The Orange God of Mar-a-Lago: March 2022

3/3/2022: Thank God. Alex Jones was wrong and I’m still here on earth. He warned if I were vaccinated, I’d be dead in a year. (See: 2/28/22.) 

Well, stick it, Alex. I’m still breathing and you’re still a loser in multiple defamation suits, because you’re a lying douchebag. 

 

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“My point is Trump was not fit to be president…and was not competent to be president.” 

Former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton

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Now that have that resolved, let’s consider the fate of the Ukrainian people, faced with a murderous onslaught unleashed by Vladimir Putin. It would be nearly impossible to watch events unfold in recent days, to see ordinary Ukrainians rise up to defend their homeland, and not to be touched by their heroism and saddened by the punishment their country is absorbing. 

Nor would you think, would any decent American leader side with the Russians in the face of such bloody events, not when Mr. Putin has revealed a willingness to kill as many Ukrainians as necessary to achieve his goal. That goal being: To give the Ukrainian people (the ones he doesn’t kill) the kind of “good government” he has brought to Russia, and they don’t realize they want. 

Yet, we know there is one such American leader who can’t figure this out. That American leader responded to news of the invasion by noting that Putin liked him. And he liked Putin. In fact, he has been happy to trash President Biden – insisting, even in the face of a threat to the free world – that the real issue to be upset about was the stolen 2020 U.S. election. This same gentleman was a foe of NATO for years, questioning why the U.S. would ever have to defend other countries – just because the NATO charter states that all members share a common defense. And even now, this American remains incapable of recognizing grief in others. Suffering, as he does, from a narcissistic personality disorder, whenever he speaks on the fate of Ukraine, his utterances are devoid of empathy for others in their time of ultimate peril. 

We refer, of course, to Donald J. Trump, the Ghoul of Mar-a-Lago.

 

When Trump isn’t busy trashing the current occupant of the White House and ignoring the suffering of the Ukrainian people, he’s busy bragging about how he made NATO much better and how he saved the world. 

On Tuesday, former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton appeared on Rob Schmitt’s Newsmax show. What Schmitt hoped to do, as shown by graphics that ran at the bottom of the screen (TRUMP WAS TOUGH ON RUSSIA), was credit Trump for holding the Russians at bay, during his four years in office. 

Bolton savaged that argument from start to finish. He pointed out that his old boss “barely knew where Ukraine was” and once had to ask if Finland was part of Russia. For members of the Trump cult: It’s not.

 

Bolton insisted Trump didn’t take a tough stance on Russia. Quite the contrary. “It is just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians,” he pointed out. “I think the evidence is that Russia didn’t feel that their military was ready.” Bolton also cited Trump’s “lack of any significant historical knowledge,” “lack of strategic thinking,” and “pretty much his lack of thinking about pretty much anything other than what benefited Donald Trump.”

 

What was Trump’s only interest in Ukraine in the summer of 2019? Trump didn’t care about holding off Russians. He didn’t care about cleaning up corruption – his stated reason for withholding critical military aid to  Ukraine. According to Mr. Bolton, the president only cared about himself – and what might help him win a second term in office. When the Newsmax host (who no doubt had to be wondering who booked Bolton to appear on his show) tried to credit Donald, saying, yeah, well we got that aid to the Ukrainians in the end, Bolton was having no part of that either. 

“It was mandated by Congress,” he responded adamantly. Trump “made up the reasons” for withholding aid for months. After knocking down another point the Newsmax host tried to foist on viewers, Bolton said, “My point is Trump was not fit to be president…and was not competent to be president.” 

Amen.

Destroyed Russian tank.

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3/4/22: The Ghoul of Mar-a-Lago keeps getting chances to get the story of Russia’s attack on Ukraine right – and he keeps muffing it every time. On Wednesday he called in to “Mornings with Marisa” on the Fox Business network. Host Marisa Bartiromo allowed the former president to ramble through a long list of personal grievances – none of which had anything to do with the desperate plight of the Ukrainian people.

 

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“Our country would have made an absolute fortune, more money than it ever did, on this situation.”

 

The Ghoul of Mar-a-Lago, focusing on Ukraine

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Trump might have talked about mothers in Kyiv giving birth to babies in bomb shelters. Not interested. Didn’t care. Oil prices in the U.S., he warned, could “go unlimited.” You couldn’t even tell what he meant. Unlimited? Like a million dollars a tankful? Well, f--- those babies in bomb shelters.

 

Trump didn’t care.

 

Did the Ghoul wish to praise the heroic stand taken by Ukrainian President Zelensky? No. He only wanted to keep hitting the idea that Biden was weak. He went out of his way to say, “Our nation is led by fools.” You might have thought he would have harsh words for Putin, instead.

 

You might have thought he would have glanced at the same pictures and videos we’re all seeing. He might have spoken to blasted apartment buildings and smoldering wrecks of military vehicles. He might have commended ordinary Ukrainians for taking up arms in defense of their homeland. He might have shown he had more than a cash register for a soul. He might have called on the world to rally behind Mr. Biden and NATO. He might have focused on more than a million Ukrainians fleeing across the borders, into Poland and Slovakia and Moldova. He might easily have called on Vladimir Putin to sit down for talks – to agree to an immediate cease fire – might have pledged to send a million dollars in medical supplies to Ukraine, dipping into what he likes to brag about – his supposed ten billion dollar fortune.

 

Only this was Donald J. Trump.

Trump turned his back on the Kurds, our allies for a decade.

 

Just as he did when he screwed our Kurdish allies in Syria, but said we’d keep their oil, he focused on money.

 

He reminded Bartiromo that he won the election – continuing, as best he could, to keep the American people divided, rather than rally them to one cause. (His words were such music to Russian ears that they were repeated by the Russian ambassador to the United Nations the same day.)

 

(And his own former attorney general said his claims of having won the election were bullshit.)

 

Trump wanted his host and her viewers to understand that if he were still president, the United States “would export oil to everyone,” instead of buying it from other countries. He insisted, again, that Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine would never have happened if he were president, and explained how he would have made sure the U.S. benefited from the attack when it came.

 

Trump grumbled next, not about Russia’s naked aggression, but…windmills. He really hates windmills. He hates cancer-causing windmills way more than murderous Russian authoritarians. Biden should “create new energy,” Trump said – just like he, Donald, would have, if he hadn’t been cheated out of a second term. Windmills, he sneered, “are not going to do it.”

 

If the Ukrainian people were hoping to hear even a syllable of support, they had to be baffled by the bizarre message the former president was peddling.

 

Did Trump offer consolation to wives who had seen husbands cut down on the front lines? To fathers who had seen children killed by missile strikes? Did he care to praise Ukrainian women in uniform? Could he call on China, and his other friend, Xi Jinping (Trump really likes those dictators, if you’ve never noticed) to condemn the attack, to join us in economic sanctions?

 

No. The Ghoul mocked the idea of sanctions, insisting they’re weak and will never work, and Biden “doesn’t have a plan.”

 

Trump trumpeted his own great record on energy. “We were energy independent one year ago. We were exporting energy for the first time ever in the history of our country,” the former president added, noting that the U.S. was on track to “double the size this year.”

 

There was no telling where Trump got his statistics, or even what year he meant. If he meant “one year ago,” he would have been referring mostly to Biden’s first year in office, which began on January 20, 2021. And you could quickly get into the weeds of when the U.S. became energy independent, since, in 2019, when, technically, we were, we still imported 7.86 million barrels of oil daily. (We exported 8.5 million barrels daily that year.) Throw in variables like the negative effects of a two-year global pandemic, and sorting out the truth on oil independence could take a week.

 

The Ukrainians can’t spare a week. They’re dying today. They died yesterday. They’ll be dying tomorrow. Vladimir Putin is to blame.

 

Vladimir Putin is having his military murder people. And that is the only issue worth being discussed.

 

The problem with Trump remains the same. He doesn’t care how many gallons of blood are spilled. He focuses on money. He said if he were in charge, the U.S. would have been selling oil to everyone, and “our country would have made an absolute fortune, more money than it ever did, on this situation.”

 

Inspiring words!

 

Tell that to Ukrainians who are dying every day, fighting to keep their homeland free, fighting to protect their families and fending off cluster bombs, sniper fire and armored attacks.

 

Tell them, “Donald Trump stands shoulder-to-shoulder with…okay, no, not you. With piles of dollars.” If you can make an absolute fortune, that’s all that has ever mattered to the Ghoul of Mar-a-Lago.

 

Or, as his own NSA man, John Bolton, said earlier this week, Trump was “not fit to be president.”

 

FUN FACT: Trump told Bartiromo that Biden’s mistakes would bring on a recession next year. Or maybe the year after that. 

This is not the same as the depression Trump predicted for 2021, if Joe Biden were elected president.

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3/5/22: If you haven’t been paying attention to what Rejected-President Trump has been saying about how likeable and smart Vladimir Putin is, because you find such comments nauseating, you’ve missed a lot.

 

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“I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me…that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars. There would be no NATO if I didn’t act strongly and swiftly.” 

Donald J. Trump

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We had a special dose of stupidity spilled from the Orange God of Mar-a-Lago’s lips on Saturday night. According to a tape recording of comments he made in a meeting with supporters in New Orleans, Trump suggested a novel plan to keep the U.S. out of the Russia-Ukraine War. It was the same kind of genius plan which led to Mexico never paying for the wall. To Trump having four years to craft a healthcare plan and not producing a box of Band Aids in the process. 

