Donald Trump is my hero

[some seeing eye]

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates.

There is a scattergraph of vaccination and death rates vs Trump and Biden election results and county size. Disinformation studies discussed.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... death-rate

C Scott Olson/Getty

[Simon of the Playa]

"The day before Trump's speech, a homeopathic doctor named Edward Group stood on the same stage and suggested to the audience they should drink their urine as an alternative to getting vaccinated against COVID-19. Another speaker, Carrie Madej, said that the vaccines contained microscopic technology designed to put "another kind of nervous system inside you." The true purpose of the vaccines, she claimed, was to turn humans into cyborgs."

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/10573445 ... epublicans

[Simon of the Playa]

AC5BF716-C9B4-4280-A2B3-FBAA81ECBCC1.jpeg

[Simon of the Playa]

Today, Robert Costa, the Washington Post reporter who wrote the book Peril with veteran journalist Bob Woodward about the fraught weeks surrounding the January 6 insurrection, laid out the timeline for early January in the White House.

In December, right-wing lawyer John Eastman began drafting the Eastman Memo calling for Pence to refuse to count electors from states Biden won and laying out a number of ways Pence could throw the election to Trump. (Trump’s own loyal attorney general, William Barr, and his deputy Jeffrey Rosen, who replaced Barr when he resigned on December 23, 2020, had already concluded the election was not fraudulent.) The plan, as Costa and Woodward put it in Peril, was: “Either have Pence declare Trump the winner, or make sure it is thrown to the House where Trump is guaranteed to win.”

The White House had the memo by January 1. Meadows was working with the Trump team to push the ideas in it. Someone in the White House gave it to Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and others on January 2. Meadows met with both Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Meadows’s office on January 2 to brief Graham, who was then the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on what they claimed was voter fraud. Graham demanded proof.

On January 3, Pence conferred with the Senate parliamentarian, who told him he was simply there to count the votes. It was clear he was not on board with Trump’s plan.

On January 4, Trump called Pence to the Oval Office to pressure him. Eastman presented his case to Pence; Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short; and Pence’s legal counsel, Greg Jacob. On that day, someone presented the PowerPoint to a number of Republican senators and members of the House.

Apparently, none of the people briefed called the attention of the FBI to the coming attempt to overturn the election.

On the evening of January 5, Trump called Pence to a meeting as his supporters were gathering on Freedom Plaza near the White House. The people in the streets were cheering and waving “Make America Great Again” flags. Trump asked Pence to throw the election to the House of Representatives; Pence again said he did not have authority to do anything other than count the certified electoral votes.

And then, according to Costa and Woodward in Peril, Trump asked: “Well, what if these people say you do?” gesturing to the crowds outside. “If these people say you had the power, wouldn’t you want to?”

Pence, who would have been the face of the insurrection if he had done as he was asked, still said no.

That night, Trump called his people in the so-called “war room” at the Willard Hotel, where loyalists had been trying to figure out a way to delay certification if Pence didn’t cave. He called the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, since Giuliani wanted to preserve attorney-client privilege. “He’s arrogant,” Trump told his lieutenant Stephen Bannon.

They appear to have settled on a plan to get Republican lawmakers to raise enough objections that it would delay the counting long enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives. (This squares with the voicemail Giuliani left for newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) in the midst of the insurrection, saying: “The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow.”)

Since his memo became public, John Eastman has said it “was not being provided to Trump or Pence as my advice.... The memo was designed to outline every single possible scenario that had been floated, so that we could talk about it.” When subpoenaed by the January 6 committee, Eastman declined to appear, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Since journalist Lowell broke the story of Trump’s calls to the Willard the night of January 5, Trump’s spokesperson has said that the account “is totally false” but provided no more information.

Since the story of the PowerPoint dropped, retired U.S. Army colonel Phil Waldron, who was working with the Trump team to challenge the election results, claimed authorship of it. Waldron told the Washington Post that he met with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and was the one who briefed several members of Congress about the information in his presentation on January 5.

