Today’s news starts yesterday, when Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to demand he overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia and deliver the state to Trump. Raffensperger apparently recorded the call, keeping it handy in case Trump misrepresented it publicly. This morning, Trump did exactly that, tweeting: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!” Raffensperger retweeted the president’s accusation with the comment: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out[.]”
As I have mentioned before, I have a good friend who spent his career adjacent to and then in the upper ranks of the Imperial Bureaucracy. Specifically, the military wing/ Today he told me that the reason the ten living ex-Secretaries of State wrote the op-ed in the Washington Post is because there is fear that the far right radicals Trump has promoted over at the Pentagon, who are serious Trump Loyalists, are trying to find lower-level military officers or civilian leaders in the military bureaucracy who might be amenable to orchestrating a coup, who they could reach down to as they fire the senior leadership, which will refuse such orders. As a matter of fact, the event was orchestrated by Dick Cheney (of all people). They didn't just "write for the record." They wrote to remind people over at the Pentagon that regardless of who they are, if they got involved in this shenanigan, it would (legally speaking) mean their heads.
Trump cannot pardon himself from state crimes, and he has now committed several state crimes - and one can bet that Governor Kemp is no longer among those who are subservient to him, which means Georgia could do something about this. Also, this was done less than two weeks before there is a new Attorney General at DoJ. No matter how "go along to get along" Biden wants to be, this is not something that can be swept under the rug in the cause of "looking ahead."
It will be surprising if there are not more than one Impeachment Resolution submitted in the House tomorrow. There's also talk of a bipartisan group trying to put together an Official Rebuke, calling on Trump to resign.
By god, finally his moron stupidity led him to go too far. A lifetime of "getting away with it" is coming to an end.
One way or the other, but the end of this year, he's going to be doing 20 years somewhere, or will have fled to either Brazil or Russia (no extradition treaties with both).
There isn't really much to add to this. To my mind, there is very little ambiguity here; people who continue to support Trump and his enablers cannot, with any credibility, claim ignorance as to the meaning and intention of their actions. The only thing supporters of our democratic republic can, or should, do now is vote, stay at home, and hope this meteor from hell doesn't obliterate our country.
Let the venal and the violent take the streets for the next few days, let them declare their intention to overthrow our government. As individuals, we must not meet them in the streets. Instead, our institutions -- police, military, church, courts, and civil government -- must strain themselves to the breaking point to hold our society together.
Hi everyone! I subscribed today, finally, after reading since March. As so many have expressed, Heather’s letters and this community have been a life preserver in the stormy sea of 2020. I feel like I know some of you a little bit, who comment often. I am very grateful to all of you for your generous sharing of info, ideas and feelings... I am regularly inspired, always learning, and even occasionally amused😊 Thank you!
For a while there I thought we were in the denouement of the Trump fright-fest. Turns out we might not have even passed the climax of the story. Good lord when will this end?.....
What befuddles me is: why wouldn't Meadows, at least, have had the premonition that Raffensberger would be recording the phone call, given Trump's Roy-Cohn-ish penchant for threats? He can't be that stupid. Or can he? Maybe the White House crazy is literally contagious.
I hope this elicits a change of attitude on the part of the incoming Biden team as regards "moving forward" from the Trump years by quickly putting his malfeasances out of America's collective mind. There's no way to parse this phone call other than as a clear case of attempted election fraud on the part of the highest elected official in the land. Biden's attorney general -- and I hope it's Preet Bharara -- needs to pursue Trump and his whole sick crew with the determination of the Furies. If this does not happen in the first year of the Biden administration, he is setting himself up for failure. Jes' sayin'.....
I hate that we cannot edit. I deleted, so I could make a correction.
