I Guess it's Time to Discuss January 6th

[Lloyd]

If anyone has an Atlantic subscription, Romney has an opinion piece today, July 4.

Here's the pdf of the Romney piece
http://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/62c35aabc0230/Romney.PDF


Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™

[Chuck Naill]

If anyone has an Atlantic subscription, Romney has an opinion piece today, July 4.

Here's the pdf of the Romney piece
http://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/62c35aabc0230/Romney.PDF


Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™

Best I can do brother.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/...u-s-incurable/

[TSherbs]

Here's a recent author on Mark Meadows, as WH Chief of Staff:

After Trump hires his fourth CHief of Staff, more than any other president in a single term...

"What he wanted is what he got ultimately in Mark Meadows, which is a sycophant," Whipple said of Trump's approach to the job. "I think he was less a chief of staff than a kind of glad-handing maitre d' who tried to please Trump in every way. And, in fact, he told basically everybody what they wanted to hear, not just Trump. He was and is a spineless character and the polar opposite of the best chiefs."

from https://www.businessinsider.com/mark...whipple-2022-6

[Chuck Naill]

I just brought myself up to date on Meadows. He has had an interesting rise to power. His actions during the pandemic regarding masking and experts are probably why he would be considered a sycophant.

[Chuck Naill]

Lets enjoy it while we can.
"Seven advisers and allies of Donald J. Trump, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham, were subpoenaed on Tuesday in the ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia of election interference by Mr. Trump and his associates. The move was the latest sign that the investigation has entangled a number of prominent members of Mr. Trump’s orbit, and may cloud the future for the former president.

The subpoenas underscore the breadth of the investigation by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta. She is weighing a range of charges, according to legal filings, including racketeering and conspiracy, and her inquiry has encompassed witnesses from beyond the state. "

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/u...n-georgia.html

[Chip]

The right-wing gospel about giving more power to the states can cut both ways.

[dneal]

The right-wing gospel about giving more power to the states can cut both ways.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

[Chuck Naill]

The right-wing gospel about giving more power to the states can cut both ways.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

It can be a bad thing @dneal or whatever your hidden identity is.

[TSherbs]

Mick Mulvaney has now published comments against Trump re January 6th: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/06/polit...tee/index.html

If Trump were to be president again, who would agree to serve in his cabinet and in the West Wing? Are the sycophants already lining up?

[Chuck Naill]

Mick Mulvaney has now published comments against Trump re January 6th: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/06/polit...tee/index.html

If Trump were to be president again, who would agree to serve in his cabinet and in the West Wing? Are the sycophants already lining up?

He’s just agreeing with what you and i always knew, Ted

[TSherbs]

Mick Mulvaney has now published comments against Trump re January 6th: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/06/polit...tee/index.html

If Trump were to be president again, who would agree to serve in his cabinet and in the West Wing? Are the sycophants already lining up?

He’s just agreeing with what you and i always knew, Ted

Yes, but it is significant that it is Mulvaney this time.

Sent from my moto g power using Tapatalk

[Chuck Naill]

Aquilino Gonell, a member of the Capitol Police


"After the riot, I received a Congressional Gold Medal and was recently named a Great Immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation. After recently passing the lieutenant’s test, I hoped to be promoted. Instead, on the day of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, I was heartbroken to hear my doctors tell me that at 43, I should no longer work with the police force.

The physical and emotional damage I sustained on Jan. 6 not only cut short my career, it has upended my life. Five of my colleagues in law enforcement died and more than 850 rioters were arrested. So many families have been ruined because of one man’s lust for power.

Even more galling are the Republicans who still refuse to provide testimony under oath and instead dangerously downplay how close we came to losing our democracy. I applaud the courage of the witnesses who’ve come forward to tell the truth. I know from personal experience — I have given testimony several times about that day to Congress, to the F.B.I. and in court — how distressing it can be. I just wish we all had been able to testify sooner, right after Jan. 6, when we might have had more impact.

The enabling of Mr. Trump needs to stop now. He should not only be banned from running for any other government office, he should never be allowed near the White House again. I believe he betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution, and it was to the detriment of me, my colleagues and all Americans, whom he was supposed to protect."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/o...smid=url-share

[TSherbs]

Boom.

Sent from my moto g power using Tapatalk

[Chuck Naill]

Not sure why, I guess Cassidy Hutchenson, but my thoughts went to Monica Lewinsky and wondering why she was never allowed to provide her account to congress.

[Chip]

So you were in a drug daze or watching sports?

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nyti...ewinsky_1.html

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nyti...ewinsky_2.html

[Chuck Naill]

I’m hoping to catch the broadcast tomorrow. What Trump did and didn’t do for three hours will be interesting to learn.

[Chuck Naill]

Jury tampering by Trump. Republicans are being in tire. It sure took them a while to see what many of us knew in 2015.

Anyone here considering Cheney and Kitzinger? I am impressed.

[TSherbs]

Jury tampering by Trump.

I don't know. Is an unanswered call a form of tampering?

[Chuck Naill]

An abstract from Heather Cox Richardson’s post today regarding Steve Bannon. I remember @dneal swooning over Bannon. He’ll wet his pants over Bannon’s f bomb.


“Trump knew that Democratic mail in ballots would show up in the vote totals later than Republican votes cast on election day, “[a]nd Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said. “That’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner…. So when you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” he said. “You’re going to have antifa, crazy. The media, crazy. The courts are crazy. And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting sh*t out: ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.'”

