Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Lawrence O’Donnell flabbergasted ‘stupidest man on earth’ hid the evidence in his desk

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday examined why it was is important that FBI agents allegedly seized classified information from Donald Trump's desk.

"The Trump lawyers, on Jun. 3, swore under oath that they were on that day, handing everything over to the FBI," O'Donnell reported. "When the FBI comes back with a search warrant, they find twice as many classified documents as the Trump lawyers handed over to them."

"And where did they find them? In his desk," O'Donnell continued. "In his desk! That's where the FBI found three classified documents when they executed the search warrant of Trump's home, in Donald Trump's desk! In his damn desk! That's where they were!"

"For well over 100 years now, going back to at least Sherlock Holmes, we have been treated to an endless array of mystery novels and short stories, and plays, and movies, and TV shows. They bring in a detective that struggles mightily to get into the mind of the brilliant criminal, to try to imagine, 'If I was the brilliant criminal, where would I hide the evidence of my crime, the proof of my crime?'"

He continued by saying, "On the morning of august 8th, FBI agents had to imagine, 'If I was the stupidest man in the world, or maybe just the stupidest man who ever won the Electoral College, where would I hide the evidence of a crime?' "And so the FBI went straight to Donald Trump's desk where they found three classified documents, which is exactly three more than Donald Trump was legally allowed to have in his desk."

O'Donnell concluded, "the only way those documents could be closer to Donald Trump is if they were in his pockets."

He explained how he keeps his passport in the upper-right drawer in his desk.

"I know exactly what's in the drawer with my passport, it's the most important drawer in the office. It's the drawer where the most important stuff goes," O'Donnell explained. "And so tonight, Donald Trump's sleep struggle it's going to be trying to fall asleep well he wonders if the FBI has been able to find his fingerprints on the classified documents that he was hiding in his desk."

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[Rick Plant]

‘This is crazy!’ Democratic lawmakers fear 'erratic and strange' Trump will blurt out top-secret intel in fit of rage



Democrats are increasingly concerned that Donald Trump will reveal top-secret intelligence during his ongoing public meltdown over the search of Mar-A-Lago.

FBI agents seized boxes of classified materials the former president had hoarded at his private resort in Florida, and lawmakers are worried that he might lash out against the government by blurting out top-secret information on his Truth Social account or during back-channel discussions with foreign leaders, reported The Daily Beast.

“I would not leave it beyond him to do something as insane as that," said Rep. Ted Lieu (DCA). "When someone is cornered, they make very bad decisions, and Donald Trump is in a very bad situation right now. We don’t know what he will do."

A photo released Tuesday by the Department of Justice shows investigators found top-secret documents, some marked as highly classified, in boxes and desk drawers at Mar-A-Lago, and Trump's social media posts have gotten increasingly unhinged -- and have hinted he may retaliate by releasing some of that information.

“Thought they wanted them kept Secret?" Trump posted Wednesday morning. "Lucky I Declassified!”

A court filing revealed the DOJ was seeking documents that could include specific information about the nation's nuclear weapons, which under the Atomic Energy Act a president cannot unilaterally declassify -- but Lieu is concerned Trump would try anyway.

“You can’t just have this lying around at Mar-a-Lago -- this is crazy,” Lieu said. “Who knows who would have seen these documents in a public place like Mar-a-Lago? This is a resort where lots of people go.”

Other lawmakers expressed fears about who had already seen some of that information, and Trump's own attorney Alina Habba admitted Wednesday night on Fox News the former president hosted frequently guests in the office where some of that material was found.

“Did the MyPillow guy spend hours in the office taking notes? Did Rudy Giuliani? We don’t know," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT). "We’ve got to assess that to see if there are steps we should take to mitigate damage. To put them in an unsecure office, where his pals can amuse themselves by looking at these documents, is appalling.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) was concerned that Trump refused to read his daily spy briefing as president but was interested enough in that secret information to squirrel those documents away at his private home, and he said those online rage spasms were a source of anxiety.

“It’s hard to predict exactly what he’s going to do," Castro said. In the last few days, he’s been behaving very frantically. It’s very erratic and strange behavior — particularly from a former president. But the entire episode of how he treated those documents was erratic and unsafe.”

