Monthly Archives: January 2022

Among those still in the if-everyone-would-only-ignore-Trump-hed-simply-go-away camp, Joe Biden finally realized that the concept wasnt working. Not only was it not working, it was a disaster. And not only has it been a disaster, theres no easy way to fix it.

Some are saying Biden gave the best speech of his presidency Thursday on the anniversary of January 6 OK, a low bar but in this case, there was no need for soaring rhetoric, just plainspoken truth. It was time a year after the Capitol riot/attempted coup and the GOPs continued embrace of the Big Lie for Biden to finally and straightforwardly call out Donald Trump and his followers/enablers for holding a dagger to the throat of American democracy.

In his speech, Biden basically read out an indictment of the former president, which was, in effect, an indictment of the Trump-fully-owned Republican Party and the only plank in its platform, which is to promulgate the Big Lie. For Trump, that is basically the entirety of his message. That is, if you dont include his attacks on the media, antifa, Black Lives Matter, Democrats, Liz Cheney, immigrants, refugees from shithole countries, Adam Schiff and any Republican who dared to vote to impeach him or convict him or simply question the holy writ that is the Big Lie.

Biden called Trump a sore loser loser being for Trump the most damning epithet whose bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution. He cant accept he lost.

For Bidens part, he ran on unifying the country and couldnt seem to accept the notion that to still believe in bipartisanship is a suckers game. When nearly three in five Republicans still tell pollsters that they dont think your election was legitimate, its past time to change tactics.

Not a single Republican senator showed up for ceremonies commemorating all that was lost on that January day when the Capitol came under siege. Only one Republican House member the now-exiled-from-her-own-party Liz Cheney, accompanied by her father, Dick showed up. When you see Democrats lining up to praise Dick Cheney, you know the world has gone either upside down or sideways. A few Republican senators did leave January 6 statements, a very few. Where was Mitt Romney, whose life may have been saved as he himself has often expressed by a brave member of the Capitol police? As the New Yorkers Susan Glasser put it of the Republican boycott: Thats why the story of January 6, 2022, is also the story of the elephant not in the room.

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Maybe the most telling moment of the day came when Ted Cruz who has called the storming of the Capitol a terrorist attack had to go on Tucker Carlsons Fox News program to apologize for telling that truth. It was more groveling than apologizing, actually, but we already knew who holds the real power in Republican politics. The party line is to say either that it was just another tourist-filled day at the Capitol or that the FBI had stoked the insurrection or that the rioters were really antifa. Even in the era of the Big Lie, those talking points cant all be true at once, but no matter.

Biden mentioned Trump 19 times in his speech but never by name, which must have infuriated the former guy, even as he plots his return to power from Elba-al-Margo. And while most Americans believe the Big Lie is, in fact, a big lie, you can hardly expect Bidens words to have any impact on the Trump cultists or those GOP politicians lacking the spine to stand up either to Trump or to his base or to Tucker Carlson.

Read more of Mike Littwins columns.

But they could change the tone of the conversation, which desperately needs changing. Trump is Trump, the carnival-barking demagogic huckster he always has been. There really isnt much to learn there.

What there is to learn is how Trump managed to get elected in the first place, how more than 70 million Americans voted to re-elect him in 2020, how he has been able to tighten his hold on the GOP even when out of power. Ive seen many attempts at explaining all this, but Im not sure weve hit on the answer.

But without taking on Trump directly, you cant really take on the base of Trump cultists, the true believers who have been manipulated maybe duped is the better word by Trump, Hannity, Carlson, Bannon and the rest.

Kyle Clark, the 9News anchor, drew some national attention when he said that the media fails when applying a double standard to politicians like Lauren Boebert, who is so often so outrageous that her unstinting support for lies, Big and Little, is often overlooked because of her constant assault on the truth.

The real truth is that though Boebert may be an extreme example, shes hardly alone. While most of the responsible media now openly call out the Big Lie, they dont often press those Republicans who only sporadically parrot the lie or those who simply refuse to answer when asked about it. For me, this was the most important part of Bidens speech. He credited those courageous men and women in the Republican Party standing against Trumps lies.

