BLOGGER’S NOTE: Throughout this post, we will insert little pictures of Tinkerbell (as seen above, but reduced) every time you are required, if you choose to believe in the fairy tale of the “Stolen Election,” to accept a ridiculously unbelievable statement, swallow an absurdity as fact, overlook an outright lie, refuse to consider evidence to the contrary or ignore common sense.
There is no fairy in Donald Trump’s fairy tale, a bedtime story he tells his followers every night. You will find herein, however, that there was a plethora of toadies and sycophants, and (very likely) lawbreakers, all at work, trying to Donald a second term even he (if he could face reality) and they knew he didn’t deserve.
Hearings #1 & #2:
The “Stolen Election” Fairy Tale
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“You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election.”
Attorney
General Bill Barr
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We here, living in reality as best we can, continue to gather information regarding the fairy tale of the 2020 “Stolen Election.” At this point, both skeptics and believers can agree on the critical foundation of this sorry saga. Donald J. Trump will carry a belief in that myth to his grave.
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“No candidate who ever lost both Ohio and Florida, was ever elected president,” Trump’s tombstone might appropriately read.
That’s just one of many claims delusional Donald has made, that one coming a few weeks after he lost the last presidential contest. Since Biden lost both states – Trump deduced that the election had to have been rigged. Like so many falsehoods that poured from his pouty lips, the former president got that glaringly wrong.
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JFK lost both Ohio and Florida in 1960. |
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It’s also important not to draw conclusions based on logic.
The question at this point is how does one bolster one’s belief in such a dopey fairy tale? Powerful hallucinogens? Ignoring current events, for example, recent hearings in Congress, remains a key.
In fact, let’s start right there. If you argue with family and friends, people who still love Trump (and you can’t imagine why), or get into Twitter “debates,” you already know what I’m talking about. The Trump fans are going to tell you the hearings are rigged and fake and the media is mean, and besides, Joe Biden can’t ride a bicycle without falling off, which proves he couldn’t have won the election. Plus, gas prices are high! What about that!!!
“Did you watch?” you reply. “Gas prices have nothing to do with a plot to steal the last election.”
“No,” they admit. But still, they know the hearings are rigged.
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Nearing the end of a cross-country ride in 2007. I still ride today, at age 73, and I often take spills. |
(Sorry, if you think Biden on a bicycle is the issue; you need to watch these hearings. Or: read this fine blog!)
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“You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election.”
Attorney General Bill Barr
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If you haven’t been watching the hearings because you hate to face facts, here’s most of what you missed.
(The blogger is retired, and has, so far, watched every minute. So you can thank me for that. Civic duty, and all.)
Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, has testified that he met with Trump three times in the wake of his defeat at the polls: November 23, December 1, and December 14, 2020. On that final occasion, Barr determined to resign. He told the president his repeated claims of a stolen election were “bullshit.” As for his decision to step down, he explained to investigators, “You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election.”
He told lawyers for the committee that there was “zero basis for the allegations” that Dominion Voting machines had been rigged to steal votes. Such claims, he said, were “complete nonsense,” “crazy stuff.” Making such claims, he added, represented a “grave disservice to the country.”
(And remember, all of these witnesses are under oath.)
In the first three hearings, a parade of Trump lawyers, Trump campaign staffers, and White House advisors – even Ivanka Trump – have followed Barr, and bolstered his position. Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann was asked about claims of rigged machines. “The Dominion stuff was…I never saw any evidence to sustain those allegations,” he scoffed.
As for claims put forward by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who eventually became the face of the Trump legal team fighting to overturn the vote, regarding Dominion, Herschmann added, “What they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”
Matthew Morgan, former general counsel for the Trump 2020 campaign, said he investigated all the allegations as they came to him. He found nothing that would have been “outcome determinative.”
During one meeting of top campaign people, he testified that everyone in the room – “at least among the staff” that had been tracking down the falsehoods – agreed.
No real evidence to be found.
Bill Stepien, who took over a foundering Trump reelection campaign with only 115 days left, was featured in video testimony. On the night of the election, he said Rudy Giuliani began telling Trump he should declare victory – and not wait for the votes to be tallied in every state. A cut to Jason Miller, was inserted. Had anyone been drinking that night, anyone in meetings with Trump?
