fight inflation and lower costs for American families,” he said in a statement.
“With this agreement, we have a chance to make prescription drugs cheaper by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices and we can lower health insurance costs for 13 million Americans, by an average of $800 a year, for families covered under the Affordable Care Act.
“We will improve our energy security and tackle the climate crisis—by providing tax credits and investments for energy projects. This will create thousands of new jobs and help lower energy costs in the future.
“This bill will reduce the deficit beyond the record setting $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction we have already achieved this year, which will help fight inflation as well.
“And we will pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year.
“This is the action the American people have been waiting for. This addresses the problems of today—high health care costs and overall inflation—as well as investments in our energy security for the future.
“I will have more to say on this later. For now, I want to thank Senator Schumer and Senator Manchin for the extraordinary effort that it took to reach this result.
“If enacted, this legislation will be historic, and I urge the Senate to move on this bill as soon as possible, and for the House to follow as well.”
Tonight, Senate Republicans unexpectedly killed the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, which would have provided medical benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service. The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 84 to 14 in June and had been sent back to that body for a procedural cleanup after the House passed it with the expectation that it would repass easily. Tonight’s vote is being widely interpreted as revenge for the resurrection of the reconciliation package.
Attacking our veterans out of spite might not be a winning move.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 28, 2022 (Thursday)

Today saw widespread outrage that Senate Republicans sank the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) bill—a bill they had already agreed to by a strong margin—out of spite over the resurrection of a reconciliation package that would make drugs cheaper, plug tax loopholes for corporations and the extremely wealthy, and invest in switching the economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. The PACT bill would provide medical benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) vowed that he would not permit the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) bill, which appropriates $280 billion to speed up the manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. and to invest in scientific research and development in computers, artificial intelligence, and so on, to pass unless Democrats gave up their larger plan. Yesterday, the Senate passed the CHIPS bill, and shortly after, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced that he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had agreed to much of what McConnell objected to. They introduced a new bill, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, to pass through reconciliation.
Although the CHIPS Act was a popular bipartisan bill, Republicans claim the Democrats’ political hardball in passing it before turning to other, also popular measures like lower prices on prescription drugs, was a betrayal of the Republican Party.
In retaliation, besides blocking the PACT bill, Republican leaders whipped their caucus in the House against voting for the CHIPS bill. In addition, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who has been working to find votes in the Senate to protect gay marriage, told Jonathan Nicholson of HuffPost that Senate Republicans now would be unlikely to agree to that protection. That bill reflects the fact that 70% of Americans support gay marriage. It seemed as if the Senate might agree to it (the House has already passed it), but Republicans seem to be backing away from it out of anger that the Democrats want to pass measures that are actually quite popular.
Trying to demonstrate a party’s power to kill popular legislation is an interesting approach to governance. Right now, the Republicans are getting hammered, primarily for their refusal to repass the PACT bill, which is a real blow to veterans. Veterans’ advocate and comedian Jon Stewart has been especially vocal today, calling out Republican senators at the Capitol and then on a number of media shows, going “nuclear,” as the Military Times put it, over the undermining of medical treatment for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. “[I]f this is America First,” he said, “then America is f*cked.”
At the end of the day, it is still possible that the bill will pass, but it will not come up until Schumer reschedules it, meaning the Republicans are simply going to have to endure the hits they are taking for this fit of pique until he decides to give them some cover.
Indeed, the demonstration that Republican leadership wants power to kill popular legislation creates an opening for Democrats and Republicans eager to break away from the party’s current extremism.
That showed in today’s vote in the House on the CHIPS bill, when 187 Republicans voted no but 24 Republicans, including Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), both of whom sit on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, joined the Democrats to vote yes. The 24 representatives did so despite the fact that Republican leadership was urging them to vote no, and although the Democrats all hung together and therefore Republican votes were not necessary to pass the measure.
The momentum growing behind the Democrats as Republicans begin to buck House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) seems as if it might reflect the realization that more information will be coming from the January 6th committee and that it is unlikely to be the sort of information that reinforces faith in the Republican Party.
News broke today that U.S. Secret Service director James Murray, who resigned with a plan to leave at the end of the month, has now delayed his retirement from the force as it is under investigation. Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Maria Sacchetti also broke the news that it is not just the texts of Secret Service agents that are missing from the days before January 6. Also gone are text messages from Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, also lost in a “reset” of their phones.
CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig noted: “Every federal law enforcement agency—including DHS / Secret Service—is fully aware that it must retain emails and texts, and has internal policies and technology to ensure compliance. You don’t get to say ‘technology upgrade’ and just toss everything out. They know this.”
Those who can get out in front of the January 6 mess are doing so. Members of the January 6th committee are interviewing Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and are negotiating with Trump’s Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as well. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted: “At this point, it’s becoming a race to get to testify in front of the January 6 Committee.”
Vance explained: “[Representative] Liz Cheney said during last week’s hearing that the dam is breaking. Prosecutors recognize that moment in a long-term investigation. It’s when the bad guys realize they have lost and begin to try to cut their losses."
