Tag: 2020 presidential election
Fani Willis

Georgia Supreme Court Rejects Trump Attempt To 'Quash' Election Probe

The Georgia state Supreme Court unanimously rejected Donald Trump’s motion to “quash” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ special grand jury report, to block her from prosecuting him, and to bar her from using any evidence the grand jury obtained to charge him criminally or civilly.

Bill Rankin, the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s legal affairs reporter, and Lawfare blog’s Anna Bower, who covers the Fulton County investigation, first reported the news.

“Even if the petition were procedurally appropriate, Petitioner has not shown he would be entitled to the relief he seeks,” the three-judge panel said in its dismissal, according to WABE’s Sam Gringlas.

Trump had asked the court on Thursday to intervene.

“Weeks before he’s expected to be indicted in Fulton County, former President Donald Trump revived his push to disqualifyDistrict Attorney Fani Willis from investigating him for election interference,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had reported on Friday.

“In a petition filed before the Georgia Supreme Court, Trump’s attorneys also sought to quash the final report of a special purpose grand jury that recommended people be indicted. Additionally, they requested a ruling that would forbid Willis from using any evidence obtained by the investigative jury, which heard testimony from about 75 witnesses between May 2022 and Jan. 2023,” the AJC added.

“The motion filed on Thursday asks Georgia’s highest court to put a halt to any ongoing proceedings ‘related to and flowing from the special purpose grand jury’s investigation until this matter can be resolved.’ This would include any consideration of a possible indictment for alleged criminal meddling in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election by one of two regular Fulton grand juries that were seated on Tuesday.”

11 Alive News’ Nick Wooten posted the Court’s order dismissing Trump’s request.

Willis is widely expected to ask for and win an indictment against Trump for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia in early August.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Timothy McVeigh

Tracing America's Political Poisoning Back To Timothy McVeigh

You’d like to think that in the wake of the farcical and failed January 6, 2021, uprising to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, even the Republican Party had sobered up and right-wing conspiracy theories were fading from prominence in the United States.

Ain’t happening.

But then you’d also like to think that the malign influence of Fox News would have receded since the network agreed to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to Dominion Voting Systems after numerous talking heads and ranking executives admitted under oath that they knowingly broadcast thunderous lies about the “stolen” 2020 election.

Also not happening. Despite some slippage of media outlets even further out on the fringe and the purging of “white replacement” conspiracy maven Tucker Carlson, Fox News remains highly profitable and influential. A substantial proportion of Americans, it appears, simply want to be lied to if it flatters their incipient paranoia.

You’d imagine, as well, that a former president who publicized the private address of another former president, enabling and encouraging an armed crackpot to stalk his neighborhood with lethal intent, would find himself shunned and essentially disqualified from seeking public office by members of his own party, who preach law and order.

After all, what would happen to any other criminal defendant who broadcast naked threats against prosecutors and their families?

Yet, with the signal exception of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who hasn’t the proverbial snowball’s chance, Teflon Donald Trump’s GOP rivals remain discreetly mute.

Instead, Trump appears to have a substantial lead for the GOP nomination. “NOW THAT THE ‘SEAL’ IS BROKEN ...,” began one all-caps outburst on his Truth Social account recently — a pointed allusion to the Book of Revelation (although it’s unlikely Trump’s ever read it). He ended up vowing retribution against Democrats he accuses of maliciously destroying the country.

It’s more like a professional wrestling spectacle than an American election campaign. Even the Mini Mussolini currently running second in polls promises to purge the nation of heretics. He uses the word “die” a lot.

So, have a substantial proportion of Republicans simply gone around the bend and abandoned reason altogether? Alas, many have, yes. And whether they acknowledge it or not, their movement’s patron saint is Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

I come by this opinion after reading Jeffrey Toobin’s extraordinary new book, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. A terrific reporter with legal expertise and a knack for vivid storytelling, Toobin has written several excellent books about criminal trials — including a bestseller about the O.J. Simpson case.

Toobin originally covered McVeigh’s trial for murdering 168 people (including 19 children) with a truck bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, for The New Yorker. He describes having a flashback in 2020 while reading about the militia loons who plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and try her for treason in a kangaroo court.

“I know these people,” he said to himself, recognizing that the self-styled patriots’ motives were essentially identical to McVeigh’s a quarter-century earlier. Indeed, much of McVeigh’s deadly plot was conceived on a remote Michigan farm belonging to co-conspirator Terry Nichols’ family.