This time, he thought it would be great to paint a bunch of F-22 aircraft and “bomb the shit out of Russia.” Then we would say, “China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch.” 

If you’re still a Trump fan, you might write this off as a joke. If you’re the Chinese, you’re not going to see the humor. 

Nor the Russians, either. 

You could chalk it all up to Trump’s adamantine ignorance. The idea that F-22 warplanes could ever pass as Chinese was ludicrous. If you knew your history, you might not think it was funny – since Hitler staged a fake attack in 1939, to justify his invasion of Poland. In fact, Trump’s “plan” would have been a clear violation of international law. And, above all else, the fact that getting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of human beings killed is never a topic to turn into a joke

 

Trump is to saving NATO
as Bill Cosby is to saving young women from sexual predators.

In related news, Trump saying he saved NATO, as he now claims, is like saying Bill Cosby saved women from sexual predators. In the entire history of NATO, for example, Donald was the only U.S. president ever to call the alliance “obsolete,” which he did just four days before he took office in 2017. That comment was no doubt honeyed music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. 

Then came the crash of an entire symphony. In July 2018, Trump questioned the very basis of NATO: Article Five. That article holds that an attack on one member will be considered an attack on all. 

No one had ever questioned Article Five before, until Trump appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. His host posed the question this way: “So, let’s say Montenegro – which joined [NATO] last year – is attacked, why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack? Why is that?”

 

“I understand what you’re saying,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve asked the same question.”

 

Or to put it another way: Why should the U.S. defend Poland? Or Hungary? Or Norway? Or Great Britain? Or Canada?

 

Without Article Five, NATO would cease to exist. And in a war against Russia – or China – the U.S. would be alone.

 

In any case, Loser Donald’s claim to have saved NATO was met with scorn by his former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Where President Biden had rallied NATO to aid in Ukraine’s defense, Bolton was clear. “Donald Trump,” he said “cared one thing about Ukraine, which was how does it affect his political future, and I can say that every other senior national security advisor, Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper at Defense, all of us thought we needed to bolster Ukraine’s security and were appalled at what Trump was doing.” In his memoir, Bolton says Trump wanted to leave NATO in 2018. “I had my heart in my throat,” he says. He believes Trump was going to pull out in his second term, and adds, “And I think Putin was waiting for that.”

 

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IF YOU HAVE BEEN focused on the terrible scenes from Ukraine, there are still a couple of important stories you might have missed. 

First, the jobs report for February was stellar. Again. Another 678,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy last month. 

We need not remind you, if you have the sense god gave an Osage orange, that the numbers under Biden are far better than under Donald J. Trump, who saw a net loss of jobs during his four years in office. (We’ve mentioned repeatedly that monthly job gains in the last 76 months Obama was in office were better than monthly gains under Trump, even in his first 37 months, before the pandemic hit.) 

The figures for January were also revised upward, to 481,000, from 467,000. So that was good. 

And the final numbers are now in for 2021. In Biden’s first eleven full months in office, the U.S. saw 6,223,000 jobs added to the economy. Add the 1,159,000 added in the first two months of this year, and you have more jobs gained in thirteen months under Biden than were added in Trump’s first three years. 

Those Trumpian numbers again: 

   715,000 jobs added in 2020 (January-February)

1,968,000 jobs added in 2019

2,292,000 jobs added in 2018

1,901,000 jobs added in 2017 (February-December)

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6,876,000 jobs added in Trumps’ first 37 full months in office, before he started insisting

COVID-19 wasn’t so bad, and it would soon go away. 

 

(For comparison, if you remember how often Trump whined about “inheriting a mess” from Mr. Obama, in his predecessor’s last full year in office – 2016 – a total of 2,318,000 jobs were gained.) 

At any rate, the Labor Participation Rate ticked up again in February, to 62.3 percent and unemployment fell to 3.8%.

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The “Stolen Election” Myth Takes a flurry of body blows. 

One big story that we know Trump fans are going to have to work to ignore, involves a flurry of body blows to the “stolen election” myth. You’re not going to see this saga covered in any detail on right-wing news – but that doesn’t mean when CNN covers it that it’s “Fake News.” 

(Know who else calls stories he doesn’t like “Fake News,” then arrests journalists he doesn’t like? Putin.) 

Consider the comments of former Attorney General Bill Barr – who said in an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News – that he wasn’t President Trump’s toady. (Until too late, he was.) Barr now says he made it clear in the last weeks of 2020, that Trump had lost the election, fair and square. In a White House meeting, he told the president the information he was getting, that there had been massive voter fraud, was “bullshit” and “it was wrong to be shoveling it out, like he and his team was.” 

In response, Trump sent NBC a three-page letter, saying Barr’s book, which is about to go on sale, was “Fake.” He called his former attorney general “lazy,” “a coward,” and “a big disappointment.”

Bill Barr calls "bullshit."

 

Meanwhile, the House Select Panel examining events related to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has uncovered ample evidence indicating that former-President Trump and his aides may have broken numerous laws in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

A few highlights from a recent report will give you a sense of how Trump’s legal team performed in attempting to prove that an election that wasn’t stolen (see Barr, above) was stolen: 

First, Rudy Giuliani’s law licenses were revoked in New York and Washington D.C. after he “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer” for Mr. Trump. 

Second, L. Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and seven other Trump lawyers were sanctioned in Michigan, with the court noting,  

 

[it] is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated.

 

Third, according to the president’s senior campaign advisor, soon after the election, a campaign data expert told the president “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose. 

Fourth:

 

On November 12, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a public statement noting “unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation” about the election, and affirming that “[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted our lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

 

Fifth:

 

Evidence obtained by the Select Committee reveals that Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue discussed allegations of voter fraud with President Trump on multiple occasions in December of 2020 – and informed him, both as to specific allegations and more generally, that the President’s claims of massive fraud sufficient to overturn the election were not supported by the evidence [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted]. According to Rosen, at a December 15, 2020 meeting at the White House that included Rosen, Donoghue, Ken Cuccinelli (Department of Homeland Security), Pat Cipollone (White House Counsel) and Mark Meadows (White House Chief of Staff), participants told the president that “people are telling you things that are not right.” According to Donoghue, he personally informed the President on a December 27, 2020 phone call “in very clear terms” that the Department of Justice had done “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” had looked at “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada” and concluded that “the major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed.”

 

Sixth, in a court filing demanding documents from John Eastman, who did his best to push Vice President Pence to ignore the electoral votes of select states which Trump definitely lost, the committee notes:

 

President Trump, Plaintiff, and several other associates of the President reached out directly to state officials to communicate unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud and request that state legislatures disregard popular election results. On January 2, 2021, the President and Plaintiff convened a videoconference with hundreds of state legislators from swing states won by candidate Biden. The Trump team reportedly urged the legislators to “decertify” the election results in their States. According to Michigan State Senator Ed McBroom, this call focused (without any valid legal or factual basis) on the purported power of state legislators to reject the rulings of federal and state courts and overturn already certified election results.

 

Seventh, the Select Committee notes, “That same day, President Trump spoke with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressing false and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and ultimately asking Raffensperger to ‘find 11,780 votes’ for Trump in the State.”

 

Eighth:

 

President Trump also took steps that would have corrupted the Department of Justice; he offered the role of Acting Attorney General to another Justice Department political appointee, Jeffrey Clark, knowing that Mr. Clark was pressing to issue official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results. The Department’s senior leadership and President Trump’s White House Counsel threatened to resign if President Trump elevated Clark and fired those who were resisting Clark’s requests.

 

Ninth: We now know that multiple recounts in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin said…um…Biden won in Georgia. He won in Arizona. He won in Michigan. And he won in Wisconsin, too.

 

Tenth:

 

Mr. Trump’s team also mounted an effort to obtain false election certificates purporting to demonstrate that the electors of seven States were committed to President Trump rather than President Biden. … Michigan Republican Co-Chair, Meshawn Maddock publicly stated, for example, that she “fought to seat the electors” because “the Trump campaign asked us to do that.” The certificates included false statements that they were official.

 

Eastman then pressed for a plan to have the vice president refuse to count the certified electoral votes of several states which President Trump had lost.

 

Plaintiff’s proposal was the subject of heated discussions in the White House in the days before January 6, including with the Vice President’s legal counsel and others who told Plaintiff that what he was proposing was illegal.

 

Eleventh:

 

This did not deter either Plaintiff or President Trump. Describing his own proposals in a now-public memorandum, Plaintiff characterized his proposed options as “BOLD, Certainly, but necessary because “this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage,” advising that “we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules.”

 

Following this advice from Plaintiff – advice that Plaintiff admitted no member of the Supreme Court would accept – President Trump repeatedly attempted to instruct, direct, or pressure the Vice President, in his capacity as President as of [sic] the Senate, to refuse to count the votes from six States.

 

Twelfth: There were fruitless meetings on January 4 and January 5, with Eastman and Trump pushing Vice President Pence to ignore the electoral votes of several states. 