But then he came after the not-so-courageous majority, including those who have passed voting laws in 17 Republican-led states Not to protect the vote, Biden said, but to deny it; not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it; not to strengthen or protect our democracy, but because the former president lost.

At this moment, Biden added, we must decide: What kind of nation are we going to be?

Thats all thats at stake, I guess. On Friday, Biden came to Colorado to console survivors of the Marshall fire, encouraging them to hang on to one another. On Tuesday, his role changes. He goes to Atlanta to call for passage of two voter-reform bills, which would counteract some of the damage to be done by those red-state, voter-suppression laws. No Senate Republican is expected to support either bill, meaning neither can pass unless all 50 Democratic senators vote to reform the filibuster rules. Biden, a self-described creature of the Senate, has reluctantly joined that cause. But at this point, at least two Democrats have refused to sign on.

Biden doesnt have to call out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema by name. But he does have to call out those Democrats who worry more about protecting a Senate rule than protecting democracy. Its time. Its past time. How else can Biden legitimately raise the question he asked Thursday: What kind of nation are we going to be?

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.

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Littwin: It was late coming, but Biden finally said what had to be said of Trump and his enablers - The Colorado Sun

When the insurrectionists of 6 January rampaged through the Capitol, congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia helped barricade a door, and he fled when the rest of Congress did. A photograph shows him looking panicky, mouth wide open and arm gesticulating wildly, behind what appears to be a security team member with a gun drawn, defending him. But a few months later he declared: Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didnt know the TV footage was a video from 6 January, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

Clydes account of 6 January might be a little more preposterous than those of his fellow Republican legislators. But they all joined him in pretending nothing much had happened and objecting to the investigation of the days events. After all, they were partly responsible, most of them. It was elected Republicans who supported and spread the earlier lies that Donald Trump had won the election, the lies that fed the insurrection; and then they lied some more about their own words and actions before, during and after. In the immediate aftermath, the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was angry and shaken, declaring: The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president. Then he too began the project of walking it all back.

What has ensued is a cover-up in plain sight. When Trump took office in 2016, Republicans faced a crisis: their party had won, but only by ushering to a minority victory one of historys most extravagantly dishonest men. They had to stand with him or against him, and most chose to stand with him. Others chose to fade away by resigning or going home when their terms were up.

Almost none of them stood up against him. The famously vindictive Trump punished any signs of disloyalty, so they were loyal. And to be loyal meant joining him in corruption and lies. If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it, Lindsey Graham tweeted in the spring of 2016, before becoming one of Trumps most grovelling sycophants.

In a way, the sycophants got stronger: if truth restrains us and links us together, they unchained themselves. We make contracts with each other with words; we share information, make agreements and commitments, hold each other accountable and show who we are. Lies are broken contracts, in which words misrepresent what the speaker knows; they aim to delude, exploit and divide. The liar may get stronger, but the social fabric gets weaker. That strength is precarious, so lies have be piled atop lies to keep accountability at a distance.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are notoriously shifty, and the Republican party had no great reputation for honesty previously. Many of their campaigns long before Trump could politely be called misleading. But after 2016, they clustered around the gaslighter-in-chief like bugs around a streetlight. I often think of what Trump did as disinhibition: the pallid, bashful untruths of yore were replaced by baldfaced outrages. They lost any compunction about openly contradicting themselves, and did so often, never more than with the insurrection of 6 January.

As the mob was smashing its way into the building, congressman Jim Jordan had been on the house floor accusing election officials in six states of corruption. A week later he declared: Ive never said that this election was stolen. But, as CNN noted: Jordan claimed in October that Democrats were working to steal the election and spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Pennsylvania two days after the election. In December, he said he didnt know how he could be convinced that Trump didnt actually win the election.

During the hours when the mob rampaged through the US Capitol building, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called up Trump, reportedly furious. The president bears responsibility for the attack, he said shortly thereafter. Then he devoted himself to winning back Trumps favour and playing down what had happened. Pressed on whether he regretted working to overturn President Bidens 2020 victory, Mr McCarthy took the position that he did no such thing, the New York Times reported in April.

