Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[LFC]

We're just a few fascists away from becoming a collapsed, non-functional democracy. Imagine if the likes of American traitor Mike Flynn were in charge. You know they will be if Trump or DeSatanist make it into the White House.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper directed senior military leaders to alert him to any “unusual” requests from the White House.

Esper wrote about the directives and his concerns that Trump would use the military to intervene in the election in his new memoir, A Sacred Oath, a copy of which was obtained by TPM.

The former Pentagon chief wrote that concern in the military began to increase in September 2020, as racial justice protests began to subside.

“These were crazy days, so I didn’t want to take anything for granted. I had watched as the President became more aggressive, egged on by some in the White House, as the election neared and the polls remain[ed] unchanged with Biden at a high single-digit lead,” Esper wrote, saying that while there was “nothing concrete we could point to,” he understood that Trump “often turned to the military when times got tough.”

Esper wrote that, specifically, he and some senior military leaders were concerned that Trump would ask the military to get involved as he was already “setting the stage” to “claim voter fraud if he lost the election.”

Over the summer, the book says, Trump had sought to employ the National Guard against the nationwide protests that began in response to the murder of George Floyd, including demands to “shoot” peaceful protestors. Esper wrote that the experience made him worried about the National Guard specifically.

So, on October 22, 2020, Esper told all fifty state adjutant generals — the heads of each state’s national guard — to be on the lookout.

Esper asked them “to keep us in the Pentagon informed about their activities and let us know immediately if they were, or expected to be, directed to do something out of the normal.”

Esper added that, “long ago,” he had directed Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to inform “the combatant commanders to give us a heads-up at once if they ever received a phone call from anyone in the White House, especially if any unusual requests came with it.”

[LFC]

More culture war bullshit from DeSatanist. I would start calling him Governor Newsmax but unfortunately that would confuse him with too many other Republican governors.

Sure, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), go ahead and take home the trophy for passing the most outrageous/bizarre/problematic anti-education laws of all the red state governors in the land, if that’s the distinction you’re after.

At this point, it seems that’s the governor’s goal (coupled with the, seemingly, broader party aim to distract voters so completely with such non-serious non-existent issues that they don’t remember why they decided to support GOPers in the midterms in the first place).

The latest DeSantis culture war to get legislated into law in Florida: a sidetrack focus on communism.

While a handful of states do have some sort of legitimate official holiday to mark a “Victims of Communism Day,” DeSantis, per usual, took the move a few steps further. In signing House Bill 395 into law on Monday, DeSantis not only recognized November 7 as the official holiday, but also made it state law for public schools in Florida to spend at least 45 minutes on that remembrance day instructing students on the regimes of various communist figures like Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro, the Miami Herald reported.

It also requires that teachers spend time in the classroom discussing famous Cuban exiles and the “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech” experienced under Castro, Stalin and Mao Zedong’s leadership, per the Herald.

“That body count of Mao is something that everybody needs to understand because it is a direct result of this communist ideology,” DeSantis said during the bill signing Monday. “I know we don’t need legislation here to do this but I think it’s our responsibility to make sure people know about the atrocities committed by people like Fidel Castro and even more recently people like Nicolas Maduro.”

On the one hand, this move is a barely-veiled effort to own the libs. DeSantis and others of his ilk have been trying for years to paint progressive Democrats and the Democratic Party as a whole as some sort of far-left radical political movement hellbent on making America a communist nation — simply for the crime of supporting things like, I don’t know, universal health care.

On the other, this appears to be another layer of the Republican Party’s effort to make public education the top campaign messaging issue for the party ahead of the Midterms. This is, of course, despite the fact that all of the education-related “issues” the GOP is focused on are not only non-existent — like claiming that teachers who educate students about LGBTQ+ issues are “groomers” — but also a form of the very censorship the party’s historically claimed to rally against.

And DeSantis, with his 2024 ambitions, is one of the worst red state offenders — leading the pack with infamously aggressive spins on laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, banning textbooks and outlawing Critical Race Theory — in Florida, the anti-CRT law extends outside of the classroom and into the workforce, aiming to ban the discussion of issues that might make a (white) person experience “discomfort.”

[pnwguy]

May 12, 2022 20:26:11 GMT LFC said:

... aiming to ban the discussion of issues that might make a (white) person experience “discomfort.”

Any communications about salsa or hot sauce are Critical Flavor Theory and cause white people "intestinal discomfort".  They are illegal under Florida law.

[LFC]

Durham's bogus conspiracy case is going to a jury trial.

Michael Sussmann, the Democratic-aligned attorney, was indicted in September 2021, days before the five-year statute of limitations would have expired.

The charge is narrow, and has generated outrage for the bizarre circumstances under which Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr, brought it.

Durham alleged that Sussmann lied to the FBI on Sept. 19, 2016, accusing the attorney of misleading the bureau’s general counsel about one thing: whether he was delivering information on behalf of a client, or independently.

Prosecutors working for Durham contend that Sussmann lied, and that he — while secretly in the employ of the Clinton campaign and a tech executive named Rodney Joffe — sent the FBI on a wild goose chase that morphed into the grander tale of Trump-Russia collusion.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew DeFilippis, a Durham prosecutor, described Sussmann’s alleged crime as part of a bigger conspiracy to drum up press attention about links to Russia, “get the government to investigate it,” and then to “get the press to report the government was investigating.”

