Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Treason Texts

Sean Hannity knew. Laura Ingraham knew. Brian Kilmeade knew. Donald Trump Jr knew. #TreasonTexts

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[Rick Plant]

Trump’s rage is ‘peaking tonight’: MSNBC host recounts former president’s dismal week



Former president Donald Trump is undoubtedly livid about major developments of the last few days, according to MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell.

"Several deeply reported books have documented Donald Trump's rage," O'Donnell said at the outset of his show, The Last Word, on Tuesday night, adding that America has "never had a rage-aholic like Donald Trump" as president before.

"We can only imagine how high his rage is peaking tonight now that a federal judge who he appointed has dismissed Donald Trump's frivolous lawsuit to block the Treasury from handing over Donald Trump's tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee," O'Donnell said.
O'Donnell said Trump's anger over U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden's ruling is "accompanied tonight by his rage" that his longtime accountant, Donald Bender, testified recently before a New York grand jury investigating the former president's financial practices.

"And all of that rage comes on top of the more than 24 hours of rage Donald Trump has been experiencing about his last chief of staff Mark Meadows' texts, revealing that Fox hosts and congressional Republicans were all trying to tell him what to do when the Capitol was being attacked on Jan. 6."

"How livid is Donald Trump tonight about the public revelation that the cowardly Donald Trump Jr. on Jan. 6 finally said what Donald Trump Jr. may have been trying to say for his whole life, but because he is Donald Trump Jr., he was not allowed to say it to his father," O'Donnell said. "He was allowed to say it to a guy working for his father, Mark Meadows."

Trump Jr.'s message to Meadows during the insurrection read, "He has to lead now."

"That is the cry from the deepest part of Donald Trump Jr.'s shallow heart, the hopeless cry from a cowardly son to a cowardly father who has never known how to lead," O'Donnell said. "Donald Trump has never known how to lead anyone, not his children, not his company, which is now under criminal investigation ... and certainly not his country."

Watch it below:

Longtime Trump accountant testifies before grand jury in NY criminal investigation



A longtime outside accountant for the Trump Organization testified recently before a New York grand jury investigating former President Donald Trump's financial practices, and Trump's former Deutsche Bank banker, Rosemary Vrablic, has been interviewed by prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s office, The Washington Post and The New York Times report, citing people familiar with Vance's Trump investigation.

Donald Bender, a Mazars USA accountant who has handled Trump's finances for decades, was automatically granted immunity from prosecution by appearing before Vance's grand jury, the Post reports. "The appearances by Bender and Vrablic suggest prosecutors are seeking information about Trump's finances from a small circle of outside partners who handled details of Trump's taxes and real estate deals. Bender and Vrablic were never Trump's employees, but they knew more about his company's inner workings than many employees did."

Vance and New York Attorney General Leticia James (D) are running parallel investigations of Trump's finances. The James inquiry is civil, meaning it could end in a lawsuit, and has already included depositions of former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, Eric Trump, and other Trump Organization employees. James also intends to depose Trump himself in January. Vance's investigation, aided by James, is criminal, and has already charged Weisselberg with felony tax fraud. Vance is leaving office in January, to be replaced by Alvin Bragg (D).

Both investigations are looking into whether Trump or his organization committed fraud by intentionally overvaluing assets and excluding liabilities to get bank loans and publicly inflate Trump's wealth while claiming a fraction of that value to tax authorities. "If Vance or Bragg ever seeks to file charges against Trump himself, the burden of proof will be high," the Post notes. "They would need to do more than simply prove the Trump Organization's numbers were wrong."

Trump's legal team will likely point to disclaimers on the "statements of personal financial condition" Bender has prepared for Trump noting that Mazars has "not audited or reviewed" the information provided by Trump and is "aware of departures from accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America," the Times notes. Armed with those caveats, "Trump's lawyers would most likely argue that no one, let alone sophisticated lenders, should have taken his valuations at face value."