The next day, Trump made it perfectly clear what he wanted:

 

This pressure continued on January 6. At 1:00 a.m., President Trump tweeted, “If Vice President @Mike-Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency… Mike can send it back!” At 8:17 a.m. the President tweeted, States want to correct their votes… all Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”

 

Thirteenth: In his speech to the crowd that gathered later that day, President Trump again made clear what he desired. Speaking to his supporters, with Dr. Eastman standing by his side, Trump insisted,

 

John is one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country and he looked at this, and he said what an absolute disgrace that this could be happening to our Constitution, and he looked at Mike Pence, and I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … And Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.

 

Fourteenth: In the wake of the riot, Eastman refused to give up. That same evening he once again asked the Vice President’s lawyer to convince Mr. Pence to break the law.

 

“I implore you to consider one relatively minor violation [of the Electoral Count Act] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.” Plaintiff knew what he was proposing would violate the law, but he nonetheless urged the Vice President to take those actions.

 

Evidence gathered by the Select Committee indicates that the president’s White House Counsel confronted Eastman before the January 6 rally, and rejected Eastman’s advice to Mr. Trump. “And Plaintiff admitted that not a single Justice of the Supreme Court would agree with his view that the Vice President could refuse to count certain electoral votes.”

 

Pence subsequently summed up Eastman and Trump’s idea, that he could somehow overturn the votes and give Trump the win, this way: “And the truth is, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.” (See: 3/9/22, for more on Mr. Eastman and the other members of the plot to steal the election. For Trump. Not from Trump.)

Eastman, left, pushed the "stolen election" lie.

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3/6/22: Yet another member of Rejected-President Trump’s old cabinet has come out and savaged the Orange God. This time it was former Attorney General Bill Barr, the man who looks like a manatee.

 

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“Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” 

Former Attorney General Bill Barr

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Barr now joins former Trump administration leaders such as Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis, who came to see his boss as a “threat to the U.S. Constitution,” and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who called Trump a “fucking moron.” Here’s how he describes his former boss in a new book: “Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” 

Frankly, that should have been obvious to Barr and all of Trump’s other supporters from the very start. In October 2017, after Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican, warned, “We have a leader who has a personality disorder,” this blogger pointed out that Trump clearly suffered from a “narcissistic personality disorder.” Anyone who could read could work the way down the list of symptoms provided by the Mayo Clinic. Trump displayed them all. So, when National Security Advisor John Bolton said recently that his boss had placed self-interest before U.S. national security, when he delayed military aid to Ukraine in 2019, we were not shocked or dismayed. 

It was f---ing obvious from the start. Trump was unfit for the job. Trump didn’t care about the people who elected him. Or those of us who voted for Hillary. Or later, Biden. He didn’t care about anyone except himself. 

That’s the profile of every person suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder; and we should not be surprised. 

Now – now! – Barr says he’s “dismayed.” He believes the Republican Party should “move on” from Trump. Republicans should turn to “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Trump’s policy ideas, but don’t bring along the baggage of his “erratic personal behavior.” It’s like saying the Seventh Cavalry should move on from General Custer, but only the day after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, when all of the men who rode by his side are already dead. 

Barr is too late to tell the truth – and try to sell his book. Trump has already called Barr, a lifelong Republican, a “RINO.” He says he always knew Barr was a terrible pick for Attorney General, “weak,” and “stupid,” and hey, “he does look like a manatee.” 

(Okay, I made that last part up.)

 

You may recall that Trump came to hate his first pick for AG, Jeff Sessions, who he also labeled “very weak.” 

So, let us save everyone the cost of Mr. Barr’s book. Let us hit just some of the ways he makes clear. We should never let Trump near the White House again. He shouldn’t even be allowed to stand out on Pennsylvania Avenue and look at the Presidential Mansion through the iron-railed fence. 

“We need leaders not only capable of fighting and ‘punching,’ but also persuading and attracting – leaders who can frame, and advocate for, an uplifting vision of what it means to share in American citizenship,” Barr now writes. “Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”

 

The former AG describes his boss as an “incorrigible” narcissist who, “through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control,” blew the 2020 election. Trump then did “a disservice to the nation” in falsely claiming his defeat was due to fraud. “The election was not ‘stolen,’” Barr says. “Trump lost it.” 

(Yeah. We knew that, too.)

 

Still, if Barr says now, what many of us long ago understood, he does provide context for our fears. We on the other side of the political divide knew that Trump was an existential threat to the rule of law from the start. We just didn’t know that inside his administration, many top officials also knew it. Barr confirms all our fears. He admits that he and White House lawyers had weekly lunches, when they would “inventory the legally problematic ideas floating around the administration.” Even more appalling, Barr says, a “fair share” of those bad ideas “came from Trump himself.”

 

So, a Monday lunch conversation might have gone like this:

 

White House lawyer #1: “Hey, pass me the ketchup for my fries.”

 

White House lawyer #2: “Did you guys see the game. The Washington Football Team looked like garbage.”

 

Attorney General Barr: “Yeah. And Trump wants us to break some laws.”

 

Lawyer #3: “Again? Can’t the guy give it a rest?”

 

Lawyer #1: “Washington needs to draft a quarterback next year – like in the first round.”

 

 

In any case, Barr goes on to explain that DOJ lawyers “operated like a tag team” so no one official “would provoke too much of the President’s ire at one time.” He adds, “We referred to this as choosing who would ‘eat the grenade.’”

 

Good image, but we need to be clear. The grenades tossed by Donald J. Trump that were always about to explode were plans to bend and/or break the law.

 

Barr no doubt has more to say, than this blogger can find by consulting reviews of his book. Did I mention, I’m not about to buy it myself? What we learn just from reviews is damning enough. “People are worthwhile to Trump only as means to his ends – as utensils,” Barr says. “When they don’t help him get what he wants, they are useless. In my case, Trump’s disenchantment started – as it was bound to – when he saw I was not willing to bend the law to do his bidding.”

 

“Bend the law” is a nice way of saying that President Trump wanted to subvert the U.S. Constitution whenever he thought it would help him get what he wanted. And we need to be clear. His own attorney general had to thwart him.

 

 

“Whack jobs from outside the government.”

 

What about Trump’s eighteen months of lies about a “stolen election?” What does Barr say about that now? Pretty much what most clear-eyed observers have said for the last eighteen months – only now providing a look from inside the Trump administration. First, the election was not stolen. Barr says he explained this repeatedly to Mr. Trump.

 

Second, the president’s constant lying stirred up his base and led at least indirectly to the attacks on January 6. “On this trajectory,” with Trump spreading lies for weeks (and now for over a year since), Barr admits, “the peaceful transition of power was not an obviously attainable goal.”

 

Or, to backtrack to what General James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, said, the man was a “threat to the U.S. Constitution.”

 

Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, Barr says. “He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails. …. He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.” What the whack jobs were putting out (and still are) were “fact-free claims of [voter] fraud.” Claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines, for example, Barr calls “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.” 

So, the whack jobs told Trump he won. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was: the biggest whack job was Trump. 

 

FUN FACT: The reviewer of Barr’s book for Esquire magazine, sums it up succinctly. He says that of all the Trump administration “memoirs that have emerged, and which will continue to emerge like slow-acting cancers on the body politic, this one may never be surpassed for pure worthlessness.”

___ 

 

3/7/22: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been too busy lately to discipline Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar – just because they showed up at a convention organized by a white supremacist 

And Greene gave a speech. (See: 2/27/22.) 

He’s going to get to it soon.

 

____________________ 

“And Trump was awesome because he was racist.” 

White Supremacist Nicholas Fuentes

____________________ 

 

Meanwhile, that organizer, Nick Fuentes, has made it clear what he stands for, and inadvertently revealed why Greene and Gosar have no business in Congress, or so much as running a Cub Scout pack. 

As Fuentes explained recently, “I am unapologetic. I thought the Capitol [riot] was awesome; it was awesome! And so was Trump. And Trump was awesome because he was racist. Trump was awesome because he was sexist. The only thing Trump wasn’t awesome for was being antisemitic; he wasn’t antisemitic.” 

“But the rest was awesome. And people have got to get racist,” he added.  

As a right-wing bonus, we should note that Fuentes hates, gays, lesbians, and transgenders of all kinds. 

Kind of like Governor Ron DeSantis.

___ 

 

3/9/22: The grim news from Ukraine has blotted out most other stories; but we continue to get bits and pieces of evidence to indicate that Rejected-President Trump was pretty much nuts. 

He’s still out there shouting, like some poor homeless schizophrenic, about how he was robbed of another four years in the White House. But his own former attorney general has said his claims are “twaddle.”

 

____________________ 

“Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections.” 

Justice David B. Cohen, New York State Supreme Court

____________________ 

 

As for the myth of the “stolen election,” we see fresh pieces of the puzzle falling in place. The Texas Bar Association has sued Trump pal, lawyer Sidney Powell, for professional misconduct. At issue: Powell’s absurd claims – pursued through the various courts – of widespread voter fraud. 

Or, as the suit against her states:

 

“Beginning in or about November of 2020[,] respondent filed multiple federal lawsuits in different jurisdictions (including the District Court of Arizona, the Northern District of Georgia, the Eastern District of Michigan, and the Eastern District of Wisconsin) alleging, inter alia, election fraud has occurred in the national presidential election in 2020,” the six-page complaint states. “Respondent had no reasonable basis to believe the lawsuits she filed were not frivolous.”

 

If the Bar Association wins the suit, it is likely Powell will be disbarred, in the same way and for the same reasons Rudy Giuliani has lost his license to practice law. 