Sussmann, who has suggested that the prosecution is politically motivated, goes to trial on Monday. The trial is not so much a test of Durham’s unified theory of the Trump-Russia scandal, but, rather, an examination of whether a charge on such a narrow and arcane topic will pass muster with a jury, potentially spurring Durham to issue further indictments.

[LFC]

Looks like the GOP doesn't approve of this one. Apparently she's just a little too nuts for Pennsylvania.

The two main contenders for the Republican nomination in Pennsylvania took a short break from savaging each other this week to train their collective fire on an unexpected rival who is experiencing a surge in popularity in the eleventh hour of the high-profile contest.

In fact, on Wednesday afternoon, it seemed like anyone with a Fox News show or a follower count in the six-digits on MAGA Twitter is speaking with the same voice: if Kathy Barnette wins the primary Tuesday, she is going to lose the Senate seat to a Democrat.

It's so hard for Republicans and their sympathizers to keep their propaganda straight. Sean Hannity and some asshat at Newsmax complaining about her attacks on Muslims is particularly rich. Sounds like they forgot where they work.

Sean Hannity took time on his show to slam her attacks on Muslims, including her claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Newsmax’s Greg Kelly called her a “race card playing scammer.” Former Trump acting intelligence director Ric Grenell called her “unfit for office,” highlighting a 2015 tweet in which Barnette said “pedophilia is a cornerstone of Islam.” Pro-Trump accounts have circulated a misleadingly edited video meant to portray Barnette, who is Black, as a radical Black Lives Matter supporter.

Conservative media outlets have stirred up murky questions about her military service. Even Trump got in on the action on Thursday, putting out a vague press release claiming Barnette would lose a general election because of “many things ​in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted.”

[LFC]

Idaho is barreling towards becoming a fascist state. Parts of this article make you realize just how utterly angry, nuts, and violent a not insignificant chunk of this country is and how many politicians either cower before them or are in active alliance to win office (like JD Vance).

On Nov. 2, 2021, Foxx told his 44,000 followers on Telegram that “If school board races go well in north Idaho, I will be running for something local there soon. And I will win easily.”

Foxx’s dream of public office has already been pursued by his friend Dave Reilly, a fellow white nationalist who, despite saying “all Jews are dangerous” and having attended the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, was endorsed last year by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee for a school board seat in Post Falls, a town neighboring the larger Coeur d’Alene in north Idaho.

Even after the endorsement drew negative media coverage, the KCRCC didn’t back down. “I believe Dave is a good man who will make an excellent Trustee and will resist the Progressive/Marxist indoctrination of our children,” Brent Regan, the committee’s chairman, wrote in a statement. (Reilly didn’t win the school board seat in Post Falls — but he performed pretty well for a guy who was in Charlottesville in 2017, winning 47% of nearly 2,000 votes.)

Regan has been at the center of the Idaho GOP’s radicalization. At his perch atop KCRCC and as chair of the board of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, an influential statewide group, both organizations have staked out far-right positions they then demand that conservatives embrace or else be labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

Regan has also repeatedly embraced noxious extremist groups and figures, like in 2019, when he led the KCRCC in passing a resolution asking the federal government to allow Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, who had close ties to the man who massacred 50 Muslims in New Zealand, to enter the country so that he could marry his fiance, a north Idaho-based alt-right influencer.

Last summer, the KCRCC unanimously passed another resolution, affirming its total support for the John Birch Society, the conspiratorial anti-communist organization that is, in many ways, the antecedent to QAnon and whose founder once declared that “democracy is a fraud.”

Foxx — who was at the Jan. 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. — has been a big name in white supremacist circles for years now. He was the founder of the alt-right media collective known as Red Elephants, worked as a chief propagandist for a violent fascist fight club and is a prominent figure in the America First “groyper” movement.

He’s rubbed shoulders with a who’s-who of prominent racists, appearing on podcasts to talk about Jewish control of the media, deny the Holocaust, or riff about the low IQ scores of non-whites. “The Buffalo shooter did something crazy and immoral but was right about white replacement,” Foxx wrote on Sunday after an 18-year-old white supremacist — who cited the racist “great replacement” conspiracy in an apparent manifesto — massacred 10 people in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

“They have completely rebranded what it is to be a conservative here in north Idaho,” Keenan said of the KCRCC. “And they have literally excommunicated and cleaned house of any rational, regular conservative from their ranks, telling them, ‘You don’t belong here. You have not passed the purity test.’ It’s a bit of a purge. A big purge.”

This radicalization accelerated in the last five years, Keenan said, pointing to a series of events — Trump’s election, the pandemic and the nationwide anti-racist uprisings of 2020 — as mobilizing the far right here to such a scary extent that he wonders whether it’s time get out of Idaho. Some of his friends already have.

There was a week when armed militias patrolled the streets with assault rifles in search of Black Lives Matter and antifa activists. Anti-maskers shut down a school board meeting, COVID-19 denialists harassed hospital workers, and bigots — some of them armed — harangued children at “Rainbow Squad” LGBTQ events at a local library.

On Feb. 25, white nationalists stopped me from entering the third annual America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. No reporters allowed, they said. “Hey, the homosexual conference is that way,” quipped one attendee, a YouTuber arrested last year for attacking media during the insurrection.