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-longtime-accountant-banker-reportedly-081041444.html


Trump-appointed judge shoots down former president's bid to keep tax returns from Congress

A federal judge has dismissed former president Donald Trump's lawsuit seeking to block Congress from obtaining his tax returns.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was nominated by Trump, on Tuesday ruled in favor of the House Committee on Ways and Means, which is seeking Trump's tax returns from the IRS.

"Former President Donald J. Trump sues to keep the Treasury from giving his tax returns to the House Committee on Ways and Means, which can publish them," McFadden wrote in his memorandum opinion. "He marshals an array of evidence suggesting the Committee’s purported interest in the Presidential Audit Program, an IRS policy that requires audits of the sitting President, is a subterfuge for improper motives— like exposing his returns. He also raises legal arguments against the statute on which the Committee relies."

"But even if the former President is right on the facts, he is wrong on the law," McFadden wrote. "A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries. Even the special solicitude accorded former Presidents does not alter the outcome. The Court will therefore dismiss this case."

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-taxes/

[Rick Plant]

Where was Ivanka? Calls grow for Trump daughter's texts after Lindsey Graham reveals Jan. 6 contacts



Ivanka Trump has been implicated in the Jan. 6 investigation by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and now calls are being made to see her text messages from that day.

The senator told CNN's Manu Raju that he asked former president Donald Trump's eldest daughter, then a senior White House adviser, to deliver a message to her father as his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol as Congress was set to certify Joe Biden's election win, reported The Independent.

"Sen. Lindsey Graham said he didn’t text with [Mark] Meadows on Jan. 6," Raju tweeted, "but told me he spoke with Ivanka Trump to deliver a message to her dad. He said he wanted then-President Trump to 'tell his people to leave.'"

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) read a text from Donald Trump Jr. to Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, begging him to ask his father to call off the mob, but it's not clear what actions -- if any -- his sister took as Graham reportedly begged her to intercede.

“You need to get these people out of here,” Graham told her, according to the Washington Post. “This thing is going south. This is not good. You’re going to have to tell these people to stand down. Stand down.”

The newspaper has reported that Ivanka Trump went between her office in the West Wing, where she saw TV footage of the riot, and the president's dining room, where her father was watching news coverage and tweeted a message of support for law enforcement.

“Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement," Trump tweeted at 2:38 p.m. "They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

Ivanka Trump reportedly tried to get him to use more forceful language to calm his supporters, and thought she had convinced him at one point, but Meadows later called to say that wasn't the case.

“I need you to come back down here," Meadows told her. "We’ve got to get this under control."

Ivanka Trump retweeted another one of her father's statements, which aides reportedly didn't think was sufficient under the circumstances, although she quickly deleted that after she was criticized for referring to the rioters as patriots.

“American Patriots - any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable," Ivanka Trump tweeted at 3:15 p.m. "The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.”

Other Twitter users are asking what Ivanka Trump and her husband, then-White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, were communicating with Meadows as the riot unfolded.

"I want to see what Jared and Ivanka were texting to Meadows," tweeted Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project.


The Paperwork Coup
A much more dangerous insurrection was underway in the inboxes of Trump's inner circle in the weeks before January 6.

This is a tale of two coups—or rather, two attempted coups.

One is the well-known January 6 insurrection, memorialized in iconic photographs, gripping videos, and minute-by-minute reconstructions, and followed by hundreds of arrests, more than 50 convictions, and a House select-committee investigation. The other attempt took place over weeks and was mostly waged in closed-door meetings, legal memos, and private phone calls; it has thus far produced little accountability.

In the days ahead of January 6, experts worried over what chicanery might happen inside the House chamber during certification, but that threat was quickly overshadowed by the violence outside. There are many reasons for this eclipse. One is the simple, disturbing drama of the insurrection, revived on Monday when Representative Liz Cheney read panicked texts from members of Congress, then under siege in the Capitol, and Fox News hosts, beseeching Mark Meadows to get then-President Donald Trump to stop the riot. Anyone can grasp what was going on immediately, regardless of how they feel about it, whereas a coup planned in dry legal language is more opaque and abstract. The violence was thus a natural messaging focus for Democrats who wanted to punish and, if possible, banish Trump. Meanwhile, information on Trump’s procedural efforts to steal the election has emerged only slowly and in small bits.

