Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Judge Cannon 'engaged herself in obstruction of justice': Experts sound the alarm on Trump documents ruling



Donald Trump's hand-picked judge in Florida put a hold on the documents seized by the Justice Department at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

In an opinion that is likely to be challenged by the DOJ, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ordered that a special master be appointed to review the documents that investigators said have already been filtered and sifted through by those with the proper security clearance.

Cannon writes that executive privilege, in addition to Trump's attorney-client privilege, is on the table for the special master and that all of the documents can be reviewed. But some legal experts think that it is likely to be challenged.

Berkeley Law Professor Jonah Glbach explained that as well as the special master, "Cannon has entered a temporary injunction restraining the government from review or use of the items seized from Mar-a-Lago for 'criminal investigative purposes.'" That puts a stop to the progression of the investigation, which certainly delays any possible indictment of the former president.

Gelbach noted that Cannon listed off four elements that Trump must establish to get an injunction, and then doesn't find that Trump has some of them.

"Her basis for finding 'a' likelihood is, she says, contained in part III of her Discussion, at pages 14-18," he continued. "But part III is full of couched language like 'arguably' and 'the Court is not convinced' and 'evidence from which to call that premise into question.'"

It made him ask how "likelihood" could be part of a court ruling. "In sum, Judge Cannon *correctly (sic) stated the legal requirement of a substantial likelihood *then declared only that she'd found 'a likelihood,' based on a discussion in which she makes no such finding, repeatedly indicating uncertainty about the merits of the review process. That alone looks like [an] abuse of discretion and thus reversible error to me. I assume that will be one point in DOJ's inevitable appeal of the preliminary injunction to CA11."

"This is one of the strongest critiques — that the order doesn’t address the threshold issue of how executive privilege applies against executive inquiry," wrote attorney Ken White, who goes by "Popehat." He disputes that the decision is a "catastrophe" for the Justice Department and some seem to think that it will be overturned anyway. "Even if the order isn’t a catastrophe, I think the observation that the court bent over backwards for Trump on every issue is a fair assessment."

The piece of the ruling he thinks are worthy of the "freakout" is what will likely be part of the reason for the appeal to ensure there's no written case law.

"Those would include (a) the identity of the special master, (b) the scope of their assignment, (c) her further orders ruling on the special master’s findings, (d) 11th circuit or SCOTUS emergency action," White wrote. He also noted that any MAGA Republicans saying that the judge stopped the criminal investigation is woefully ill-informed.

"The judge shut down, for now, [the] review of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. The criminal investigation existed before that and will continue on other channels as before," said White.

American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein noted that Cannon shouldn't even have taken the case to begin with.

"It was in the hands of the magistrate judge, she was picked by Trump's lawyers solely because she was a Trumpist, in a jurisdiction nowhere near Mar-a-Lago. She has an effect engaged herself in obstruction of justice," he alleged.

Steve Vladeck, who serves as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas Law School, similarly called the ruling "preposterous." He highlighted "the part where it blocks the government from continuing to use materials already in its possession. At the very least, that last ruling creates an immediately appealable injunctive-like order, which DOJ can now take to the Eleventh Circuit."

While the 11th Circuit isn't exactly the most friendly to progressive causes, the law is written clearly, the analysts agree. Taking the case to the Supreme Court would require a revisiting of whether the existing president is the official "executive" and thus rules "executive privilege." Trump allies like Allen Dershowitz has argued that all presidents should govern their own executive privilege and that the existing president shouldn't have any power over past president's documents and information.

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Kayal called it outright "Crazytown," with former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance posting her own agreement.

But it was a former prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, who issued a blistering takedown.

"I truly hoped Judge Cannon would adhere to the rule of law, but she in fact is now another illustration of the insidiousness of Trump and the Big Lie. And how he has infected formerly mainstream Republicans," he said on Monday.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-judge-cannon-obstruction-justice/

[Rick Plant]

One chart legal expert says could be used in the indictment of Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the election



In a live Labor Day special by Ari Melber, former federal prosecutor John P. Flannery pointed to the one chart he says is more than a mere diagram of the attempt to overthrow the election, but the perfect presentation of information that could be used to indict former President Donald Trump.