In related news, a judge on the New York State Supreme Court has allowed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic Voting Machines to proceed. The targets of that suit include: 

Maria Bartiromo, current Fox Business News host 

Lou Dobbs, former Fox Business News host 

Rudy Giuliani (again!) 

– and – 

Fox News 

But not Sidney Powell! (The judge ruled that he lacked jurisdiction to include her in the case.) 

All of the above, Smartmatic claims, damaged the company by claiming its software was rigged to ensure Donald J. Trump lost his reelection bid.

Ms. Powell, gazing at her hero's image.

 

Justice David B. Cohen wrote in explanation of why he rejected a request to dismiss the suit:

 

Even assuming that Fox News did not intentionally allow this false narrative to be broadcasted, there is a substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth. 

 

FUN FACT – FELONS: Lev Parnas, former pal of Rudy Giuliani, as Lev and Rudy and Igor Fruman worked diligently to “clean up” corruption in Ukraine back in 2019, joins the serried ranks of felons with ties to Team Trump. 

Or, to be more accurate, Mr. Parnas gets promoted in the ranks – having been convicted of one felony in October, and having decided to plead guilty to a second on Thursday. 

Mr. Fruman had already thrown in the legal towel and plead guilty last September, to charges of soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. You know: Because if you really want to clean up corruption in Ukraine, and hunt up dirt on Hunter Biden, what you do is funnel illegal campaign cash to politicians in…the USA. 

Good old Igor was fined $10,000 and sentenced to one year in prison; but it remains to be seen if he (or Parnas) will cooperate with investigators.

 

FUN FACT – PLEADING THE FIFTH: Yet another felon, General Michael T. Flynn, who plead guilty to his crimes twice (but received a well-timed pardon from Donald J. Trump) has appeared before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Flynn decided to show up for a hearing, rather than risk being cited for contempt. Then he proceeded to plead the Fifth – we suspect – to every question. That would include: “Are you wearing a toupee?” 

Flynn becomes the fifth witness, suspected of having a role in an illegal plot to steal victory from Joe Biden, to plead the Fifth. He joins Alex Jones, who plead the Fifth, by his own admission, more than a hundred times. He joins John Eastman, who refused to answer 146 times on grounds he might incriminate himself, and who asked Vice President Pence to help the plot by – okay – breaking the law. Throw in Roger Stone (also pardoned by President Trump for various crimes), who told reporters he took the Fifth for every question. The fifth member of the “Plead the Fifth Club,” would be none other than former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark, who wanted the DOJ to issue a letter suggesting there had been serious voter fraud in Georgia in 2020, when – minor detail – no one else at DOJ thought that was true.

___ 

 

3/11/22: With most of the democratic world rallying against Russian aggression in Ukraine, Rejected-President Trump has been asked repeatedly for, or volunteered his thoughts, on the crisis. 

To say his answers have been lacking is to do injustice to the pablum that keeps dripping from his lips. Trump has praised Putin for “genius” in invading, mocked what he called “$2 worth of sanctions,” blasted Biden, failed to mention the slaughter of children, and ignored a refugee crisis. 

Even bombing maternity hospitals hasn’t registered with Trump. But his latest response was the most bizarre. Appearing on a “Full Send” podcast for the Nelk Brothers (I had never heard of them before), he was asked for comment. His response was so brain dead, that when I read about it, I couldn’t believe even Donald J. Loser could be so dense. So, I watched the tape. 

Host Kyle Forgeard put this question to the former president: “What do you see happening next, then?” regarding Ukraine. “Cause it seems like the tensions are high. How does this all end? Is this going to be a long-term thing? How do you see it unfolding?”  

Could this be any easier to get right? Mention the suffering women and children. Commend NATO members for helping arm Ukraine. Talk about brave Ukrainians rising as one to defend their land… 

Nope. 

Nope. 

And nope.

 

The dope responded:

 

Well, and I said this a long time ago, if this happens, we are playing right into their hands. Green energy. The windmills don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes.

 

And yet the environmentalists love the windmills. And I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills ― and I had them way down ― but the windmills are the most expensive energy you can have. And they don’t work.

 

And by the way, they last a period of ten years, and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place, nobody ever takes them down. They just go on to the next piece of prairie or land, and destroy that.

 

God help us. Trump is a soulless buffoon – who burns with anger to be president again. He had four years to learn something, anything, and got dumber instead. 

F***ing windmills!

 

He might as well have started babbling about how to cheat on your property taxes, or all the great sex he had with Stormy Daniels. He might as well have brought up the “beautiful piece of cake” he was eating at Mar-a-Lago.

 

He didn’t mention the suffering children of Ukraine because he lacks all human capacity to care.

___ 

 

3/12/22: Saturday, we had this nugget from another former member of the benighted Trump administration.

 

____________________ 

“I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him.” 

Former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham

____________________

 

 

Asked about Trump’s relationship with Putin…former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said: “I think [Trump] feared [Putin]. I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him. I also think he admired him, greatly, I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.” She added: “And I will say this, just in watching all of this with [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, Donald Trump would be 57 feet below ground hiding. And Zelenskyy has been out there fighting for his country.”

 

From Mr. Blogger himself: Trump has bone spurs on the heart.

___

 

 

3/13/22: I pick up stories in all kinds of places and delve into details no normal human being probably should. That means I know more about Donald J. Trump than is good for my health.

 

____________________

 

A would-be tyrant or the U.S. Constitution?

____________________

 

 

Studying how he thinks is like staring into an open sewer.

 

In fact, I should probably say this once more. I don’t find most conservative principles dangerous.

 

Trump?

 

Yeah. He’s a warped human being.

 

Dan Coats, his former Director of National Intelligence, weighed in with Roll Call this week. He was asked how he felt after Rejected-President Trump called Putin’s attack on Ukraine “genius,” and went on to complement his Russian pal. Trump had noted that Putin was going to gobble up a huge chunk of European real estate, and do it at almost no cost.

 

“How smart is that?” Trump had added rhetorically.

 

Coats responded as every thinking American should. “I’m speechless on this,” he told a reporter, “how anybody could think that could be said.”

 

And Coats agreed that Trump still being the de facto Republican presidential nominee in 2024 feels like a very different party than that of Coats, or fellow Hoosiers such as Mike Pence, who as vice president did not go along with Trump’s plan to override the counting of electoral votes, or another former vice president, Dan Quayle, who served under President George H.W. Bush. Quayle advised Pence that he didn’t have the power to do what Trump asked.

 

“I think the big issue before 2024, is it going to be the Trump Party or the Republican Party?” Coats said.

 

As for what that Trump Party will look like in two years, this weekend Rep. Tom Rice of Kentucky provided another glimpse. Having voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 attacks, Rice was the target of the Orange God of Mar-a-Lago’s hate at a rally in Florence, Kentucky.

 

“Trump is here because, like no one else I’ve ever met, he is consumed by spite,” Rice warned in a statement. “I took one vote he didn’t like and now he’s chosen to support a yes man candidate who has and will bow to anything he says, no matter what.”

 

“If you want a Congressman who supports political violence in Ukraine or in the United States Capitol, who supports party over country, who supports a would-be tyrant over the Constitution, and who makes decisions based solely on re-election, then Russell Fry is your candidate,” the statement explains.

___ 

 

3/21/22: Hard to focus on anything but the war in Ukraine. Still, Rejected-President Trump keep’s raising his head. He’s like the gopher in Caddyshack, but a far more dangerous pest. 

Did you know, if the next presidential election were held today, Trump would lead Biden by 43 points? Well, liberal scumbags, it’s true. Trump would stomp holy sh*t out of “Sleepy Joe,” if only the unvaxxed voted. 

Sadly, for Trump, if the election were held today, and everyone had a chance to cast ballots, he’d lose again, 41% to 37%. And that’s with Biden’s approval ratings at their lowest point so far. Plus, the Trump base is shrinking rapidly. First, they’ve always been older, on average. Second, they’re unvaxxed! We know they don’t believe what CDC says – whereas they are huge fans of “Q,” who doesn’t exist. Consider the numbers. In 2020, Trump lost the state of Georgia by 11,799 votes. 

Georgia gave Biden 16 electoral votes. 

Trump came close but lost in several states. He lost Nevada (6 electoral votes) by 33,596 in the popular vote. He lost Wisconsin, and 10 more electoral votes, by a margin of 20,608 popular votes. That was out of a total vote in the state of 3.2 million. Then he lost Arizona by a slim margin. And lost again in a recount. Then he lost a third time when the famed Cyber Ninjas promised he’d win – but their recount proved he didn’t. The final tally in Arizona: Trump lost by 10,457 votes, and with that Arizona’s 11 electoral votes went to Biden. 

That’s 43 electoral votes, lost by a total of 76,460 popular votes. As Al Gore could tell you, it stings to lose. 

Trump? He yelps about how he won and hides out in his Mar-a-Lago fantasy world.

 

His side is currently hemorrhaging voters – because they won’t vax. If we go back to January 1, CDC reported that 825,237 Americans had already lost their lives to the coronavirus. By March 21, the number of dead had risen to 969,298, or an increase of 144,061. 

Since health experts agree that the death rate in this country, vaccinated vs. unvaxxed, from COVID, is somewhere close to 9-1, you could argue that we on the Biden side should pray for the Trump folks to keep refusing the shots. We can win any close race if Trump supporters continue dying. 

Stubborn and ignorant, so far they are. It’s not a good combination if you want to win in 2024.

