2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[RoseMorninStar]

Wow! The gold medal ceremony where they walk past McConnell & McCartney! Much deserved SHADE! How the police can claim Republicans/Trump are the party of police/law & order after Jan. 6th I'll never understand.

As for Jack Smith wanting to talk to state election officials & their role, GOOD.

[N.E. Brigand]

Andrii Derkach is a former member of the Ukrainian parliament who was feeding Rudy Giuliani supposed evidence of Biden family corruption during the 2020 election. Several months ago, the U.S. Treasury Dept. announced that Derkach has been a Russian agent for years. Today, Derkach was indicted by the U.S. Dept. of Justice for money laundering and fraud.

[N.E. Brigand]

At a Republican leadership meeting on January 10, 2021, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, who is now attempting to become Speaker, said that Twitter should disable the accounts of radical members of his party like Rep. Lauren Boebert. (This was the same meeting where McCarthy said that President Trump should resign as a result of his actions on January 6th.) Now McCarthy is falsely claiming that Twitter has been colluding with the U.S. government to stifle Republican voices.

[N.E. Brigand]

Repulican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tonight said at a gala event that "If Steve Bannon and I had orchestrated January 6th, we would have won." And MAGA Republicans are sharing that statement as if it's a good thing.

[RoseMorninStar]

Repulican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tonight said at a gala event that "If Steve Bannon and I had orchestrated January 6th, we would have won the coup would have succeeded." And MAGA Republicans are sharing that statement as if it's a good thing.

There. I corrected her statement for her.

[N.E. Brigand]

Greene also says that the insurrectionists would have been better armed (to kill cops and members of Congress, presumably) if she had been in charge.

[N.E. Brigand]

It it a crime for a Congressman to ask an outgoing President to invoke martial law (or "Marshall Law") to prevent the President-elect from taking office?

Talking Points Memo has obtained more than 2,300 text messages that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows provided to the January 6th Committee a year ago, a number of which are exchanges with various members of Congress. In one of them, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina tells Meadows to urge President Trump to do just that.

[N.E. Brigand]

Big story about how the Dept. of Homeland Security ignored warnings from its analysts about the looming threat of January 6th.

Just days before the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, DHS analysts noted in group chats that they had found many indications online that there would be violence that day, but they were told what they were reporting wasn't serious:

A message from Jan. 1, 2021, states: “Also I found a map of all the exits and entrances to the capitol building. I feel like people are actually going to try and hurt politicians. Jan 6 is gonna be crazy.”

Another from Jan. 3, 2021, said, “I mean people are talking about storming Congress, bringing guns, willing to die for the cause, hanging politicians with ropes but still not meeting threshold lol.”

Was this incompetence or malice on the part of DHS? An inspector general report says that DHS staff were poorly trained to synthesize this information. Additionally, DHS staff felt leery about acting on domestic threats after they had been called out for compiling reports on Black Lives Matter protesters.

Also I wonder: has the FBI been provided with this information gathered about people planning the Jan. 6th attacks? Has it been used in any prosecutions?

[N.E. Brigand]

Just catching up with this story at CNN which reports that the Dept. of Justice authorized prosecutors to investigate Donald Trump's role into January 6th more than a year ago.

I think I'd heard that Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who organized parts of the January 6th events and who was recently invited by Kanye West to meet Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, had received a large financial gift (in the form of cryptocurrency) from a French supporter; that was reported nearly a year ago. But I'd missed or since forgotten the news that this donor had killed himself (this happened even before his identify was revealed).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

How do think that is going to go, Steve?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It it a crime for a Congressman to ask an outgoing President to invoke martial law (or "Marshall Law") to prevent the President-elect from taking office?

Apparently Norman regrets his text, but only the misspelling.

https://taboolanews.com/article-page/-4 ... s&pev=9507

[RoseMorninStar]

How these persons can remain in congress is beyond me. These are people who are supposed to take an oath to the constitution and MAKE our laws, not break them.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't know what 'right wing spin machine' you're talking about, but everything you said above would be considered ludicrous in actual right wing circles. ...

