Heather Cox Richardson

March 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”
Langston Hughes wrote these words in a poem published in 1936. He wrote as the Dust Bowl baked in the heat, Louisiana senator Huey Long died by gunfire, the Supreme Court invalidated much of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a serial killer terrorized Cleveland, workers finished Hoover Dam, the Depression dragged on, and Black and Brown Americans fell even farther behind their white neighbors.
Today, at the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) recited some of Hughes’s poem, and the choppy era in which we are living made Hughes’s words apt.
Russia’s war on Ukraine is four weeks old. The State Department announced today that “the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine” and that the government is committed to bringing the perpetrators to account. President Joe Biden today flew to Brussels, where he will meet tomorrow with leaders of the 29 other NATO nations to discuss the conflict. Biden is expected to unveil a plan to replace the Russian oil and gas cut off by sanctions with supplies from the U.S., helping Europe to avoid a crisis even as the U.S. imposes still harsher sanctions on Russia. The meeting is also expected to discuss contingency plans in case Russian president Vladimir Putin deploys chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
At home, former president Trump is in the news.
The New York Times today published the resignation letter of former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who quit his job after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, stopped the process of seeking an indictment against the former president. In his letter, Pomerantz wrote, “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes—he did.”
Pomerantz suggested that Bragg stopped the forward motion of the case out of concern about “the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed.” Pomerantz countered that “a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”
Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been under investigation in North Carolina for claiming a false residence for purposes of voting, a deception that might constitute voter fraud. News broke today that his wife, Debra Meadows, filled out two official forms claiming the couple lives in a trailer in rural North Carolina, although they actually live in a condo in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. One of the forms she signed reads: “Fraudulently or falsely completing this form” is a Class I felony.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a convicted felon, was taken off a plane in Miami because his passport had been revoked. The plane was headed for Dubai.
Today, Trump withdrew his endorsement of Alabama Representative Mo Brooks, such a staunch supporter he spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, for suggesting that the party needs to move on past the rehashing of the 2020 election. Brooks has been trailing in the polls.
After Trump’s announcement, Brooks said that Trump had “asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” all of which would have been an illegal attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the election. Brooks said Trump was pushing this plan as late as September 2021.
Today, at the third day of the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Trump Republicans turned in a performance for right-wing media, expressing outrage over their manufactured concern that certain of Judge Jackson’s sentences for child pornography were too short and that she is a secret warrior for Critical Race Theory in the schools.
This is such a transparent reach for base votes that will score an interview on right-wing media that immediately after Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke about Critical Race Theory, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said, "I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities." Sasse’s point was borne out when a camera then apparently caught Cruz checking Twitter for his own name.
Certain Republican senators badgered and bullied Jackson, who could not fight back without endangering her chances of confirmation. It was an abusive dynamic that spoke ill of the process and of the senators themselves: the abusive Republicans, but also the many Democrats who, as legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, did little to remind viewers that the Republicans have stacked the court with extremists who are poised to take away our fundamental rights, and instead just let the Republicans beat up on Jackson.
Tonight Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) illustrated the profound difference between Jackson, who demonstrated a profound understanding of our founding documents and our legal system, and those browbeating her when she tweeted: “The Constitution grants us rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not abortions.”
It is, of course, not the U.S. Constitution but the Declaration of Independence that declares: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on to say “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
Senator Booker, though, pushed back against the Republicans as Jackson could not. In an impassioned speech, quoting Langston Hughes’s vow that “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be!” Booker said “There is a love in this country that is extraordinary.”
He spoke of Jackson’s parents and how they “didn’t stop loving this country even though this country didn’t love them back.” Jackson has talked of how the life of civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley inspired her; Booker said: “Did she become bitter” when no one would hire her after law school? “Did she try to create a revolution? No, she used the very Constitution of this nation. She loved it so much she wanted America to be America….”
“That is the story of how you got to this desk,” he told Jackson. “You and I and everyone here: generations of folk who came here and said, ‘America, I’m Irish. You may say no Irish or dogs need apply, but I’m going to show this country that I can be free here. I can make this country love me as much as I love it.’ Chinese Americans forced into mere slave labor building our railroads connecting our country saw the ugliest of America, but they were going to build their home here and say, ‘America, you may not love me yet, but I’m going to make this nation live up to its promise and hope.’ LGBTQ Americans from Stonewall women to Seneca…. All of these people loved America.”
“And so you faced insults here that were shocking to me—well, actually not shocking. But you are here because of that kind of love.”
Finally, today brought the passing of Madeleine K. Albright, whose parents were Czech refugees from the Nazis and the Communists, at 84. Albright served the United States as a diplomat and then as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, the first woman to serve in that role. Her most recent op-ed, published by the New York Times just a month ago, illustrated just how deeply she still engaged with the nation’s interests. She warned that invading Ukraine “would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.”
Her extraordinary career was a fitting backdrop today to Booker’s illumination of Judge Jackson. “The act of striving,” Albright once said, “is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

