Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Legal expert: DOJ believes there 'could be some level of criminality' in how Trump handled classified documents

On Thursday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," former federal prosecutor Elie Honig walked through the significance of the DOJ convening a grand jury to examine former President Donald Trump's handling of classified information.

The development, he argued, is a sign that they are taking seriously the possibility the former president may have broken the law.

"When you take the issue of being subpoenaed on, Trump taking documents to Mar-a-Lago, what does it say to you?" asked anchor Erin Burnett.

"This tells me the Justice Department believes there could be — and I want to stress that, could be — some level of criminality here," said Honig. "As a federal prosecutor, if you're going to issue a grand jury subpoena, you can't do that based on nothing, you have to have what prosecutors call predication, which basically just means, some fact or belief that there has been a crime. It's a low bar, but it's not nothing."

"I think what prosecutors are going to be focused on here is that it is a federal crime to remove or destroy classified documents," said Honig. "We know the documents down at Mar-a-Lago were classified, but you have to show, A, a person knew they were classified, and you also have to show a person knew that was wrong. So that's where I think DOJ is really going to be focusing here on the criminal side of things."

The National Archives first confirmed Trump removed boxes of classified information to Mar-a-Lago in February. While the president is the top classification authority in the country, many of these removals may have occurred after Trump left office.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Kevin McCarthy is facing up to 3 years in prison if he refuses to testify about Trump: ex-prosecutor



House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy of California could be facing legal exposure if he ignores a subpoena from the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol and it is established that he had knowledge Donald Trump committed a crime, a former federal prosecutor explained on MSNBC on Thursday.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner after the select committee subpoenaed McCarthy along with Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Mo Brooks (R-AL).

Kirschner noted, "subpoenas are supposed to be taken seriously, they're not party invitations."

"But I think the other thing at risk right now, Chris, is that the legal landscape has shifted not so subtly in recent weeks, because a federal judge in California did announce in his finding, that after litigating the John Eastman email issue, that there was evidence — by a preponderance of the evidence, 51% — that Donald Trump and John Eastman committed two felony crimes together," he noted.

"So now, I suggest that ups the ante on the McCarthys of the world, if they decide to refuse to testify against Donald Trump, when a federal judge has already announced by a preponderance there's evidence that he committed crimes -- that actually constitutes to federal felonies in and of itself, if you refused to come forward and talk about the crimes that have been committed against the United States, accessory after the fact and misprision of a felony," he explained.

"Which we haven't talked about a lot, but that comes directly into play, because a crime has been committed that is cognizable by a court of the United States, and you conceal it? Which is what McCarthy and the others would be doing if they refused to testify. You have committed a three-year federal felony," he said.

The host noted that discussions of pardons from Trump could indicate consciousness of guilt.

"Yeah, exactly," Kirschner replied. "You don't need a pardon for a peaceful protest or a normal tourist visit. You need a pardon for a crime."

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Outrage boils over after it's revealed that Trump’s DOJ issued 'egregious' secret subpoena



The Department of Justice has revealed that it subpoenaed records of a journalist during a leak investigation following negative stories about Donald Trump's administration.

"Leak investigators issued the subpoena to obtain the phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian’s investigations correspondent in Washington. The move was carried out without notifying the newspaper or its reporter, as part of an attempt to ferret out the source of media articles about a review into family separation conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz," the British newspaper reported. "It is highly unusual for US government officials to obtain a journalist’s phone details in this way, especially when no national security or classified information is involved. The move was all the more surprising in that it came from the DoJ’s inspector general’s office – the watchdog responsible for ethical oversight and whistleblower protections."

That wasn't the only irregularity.

"The leak inquiry was conducted on behalf of the DoJ by the inspector general’s office of an outside government department, housing and urban development (HUD). Its investigation focused on allegations that an employee within the DoJ’s inspector general’s office had leaked sensitive information to three news outlets – the Guardian, the New York Times and NBC News. The Guardian was the only one of the three outlets to have a subpoena issued relating to its reporter’s phone account," it noted.