In one sense, McVeigh was a classic American loner, a juco dropout who failed in an attempt to become a Green Beret and left the Army without a profession or a purpose. It was, Toobin writes, “a shattering defeat ... he had no plan B.”

Much of Homegrown reads like a Jack Kerouac novel about a demented loner driving aimlessly through the American outback in search of somebody to kill: from his native upstate New York to Arkansas to the Michigan north woods to Arizona and the Flint Hills of Kansas. Basically, from one gun show to another.

And as he drove, he listened to Rush Limbaugh touting the political nostrums of the fellow he called “Mr. Newt.” When Gingrich urged Republicans to describe Democrats as “sick,” “pathetic,” “traitors,” “radical” and “corrupt,” McVeigh heard him. When Limbaugh talked about a “second violent American revolution,” he thought that sounded like a great idea.

But what really caught McVeigh’s attention was a prophetic potboiler called The Turner Diaries, a novel describing an uprising against a tyrannical government of Blacks and Jews who were taking away patriots’ guns. McVeigh was all about guns. He built his bomb based on the novel’s detailed instructions.

McVeigh never expressed an ounce of regret; he died defiant, a hero to himself. And thanks to the Internet, as Toobin makes clear, the sick, racially obsessed gun nuts like him are no longer alone. And then, after Trump became president, Toobin writes, “the wolf pack had a new leader.”

Reprinted with permission from Suntimes.

What's Really Going On With That 'Smoking Gun' Tape Of Trump In Bedminster

What's Really Going On With That 'Smoking Gun' Tape Of Trump In Bedminster

The big story last night and all day today has been the audio tape obtained by CNN of Defendant Trump bragging about the top-secret plan to attack Iran during an interview for a book Mark Meadows was writing about his big, difficult, arduous 11 months as White House chief of staff. We already knew that Special Counsel Jack Smith had the tape, apparently obtained from either the writer and publisher for the Meadows book, or from one of the two staffers who were present during the interview.

The big deal was hearing Trump’s voice on the tape. Comparisons were made to the Watergate tapes, when we finally heard Nixon’s voice telling John Dean something like “we can do that” when Dean mentioned a fairly high figure being demanded by the Watergate burglars for their silence. The words “smoking gun” were used to describe the revelation on the tape, but they applied to Nixon’s voice, as well, because there just wasn’t anything like listening to a man of Nixon’s stature – he was president of the United States – committing a felony.

And now here was the voice of Defendant Trump talking about a top-secret plan to attack Iran with a roomful of people who were not cleared to hear anything about such a document, even that it existed at all, much less references to its content. The mere fact that what the document contained was top-secret was itself a secret. We lesser mortals aren’t supposed to know that our government has prepared plans to attack another nation – any nation, much less our sworn enemy, Iran.

And yet, according to what we already knew from the 37-count indictment of Defendant Trump, there he was, sitting out there at his golf club in New Jersey, bragging about having this top-secret document in his possession – in fact, right there in the room with him.

The big revelation from CNN was hearing the sound of Defendant Trump waving around a sheaf of papers and saying on the tape, “These are the papers!” Those words had been missing from the indictment of Defendant Trump, which had included most of the rest of the conversation during the interview. This had allowed Defendant Trump to trumpet in an interview on Fox News last week, “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Defendant Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

Talk about a gotcha moment! We had been able to read it before, but now, here he was on tape, talking in his Queens-accented braggadaccio way, saying this: “Look what I found! This was Milley’s plan of attack. Read it, and just show…this is interesting,” Defendant Trump says to his rapt audience of aides and interviewers. “He said that I wanted to attack Iran, isn’t it amazing?” (The sound of papers shuffling can be heard.) “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him. All sorts of stuff…pages long. Look,” Trump says, as more shuffling of papers can be heard. “Wait a minute. Let’s see here.” A staffer is heard laughing. “I just found. Isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is, like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look. Look at this…by the way, isn’t this incredible?”

Listening to the tape, you can hear comments attributed in the special counsel’s indictment to “STAFFER” and “WRITER” interjecting such encouragement as “wow,” and “uh-uh” and “you did.” But then we get to what politicians like to call the red meat, the real stuff, and in Watergate days, the smoking gun:

“I was just thinking, because we were talking about it. And you know, he said you wanted to attack Iran and…these are the papers!”

There is is! Zingo! Bam! Ka-boom! He’s got them in his hand, and he is clearly showing them to the assembled lackeys and wannabes! He continues, explaining again, in case they didn’t hear him the first time -- Defendant Trump is, if nothing else, a master of repetition, once he’s got an audience in his thrall:

“This was done by the military and given to me! Uh, I think we can probably [use it] right?”