Back at my hotel, I watched the AFPAC livestream, waiting to find out which GOP politicians would appear, lending the imprimatur of their office to this gathering of young “America First” fascists, who call themselves “groypers.”

Among the five Republican officials who spoke was McGeachin (pronounced “Ma-GEE-hin”), Idaho’s lieutenant governor. “Keep up the good work fighting for our country,” she told the crowd in a pre-recorded video. Other speakers at AFPAC then praised Adolf Hitler and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged.

Foxx gave a fiery speech, too. “We must have a deep desire to dominate without mercy,” he howled. “And if you refuse to dominate, then America First will dominate you!”

Responding to backlash over her AFPAC appearance back in Boise, McGeachin admitted in an interview with KTVB that she’d “heard” of Foxx, and yes, had taken a photo with him. She then quickly pivoted to accusing the media of playing a game of “guilt by association.”

But she was less defensive three weeks later when she appeared on a far-right podcast, telling the hosts she was well aware of what AFPAC was all about, adding defiantly: “I’m not going to back off from the opportunity to talk to other conservatives across the country.”

Her extremism has endeared her to the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a powerful dark money organization receiving bundles of donations from out-of-state billionaires. The group’s stated mission is “exposing, defeating, and replacing the state’s socialist public policies,” which in practice has meant pushing a vision of government so limited as to make Idaho the Wild West again.

Since 2009, the IFF has amassed influence largely by a tool it calls “The Freedom Index,” a system of scoring and ranking lawmakers according to how they vote on different bills. If a GOP legislator’s score falls too low for IFF’s liking, that legislator can expect the foundation to wield its considerable resources to back a primary opponent.

This has led to a caucus of IFF sycophants in the capital who fall over themselves to do the group’s bidding, chasing after high Freedom Index scores like a 4th grader working toward their next shiny gold star.

There are 24 state representatives and senators in Idaho with Freedom Index scores of 75% and above. The current top-rated legislator is state Rep. Heather Scott, with an FI score of 100%.

Scott was part of an anti-government group involved in two armed conflicts with the federal government, including the 2013 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff in Oregon (where she went by the militia codename “greenbean”). She has posed with a Confederate flag and defended white nationalism. A rabid COVID denialist, she once organized a mask-burning event and has said stay-at-home measures were “no different” than Nazis sending Jews to extermination camps.

Republican state Rep. Chad Christensen (FI Score: 99%) lists his membership in the anti-government militia group the Oath Keepers on his official Idaho government profile page.

Further down is Republican state Rep. Ben Adams (FI score: 78%). Last year, after a viral video showed an Idaho man at a conservative rally asking when he could start killing Democrats — “When do we get to use the guns? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” — Adams wrote on Twitter that it was a “fair” question.

Dr. Ted Epperly, 68, was a physician in the Army for 21 years, serving in the Gulf War and reaching the rank of colonel. He served in the White House as the personal doctor to two U.S. presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and later was named a president himself, of The American Academy of Family Physicians, overseeing its 150,000 members. He has testified before Congress 18 times and has contributed articles to respected medical journals.

But he is also a Democrat who believes that the coronavirus, which has now killed 1 million Americans, is a public health emergency. For these transgressions, Epperly received notice last June from the Ada County Commission that his role as the physician member of the Central District Health board in Boise — a position he’d held for 15 years — would not be renewed.

Republican County Commissioner Ryan Davidson made it clear to local press that he’d ousted Epperly over his support of lockdown measures like mask requirements, which he argued were tantamount to “the suspension of individual liberties.” Two months later, Davidson appointed Epperly’s replacement: Dr. Ryan Cole, an anti-vaccine influencer who had called the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine “needle rape,” and a “poisonous attack on our population.”

“Cole was an absolute COVID-denying, ivermectin-prescribing, hydroxychloroquine-prescribing, right-wing pathologist,” Epperly told me over beers near his home in Eagle, Idaho. “I mean, public health is a body of knowledge that really is in the realm of a generalist physician … never a pathologist. I mean, a pathologist deals with microscopes, slides and body tissue. I mean, they don’t even deal with living human beings!”

Cole, Epperly’s far-right replacement, has spent his tenure on the health board suggesting — including in a viral video produced by the anti-vaccine group Health Freedom Idaho — that the COVID vaccine was causing gynecological cancers, without sharing evidence of his claim. A bombshell investigation this month by the Idaho Capital Sun found he had misdiagnosed two people with cancer, including a woman who then underwent a major surgery removing her reproductive organs, all for an illness she didn’t have.

Across Idaho, the far right has laid siege to nonpartisan positions, some of which require specific expertise, and made them partisan, installing loyalists with sometimes disastrous results.

It is not a secret that many on the hard right want to seize public and democratic institutions in order to dismantle them. Some of the movement’s shining stars are very clear on this point.

A recent Vanity Fair piece, for example, profiled members of the national neoreactionary movement, acolytes of a philosopher named Curtis Yarvin, who is a close ally of billionaire Peter Thiel. This movement, which has buy-in from powerful GOP figures, is explicit about wanting to usher in the end of democracy by purging the current government of its enemies and establishing one-party control — or, put another way, authoritarianism.