But this is a moment for reassessment. Evidence about the insurrection suggests that although the mob was an obvious threat to human life, it was never an especially serious one to American democracy. Coordination within the crowd seems to have been sporadic, and if White House officials were in touch with organizers, they weren’t likely directing them. Moreover, it’s not clear how the insurrection might have successfully kept Trump in office, even if it had managed to prevent certification that day. This was an inchoate moan, a spasm of despair for a cause already lost.

Meanwhile, we now have a better sense of how dangerous what we might call the “paperwork coup” was. The theory under which Trump and his cronies attempted to steal the election was not especially elaborate or persuasive, but it didn’t need to be. It was coherent, and if a few things had happened differently—most especially, if Vice President Mike Pence had gone along with it—the result would have been chaos at the least and possibly a second Trump term and widespread conflict at worst. The violence on January 6 broke a long string of peaceful transfers of power in the United States. If the paperwork coup had worked, though, peace might have prevailed—but the transfer of power might not have happened.

What Trump was trying to do is not in question. He has always understood, and demonstrated repeatedly throughout his presidency, that voters treat as scandalous what is hidden but are more apt to accept what is done openly. So this coup attempt was no secret. Trump made clear starting the night of the election that he intended to try to cling to the White House by hook or by crook. Because neither he nor anyone else has ever produced credible evidence that fraud shifted the results of the election, this would have been plain theft. The surprising thing, which more recent revelations help underscore, is that what looked from the outside like one of Trump’s classic chaotic improvisations was in fact a concerted effort, coordinated among multiple Trump loyalists over a matter of weeks.

Some of Trump’s veteran lieutenants, accustomed to accommodating his eccentricities and outrages, drew a line here. In the early days after the election, aides anonymously assured reporters that Trump’s refusal to concede was just a short-term denial. As it became clear that wasn’t true, and as Trump mounted more desperate efforts to halt the certification process, Attorney General Bill Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, and the lawyers Jay Sekulow and Eric Herschmann were among the aides who had stuck with Trump through all sorts of dubious maneuvers but who now refused to get involved, recognizing that he had lost the election.

Rather than face reality, Trump tried to create his own—and the first step was to find lackeys who would make-believe with him. This proved easy. They included Rudy Giuliani, who had by then proved no ask was too far; the attorneys Jenna Ellis, who seems to have gone along despite having some hesitations, and Sidney Powell, who had none; the law professor John Eastman, who lent (and sacrificed) his long-standing credibility in conservative legal circles; Philip Waldron, a retired Army colonel turned cybersecurity consultant; and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

By the start of 2021, Trump was close to running out of options. No one had been able to turn up evidence of major fraud. Giuliani, Ellis, and Powell were being laughed out of courts around the country. State after state, including those run by Republicans, had certified the election results, closing off one of his great hopes for preventing Joe Biden’s swearing-in from going forward.

That left Trump with one last gambit: keeping Congress from certifying the election on January 6. Most legal scholars agreed that the day’s proceedings were meant to be a formality, but Trump’s kitchen Cabinet had decided they were a place to make a stand. One prong was a bid to get the Justice Department to simply say the election was corrupt “+ leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen” (as a DOJ official recorded Trump saying). It’s still not entirely clear what Trump hoped to do once he’d received that declaration, but in any case it came up short. Rosen refused, and Trump’s attempt to replace him with a loyalist atop the department crashed at a January 3 meeting, where Cipollone and top Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse.

The second prong was to persuade Pence to block or delay certification on January 6. Eastman wanted Pence to declare that there were no valid slates of electors from seven states that Trump allies claimed had major fraud. Ellis wrote in a memo that Pence should refuse to open votes from six states with putative controversies, though Sekulow rejected the theory. (She claims she was simply laying out legal theories, not endorsing them.) Waldron wanted Pence to accept alternative slates of electors from contested states, or else ignore the contested states altogether.