___ 

 

3/22/22: Pretend you are the President of the United States. You need advice on how to handle North Korea. North Korea has nuclear weapons. The leader of that country is a homicidal maniac. 

He also has long-range missiles. 

Who would you turn to for advice? Former presidents? Experts at the State Department or Department of Defense? Top nuclear scientists? All good choices. If you were thinking along those lines, you would make a fabulous imaginary president. You should run for imaginary office in 2024. 

What about Kid Rock? Was your first thought: I want to talk to the guy who once offered the following sage advice to fans?

 

Whatever your thing is – if it’s pills, cocaine, smoking weed – when you slow that down, which I’ve done a lot of, you’ve got to relearn how to drink. That’s the f***ing hardest part. You used to be able to go all night. Finding that balance has been interesting. I still black out here and there, but nothing too serious. 

 

If you said, “Kid Rock,” you are an unconscionable dolt and should never be allowed within a thousand miles of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Now, if you were Donald J. Trump, once the real President of the United States, yes, you would. You would seek out Kid Rock, the musician famous for blacking out drunk, and ask him for guidance. 

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson – also known for handing out idiotic advice – the Kid told the Fox News fool that Trump once asked him, “What do you think we should do about North Korea?” 

“I’m like, what?” he told Carlson. “I don’t think I’m qualified to answer this.”

 

(Neither was Trump.)

 

He said it was “really weird” to “get phone calls from [the president] and stuff. It’s just kind of mind-blowing.” 

That is true. 

And to complete the circle of fools, Kid Rock told Carlson that he was introduced to the president by…Sarah Palin.

Golf tips and foreign policy advice, anyone?

 

* 

THE CENTER of any circle of right-wing fools is still Donald J. Trump. When asked by Stuart Varney, of Fox News, what he would do about Ukraine, were he still president, Trump offered a chuckleheaded response. 

You might think, with fighting entering a second month, with nearly ten million Ukrainians having fled their homes, that Don would have some good ideas. Then again, when asked a few days ago about the war, Loser Don went off on a rant about windmills (see: 3/11/22). So, you know this time he’s got to be ready. 

Surely, his closest advisors have told him, “For god sakes, don’t mention windmills – or say you’re calling Kid Rock.” 

The guy is still the clueless oaf we all remember. “Well what I would do, is I would, we would,” Trump began, “we have tremendous military capability and what we can do without planes, to be honest with you, without 44 year-old jets, what we can do is enormous,” he bumbled, “and we should be doing it and we should be helping them to survive and they’re doing an amazing job.” 

Varney might as well have asked a kindergartner the same question.

Ukrainian forces are fighting bravely.

 

Trump also claimed this week, without saying who exactly phoned, that all kinds of generals were calling him to say, “Sir, we wish you were still around to tell Russia to call off the war because no one can intimidate Putin like you!” 

Trump didn’t name his imaginary friends with stars on their epaulettes. So, I am going to venture a guess. Those generals would include General Mills, General Delivery, and General Michael T. Flynn. 

Flynn was Trump’s first National Security Advisor. He spent time collecting fat speaking fees from Russians, and pocketed $530,000 from Turkish interests – while simultaneously offering Trump advice on U.S. national interests. 

One general I believe we can assume did not call: Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis. Remember him? General Mattis famously called his boss “a threat to the U.S. Constitution.”

___

 

3/24/22: If those of us on the left worry about Justice Clarence Thomas, we now know his wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is absolutely a problem. With a history of right-wing activism, Mrs. Thomas currently serves on the nine-member board of the Council for National Policy. 

The wife of a Supreme Court justice, or even the wife of a small-time blogger, have every right to join political groups that share their values. But the Council, through its “Action” arm, took on an outsize role after the 2020 election. And, as we learned this week, Mrs. Thomas had a role in a plot to snatch victory away from President Biden in the weeks that followed. 

The New York Times explains:

 

It was C.N.P. Action that circulated the November [2020] “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been widely known. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”

 

By the time this document went out, the signs of danger were clear – although Ginni Thomas failed to see them. We know, on December 2, that President Trump was issuing stark warning:

 

In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”

 

Mrs. Thomas had the same pyrotechnic political inclinations, insisting in the weeks after Trump’s defeat, that, “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles.”  

So. We should be clear. It wasn’t “vicious” when the two sides argued about raising taxes on the rich, or mandating mask wearing. It wasn’t a battle over “founding principles” if our side said climate change was real. Most issues which divide Americans are ordinary politics. But people like Ginni and Donald like to turn every battle into a tale of good vs. evil, with those of us with whom they differ on the side of Beelzebub. It’s a ridiculous political position to adopt – over and over and over again – but it works for the loudest tub-thumpers on the right. 

It scares the unwitting into voting for the incompetent. 

Wrap it up in a patriotic bow, and you can convince the ill-informed that Donald J. Trump is our nation’s savior.

 

Did the wife of a Supreme Court justice go too far in the weeks following the 2020 election?  We know now where she stood. We know, if she was not yet in the camp of illegality, she was hiking in the woods, looking for the campfire. Fourteen months later, we know (if we know how to read) that no significant election fraud has been found – and even her husband has acknowledged that fact. 

Yet, Mrs. Thomas was ready for war on January 6. Not necessarily war in the sense of gunfire – but war for the soul of America, as she imagined it. That morning, just hours before President Trump spoke at the “March to Save America” rally, she posted on social media: “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!” 

She should have known better. By that time, Trump supporters were praying for him to grab a second term that judges had repeatedly said he didn’t deserve. Our side had outvoted her side by seven million. 

She couldn’t admit it, or didn’t care. She was delusional, at best, criminally-inclined, at worst. She bent her efforts to overturning a fairly-decided democratic election. 

 

Did Mrs. Thomas give “legitimacy” to felony assault? 

This blogger has never cared much for her husband. But now, his wife’s right-wing activism raises fundamental questions about how much we can trust Justice Thomas to render fair judgment. After the January 6 riot, the Council of National Policy, on whose board his wife sits, circulated another memo. As The New York Times explains, that memo urged supporters to, “Drive the narrative that it was mostly peaceful protests.” The memo suggested that right-wing leaders, “Amplify the concerns of the protestors and give them legitimacy [emphasis added].” 

In the last year, nearly eight hundred of those “protesters” have been charged with crimes,  including more than 200 who stand accused of assaulting police. Did a wife of a Supreme Court justice really want to give “legitimacy” to criminal behavior, including felony assault? 

Even worse, Mrs. Thomas played some kind of role (as yet not entirely known) in planning and supporting the “Stop the Steal” effort. 

And she did so in the face of massive evidence that there had been no steal, and no real voter fraud.

 

In December 2021, she co-signed a letter

 

calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the Jan. 6 committee. Thomas and her co-authors said the investigation “brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong,” adding that they would begin “a nationwide movement to add citizens’ voices to this effort.”

 

That is, she co-signed a letter to end an investigation which, in theory, if not yet proven in fact, might reveal her part in planning what turned out to be a violent insurrection. Did she play a significant role? We don’t know. Did she conspire to break the law? We don’t know. What we do know is that a few weeks later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1, to allow release of records from the Trump White House that related to the attack on Capitol Hill. 

The one judge in dissent? 

Her husband. 

Justice Thomas once described his and his wife’s relationship as an “amalgam.” They were like one person, he said. 

So, a second question arises from the first. Can we trust him to render fair decisions based solely on law? 

We know he says his wife works, “24/7 every day in defense of liberty.” But defense of “liberty” from whom? People who might disagree with her stances on healthcare, or equal rights for transgender students, or who consider abortion not to be a crime but a matter of “reproductive right?” 

If everything is a battle to defend “liberty,” then Ginni Thomas has placed herself, in her mind, on the side that is always right. She’s defending liberty. Whatever she does, she’s justified in her mind. 

 

How Justice and Mrs. Thomas arrived at this point. 

The couple came to this point in life by radically different paths. Justice Thomas’s father left the family when Clarence was two. From that point on, he was raised largely in the home of his strict grandfather. As a young man, fresh out of college, he discovered the works of Thomas Sowell, a conservative African American writer. Sowell attacked affirmative action, warning that the policy undercut the self-reliance of  the beneficiaries. His was an argument similar to the one that Booker T. Washington had been making in 1906, and not entirely without merit. But not entirely valid, either. Self-reliance would only carry the African American citizen so far, if for example, in 1921, he or she could be lynched with impunity. Or in 1956, if he or she wanted to sit down on a bus because feet were tired. Or pass through the doors of the University of Alabama in 1962. Even a self-reliant couple, one white, one black, would run into legal and social problems if they wanted to marry in 1967, in the State of Virginia. So that the idea that standing on your own two feet and forging your own path was all that was necessary lacked nuance.

 

____________________ 

“Whether deemed inferior by the crudest bigots or considered a victim by the most educated elites, being dismissed as anything other than inherently equal is still, at bottom, a reduction of our human worth.” 

Justice Thomas, explaining his own opposition to affirmative action

____________________ 

 

Yet, as the future justice once wrote, when reading Sowell,

 

he “felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water” to see his own beliefs articulated [see quote above]. A few years later, after he was appointed by Reagan to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he would complain that black civil rights leaders “bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and moan, whine and whine.”

 

Thomas is a bright man – and it never appears to have dawned on him that those of the same color, yet not so gifted, might be held back by discrimination in all its many forms and varieties. 