J.D. Vance — the venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author who recently won the Ohio Republican primary for U.S. Senate — is a follower of Yarvin’s. He positively likened this prospective purge to the deadly “de-Baathification of Iraq.”

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” Vance told Vanity Fair. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Vance and Trump might look to north Idaho for inspiration.

And this is their manual to politics. It's all about emotion, threats, and violence. There's no mention of governance because it's not important to them.

Chaney said his wife, wanting to better understand the people threatening her family, picked up a copy of “Confrontational Politics” and read it from cover to cover. Multiple people in Idaho told me that if I really wanted to understand the far right in the state, I needed to read this book.

Authored by a former California state senator and gun rights fundamentalist named H.L. Richardson, “Confrontational Politics” is essentially a how-to guide for a Christian nationalist insurgency in the United States. “There can be no compromises with the Left,” Richardson writes. “We are ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum with no arbitration possible. Either they win or we do. They will run the government or we will. That’s the only choice open to either of us. They know it — shouldn’t we?”

Richardson prescribes an aggressive style of politics that’s always, always on the offensive, that is constantly attacking its opponents, provoking them, screaming over them, and wearing them down. Never apologize. Exploit “hot button issues” that inspire “deep emotion” and “moral righteousness” to gain followers.

And they literally threatened a rape victim. But hey, they're "Christian"!

Last year, after a 19-year-old legislative intern accused state Rep. Aaron Von Ehrlinger (FI Score: 93%) of rape, his far-right allies went on the attack. State Rep. Priscilla Giddings (FI Score: 92%) sent a letter to her constituents calling the intern a “honey trap” and the rape allegations a “liberal smear job.” Giddings also shared a link to an article on a far-right website revealing the intern’s name and photo.

“You know that photo everyone is posting? I’m 12 years old in that photo,” the intern later recalled in an Associated Press interview about the “overwhelming” harassment she endured. “I’m not even a teenager in that photo, and they’re sharing it, calling me nasty.”

The intern was made to testify at a House ethics hearing about the rape, where she told her story from behind a screen to protect her identity. As she left the House chamber, she was accosted by activists from Bundy’s People’s Rights network, along with a CBS2 reporter named Emri Moore, all of whom started to film her.

The intern screamed and fell to the ground, curling up into a ball and crying as her lawyers scrambled to protect her. (Moore could be seen hugging the People’s Rights activists after the confrontation. She was stripped of her statehouse press credentials and now works for TPUSA, the college conservative group.)

Von Ehrlinger resigned from the House and was convicted of rape earlier last month. He faces up to life in prison. Giddings is currently running in the GOP primary for lieutenant governor.

[pnwguy]

I have friends in Whitaho. They are horrified at how nutty things are getting.

[LFC]

The Republican fascists have figured out that they need to lock in minority rule at the state level as well.

It was only a matter of time. A candidate for Governor in Colorado has a proposal: create an in-state electoral college that will systematically over-weight rural votes and thus make it almost impossible for a Republican not to win the governorship as well as other statewide offices. Basically, counties take the place of states and Colorado has a ton of rural counties where very few people live. From what I can tell, he’s not the most likely nominee. But he won the top spot on the primary ballot at the state convention. So he’s not some random gadfly either. In any case, Gov. Jared Polis is popular and seems like a shoe-in for reelection. But this seems like the leading edge of the broader trend.

We’re no longer seeing conservatives make traditionalist arguments for anti-majoritarian aspect of the US political system like the electoral college. (It’s always been this way. Why change it?) They’re making affirmative arguments for reforms that accomplish the same things. Greg Lopez, the candidate with the proposal, is pretty transparent about the goal of the reform: Republicans can’t win otherwise. In one example of the math, about 2,000 voters in one set of three counties would have twice the number of electoral votes as a quarter of a million voters in another. The national electoral college is bad but it’s not *remotely* that bad.

This plan isn’t going anywhere. But it seems highly likely that plans along these lines are coming down the pike. Anything like this has been prevented for decades by the “one man, one vote” Supreme Court decisions of more than half a century ago. But why should we believe those cases are likely to be affirmed by the current Court?

[goldenvalley]

May 19, 2022 15:57:08 GMT LFC said:

The Republican fascists have figured out that they need to lock in minority rule at the state level as well.

It was only a matter of time. A candidate for Governor in Colorado has a proposal: create an in-state electoral college that will systematically over-weight rural votes and thus make it almost impossible for a Republican not to win the governorship as well as other statewide offices. Basically, counties take the place of states and Colorado has a ton of rural counties where very few people live. From what I can tell, he’s not the most likely nominee. But he won the top spot on the primary ballot at the state convention. So he’s not some random gadfly either. In any case, Gov. Jared Polis is popular and seems like a shoe-in for reelection. But this seems like the leading edge of the broader trend.

We’re no longer seeing conservatives make traditionalist arguments for anti-majoritarian aspect of the US political system like the electoral college. (It’s always been this way. Why change it?) They’re making affirmative arguments for reforms that accomplish the same things. Greg Lopez, the candidate with the proposal, is pretty transparent about the goal of the reform: Republicans can’t win otherwise. In one example of the math, about 2,000 voters in one set of three counties would have twice the number of electoral votes as a quarter of a million voters in another. The national electoral college is bad but it’s not *remotely* that bad.

