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Author Topic: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2  (Read 290386 times)

Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5400 on: June 22, 2022, 11:00:28 AM »
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Here's another right wing Republican trying to gaslight us again.

Aren't they pathetic? 

1,292 pounds of fentanyl was seized at our southern border in April. That's a good thing because those drugs never made it in the United States.

Bill Hagerty is trying to gaslight us calling the seizing of drugs a "crisis". That's not a "crisis". President Biden's border policies are working to keep dangerous drugs out of America. That's exactly what we want.

What's his ridiculous argument? He says the seizing of drugs in 2022 is a 420% increase compared to April 2020 under Criminal Donald. That means Criminal Donald was failing to keep these dangerous drugs out of America. So in this absurd tweet, Hagerty managed to show the world that Criminal Donald failed to seize fentanyl with his disastrous policies.

President Biden is getting the job done by not allowing these dangerous drugs to enter into America. That also debunks the phony "open border" lie that the radical right pushes each day in the right wing media.   

This is right wing propaganda. All these right wingers push similar talking points like this to gaslight Americans. It's very similar to the official GOP Twitter account that tweeted the same gaslighting lie. The only goal of the GOP is to falsely attack Biden when he's getting the job done.

Absolutely pathetic.       

Senator Bill Hagerty @SenatorHagerty

1,292 pounds of fentanyl—which killed more than 100,000 Americans last year—was seized at our southern border in April—a more than 420% increase compared to April 2020. This is a crisis, and Biden needs to address it now

https://twitter.com/SenatorHagerty/status/1533608821985271810



Trump administration struggles to confront fentanyl crisis
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/fentanyl-epidemic-trump-administration/

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5400 on: June 22, 2022, 11:00:28 AM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5401 on: June 22, 2022, 11:46:13 AM »
Arizona official details threats from Trump supporters: ‘They set up a guillotine for me’

CNN's Erin Burnett interviewed to election official who received threats for failing to go along with Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Burnett interviewed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) and Maricopa County Board of Supervisor's Chair Bill Gates (R).

Benson argued that election officials were emboldened to fight for democracy in the face of the threats.

"We took oaths of office to support and defend the Constitution. We know the truth and law and history of this country is on our side. We know standing up for democracy is what every American needs to do right now so I'm proud to join my colleagues on the front lines even with the threats," Benson said. "In times like this, that is what protecting and preserving democracy requires."

"Look. here's the situation," Gates said. "We got a job to do. We got important elections to run in 2022 and we cannot let these people intimidate us."

"We have to be safe, but the threats have come in. You mentioned many of them before. They set up a guillotine for my colleagues and at the Arizona state capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and we got to press forward," he explained. "I agree with Secretary Benson, I think a lot of us are as inspired and emboldened as ever and seeing new people, young people, who want to get involved in the business of running elections. It's inspiring."

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Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5402 on: June 22, 2022, 12:50:58 PM »
Ron Johnson tried to hand fake elector info to Mike Pence on Jan. 6, panel reveals

A top aide said the Wisconsin Republican senator wanted to give Pence the list of pro-Trump electors as he prepared to certify the 2020 election.



A top aide to Sen. Ron Johnson attempted to arrange a handoff of false, pro-Trump electors from the senator to Mike Pence just minutes before the then-vice president began to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The aide, Sean Riley, told Pence’s legislative director Chris Hodgson that Johnson wanted to hand Pence lists of the fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin for Pence to introduce during the counting of electoral votes that certified Joe Biden’s win. The attempt was revealed in text messages obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee during its fourth public hearing on Tuesday.

“Do not give that to him,” Hodgson replied.

The attempted handoff shows just how much former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to lean on Pence to introduce false slates of electors that could have thrown the 2020 election from Biden to Donald Trump. The committee laid out an intense pressure campaign, led primarily by Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani, to push state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors and override the will of voters in their states.

In video and live testimony, state legislative leaders in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan — all Republicans — described repeated, sometimes daily pressure from Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Michigan State Senate leader Mike Shirkey recalled in video testimony how, after Trump tweeted out his phone number, he received thousands of messages from Trump supporters asking him to appoint Michigan’s electors through the legislature.

Arizona State House speaker Rusty Bowers rejected similar pressure from Trump.

“You are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath,” he recalled saying.