A staffer answers hesitantly, “I don’t know, we’ll have to see. I think we’ll probably have to…”

“Declassify it. See as president, I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” says Defendant Trump.

Double Zingo!

Okay, I thought to myself. I’ll go along with the conventional wisdom that the tape, and especially hearing his voice, proves that, for want of a better phrase, we’ve got him. It is, by God, a smoking gun.

But then I looked again at the date of the Bedminster interview: The indictment tells us it took place on July 21, 2021, less than six months after Trump left the White House.

Then I began to wonder why all the stories about the audio tape begin with reporting about how upset Defendant Trump was with a book written by the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and the New York Times’ Peter Baker and published more than a year later: The Divider: Trump in the White House. The book portrayed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as so alarmed by the behavior of Defendant Trump after he lost the election in November 2020 that Milley began making daily morning phone calls between himself and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

“Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the ‘land the plane’ phone calls,” Baker and Glasser wrote. “‘Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the 20th of January,’ Milley told his staff. ‘This is our obligation to this nation.’ There was a problem, however. ‘Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.’”

The book goes into paranoia among the top Pentagon brass that Defendant Trump would order a strike against Iran. The week that Defense Secretary Mark Esper was fired, just a few days after Defendant Trump lost the election, the book reported, “Milley was called to the Oval Office to present various military options for attacking Iran and encountered a disturbing performance by [Christopher] Miller, the new acting Defense Secretary…Trump kept asking for alternatives, including an attack inside Iran on its ballistic-weapons sites. Milley explained that this would be an illegal preëmptive act: ‘If you attack the mainland of Iran, you will be starting a war.’”

The book goes on to report that Trump “continued pushing for a missile strike on Iran even after that November meeting. If Trump said it once, Milley told his staff, he said it a thousand times. ‘The thing he was most worried about was Iran,’ a senior Biden adviser who spoke with Milley recalled. ‘Milley had had the experience more than once of having to walk the President off the ledge when it came to retaliating.’”

But an excerpt from the Glasser/Baker book was published on August 8, 2022, more than a year after Defendant Trump gave the Bedminster interview in which he appeared obsessed with Milley thinking that he was going to start a war with Iran.

Then there was the other book that got Defendant Trump’s ire up: Peril, by Washington Post writers Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. CNN headlined a story on the book the day it was published on September 14, 2021, titled “Worried Trump could ‘go rogue,’ Milley took secret action to protect nuclear weapons.” “Two days after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons,” CNN reported.

After the attack on the Capitol, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called Milley, sounding alarmed. “What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do?” Pelosi said to Milley, according to a transcript of the call obtained by Woodward and Costa. “And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?” Pelosi continued. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time.”

Milley responded, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” CNN reported that after the call with Pelosi, “Milley decided he had to act. He told his top service chiefs to watch everything ‘all the time.’ He called the director of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone, and told him, ‘Needles up … keep watching, scan.’ And he told then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, ‘Aggressively watch everything, 360.’”

Woodward and Costa reported that Milley “felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions.” Milley told Woodward and Costa it was the “absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility.”

So, there is a lot of stuff out there about General Mark Milley for Defendant Trump to be pissed off about – but every sentence was published well after the day the tape was made at the Bedminster golf club in July of 2021.

One thing we can be certain of is that Trump would never have given an interview to the ghost writer and publisher of a memoir by Mark Meadows if he had known back in July 2021 that Meadows had been on the phone almost daily after November 2020 with Milley and Pompeo talking about “landing the plane” on January 20, 2021, so there would be a smooth transition of power.

Nor would he have given an interview to help out his former chief of staff if he had known that Meadows would give testimony before grand juries in both Washington D.C. and Atlanta about Defendant Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election of 2020. Rolling Stone reported last week that members of Trump’s legal team have been using a rat emoji when referring to Meadows. Other reports have said that nobody close to Trump has been in touch with Meadows “for months.”

So, there are at least two questions about that interview in Bedminster: One, what was Defendant Trump doing with a top-secret document he described as a plan to attack Iran given to him by General Mark Milley? And two, why was he so exercised about Milley on that particular day, months before the Woodward/Costa book would expose the split between him and Milley, and over a year before the Glasser/Baker book would first note that Defendant Trump had asked Milley for a plan to attack Iran just days after he lost the election, and Milley had become so concerned, that he instituted the “land the plane” phone calls?