"
I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities
"

heh

life is short and death is sure

post me bro

that i might sell sh*t to rich people and become one o them

if i cain be one on my own i will marry one



not signed bob dylan i can tell you that

Heather Cox Richardson

March 24, 2022 (Thursday)

“We are very pleased, dear President, dear Joe, to welcome you again in Brussels,” European Council president Charles Michel of Belgium told President Joe Biden today. “Your presence here and your participation in this European Council meeting is a very strong signal.”
The European Council is made up of the heads of states of the European Union states, along with the President of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. “Our unity is rock solid, and we are very, very pleased to coordinate, to cooperate with you. These are difficult times, challenging times, and we need to take the right and the intelligent decisions for the future and for the security, for the stability,” Michel said.
“And thank you for this excellent cooperation and coordination,” he concluded.
Michel was referring to the joint statement made today by Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, of Germany, condemning Russia’s “unjustified and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” which is now four weeks old. They declared that “we are united in our resolve to defend our shared values, including democracy, respect for human rights, global peace and stability, and the rules-based international order.”
They announced more sanctions—the U.S. announced sanctions on more than 400 additional individuals and entities today—as well as $1 billion in humanitarian aid from the U.S. for Ukraine in addition to the more than $2 billion in military equipment the U.S. has pledged. They announced cooperation to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas, a focus on food security to prevent food shortages as Russian and Ukrainian grain production slows, and additional cybersecurity. To help resettlement, the U.S. has agreed to take up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their homes.
They also announced joint efforts to strengthen democracies in and around Ukraine. The U.S. will launch the European Democratic Resilience Initiative (EDRI) to provide at least $320 million in new funding to “support media freedom and counter disinformation, benefit the safety and security of activists and vulnerable groups, strengthen institutions and the region’s rule of law, and help ensure accountability for human rights abuses and violations of international law.” The European Commission will “reallocate funds from EU programmes to support civil society organizations, human rights defenders, journalists, and pro-democracy activists in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova,” in addition to providing emergency grants to save civic activism and open media in Ukraine. The statement also demanded accountability for any war crimes Russians commit in Ukraine.
Biden responded to Michel by reiterating that “from the very beginning, I was of the view: The single most important thing that we have to do in the West is be united.” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming objective, Biden said, “is to demonstrate that democracies cannot function in the 21st century—because things are moving so rapidly, they require consensus, and it’s too difficult to get consensus—and autocracies are going to rule.” Putin has tried for years to break up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so he could face 30 individual countries rather than one united front. The single most important thing we can do is to be united.
That impressive unity abroad has not translated to the United States.
Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson continues to promote pro-Russian, anti-Biden propaganda. Today the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Biden’s son Hunter’s foundation had financed biological labs in Ukraine (which earlier propaganda said were developing biological weapons); less than 12 hours later, Carlson made the same claim.
More explosively, tonight Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS broke the story that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, a right-wing activist who goes by the name Ginni, exchanged at least 29 texts with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows about the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, 21 from her, 8 from Meadows.
The messages were among the 2320 messages Meadows provided to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol; the aides and committee members to whom Woodward and Costa spoke indicated their belief that there were more messages between Ms. Thomas and Meadows than just the 29.
The messages show that Ms. Thomas bought into the conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, including the extreme theories pushed by QAnon. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she urged Meadows on November 10, after the results were in. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” (Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes, and by a vote of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.) On November 24, Meadows wrote, “This is a fight of good versus evil…. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”
In January 2022, Ms. Thomas’s husband, Justice Thomas, was the only member of the Supreme Court to vote against permitting the January 6 committee to see a different cache of documents concerning the fight to overturn the election. Trump had claimed executive privilege over documents stored as part of the presidential records archive at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court agreed that the committee’s subpoena must be enforced.
Considering that his wife might have communications in that NARA cache, it was likely a conflict of interest for him to participate in that decision.
Neither Thomas responded to requests for comment. The Supreme Court announced Sunday that Justice Thomas, 73, had been hospitalized with an infection that is not Covid-19 and that he was expected to be released Monday or Tuesday. Thomas was not in court Wednesday, and the court has provided no further updates.
That Thomas is now at the center of this scandal suggests another dimension to the extraordinarily vicious attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at this week’s Senate hearing for confirmation to the Supreme Court.
The former president himself is also trying to keep his name in the news and his base angry. Today his lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, Christopher Steele (who produced the Steele Dossier suggesting that Trump had concerning ties with Russia), and so on—a laundry list of 47 people and companies he claims were part of a conspiracy against him after the 2016 election—claiming that “Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot…. Acting in concert, the[y]... maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” Their actions were “so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”
It is a mess, full of debunked claims, misspellings, and outright lies; Aaron Blake of the Washington Post called it a press release. It is impossible to imagine Trump intends to continue the case until it gets to discovery, when the defendants’ lawyers could request his testimony under oath. The complaint asks for a trial, and it appears to be designed to rile up his base with familiar stories—possibly for 2024, as Blake suggests, but, if history is any guide, primarily to encourage donations.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 25, 2022 (Friday)