He had been married before, and had custody of his teenage son Jamal, when he and Ginni met. They were married in 1987. Four years later, when he was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court, one of Ginni’s aunts told the Washington Post, that the family had been impressed – in a bigoted sort of way. He “was so nice,” she explained, “we forgot he was black.” 

“He treated her so well,” Aunt Bigot added, “all of his other qualities made up for his being black.”

 

* 

THE QUESTION of how much influence his wife wields over him, and his decisions in cases he hears, merits increasing scrutiny. Mrs. Thomas has long been a conservative activist (which is legal and fine), but she takes unbending stands on issues that come before her husband’s court. And he has blurred the line between politics and justly-rendered decisions on several occasions. His wife is a staunch opponent of abortion, for example, and has long been active in the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

The question becomes, when Justice Thomas decides in such cases, is he strictly interpreting the law? Or is he hearing everything his wife has said for the last 35 years and reacting as she would desire? 

We now know that Mrs. Thomas proved incapable of putting aside her wish that Trump had won reelection long enough to study the evidence. And it’s always dangerous if individuals can’t focus on reality. Yet, she admits, this was not the first time her beliefs blinded her to realities. “Our family didn’t believe Nixon did anything wrong in Watergate until way after he admitted guilt,” she once said. “We believed any Republican until all the evidence was in, and then a little more.”  

As it was in 1974, when Nixon imperiled the U.S. Constitution, so it was in 2020, when Trump insisted the election was stolen. Ginni went along with him, long after evidence proved otherwise – to a point where the republic was endangered.

 

* 

HER OWN CONSERVATISM took root within her family, during her girlhood, growing up in Nebraska. Her mother, for instance, fought hard to overturn the state legislature’s 1972 approval of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

In 1996, Phyllis Schlafly, the leader of that fight, nationally, introduced Ginni at a gathering of the conservative Eagle Forum.

 

“It was back in 1973 that a little group in Omaha, Nebraska, decided that they would rescind Nebraska’s ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it was just about half a dozen of them, but Ginni’s mother was in that group,” [Schlafly said], calling it “a real turning point in our long battle” against the amendment, which the forum said would not “celebrate womanhood” but “erase it.”

 

Nebraska did rescind its ratification, on March 15, 1973, and ultimately the ERA failed to pass. 

And so, to revert for a moment, to Justice Thomas’s firm belief in “self-reliance.” For the next fifty years women were forced to engage in battles on a thousand different fronts. Was the ERA really all about a desire to “erase” womanhood? Or did airline stewardesses have a right to keep working after they turned 35, and airlines said they “aged out?” Did girls have a right to play Little League baseball? Could a female fly a jet in combat? Join the carpenters’ union? Keep her last name when she married? Or keep teaching if she got pregnant? Did colleges have to have a soccer team for females, if they had a soccer team for males? Could a female drive a truck for UPS, wrestle in middle school, or even sit on the U.S. Supreme Court? 

And, of course, if a female became pregnant, did she have the right to terminate her own pregnancy? 

Mrs. Thomas might have answered “no,” in every one of those eleven situations. And in right-wing circles she and her husband were rising. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1990, and elevated to the Supreme Court sixteen months later. In five years of work for the Heritage Foundation, she earned $700,000 – yet the couple failed to disclose the source of her earnings, as required by federal law. They had to amend their tax filings. They hosted Rush Limbaugh’s third wedding. “Family values” – right? – and don’t let the gays get married. And in 2010, Ginni started her own advocacy group, Liberty Central. Her salary that year was $120,511. As part of her work “for liberty,” she lobbied the courts to overturn the Affordable Care Act. When the constitutionality of that act came before her husband’s court, Justice Thomas declined to recuse himself. 

As his lovely wife would have wished, he voted to overturn the law, but ended up in the minority.

 

It was not the first time the couple had, if not stepped across a red legal line, at least tiptoed perilously close.

 

The federal judicial code of conduct, adopted in 1973, restricts judges from being “a speaker, a guest of honor or featured on the program” at fund-raising events. While the code doesn’t officially apply to the nine justices, [Chief Justice John] Roberts said in a 2011 report that the justices “do in fact consult” it when “assessing their ethical obligations” – a statement reiterated by a spokeswoman for the court when [The New York Times] asked for comment. But according to documents and recordings of such events reviewed by The Times, Justice Thomas has at least twice headlined annual conferences at the Eagle Forum, a conservative grass-roots group opposed to abortion and modern feminism.

 

The first was in 1996 when he received an Eagle award. “He’s better than Rehnquist, he’s better than Scalia, he’s just wonderful,” Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the Eagle Forum and one of the most influential conservative activists of her generation, told the audience, according to a cassette recording of the speech. She even recited a poem in his honor, which began: “No high court justice shows such promise/As our favorite, Clarence Thomas/You’re a jurist for the ages/Who sends liberals into rages.”

 

It should not be necessary to note that the job of a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court is not to send liberals “into rages.” 

But if Justice Thomas was cognizant of the inherent danger there is no record that he ever protested. 

In 2008, he stumbled over the ethical line again, or perhaps was pushed. He delivered a keynote speech to donors to the Manhattan Institute, what the Times referred to as “a secretive political retreat hosted by the billionaire Charles Koch.” Two years later, Thomas joined the 5-4 majority in the case of Citizens United v. FEC. That decision essentially held that billionaires like Koch could donate as much money as they wanted to political campaigns and causes. Donating huge piles of cash was a matter of “political speech” and therefore protected by the First Amendment. 

Or, to put it colloquially: “Money talks.” Or shouts! Which no Founding Father ever suggested was a good idea in terms of good governing.

 

*

____________________ 

“Several cases involving transgender rights were making their way through the federal courts.”

____________________ 

 

With the rise of Donald J. Trump, Justice and Mrs. Thomas rose ever higher in the right-wing pantheon. Based on “interviews with nine former Trump aides and advisers, most of whom requested anonymity in order to speak frankly,” the Times described several meetings between Ginni and the Orange Buffoon (the blogger’s term). Those aides and advisers “recounted how she aggressively pushed far-right candidates for various administration jobs and positioned herself as a voice of Trump’s grass-roots base. ‘Here’s what the peeps think,’ she would say, according to one of the aides. ‘We have to listen to the peeps.’” 

One meeting, held on January 25, 2019, stood out. Mrs. Thomas and a delegation arrived to speak with President Trump.

 

“It was the craziest meeting I’ve ever been to,” said a Trump aide who attended. “She started by leading the prayer.” When others began speaking, the aide remembers talk of “the transsexual agenda” and parents “chopping off their children’s breasts.” He said the president “tried to rein it in – it was hard to hear though,” because throughout the meeting attendees were audibly praying.

 

It was an event with no precedent, and some of the details of what transpired soon leaked: the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice lobbying a president when several cases involving transgender rights were making their way through the federal courts. … The meeting grew chaotic. Ginni Thomas and other attendees complained to the president that their favored hard-line job candidates were being blocked and that his own personnel office should be purged, depicting some of his aides as closet liberals and Never Trumpers.

 

Not long after, Justice Thomas had another chance to weigh in on the issue of rights for gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. At issue: the question of whether they were covered, on the basis of sex, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In particular: Could they be fired from a job because of gender identity. With the court ruling in a pair of cases, 6-3, that they were protected, Thomas joined Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in furious dissent. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned a separate minority opinion.) 

The New York Times explained:

 

“There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation,” Justice Alito wrote. “The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.”

 

“A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall,” he wrote. “The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous.”

 

The common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964, Justice Alito wrote, was bias against women or men and did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If Congress wanted to protect gay and transgender workers, he wrote, it could pass a new law.

 

“Discrimination ‘because of sex’ was not understood as having anything to do with discrimination because of sexual orientation or transgender status” in 1964, he wrote. “Any such notion would have clashed in spectacular fashion with the societal norms of the day.”

 

Justice Alito was right, of course. Congress could have passed a law to ban discrimination on grounds of “sexual orientation or transgender status.” Or the various states might have addressed the issue. The problem for the victims of discrimination, of course, was that lawmakers had never done so. As for the notion that human rights should rest on “societal norms,” Alito was flagrantly wrong. 

He and Justice Thomas should have known it, too. In 1692, “societal norms” would have supported the idea that judges in Salem, Massachusetts could order witches hanged for the spells they cast on their victims. When the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1789, societal norms held that limiting voting on the basis of sex was a rock-solid concept. In 1857, societal norms (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court), made clear that Dred Scott, a slave, had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” In terms of social norms, this nation was willing to lock up Japanese American citizens in 1942, on mere suspicion they might support our enemies in time of war. Society wasn’t ready for interracial marriage in 1967, nor gay marriage in 2015. 

Of course, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito voted in the 5-4 minority in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case which determined that gays and lesbians could marry.

"Societal norms," pre-1808, as established in the U.S. Constitution.

 

* 

If you care about human rights, and almost all questions of good governing, you should keep in mind that few U.S. Supreme Court decisions are unanimous. So, when deciding what is just, and what the law means, and all other kinds of political questions, people of differing views can fairly disagree. It doesn’t mean, if your side loses, that the nation is in peril. But it would appear that Ginni Thomas has never given this matter serious thought. Like a blood-thirsty crusader of old, she is ready at every turn to lop off the heads of her enemies with her sword. After Trump got thumped in the 2020 election, she had a new cause for which she was ready to fight. She was going to save the soul of this nation. 