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, blasted the subpoena as “an egregious example of infringement on press freedom and public interest journalism by the US Department of Justice."

The Guardian published two stories on Trump's family separation policies during the heart of the 2020 election.

"The Guardian published two sensitive reports by Kirchgaessner within the timeframe of the DoJ review into child separation covered by the leak inquiry. On 23 July 2020 she revealed that the DoJ’s former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had personally advised that migrant parents should be prosecuted, no matter how young the children accompanying them. On 2 September 2020, Kirchgaessner reported that a senior justice department official nominated by Trump to be a federal judge had participated in the removal of a Texas prosecutor who had sounded the alarm over child separation," The Guardian reported.

The documents were released following a Freedom of Information Act request by reporter Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed News.

Read more info below:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21996102-leopold-doj-oig-foia-zero-tolerance-policy-leak-investigation

[Rick Plant]

GDP Growth Under Trump Was the Worst Since Hoover
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-02/trump-s-gdp-growth-was-the-worst-since-the-great-depression

[Rick Plant]

Georgia election official allowed conspiracist to breach voting system in search of 'fraud'



A former Georgia county elections supervisor opened her offices to an election-denying businessman shortly after the 2020 presidential election, granting access to voting equipment that election-deniers claim was vital to rigging the election, according to a Washington Post report.

Misty Hampton told the Post that she cannot remember when the walkthrough took place or what was done during the visit but recalled giving access to Scott Hall, the owner of a Georgia bail bond business.

"I'm not a babysitter," she reportedly said of her past role in the Coffee County office.

In an interview with Post, Hampton said that she was unaware that the visit might contravene the state's guidance barring voting equipment from being released to the public.

"I don't see why anything that is dealing with elections is not open to the public," Hampton said. "Why would you want to hide anything?"

Even though Donald Trump had won the county by a 40-point margin, many election officials "voiced suspicions of fraud" after the 2020 election, according to the Post. Hampton reportedly spread the baseless notion that "rogue" administrators might have tampered with the ballots in order to give then-President-elect Biden a bigger edge.

Hall's visit first came under federal scrutiny as part of a months-old lawsuit filed by the Coalition for Good Governance, which calls into question the integrity of Georgia's election system. Court documents related to the suit reportedly reveal a March 2021 call between Hall and Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, during which Hall told Marks that he chartered a plane to transport people to Coffee County in order to copy voting data.

The group reportedly "went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment," Hall said in the phone conversation. "We basically had the entire elections committee there," he added. "And they said: 'We give you permission. Go for it.'"

According to the Post, Hall and Hampton were accompanied by one county elections board member, Eric Chaney, during their visit.

On January 6, 2021, during the Capitol insurrection, Hampton reportedly texted Chaney that Hall was considering analyzing "our ballots from the general election like we talked about the other day."

Chaney's lawyers told the Post that the elections officer does not know Hall and did not take part in any visit where people "illegally accessed the server or the room in which it is contained."

By May of that year, after Hampton had been fired over a separate offense, her replacement, James Barnes, found a business card belonging to Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm that led a carnivalesque "forensic audit" of the election in Arizona's Maricopa County. After Barnes sent an email regarding the business card to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, state officials replaced the elections server in Coffee County with a new one. Last month, attorneys for Raffensperger claimed that a former elections official reportedly changed the password for the old server, rendering it impossible for other officials to gain access.

Hampton's office tour is just the latest in a pattern of improprieties by GOP election officials at the state and local level. As the Washington Post notes, suspected and attempted breaches in election security have prompted multiple investigations in states like Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/13/coffee-county-misty-hampton-election/

[Rick Plant]

Arizona election security chief quits — and issues urgent warning about MAGA radicals trying to take over



On Friday, VICE released an interview with Ken Matta, Arizona's longtime head of election security, who is now leaving office for the private sector — and warning that the efforts by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists to hijack and intimidate election offices is becoming a dire problem for both the election process and for the well-being of the officials running it.