Then he worked hard to sabotage the investigation into what had happened, by trying to put two congressmen most loyal to the big lie, Jim Banks and the ever-disruptive champion shouter Jim Jordan, on the committee. The house majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, blocked their appointment. Banks was later caught sending out letters, seeking information from government agencies, claiming he was the ranking Republican on the 6 January committee, of which he was never in fact a member.

By September, McCarthy was full team cover-up: the Guardians Hugo Lowell noted that McCarthy threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests of the congressional committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Thats not technically lying, but its certainly an attempt to prevent the truth from being known. Theres a lot to cover up, especially if you dont want the committee to find out the extent to which Congress itself was involved in the attack on Congress.

The politicians who fled in fear thereafter threw themselves into denying the threat and protecting its chief instigator. No one did so more slavishly than the then vice-president, Mike Pence, who was pressured before and during 6 January to violate the law and exercise a power he did not possess to change the election outcome. If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency, Trump had tweeted early that day; and then, Mike Pence didnt have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution. At Trumps instigation, the mob was chanting: Hang Mike Pence!

Pence trivialised the event when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network: Im not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration. Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonnell, who was seriously injured defending the politicians, told NPR: That one day in January almost cost my life. And we did everything possible to prevent him [Pence] from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now hes telling us that that one day in January doesnt mean anything. Its pathetic. Its a disgrace.

One of the first lies to explode out of the insurrection was that somehow the attack on the Capitol was the work of Antifa. The very idea of Antifa, as they used it, was an older lie, a transformation of scattered individuals and impromptu groups of antifascists into a cohesive sinister gang that could be blamed for pretty much anything, anywhere. The New York Times described how on 6 January the right was claiming that the insurrection had been led by Antifa, not Trump supporters.

By the end of the day, Fox was promoting it, the claim was all over Twitter, and: Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters were members of the violent terrorist group antifa. The claim, the Times added, has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party

That is, they took the position that the riot, which at the time Republican legislators begged the president to stop, was instead a riot by an essentially imaginary leftwing organisation with no conceivable motive to prevent the confirmation of Bidens victory. Now the investigation is closing in on the role that many in Congress played in the attack on Congress. Having fled their own mobs, they are now trying to flee the truth, and relying on the fact that a significant portion of the country prefers the lies.

The Republicans who helped the failed coup along and then dismissed its import are preparing to do it better next time. The Democratic senator Brian Schatz tweeted on Tuesday: They are organizing the next one, not as a secret conspiracy, but as a central organizing principle for the next election. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: Donald Trump has infected, and thats the appropriate word, the Republican party with his big lie and with his desire to stop democracy. We have no choice but to move forward, by which he meant overturn the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. 6 January was one confrontation; theres another one coming. The lies may implode at some point, but the liars have to be defeated.

More here:

Republicans are laying a path back to power and paving it with lies - The Guardian

After thousands of posts appeared for weeks on a website called TheDonald.win detailing plans for the 6 January attack on the Capitol, including how to form a wall of death to force police to abandon defensive positions; after Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned his senior aides of a Reichstag moment like the 1933 burning of the German parliament that Hitler used to seize dictatorial power; after insurrectionists smashed several ground floor windows of the Capitol, the only ones out of 658 they somehow knew were not reinforced, that allowed rioters to pour inside; after marching to the chamber of the House chanting Hang Mike Pence!; after pounding on the locked doors; and as the Capitol police led members in a run through the tunnels under the Capitol for safe passage to the Longworth Building, Congressman Jody Hice, a Republican of Georgia, raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: You screwed it up, yall screwed it all up!

Hice, an evangelical minister, professor of preaching at a Southern Baptist seminary, and radio talkshow host before his election in 2014, has notably declared that freedom of religion should not apply to Muslims and that the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people at an elementary school by a deranged shooter occurred because liberals were kicking God out of the public square.

He was tasked to present a challenge to Georgias electors before the joint congressional session convened on 6 January to certify the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Hice performed his assignment as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself. Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber, with the caption, This is our 1776 moment.