The evidence kept piling up against her; but she refused to face it. On December 8, the U.S. Supreme Court shot down a request by Trump’s lawyers to overturn the vote in the state of Pennsylvania. The court required a single sentence to blow up the case. 

Other courts, both state and federal, had in dozens of similar battles crushed Team Trump’s legal hopes. 

Hours after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a lethal blow to Trump’s hopes in Pennsylvania, the Arizona Supreme Court turned down another appeal. This time, it was an effort to overturn that state’s election results. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that plaintiffs had failed “to present any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,’ let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results.” 

Plain enough language. 

Yet, for Ginni, the 2020 election was Watergate all over again. She couldn’t believe Trump lost because she didn’t want to believe. That very month, the Council for National Policy picked up the “stolen election” banner and began waving it wildly. A CNP newsletter began to circulate. Included was a report,

 

titled “Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” targeting five swing states where Trump and his allies were already pressing litigation. But time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void,” the report warned. The newsletter advised: “There is historical, legal precedent for Congress to count a slate of electors different from that certified by the Governor of the state.” One co-author of the “Five States” report was Cleta Mitchell, who by that time was among the lawyers advising Trump.

 

The problem, of course, was that one of those five states was Arizona, where the court had already ruled. Pennsylvania was another. So was Georgia, where three recounts had shown that Trump had been beaten. Yet three recounts didn’t stop Trump, or Mrs. Thomas, or Ms. Cleta Mitchell, or any of the other sycophants, liars, and kooks, who by this time surrounded the man in the Oval Office. Mitchell herself took part in the call the president made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021. In that infamous call, Donald Trump pressured an elected official – a Republican – to “find” 11,780 votes and overturn the Biden victory in Georgia. He wanted Raffensperger to gift him 16 undeserved electoral votes. 

Ginni Thomas fought for Donald Trump until the bitter end, long after reality should have dawned. She backed the January 6 “March to Save America” rally. By that time, she had spent weeks insisting that Trump was the rightful winner – although a story that she paid for busloads of protesters to come to D.C. on the day of the riot is apparently wrong. 

So the story of buses was wrong; but Mrs. Thomas was wrong about all the rest. No one stole any election. 

Trump didn’t win. 

And she wasn’t fighting for liberty, or anything else worth saving. She was on the wrong side of history, like people who went to war to save slavery in 1861. She wasn’t a patriot fighting for fair elections, or for the soul of this nation. God, in His infinite wisdom, according to people like her had not anointed Trump and intended for him to serve two terms. 

She was smack dab in the middle of the mob, figuratively speaking, that nearly wrecked democracy forever.

 

* 

On January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden Jr. was duly sworn in as the 46^th President of the United States. 

Team Trump still refused to give up – still refused to admit the truth – still continued to undermine faith in our elections. Justice Thomas had a last chance to have a say. That February,

 

[while] Trump and his associates continued pressing for state lawmakers to audit – and reverse – the 2020 election, Justice Thomas sharply dissented when a 6-3 majority rejected the case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans that the court had refused to take up in December. Echoing the arguments advanced by [the Council of National Policy group], he wrote that legislatures have the constitutional authority to determine how federal elections are held, yet in 2020, “nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead.”

 

He called the refusal by his colleagues to hear the case “inexplicable,” arguing that “allegations of systemic maladministration, voter suppression, or fraud” go “to the heart of public confidence in election results. That is obviously problematic for allegations backed by substantial evidence. But the same is true where allegations are incorrect.” In other words, election disputes and claims of fraud carried as much weight – and should lead to court hearings, just as Trump and his supporters had wished – whether they were true or not. “By doing nothing,” Thomas continued, “we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence.”

 

Even Justice Thomas, however, slapped aside the idea that there was merit to claims of a stolen election. In a footnote to his dissent he noted that the 2020 election had been “free from strong evidence of systemic fraud.”

 

Finally. He got one right.

___ 

 

3/26/22: At a rally in Georgia, Trump again discounts any danger related to climate change. “Yet you have people like John Kerry worrying about the climate! The climate!...” he barks. “Ah, I heard that the other day. Here we are [the] guy’s threatening us, he’s worried about, ‘The ocean will rise one-hundredth of one percent over the next 300 fuckin’ years!” 

His crowd loves it. Donald used a potty word. 

Meanwhile, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that 2021 was the sixth hottest year in recorded history. The top ten hottest years are now: 

2016

2020

2019

2015

2017

2021

2018

2014

2010 

– and – 

…fucking 2013.

 

That list includes all nine years in the life of my first grandchild; and it’s going to get way worse by the time she’s my age. 

 

Even carmakers know something drastic must be done to meet the challenge Loser Don ignores. Ford, Volvo, Mercedes, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors have announced plans to go to all electric or hybrid vehicles by no later than 2035.

___

 

3/27/22: Rep. Mo Brooks, who spoke at the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally has reiterated a claim the “Fake News” types reported that he made four days ago. 

That is:

 

President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency. As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that January 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.

 

As CNN notes, Brooks told reporters for CBS news that Trump did in fact ask him to “rescind the election. He always brings up, ‘we’ve got to rescind the election. We got to take Joe Biden down and put me in now.’”

 

When asked if Trump still says that to him, Brooks said he did.

 

In other words, fourteen months after being ejected from the White House, Trump still hankers to be reinstated, by force, if necessary. (He’s got no legal route back. We know that for sure.)

 

No sign yet that Ex-President Blubber cares about the legal route, the Constitution, the rule of law, election results (unless he wins), or anything but himself. His ability to pit half of America against the other half must immensely please our enemies in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

 

For Putin and Xi Jinping, it’s a dream come true.

___ 

 

3/28/22: Speaking of rip-offs, pandemic relief programs “crafted” by the Trump administration had such lax standards, that is estimated crooks managed to loot as much as $80 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program. An additional $400 billion may have been drained from pandemic unemployment relief programs. 

Your taxpayer dollars at work. You will be “happy” to note, for example, that one crook used money from the PPP program to buy three Italian luxury cars for his own use, each worth more than $100,000. That would include a cherry red 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said Matthew Schneider, a former U.S. attorney from Michigan. “It is the biggest fraud in a generation.” 

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz was blunt in speaking with reporters. “What didn't happen,” he explained, “was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time.” 

Or: Team Trump in action.

___ 

 

3/29/22: The House Select Committee investigating events of January 6, 2021, has put together a partial record of President Trump’s phone calls that day. He made at least eight calls that morning. He made eleven more later that evening. What we don’t know is whether or not he made any calls during a crucial stretch of seven hours, and thirty-seven minutes, during which time the riot was brewing and then exploding. 

Or, rather, we know he did make and receive several calls – because Republican lawmakers and aides have admitted making or taking them.

 

____________________ 

John Eastman’s “emails would be discoverable under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.” 

Slate magazine

____________________ 

 

White House records submitted to investigators show no calls. Not in. Not out. It would be as if Donald had been in a state of suspended animation. Suspicious minds suggest that Trump might have used a “burner phone” in order to cover his tracks. 

Trump has responded with a slick bit of legalese. “I have no idea what a burner phone is,” he claimed this week, adding, “to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term.” 

His former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, disagreed. He told CBS News, “that he had heard former President Donald Trump use the phrase ‘burner phones’ in several discussions and the former president knew what it meant.” Bolton added that he and the president had discussed the use of “burner phones” and how they were used to avoid having a record of calls that authorities might scrutinize. 

As it stands, we have no record of any calls Mr. Trump made or received between 11:17 a.m. on January 6, with a yawning gap until 6:54 p.m. 

If you are old enough to recall the 18 ½-minute gap in one of the key Watergate tapes, you know this doesn’t pass the sniff test.

 

* 

The “smell test” isn’t used in court, but charges of criminal contempt are another matter. In related news, the House Select Committee has threatened to file charges against two Trump aides who have refused to appear for testimony, despite being subpoenaed. Peter Navarro, a White House trade advisor, and Dan Scavino, former deputy chief of staff, must appear or risk arrest. 

CBS notes:

 

In a statement Monday night, Navarro said the select committee's "witch hunt is predicated on the ridiculous legal premise that Joe Biden can waive Donald Trump's Executive Privilege. The Supreme Court will say otherwise when the time comes – as it surely must – and the DOJ knows such nonsense would gut Executive Privilege and the critical role it plays in effective presidential decision making.”

 

The high court has already rejected one such plea – and ruled that Mr. Biden could wave executive privilege, especially if information might pertain to criminal activities. 

Navarro and Scavino are likely to have to appear. If forced, they can do what several other suspected plotters have done. 

Plead the Fifth.

 

The committee is seeking information from Scavino because, according to Sunday's report, he was “reportedly present for meetings in November 2020 where then-President Trump consulted with outside advisors about ways to challenge the results of the 2020 election” and because they have “reason to believe that Mr. Scavino was with then-President Trump on January 5 and January 6 and was party to conversations regarding plans to challenge, disrupt, or impede the official congressional proceedings.” 

 

According to Sunday’s report, Navarro worked with “[Steve] Bannon and others to develop and implement a plan to delay Congress’ certification and ultimately change the outcome of the November 2020 Presidential election.”