And, Bannon continued: “Here’s the thing. After then, Trump never has to go to a voter again…. He’s gonna say ‘F*ck you. How about that?’ Because…he’s done his last election. Oh, he’s going to be off the chain—he’s gonna be crazy.”

[TSherbs]

Despite Bannon's being a slimy political snake and a grifter, here is a good column about reasonable caution in exercising contempt of Congress charges:

Wait, What? (Atlantic)
"The Trump Enablers Truly in Contempt of Congress"
By Molly Jong-Fast

Over the weekend we learned that Donald Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon had written to the January 6 committee indicating that he might, after all, be willing to testify. Bannon, who has been indicted for contempt of Congress, had previously claimed to be bound by executive privilege—though no court has accepted that argument—but he now presented a letter from the former president granting a waiver. Indicating perhaps how seriously he took the committee’s work, Bannon chose to participate in a podcast with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani rather than appear at a court hearing yesterday on the contempt charge.

“Congress should not fall for the Bannon-Trump ploy of the withdrawal of a nonexistent privilege,” Norm Eisen, a former ambassador to the Czech Republic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. “Compliance does not purge criminal contempt as a matter of law, and Bannon should not be shown any leniency unless he tells the whole truth.”

What of other Trump associates who have refused to obey the committee’s subpoenas and testify? Only the former trade adviser Peter Navarro faces charges and risks the mandatory minimum of a month in prison if found guilty. The Department of Justice has declined to follow up on the committee’s other referrals—most notably, of Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. Why this hesitancy to prosecute contempt of Congress?

One explanation may go back to what has come to be seen as one of the darkest episodes in congressional history, which involved my own grandfather: the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC was established in the late 1930s to investigate subversive political activity—ostensibly, at first, of both the fascist and communist varieties. By the late ’40s, however, with the Cold War under way, the committee was focused almost exclusively on unmasking alleged communist plots. Through the ’50s, HUAC’s work ran in parallel to Joseph McCarthy’s Senate hearings, which promoted Red Scare paranoia.

My grandfather, the author Howard Fast, came to HUAC’s attention through his work for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, a group set up in 1941 to fund care for refugees from Franco after the Spanish Civil War. The organization had a fundraising arm called the Spanish Refugee Appeal, which my grandfather learned about, he told me, from a friend, the playwright Lillian Hellman, who was the partner of Dashiell Hammett. My grandfather was then working in Hollywood, after a wartime stint at the Voice of America. (According to family lore, Hammett also had an affair with my grandmother, Bette Fast.)

Others involved in the refugee appeal included Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, Dalton Trumbo, Leonard Bernstein, and Langston Hughes; the group held parties and dinners in Hollywood to raise money for civil-war orphans. But to the Red Scare witch hunters, the refugee committee was a communist front organization. Some of those involved were communists—my grandfather, certainly—but by no means all. In April 1946, a year or so before HUAC went after the Hollywood Ten, the House voted to refer the refugee committee’s board, my grandfather included, for criminal prosecution for refusing to cooperate with HUAC.

Action from the Justice Department was swift. According to The New York Times, “All of them were held in contempt,” and most were jailed, some for as long as a year (my grandfather served three months in federal prison). My grandfather later also appeared before McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee, and as he wrote: “Each time I called upon the protection of the Fifth Amendment … I demanded from the Senators the right to state why I was using this privilege. They were almost hysterical in their unwillingness to grant me that right. The hearing was being televised, and they had no desire to allow an explanation of the beginnings of the Fifth Amendment to go out over the air to millions of Americans.”

Jail and blacklisting ruined many lives, though not, fortunately, my grandfather’s. He began writing Spartacus in prison and found a way to self-publish the book during the blacklist under a pseudonym. It came out via an imprint that he and my grandmother scraped together their savings to create, which they named the Blue Heron Press—after thinking better of naming it the Red Herring Press.

My grandfather saved his explanation for taking the Fifth that the senators wouldn’t hear for his 1990 memoir, Being Red: “Some of the best and richest parts of our heritage exist because the early dissenters were willing to fight for principles, face prison, and if necessary, death. Unless we realize that this is also the case with the dissenters of today, we will find that we have sold our entire democratic heritage for a mess of very poor pottage.”

The congressional power to subpoena witnesses and punish those who refuse to comply needs to be used carefully, and the prosecutions of those who defied HUAC and McCarthy are viewed by many as a gross overreach that infringed upon citizens’ constitutional rights. But there is a sharp difference between then and now. Whereas my grandfather was jailed for refusing to divulge details of charitable work for orphans—because anything anti-fascist was seen as suspect—Steve Bannon was indicted for refusing to share what he knew of an actual fascist plot against America. Bannon has offered no defense of our “democratic heritage,” but has instead hidden behind the former president’s dubious assertion of executive privilege. Now Bannon appears to be seeking to trade belated cooperation to get the earlier charge of contempt dropped.

“Unlike your grandfather, who showed up, actually appeared before Congress, and asserted constitutional and other privileges on a principled basis, Bannon failed to show at all and is utterly unscrupulous,” Eisen said. “He should be prosecuted, and a jury will convict him.”

The part Congress played in the witch hunts of the ’40s and ’50s deserves the infamy it has attracted down the years. But that is no excuse for the Department of Justice to soft-pedal action against those who prefer to protect their political boss rather than the Constitution. Mark Meadows was the chief of staff for the most powerful man in the world, a president who was trying to overturn the result of a democratic election in order to stay in office illegally and illegitimately. Those who advised, aided, and abetted the former president in the run-up to January 6 but refuse to testify should definitely be held in contempt.