Since Politico dropped the story about her memos, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis said: “At no time did I advocate for overturning the election or that Mike Pence had the authority to do so…. As part of my role as a campaign lawyer and counsel for President Trump, I explored legal options that might be available within the context of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law.”

Yesterday, the January 6 committee subpoenaed six more people who had been involved in planning the rallies in Washington on January 5 and January 6. Some of them communicated with Trump directly; one communicated with Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL). Subpoenas went to Bryan Lewis, Ed Martin, Kimberly Fletcher, Robert “Bobby” Peede Jr., Max Miller, and Brian Jack.

On Monday, December 6, we learned that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, has been cooperating with the January 6 committee.


https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... er-11-2021

[Simon of the Playa]

"Trump has a long history of falling out with members of his team amid investigations and controversy including his former attorney Michael Cohen, a long list of fired White House officials, and, at times, Bannon. Given that record, it’s easy to doubt Stockton and Lawrence’s claim of being shocked by his behavior. However, the pair insist their experience with the aftermath of Jan. 6 opened their eyes.
“Other people had warned us … People in his inner circle even,” Stockton said of Trump’s paper-thin loyalty. “It’s not like we didn’t see him cast people aside before selfishly, but we always kind of just said, ‘Oh, that’s just disgruntled former employees, right?’ You know, we bought the bullshit.”



https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... r-1253392/

[some seeing eye]

^^ Trump savaged his previous BFF Netanyahu in an interview broadcast there. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-curs ... ction-win/

He has that crazy Nixon enemies syndrome.

[Simon of the Playa]

"As Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress, Trump was famous for never texting, never using email, and never actually saying he wanted criminal actions taken; rather, he would suggest a course of action that others carried out. As Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post pointed out today, this puts Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in a tight spot, since he was the one standing between his boss and the world, the one people would call and text with messages for the president, whose fingerprints stayed off damning material.

For his part, Trump is not returning Meadows’s loyalty. He has called Meadows—and presumably his initial willingness to turn over documents to the the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol—“f**king stupid.”

Today, the January 6th committee subpoenaed retired army colonel Phil Waldron, who wrote the PowerPoint explaining how Republican members of Congress could throw the election to Trump by refusing to recognize Biden’s electors. Waldron claimed he met with Meadows six to eight times. He must turn over all relevant documents by January 10 and appear for a deposition on January 17."


https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... er-16-2021

[Simon of the Playa]

"The Trump administration engaged in “deliberate efforts” to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released Friday concludes.

The report, prepared by the House select subcommittee investigating the nation’s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump's political agenda."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congre ... t-n1286211

[some seeing eye]

^ Trump is responsible for dismantling the cooperative programs with China which could have sensed the virus earlier. Another example of him dismantling programs solely because they were created by Obama.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... s-in-trump

[Simon of the Playa]

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones issued a "warning" to former President Donald Trump, calling him either "ignorant" or "evil" for encouraging people to take the coronavirus vaccine.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 82573.html

[BBadger]

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones issued a "warning" to former President Donald Trump, calling him either "ignorant" or "evil" for encouraging people to take the coronavirus vaccine.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 82573.html

It's kind of encouraging if Jones takes his own advice. Let's see what his snake oil supplements do for him.

[Simon of the Playa]

As it was unfolding, we asked one of the rioters, who called himself "Joe from Ohio," what the goal was.

"The people in this house, who stole this election from us, hanging from a gallows out here in this lawn for the whole world to see, so it never happens again," he said. "That's what needs to happen. Four by four by four, hanging from a rope out here for treason."

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/02/10688913 ... nniversary

[Simon of the Playa]

The New York Times editorial board—which consists of opinion journalists who weigh in on important issues—warned that the attack on democracy we witnessed so traumatically on January 6 has not ended. It persists in ongoing threats to election officials, threats to murder opponents, and new state laws skewing elections toward Republicans.

“In short,” they wrote, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends.”

The board called for Republicans to be honest with their voters and to fight their party’s extremists. It called for Democrats to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, at least. And it called for “Americans of all stripes who value their self-government” to “mobilize at every level…to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy.”



https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ary-2-2022

[DVD Burner]

FACT!