The panel drew a direct connection between the events of Jan. 6 and the months-long effort by Trump and Giuliani to browbeat state legislative leaders. Even without the compliance of those lawmakers, Trump pushed the Republican National Committee to help identify and coordinate false slates of electors in the states.

In fact, Trump had called RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and handed the phone to attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s plan to remain in power, according to newly revealed video of her testimony to the committee. Eastman urged her to help identify false electors to meet and cast votes for Trump on Dec. 14, 2020, when the legitimate members of the Electoral College were required to meet and vote.

“He turned the call over to Mr. Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather contingent electors in case legal challenges that were ongoing change the result,” McDaniel said in video testimony.

Under Trump’s plan, Pence would be presented with competing slates of electors — the official results certified by the governors and those certified by state legislators — and he would assert the extraordinary power to choose which slates to count. But no state legislature responded to Trump’s demand, and Pence, without any genuine controversy, rejected the scheme as illegal.

The legality of the plan was at the heart of Tuesday afternoon’s hearing, led in part by panel member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

“The system held, but barely,” Schiff said in his opening remarks.

During the hearing, another theme emerged: State legislative leaders pleaded with Trump and Giuliani for any evidence to support their sweeping claims of fraud and irregularities. But Giuliani, while insisting the evidence existed, never provided it. Trump attorneys Cleta Mitchell and Eastman discussed the absence of such evidence in emails on Jan. 2 and Jan. 3.

Asked about the text messages displayed by the select committee, Johnson called it a “non-story.”

The senator said he was “aware” that his office had received a package but had “no idea” who delivered it. Nevertheless, he said his office attempted to facilitate the delivery of the package from Johnson to Pence, but ultimately did not after Pence’s team rejected it.

“I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver to the vice president,” Johnson said. “We reached out. They didn’t want it, we didn’t deliver it.”

Johnson said his chief of staff “did the right thing” by attempting to arrange the delivery, adding that it all “took place in a span of a few minutes.”

Notably, Johnson held his own hearing on purported election fraud in mid-December 2020 and was accused by Democrats of spreading misinformation.

Trump-aligned lawyers concocted the effort, leaning on fringe constitutional theory and the guidance of Eastman. He acknowledged in emails obtained by the select committee that the Pence plan would be “dead on arrival” without the backing of state legislatures — yet he pushed ahead anyway, suggesting that the confusion around alternate electors would give Pence enough cover to act.

Trump’s own White House counsel’s office also raised doubts about the plan, according to testimony released by the select panel in court filings. And in the days before Jan. 6, Pence’s chief counsel Greg Jacob engaged in an intense debate with Eastman, contending that not a single justice of the Supreme Court would back his plan — a point he said Eastman reluctantly conceded.

Other witnesses testified about Trump’s pressure on Tuesday, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump famously told on Jan. 2, 2021, to help him “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to win the state. Neither Raffensperger nor GOP legislators in Georgia complied with Trump’s push, and his effort in Georgia triggered an ongoing investigation by the Fulton County district attorney.

Members of Trump’s inner circle began contemplating the notion of turning to state legislatures even before the election was called for Biden. On Nov. 5, 2020, Mitchell — who had been leading preelection preparations for Trump’s legal team — reached out to Eastman with a request.

"John — what would you think of producing a legal memo outlining the constitutional role of state legislators in designating electors?” Mitchell wondered. “Rather than governors, the US Constitution vests that responsibility with state legislators. … why couldn’t legislatures reclaim that constitutional duty, and designate the electors — rather than delegating to governors.”

Eastman wrote a memo later that month, which was then forwarded to the Oval Office by Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, according to documents obtained by the Jan. 6 select committee. As Trump’s legal challenges to the election began to fail and states began certifying Biden’s victory, Eastman began consulting directly with state legislators, encouraging some to simply retabulate their popular votes in order to show Trump in the lead.

The goal was ultimately to present Pence with an apparent controversy: competing slates of electors certified by different government bodies — governors and legislators. Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, told the vice president at the time that had any state legislatures certified an alternative slate the outcome might’ve been different.

"A reasonable argument might further be made that when resolving a dispute between competing electoral slates, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution places a firm thumb on the scale on the side of the State legislature,” he wrote in a memo obtained by POLITICO.