In confirmation hearings this week for her elevation to a Supreme Court seat, the highly qualified and well-respected Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson endured vicious attacks from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who vow to reject her confirmation despite the fact that her record is stronger than those of recent Republican nominees and that 58% of Americans want her to be confirmed. (In contrast, only 42% of Americans wanted Justice Amy Coney Barrett confirmed.)

Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) explained: "Judge Jackson has impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but she “refused to embrace” the judicial philosophy of originalism, which would unravel the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights, as well as most of the other civil rights protected since the 1950s.

Indeed, the hearings inspired Republicans to challenge many of the civil rights decisions that most Americans believe are settled law, that is, something so deeply woven into our legal system that it is no longer reasonably open to argument. The rights Republicans challenged this week included the right to use birth control, access abortion, marry across racial lines, and marry a same-sex partner.

These rights, which previous Supreme Courts said are guaranteed by our Constitution, are enormously popular. Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. Eighty-nine percent of Americans in 2012 thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. Even the right to abortion remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

So how do today’s Republicans square overturning these established rights with the fact that we live in a democracy, in which the majority should rule, so long as it does not crush a minority?

A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by “self-government,” the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.

Barr quoted the leading author of the Constitution, James Madison, to prove his argument. “In the words of Madison,” he said, “‘We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…’.”

This has been a popular quotation on the political and religious right since the 1950s, and Barr used it to lament how the modern, secular world has removed moral restraints, making Americans unable to tell right from wrong and, in turn, creating “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.” “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’” he said, “have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.” The law, Barr said, “is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values” through judicial interpretation, and he called for saving America by centering religion.

Madison never actually said the quotation on which Barr based his argument. It’s a fake version of what Madison did say in Federalist #39, in 1788, which was something entirely different. In Federalist #39, Madison explained how the new government, the one under which we still live, worked.