When I was a Kid,

I passed by his house everyday when I went to High School.

YEAH....



TRUMP IS FROM MY HOOD!


I'VE BEEN DEALING WITH

HIM, HIS DADDY AND HIS GRANDADDY


ALL MY LIFE!



FUCK EVERYONE!

[Simon of the Playa]

The committee’s letter specified that they had seen a number of Hannity’s texts, all of which were eye-popping and which revealed that Hannity was acting as an inside member of Trump’s team. On December 31, 2020, he texted Meadows: “We can’t lose the entire WH counsels office. I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told. After the 6 th. [sic] He should announce will lead the nationwide effort to reform voting integrity. Go to Fl[orida] and watch Joe mess up daily. Stay engaged. When he speaks people will listen.”

On January 5, the night before the insurrection, Hannity “sent and received a stream of texts,” including the message: “Im very worried about the next 48 hours.” The committee noted that the counting of the certified ballots was scheduled for 1:00 on January 6, so why was Hannity worried about the next 48 hours?

Hannity appears to have talked with Trump on January 10 and was concerned with what he heard. He texted Meadows and Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), saying, “Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days. He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”

The texts reveal that Hannity saw his role not as a news reader, but rather as a member of the White House team, protecting the president, and Hannity’s participation in the conversations means that none of them can be considered privileged.



https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ary-4-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

sedition: [noun] incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/06/politics ... index.html

[lucky420]

Looking forward to televised hearings. We deserve to watch

[Simon of the Playa]

7F7A9FB8-5B15-4750-8098-E14E13A79226.jpeg

[Simon of the Playa]

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.

The committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -biden-win

[Simon of the Playa]

"LIAR LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!!"

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/10722044 ... s-vaccines

[Simon of the Playa]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ry-20-2022


The committee said it knew that “in the days before January 6th, a member of the House Freedom Caucus with knowledge of the President’s planning for that day sent a message to the White House Chief of Staff with this explicit warning: ‘If POTUS [meaning President Trump] allows this to occur…we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic….’”

The committee called attention to Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet saying, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” It listed statements from rioters describing how that tweet set them off: “Once we found out Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election, like officially, the crowd went crazy….” “Then we heard the news on pence… And lost it… So we stormed.”

[Simon of the Playa]

On Wednesday, January 19, by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court refused to block the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) from releasing documents produced by the Trump White House to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Last night, NARA handed over hundreds of pages of documents to the committee. Today, Betsy Woodruff Swan at Politico published one of them.

Hoo, boy.

It was an unsigned executive order dated December 16, 2020, just two days after the false Trump electors in seven states executed documents falsely saying Trump had won the election in their states. The executive order charges that there is “evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election.” It went on to echo the lies that the campaign peddled after Trump’s loss.

Those complaints were used to justify using the National Guard to seize the nation’s election machines (ironically, the most intrusive possible federal interference in state elections from the leader of a party that just killed a voting rights bill on the alleged grounds it was federal overreach).

The order told the secretary of defense to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records” from the election. It gave the defense secretary power to call up the National Guard to support him and told the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security to provide support from the Department of Homeland Security.

The secretary of defense had 60 days to provide an assessment to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, suggesting that the process would continue after Inauguration Day.

The executive order also provided for “[t]he appointment of a Special Counsel to oversee this operation and institute all criminal and civil proceedings as appropriate based on the evidence collected and provided all resources necessary to carry out her duties consistent with federal laws and the Constitution.”

Aside from the eye-popping content, the executive order gives us some hints of who was behind it.

The document cites two National Security Presidential Memoranda—numbers 13 and 21—to justify the emergency powers Trump planned to assume. That citation revealed that this was no run-of-the-mill bananas proposition: the existence of Memorandum 21 was not publicly known. Its inclusion in this document suggests the author had access to sensitive government secrets. Tonight, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian noted that the National Security Council would not say anything about what National Security Presidential Memo 21 authorizes.