In a timeline, Melber showed the beginning of the Electors plot, the lawsuits and states attempting to overturn the 2020 votes in November. As December approached, that turned into Republican congressional officials coordinating to vote down the election certification, a lobbying effort began to get Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 election, the attempt to get the military to seize voting machines, and the plotting of the Jan. 6 attack.

Thus far, it appears that the investigations have only focused on what happened involving the Jan. 6 attack and how it began. But Melber argued that looking all the way back at the efforts in November is important in understanding the insurrection. You can't pin an insurrection on one speech, he argued. But it wasn't one act. It was months of efforts leading up to Jan. 6

"I think it's a devastating indictment in an informal sense of what went wrong and how the desire to win when one lost overcame all lawful constitutional, legal and other normal barriers so that they could replace themselves in an election that they lost," Flannery said. "And I think that what you have shown is with that original intent, as they are moving forward, even through the legal cases, there's a pattern of conduct there that tells us, from the very beginning, 'we just say we won, even though we didn't.' So, you go into court, and you claim there's been misconduct, and there's not. You claim there is fraud, and there's not. And you accumulate 50 cases, and then you use the fact that you lost to try to get electors. And we move into your zone, where it becomes, without question, a crime. And you walk it up the ladder from that."

He continued: "So, could you take your charts and turn them into an indictment? Yes, you could. It could be a single conspiracy, that is to say, all these people were connected, and all knew what was going to happen, and all planned out was going to happen. That had various means to do it, and their objective was to overturn the election."

Flannery walked through the chart, showing that the lawsuits were "green" because it's completely legal to bring a lawsuit.

"However, you can't bring a lawsuit based on the false fact, or on a frivolous cause of action," said Flannery. "If he did it in one case, that would be one thing. When you have so many cases, you have a pattern of conduct of rebutting and innocent intent. What happens next? The electors are persuaded by the lawsuits that there's fraud [and] that we need alternative electors, so it could overturn the election as if the lawsuits were real and genuine, and they were not. We do know that the Justice Department is investigating the electors."

The chart then moves into the states, Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence.

"That is the motherlode," Flannery explained. "You are at a point where to take the theory that they can vote on what the electors did or didn't do, first of all, that wasn't the law. Second of all, the facts they are relying on are, themselves, fraudulent. They made the same pitch to the states. You see [Rudy] Giuliani and company doing that. They made the same pitch to Congress, and we have [Mark] Meadows and [Peter] Navarro and others in dealing with that. We have Pence, we have Trump himself trying to persuade Pence to do the dirty deed."

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was that Trump allies at the Justice Department attempted to challenge states on the grounds that there are "questions" and thus shouldn't be counted.

"Just before the final chapter, they have the DOJ coming in to give in an extra push in Georgia and elsewhere to prosecute this crazy meshugana theory of the law to overturn an election illegally," Flannery closed. "It's a cuckoo coup, I suppose. I think it all holds up. We have enough public evidence to know this, and these people do it with several people present. So, it's not going to be hard to charge. The shame is that some of these people have been in the grand jury, but others have, recently.



Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Republican strategist says she's been sounding the alarm on the GOP turning fascist for over a year



Susan Del Percio has a history of working with Republican candidates and in Rudy Giuliani's administration, but even she thinks that the Republican Party has taken a hard turn toward fascism.

Speaking out on Monday to Joy Reid, she said that she's been sounding the alarm for over a year. Reid played a clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who last week spoke warned of violence.

She went on to call it "a gentlemanly hat on the brown shirtism he displayed last week."

"How is it that now you have what used to be mainstream Republicans -- this was John McCain's supposed best friend -- is now justifying saying that there will be blood in the streets, basically, if Donald Trump is treated the way every single person on this panel and in this country would be treated if they stole classified documents," Reid asked.

Del Perciao said that it made her wonder what Trump has on Graham to make him change so quickly.