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) agreed Trump's social media posts presented an ongoing threat to national security.

“Here’s what makes it truly scary: Trump is weirdly attached to all of this ‘Top Secret’ information, he constantly throws tantrums, and he has an insatiable desire for attention including on social media,” Huffman said. “Since he no longer has White House china to smash, his next tantrum might be blurting out sensitive national secrets on Truth Social, or calling his pal [Vladimir] Putin to divulge or even sell information. With anyone else these would seem like crazy scenarios, but not with Trump.”

Read More Here:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/democratic-lawmakers-grow-concerned-donald-trump-may-spill-state-secrets

[Rick Plant]

'Isn't that sedition?' Trump ignites fury after revealing he's financially supporting J6 defendants



Donald Trump revealed Thursday he is meeting with and financially supporting January 6 insurrection defendants, while he floated pardons for them in remarks he made on the far right wing Wendy Bell Radio streaming podcast. His remarks are causing concern among legal and government experts.

“So I met with a number of fans but I met with and I’m financially supporting people that are incredible,” Trump announced (video below), referring to those who he said are being charged with crimes related to the January 6 insurrection, while mentioning that “contributions should be made.”

“And they were in my office actually two days ago. It’s very much on my mind. It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people. It’s disgraceful and, and mostly, I mean, you know, it’s firemen, they’re policemen, there are people in the military. There are people that were, you know, you look at what took place with the police where there are ushering them in and so many different things.

Trump went on to bash “radical leftists,” who he called “sick,” and said, “there’s something wrong with them, and nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

He also called federal prosecutors the “most cold-hearted people,” saying “they don’t care about families. They don’t care about anything. They just, and you see what they’re doing with the sentencing.”

“And I will tell you, and I’m looking at it very carefully, I’ve studied it, I study cases and contributions shouldn be made. We have to do that because you know, they have some good lawyers, but even the good lawyers, you get some of these judges that that are so so nasty and so angry, mean, the sentences, and I will tell you, I will look very, very favorably about about full pardons, if I decide to run and if I win I will be looking very, very strongly at pardons – full pardons.”

“I think that’s probably going to be the best because even if they go for the two months or six months and you know they have sentences that go a lot longer than that, but we’ll be looking very, very seriously at full pardons. Because we can’t let that happen here, and I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he declared.

Experts are expressing outrage.

“So, if you are meeting with seditionists and giving them money and promising them pardons which could be seen as obstruction of justice and support for further anti-government violence…isn’t that, um, sedition?” asked foreign policy, national security, and political affairs expert, journalist, CEO, and political commentator David Rothkopf.

“If Trump is elected, he’ll apologize to the J6 traitors because the Capitol police got in the way of their bats, poles, stun guns and bear spray,” observed former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob.

“But this isn’t fascism, right?” former U.S. Dept. of Defense official Adam Blickstein noted sardonically.

“Coup leader pledges relief to his assistants,” observed attorney Eric Columbus, who served at DOJ, DHS, and as a special counsel in the House and Senate.

“Trump admits to funding the people who violently attacked the capitol in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election. Also, he wants to pardon them and wants America to apologize to them, said Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide Jesse Ferguson.

https://www.rawstory.com/isnt-that-sedition-trump-ignites-fury-after-revealing-he-s-financially-supporting-j6-defendants/

[Rick Plant]

'The dictionary definition of fascism': Conservative columnist condemns Donald Trump's MAGA 'cult'



MAGA Republicans have been attacking Robert Reich as a “coastal elitist” in response to an August 23 tweet in which the liberal economist, UC Berkeley professor and former secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration described far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a “fascist.” Reich’s MAGA critics have been arguing that his condemnation of DeSantis, former President Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans is painfully out of touch with Main Street America — and that Reich and other liberals and progressives simply don’t understand conservative values.