Buckle up everyone, this week is going to be one heck of a ride. Wow! Committing criminal acts as if no one cares what he does. Oh, wait a minute. He's gotten away with this type of behavior all of his life and last year during the Impeachment trial in the Senate. Of course, he will continue to be brazen in his actions. He knows he will get away with it, and to that I say the new DOJ starting on January 20th needs to begin the process of holding these people to account. Georgia law was broken by Trump and all on that call, and Georgia as a state could absolutely charge them on January 21st, correct? The House and the Senate on January 21st need to call out and name every single member of congress involved in this clear and unmistakable attempt at sedition. The Constitution clearly gives remedy to such behavior in Amendment 14 Section 5 - if these members are not going to be unseated and prevented from ever holding office again, then they should absolutely be stripped of all roles in committees, denied access to classified information that other members of Congress in good standing would be entitled to have, and introduced as Seditionist, TX Sen. Ted Cruz. (wishful thinking, but wearing that S on their title is warranted). These people must be held to account if trust in our government and the rule of law is to be restored. When people of power continue to get away with criminal acts that the average person would be prosecuted for, especially people of color who would be and are always prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, it is hard for the main street American to trust the system.
As I understand the law, if Raffensperger did not inform all parties he was recording the call, the recording cannot be used as evidence before a grand jury or court. (The court of public opinion is quite another matter.) Since Trump's lawyers were so incompetent as to allow him to make the call in the first place, and to possibly incriminate themselves by listening in, maybe they wouldn't have objected to it being recorded. A trifecta of legal incompetence.
That said...
Shouldn't a Georgia or federal grand jury hear evidence for a possible indictment on federal and/or state charges of election tampering immediately, as in today, against lawyers and staff who participated in the call? (Disbarment proceedings should be scheduled by lunchtime.) In sixteen days presidential immunity ends for Trump, and the grand jury(s) can consider him for indictment as well.
SDNY attorneys might start screaming, "We get him first! We get him first!"
I am glad that Professor Richardson is recording these events, giving context while laying out the facts.
These Letters can serve as a guide when Trump is finally gone, whether he resigns before January 20th and is pardoned by Mike – the scenario I believe is likely – or exits grumbling and threatening into the cold, January sky. They are a roadmap to name and hold accountable all those who have been accessories to his efforts.
He has behaved criminally and so have many Trumpist elected and appointed officials. There needs to be accountability. I don’t care that Tom Cotton is encouraging his colleagues to refrain from challenging the votes this week. He voted to acquit – that is enough, IMHO, to make him ineligible to hold an office of public trust in the country.
We must be very wary of Cotton, Hawley and the other Ivy Assassins who people the government at present. They are as dangerous to liberty as Trump, perhaps more so, packaged as they are in the laurel wreaths of our most prestigious institutions of higher learning.
The devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin' for a soul to steal, he was in a bind because he was way behind, and was willing to make deal...CDB
They say art imitates life...in this case it pre-saged life...I give Brad R and his lawyer credit for standing up to an hour of an onslaught of stream of concisnous rambling puncuated by brief pauses to make thinly veiled requests to falsify American election results.
The tRumpists will simply ignore what he tried to do and blame Brad R. Hopefully the courts will get all over it. I suspect Biden will let the state courts handle it; why give 45 any more air time at the federal level than needed...Biden needs to get his admin up and running quickly...best to let the mad dog get buried by NYS and GA.
I agree with another post about letting the protesters rage and not confront them...at some point they will get tired and go home. Hopefully there is no property damage and no one gets hurt.
The effect of all the misinformation really bothers me...70 plus million people have been completely saturatrd with the koolaid...how we can de-program them all is beyond me...
They say our President is the most powerful man in the world...for the next 16 days he is the most dangerous...I hope all our military leaders keep their backbone, and 45 keeps digging himself in deeper without doing any real harm.
Praying for Democratic victories in GA runoffs...and you KNOW 45 will call that out as fraudulent if it does happen.
All my elected Congressional reps are Republicans. I've already emailed Senators Cornyn and Cruz, not that it'll do any good. My rep in the House did not sign onto the TX lawsuit; in fact, he wrote strongly against it. I hope that translates into not being one of the 100+ House members planning to contest the election.