"There is no way to explain it, honestly," she said. "Joy, I was on your show a year ago, I said it plain and simple. We are seeing the Republican Party turn into a party of neofascism. I stand by that statement 15 months later. That's what it is, when you see the call for violence in the streets with not believing in the election results, just like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said. This is a dangerous place. If we're wondering, can it happen here? It already has. January 6th happened and we could see something much worse come this Nov. if Donald Trump does, in fact, try to rile up his army, because that's what it's becoming and looking like."

Addressing the recent speech by President Joe Biden about the MAGA Republicans being anti-democracy and supporting violence like what was seen on Jan. 6 and the recent attacks on the federal government.

The Nation's Joan Walsh said that she never felt insulted when there were attacks on racists because she wasn't a racist. She applied that same logic to Republicans, who are seemingly triggered by the accusation that the right-wing has turned toward fascism.

"If you're not a fascist, then he's not talking about you," she explained.

See the discussion below:

[Rick Plant]

"White life" and the fascist movement: Hey, at least they're being honest

Republicans don't bother to speak in code anymore. Why should they? Their big plans for America are no mystery

JULY 6, 2022



Maya Angelou famously counseled, "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time." Her wisdom remains undefeated.

If the American people — especially white people — along with the news media and political elites had heeded that wisdom, perhaps our country would not now be teetering on the edge of a fascist abyss.

The contemporary Republican Party has become the world's largest white supremacist organization, and now also explicitly supports the use of political violence and terrorism to advance the goal of ending multiracial democracy. Donald Trump's coup attempt, culminating in the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was the literal embodiment of those values, beliefs and goals.

The foundational premise of the Trump coup attempt and the Big Lie about the 2020 election that fueled it was that the votes of Black and brown people essentially do not count, or at least should not have equal weight with votes of white people, especially white "conservatives" in the former slave-owning Confederacy and other parts of "red state" America.

White supremacy is violence; white supremacist violence is personal, structural and institutional. It is through violence, and the threat of violence, that a society organized around maintaining white privilege across all areas of life is created, maintained, expanded, protected and enforced.

Those who fail to understand Jan. 6 as an act of white supremacist violence effectively deny the reality of what happened that day, along with its genesis, meaning and long-term implications. For today's Republican Party and the "conservative" movement, the racist "dog whistles" or "coded appeals" required by the "Southern strategy" of the '60s, '70s and '80s are now almost totally obsolete. Those things belong to an earlier moment when white supremacy had to be cloaked in plausible deniability because majority society increasingly viewed it as shameful.

As the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 presidential election draw closer, the Republican Party and the larger white right will both literally and figuratively drop their masks. They have showed us who they are; we should believe them.

During a speech at a Trump rally in Illinois two SaPersonays ago, Rep. Mary Miller, a Republican who represents a district in rural southeastern Illinois, spoke in celebration of the Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. "President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America," she said, "I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday."

That statement did not appear to be a gaffe or an error. Miller was reading from a prepared text and did not pause, attempt to correct herself or look embarrassed in any way. Subsequently her campaign has claimed that she intended to say "the right to life." Such a defense lacks any credibility.

For one thing, Miller's remark about "white life" fits into a larger pattern. Consider what she said at a rally on Capitol Hill in January 2021:

Each generation has the responsibility to teach and train the next generation. You know, if we win a few elections, we're still going to be losing, unless we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. … Hitler was right on one thing: He said, "Whoever has the youth, has the future."

Miller belongs to the large majority of Republicans in Congress who voted to reject electoral votes from states Joe Biden had won in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack. Last Tuesday, to no one's surprise, she was renominated by Republican voters in her district in the Illinois primaries.

Claims about the need to protect "white life" by banning abortion are a key element of the racist "great replacement" conspiracy theory. Within that worldview, "white life" is uniquely sacred and white women play a special role in saving or protecting the future of the white race, which is locked in an existential struggle against Black and brown "invaders" who are trying to conquer or destroy majority Christian nations or "Western civilization" as a whole.