The proposed special counsel was likely Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who was lobbying to become a special counsel at the time this executive order was drafted. Indeed, she may have had a hand in drafting it, although lawyer Rick Petree noted that the important role of the secretary of defense suggests that Trump loyalist Kash Patel might have been involved as well. After he lost the election, Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and replaced him with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, making Patel Miller’s chief of staff where he exercised unusual authority.

Washington reporter for Reuters Brad Heath noted that people close to Sidney Powell said Trump authorized this executive order before his staff talked him out of it.



https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ry-21-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

The extent of Bobb’s involvement demonstrates the ways in which the endangered far-right outlet functions as a propaganda machine spreading an alternate reality about the 2020 election, which Bobb has helped take the lead in performing.

Bobb previously confirmed to The Washington Post that she volunteered with the Trump campaign’s legal team, after it was first reported by The Daily Beast in November 2020. The Post has now reported that Bobb was on at least one phone call about putting together the fake Electoral College slates for Trump.


https://www.mediamatters.org/one-americ ... tor-scheme

[Simon of the Playa]

The committee has also issued a subpoena for documents and testimony from former deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere, who, according to a copy of the subpoena letter obtained by CNN, helped with “formulating White House’s response to the January 6 attack as it occurred.” The letter also said that Deere was in a January 5 staff meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump repeatedly asked “What are your ideas for getting the RINOs to do the right thing tomorrow? How do we convince Congress?” Deere was part of the White House response to the insurrection on January 6 and beyond. He currently works as a deputy chief of staff to Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN).

On Tuesday, Ben Williamson, who was an aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified before the January 6 committee for between six and seven hours and did not invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the January 6 committee, told CNN: “We have filled in a lot more evidence that [Trump] wasn’t just inciting an insurrection, he was working to organize a coup against the democracy...I can’t imagine that the Department of Justice would not have evidence at this point to that effect.”


https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ry-28-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

That promise of pardons might also be for crimes not yet committed. Trump called for "the biggest protest we have ever had" in New York City, Washington, and Atlanta if the prosecutors "do anything wrong or illegal." The specificity of the cities he mentioned suggests that the cases against him in New York City, Georgia, and Washington are weighing on his mind. "These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They're racists and they're very sick—they're mentally sick," he said. "They're going after me without any protection of my rights from the Supreme Court or most other courts. In reality, they're not after me, they're after you."

Observers saw his comments as a call for violence if the various legal cases against him lead to indictments. Crucially, these statements were clearly part of a plan: he did not say them off the cuff but appeared to read them from a teleprompter. It seems likely that as investigators get closer, he is turning to the threat of street violence to try to get them to back off.


But Bunch noted that, overlooked by those not attuned to the siren songs of the right, Trump’s use of the word “racist” is a call to white supremacists. Three of the main prosecutors investigating the former president—Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis; New York State attorney general Letitia James; and Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg (who recently took over from Cyrus Vance, Jr.)—are Black. So is Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chairs the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult,” Bunch wrote. Trump, he said, “is seeking to start a race war.”



https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ry-30-2022

[lucky420]

Hopefully those J6 hearings will be televised soon

[some seeing eye]

Trump is 75. He has a lot of mental problems which are only going to increase with age. The problem is that his mental decline is going to be hard to see within his long term behavior patterns and coverups by staff. His family has a history of dementia.

[Simon of the Playa]

Former President Donald Trump's advisers drafted two versions of an executive order to seize voting machines -- one directing the Department of Defense to do so and another the Department of Homeland Security -- as part of a broader effort to undermine the 2020 election results, multiple sources tell CNN.

The idea of using the federal government to access voting machines in states that Trump lost was the brainchild of retired Col. Phil Waldron and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, the sources said. Both Army veterans spread misinformation about the election being stolen from Trump.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/31/politics ... index.html

[Simon of the Playa]

768F1880-61B2-414D-A25C-5C5C6EBAD11F.jpeg

[some seeing eye]

^ Deliberately provoking a race was was also the idea of murderer and psychopath Charles Manson's "helter skelter."

If Trump is reelected, NATO is toast. It is almost certain that Russians hold all his loans. It is not impossible that as early as 2023 he could bully his party in Congress to start destroying NATO.