Tonight, Kyle Cheney reported in Politico that the January 6th committee is handing 20 witness interviews over to the Department of Justice, and yesterday, we learned that the Department of Justice has obtained a warrant to search the phone of John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining the plan for Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to recognize certified electors for President-elect Joe Biden.
Today, Katelyn Polantz and Evan Perez of CNN reported that a former Department of Justice staffer who worked with Jeffrey Clark, the man whom Trump considered installing as attorney general to further his attempt to overturn the election, has been fully cooperating with the Department of Justice. The staffer is Ken Klukowski, and he has turned his electronic records over to the Justice Department.
Perez and Polantz also reported that prosecutors from the Department of Justice are planning court fights to get former White House officials to testify about Trump’s actions around January 6.
Vox correspondent Ian Millhiser, who is a keen observer of American politics, commented tonight: “This was a good week for the United States of America and I may be coming down with a case of The Hope.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 29, 2022 (Friday)

Democrats continue to illustrate the difference between them and the Republicans in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms. Today, Americans continued to spit fury over the Republican senators’ destruction of the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) bill, which would provide medical benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins during their military service, after previously passing the measure.
That destruction has added to the growing list of unpopular positions Republicans are taking as Democrats are forcing votes on them. Republicans have voted against protecting the right to abortion, the right to use birth control, the right to cross state lines to obtain reproductive health care, and gay marriage, all of which are very popular.
Today, the House of Representatives passed a measure to ban assault weapons. The vote was 217 to 213, mostly along party lines: two Republicans voted yes, and five Democrats voted no.. Since the horrific massacre of 19 schoolchildren and 2 of their teachers, along with the wounding of 17 others, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May, support for a ban on assault-style weapons has climbed to 67%.
Also today, oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron reported historic profits from the last three months. Exxon made $17.9 billion (not a typo) last quarter, up 273% from the same time last year, while Chevron made $11.6 billion. Exxon’s rate of income was $2,245.62 every second of every day for the past 92 days; Chevron made $1,462.11 per second. Together, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies are expected to announce $60 billion in profits for the past three months. They plan to spend much of the profit not on reinvesting in their businesses, but on stock buybacks, which drives up the price of the stock.
These record profits came at the same time that American consumers were staggering under high gas prices, which made up almost half of the increase in inflation of the past few months.
The record profits of oil companies made a perfect backdrop to early discussions of the Inflation Reduction Act advanced by Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). If passed, that measure will be a sea change in the nation’s economic policy. Its $385 billion devoted to addressing climate change will be the nation’s largest ever investment in clean energy, and it will incentivize cutting carbon emissions, delivering 40% cuts by 2030, which is close to Biden’s stated goal.
The Inflation Reduction Act will also expand healthcare subsidies, lowering healthcare premiums, and will enable Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain drugs with pharmaceutical producers.
It calls for a 15% corporate minimum tax, the closure of the carried interest loophole, and increased spending on the IRS so it can enforce tax laws. It leaves Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest individuals because Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) insisted they stay in place. But the measure would raise about $470 billion, about $300 billion of which would go toward reducing the federal deficit over the next decade. After decades of tax cuts that have helped wealth to concentrate among the very wealthy, this measure would set out to begin the process of restoring fairness in our revenue system.
Another gulf between Republicans and Democrats is their approach to the events of January 6, 2021. Tonight Maria Sacchetti and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, who was appointed by Trump, knew last December that the texts between Secret Service agents had been deleted. Not only did he neglect to tell Congress that those messages were missing, but also when his investigative team set out to recover the messages, he told them not to. Moreover, he neglected to tell Congress that the text messages from the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, and acting deputy secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, from that same period were also missing.
Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, today said in a statement: “The destruction of evidence that could be relevant to the investigation of the deadly attack on our Capitol is an extremely serious matter. Inspector General Cuffari’s failure to take immediate action upon learning that these text messages had been deleted makes clear that he should no longer be entrusted with this investigation.” Durbin says he has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to get to the bottom of what happened to the missing messages and hold those responsible accountable.
Finally, today, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov of Moscow, who, along with at least three other Russian officials, it says “engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States.” Allegedly, Ionov recruited political groups in the U.S. and, with the supervision of the Russian government, illegally used their members to “sow division and spread misinformation inside the United States.” The targeted groups were located in Florida, Georgia, and California, and Ionov allegedly worked closely with them, directing and controlling their leaders, who appear to have been aware of his connection to the Russian government, since at least December 2014.
FBI special agent in charge David Walker today told reporters that Ionov’s actions were “some of the most egregious and blatant violations that we’ve seen by the Russian government in order to destabilize and undermine trust in American democracy.... The Russian intelligence threat is continuing and unrelenting.”