Answering the question of whether the new government the Framers had just proposed would enable people to vote for their representatives, he said yes. “No other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” Madison said nothing about personal morality when he talked about self-government, though. Instead, he focused on the mechanics of the new national government, explaining that such a government “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”

He went on to say (and the capitalization is his, not mine): “It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an [small] proportion [of people], or a favored class of it….”

In his 2019 speech, Barr also expressed concern that people in the United States misunderstood the First Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly forbids the government from establishing a national religion or stopping anyone from worshiping a deity—or not—however they choose. In Barr’s hands, the First Amendment “reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.” To support that argument, he cites a few lines from Madison’s 1785 pamphlet objecting to religious assessments that talk about how Madison defined religion.

In reality, that pamphlet was Madison’s passionate stand against any sort of religious establishment by the government. He explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of religion attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Madison warned specifically that they could control the press, abolish trial by jury, take over the executive and judicial powers, take away the right to vote, and set themselves up in power forever.

Madison was on to something when he warned that there was a connection between establishing a religion and destroying American democracy. At the same time Republican lawmakers are now talking about rolling back popular civil rights in order to serve Christianity, they are also taking away the right to vote and appear to be looking to set a minority into power over the majority.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni, on November 24, 2020, in a text about overthrowing the will of the voters after Joe Biden had won the presidential election by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 votes in the Electoral College. Referring to Jesus Christ, Meadows continued: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 26, 2022 (Saturday)

Today, President Joe Biden ended four days in Europe with a landmark speech. After meeting with world leaders in Brussels, he traveled to Poland, where he visited American troops stationed there, met with humanitarian workers and refugees, talked with Polish president Andrzej Duda, and, finally, addressed an assembled crowd.

Biden spoke at the historic Royal Castle in the Polish capital of Warsaw, a building that was destroyed by the Nazis after the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish resistance tried to throw off German occupation. The Polish government rebuilt the castle in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is now a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, considered to be of “outstanding value to humanity.”

There, Biden began with the words of the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, after his election in October 1978: “Be not afraid.” Biden explained that those words were “a message about the power—the power of faith, the power of resilience, and the power of the people.”

Biden briefly retraced Poland’s struggle and ultimate victory against Soviet repression and tied that story to the history of the United States by nodding to former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who passed away this week, and who had, he said, “fought her whole life for essential democratic principles.”

With this backdrop, Biden warned that we are again “in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Ukraine is at the frontlines of that battle.

“[T]heir brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people: the rule of law; free and fair elections; the freedom to speak, to write, and to assemble; the freedom to worship as one chooses; freedom of the press.”

“These principles are essential in a free society,” he said to applause. “But they have always…been under siege.” He noted that “[o]ver the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe,” showing “contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom, contempt for the truth itself.” He called for democratic countries to work to stop autocracy.

Biden reiterated that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a war of choice that had “no justification or provocation. It was, he said, an example of using “brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.” That is, he said, “nothing less than a direct challenge to the rule-based international order established since the end of World War Two,” and it threatens to throw Europe back into the old world of wars that the international rule-based order ended.

Biden outlined how the West has come together to try to stop Putin’s aggression. It has sanctioned oligarchs, lawmakers, and businesses to hurt the Russian economy. It has blocked Russia’s Central Bank from the global financial systems, even as more than 400 private companies have stopped doing business in Russia.

These economic sanctions, he said, “are a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might,” and they are weakening Russia’s power to make war and to “project power.”

At the same time, the West has supported Ukraine “with incredible levels of military, economic, and humanitarian assistance,” that the Ukrainian people have used “to devastating effect.”

Biden reiterated that U.S. troops are in Europe not to fight Russia, but to defend our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. “Don’t even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory,” he warned. NATO nations will defend “each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.”

He called on all the world’s democracies to help the Ukrainian refugees, and pledged that the U.S. would do its part.