To whom was Hice shouting that yall had screwed it all up? It seems likely it was Meadows. And what had they screwed up? They had screwed up the coup that led to the insurrection.

The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months to claim that the votes in the key swing states were fraudulent, for Mike Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session of the Congress to declare on that basis that the certification of the presidential election on the constitutionally mandated date could not be done, to force that day to pass into a twilight zone of irresolution, for House Republicans to hold the floor brandishing the endless claims of fraud, to move the decision to the safe harbor of the House of Representatives, voting by states, with a majority of 26 controlled by the Republican party, to deny both the popular vote and the electoral college vote to retain Trump in office, for protests to breakout at federal buildings, and for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose law and order.

Presumably, any gesture to forestall the coup by the joint chiefs would be communicated at once to Trump from his agent, Kash Patel, a former aide to far-right representative Devin Nunes), sworn enemy of the Deep State, embedded as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and presidential orders would be issued to countermand. The rally on 6 January will be wild, Trump promised was a last-ditch attempt to intimidate the vice-president with the threat of violence into fulfilling his indispensable role in the coup, to lend support to the Republicans objecting to certification, and to delay the proceedings into a constitutional no mans land.

The insurrection may also have been intended to provide a pretext for precipitating clashes with anti-Trump demonstrators, following the example of the street violence and multiple knife stabbings perpetrated in Washington by the neo-Nazi Proud Boys chanting 1776 on 12 December, and which would then be an excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act. In the criminal contempt citation of Meadows for his refusal to testify before the select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, the committee noted that Meadows sent an email the day before the assault to an unnamed individual that the national guard would be present to protect pro-Trump people and that many more would be available on standby. From whom would pro-Trump people be protected?

In the midst of the attack, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, managed to reach a preoccupied Trump, who was riveted viewing the unfolding chaos on television at the White House, closely monitoring whether the coup would finally succeed, taking phone calls from Jim Jordan and a host of collaborators, and fending off urgent pleas to call it off from his daughter Ivanka. Trumps first reply to McCarthy was to repeat the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol, according to the Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler.

McCarthy argued: Its not Antifa, its Maga. I know. I was there. Well, Kevin, said Trump, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are. Who the fuck do you think you are talking to? McCarthy inquired in an uncharacteristic display of testosterone that soon was replaced with his regular order of servility before Trump and Jordan. The absence of antifa, and McCarthys refusal in the heat of the moment to lend credence to the phantom menace, may have condemned any false-flag thought of invoking the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, the bayonet-ready national guard idly awaited orders for hours to quell the actual insurrection.

The coup was thwarted by the justice departments rejection of Trumps strong-arm tactics, the Pentagons denunciation of any hint of imposing martial law, the rebuff by state election officials to Trumps claims of fraud, and, finally, Pences refusal to utter his scripted lines. At the 6 January rally, Trump said: I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. But Pence had already stated that he would do no such thing. Then, Trump said: And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country any more So, were going to, were going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And were going to the Capitol The insurrection was on.

The coup was hardly Trumps full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. Trump eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.

More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A Political Process Working Group focused on election law and ballot integrity was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust.

Nelson is also a member of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), composed of more than 400 rightwing Republican leaders, a roster that includes Ginni Thomas, the ubiquitous rightwing zealot and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the conservative Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, a $250m dark money operation to pack the federal courts and deny Democratic appointments to the bench, according to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehead.

The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives.

A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. She is also a board member of the Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of conservative organizations, including Alec and the CNP. Most importantly, she has directed the Bradley Foundation to serve as the chief funder of a group of which she is chairman, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), a principal conservative organization seeking to purge voter rolls of minorities and immigrants, file suits that accuse local election officials of fraud, and attempt to overturn election results. At a February 2020 meeting of the CNP devoted to election tactics, the Pilf president, J Christian Adams, advised: Be not afraid of the accusations that youre a voter suppressor, youre a racist and so forth.

Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:

The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President Donald J Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.