Turning to the FBI, their classic M.O. for 'thwarting' terrorist plots (find a hapless muslim, radicalize him, suggest a terrorist plot, fund the plot, then go arrest him when he tries to carry it out (The Hill), was used in the fake Whitmer kidnapping. It's interesting to note that the FBI agent in charge of that failed and humiliating operation was promoted to the Washington field office shortly afterwards (revolver), before the plot was revealed to be a sting operation and the defendants acquitted at trial. He would thus have been in charge of operations at the Capitol on Jan.6. Of course, the FBI refused to say how many operatives they had at the Capitol that day, or if any of them perpetrated acts of violence. (FBI)

Emphasis mine.

Since this was the most recent post to mention the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, let me note here that following two days of deliberation, the two ringleaders of that plot, Adam Fox and Barry Croft, were convicted today in federal court of conspiring to kidnap Whitmer and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction, and Croft was additionally convicted of possessing an unregistered destructive device. They likely face many years in prison.

This was a retrial after a jury four months ago hung on the charges against Fox and Croft and acquitted two others then alleged to have been part of the plot. Two other plotters, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, previously pled guilty to kidnapping conspiracy charges and testified in this trial. Another ten members of the group are facing state charges.

A jury has convicted three more men in the Whitmer kidnapping plot. So much for the narrative that it was all a set-up by the FBI?

Three of the men who plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer have each been sentenced to lengthy imprisonment: a minimum of 7 years, 10 years, and 12 years, respectively.

[N.E. Brigand]

Politico reported earlier today that the committee will vote Monday on whether to refer criminal charges for Donald Trump to the Dept. of Justice for obstruction (USC 1512c), conspiracy to defraud the United States (USC 371), and "rebellion or insurrection" (USC 2383).

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Also, a D.C. judge unsealed some of what's happening in the Dept of Justice investigation of former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, who seems to have played a key role in Trump's attempts to overturn the election. I gather that Clark tried to keep DOJ from getting advance copies of a not yet published autobiography he wrote, in which he confirms that Donald Trump approved of a letter Clark wrote outlining one of their plans to keep Joe Biden from becoming President.

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New court documents reveal that prosecutors have obtained about 130,000 texts and/or emails in a Jan. 6th investigation of Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. Prosecutors asked a judge to rule on whether 37 of those were protected by attorney-client privilege. She said they were not.

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And charges have been brought against a suspect of the Jan. 6th insurrectionists, Edward Kelly from Tennessee, for plotting against the FBI agents investigating him.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The unsealing of the Clark and Perry documents is odd. I can't figure out why the DoJ asked for them to be unsealed. Unless they've decided not to charge Cark or Perry, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

[RoseMorninStar]

Former Members of Congress Demand Ethics Investigation of Lawmakers Who Sought to Prevent Transfer of Presidential Power

Dear Members of the House of Representatives:

We are former members of the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats, who watched in distress on January 6th, 2021 as supporters of the former president assaulted the U.S. Capitol. We feared for each of you, including many of you who fled for your lives.

As is now clear, January 6th was only one event among many that together constituted an extraordinary campaign to overturn an election. The scale and audacity of the campaign is profoundly troubling. Among the most alarming findings is that various members of Congress participated in it.

We now know, for example, that sitting lawmakers corresponded and met with White House officials and allies to plot various prongs of the campaign, including to advocate that the president declare martial law; that states submit false certificates of electoral votes to Congress; that the vice president, in contravention of his constitutional duties, interfere with the counting of electoral votes; and that federal law enforcement authorities be enlisted to interfere with the election; among other startling facts. We also now know that various sitting lawmakers sought presidential pardons.

These lawmakers stopped short of storming the Capitol themselves. But they shared a common goal with those who did: to prevent the lawful transfer of power for the first time in the Republic’s history. As with those who stormed the Capitol, they must be held accountable.