The war has already been a strategic failure for Russia, he said. “The democracies of the world are revitalized with purpose and unity found in months that we’d once taken years to accomplish.” And people are fleeing Russia as President Vladimir Putin cracks down on protesters and shuts down the media.

Biden reassured the Russian people that they are not our enemies, noting that they, too, have reason to hate the war. Just days ago they were “a 21st century nation with hopes and dreams that people all over the world have for themselves and their family,” and now “Vladimir Putin’s aggression has cut you, the Russian people, off from the rest of the world, and it’s taking Russia back to the 19th century.” “This war is not worthy of you, the Russian people,” he said, and reminded them that “Putin can and must end this war.”

Turning to Europe, Biden said that turning to clean and renewable energy is a matter of economic and national security, as well as vital for the planet. He urged democracies to fight the corruption that has fueled Putin’s power. And finally, he said that the world’s democracies must maintain “absolute unity.”

“It’s not enough to speak with rhetorical flourish, of ennobling words of democracy, of freedom, equality, and liberty,” he said. “All of us…must do the hard work of democracy each and every day. My country as well.” His message “for all freedom-loving nations,” he said, is that “we must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul.” In the end, though, “the darkness that drives autocracy is ultimately no match for the flame of liberty that lights the souls of free people everywhere.” “We will have a different future—a brighter future rooted in democracy and principle, hope and light, of decency and dignity, of freedom and possibilities.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, “this man cannot remain in power.”

That last line seemed a logical conclusion to the argument Biden has been making about the struggle between democracy and autocracy, rallying democratic countries to stay unified against Putin as his troops smash Ukraine. But it prompted a flurry of media stories saying Biden had made a gaffe, changing his long-standing insistence that the U.S. is not engaging in regime change but rather is trying to defend Ukraine’s right to exist independently of Russia. A White House official clarified that “[t]he president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region…. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger of the New York Times noted that, however Biden meant the line, it underscored the difficulty of holding allies together against Putin while also avoiding an escalation of the war.

After the speech, the White House dropped on social media a cut of its section addressed to the Russian people… with Russian subtitles.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 28, 2022 (Monday)

Today, United States District Judge David O. Carter of the United States District Court for the Central District of California ordered John Eastman to disclose 101 documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Eastman is a former law school dean at Chapman University and author of the Eastman memo outlining a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump. He also spoke at Trump’s January 6 rally on the Ellipse, lying to the crowd: “We know there was fraud…. We know that dead people voted.” Now he will have to share his communications about the events of January 6 with the January 6th Committee.

The backstory to this lawsuit is that on November 8, 2021, the January 6 Committee subpoenaed Eastman’s testimony and disclosure of documents and emails sent or received by Eastman between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021, related to the Capitol attack. Eastman testified before the committee on December 3, 2021, but asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 146 times. He also refused to produce any documents, again asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

So on January 18, 2022, the January 6 Committee subpoenaed Eastman’s emails from Chapman University—it had parted ways with Eastman by then—which initially collected 30,000 documents off its servers. The January 6 Committee then worked with Chapman to winnow down those results, ending up with just under 19,000 documents.

Eastman then tried to stop that document production. The court refused to agree. When Eastman appeared to be delaying disclosure, the court ordered him to focus on emails from January 4–7. On February 22, 2022, Eastman sued Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), chair of the January 6 Committee, and Chapman University to prevent disclosure of certain emails, claiming that 111 of them from January 4–7 should not be disclosed because they are covered by attorney-client privilege, with the “client” being Trump. The committee disagreed.

So Judge Carter personally examined the contested documents to decide if they should be disclosed or kept private. He concluded that 10 were indeed covered by attorney-client privilege because they did not involve Trump or involved litigation that was not covered by the subpoena. The other 101 must be disclosed.

That disclosure is important. But far more important is what is in Carter’s decision. It lays out, point by point, what depositions have now told us about the actions of former president Trump in the days before January 6, and explains what those actions mean.