"Right now with the threats, the hostility, the public bashing of election workers and election officers based on misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, it’s tough to stay," Matta told Todd Zwillich. "The job is fairly thankless anyway; we only get bad press."

Arizona, which voted for President Joe Biden by barely 10,000 votes, has been a hotbed of election conspiracy theories, and state-sponsored attempts to gather evidence for them — most infamously, a months-long partisan "audit" of Maricopa County done by a private security firm at the request of the GOP-controlled state Senate. That investigation, which explored bizarre ideas like hunting for bamboo fibers in ballots to look for Asian forgeries, ended with Biden netting slightly more votes — but then the state launched another "investigation," this time of the voting machines, headed up by a man who attended a pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" rally.

According to Matta, he feared for his own safety through all of this — and even felt the need to walk around armed.

"Working out of the Arizona secretary of state’s office, you can imagine we got hit pretty hard. Just mean abuse, horrible and harassing language. Just hundreds of them. For a while there, a good part of my day was just listening to these horrible messages," said Matta. "I started carrying a gun. When they started sending me to the partisan review in Maricopa County, what some people call an 'audit,' as I’m driving through, there’s people out front with full autos and assault rifles. They’re looking in our cars, they’re seeing who’s going in and who’s going out. I decided I was going to start carrying. I have a concealed-carry permit in Arizona."

Matta's biggest fear, he warned, was these same people taking jobs like the one he is now leaving.

"A lot of the people coming in to take those empty spots are going to be election deniers or conspiracy theorists," said Matta. "We have a lot of concerns about their entry into the process. This is really important: In the elections community, I can still say everybody is on board with the rules-based integrity of their jobs and the importance of elections. I can say I’d still trust my vote to any of these people. That will not continue to be true, starting in 2022 and definitely in 2024. It’s just impossible for that to remain true nationally."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpjy9/arizona-election-security

[Rick Plant]

Other Republicans feel the same way, but are afraid to say it publicly because their rabid base would turn against them, so they say it privately and get caught on tape.

Lindsey Graham said Joe Biden is ‘best person’ to lead US, tapes reveal

Republican senator and Trump loyalist made comments in wake of January 6 US Capitol attack to authors of new book



Democrat Joe Biden is “the best person” to lead the US, the Republican senator and fervent Donald Trump supporter Lindsey Graham said in tapes released on Monday by the authors of a bestselling political book.

The South Carolina senator was speaking on and shortly after 6 January 2021 to Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, now authors of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.

On 6 January 2021, shortly before the US Capitol was attacked, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his defeat by Biden in the 2020 election was caused by voter fraud.

A bipartisan Senate committee has linked seven deaths to the riot that followed, an unsuccessful attempt to stop certification of electoral college results.

“Moments like this reset,” Graham said that day, in a tape played on CNN on Tuesday.

"People will calm down. People will say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with that.’ This is a group within a group. What this does, there will be a rallying effect for a while, [then] the country says ‘We’re better than this.’”

Asked if Biden could help the country come together again, Graham said: “Totally.”

“He’ll maybe be the best person to have. I mean, how mad can you get at Joe Biden?”

In the year and a half since the Capitol riot, much of the country, and most Republicans, have stayed mad at Biden. The president’s approval numbers continue to plumb depths similar to those charted by Trump while he was in office.

Biden is reportedly mad at Graham, a longtime associate in the Senate who despite saying he was “out” of Trump’s camp immediately after the January 6 riot, soon returned to the fold.

In other taped remarks played by Martin and Burns, Graham said Trump “misjudged the passion” of his supporters.

"He plays the TV game and he went too far here,” the senator was heard to say. “That rally didn’t help, talking about primarying” the Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a member of the House January 6 committee.

“He created a sense of revenge.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/11/lindsey-graham-joe-biden-donald-trump