According to the tape obtained by CNN, Defendant Trump began the interview by calling unnamed people “bad” and “sick.” A staffer who was present during the interview jumps in and says they had tried a “coup” against him. Defendant Trump responds, “Like when Milley is talking about, ‘Oh you’re going to try to do a coup.’”

“No, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in,” the staffer chimes in.

So the whole thing was touched off by Defendant Trump’s allegation that Milley had accused him of attempting a “coup.” And to rebut Milley, Trump launches into his detailed discussion about the top-secret plan to attack Iran that he alleges Milley gave him.

None of it adds up, especially when you consider that all of this happened before the National Archives had even begun bugging Defendant Trump for the documents and materials they believed he had removed from the White House on January 20 as he left office. And most especially when you consider that Defendant Trump had moved the top-secret document he was waving around twice – first from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and second, from Mar a--Lago to Bedminster in May 2021 when he relocated for the summer.

There are even more questions: how many other top-secrets documents did Defendant Trump take with him that spring from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster? And why, for crying out loud? He probably didn’t know in May that Meadows would contact him in July and ask him to talk to his ghost writer and publisher. So, what was he doing with a top-secret plan to attack Iran that he could simply pull from a pile of papers on his desk and describe for his drooling crowd of suck-ups? Did he want to have his secret documents with him in in Bedminster so he could impress his golfing buddies?

Or was there more going on that we don’t yet know?

For the time being, we’ve at least got Trump’s voice committing a felony on tape, exposing some of the nation’s most sensitive national security and military secrets to a gaggle of adoring goofballs, not one of whom had so much as a “confidential” security clearance, much less the clearance needed to see or hear about a document with markings labeling it Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information – for the eyes only of the man who gave it to him, General Mark Milley, and probably a half-dozen other top Pentagon commanders.

If I were Ayatollah Whoever-the-hell-is-in-charge over in Iran, I would be rubbing my hands together with glee. The rest of us can join him at our leisure as the jaws of justice clench tighter and tighter around the ankles of Defendant Trump.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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Ranting Cruz Votes No On Bipartisan Bill To Stop Electoral Coup (VIDEO)

Ranting Cruz Votes No On Bipartisan Bill To Stop Electoral Coup (VIDEO)

The Senate Rules Committee voted 14-1 to advance the Electoral Count Act, legislation designed to prevent another coup like the one led by defeated President Donald Trump, and Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, on January 6, 2021. Every Democrat and every Republican except the junior GOP Senator from Texas voted for the legislation.

The bill is even supported by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But according to Sen. Cruz, who once bragged he was “leading the charge” to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the bill is “all about” Donald Trump.

With so many stories published about the GOP’s efforts to keep Trump in the White House despite Joe Biden winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College by large margins, some may have missed The Washington Posts reporting back in March the shows “just how deeply” Cruz “was involved, working directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power.”

“As Cruz went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump’s base and lay the groundwork for his own potential 2024 presidential bid, he also alienated close allies and longtime friends who accused him of abandoning his principles,” the Post notes.

“Cruz’s efforts are of interest to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in particular whether Cruz was in contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman, a conservative attorney who has been his friend for decades and who wrote key legal memos aimed at denying Biden’s victory.”

On Tuesday Cruz railed against the Electoral Count Act, which would make the January 6 attempt to overturn the election at least more difficult, as his fellow Republicans seemed to ignore his outburst.

“This bill is all about Donald J. Trump,” Cruz declared, not realizing that he was indicting the former president by saying so. “And nobody in our lifetimes has driven Democrats in this body more out of their mind than President Trump.”

“This bill is a bad bill, this bill is bad law,” Cruz complained. “It’s bad policy and it’s bad for democracy,” he added, despite every other Republican on the committee voting for it and several Republicans voting for the House version.

What he did not say is that no Democrat has ever conspired to overturn an election and execute a coup.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) after Cruz’s rant, reminded the committee the bill does not “come out of the blue,” saying it is “a modification of a 150-year old law.”

“It’s not a new effort of Congress to intrude into the electoral process,” he said, taking a gentle swipe at Cruz.

“I watched this,” NPR’s Peter Sagal said of Cruz’s remarks, “and what’s remarkable is to the extent to which all the other Senators (with the exception of a mild correction from Sen King) simply ignore him.”

He went on to note the bill “merely intended to clarify” the existing law, “which virtually everyone … has agreed is archaic and confusing.”

Despite all his bravado, the bill did advance out of committee almost unanimously, with the exception of Cruz’s lone no vote.

Watch below or at this link.


Reprinted with permission from Alternet.