This plan isn’t going anywhere. But it seems highly likely that plans along these lines are coming down the pike. Anything like this has been prevented for decades by the “one man, one vote” Supreme Court decisions of more than half a century ago. But why should we believe those cases are likely to be affirmed by the current Court?

They all look at California, where the number of Republicans is not about equal to the number of "no party preference" registrants, and less than the number of registered Democrats.  Plus Republicans tend to be found in the less populated parts of the state which further reduces their influence.

[LFC]

With the leading candidates out due to not being competent enough to collect signatures the Republican frontrunner to be Michigan's next governor is literally a fascist traitor involved in the Jan 6 Republican Insurrection. (paywalled)

With the one time frontrunners both now removed from the ballot, a new poll shows that the new leader in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary is Ryan Kelley, a man recorded in multiple videos as literally part of the mob that stormed the US Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. It’s not much of a lead. He’s currently pulling 19% support in what is now clearly a highly unsettled race. He’s followed by Kevin Rinke at 15% and Tudor Dixon – the candidate now backed by the DeVos family – at 9%.

Jan 6th may not have been Kelley’s first or only insurrection. Kelley was also at the center of the pandemic-era agitation that roiled Michigan in 2020 and 2021. He ran a militia-affiliated group called the American Patriot Council which called for the arrest of Gov. Whitmer and others the group identified as “traitors”. The APC’s events were also magnets for the men later charged with planning to kidnap and murder Whitmer.

Kelley later denounced efforts to murder Whitmer, which seems like a good thing to do, but later claimed the attempted assailants were left wing plants used to discredit his group.

[LFC]

Durham's fascist attempt to punish anybody he could deem to be an enemy fell flat on its face. He's a partisan hack who is in complete disgrace, not that you would have ever expected better from Bill Barr.

The federal investigation of a Clinton-connected lawyer over his role in spreading news of a Trump-Russia mystery—the still-unexplained computer links between the Trump Organization and Russia’s powerful Alfa Bank—has ended just like the conundrum he shared. It was a dud.

On Tuesday, a jury found Michael A. Sussman was not guilty of lying to the FBI when he passed along computer signal information to the feds—but allegedly didn’t tell them he was a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic Party.

Sussmann was indicted in September 2021 and charged with a single count of “willfully and knowingly” making a “materially false” statement to a federal agent. He was the primary target of a politically charged prosecution led by a Justice Department attorney that Republicans had hoped would be the counter to the much-maligned Trump-Russia investigation.

When the independent team led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up its probe, the Trump administration started its own investigation of that investigation. The administration tapped Special Counsel John H. Durham, then the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to lead his own mission. Sussman was supposed to be his first major takedown.

First? That means Durham is going to make sure his bullshit continues right through the 2024 election. This is where we need an AG with real balls who demands that Durham put up or shut up. I'm sick of these endless Republican hit jobs.

[LFC]

TPM has a nice recap of Durham's Debacle, a corrupt mess from the get go.

It’s hard to know what there is bad enough to say about the John Durham probe, which just saw its cause celebre indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann drop kicked to eternity in a rapid acquittal. This was a corrupt effort from the git-go. Durham’s own deputy, who had worked with or for him for decades, felt obliged to resign because of pressure to produce meritless indictments to save Trump’s bacon in the dying days of his presidency.

Perjury and false statement cases are generally only brought when the evidence of deception is overwhelming. The cases most often turn on whether the deception was meaningful, material to an actual case. In this case the evidence that Sussmann deceived anyone was extremely thin. The argument that the notional deception was material to anything was even weaker.

Durham’s probe has gone on more than a year longer than the Mueller probe it was purportedly investigating. And it’s biggest “get” was this absurd indictment that was ignominiously tossed this afternoon. This was never a true investigation or prosecution. It was always a political assignment created by Bill Barr for the benefit of Donald Trump. Corrupt from the first moment, fruit of the poison tree.

[LFC]

Peter Navarro, Trump adviser and total whackjob, has been served with a grand jury subpoena. If he tries to pull the executive privilege card, or any other card, they need to move for contempt charges and imprisonment IMMEDIATELY. They can't let this drag out to 2025.

Former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro announced this weekend that he received a federal criminal grand jury subpoena as part of D.C. federal prosecutors’ investigation into the Capitol insurrection — the first such subpoena for an administration official to be made public.

Navarro disclosed the existence of the grand jury in a draft lawsuit that he circulated over the weekend.

Apart from the fact of receiving the subpoena, little is clear from Navarro’s description of the demand in the lawsuit, which he filed pro se and which is replete with bizarre claims about the federal criminal probe being the “fruit of the poisonous tree” that is the separate, congressional Jan. 6 investigation.

Navarro is not an attorney.

But the news does suggest that D.C. federal prosecutors are examining the activities of White House officials in relation to the insurrection attempt.

“If this is the first grand jury subpoena to a former White House official in this investigation, I’d say it’s an escalation,” Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, told TPM.

[LFC]

Bill Barr shows he's the same old fascist he always was as he applauds and lies about his hand-picked attack dog's failed, bogus, political hack job.

Aaaaand Scene!

Ex-Attorney General Bill Barr baldly confirmed on Wednesday what we all knew: The John Durham investigation, which ended up being a total bust, into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was nothing more than political theater–and Barr is “very proud” of Durham’s performance despite the case ending in a speedy acquittal. After all, the former Trump crony got what he wanted.