But Reich’s MAGA critics are ignoring or overlooking the fact that anti-MAGA arguments are hardly confined to the left. A long list of right-wing Never Trump conservatives, from attorney George Conway to The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes to Washington Post columnist Max Boot to former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a former GOP congressman), have been attacking MAGA as a movement that favors far-right authoritarianism rather than traditional Reagan/Goldwater/McCain conservatism. And William Saletan, a writer for the conservative website The Bulwark, defends President Joe Biden’s anti-MAGA use of the term “semi-fascism” in an article published on September 1.

“Republicans are furious over President Biden’s recent remarks linking Donald Trump and his supporters to ‘semi-fascism,’” Saletan writes. “For days, they’ve been all over TV and social media, denouncing Biden’s use of the F-word. But Biden was right. Many of the ideas and tactics deployed by Trump and his apologists, including those who decry Biden’s comparison, fit the dictionary definition of fascism.”

Saletan stresses that refusing to accept democratic election results, which is what Trump and his followers did after the 2020 election, is an “authoritarian” act.

“A stickler might say that an attempt to overturn an election isn’t really fascist unless it involves the use of state power or mob violence, but Trump and his allies tried to use both,” Saletan explains. “Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s right-hand man in several abuses of power, says it’s Biden, not Trump, who runs America like ‘a damned dictatorship.’ But in December 2020, after the Electoral College had certified Biden’s election, Giuliani — at Trump’s direction — phoned the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security to ask whether DHS could seize voting machines from states. Then, at Trump’s January 6th rally on the Ellipse, Giuliani exhorted the crowd: ‘Let’s have trial by combat!’”

Saletan adds, “Giuliani didn’t just help to incite the attack on the Capitol. To this day, he continues to whitewash it and excuse the perpetrators.”

The Bulwark writer cites other examples of “authoritarian” behavior from MAGA Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wondering how long it would be before “we get to hang” former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and calling for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason.

“The dictionary definition of fascism doesn’t just talk about autocracy,” Saletan notes. “It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-fascist. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to fascism a baseless ‘message of hatred.’ But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican presidential nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because ‘he’s a Mexican.’ And McEnany defended this attack…. You could argue that an out-and-out fascist would use nationalist bigotry to persecute a whole minority group, not just a single judge. That’s what Trump did in 2015, when he called for a ‘complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’”

According to Saletan, “Trump’s cult” contains many “components” of fascism, including “paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state.” Another is “invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.”

“But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into fascism might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,” Saletan writes. “As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, ‘There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.’ Orbán called this a ‘mixed-race world’ and concluded, ‘We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.’”

Saletan continues, “Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech ‘a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.’ But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded. This past Monday, CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán.”

https://www.rawstory.com/the-dictionary-definition-of-fascism-conservative-columnist-condemns-donald-trump-s-maga-cult-2658013651/

[Rick Plant]

'I don't know what to make of it': Pro-Trump attorney struggles to defend former president's lawyers on CNN

Attorney David Schoen, who defended former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, struggled to defend some actions taken by Trump's lawyers in the current dispute over top secret government documents being kept in Mar-a-Lago.

During an interview on CNN, host John Berman asked Schoen what he made of attorney Christina Bobb signing a sworn affidavit saying Trump had handed over every piece of classified information the National Archives had requested, despite the fact that Trump was actually still hoarding several boxes worth of classified documents.

"We don't know exactly what went on behind the scenes," Schoen began. "It's a question that's going to have to be answered. I can tell you this, I know Evan Corcoran, local counsel for me in another case... he is as honest as the day is long. I don't believe -- I have no reason to believe he would have done anything dishonest or otherwise."

That said, Schoen also couldn't come up with a plausible explanation for why Trump's lawyers had signed an affidavit that had proven to be clearly untrue as evidenced by the fact that the FBI recovered several boxes full of classified documents that they had sworn were not there.

"I don't know what to make of it," he acknowledged. "There is, again -- the question that's going to have to be answered."

Watch the video below:

[Rick Plant]

'Corrupt as hell': Demands for Clarence Thomas to resign follow new details of wife's election scheming



U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faced fresh calls to step down Thursday after new reporting revealed that his wife's involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election was broader than previously known, extending to the battleground state of Wisconsin as well as Arizona.

"Reminder that Clarence Thomas heard election cases while his wife conspired to overthrow democracy."