What more shall I do? Letters to the local newspaper? I donated to Fair Fight (and now receive gobs of emails everyday asking for more money.)
So many concerns: the obstructed transition process, the Russian hacking, possible loss of peaceful transfer of power, Covid-19 death toll and botched vaccination distribution, etc.
I long ago gave up on Trump being the adult in the room -- I expect nothing "presidential" of him; but the sycophants and obstructionists that enable him must be held accountable.
For the five years we have had to live with Trump’s erratic behavior and mood swings, there is one consistent pattern as predictable as the rising sun - his accusations mirror (and serve as a smokescreen for) his own misbehavior. He calls others liars when he’s about to tell a whopper, complains about “fake news” when he is peddling malarky, accuses others of cheating when he is breaking the rules. Does this pattern hold regarding his endless election fraud allegations? After all, he is the one candidate in the last two national elections whose proportion of the vote in battleground states far exceeded multiple polls. Maybe the Ds in Congress ought to take-up the latest Kamikaze Caucus calls for a commission to investigate election fraud, expanding it to all 50 states, making it bipartisan, inviting state secretaries of state to assist, appointing adults from both sides of the aisle, and for good measure expanding its scope to include voter suppression.
This is an important analysis of The Phone Call from Josh Marshall at TPM:
As with the President’s “perfect call” with President Zelensky of Ukraine, the Raffensperger call is so transparent and damning it rather defies commentary. What more is t here to say? The call is reminiscent of descriptions of Trump calls and ploys going back decades. I’ve actually been in calls like this with angry CEOs. One of them I remember most palpably was with a New York richie who’s a pal of the President’s. They’ve been puffed up on affirmations and theories by their yes-men and your job is to listen to them vent and yell.
I’ve said before that I don’t think Trump ‘believes’ anything in the way you or I might mean the term. We have things we believe and things which advantage us. Much of the moral calculus of our lives revolves around how we resolve the conflicts between the two. The two don’t exist as separate domains for Donald Trump. He’s like a particular, avaricious kind of salesman. He says and embraces what helps him. Asking whether he thinks this or that claim is ‘true’ would make no more sense to him than asking a novelist whether her latest chapter is ‘true’.
Listening to the audio or reading the words in this call the image is of an omnivore, a predator moving forward. He rattles off a litany of rumors, factoids, propaganda, lies which his toad ies and sycophants have been plying him with for months. But he’s not deluded. They’re simply a map, a storyline to guide his aggression and appetite for power, which emanate from the deepest depths of his being. He pitches from one side to the other, between aggressive and sullen, threatening and sarcastic. Hungry and desperate. Predatory.
As I mentioned earlier, perhaps the most striking thing about this transcript is not the criminal conduct. That’s not surprising. We’ve seen this from Trump many times before. It is that he still believes he can remain President and that enough threats or gifts can make that a reality. This is a private call, not playing to the Trumpite masses to build a post-presidential grievance movement. This portends a chaotic and quite likely violent final two weeks of his presidency.
This is about more than losing power or the prestige of the presidency. This is more existential. Leaving the White House is a terrifying vulnerability.
I was in my 20s during Watergate. I never expected to see the likes again. Well, as you said so well, this makes Watergate look quaint! We are in for an interesting few weeks. Lord help us!
It is interesting that we now have lawyers participating in and enabling crimes in the state of Georgia. First, I would suggest writing a brief email to Jay Rothman, CEO of Foley Lardner LLP - jrothman@foley.com, Cleta Mitchell's law firm regarding the behavior of a partner in the firm. Second, she is admitted to practice in DC and Oklahoma. Here is where to file a complaint about her behavior for the DC bar -https://www.dcbar.org/attorney-discipline/office-of-disciplinary-counsel/filing-a-complaint. If she is such a wonderful election lawyer, it is time to see her chops as a criminal defendant.