• Durham “accomplished something far more important” than a conviction; he “brought out the truth,” Barr told Fox News.

• Barr openly praised Durham for using the investigation to peddle MAGAland’s conspiracy theories. Durham, the ex-attorney general said, “crystallized the central role played by the Hillary [Clinton] campaign in launching as a dirty trick the whole Russiagate collusion narrative.”

• Not all Republicans are as happy as Barr, though. They’re pretty mad that nobody got convicted.

From that last link:

Following Tuesday’s lightning-fast acquittal in John Durham’s case against DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann, some conservatives are starting to profess deep doubt about the foundations of the country’s legal system.

Why is it, they ask, that Democrats get off so easy? Could it be that the entire system is rigged in their favor? Are trials held in the nation’s capital by nature bound to go in favor of the left?

“Four percent of Washington, D.C. voted for Donald Trump,” moaned Matthew Whitaker, the former acting attorney general and onetime hot tub salesman, on Fox News Monday evening.

“This looks more like a jury nullification, where even though the evidence was overwhelming, even though they, the government, proved their case, that the jury just decided that this wasn’t a case worth pursuing,” he continued, articulating a theory shared by many bereft commentators of his political stripes.

The right wing isn't just playing the victim in elections they lose fairly. Now, despite one legal analyst after another saying this case was brutally weak from the get go, they're playing the victim when the judicial system doesn't deliver what they demand. Fascism must destroy all independent centers of power. This is just another one that still hasn't been brought to its knees despite decades of Republican court packing. The TPM link summed it up nicely:

The jury deliberated for all of six hours before deciding to acquit in a unanimous verdict. Along with Whitaker, many on the right have now taken to arguing that the result suggests not that the case was flawed, but rather that the whole system should be burned to the ground.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway described the result as an “existential threat to the country,” saying that it represents “two standards of justice, one where friends of the regime can do anything and get off scot-free and one where opponents of the regime will have their lives destroyed for things that friends of the regime can do.”

American Greatness, a MAGA news outlet, published an article on the day of the verdict titled “Clinton’s Plot Came Closer To Succeeding Than January 6 Ever Did.”

The piece mostly attributes Sussmann’s acquittal to “Clinton donors” on the jury, while rehashing the same claims of a grand conspiracy to smear Trump by association with Russia.

But the point is the same: if not our justice, then no justice.

[LFC]

The Republican bogus conspiracy theories based on nothing but pure fabrication are slowly falling apart. Unfortunately that doesn't help our nation any. The lies are now deeply entrenched in the DNA of the Republican Party and no facts or reality will ever dislodge them. Of course the Democrats should be trumpeting the failure of these lies and pointing fingers at the Republicans who supported them, calling them out and calling them un-American since that's what they are.

But one conspiracy theory that birthed out of that whole debacle was focused on the Obama administration. Trump allies spread allegations that Obama officials “unmasked” Flynn intentionally in an attempt to ignite questions about the probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged coordination with Russia. Trump and his allies claimed that Obama administration officials specifically pushed for Flynn’s identity to be revealed in top-secret government intelligence reports regarding his call with Kislyak — and that the unredacted details of said call were leaked to the media for political reasons. In short, MAGAland claimed that the Obama administration was “spying” on Trump and his campaign.

BuzzFeed obtained a copy of a DOJ report that digs into the details of a Barr-demanded investigation into the allegations. The report in essence completely debunks the Trump-era “deep state” conspiracy theory, revealing that there were “no unmasking requests made before Election Day that sought the identity of an apparent associate of the Trump campaign,” then-U.S. Attorney John Bash wrote in the September 2020 report.

“I … examined whether any senior officials had obtained General Flynn’s identity in connection with those communications through an unmasking request made during the transition period,” Bash wrote. “The answer is no.”

“According to the FBI, the Bureau did not disseminate an intelligence report discussing those communications and containing masked [U.S. person identity information] for General Flynn before President Trump’s inauguration,” Bash wrote. “For that reason, the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request.”

In his conclusion, Bash declared that there was effectively no evidence to back up the claims made by Trump and his allies, which have always been conspiratorial, at best:

“I have not found evidence that senior U.S. officials unmasked the identities of U.S. persons contained in intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 election period or the ensuing transition period,” he wrote.

[LFC]

More identification of targets by the fascists. Nothing good can come of this.

The arch conservative Liberty Alliance has unveiled its new “Woke Heat Map” of Missouri, dotted with “hot spots” where it says the “the Woke agenda … is permeating all across” the state. Click on one, and you’ll see the spots tie to instances where someone has raised a stink about one of the right-wing culture war outrages of the day: diversity training, a lesson about George Floyd, “gingerbread person” cookies.

What ties all these hot spots together? Each one targets a school. And what reason could there be to drop pins on a map other than to mark the sites for protest — or worse?

If there’s another reason, the group hasn’t told us, even after we asked repeatedly Tuesday why it’s doing this now, of all times.

The only reply was that the map was not “published in response to the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas,” where 19 elementary schoolchildren and two teachers were gunned down with military-style weapons by an 18-year-old.