This set of toxic fictions has now entered the political mainstream: Public opinion polls show that more than half of Trump voters and Republicans believe in the central claims of the "great replacement" theory. Last weekend in Illinois, no one booed Mary Miller's reference to "white life." There was no moment of uncomfortable silence or awkwardness. The crowd cheered.

Donald Trump certainly did not look uncomfortable. He looked on approvingly as Mary Miller spoke glowingly of the importance of "white life." While Trump typically speaks in more coded terms, he has repeatedly shown himself to be a white supremacist who traffics in race-war fantasies, white victimology, and both explicit and implicit calls for violence to protect "real America" (meaning white people who support him) from those who are un-American and dangerous, a category that includes nearly all Black and brown Americans as well as liberals and progressives, feminists and LGBTQ people, among others.

That same weekend, also in response to the Supreme Court's ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas posted a now infamous tweet: "Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education."

Officially, according to his own explanation, Cornyn was criticizing those who argued that long-standing Supreme Court decisions should not be overturned. "Thank goodness some SCOTUS precedents are overruled," he subsequently tweeted after his first statement was met with public outrage.

In reality, Cornyn was clearly suggesting that Black Americans should once again become second-class citizens by reinstating the Jim Crow white supremacist terror regime epitomized by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision — a regime under which tens of thousands of Black Americans were murdered by white people in "race riots," pogroms, lynchings and other targeted killings from the end of the Civil War all the way through to the civil rights movement more than 100 years later.

Whatever Cornyn's expressed intention, the evidence is clear: The Republican Party supports, advocates for and enables policies and outcomes designed to maintain the dominance and control of white people over all areas of American society. Furthermore, it endorses and uses violence to achieve its goals, as public opinion polls make clear and the Capitol attack of Jan. 6 so vividly illustrates.

In fact, the end of Roe v. Wade and the assault on women's reproductive rights and freedoms is the result of a decades-long pressure campaign that has used intimidation, arson, bombings, physical assault and even murder to achieve its goals. Kathy Spillar summarizes this at Ms. Magazine:

For nearly 50 years, as anti-abortion legislators in states around the country have chipped away at the constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion, they have done so with the steady drumbeat of violence at their back. ...

Though violence and threats of violence directed against abortion providers have been a prominent aspect of abortion in the United States since Roe was decided, anti-abortion legislators would like to ignore this history. Instead, they try to frame the history of post-Roe abortion as a "hard issue" and one of mere "controversy" that should be settled by these same state legislators. But decades of violence make clear that the debate over abortion in America isn't a matter of some "civil disagreement." It is the subject of unrelenting attacks by those who have no regard for the rule of law.

In the decision expected within the next few months, if the Supreme Court overturns or severely guts Roe v. Wade, it will send an unmistakable and dangerous message: that the violence against abortion providers has worked…

Spillar was writing before the Dobbs decision, but predicted that a decision overturning Roe would "send an unmistakable and dangerous message: that the violence against abortion providers has worked." She also suggests that the decision will "further embolden extremists to engage in violence in their crusade to end abortion in the United States":

After all, extremist violence has not been confined to those jurisdictions that would be expected to curtail abortion rights if Roe is overturned. Six of the murders committed by anti-abortion extremists occurred in jurisdictions that would likely preserve access to abortion: Colorado, Massachusetts and New York. If anti-abortion sentiments are unable to sway legislators in some states to ban abortion outright, there are very real reasons to be concerned that extremists — who for decades have disregarded the rule of law and legitimate political process — will take matters into their own hands.

As documented by historian Nancy MacLean in her book "Democracy in Chains," the leaders of today's "conservative" movement have utter disdain for democracy, the Constitution, human rights, human freedom, the common good and the rule of law. This anti-democracy movement also wants to impose a type of Christian fascist regime on the American people.