It isn’t hard to spin scenarios about how this might have turned out, because the proponents did so right there in writing. Eastman imagined that Democrats would object, so Pence would say the matter had to go to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation would receive a vote. Because Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations, they would elect Trump. Ellis foresaw a different possibility: Pence would demand that states make a response, effectively kicking the question back to state legislatures. Waldron, who was more of an outsider but did manage to meet with Meadows and members of Congress in the days before January 6, had the most chilling suggestion: that Trump declare a national-security emergency, effectively bypassing democracy in the name of a manufactured crisis.

These scenarios are frightening because they’re so plausible. Perhaps some members of the House would have objected and refused to back Trump in a vote, but the pattern of the Trump presidency was that many members swallowed private objections and got in line publicly. The Ellis plan is perhaps even worse, because state legislatures are more likely to be full of fringe elements. Many state officials refused to endorse Trump’s attempts to cheat before January 6, but they could point to precedent. If Pence had tossed the matter back to them later, there would have been no precedent to use as a shield—and Trump’s supporters would have been baying at the doors.

Any of these matters would have immediately ended up in federal court, and courts did not look kindly on the suits that Trump allies brought alleging fraud. But the genius of the proceduralist track was that it didn’t depend on the allegations being true—it was constructed on the hysteria the allegations had created. The current Supreme Court seems loath to interfere with procedure, as its handling of a Texas abortion law this term has shown. Perhaps the Supreme Court would have shut the effort down promptly, but we can only speculate.

The mystery is why Pence didn’t go along with it, a question only he can answer fully. Pence had stuck with Trump over four and a half tumultuous years, only briefly flinching in October 2016, when a tape of Trump boasting about sexual assault emerged. His political future was, by now, inextricably bound up with Trump’s: Standing by Trump might not guarantee him the presidency, but breaking with him would almost certainly doom his political future. Pence seems to have been searching for a way to do what Trump asked. In late December, according to the journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Pence spoke with fellow Hoosier and former Vice President Dan Quayle, and pressed Quayle for whether there was some way to pause certification. Quayle bluntly shut him down.

For the first few days of the year, Trump did not speak with Pence, according to The New York Times. Then on January 4, Trump met with Pence several times in the Oval Office, where he pressured Pence hard to go along with the plan. But by then, Pence was apparently resolved, and met the arguments of Trump’s legal advisers with those of his own. Finally, on the morning of January 6, Trump called Pence and told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Trump was right about the choices, but not about which was which. Pence chose patriotism.

As the contours and scope of the paperwork coup become clear, we can better understand Trump’s enormous rage at Pence on January 6. As a mob stormed the Capitol, assaulted police, and chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump watched impassively from the White House, making barely any effort to quench the violence. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” he tweeted as the assault continued.

More recently, in an interview with ABC’s Jon Karl, Trump called the January 6 mob’s fury at Pence “common sense.” What else could he say? He remains furious. On Saturday, during an appearance in Florida, Trump brought up the idea of bouncing the election to states again. “Mike should have sent those crooked votes back to the legislatures and you would have had a different result in the election, in my opinion,” he said. Whereas the insurrection was doomed from the start, Trump knew how tantalizingly close he’d been to clinging to power.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/trumps-coup-before-january-6/620998/

[Rick Plant]

BUSTED: Newly-released text reveals GOPer conspiring to overturn election ‘within hours of the polls closing’



A Republican lawmaker sent a text message to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows within hours after polls closed to hatch a plot to overturn a Donald Trump loss.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) read a message from the GOP lawmaker, whose name was not publicly revealed, when the U.S. House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of court, and revealed that members of Congress were conspiring with the White House to prevent Trump from losing before the results were known.

"HERE's an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY: Why can't [sic] the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS," the message read.

Election officials were still counting legal votes at the time that message was sent, and Joe Biden's election win was officially projected on Nov. 7 and confirmed by the Electoral College on Dec. 14.