Liberty Alliance released its map on May 19, five days after 10 Black people were murdered in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store, allegedly by a self-proclaimed white nationalist 18-year-old with a military-style rifle.

At best, the map is irresponsible, given our deeply polarized political climate and the volatility of school board meetings in recent months, which have too often been marked by raw emotions and incendiary language.

[pnwguy]

We all have to get used to the idea that these fascists, armed to the teeth, will be coming after us ("those people"). The more educated you are, the more you are an enemy.

[LFC]

More not at all surprising info on the fake electors in Georgia.

Then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign seemed at least vaguely aware that the fake Trump elector scheme was something of a shady cloak-and-dagger operation, as indicated by an email from a campaign director obtained by the Washington Post and CNN.

Robert Sinners, Trump’s election operations director in Georgia, sent the 16 fake Trump electors in the state an email on Dec. 13, 2020 urging them to keep quiet about their upcoming gathering the next day at the Georgia Capitol, where they signed certificates falsely claiming to be electors.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” Sinners wrote, according to the Post and CNN. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

The campaign official directed the sham electors to falsely tell the security guards at the Georgia Capitol that they were there to meet with either state Sen. Brandon Beach (R) or state Sen. Burt Jones (R), who was one of the 16 electors.

“Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media,” Sinners wrote, with the text highlighted in bold, according to the Post.

Sinners defended the email in a statement to the Post and CNN, claiming he was just doing what lawyers and Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, another fake Trump elector, had told him to do.

“I was advised by attorneys that this was necessary in order to preserve the pending legal challenge,” Sinners said.

[LFC]

Trump had a boner over the Insurrection Act which would explain why he incited an insurrection and then refused to do anything to quiet it down. It doesn't get any more fascist than this.

Former President Trump “mused” about using the Insurrection Act during his presidency, a former Trump official said on Monday.

Miles Taylor, the infamous self-proclaimed author of the “I Am The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration” op-ed, wrote on Twitter that Trump called the law a “magic power.”

Taylor, a former DHS official, said that Trump would make the statements “in convos I witnessed & was briefed on.”

Taylor has parlayed his break with the Trump admin into a series of gigs aimed at removing Trump from the Republican Party. His statement comes in advance of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s first public hearings this year.

Under the Insurrection Act, the President can order military forces to deploy on missions within the country aimed at law enforcement tasks that would otherwise be handled by civilian organizations. To invoke the act, the President needs to declare that an “insurrection” or “rebellion” is taking place.

Trump discussed invoking the act to use the U.S. military to suppress the summer 2020 racial justice protests, but was dissuaded from doing so by top advisers.

The law may have figured into some of the planning for those accused of storming the Capitol in a bid to stop the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s win.

[LFC]

Charges are getting more serious against the right-wing domestic terrorists involved in the Jan 6 Republican Insurrection.

A federal grand jury on Monday returned a superseding indictment charging Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio with seditious conspiracy over his alleged involvement in the Capitol insurrection.

Four other Proud Boys, including Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, were also charged.

The indictment represents the second instance of sedition charges being brought by federal prosecutors in the Jan. 6 investigation, after Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes was charged with the same crime in January 2022.

Prosecutors alleged that Tarrio, after his arrest on Jan. 4, did not “immediately comply” with a court order to leave D.C.

Rather, the indictment reads, Tarrio met with Rhodes, the Oath Keepers leader, in the basement of the capital’s Phoenix Park Hotel.

“During this encounter, a participant referenced the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote.

In addition to seditious conspiracy, prosecutors charged the five with assaulting federal officers, destruction of government property, abetting civil disorder, conspiracy to block government officers from discharging official duties, and obstruction of official proceedings.

The superseding indictment brings two new charges against the group: seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to prevent government officers from discharging official duties.

All had previously been indicted, and have pleaded not guilty to the other charges.

The new charges represent some of the most severe tools in the government’s arsenal for trying to hold those who organized the storming of the Capitol accountable.

Critically, seditious conspiracy charges don’t require direct, firsthand participation in the violence. Tarrio was not physically present on Jan. 6.

Rather, prosecutors alleged that, like the Oath Keepers, Tarrio organized the Proud Boys to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2020. It comes with a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment.

LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!

[goldenvalley]

Jun 7, 2022 19:44:16 GMT LFC said:

Trump had a boner over the Insurrection Act which would explain why he incited an insurrection and then refused to do anything to quiet it down. It doesn't get any more fascist than this.

Former President Trump “mused” about using the Insurrection Act during his presidency, a former Trump official said on Monday.

Miles Taylor, the infamous self-proclaimed author of the “I Am The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration” op-ed, wrote on Twitter that Trump called the law a “magic power.”

Taylor, a former DHS official, said that Trump would make the statements “in convos I witnessed & was briefed on.”

Taylor has parlayed his break with the Trump admin into a series of gigs aimed at removing Trump from the Republican Party. His statement comes in advance of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s first public hearings this year.

Under the Insurrection Act, the President can order military forces to deploy on missions within the country aimed at law enforcement tasks that would otherwise be handled by civilian organizations. To invoke the act, the President needs to declare that an “insurrection” or “rebellion” is taking place.

Trump discussed invoking the act to use the U.S. military to suppress the summer 2020 racial justice protests, but was dissuaded from doing so by top advisers.