Even as rioters swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and sent Pence, Jacob and lawmakers into hiding, Eastman leaned on Pence to single-handedly delay the count of electoral votes, citing the possibility that the Pennsylvania legislature would reconvene and adopt an alternative slate. But Pence and his team came to view the delay as a violation of the law that governs the transfer of power and the counting of electoral votes.

Eastman’s correspondence throughout the post-election period, including with another pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, shows the two grappling with the challenge of convincing state legislatures to adopt Trump slates of electors and building it into their plans. The two men helped contemplate the Trump campaign’s effort to assemble pro-Trump electors to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, and cast ballots as though they were the true electors from their states. Those false certificates have drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors. Eastman and other Republicans have contended that those meetings were necessary in case any courts sided with Trump and tipped the outcome in his favor.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/21/jan-6-panel-trump-overturn-2020-election-00040816

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5402 on: June 22, 2022, 12:50:58 PM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5403 on: June 22, 2022, 02:40:04 PM »
Trump showed he'd 'go to any length to destroy our democracy': former GOP lawmaker



Former Rep. Francis Rooney (R-FL) on Wednesday delivered an excoriating assessment of former President Donald Trump's actions in the wake of his loss in his 2020 election.

During a panel discussion, Rooney was asked about revelations that Trump campaign officials created phony electors that would be used to overturn the certified results in states he lost to President Joe Biden.

"That tells me that they would go to any length to destroy our American institution of democracy," Rooney said. "This reminds me so much of Chavez in Venezuela when 80 percent of his precincts reported exactly the same vote. I mean, that's not what our country is all about. It's about respecting the elections and process win, lose or draw."

Rooney was also asked about Sen. Ron Johnson's involvement in the fake electors scheme, and he said that he wasn't convinced by his denial of having knowledge of the plot.

"Part of the problem with the people who serve in those jobs is they throw the staff under the bus to protect themselves," he said. "I think it's absurd that he denied that he knew about it and sent the poor staffer to take that over to Pence's office."


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5404 on: June 23, 2022, 12:08:36 AM »
'Everybody knows he's lying': Morning Joe shreds Ron Johnson's defense after he's snared in Trump's conspiracy

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and conservative attorney George Conway aren't buying Sen. Ron Johnson's excuses about his participation in a conspiracy to deliver fake electors to vice president Mike Pence.

The Wisconsin Republican was implicated in Donald Trump's scheme to overturn his election loss during Tuesday's hearing of the House select committee, and Johnson responded to reporters afterward by pretending to be on his phone and then blaming his involvement on staffers.

"Oh, I mean, this is just hysterical, I mean, he's clearly covering up," Conway said. "He's clearly not telling the truth here. But this whole fake elector thing, I mean, it's -- it really is highlighting the fact that this is, you know, criminal fraudulent conspiracy to create false documentation and you have -- you can't hand out counterfeit bills to people saying, well, the bank made a mistake, so this would be real money if the bank hadn't made a mistake. This is exactly the same thing, and the evidence yesterday showed it, Ronna Romney McDaniel's testimony showed. He was all in on the fake elector scheme which involved fraudulent, false documentation. It doesn't matter if he reads that somehow he did or should have won and has all sorts of facts that he claims he should have won."

"He was conspiring to commit -- to throw in false documents," Conway added, "and it's sort of interesting, too, because you have Rudy [Giuliani] saying, we've got all of these legal theories, but no evidence, and then you have a judge out in California, Judge [David] Carter saying this was a coup in search of legal theory. Well, they had coups in search of legal theories that didn't have evidence. I mean, it is absolutely a complete sham. You know if this doesn't show fraudulent intent of these co-conspirators all the way up to Donald Trump I don't know what does."

Johnson claims that an unspecified House intern gave his office an envelope containing fraudulent elector documents and asked his staff to pass it along to Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, but Scarborough -- a former Republican member of the House -- said that explanation strains credibility.

"I think it goes without saying that nobody that ever worked with me would have ever done that on a single vote, certainly would have never passed anything to anybody in leadership, in the House leadership or the Senate leadership, without passing it by me first," Scarborough said. "It just -- it doesn't work that way. I would have people saying, 'Oh, Joe, you're supposed to be so conservative, and yet, you have moderate Republicans and Democrats on your staff, and I go, 'They don't vote, I do.' They go, 'Oh, they're going to impose' -- what are you talking about?"