Judge Carter explains how Trump and Eastman fostered the public belief that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud, despite the lack of evidence for that claim. They urged state legislators to question the results of the election. On January 2, 2021, Trump and Eastman hosted a briefing urging several hundred state legislators from states Biden won to “decertify” the electors.

The same day, January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to get him to throw the election to Trump. Raffensperger refuted all of Trump’s arguments, “point by point,” and told him “the data you have is wrong.” Trump insisted he just wanted to find 11,780 votes, one more than Biden received to win the state.

The next day, January 3, Trump tried to remove the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who had replaced Attorney General William Barr when he resigned on December 23, 2020, and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, who planned to write a letter to certain states Biden won, telling them that the election might have been stolen and urging them to decertify the electors. Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, told the January 6 Committee that the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described Clark’s proposed letter as a “murder-suicide pact” that would “damage everyone who touches it” and said “we should have nothing to do with that letter.” When high-ranking officials in the Department of Justice warned they would resign together if Trump appointed Clark, he did not do so.

Judge Carter outlined how in the months after the election, sources from members of Trump’s inner circle to statisticians told Trump and Eastman that there was no evidence of election fraud. Christopher Krebs of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that “[t]he November 3rd election [was] the most secure in American history,” and that it found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An internal memo from the Trump campaign said the fraud claims about Dominion voting machines were baseless. In early December, Barr said publicly there was no evidence of fraud, and on December 27, Donoghue told Trump that after “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” the Justice Department had concluded that there was no evidence of voter fraud that had changed the election results.

Still, Trump insisted that the Department of Justice should say that the election was fraudulent.

By early January, courts had rejected more than 60 cases relating to accusations of fraud, owing to lack of evidence or lack of standing.

By late December, Eastman wrote a memo proposing to reinstate Trump by getting Pence to reject the certified electoral votes from states Trump claimed to have won. If Pence rejected the votes from those states, Trump would win. Alternatively, Pence could send the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get a single vote and Republicans had a majority of the states, and elect Trump that way. Eastman wrote: “[t]he main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.”

Eastman expanded on this a few days later, saying that the plan was “BOLD, Certainly. But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules.”

On January 4, Trump and Eastman pressed Pence, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob, and Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short to reject the electors or delay the count. Pence insisted he did not have the authority to do either of those things.

The next day, Eastman again pressed Jacob and Short to follow his plan. Jacob has testified that Eastman admitted his plan was “contrary to consistent historical practice, would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, and violated the Electoral Count Act on four separate grounds.” Nonetheless, Eastman and Trump continued to pressure Pence to follow it.

At 1:00 am on January 6, Trump tweeted, “If Vice President [Pence] comes through for us, we will win the Presidency…. Mike can send it back!” At 8:17 am, he tweeted, “States want to correct their votes…. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!” Then Trump called Pence twice, reaching him on the second attempt and berating him for “not [being] tough enough to make the call” to reject or delay the electoral votes.

At the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, Eastman and Trump spoke to explain the plan to the attendees and those watching at home. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani introduced Eastman as the professor who would explain how the Democrats cheated. Eastman told the crowd that they just wanted Pence to “let the legislators of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it, and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government, or not. We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question. This is bigger than President Trump. It is a very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done. And anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it, does not deserve to be in the office. It is that simple.”

Following him, Trump praised Eastman as “one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country” who looked at this and he said, ‘What an absolute disgrace that this can be happening to our Constitution.’... Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election….”

Pence rejected the plan publicly, and at 1:00, members of Congress, gathered in joint session, began to count the electoral votes. Trump urged his supporters to walk with him up to the Capitol, saying: “[I]t is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down…. [W]e’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

After the speech, Trump went back to the White House while several hundred protesters stormed the Capitol. Even after he had been informed of the violence, Trump tweeted at 2:24 pm: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

During the riot, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob emailed Eastman that the rioters “believed with all their hearts the theory they were sold about the powers that could legitimately be exercised at the Capitol on this day…. [a]nd thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.” Eastman responded: “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so the American people can see for themselves what happened.”