Emails obtained by the Washington Post and the organization Documented show that Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist with close ties to the conservative dark money network, "messaged two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin: state Sen. Kathy Bernier, then chair of the Senate elections committee, and state Rep. Gary Tauchen," the newspaper reported.

"Bernier and Tauchen received the email at 10:47 a.m. on November 9, virtually the same time the Arizona lawmakers received a verbatim copy of the message from Thomas," the Post added. "Ginni Thomas' political activism is highly unusual for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice, and for years it has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for her husband. She has said that the two of them keep their professional lives separate."

But watchdog groups and Democratic lawmakers have questioned that claim and demanded that Thomas, at the very least, recuse himself from election-related cases—something he notably didn't do while his wife was engaged in attempts to keep former President Donald Trump in power.

"Reminder that Clarence Thomas heard election cases while his wife conspired to overthrow democracy," Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted Thursday. "Clarence Thomas is corrupt as hell and should resign from the Supreme Court."

House Democrats have also called on the party leadership to launch impeachment proceedings against the right-wing justice, a demand backed by more than 1.2 million people across the U.S.

Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, said in a statement Thursday that "if Clarence Thomas had any shame, he would resign immediately."

"But he doesn't," Harvey continued, "so Congress must act immediately to pass a code of ethics for the Supreme Court that would require justices to recuse themselves in cases where they have an actual or apparent conflict of interest."

The latest revelations from the Post add to the newspaper's previous reporting about Ginni Thomas' messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Arizona Republicans in the wake of Trump's election loss.

"Ginni Thomas didn't just push Mark Meadows to overturn the election or urge lawmakers in Arizona to ignore the popular vote," tweeted the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "She also pushed Wisconsin lawmakers to ignore Biden's victory in the state."

"Despite all this, she's still on a federal board," the group added, referring to Thomas' spot on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board. Trump appointed her to a five-year term on the board in May 2020.

Thomas' actions in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest have drawn the scrutiny of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, an attack fueled by Trump's lies about the presidential election.

The Post reported Thursday that the House panel "asked Thomas to sit for a voluntary interview in June."

"The committee also sought a broad range of documents from her, including any related to plans to overturn the election and all communications with members of Congress and their staff and Justice Department employees," the Post noted. "At the time, Thomas indicated she would comply. 'I can't wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,' Thomas told the Daily Caller, her former employer."

"Less than two weeks later, on June 28, Paoletta told the committee that while Thomas remained willing to sit for an interview, he did not believe there was 'sufficient basis' for her to do so," the Post added.

The House committee is expected to kick off a new series of hearings on the January 6 attack this month.

Read More Here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/09/01/ginni-thomas-wisconsin-bernier-tauchen/

[Rick Plant]

'That’s the ball game': Former prosecutor shoots down Trump’s latest claim of executive privilege



Donald Trump has vacillated between attorney/client privilege to executive privilege and at times he merely says "privilege" as the justification that the FBI shouldn't have access to the government documents he retained when he left the White House.

Former Justice Department lawyer Harry Litman explained that Trump's recent rant of executive privilege makes it clear that the game is over. At the same time, none of the information that was revealed by the recent Justice Department response would have been available without Trump's demand for the special master. Over and over, Trump appears to miscalculate and the Justice Department appears to be several steps ahead of him.

"It's been a series of self-inflicted wounds, each one worse than the last," Litman explained. In "this last one they were able to really give some more detail because Trump did a little forum shopping to get another judge. They said to that judge you haven't seen the affidavit so let us tell you a thing or two, and the thing or two was really extremely damning."

The idea of "smashing together" the various types of privilege, "is the ball game here," Litman continued.

"All their case is asking for a special master involves attorney/client privilege. Trump could have attorney/client privilege with his own personal lawyers. What he doesn't have is any kind of standing about these documents, the public documents and the very first legal argument that DOJ made and that Trump will have to answer in an hour is why do you have any interest in these documents at all to even be here?" he revealed. "You've got no right, no interest. These don't belong to you any more than to any other citizen. It's a tough argument and his submission last night really doesn't begin to answer it."

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