"Ron Johnson knows that," he added. "Yes, every member -- by the way, you bring up a great point here. I know that's a lie because I served as one of 435 in the little House, but in the House of Lords this definitely never happens, right, and it certainly wouldn't happen with somebody that's been in office for as long as Ron Johnson's been in office. It will never happen that way, so everybody on the Hill, including other Republicans, knows he's lying."

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5404 on: June 23, 2022, 12:08:36 AM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5405 on: June 23, 2022, 12:24:31 AM »
Jan. 6 committee exposes the disturbing consequences of Trump's 2020 lies



The scope of Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election widened in the congressional testimony on June 22 as Republican state legislators, state election officials and local election workers described Trump’s pressure campaigns and bullying that targeted them and led to them facing severe harassment for doing their jobs.

“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” said Ruby Freeman, who, with her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, were election workers at an Atlanta arena and were repeatedly named and smeared by Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for what the men falsely said was an attempt at stealing Georgia votes for Joe Biden.

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?” Freeman continued. “The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me.”

A video of the two women as they resumed processing ballots after an evening break was mischaracterized and widely circulated by Trump’s allies. Giuliani told Georgia’s state Senate that the Black women were criminals. Trump said they were part of a conspiracy to steal the election, which led his supporters to threaten and stalk the women, and even saw vigilantes barge into Freeman’s elderly mother’s home to attempt a “citizen’s arrest” of her and Moss.

The January 6 hearings have shown that it was Trump and his minions—not Democrats, nor state officials who followed their oaths of office, nor local election workers who did their jobs—who plotted to overturn the election, and who embraced lying, ignoring laws, harassment and violence to seize the presidency.

“Donald Trump did not care about the threats of violence. He did not condemn them… He went forward with his fake allegations,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-WY, the panel’s co-chair. “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.”

From a legal standpoint, the hearing of June 22 directly tied Trump to one scheme where complicit Republican Party officials and state office holders knowingly forged and signed fake Electoral College certificates that declared Trump, not Biden, won their state’s votes. That scheme emerged after Trump could not get any Republican governor or GOD-led legislature to reconvene to award him an Electoral College victory despite Biden winning the state’s popular vote.

But what stood out was Trump’s boorish and boundary-breaking harassment of legislator leaders and top election officials who would not bend to his will to overturn their state’s election results. Trump’s ongoing claims that the election was stolen have sparked many copycat candidacies in 2022 among right-wing Republicans. That posturing continued and targeted the panel’s opening witness, underscoring the threat that Trump’s cadre still poses.

Before the hearing began, Trump issued a statement saying that the first witness, Rusty Bowers, the Republican longtime speaker of its House, had personally told Trump in November 2020 that Arizona’s election had been “rigged” for Biden. Bowers was present to describe Trump’s efforts, from receiving phone calls from President Trump to lobbying by his legal team, to push Bowers to launch an unprecedented legislative process to retract Biden’s victory.

“Before we begin with the questions I have prepared for you, I want to ask you about a statement that former President Trump issued, which I received just prior to the hearing,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-CA. “Former President Trump begins by calling you a RINO, Republican in Name Only. He then references a conversation in November 2020, in which he claims that you told him that the election was rigged, and that he had won Arizona… Did you have such a conversation?”

“I did have a conversation with the president. That certainly isn’t it,” Bowers said. “Anywhere, anyone, anytime has said that I said the election was rigged—that would not be true.”

Bowers went on to testify that Trump pushed and then bullied him to convene a special legislative session to revoke Biden’s victory. (Michigan’s Senate President, Republican Mike Shirkey, told the panel the same thing in a videotaped interview: Trump had pushed him to take the steps needed to declare him the state’s Electoral College vote winner.)

Bowers testified that he told Trump that he did not have the authority to do so under Arizona’s state constitution and the federal constitution, and that he would not violate his oath of office to do so. Shirkey told Trump much the same thing.

Then Trump moved on to a second ploy based on an untested legal theory by John Eastman, a lawyer who argued that state legislatures had the power to ignore the popular vote and appoint Electoral College slates of their choosing. The so-called fake-elector plan involved Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, who Trump asked to promote it—another disclosure that was made on June 22.

In that same conversation with Bowers, Trump claimed to speak on behalf of other senior Arizona lawmakers, Bowers recounted, to pressure the speaker to hold a hearing on Eastman’s theory—which would lend it credibility.