Jake Tapper: "An anonymous GOP lawmaker texts then WH chief of staff Meadows within hours of the polls closing, proposing a way to disenfranchise millions of voters because election officials were still counting legal votes and Trump’s victory was not assured.



Jim Jordan confirms he sent one of the damning Mark Meadows texts



Several Republican lawmakers sent text messages to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows ahead of the January 6th riots at the United States Capitol in which they advocated having Vice President Mike Pence throw out certified electoral college votes.

Although the House Select Committee investigating the riots has not made the names of the lawmakers public, Politico has confirmed that one person who sent such a text was Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Jordan's office admitted that he was the one who sent a text that pushed for Pence to toss out votes from key states, although they say that he didn't write the argument himself but rather forwarded it from a third party.

The text message reads as follows:

“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).”

According to Politico, the analysis was originally written by former Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz.


AP finds fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud in six 2020 battleground states

An Associated Press into the 2020 election found fewer than 475 cases of voter fraud in six battleground states, refuting former President Trump's claims of a massive, coordinated effort to steal the election from him.

Reporters conducted a months-long examination of the election, which the AP called one of the most comprehensive to date, at more than 300 local election offices where ballots were submitted in swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. President Biden won those states by a combined 311,257 votes.

The AP concluded there was no collusion to steal the election and found fewer than 473 cases of individual voter fraud, with 80 percent of the counties in the battleground states reporting no suspicious activity.

"The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not," reporters wrote.

The instances of individual voter fraud include a Wisconsin man who thought he could vote on parole and a Pennsylvania man who voted twice, for himself and his son. In most cases, fraud was intercepted by election officials, which the AP said further confirmed the security and integrity of the election.

Trump told The Associated Press he would soon release more information about the alleged massive voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,” he told the publication.

Biden beat out Trump with a historic amount of votes, winning more than 81 million. Biden also won each of the crucial swing states by thousands of votes each, winning a total of 79 electoral college votes.

But Trump continues to claim the election was stolen, citing massive voter fraud and contesting the use of mail-in voting, which was used on a larger scale than usual due to the coronavirus pandemic. His rhetoric fueled the Jan. 6 riot, during which Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the Senate and then-Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the election results.

Trump's lawsuits in battleground states have largely been thrown out of court, and election audits have also unearthed little evidence of voter fraud, including a highly publicized one in Arizona.

But the AP investigation into the battleground states is the most thorough debunking of Trump's repeated claims of massive voter fraud. Reporters found no mass wave of mail-in ballots from unregistered voters or more votes than registered voters.

A spokesman for the Biden administration, Andrew Bates, told the AP the investigation further cements Biden's victory.

“Each time this dangerous but weak and fear-ridden conspiracy theory has been put forward, it has only cemented the truth more by being completely debunked," he told reporters.

The review found individualized cases of voter fraud in each state: 198 in Arizona, 64 in Georgia, 26 in Pennsylvania, 31 in Wisconsin, 56 in Michigan and around 98 in Nevada.

https://thehill.com/homenews/presidential-campaign/585901-ap-finds-fewer-than-475-cases-of-potential-voter-fraud-in-six

[Rick Plant]

Multiple House Freedom Caucus members coordinated with Mark Meadows schemes to keep Trump in power: NYT



A new report in the New York Times reveals how several members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus went out of their way to take drastic measures to keep former President Donald Trump in power.

According to the Times, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows worked closely with Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) to push the United States Department of Justice to intervene in the certification of the 2020 presidential election to stop President Joe Biden from taking power.

Perry late last year called former Trump DOJ official Richard P. Donoghue and told him he "had compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations that the department needed to vet" and urged him to authorize Trump DOJ loyalist Jeffrey Clark to “do something” about them.

"Justice Department officials viewed it as outrageous political pressure from a White House that had become consumed by conspiracy theories," reports the Times.

Other Republicans who worked with Perry and Meadows to keep Trump in power included Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX), reports the Times.