Trump eventually released a video asking the rioters to leave the Capitol but saying “We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel.” At 6:00 pm, he tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Eastman continued to press Pence to delay the count until almost midnight on January 6.

Judge Carter concluded that Trump’s actions “more likely than not constitute attempts to obstruct an official proceeding.” He also concluded that “Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification.” The plan, Carter wrote, “was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means.” He also found that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

Eastman and Trump “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Carter wrote. “Their campaign was…a coup in search of a legal theory…. If [the] plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”

Thx RSP!!

Just read this AM that the White House "communication logs" that Trump has been refusing to turn over have finally been delivered to the committee..........with a 7 Hr. "GAP" in the records...............on Jan. 6th, 2021. How convenient is that??

Makes the little "erase job" done on the Nixon tapes look tiny, doesn't it??

What do y'all think it's gonna take for the Trumptards (like the Canuck doofuss) to finally realize they have been duped to the point of public shame.
They have ruined their reputations by backing a FAKE human. A con man and grifter of the highest order. Someone who just thought they were so stupid he could just lie 24 hrs. a day and they'd NEVER figure it out!

Problem is, for about 70 million Americans, (and at least one Canadian!) he was RIGHT!
They ARE that stupid and unaware of reality!

nixon was shamed out of office

trump ain got no shame so trump got voted out of office

woe be unto him who votes trump, putin's vassal, back in



go joe you dodderin ol fool

Blissful. Poetic even.

Like that "dodderin old fool" line but it's got an extra e.........eh?
And vassal.............linguistic whipped cream.
A+

While the idiot canuck portrays the orange clowns garbage lawsuit as the biggest thing since Watergate the REALITY and FACTS tell us that the clown and his administration committed offenses virtually daily that dwarf Watergate.

PROJECTION MUCH???

HEATHER COX RICHARDON

March 29, 2022 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, a decision by Judge David Carter said that Trump had likely committed a federal crime when he was part of a conspiracy to obstruct Congress’s count of the votes of the Electoral College on January 6, 2021. Today, a Trump spokesperson called yesterday’s decision “absurd and baseless.”

But the investigation into the events of January 6 is producing more and more evidence about the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and it is neither absurd nor baseless.

Today, journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa broke a story about the internal White House records turned over to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Those records show previously unreported brief calls on the morning of January 6 between then-president Trump and unofficial advisor Stephen Bannon and between Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They also show a ten-minute phone call with Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was, as Woodward and Costa note, “a key figure in pushing fellow [Republican] lawmakers to object to the certification of Biden’s election.”

Trump also talked for 26 minutes with senior advisor Stephen Miller, who had publicly pushed the idea that alternative electors from contested states would replace the official electors who cast ballots for Biden. Trump then talked, cryptically, “to an unidentified person.”

And that was the last call identified before a seven hour and 37 minute gap in Trump’s phone logs. This blackout includes the crucial hours in which the Capitol was under attack. There is no record of any calls to or from Trump for 457 minutes, from 11:17 am to 6:54 pm.

Since there have already been reports of a number of phone calls during that time, including calls to Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the committee is now investigating whether Trump hid his calls or communicated through the phones of his aides, or perhaps through unsecure “burner” phones, cheap prepaid mobile phones that are untraceable and are thrown out when no longer needed. Trump tried to kill this idea by saying in a statement: “I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term.”

But former national security advisor John Bolton contradicted that, saying he personally heard Trump using the term “burner phones” in several discussions and had discussed with him how burner phones helped people keep phone calls secret. In November 2021, Hunter Walker of Rolling Stone reported that the organizers of the January 6 events used burner phones to communicate with the White House and the Trump family, including Eric Trump, his wife Lara Trump, and chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The news of this gap in the record is significant because Trump and his allies have maintained that they were challenging the election results because they honestly believed the results were false, and that they believed they were operating within the law.