As former lawmakers, we are well accustomed to disagreeing with our colleagues. The undersigned disagree on any number of policy issues. Among elected representatives, this is expected — and in a healthy democracy, normal. What is not normal is subverting an election when the results do not suit us. We expect that Congress will and should be home to intense and passionate disagreement. But we did not expect that lawmakers who found their party on the losing side of a presidential election would take matters into their own hands.

Our ability to ensure that such efforts are not repeated rests upon accountability for unlawful and unethical behavior. No one — including members of Congress — is above the law.

Our Congress enjoys unique protections in our constitutional order. Generally, the Constitution insulates lawmakers from liability arising out of the performance of their legislative duties in order to permit open deliberation by our representatives. But these protections are not absolute. The Constitution permits exceptions, including for actions that constitute “Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace.” Members whose misconduct falls outside of their constitutionally protected legislative duties are no more immune to legal accountability than their fellow citizens.

Our Congress is responsible for also setting its own standards of acceptable behavior and disciplining members when ethical lines are crossed. In exchange for broad protections, the Constitution grants each house of Congress the authority to “punish its Members for disorderly Behavior.” The exercise of Congress’s authority to discipline itself dates back to the earliest years of the Republic. Members have been expelled, censured, fined, and stripped of various privileges for all manner of misconduct, from bribery and physical altercations to support for the Confederacy. Surely, taking part in an effort to overturn an election warrants an institutional response; previous colleagues have been investigated and disciplined for far less.

Based on the facts and findings to date, we urge you to demand that the Office of Congressional Ethics thoroughly investigate those members who played a role in the events leading up to and on January 6th, and if appropriate, that the House exercise its disciplinary functions. At stake is not only the institutional integrity of the legislative branch — to draw and enforce bright lines of ethical conduct — but the principle of accountability upon which our democracy rests.

All of us have won elections; and many of us have lost them, too. The world’s greatest and oldest democratic experiment persists because we, like most of you, have accepted defeat at the ballot box — and then worked even harder to earn our constituents’ support the next time around. If those who have eschewed that basic republican tenet evade accountability, we fear lessons will go unlearned, and that history will repeat itself.

(If you are a former member of the House of Representatives and would like to add your name to this statement, please complete this form. New signatories will be accepted until December 31st.)

Sincerely,

(linked letter includes list of those who signed letter)

[N.E. Brigand]

I hadn't previously realized that a number of Donald Trump's supporters expected the Director of National Intelligence to release a report on Friday, December 18, 2020 that they believed would reveal actual evidence of foreign interference meant to help Joe Biden in that year's election. (The report was due to be issued by that date -- 45 days after the election -- per an executive order that Trump had issued in 2018.) Here, for instance, is a Dec. 16, 2020 post anticipating that outcome by Herschel Walker's son Christian, who much later turned against his father's 2022 candidacy but then was very much in the MAGA camp (and may be still be, for all I know). It appears that the original plan to keep Trump in power was for him to use the Dec. 18 report to invoke the insurrection act or otherwise declare martial law. On Dec. 17, 2020, Michael Flynn was on Newsmax saying that Trump could order the military to re-run the election in contested states if necessary. But then the ODNI didn't deliver their report. It was over the subsequent weekend that Trump first urged his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, 2021.

[N.E. Brigand]

I hadn't thought about the possibility that Jim Jordan and his fellow Republicans, once they control the House next month, could offer testimonial immunity to participants in Donald Trump's attempted coup as a way of undermining the Dept. of Justice investigation.

[N.E. Brigand]

We'd heard a little before about some disagreements among the members of the January 6th Committee about how the final report should be focused. Apparently those discussions got heated last week, with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) arguing that the report was not emphasizing Donald Trump's role sufficiently in contrast to Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Florida), who argued that the failures of law enforcement needed more attention.

(I'm not sure this isn't a strategic leak meant to emphasize the thoughtfulness of the Committee.)