Read the full report here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/us/politics/trump-meadows-republicans-congress-jan-6.html


Trump's DC hotel lease had 'zero checks and balances' as federal agency 'washed hands': House panel

Former president Donald Trump's D.C. hotel operated with an alarming lack of oversight from the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency that manages his company's lease of the Old Post Office Building, according to a new congressional report.

The GSA "failed to examine ethical conflicts and constitutional issues posed by then-President Donald Trump’s refusal to divest from the property," according to NBC News, which obtained a copy of the report from House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

The GSA also failed to "track foreign government payments to the hotel or identify the origins of more than $75 million in loans made by Trump and his family to shore up its troubled finances."

The report is based on 14,000 pages of newly obtained GSA records that were first requested by the committee two years ago, but which the Trump administration declined to turn over.

"The GSA 'washed its hands of any responsibility' to review whether the emoluments clauses of the Constitution were being followed, the report said, including by trying to ensure that profits from foreign governments didn’t benefit Trump," NBC News reports. "The agency did not take any steps to identify expenditures by foreign or domestic government officials and implemented 'zero checks and balances' to make sure the hotel's calculations of such payments were 'fair, complete and accurate,' the committee found."

Back in October, another House committee found that the former president had “grossly exaggerated the financial health" of the hotel. Trump claimed the hotel had generated $150 million in income during his presidency, when in fact it lost more than $70 million.

According to the new report, Trump and three of his adult children — Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump — loaned the hotel more than $75 million to keep it afloat. The Trumps ultimately forgave $72 million of those loans, with the hotel repaying less than $3.5 million. However, the report found that the GSA "never made any effort to identify the origin of these loans and whether the ultimate source of the financing posed any constitutional concerns."

Although Trump transferred ownership of the hotel to a trust controlled by Donald Trump Jr. and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg after the 2016 election, the former president never divested his financial interest — which, according to the report, was “problematic” and “created multiple conflicts of interested during his presidency that both he and GSA refused to properly address.”

"For example, the report noted that political appointees at GSA were responsible for making federal real estate decisions 'that impacted the president’s personal properties as well as that of his competitors,'" NBC News reports.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who chairs the committee, told the network that the report “brings to light GSA’s flagrant mismanagement of the Old Post Office lease and its attempt to duck its responsibility to support and defend the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clauses.”

Last month, the former president reached an agreement to sell the Trump International Hotel in D.C. for for $375 million.

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-2656046762/

[Rick Plant]

All of these anti American traitors need to be locked away in prison for treason. These losers knew Trump was going to lose the election because every single poll showed us he would. So, after the polls were confirmed to be accurate when Trump lost, they concocted their treasonous plan to steal the election and to keep this lunatic in power. It was plainly obvious what they were doing because Trump refused to concede and all of them were saying "Trump was going to have a second term" even though he lost. Those words prove they hatched this coup plot in November.

Man behind the infamous PowerPoint has a long history of election subversion attempts -- in multiple states



WASHINGTON — The suddenly famous election denier behind the circulation of a PowerPoint filled with plans to overturn the 2020 election has a long history of election subversion attempts in multiple states.
Retired Army Col. Phil Waldron also has close ties to former President Donald Trump’s legal team and served as one of its key witnesses in efforts to reverse the presidential election results.

This week, Waldron became known as the person responsible for circulating the document titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” to Trump’s allies and Republican lawmakers on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Waldron also said he met with Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in the White House “maybe eight to 10 times” after the election, the Washington Post reported. Meadows is a former North Carolina congressman who on Tuesday was found in contempt by the U.S. House for not answering questions about its Jan. 6 inquiry.

But before any of that work, Waldron was working to subvert the election by sowing doubt about electronic voting, pushing for election “audits” in the states, including Arizona, and testifying as a witness for Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in hearings in Georgia and Michigan.

Giuliani repeatedly cited Waldron as the source of information in the former New York mayor’s legal filings seeking to overturn the 2020 election. Waldron’s testimony was filled with misinformation about election administration and false claims about fraud.