If so, why the seven-hour blackout?

The missing logs might not, in the end, obscure any phone calls made in that time, though, not only because witnesses can fill in some of the holes, but also because last summer, the January 6 Committee instructed 35 telecom and social media companies to preserve records of calls. When news broke today of the missing records, Crooked Media editor in chief Brian Beutler recalled McCarthy’s threat to punish telecom companies that cooperate with the January 6 Committee.

The ten-minute phone call with Jordan suggests that the 139 members of the House of Representatives who objected to the counting of the certified ballots were perhaps not simply making a protest vote, but rather were part of a larger organized Republican effort to steal the election. That story dovetails with yesterday’s story by Michael Kranish in the Washington Post about Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who worked hard to keep Trump in power despite the will of the American voters, intending to lay the groundwork for his own presidential bid in 2024.

Cruz and John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo outlining a strategy for then–vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, have been friends for close to 30 years, since they clerked together for then–U.S. Appeals Court judge J. Michael Luttig. While Eastman presented a plan by which Pence could refuse to count Biden’s electors, Cruz wrote a plan for congress members to object to the results in six critical states that Biden won, establishing a 10-day “audit” that would have enabled Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the election results in their states. Ten other senators backed Cruz’s plan, offering a path to create enough chaos to keep Trump in power.

Luttig told Kranish that Cruz was central to the events of January 6. Contesting the states’ electoral votes required one senator and one representative for each state. Then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made an effort to keep his caucus from working with representatives who planned to challenge the count. But junior senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) broke ranks and said he would join the challenges. Not to be outflanked by Hawley on the right, Cruz immediately stepped aboard the train and brought 10 senators with him. “Once Ted Cruz promised to object,” Luttig said, “January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen.”

Along with Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Cruz was the first to challenge an electoral ballot: that of Arizona.

Cruz’s plan was similar to a plan White House advisor Peter Navarro explained in fall 2021 called the “Green Bay Sweep.” According to Navarro, that plan was to block the counting of electoral votes until public pressure forced Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the election results and give the presidency to Trump. (It is worth noting that Navarro’s plan absolves Trump of responsibility for the Capitol violence, and seems to have been deployed in part for that reason.)

Cruz’s spokesperson said the senator “does not know Peter Navarro, has never had a conversation with him, and knew nothing about any plans he claims to have devised.”

Navarro has his own problems. Yesterday, the January 6 committee moved to hold him and another Trump aide, Dan Scavino, in criminal contempt of Congress, sending the resolution to the full House for a vote. Navarro has ignored the committee’s subpoena, saying—falsely—that Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony and so he could not testify, despite the fact he had written extensively about his participation in the attempt to overturn the election. Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, has also ignored the committee’s subpoena.

A budget proposal from the Department of Justice yesterday revealed that it wants 131 more lawyers to handle January 6 cases. In the request, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, "Regardless of whatever resources we see or get, let's be very, very clear: we are going to hold those perpetrators accountable, no matter where the facts lead us,... no matter what level.”

Today, on a right-wing news show, Trump appeared to try to change the subject and regain control over the political trends when he called for Russian president Vladimir Putin to release dirt on the Biden family, since “he’s not exactly a fan of our country.” Russian state TV featured a Russian government official calling for “regime change” in the United States, asking the people of the U.S. to replace President Biden with Trump “to again help our partner Trump to become President.”

this is so sweet

they got Capone on tax evasion, they got Nixon on the coverup

Trump is impervious to the law

his bluster and his willingness to go bankrupt and his connections to power and money have always got him through

big miscalculation the eight hour gap

he will blame it on a underling or he will say he sent it and the evil democraps lost it on purpose

boy this is some flour in the roux right here though

i heard two republican senators have in their possession on the senate floor right now as we speak cancelled $100K checks written by china to hunter biden

i bet on the memo line it says "1/2 4 fauci 1/2 4 U"