As I have mentioned before, I have a good friend who spent his career adjacent to and then in the upper ranks of the Imperial Bureaucracy. Specifically, the military wing/ Today he told me that the reason the ten living ex-Secretaries of State wrote the op-ed in the Washington Post is because there is fear that the far right radicals Trump has promoted over at the Pentagon, who are serious Trump Loyalists, are trying to find lower-level military officers or civilian leaders in the military bureaucracy who might be amenable to orchestrating a coup, who they could reach down to as they fire the senior leadership, which will refuse such orders. As a matter of fact, the event was orchestrated by Dick Cheney (of all people). They didn't just "write for the record." They wrote to remind people over at the Pentagon that regardless of who they are, if they got involved in this shenanigan, it would (legally speaking) mean their heads.
Trump cannot pardon himself from state crimes, and he has now committed several state crimes - and one can bet that Governor Kemp is no longer among those who are subservient to him, which means Georgia could do something about this. Also, this was done less than two weeks before there is a new Attorney General at DoJ. No matter how "go along to get along" Biden wants to be, this is not something that can be swept under the rug in the cause of "looking ahead."
It will be surprising if there are not more than one Impeachment Resolution submitted in the House tomorrow. There's also talk of a bipartisan group trying to put together an Official Rebuke, calling on Trump to resign.
By god, finally his moron stupidity led him to go too far. A lifetime of "getting away with it" is coming to an end.
One way or the other, but the end of this year, he's going to be doing 20 years somewhere, or will have fled to either Brazil or Russia (no extradition treaties with both).
There isn't really much to add to this. To my mind, there is very little ambiguity here; people who continue to support Trump and his enablers cannot, with any credibility, claim ignorance as to the meaning and intention of their actions. The only thing supporters of our democratic republic can, or should, do now is vote, stay at home, and hope this meteor from hell doesn't obliterate our country.
Let the venal and the violent take the streets for the next few days, let them declare their intention to overthrow our government. As individuals, we must not meet them in the streets. Instead, our institutions -- police, military, church, courts, and civil government -- must strain themselves to the breaking point to hold our society together.
Vote. Pray. Love each other. Hold fast to peace.
Hi everyone! I subscribed today, finally, after reading since March. As so many have expressed, Heather’s letters and this community have been a life preserver in the stormy sea of 2020. I feel like I know some of you a little bit, who comment often. I am very grateful to all of you for your generous sharing of info, ideas and feelings... I am regularly inspired, always learning, and even occasionally amused😊 Thank you!
For a while there I thought we were in the denouement of the Trump fright-fest. Turns out we might not have even passed the climax of the story. Good lord when will this end?.....
What befuddles me is: why wouldn't Meadows, at least, have had the premonition that Raffensberger would be recording the phone call, given Trump's Roy-Cohn-ish penchant for threats? He can't be that stupid. Or can he? Maybe the White House crazy is literally contagious.
I hope this elicits a change of attitude on the part of the incoming Biden team as regards "moving forward" from the Trump years by quickly putting his malfeasances out of America's collective mind. There's no way to parse this phone call other than as a clear case of attempted election fraud on the part of the highest elected official in the land. Biden's attorney general -- and I hope it's Preet Bharara -- needs to pursue Trump and his whole sick crew with the determination of the Furies. If this does not happen in the first year of the Biden administration, he is setting himself up for failure. Jes' sayin'.....
I hate that we cannot edit. I deleted, so I could make a correction.