Before the election, Waldron started working with Texas-based Allied Security Operations Group, a company led by cybersecurity analyst Russell James Ramsland Jr., Waldron told the Washington Post. Ramsland, a Republican businessman and failed congressional candidate, is credited as one of the leading election deniers to spread false information about the election, the Post said.

Despite the lack of evidence behind Allied Security Operations Group’s allegations of inaccuracies in electronic voting audit logs, Republican officials called on it to advise them post-election. In February, Republican Arizona Senate President Karen Fann tapped Waldron and Allied Security Operations Group to conduct an audit of the election in Maricopa County under another company. Arizona Senate Republicans later hired Cyber Ninjas to lead the audit.

Last December, Waldron testified before a Michigan House subcommittee at Giuliani’s request, the Detroit News reported. Waldron told lawmakers he was part of the “forensics team” responsible for a debunked report signed by Ramsland falsely claiming that election results in Antrim County, Michigan, were tabulated with a 68 percent error rate.

Citing the same report, Waldron also falsely told lawmakers there were 10 Michigan precincts with 100 percent turnout and six precincts that recorded over 120 percent voter turnout.

In response to his testimony, Michigan’s former elections director, Chris Thomas, tweeted, “Colonel Waldron is not up to speed on election results reporting.”

After his testimony in Michigan, Waldron continued to spread false claims on Fox News, alleging there were 17,000 dead people who cast ballots in the state.

“Each one of those is a woeful attempt to strip rightful voters in America of their civil rights,” he said. “It’s a multifaceted attack.”

In Arizona in November 2020, Waldron, serving as a witness for Giuliani, said voting machines are “vulnerable everywhere,” falsely claimed that Arizona voting machines are connected to the internet, and stated incorrectly that signatures on mail-in ballots are not verified.

Waldron also appears in a film about purported election fraud by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, and claims with no evidence that the Chinese government has access to Dominion Voting Systems’ files and that servers in Europe played a role in manipulating election results, the New York Times reported.

Despite Waldron’s history of spreading false information and his connection to the Jan. 6 PowerPoint, states continue to give him a platform. A voting panel in Louisiana tasked with replacing the state’s voting machines invited him to speak on Tuesday.

“We’re very pleased to have him here and excited to hear what he has to say,” said Louisiana GOP Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, according to the Washington Post. Ardoin added that the audience included many members of Waldron’s “fan club.”

https://www.virginiamercury.com/2021/12/16/how-an-election-deniers-fan-club-got-its-start-in-the-states/

Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence.

[Rick Plant]

Fox "News" passes Trump's loyalty test: It's about more than lying — it's about teaching how to lie



After a full day of silence, the hosts of Fox News finally quit ignoring their bombshell text message scandal and came out swinging. It's unclear, however, why they needed an entire day to draft their responses as what they finally offered was both lazy and incoherent.

The text messages sent to Donald Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 6 indisputably prove that Fox News hosts deliberately lie to their audiences.

Privately, the network's biggest stars were freaked out by the Capitol insurrection. They clearly, and correctly, saw it as something Donald Trump purposefully instigated. Publicly, however, they were willing to deflect blame from Trump, defend the rioters and minimize the violence. But rather than apologize to their viewers for spending 11 months lying to them, the hydra-headed Fox News monster just threw out a bunch of contradictory and not even remotely persuasive excuses.

Laura Ingraham whined about "left wing media hacks" who are in "spin and defame mode." Tucker Carlson flatly claimed that the texts were "exculpatory" and "a tribute to the people who wrote them." Sean Hannity sneered that the release of his text messages was "a weak attempt to smear yours truly and presumably I guess President Trump." In reality, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — who is a hardcore conservative, but is just an outlier in finding fascist insurrections distasteful — simply read the texts verbatim, no garnish needed to expose these two as sleazy liars.

They pretended their "privacy" was being invaded, even though the texts were turned over under legal subpoena. And they continued to pretend that the insurrection didn't actually happen while also insisting that their texts show they took it seriously while it was happening. Hannity even tried to revive the talking point that the insurrection was actually the fault of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, instead of the guy that gathered his supporters together with promises that it would be "wild," and then unleashed them on the Capitol for six hours.