In a recent essay for ScheerPost and Salon, Chris Hedges argues that the "Christian fascists are clear about the society they intend to create":

In their ideal America, our "secular humanist" society based on science and reason will be destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of the legal system. Creationism or "Intelligent Design" will be taught in public schools, many of which will be overtly "Christian." Those branded as social deviants, including the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as "nominal Christians" — meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible — will be silenced, imprisoned or killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, "homeland" security and waging war. Most government assistance programs and federal departments, including education, will be terminated. Church organizations will be funded and empowered to run social welfare agencies and schools. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and sinfulness, will be denied help. The death penalty will be expanded to include "moral crimes," including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women, denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law, will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens. The wars waged by the American empire will be defined as religious crusades. Victims of police violence and those in prison will have no redress. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media will be "Christian." America will be sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the "Christian" authorities, at home and abroad, will be condemned as agents of Satan.

Today's "conservative" movement is now in revolutionary mode, determined to destroy the expansion of freedom, human rights and democracy that took place from Reconstruction through the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, the gay pride movement and other progressive movements throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

At its core, fascism is always revanchist and seeks to impose an old order (which is often imaginary or invented) on a new world. That new-old world for today's Republican-fascists goes back at least to the 19th century, if not before. In a recent essay at the Daily Beast, David Rothkopf explains the role of the Supreme Court in that revolutionary political project:

History may look back at the period in which we are living and call it the Great Regression. It is a time in which on issue after issue, we are seeing decades and sometimes centuries of progress reversed.

If the term regression feels too academic, we may just as easily call it the Great Leap Backwards. If it continues at its current pace, it may end up being known as the American Dark Ages … or worse, to borrow from another historical saga, the Decline and Fall of the United States. ...

Do not call this band of reckless revisionists on the court conservatives, by the way. Nothing about what they are doing is "conservative," nor should you call them "strict constructionalists" or "originalists," as their decisions disregard legal precedent, the spirit of the Constitution, and often craft citations for their decisions from whole cloth….

These are huge regressions for American society. ... And the scariest part is that they are proof the right wing's campaign to obliterate social progress over the past four decades has thus far been scarily successful. If they are not stopped at the polls, they may someday turn back the clock so far that we and the world wonder once again whether the United States is an idea that can long survive.

The world imagined by today's Republican Party and the larger neofascist movement is a world of rules and hierarchies. White people rule over Black and brown people. Right-wing Christians will rule over other religious groups and non-believers. Men will rule over women. The rich and moneyed classes will have total power over the poor, the working class and the middle class, most likely all of those outside the top 5 percent. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans people will be virtually erased from American society, and perhaps literally disappeared. Other marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and undocumented immigrants, will face similar fates. The "rights" of property, corporations and guns will fully supersede those of human beings, the natural world and the commons. "Democracy" will exist in name only, and in practice will be what political scientists call "competitive authoritarianism" or perhaps even an outright authoritarian state adapted to fit the mold of American exceptionalism.

None of this should be a surprise to anyone. Republicans and "conservatives" have been publicly announcing and telegraphing their plans to end American democracy — and to reject pluralism and human rights more broadly — for decades. In their own fashion, they have been direct and polite: They have told us what they would do, and then they have done it.

Too many Americans — especially leading Democrats and mainstream liberals, along with the guardians of approved public discourse in the national media — have continued to tell themselves comforting lies. Republicans are "exaggerating" or being "hyperbolic" because "we are all Americans" who have "the same fundamental values". Those comforting lies were always cowardly, now they are just contemptible. In fact, the Republican-fascists and their allies told us clearly who and what they were from the beginning. The question now becomes whether it is too late for the majority of Americans to take them at their word, and use the precious time remaining to defend, preserve and rebuild our democracy.

https://www.salon.com/2022/07/06/white-life-and-the-fascist-movement-hey-at-least-theyre-telling-us-the-truth/

[Rick Plant]

'How Fascism Works' Author On Trump's Attempts To Overturn Election Results

November 21, 2020

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks to Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, about President Trump's refusal to concede and his party's willingness to go along with it

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

We begin the program with President Trump's latest efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election. This week, his personal attorney and the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, alleged widespread national voting fraud despite the fact that the campaign has lost more than two dozen legal challenges filed since Election Day, and there is no evidence of fraud.

Today, the Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee are requesting a delay to the certification process and an audit of the vote, a move the secretary of state and legal experts say is against state election code. President-elect Joe Biden won Michigan and has a lead there of more than 155,000 votes.