The law may have figured into some of the planning for those accused of storming the Capitol in a bid to stop the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s win.

The insurrection law should at least be amended to require anyone who wants to declare martial law to properly spell "martial." Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke is not involved in this.

[LFC]

A man walked into the lion's den of MAGAt plaid shirts. The reaction was as expected. The Republican march towards fascism goose steps on.

This is just a wild story. Really a sign of the times in many ways. A seventy-something Democratic protestor showed up at a Republican event in Arizona with far-right Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. He was clearly there looking to make a stir. The man, Peter Jackson, had on a Black Lives Matter shirt, a “Jail Trump” hat and a mask. So clearly he wasn’t going to blend in. He also had his phone out videotaping. So he clearly wanted a record of how the crowd reacted. But he wasn’t violent in any way. The crowd quickly got violent with him, punching him, knocking him down. The Masters supporters claimed that he attacked a woman. The video clearly shows that’s not true. At one point Masters puts his hands around the guy’s neck and starts throttling him. It would probably be a bit much to say he tried to strangle him. But it wouldn’t be wildly off the mark. Anyway, THIS IS ALL ON VIDEO.

Jackson ends up on the ground, beat up, and when cops arrive all the Masters supporters insist he was the one who got violent and he is the one who was cited for battery. The best run-down I’ve seen of the whole thing is this opinion piece by Dan Shearer in the Tucson Sentinel. It sort of goes out of its way to say, well, Jackson basically asked for it. But it does get the key points right. That the crowd got violent, not Jackson. His only moves were clearly in self-defense, trying to defend himself when getting smacked and punched. And what the hell? Masters is pulling a full Gianforte practically strangling the guy. Here’s the video.

[LFC]

Republicans are already planning on "one rule for thee, another for me" if they gain both the House and Senate in 2022. I guess nobody is shocked. Expect an "investigation" of Hunter Biden while we're at it.

With Republicans believing they will reclaim both houses of Congress in the November midterms --with the House the most likely going from a Democratic majority to a GOP majority -- the Washington Examiner is reporting that conservatives hope to make rule changes that will keep President Joe Biden from using a key presidential tool to effect change.

According to the Examiner's Haisten Willis, Republicans are not only being encouraged to limit Biden's ability to implement executive orders, but they are also getting help from the far-right lobbying group Heritage Action with proposed rule changes.

The day after Biden addressed executive orders in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, telling the late-night host, "I have issued executive orders within the power of the presidency to be able to deal with everything having to do with guns, gun ownership… all of the things that are within my power. But what I don’t want to do, and I’m not being facetious, I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the constitution and constitutional authority," the Examiner is reporting Republicans hope to derail any attempts he does make to use them.

The Examiner report states, "Biden has already attempted many unilateral actions through executive orders or executive branch agencies," before adding, "In preparation for this and to fight current executive proposals, conservatives are sharpening their advocacy tools to make sure their voices are heard within the White House. Many of the proposed rule changes require a public comment process, during which they can be slowed down or even defeated by popular backlash."

According to Heritage Action's Executive Director Jessica Anderson, "What I hear so much while I’m on the road is: ‘What can we do to impact the Biden regime?’ There’s a lot of frustration where people feel like they’re calling a member of Congress and nothing happens because Republicans don’t have control.”

According to the Examiner's Willis, demanding a pause for public comments has previously worked well for conservatives, with the report pointing out that "Heritage Action's first big push came last summer when the Department of Education proposed plans to fund grants for programs based on critical race theory. Heritage pushed a toolkit and sent activists to the Federal Register. More than 35,000 public comments were sent in on the proposed rule ahead of the deadline, and the Education Department later walked back its plans."

According to Anderson, "By us engaging more forcefully and strategically in their rulemaking process, we'll be in the position to point out when the Biden administration is trying to circumvent and prevent Americans from weighing in."

[LFC]

Clearly a slanted view but this piece called How Republicans abandoned democracy in 1960 is brimming with facts. They have been the fascist party for over 60 years and their fascist dreams are becoming a reality.

[AnBr]

A 1955 book on right-wing extremists predicted the Jan. 6 attack

The year was 1954, and the Cold War was in full swing. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was seeing Soviet spies in every corner of the government. And a young sociologist at Columbia University, Daniel Bell, convened a seminar to come to grips with the menace of McCarthyism.

Bell enlisted an academic dream team that included historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. A year later, the group of seven intellectuals published their findings as an essay collection, edited by Bell. “The New American Right” argued that McCarthy’s conspiratorial anti-communism was here to stay.

By then, the Senate had censured McCarthy, and McCarthyism had collapsed. The book looked dead on arrival.

But nearly 70 years later, as a congressional committee investigates the far-right attack on the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, the forgotten text has never looked more prescient.

The authors wrote that far-right activists who wrapped themselves in the American flag actually posed a grave threat to the country’s core principles. In the name of protecting U.S. democracy, they warned, the radical right would employ the language and methods of authoritarianism.

If “The New American Right” seemed obsolete when it was first published, that changed quickly. By the early ’60s, it was obvious McCarthy had spawned a movement with real staying power made up of anti-communist organizations.

Take the John Birch Society, which in 1962 counted about 60,000 members and an estimated 9.5 million sympathizers. Its founder, a candy tycoon named Robert Welch, thought “traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country’s sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’”