Mitchell was by then a Trump campaign legal adviser, with direct access to Trump and working on the Georgia challenge to the results. The Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit a week earlier, on 4 December, claiming there were literally tens of thousands of illegal votes. On 30 December she sent the petition to Meadows with 1,800 pages of exhibits of supposed fraud, which Meadows promptly forwarded to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, who was under tremendous pressure from Trump to intervene on his behalf to throw out the election results.

Pure insanity, the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Rosen. Meadows pressured Rosen again on 1 January. Can you believe this? Rosen wrote Donoghue. I am not going to respond The next day, Trump called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to instruct him to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the vote deficit] we have, because we won the state. Cleta Mitchell was on the call with Trump. Well, Cleta, how do you respond to that? Maybe you tell me? asked Trump. She accused Raffensperger of withholding records that would prove there were more than 20,000 fraudulent votes and rigged voting machines. All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes, said Trump.

On 4 January, Trump brought Pence to the Oval Office to be pressured not to certify the results by a former Chapman University law professor, John Eastman, who was also a director of the Pilf that Mitchell chaired, and had been recruited to play professor to the slow-learning Pence, the Pygmalion of the putsch. Eastman had written a memo, January 6 scenario, laying out precisely how Pence should conduct the stoppage of the electoral college count to create a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors

Eastmans memo filled in stage directions for Pence that followed the well-developed coup plot. All Pence had to do was repeat the lines he was given: the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. His general counsel, Greg Jacob, however, informed him that if he obeyed Trump he would betray his oath to uphold our laws and the constitution of the United States. That was a fools errand.

Trump electors in the swing states had already met on 14 December to prepare to usurp the Biden ones. That day Trump summoned William Barr to the White House to demand his support for claims that the election returns in the swing states were fraudulent. Barr would have undoubtedly been aware of the meeting of the Trump electors rehearsing their part in the coup. Long having done Trumps bidding from consciously lying about the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to aid Trump onward, he now reached a line he would not cross and told Trump that his assertions of fraud were bullshit. And then he resigned. He would have no part of the coup. In came Rosen, who was subjected to rounds of coercion.

When Mitchells role was disclosed, the Washington law firm of Foley & Lardner where she was a partner forced her to resign on 5 January, the day before the insurrection. She had neglected to tell her partners of her work for Trump. The Senate judiciary committee, in its report, released on 7 October 2021, Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DoJ to Overturn the 2020 Election, recommended that Mitchells activities warrant further investigation.

The sweeping nature of the coup, involving Republican operatives, major Republican donors, organizations and members of the Congress is starkly laid out in documents the House investigating committee has obtained under subpoena.

The production of documents from Meadows revealed a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled Options for 6 JAN, prepared by Phil Waldron, a retired army colonel expert in psychological warfare and proliferator of conspiracy theories who worked with Trumps lawyers. Waldron said he spoke with Meadows maybe eight to 10 times and briefed members of Congress. Besides reiterating the basic elements of the coup VP Pence rejects the electors Waldron added that China and Venezuela had INFLUENCE and CONTROL over US Voting infrastructure in at least 28 States. He urged that all electronic ballots be declared invalid and that Trump should Declare National Security Emergency.

Bernard Kerik, working with Trumps attorney Rudy Giuliani to spin fantasies of fraud, turned over to the House committee under subpoena a document, Strategic Communications Plan, to educate the public on the fraud numbers and to disregard the fraudulent vote count and certify the duly-elected President Trump. Replete with fallacious assertions (Fulton County, GA, video of suitcases of fraudulent ballots), it detailed the extensive reach of the big lie campaign, encompassing Identified Legislative Leaders in each swing state, legal teams in the key states, and ranked social media influencers to spread the message: YOU CANNOT LET AMERICA ITSELF BE STOLEN BY CRIMINALS. Kerik, a convicted felon, guilty of numerous crimes from tax fraud to lying under oath, rose from Giulianis driver to New York City police commissioner and incredibly the minister of the interior of Iraq, before serving a four-year sentence in Rikers Island jail. Like convicted felons Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, he was granted a pardon by Trump that allowed him to participate in the coup with impunity.