“I said to what end? To what end the hearing?” Bowers recounted. “He said, ‘Well, we have heard by an official high up in the Republican legislature that there is a legal theory or a legal ability in Arizona, that you can remove the electors of President Biden and replace them. And we would like to have a legitimate opportunity through the committee… And I said, ‘That’s totally new to me. I’ve never heard of any such thing.’ And he pressed that point.”

Trump’s lie-laced pressure tactics didn’t end there. Giuliani kept lobbying Bowers. Then came more bullying. When Bowers did not budge, Trump supporters went to his home and held menacing protests, he said. The protests occurred while his daughter was very ill at home and would soon pass away.

“We had a daughter who was gravely ill, who was upset by what was happening outside,” he said.

At the hearing on June 22, numerous Republican and Democratic legislators and state election officials described how Trump’s foot soldiers threatened them on social media, published their private contact information online and stalked them outside their homes—which neither Trump nor his team discouraged, as Cheney noted.

The officials who recounted this harassment included Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who testified, Michigan’s Mike Shirkey, a Republican, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, and Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican.

Raffensperger recounted how someone broke into his daughter-in-law’s home after the election, which he attributed to the threats he received. When asked why he didn’t leave his job or cave to Trump, his reply was much the same as Bowers: he felt he had a public duty to oversee a constitutional process even if it meant that his party did not win the White House.

“I knew that we had followed the law, we had followed the Constitution,” Raffensperger said. “You’re doing your job. And that’s what we did.”

But not every witness had a story of valor under duty. Georgia’s Ruby Freeman said that the targeting of her by Trump and Giuliani led to the loss of her business, a loss of privacy and her sense of security. She was afraid to use her name in public, she testified, because she feared it could provoke more harassment.

“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” she said.

And her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, told the committee that she had to leave her job as an election worker after a decade, leave her home and go into hiding—as advised by the FBI—and became deeply depressed. But she was most upset because of the threats made by Trump’s thugs to her grandmother—who called her in a panic when his foot soldiers barged into her house seeking to make a “citizens’ arrest” of her and her mother.

“It was my fault for putting my family in this situation,” she said, referring to her work as an election official.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Schiff replied.

But that morning, Trump was back at it—putting false words into another witness’s mouth, as if nothing mattered except his return to power.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5406 on: June 23, 2022, 04:36:40 AM »
CBS News pics show access British filmmaker had to Trump family around Jan. 6: report

CBS News on Wednesday revealed it has obtained two images from video show the access he had to the Trump family before and after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

"Well, now to some exclusive reporting ahead of tomorrow's Jan. 6 hearing, CBS News has learned that the committee has gained access to footage from inside the White House, both before and after the attack on the Capitol," Nora O'Donnell reported.

"What have we learned?" she asked reporter Robert Costa.

"There are new, breaking developments on the Jan. 6 front. the committee announced today it will hold additional hearings in July because it keeps gathering new evidence," Costa replied.

"Some of that new evidence comes from British filmmaker Alex Holder, who is going to meet with the committee tomorrow morning in a private deposition. CBS News has exclusively obtained two images from his upcoming three-part series called 'Unprecedented.' One shows him interviewing Ivanka Trump, the president's eldest daughter, the other shows him interviewing President Trump," Costa reported.

"He talked to trump both before and after Jan. 6," he explained. "It reveals the access he had to the inside of the Trump inner circle during that period."

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5406 on: June 23, 2022, 04:36:40 AM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #5407 on: June 23, 2022, 05:02:36 AM »
Trump's crazed mob inflicts terror on ordinary Americans



There is so much evidence emerging from the January 6th hearings that it's sometimes hard to wrap your arms around what it all means. They are making a strong case that Donald Trump knew the election was legitimate yet spread the Big Lie that it was stolen anyway. He was also told that his scheme to have his vice president, Mike Pence, overturn the election was illegal and unconstitutional. The committee on Tuesday, during its fourth hearing, laid out how Trump was intimately involved in the pressure campaign to persuade Republican state officials to illegally change the legitimate results and "decertify" the will of the people. Future hearings will discuss the plot to corrupt the Department of Justice(DOJ) and incite the mob to intimidate the joint session of Congress and the vice president into overturning the election.

All roads lead to Trump and his henchmen. It's clear that there were many enablers around him — as even those who resisted internally didn't publicly sound the alarm.