President Trump's conduct in recent weeks has been criticized by many as a subversion of democracy, even prompting some to denounce the moves as tactics of fascism. Jason Stanley's been warning about this since before the election. He's a professor of philosophy at Yale and author of the book "How Fascism Works: The Politics Of Us And Them." He joins us now.

Jason Stanley, welcome back.

JASON STANLEY: Thank you very much, Leila. It's good to be back.

FADEL: So, first, how do you make sense of what you're seeing now in terms of the president's refusal to concede and his party's willingness to go along with it?

STANLEY: So it was extremely disturbing to see the GOP official Twitter site retweet a video with the president's attorney claiming a massive conspiracy theory and fraud based on voting machines. That was tantamount to an endorsement by essentially the ruling party of these tactics.

As far as President Trump is concerned, he has had a clear plan to deny the results of the election, should they fall against him, for many months. He's been very clear about that plan. It was to use COVID denialism among his supporters to rack up a large lead on Election Day, declare victory on election evening, and then do the tactics that we are now witnessing. That plan didn't work. He didn't win on Election Day with the same-day voters, Election Day voters. So we're seeing desperate moves to overturn the election anyway.

FADEL: So remind our listeners why you say this is an example of fascist behavior.

STANLEY: So fascism is a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by minorities, liberals and immigrants. He represents the cities as corrupt, filled with foreigners and disease, and the heartland as the true nation that he represents. And then he takes over a political party, transforms them into a cult of the leader and says only he can deal with the problem.

So we're - we've seen his election campaign focus on Black Lives Matter, on a minority social justice movement. We've seen him promise patriotic education in a second term - all sorts of tactics that we ideologically associate with far-right ultranationalism, i.e., fascism.

FADEL: And it seems like many Americans, evidence or not, are buying into the conspiracy theory that there is mass fraud.

STANLEY: Absolutely. The heart of fascist politics is the destruction of truth. Fascist politics is based on a friend/enemy distinction where your enemy's not a legitimate opponent. Your enemy is hiding terrible crimes, and you can't treat them as any kind of normal opponent. And this is the purpose of conspiracy theories like QAnon.

FADEL: When you were last on the program, you spoke about conspiracy theories, and you just mentioned being a core tenant of fascism, saying in part that they destroy an information space. We just mentioned Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer, echoing false claims of voter fraud this week. This is a claim that the president himself has said many times. But it has been widely debunked by major news organizations - even by the courts. Why do they persist?

STANLEY: They persist because that's the core of representing politics as militarized. Fascist politics transforms politics into a battlefield. And in the battlefield, like, you don't care if your opponent is speaking truth or not. They're the enemy. They want to kill you. So the goal is to represent politics as a battlefield. If your leader says false things, it doesn't matter. He's trying to win the battle, win the war for you. So that's the structure.

And then you delegitimize the media by connecting them to your opponent, saying it's one big conspiracy to undermine the nation, and then only you are the savior. Only you can save things. People have to have blind faith in you. And Trump has created that kind of connection between him and his supporters.

FADEL: Have we ever seen a president do the types of things that we're seeing right now - questioning the popular vote, claiming fraud when there is none?

STANLEY: I don't think so. I mean, I - this is a step beyond what we've seen before. And we knew Trump was going to do this. He's been announcing his plans to do this. But what concerns me most of all is the Republican willingness to go along with this - with what is, frankly, an absurd, conspiracy-laden package of nonsense.

So, yes, Trump is doing extreme damage to our democracy, but the worst is being done by one of our two political parties that is largely so far legitimating it, or at least refusing to stand up against it. And we can see what would have happened had the election been a little closer.

FADEL: So when you were last on the program, the election hadn't happened yet. And one of the points you made then was that our country's democracy, the U.S.'s democracy, was on life support. Now, of course, we don't know what's going to happen next, but what would it take to rebuild democratic institutions after this?