Though under subpoena, Kerik refused to turn over to the House committee a document entitled DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS. The date on Keriks letter, 17 December 2020, was the day that former general Mike Flynn, Trumps disgraced national security adviser, gave an interview to the far-right Newsmax calling on Trump to seize every single one of the voting machines around the country, and take military capabilities in the key states to basically rerun an election. Flynns notions were echoed in the Waldron PowerPoint and in the Kerik letter.

On 18 December, Flynn met at the White House with Trump at which he proposed invoking the National Emergency Act. (Flynn had circulated a call for Limited Martial Law To Hold New Election weeks earlier, on 1 December.) The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, and the army chief of staff, Gen James McConville, issued a statement on the day Flynn met with Trump disavowing Flynn and any suggestion of martial law. There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election, they stated.

The criminal citation of Meadows for contempt from the House committee to the justice department notes that he was in nonstop communication throughout the day of January 6 with Kash Patel at the Pentagon, and among other things, Mr Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the national guards response to the Capitol riot. The House resolution also references Meadows contacts with Republican state legislators, private individuals who planned and organized a January 6 rally, and members of Congress prepared to object to the election certification a panoply of people involved in the coup. The committee also released texts from Fox News personalities to Meadows on 6 January imploring him to get Trump to stop the insurrection. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy, wrote an anxious Laura Ingraham. The familiar relationship suggested the intertwining of Fox News as the chief outlet for Trump messaging about the big lie up to the insurrection. But the ties went further.

On 4 January 2022, the House committee requested the voluntary testimony of Sean Hannity as a fact witness. The committee wrote him that it had in its possession dozens of texts from Hannity to Meadows indicating that you had advance knowledge regarding President Trumps and his legal teams planning for January 6th, and that you were expressing concerns and providing advice to the president and certain White House staff regarding that planning. On the evening of 5 January, Hannity texted Meadows: Pence pressure. WH counsel will leave. He also appeared to have had a conversation directly with president on the evening of January 5th (and perhaps at other times) regarding his planning for January 6th. What did Sean Hannity know and when did he know it?

When the riot was finally subdued and the Congress reconvened to certify the election, the House Republicans still rose to object. Hice, with QAnon proponent representative Marjorie Taylor Greene standing at his side, declared: Myself, members of the Georgia delegation and some 74 of my Republican colleagues object to the electoral votes from the state of Georgia on the grounds the election conducted on November 3 was faulty and fraudulent due to unilateral actions by the secretary of state to unlawfully change the states election process.

Of the thousands involved in the Capitol riot, 725 so far have been charged with various crimes. But those sentenced, mostly true believer foot soldiers of the Trump mob, were not the originators of the coup, the most dangerous sedition against the constitutional order since secession. Nor were the leaders of the militias, of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, present at the creation.

The 6 January attack was a spawn of the coup; it was its effect, not its alpha and omega. Only those incited to sacrifice themselves in the Picketts Charge of the insurrection have paid the price, but none of those who conceived the coup a year earlier have been brought before a federal grand jury, charged, or apparently are even being investigated by the Department of Justice.

It would be as if only the Watergate burglars were prosecuted and that was the end of the affair. All of the higher-ups involved in the scandal chief of staff Bob Haldeman, his deputy John Ehrlichman, attorney general John Mitchell, the entire cast of complicit characters and President Richard Nixon would have remained untouched in power.

There will be more to know about the coup from the House investigation. The committee has gathered more than 30,000 documents and interviewed more than 300 witnesses. Two, three, many John Deans may testify before the cameras. Criminal referrals will probably be made.

The coup of 2020 gestated within the central organizations of the Republican right, and it was a learning experiment for the Republican party as a whole. Hice has announced he will run in the Republican primary against Raffensperger for Georgia secretary of state. He is only one of the Republicans focused on taking over the states electoral apparatus to ensure that the next time there will be no obstacles. By December, Republicans had proposed 262 bills to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with the non-partisan administration of elections, with 32 becoming law in 17 states, according to the non-profit Protect Democracy group.

The threat of intimidation, coercion and intimidation hangs over American politics. The coup may have failed, but it rolls on.

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The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg - The Guardian