Trump ordered the Republican National Committee to "help" with the "fake elector" scheme, knowing that there was no constitutionally valid alternative, which they were happy to do. Yet the so-called Team Normal surrounding Trump, who knew their leader was staging a coup, simply shrugged and backed away quietly. Lawyers in Trump's orbit testified that they knew the "fake elector" scheme was illegal and unethical and simply washed their hands of it rather than step up to say something.

Nonetheless, there were Republican officials who did their duty and Tuesday's hearings featured three of them.

Arizona's Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers movingly testified to the intense pressure brought to bear on him to use his office to help Trump overturn the election in his state. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger talked about that famous phone call in which Trump asked him to "find" just enough votes for him to win and Gabriel Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer of Raffensperger's office, spoke at length about how the accusations of fraud were disproved over and over again. Unlike most of the people around Trump (and many in the states), these were people who took their oaths of office seriously and refused to do Donald Trump's bidding. Their testimony in that regard was very compelling.

Hovering over all these hearings, however, is the ongoing threat of political violence and that narrative is unfolding right along with the narrative of the coup plot itself. The violence was unleashed long before Jan. 6th and looking back it seems inevitable that it was leading to an insurrection. Tuesday's hearing illustrated how that was felt by the individuals on the receiving end of those threats. Various officials relayed their experiences with threats and harassment at their homes and on their jobs, some of which is ongoing. Bowers's gravely ill daughter and neighbors, for instance, were threatened and he still has video panel trucks running by his house and in his neighborhood calling him a pedophile and pervert. Raffensperger's wife got what he called "sexualized" threats and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was intimidated at her home. These stories can be repeated all over the country as elected officials were harassed for failing to follow Trump's orders to make him the winner of the 2020 election regardless of the legitimate election results.

But that was nothing compared to the horrors inflicted on innocent election workers who were targeted for allegedly cheating on behalf of Joe Biden. None suffered more than Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, both of whom gave testimony to the committee.

In his famous phone call to Raffensperger, Donald Trump called Freeman a "professional vote scammer and hustler." His lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a Georgia legislative hearing that the two women were committing voter fraud, "surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine." It turned out that the "USB ports" (the supposed tech expert meant USB drive) was actually a mint that Freeman passed to her daughter. This disgusting slander was all over right-wing media:

And where did that come from? It started in the far corners of the right-wing fever swamp and ended up on Fox News and in Donald Trump's mouth.

Moss described how her life was turned upside down by what Trump and his followers did to them. Angry Trumpers tried to push through her grandmother's front door saying they were there to make a citizen's arrest. The FBI told Freeman she needed to leave her home because her life was in danger. Both of them are afraid to use their names in public and Moss has quit her job as an election worker along with everyone she worked with on the 2020 election. These women were hounded, harassed and threatened all because Donald Trump's ego wouldn't let him admit he lost the election and many of his followers have lost all common sense and common decency.

The violence of January 6th had been a long time coming, even before the election.

We saw state houses taken over by armed militia "protesting" mask mandates. Public health officials were threatened at their homes. School board members were plagued with taunts of "we know how to find you" at public meetings. Many of these "protesters" are armed.

The RNC even called January 6th "legitimate political discourse." The threat of political violence is now an everyday feature of right-wing political activism.

Trump didn't create this phenomenon. He's just the first president to openly endorse it and coerce the GOP establishment to fully embrace it. The violent rhetoric of the right-wing media was way ahead of him. Recall original gangster Rush Limbaugh who said decades ago now, "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus — living fossils…. " Or consider Ann Coulter when asked what was her biggest ethical dilemma said, "There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'"

Violent rhetoric has been the coin of the realm in right-wing media since Trump was a Democrat. But it's gone into overdrive since he came on the scene and his Big Lie and coup attempt were destined to end up with people getting hurt and killed.

We don't yet know what the committee has uncovered about Trump's knowledge of the various violent plots that were cooked up around January 6th. It's possible he knew nothing of them. But that doesn't absolve him of responsibility for the atmosphere he amplified during his time in office. He not only publicly modeled the bullying and authoritarian style of the mob boss, but he also encouraged his followers to use threats and intimidation to force political acquiescence over democratic means. Of course, they would resort to violence. That's the whole point.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-s-crazed-mob-inflicts-terror-on-ordinary-americans/