“Uh, Rudy Giuliani,” Miller said. “He was definitely intoxicated.”
Stepien explained why he opposed such a declaration. “It was far too early…ballots were still going to be counted for days,” if not weeks. “I always told the president the truth,” he said. “We’re going to have to wait to see how it turned out.”
Miller also advised the president not to declare victory.
Yet, in the early morning hours of November 4, Trump did just that. Appearing angrily before a gathering of supporters, he proclaimed loudly, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
His own people have testified that they believed he had not. Stepien described all kinds of accusations of fraud. One: that illegal votes from other countries were coming in by the thousands. What had really happened, he testified, was ballots from Americans living overseas were still being received and counted.
That’s not fraud; and these ballots always arrive late.
It might have made sense initially to contest results, and ensure the numbers that were reported were accurate and complete, Stepien said. He wasn’t optimistic though. He said he believed the president had lost. The real numbers, he said, were “very, very, very bleak.” He told investigators that, at best, he believed Trump had a 5-10% chance of contesting results, and securing a win.
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Barr testified that on Trump’s part, there was never any “indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
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Unfortunately, voices of reason were drowned out. Rudy appeared on television, screaming about hundreds of thousands of fake ballots being brought in in “garbage cans” and “shopping carts.” Sidney Powell was unleashed to make all kinds of wild claims on television. Herschmann summed up one stolen election theory as “completely nuts.” Morgan explained that Trump’s original set of lawyers began bowing out. “Law firms,” he told investigators, “were not comfortable with claims Rudy was making.” Stepien, himself, left his post. “I didn’t think that what was happening at that point was honest or professional,” he explained. Barr concurred. He described “an avalanche of accusations,” and said the Department of Justice tried to track any credible claims down. Most proved “completely bogus,” and “silly,” he said. And then he gave a laugh.
Only, this was no laughing matter. Because even Trump’s top people knew he had lost. On November 29, the president attacked Barr and DOJ and said they weren’t doing their jobs, weren’t doing enough to help him get the win. The attorney general issued a statement on December 1, 2020, in response. DOJ had been investigating – but had found no proof of significant fraud.
Later that day, he had a meeting at the White House with Mr. Trump. He said the president was madder than he had ever seen him, “trying to control himself.” Trump fumed: “You must hate Trump.”
This was the same guy who saved Trump’s fat ass by declaring the Mueller report cleared the president’s name. You had to work overtime, do some mental gymnastics, if you believed the fairy tale, to ignore that fact.
Trump was implacable. He was going to do whatever was necessary, illegal or not, to secure a win. He insisted that he had seen “boxes” of bogus votes being delivered in Detroit, in the dark hours after polls closed on November 3. Barr explained that no fraud was involved. Detroit, he said, had 630 voting precincts. It was standard procedure for precincts to deliver all ballots to a central location, so they could be tallied. “The stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public,” Barr testified again, was “bullshit.” Perhaps most damning of all, the former attorney general said that on the part of the president there was never really any “indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
Lawyers for the committee asked Barr what he thought of claims of stolen votes put forward in the movie, “2,000 Mules.”
At that point, Barr laughed out loud.
Like so many others, Derek Lyons, a former counsel to President Trump, reinforced the “no fairy tale” position. He said that “Eric and Pat” told him allegations of fraud didn’t hold up. (I believe “Eric” was Herschmann. “Pat” was Pat Cipollone, Chief White House Counsel at the time.) Alex Cannon, a lawyer for the campaign, could see no proof of systemic fraud. When he refused to say that he did, and cited a report by Chris Krebs, another Trump appointee, to support his contention, Peter Navarro, a Trump loyalist, stormed into his office and accused him of being an “agent of the Deep State.”
(Mr. Krebs was, at the time of the election, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security. CISA released a statement soon after, calling the election “the most secure in American history.”)