“This indictment is just the first of our responses, but it will not be the last,” Walker said, and before the day was over, the U.S. State Department had placed sanctions on two people and four entities that work with the Russian government to influence other countries and interfere in their elections. These sanctions are separate from those related to the sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
“The Russian Federation has demonstrated determination in its attempts to undermine the democratic processes and institutions essential to the functioning of our democracy and that of other countries. It is crucial for our democracy, and democracies around the globe, to hold free and fair elections without malign outside interference,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
The new sanctions come a day after the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm linked to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and other Russian entities and individuals “for their engagement in U.S. election interference.” The Internet Research Agency, the State Department spokesperson said, “is a Russian entity engaged in political and electoral interference operations. Beginning as early as 2014, IRA began operations to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with a strategic goal to sow discord.” The reward offer “is part of [the] United States Government’s wider efforts to ensure the security and integrity of our elections and protect against foreign interference in our elections.”
“The United States will continue to act to deter and disrupt these efforts [in order] to safeguard our democracy, as well as help protect the democracies of our allies and partners,” Blinken said.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 30, 2022 (Saturday)

This morning, Jon Swaine and Dalton Bennett of The Washington Post reported that on October 11, 2019, at Trump’s National Doral golf resort in South Florida, Danish filmmakers caught an unguarded conversation between Trump allies talking about their legal exposure because of their work for the president.
Recording a documentary about Trump’s friend and operative, Roger Stone, the filmmakers caught Stone and Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Stone’s lapel microphone talking about Stone’s upcoming trial for lying to Congress and witness tampering during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Federal prosecutors said that before the 2016 election, Stone repeatedly reached out to WikiLeaks “to obtain information…that would help the Trump campaign and harm the campaign of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Campaign officials “believed that Stone was providing them with nonpublic information about WikiLeaks' plans. Indeed, [Trump advisor and campaign chief executive Steve] Bannon viewed Stone as the Trump campaign’s access point to WikiLeaks.” Stone lied to Congress five times, interfering with their Russia investigation, and threatened another witness to try to keep him from exposing Stone’s lies.
At the time the new tape was recorded, Stone was complaining that prosecutors were pressuring him to turn on Trump, and on the tape, said he might “have to appeal to the big man.” Gaetz can be heard agreeing that Stone was “f*ck*d,” but Gaetz didn’t think he would “do a day” in prison. Claiming he had heard it directly from Trump, Gaetz said: “The boss still has a very favorable view of you,” and continued, “I don’t think the big guy can let you go down for this.” “I don’t think you’re going to go down at all at the end of the day,” Gaetz told Stone.
Gaetz sits on the House Judiciary Committee and thus had seen portions of the redacted sections of Special Counsel Muller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the committee members were prohibited from talking about it except among themselves, Gaetz talked with Stone about it, telling him that he was “not going to have a defense.”
Stone told Gaetz he had seen the entire report himself thanks to a ruling from Judge Amy Berman Jackson, although when he had asked for such access, she had given him access only to some of it, so it is unclear what he meant. He, too, was not supposed to discuss that material.
The two men briefly discussed a photograph of the two of them with Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg that Stone said had “come back to bite us in the a**”; months later Greenberg was arrested and pleaded guilty to six charges including sex trafficking a minor. Greenberg is cooperating with authorities. Stone and Gaetz also discussed the outcry over the FBI raid of Stone’s house: media were at the raid, and Stone accused the FBI of tipping them off. Gaetz guessed the tip came from Stone himself. “Innocent until proven guilty,” Stone replied.
As the two men expected, on November 15 a jury found Stone guilty of seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering.
And then, when it came time for his sentencing, events played out as Gaetz suggested they would.
On February 10, prosecutors wrote to Judge Jackson to recommend jail time of 7 to 9 years for Stone, noting that his crime was about the integrity of our government. "Investigations into election interference concern our national security, the integrity of our democratic processes, and the enforcement of our nation's criminal laws,” they wrote. “These are issues of paramount concern to every citizen of the United States. Obstructing such critical investigations thus strikes at the very heart of our American democracy." Their recommendation fell within standard department guidelines.
Immediately after the sentencing recommendation, though, Trump tweeted that it was “horrible and unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.” The Justice Department, operating under Attorney General William Barr, then reversed itself, saying its own prosecutors had failed to be “reasonable.”
In response, all four of the federal prosecutors responsible for Roger Stone’s case withdrew. The administration also abruptly pulled the nomination of the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Stone prosecution for a top position in the Treasury Department.
It appeared that the prosecutors were right and the case was actually about the integrity of our democratic processes. It also appeared that Barr had hamstrung the Department of Justice to make sure that no one could touch the president.
Trump tweeted: “Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted.”
Days before Stone was due to report to prison in July to serve 40 months, Trump commuted his sentence, thus removing his jail time, supervised release, and a $20,000 fine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called Trump’s move “an act of staggering corruption,” and Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) called it “a real body blow to the rule of law in this country.”
Then, on December 23, 2020, Trump pardoned Stone, as Gaetz had predicted, rewarding his personal loyalty.
Two weeks later, on January 6, 2021, Stone was back in Washington, D.C.
Once again, the Danish film crew was filming and, after the events of that day, recorded Stone asking again for a presidential pardon. This time, Gaetz apparently wanted one, too.
When White House counsel Pat Cipollone prevented Trump from issuing those pardons, Stone told a friend that Trump was “a disgrace…. He betrayed everybody.”