Buckle up everyone, this week is going to be one heck of a ride. Wow! Committing criminal acts as if no one cares what he does. Oh, wait a minute. He's gotten away with this type of behavior all of his life and last year during the Impeachment trial in the Senate. Of course, he will continue to be brazen in his actions. He knows he will get away with it, and to that I say the new DOJ starting on January 20th needs to begin the process of holding these people to account. Georgia law was broken by Trump and all on that call, and Georgia as a state could absolutely charge them on January 21st, correct? The House and the Senate on January 21st need to call out and name every single member of congress involved in this clear and unmistakable attempt at sedition. The Constitution clearly gives remedy to such behavior in Amendment 14 Section 5 - if these members are not going to be unseated and prevented from ever holding office again, then they should absolutely be stripped of all roles in committees, denied access to classified information that other members of Congress in good standing would be entitled to have, and introduced as Seditionist, TX Sen. Ted Cruz. (wishful thinking, but wearing that S on their title is warranted). These people must be held to account if trust in our government and the rule of law is to be restored. When people of power continue to get away with criminal acts that the average person would be prosecuted for, especially people of color who would be and are always prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, it is hard for the main street American to trust the system.
As I understand the law, if Raffensperger did not inform all parties he was recording the call, the recording cannot be used as evidence before a grand jury or court. (The court of public opinion is quite another matter.) Since Trump's lawyers were so incompetent as to allow him to make the call in the first place, and to possibly incriminate themselves by listening in, maybe they wouldn't have objected to it being recorded. A trifecta of legal incompetence.
That said...
Shouldn't a Georgia or federal grand jury hear evidence for a possible indictment on federal and/or state charges of election tampering immediately, as in today, against lawyers and staff who participated in the call? (Disbarment proceedings should be scheduled by lunchtime.) In sixteen days presidential immunity ends for Trump, and the grand jury(s) can consider him for indictment as well.
SDNY attorneys might start screaming, "We get him first! We get him first!"
I am glad that Professor Richardson is recording these events, giving context while laying out the facts.
These Letters can serve as a guide when Trump is finally gone, whether he resigns before January 20th and is pardoned by Mike – the scenario I believe is likely – or exits grumbling and threatening into the cold, January sky. They are a roadmap to name and hold accountable all those who have been accessories to his efforts.
He has behaved criminally and so have many Trumpist elected and appointed officials. There needs to be accountability. I don’t care that Tom Cotton is encouraging his colleagues to refrain from challenging the votes this week. He voted to acquit – that is enough, IMHO, to make him ineligible to hold an office of public trust in the country.
We must be very wary of Cotton, Hawley and the other Ivy Assassins who people the government at present. They are as dangerous to liberty as Trump, perhaps more so, packaged as they are in the laurel wreaths of our most prestigious institutions of higher learning.
GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has saved our republic for now. Say his name. Brad Raffensperger-
The devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin' for a soul to steal, he was in a bind because he was way behind, and was willing to make deal...CDB
They say art imitates life...in this case it pre-saged life...I give Brad R and his lawyer credit for standing up to an hour of an onslaught of stream of concisnous rambling puncuated by brief pauses to make thinly veiled requests to falsify American election results.
The tRumpists will simply ignore what he tried to do and blame Brad R. Hopefully the courts will get all over it. I suspect Biden will let the state courts handle it; why give 45 any more air time at the federal level than needed...Biden needs to get his admin up and running quickly...best to let the mad dog get buried by NYS and GA.
I agree with another post about letting the protesters rage and not confront them...at some point they will get tired and go home. Hopefully there is no property damage and no one gets hurt.
The effect of all the misinformation really bothers me...70 plus million people have been completely saturatrd with the koolaid...how we can de-program them all is beyond me...
They say our President is the most powerful man in the world...for the next 16 days he is the most dangerous...I hope all our military leaders keep their backbone, and 45 keeps digging himself in deeper without doing any real harm.
Praying for Democratic victories in GA runoffs...and you KNOW 45 will call that out as fraudulent if it does happen.
Oh well...time for breakfast...
What more shall we do in response?
All my elected Congressional reps are Republicans. I've already emailed Senators Cornyn and Cruz, not that it'll do any good. My rep in the House did not sign onto the TX lawsuit; in fact, he wrote strongly against it. I hope that translates into not being one of the 100+ House members planning to contest the election.