Once Barr stepped down, Trump upped the pressure on the Department of Justice to do his bidding. Richard Donoghue and other top DOJ officers met with Trump at the White House. Trump claimed at one point, that votes in places in Michigan had an error rate of 68%. Donoghue demurred. The actual rate, he said, was “0.0063,” or one error for every 15,000 votes. Trump simply switched examples – and threw out another wild claim. What about the “suitcase” full of votes in Georgia? What about that? The president insisted the votes had been rolled out – and counted three times – something like 54,000 fake votes, all going to Joe Biden. Donohue said that accusation was false. Bjay Pak, who had been the U.S. District Attorney with jurisdiction over the matter, spoke next. He said his team had looked into the story, and found the “suitcase” was actually an “official lock box.” The F.B.I. and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had both looked into the question of fraud. “Nothing irregular” had been found. Donoghue told the president several times that these allegations “were false.” A hand recount of Georgia ballots had shown that the story of fake ballots run three times, was “not true.”
Al Schmidt was up next. The only Republican on the board that oversaw voting in Philadelphia, he, too, said claims of fraud were untrue – and untrue by leaps and bounds. Rudy was out there, claiming that 8,021 dead people had voted in Pennsylvania. Schmidt said that “there wasn’t evidence of eight.” No matter how “fantastical or absurd,” election officials had tracked down such claims and found them false. Trump also insisted that more people had voted in Philadelphia than there were people living there. Schmidt said that this was patently false. Barr, before he resigned, called that claim “absolute rubbish.” The president soon attacked Schmidt by name in a tweet. After that, Schmidt said, the kinds of death threats he was getting changed. Before, they had been generalized. Now, threats he received included his family’s address, the names of his wife, of his children, and their ages, and where they went to school.
President Trump should have cared, should have been careful. He didn’t care about Schmidt or the safety of his family. He didn’t care about American democracy, either.
He only cared about himself.
In terms of court battles, as a dutiful blogger, I had picked up some of the bottom line numbers before. I knew Trump’s lawyers had filed roughly five dozen challenges to the vote in various states and federal court. I knew they lost all but one time.
The committee provided details: 62 cases were filed, and 61 losses were the result. (The lone exception was a temporary “victory,” soon negated by events.) Nor were the courts “rigged” against the president – although, of course, he insisted they were. Twenty-two federal judges appointed by Republican presidents, including ten appointed by Trump himself, rejected his various claims). All three of his picks for seats on the U.S. Supreme Court denied him legal redress. At least two dozen elected Republican state judges refused to provide the president with legal relief – because there was no evidence to support the kinds of claims his lawyers were carrying into court.
Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican lawyer and expert in election challenges, sustained the same line. There was no handsome prince on the way, to kiss the sleeping beauty at Mar-a-Lago and awaken him to the fact he was still President of the United States. There was no glass slipper to stick on a fat foot. There wasn’t even a “Tooth Fairy” to slip money under a pillow.
Well, maybe a MyPillow. Trump did at least have Mike Lindell on his team.
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Poor Mike Lindell is still dreaming of a return for Trump today. |
Trump lost in 2020 – and lost badly, in fact. Ginsberg scoffed, for example, at the work of the “somewhat farcical Cyber Ninjas” recount conducted in Arizona. It was duly noted during the first hearing, that in three of four states where recounts occurred, Biden actually gained votes.
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“People had been talking for weeks, and everyone understood for weeks, that that was going to be what happened on Election Night.”
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Finally, Trump and his team should have known what was coming, long before the election itself. Chris Stirewalt, who used to be in charge of explaining election numbers for Fox News, said it was clear before November 3, that this battle would be different. Early balloting had increased by 50%. Stirewalt and his team knew that in-person voting would trend red, favoring Mr. Trump. That would be the “red mirage.” Trump’s people knew it too, and they told Trump as much. Stirewalt explained that in every election for the last fifty years, Democratic votes in cities come in late, whereas red rural districts count far fewer votes first and report. “People had been talking for weeks, and everyone understood for weeks, that that was going to be what happened on Election Night.”
Yet, as Mr. Barr noted, the president was standing before the American people, just hours after the polls closed, and most had bedded down for the night, and howling that the vote counting should immediately end. He was, Barr noted, claiming fraud “before there was an actual potential looking at evidence.”
Trump was making shit up.
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