Conspiracies, Truths, and the Difficulty of Nailing Trump
Ace sleuths with Internet Bureau of Investigation(IBI) ™ are running around in circles this week, typing like mad on their devices, insisting that Important Stuff is about to come down in the inquiries into what happened and who is responsible for the January 6th insurrection.
Two weeks ago these very same Twitterzens were screaming for Stephen Bannon’s head on a stick after he refused a subpoena from the House Select Committee. “Lock him up.” they said alternating with bleats about how either the Congress or the Department of Justice didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to prosecute.
There are good reasons to pursue Mr. Bannon. But the reality is he will drag things out for months, eventually showing up to take the Fifth Amendment to any relevant questions.
https://twitter.com/RepLizCheney/status/1451229856407113733?s=20
On Monday, a Rolling Stone article claimed there are witnesses who are cooperating with the government about the involvement of multiple members of Congress in planning former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his election loss, and the January 6 protests that ended in violence.
Interestingly enough, no other major media have been able to track down their sources, so coverage has been limited to saying Rolling Stone ran with an unverified story. This is being taken as by IBI agents as evidence of mass media censorship and/or collusion.
Based on the behavior and public statements coming from Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks (who wore body armor on January 6), Madison Cawthorn, and Louie Gohmert, there is something there. I’ll wait to see what the congressional staffers who are reportedly cooperating with investigators have to say.
The best chronicle of these events I’ve seen was published by ProPublica on June 25. It described how events leading up to the insurrection created a coalition of extremists:
Right-wing leaders who had once known each other only peripherally were now feeling a deeper sense of camaraderie. In an interview, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio described how he felt as he walked alongside Jones through the crowds assembled in Washington on Nov. 14, after Jones had asked the Proud Boys to act as his informal bodyguards.
“That was the moment we really united everybody under one banner,” he said. “That everyone thought, ‘Fuck you, this is what we can do.’” According to Tarrio, the Proud Boys nearly tripled in numbers around this time, bringing in over 20,000 new members. “November was the seed that sparked that flower on Jan. 6,” he said.
The crowds impressed people like Tom Van Flein, chief of staff for Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. Van Flein told ProPublica he kept in regular contact with Alexander while Gosar led the effort in Congress to shoot down the election certification. “Ali was very talented and put on some very good rallies on short notice," Van Flein said. “Great turnout.”
Other developments in the case point to an intensification of both the Congressional and DOJ inquiries.
Individuals who have been flagged as organizers for both the Stop The Steal rally and the storming of the Capitol building will be testifying before Congress for next few days. Three of the eight people subpoenaed have been granted short postponements, suggesting that they have been more cooperative than others.
The Union-Tribune reports that an Ocean Beach resident, Philip James Weisbecker, was arrested last week after two tipsters contacted the FBI and sent photos and CNN screenshots placing him in the Capitol building on January 6.
Weisbecker is quite the character, having told investigators he believes Donald Trump is the true president and that the fellow San Diegan killed by police during the insurrection— Ashli Babbitt — never existed,
***
The existence of a “war room” at the Willard Hotel was confirmed on Monday in an interview with Washington Post reporter Robert Costa and Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward, his colleague and co-author of their new book Peril,
From the Washington Post:
They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.
The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.
They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
The working group took calls from the President, and finally decided on a strategy of getting Vice President Mike Pence to delay counting the electoral votes, giving the states time to resolve concerns about voting irregularities.
Pence wasn’t convinced of the legality of the move. Still, they held onto the possibility he might change his mind.
On January 6, John Eastman spoke at the rally on the Ellipse.
“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o’clock he let the legislatures of the states look into this so that we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not! We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question!”
Subsequent to the violence of January 6, Eastman walked back a claim that his memo amounted to a plan of action in a National Review interview, saying, “Anybody who thinks that that’s a viable strategy is crazy.”
The trouble with these hard core Trumpanistas is that they can’t pass up a chance to sound important. Reporter Lauren Windsor got Eastman on videotape saying a bunch of really stupid stuff.
https://twitter.com/lawindsor/status/1453365068779835393?s=20
We should all look forward to his testimony before the House Select Committee. I hope it’s televised.
A report from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats last week found that Trump tried a stunning nine times to get ‘his’ Justice Department to undermine the election. Whew!
On Friday, former top Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark is scheduled to field questions from committee investigators. Something is up here. He parted ways with his lawyer just days before his appearance. Is he flipping or Fifthing?
From Politico:
Clark has drawn notoriety for his role in the final days of the Trump administration. He pushed for other senior DOJ officials to greenlight a letter falsely claiming the FBI found serious evidence of voter fraud in multiple states. At one point, Trump also discussed firing his acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and replacing him with Clark. When the rest of the department’s top leadership learned of the plan, they told Trump in a White House meeting that they would all quit if the president followed through on it.
Those who are expressing impatience with the pace of the investigations fail to comprehend the complexity of this situation.
This ultimately is an organized crime investigation; there’s the stuff that just happened with opportunists, the money, mid-level management/lawyers and then there’s The Don-Don. The higher prosecutors go up the chain of command, the more defense lawyers they’ll face, necessitating redundant amounts of evidence.
Trump’s efforts to persuade state officials to challenge or cancel vote counts is one path to follow. The seeming lack of preparedness by security authorities is another. The leadership of those who stormed the Capitol is another. White House cooperation with the insurgents is yet another.
More than 650 people have been charged as a result of their participation in the events of January 6th. Contrary to what the right wing media would have you believe, less than 10% are in jail.
The Justice Department has resolved about 90 cases via guilty pleas — largely by those who were charged only with misdemeanor offenses.
Via the Associated Press:
The Justice Department has called it the largest investigation in American history, with probes open in 55 out of 56 FBI field offices. Evidence collected in the attack includes thousands of hours of video footage, hundreds of thousands of tips from the public and more than 1 million Parler posts, replies and data. The Justice Department is building massive databases to share all evidence stemming from the attack with defense attorneys.
In the most high-profile case brought so far, involving more than a dozen members and associates of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers, prosecutors recently told a judge that a January trial date for the first set of defendants is looking increasingly unrealistic given how much evidence they still need to get into defense attorneys’ hands.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said if they have to wait until prosecutors turn over “every single scrap of evidence” they’ve collected in the Jan. 6 investigation — rather than just that which relates to a specific defendant — there won’t be trials in any of these cases before 2023. And three of the Oath Keepers defendants, accused of conspiring to block the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over Trump, are behind bars.
The Trump camp has undertaken a crusade to reformulate the "news" of January 6 in a manner suggestive of the facts of the day are now debatable.
Professional spinner Tucker Carlson has been tasked with completely flipping the narrative so his followers will believe the events of that day were actually a “false flag,” an opening salvo of a literal war on conservatives.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1453522027273408515?s=20
It will surprise nobody when an overstimulated viewer decides to take matters into his own hands and goes on a killing spree.
Donald Trump always seems to get away with it. And he's trying to do it again.
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