What more shall I do? Letters to the local newspaper? I donated to Fair Fight (and now receive gobs of emails everyday asking for more money.)
So many concerns: the obstructed transition process, the Russian hacking, possible loss of peaceful transfer of power, Covid-19 death toll and botched vaccination distribution, etc.
I long ago gave up on Trump being the adult in the room -- I expect nothing "presidential" of him; but the sycophants and obstructionists that enable him must be held accountable.
For the five years we have had to live with Trump’s erratic behavior and mood swings, there is one consistent pattern as predictable as the rising sun - his accusations mirror (and serve as a smokescreen for) his own misbehavior. He calls others liars when he’s about to tell a whopper, complains about “fake news” when he is peddling malarky, accuses others of cheating when he is breaking the rules. Does this pattern hold regarding his endless election fraud allegations? After all, he is the one candidate in the last two national elections whose proportion of the vote in battleground states far exceeded multiple polls. Maybe the Ds in Congress ought to take-up the latest Kamikaze Caucus calls for a commission to investigate election fraud, expanding it to all 50 states, making it bipartisan, inviting state secretaries of state to assist, appointing adults from both sides of the aisle, and for good measure expanding its scope to include voter suppression.
This is an important analysis of The Phone Call from Josh Marshall at TPM:
As with the President’s “perfect call” with President Zelensky of Ukraine, the Raffensperger call is so transparent and damning it rather defies commentary. What more is t here to say? The call is reminiscent of descriptions of Trump calls and ploys going back decades. I’ve actually been in calls like this with angry CEOs. One of them I remember most palpably was with a New York richie who’s a pal of the President’s. They’ve been puffed up on affirmations and theories by their yes-men and your job is to listen to them vent and yell.
I’ve said before that I don’t think Trump ‘believes’ anything in the way you or I might mean the term. We have things we believe and things which advantage us. Much of the moral calculus of our lives revolves around how we resolve the conflicts between the two. The two don’t exist as separate domains for Donald Trump. He’s like a particular, avaricious kind of salesman. He says and embraces what helps him. Asking whether he thinks this or that claim is ‘true’ would make no more sense to him than asking a novelist whether her latest chapter is ‘true’.
Listening to the audio or reading the words in this call the image is of an omnivore, a predator moving forward. He rattles off a litany of rumors, factoids, propaganda, lies which his toad ies and sycophants have been plying him with for months. But he’s not deluded. They’re simply a map, a storyline to guide his aggression and appetite for power, which emanate from the deepest depths of his being. He pitches from one side to the other, between aggressive and sullen, threatening and sarcastic. Hungry and desperate. Predatory.
As I mentioned earlier, perhaps the most striking thing about this transcript is not the criminal conduct. That’s not surprising. We’ve seen this from Trump many times before. It is that he still believes he can remain President and that enough threats or gifts can make that a reality. This is a private call, not playing to the Trumpite masses to build a post-presidential grievance movement. This portends a chaotic and quite likely violent final two weeks of his presidency.
This is about more than losing power or the prestige of the presidency. This is more existential. Leaving the White House is a terrifying vulnerability.
When is treason treason in this country?
Maybe Raffensperger should get the medal of freedom award instead of the undeserving Nunes and Johnson. A day that seems like years!
I was in my 20s during Watergate. I never expected to see the likes again. Well, as you said so well, this makes Watergate look quaint! We are in for an interesting few weeks. Lord help us!
It is interesting that we now have lawyers participating in and enabling crimes in the state of Georgia. First, I would suggest writing a brief email to Jay Rothman, CEO of Foley Lardner LLP - jrothman@foley.com, Cleta Mitchell's law firm regarding the behavior of a partner in the firm. Second, she is admitted to practice in DC and Oklahoma. Here is where to file a complaint about her behavior for the DC bar -https://www.dcbar.org/attorney-discipline/office-of-disciplinary-counsel/filing-a-complaint. If she is such a wonderful election lawyer, it is time to see her chops as a criminal defendant.