STANLEY: We need a responsible Republican Party and responsible conservatives that are committed to the rule of law and democracy. We need to challenge - we need to get out of this cycle of racial demagoguery. So we have large political protest against racial violence and injustice, and then we have demagogues using that to spread conspiracy theories about riots and corruption and lawlessness spreading from the cities.

And this is a cycle that we see again and again in U.S. politics. And it opens us up to extremely anti-democratic consequences of the sort that we are now witnessing.

FADEL: That was professor Jason Stanley. He's the author of "How Fascism Works: The Politics Of Us And Them."

Jason, thank you so much.

STANLEY: Thank you for having me on the program.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/21/937638178/-how-fascism-works-author-on-trump-s-attempts-to-overturn-election-results

[Rick Plant]

Trump judges don't believe in the law, facts or logic: Elie Mystal tears down the intelligence of Judge Cannon

MSNBC's Joy Reid started her Labor Day show with Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell and legal experts Elie Mystal and Glenn Kirschner talking about the bizarre ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon. She isn't the judge presiding over the Donald Trump document case, but she inserted herself into the case in another district, and ultimately helped the president who appointed her.

Legal experts have already indicated there are some legally unsound pieces of her ruling that likely won't make it through further court systems unless the 11th Circuit or Supreme Court intends to change the law dramatically.

"She's biassed and corrupt," sad Mystal. "Like, I don't know what to tell anybody anymore. I've been saying this since he took office. When you allow Republicans to control the courts you get nothing. Trump judges do not believe in the rule of law. They do not believe in precedent. They do not believe in facts. They do not believe in logic. They just believe in whatever will help Donald Trump and they've proven it again and again and again. So, when I say you cannot trust Trump judges. I don't know what more evidence you need for that fact, right?"

He went on to cite that the argument that Trump has executive privilege is so stupid that it's hard to explain.

"First of all, privilege goes to the current president," he explained. Trump's suit didn't even argue executive privilege, it argued attorney-client privilege. "We only have one president at a time. So, it's not Trump's privilege to have. But even if it was, as you point out, with Bill Barr who believes that the executive of the United States is something closer to a king than a president, even Bill Barr says that if he had a privilege, that privilege still goes with the government and not with Trump."

Barr said over the weekend that the idea that Trump has any kind of privilege over the documents is absurd.

"So, these documents belong in the Archives and it would be like Trump's call for executive privilege over the plane and then parked the plane, Air Force One, at Mar-a-Lago. Can't do that. Even if it was his, we have the right to take it back, but when you allow Trump judges to infect the system these are the kind of decisions you get," Mystal continued

His final point, he said is that the media needs to stop pretending that the Trump judges are the legitimate piece of the judicial system.

"They have to stop carrying water for them and start calling them out as they are, corrupt, leave behind gifts from the Trump administration to destroy the rule of law in America," he closed.

See the opener below:

[Rick Plant]

Ex-federal prosecutor thinks the Justice Department might be looking into a Georgia voting machine conspiracy



Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade thinks that the Justice Department is looking into whether there was a coordinated conspiracy to access electronic voting machines after the 2020 election.

Video footage was released Tuesday showing that operatives of Donald Trump were able to enter a secure Georgia location thanks to a fake elector and GOP chairwoman. The operatives have said that they gained access to at least one electronic voting machine and did so because Trump lawyer Sidney Powell asked them to do it.

"This video shows a very strong kind of coordinated effort to overturn the election," NBC's Blayne Alexander reported.

McQuade explained that tampering with election machines, ballots or with voting in general is prohibited under the laws of many states.

"The reason for it is to protect the integrity of the voting systems," she said. "The chain of custody is important. Those items never fall out of a chain of certain officials who are entitled to possess them. If you give them to some third party, it compromises their integrity and leaves them vulnerable to accusations of fraud. There's also the possibility of hacking them, of reverse engineering the way the systems work for future hacking. There are a lot of reasons this increases vulnerability to our election."

Host Katy Tur asked if the video was showing a coordinated plot, and McQuade said it's possible the DOJ is looking into it as one.