Don't try to make sense of all these Fox News excuses. They aren't meant to be rational, logical, or persuasive. On the contrary, the swirl of rationalizations is intended to discombobulate.

While good faith actors are busy picking apart Excuse A, Fox News hosts are busy churning out Excuses B, C, D, and E. There's no keeping up with the firehose of bulls**t. This is gaslighting and not just garden variety lying. There's no intent here to fool anyone — not the media, not liberals, and certainly not Fox News viewers. Instead, the intent is to flood the zone with so much nonsense that the opposition becomes exhausted and gives up fighting for truth. Most importantly, Fox is training their audiences to embrace the same approach to politics.

What the average Fox viewer gets from this grotesque display is not a convincing argument that the hosts are blameless victims of a left-wing smear campaign. What he is being persuaded of is the importance of releasing any lingering attachment to truth or decency. Facts and rationality are direct threats to the authoritarian ideology and must be crushed under the heel. What Fox viewers are learning is shamelessness. Fox News hosts are demonstrating a willingness to say or do whatever it takes to advance the cause of what is, ultimately, fascism.

As Andrew O'Hehir argued at Salon Wednesday morning, for Trump, "reality is always contingent, always manufactured." Selling this fake reality does not depend on a convincing or even logical story. Instead, the key is belligerence: "Never break character or let down your guard; never admit doubt or regret or uncertainty." Just keep repeating the lies, loudly and ad nauseum, and exhaust your opponents into giving up.

The tornado of bulls**t emanating from Fox News in response to the text scandal is proof that the students of Trump have become the masters.

Gone are the fearful mice that were worried that inciting an insurrection might make the GOP look bad, or scare their followers away from taking the fascist movement to the next level. Instead, they are more committed than ever to the belief that truth doesn't matter. All that matters is power. Indeed, the more ridiculous and unjustified the claims, the more power they demonstrate by standing by them anyway. This is something Trump has always understood, which is why his first act in office was to insist that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's, and refuse to relent in the face of what should have been indisputable photographic evidence that showed otherwise.

The bellicosity worked. A study swiftly demonstrated that, when shown pictures of both the Trump and Obama inauguration crowds, a significant percentage of Republican voters rejected the evidence of their own eyes to insist the Trump crowd was bigger. They aren't crazy or deluded. They just understand what is expected of them: Facts don't matter. All that matters is toeing the party line.

Back in 2017, more than 40% of Republican voters were shameless enough to parrot the "Trump's crowd was bigger" line, even when they were being embarrassed by pictures that showed otherwise. The situation has only gotten worse since then. Now 7 out of 10 GOP voters will tell a pollster they believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, even though their actual behavior indicates they do not believe this at all. The average Republican voter is now committed to doing and saying whatever it takes to end democracy and has no compunction about telling obvious lies to achieve that goal.

The situation has gotten worse since 2017, in no small part because Fox hosts spent the past five years or so instructing their audiences in the art of gaslighting. As Trump demonstrated, the trick is to make claims that both the liar and their targets know are untrue, but to make them "true" through the simple but effective method of relentlessness.

In a sense, it's not even really lying. Lying is an attempt to deceive. Gaslighting, however, does not try to convince anyone of anything, except their own powerlessness. Trump's incessant insistence that the election was "stolen" convinces no one. But, by grinding at it day and night, Trump has indoctrinated his followers into parroting the lie, not because they believe it, but as a means to demonstrate loyalty.

So Fox News hosts lie to their audience. They know it, their opponents know it, and most crucially, their audiences know it. The excuses being fanned out to justify it aren't persuasive in the slightest, nor are they meant to be. The only purpose is to fill Fox viewers with hot air that they can, in turn, spew back out when defending their support for Trump. Lies do not offend GOP voters, because they understand that lies are a tactic in gaining power. And power is, ultimately, all that matters to them.

https://www.rawstory.com/fox-news-trump-lies/