"I think that is something that the Justice Department is investigating," she explained. "We know that Michael Flynn proposed using the military to seize voting machines. When that failed, they tried to do it in a one-off manner. We know some of this information in Arizona, at least to this group called the CyberNinjas, even that alone was problematic. If you could find this was coordinated at a high level, that someone like Sidney Powell or someone else close to Trump was coordinating all of this activity, that most certainly could be part of a larger investigation into conspiracy to defraud the United States. That is suggesting that the election was stolen when in fact it was not."

Powell has already been sanctioned by a judge in Michigan for bringing frivolous lawsuits and is facing a number of questions about her integrity in states after the November election.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

And MAGA extremists still want to push the absurd claim that there was "no Russian collusion". Russia calls Trump "our candidate" and helped to install him in 2016.

 
'He is simply incredible': Russian state television gushes over 'our candidate' Donald Trump



Former President Donald Trump's decades-long relationship with the Kremlin has faced intense scrutiny since he announced his run for the White House in 2015.

Intelligence reports and media investigations have unequivocally established established that the 2016 election was the target of a massive disinformation campaign executed by Russian President Vladimir Putin's cyber army of social media trolls. Their objective was to sow discord among the American electorate in order to give Trump, a Republican, the advantage over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

During and after his presidency, Trump has maintained praise of Putin and denied that their coziness had nefarious components.

Putin's cheerleaders, however, have not been shy about their government's support for Trump. The latest instance occurred on Monday when propagandists on Russian state television boasted about their government's adulation of Trump and the investments that Moscow has made in his political future.

"He is simply incredible. Trump is an incredible guy," said Russia 1 host Evgeny Popov.

"I believe there is no real need for us here to rip the masks off European politicians, and American ones to a certain extent, except for our beloved Trump, in whom we place all of our hope that he might sober up America," mused Vitaly Tretyakov, the dean of the Higher School of Television at Moscow's Lomonosov State University.

"As always, our candidate doesn't let us down," added state television host Olga Skabeeva. "We need to support him."

Footage and translation were provided by the Russian Media Monitor.

Watch below via The Daily Beast's Julia Davis:

Julia Davis @JuliaDavisNews

Meanwhile in Russia: watch these highlights from today's state TV shows. The Kremlin's pet propagandists hate America, love Trump, find him "incredible," say they place all of their hope in him and Russia should continue to support "its candidate."

Watch: https://twitter.com/i/status/1567001382648963073



Eight former Defense Secretaries issue a 'thinly veiled indictment' of Trump

Two of Donald Trump's former defense secretaries were among eight former Pentagon chiefs who signed an open letter warning of "an exceptionally challenging civil-military environment."

"The letter does not mention Mr. Trump by name. But in 16 points on the principles that are supposed to define civil-military relations, the signatories issued a thinly veiled indictment of Mr. Trump and the legions of his followers who called on the military to support his false claim that the election was stolen from him," The New York Times reported. "The letter reads like an American high school civics lesson. But in the six years since Mr. Trump entered the White House, the theme of the military’s duty to obey only legal orders has come up frequently. Mr. Trump’s tenure was a turbulent period for the Pentagon in which the president ordered American troops to the southwest border in a standoff against immigrants, riled up a crowd that stormed the Capitol and asked the military to deploy against protesters seeking racial justice."

Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen said the open letter “is not pointed at Trump, but when you hear him talk about Hitler’s generals, well, that’s not who we are."

The book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021" by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked former general and White House chief of staff John Kelly why he could not have loyal generals like the "German generals in World War II."

The New York Times noted that current Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley had faced calls to resign after angering Trump.

"In the summer of 2020, for instance, Mr. Trump summoned General Milley to join him in a walk across a park near the White House where civilians protesting police brutality and racism had just been tear-gassed, so that the president could pose for a photo while holding a Bible," the newspaper reported. "The general apologized later, infuriating the president. General Milley also angered Mr. Trump by asking other senior generals to review routine procedures for launching nuclear weapons during the last days of the Trump administration."

Read More Here:

https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/to-support-and-defend-principles-of-civilian-control-and-best-practices-of-civil-military-relations/