 

The report also said that Navarro detailed in his November 2021 book In Trump Time, this plan, called the “Green Bay Sweep.” Navarro called this “the last, best chance to snatch a stolen election from Democrats’ jaws of deceit.” In a later interview about the book, Navarro said Trump was “on board with the strategy.”

 

The glaring flaw to the plan: In a year and more since, NO significant voter fraud has ever been found. 

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law is scheduled to appear to answer questions on Thursday, although he was not present at the White House on January 6. Ivanka Trump, his wife, was – and has been negotiating with the Select Committee regarding providing testimony.

 

* 

A plan to “permanently [end] the peaceful transition of power.” 

In the meantime, a federal judge in California, has ordered Team Trump lawyer John Eastman to turn over another 101 emails and communications he had claimed were “privileged” attorney-client documents. To say that Judge David O. Carter penned a blistering opinion is to understate the matter. Most news outlets headline the fact that Carter ruled former President Trump “more likely than not” tried to impede official congressional proceedings on the day of the attack. 

That would mean Trump broke the law. 

Carter’s 44-page ruling is much more damaging than that. The short version of the story, from Slate, explains:

 

The court ruled that Eastman, the lawyer who authored two memos that were the legal blueprint for Trump’s bloodless coup, likely violated the law, meaning his emails would be discoverable under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. Notably, the court also found that Eastman’s client, Trump, likely committed federal crimes in his effort to overturn the 2020 election.

 

In his opinion, Judge Carter is clear. He concludes that then-President Trump and his lawyer, in all likelihood, “corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” and with deceitful intent conspired to defraud the United States government. 

This isn’t hard to understand if you have ears that work. If you listen to the same call Judge Carter cites (and the same call this blogger has heard – and you can hear) you will understand that Trump was willing to trample the rule of law. In that call on January 2, 2021, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, then-President Donald J. Trump asks Raffensperger to find him the votes he needs to “win” the Georgia election and snag the state’s sixteen electoral votes.  

Carter believes the president,

 

clearly demonstrate[s] that his justification was not to investigate fraud, but to win the election: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that President Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification.

 

Eastman, too, Judge Carter believes, had a similar “corrupt intent.” As reporters at Slate explain,

 

Monday’s decision is significant for its flashing-red-light conclusion:

 

this case is a warning about the dangers of ‘legal theories’ gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution.

 

Carter captures the whole misadventure in one elegant line: Trump’s and Eastman’s unprecedented campaign to overturn the election was “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

 

If that sounds damning, a deep dive into Judge Carter’s opinion leaves little doubt what he thinks. Having been thwarted by Secretary Raffensperger and other Georgia officials, Judge Carter notes that on the very next day,

 

President Trump attempted to elevate Jeffrey Clark to Acting Attorney General, based on Mr. Clark’s statements that he would write a letter to contested states saying that the election may have been stolen and urging them to decertify electors. The White House Counsel described Mr. Clark’s proposed letter as a “murder-suicide pact” that would “damage everyone who touches it” and commented “we should have nothing to do with that letter.”

 

When the president and his allies continued to press the plan, “multiple high-ranking members of the Department of Justice threatened mass resignations that would leave the Department a ‘graveyard.’” Furthermore,  “numerous credible sources – from the President’s inner circle to agency leadership to statisticians – informed President Trump and Dr. Eastman” in the weeks after the election “that there was no evidence of election fraud.”

 

Despite the dearth of evidence, Eastman continued to press Vice President Pence to go along with the plan to decertify electoral votes from states that had voted for Mr. Biden. At a meeting on January 5, with Mr. Pence and his counsel Greg Jacob, “Dr. Eastman conceded that his argument was contrary to consistent historical practice, would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, and violated the Electoral Count Act on four separate grounds.” 

If Eastman knew his plan was illegal (and Judge Carter believes both he and Mr. Trump did) the lawyer and the president were not dissuaded. On the morning of January 6, “Vice President Pence’s National Security Advisor, General Keith Kellogg, Jr., was present and described President Trump as berating the Vice President for ‘not [being] tough enough to make the call’ to delay or reject electoral votes.” 

Eastman has already appeared before the House Select Committee and given testimony – if you can call it that. 

He invoked the Fifth 146 times.

 

Yet, he’s still worried – and for good reason. In a memo he penned to convince Mr. Pence to overturn the vote, he states explicitly: “[t]he main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. … as he conceded, his legal theories would be rejected ‘9-0’ by the Supreme Court.” 

Judge Carter notes that some of the documents Dr. Eastman had hoped to keep out of investigators hands must be

 

disclosed based on the crime-fraud exception, as the Select Committee argues. The crime-fraud exception applies when (1) a “client consults an attorney for advice that will serve [them] in the commission of a fraud or crime,” and (2) the communications are “sufficiently related to” and were made “in furtherance of” the crime.

 

If you read that to mean the judge believes Trump and his lawyer were involved in a criminal plot, you deserve an “A+.”

 

* 

“AND WE WIN.” 

THAT PLOT had many moving parts. Carter lays them out: “President Trump facilitated two meetings in the days before January 6 that were explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the Joint Session of Congress.” On January 4, he and Eastman hosted a meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Pence, Mr. Jacob, and the Vice President’s Chief of Staff Marc Short. Pence remained convinced that Dr. Eastman’s plan was illegal. 

The next day “President Trump sent Dr. Eastman to review the plan in depth with the Vice President’s counsel”  

Pence refused to budge.

 

On the morning of January 6, President Trump made several last-minute “revised appeal[s] to the Vice President” to pressure him into carrying out the plan. At 1:00 am, President Trump tweeted: “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency . . . Mike can send it back!” At 8:17 am, President Trump tweeted: “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!” Shortly after, President Trump rang Vice President Pence and once again urged him “to make the call” and enact the plan. Just before the Joint Session of Congress began, President Trump gave a speech to a large crowd on the Ellipse in which he warned, “[a]nd Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you. I will tell you right now.” President Trump ended his speech by galvanizing the crowd to join him in enacting the plan: “[L]et’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to give Vice President Pence and Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” Together, these actions more likely than not constitute attempts to obstruct an official proceeding.

 

In other words, Judge Carter believes the president and his lawyer intended to commit a crime. 

In a footnote to his opinion, he adds that President Trump expressed his displeasure to the Vice President in a text message, saying. “If you don’t do it, I picked the wrong man 4 years ago.” In the call that morning, he reportedly told Mr. Pence, “You’re going to wimp out. You can be a hero, or you can be a pussy.”) 

Having looked hard for evidence of proven voter fraud in the nearly fifteen months since the attack on Capitol Hill, this blogger was not surprised by Judge Carter’s conclusion in that regard:

 

President Trump and Dr. Eastman justified the plan with allegations of election fraud – but President Trump likely knew the justification was baseless, and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful. Although Dr. Eastman argues that President Trump was advised several state elections were fraudulent, the Select Committee points to numerous executive branch officials who publicly stated and privately stressed to President Trump that there was no evidence of fraud. By early January, more than sixty courts dismissed cases alleging fraud due to lack of standing or lack of evidence, noting that they made “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” and that “there is no evidence to support accusations of voter fraud.”

 

If nothing else,

 

Vice President Pence “very consistent[ly]” made clear to President Trump that the plan was unlawful, refusing “many times” to unilaterally reject electors or return them to the states. In the meeting in the Oval Office two days before January 6, Vice President Pence stressed his “immediate instinct that there is no way that one person could be entrusted by the Framers to exercise that authority [emphasis added].”

 

Eastman argued that the plot he and Trump had hatched was not illegal. He insisted it “was grounded on a good faith interpretation of the Constitution.”

 

* 

A last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency “by any means.” 

Judge Carter demurred. If the president believed the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional that did not give him “license to violate it. Disagreeing with the law entitled President Trump to seek a remedy in court, not to disrupt a constitutionally-mandated process.”  The president had already filed and lost numerous lawsuits, intended to overturn election results. This plan then, was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency “by any means.”

 

The illegality of the plan was obvious. Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the Vice President to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election. As Vice President Pence stated, “no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority.” Every American – and certainly the President of the United States – knows that in a democracy, leaders are elected, not installed. With a plan this “BOLD,” President Trump knowingly tried to subvert this fundamental principle.

 

Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021. 

 

Judge Carter further believes that Trump and Eastman – and others

 

conspired to defraud the United States by disrupting the electoral count, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.242[.] That crime requires that (1) at least two people entered into an agreement to obstruct a lawful function of the government (2) by deceitful or dishonest means, and (3) that a member of the conspiracy engaged in at least one overt act in furtherance of the agreement.

 

President Trump continuing to push that plan despite being aware of its illegality constituted obstruction by “dishonest” means under § 371. The evidence also demonstrates that Dr. Eastman likely knew that the plan was unlawful. Dr. Eastman heard from numerous mentors and like-minded colleagues that his plan had no basis in history or precedent. Fourth Circuit Judge Luttig, for whom Dr. Eastman clerked, publicly stated that the plan’s analysis was “incorrect at every turn.” Vice President Pence’s legal counsel spent hours refuting each part of the plan to Dr. Eastman, including noting there had never been a departure from the Electoral Count Act and that not “a single one of [the] Framers would agree with [his] position [emphasis added].” Dr. Eastman himself repeatedly recognized that his plan had no legal support. In his discussion with the Vice President’s counsel, Dr. Eastman “acknowledged” the “100 percent consistent historical practice since the time of the Founding” that the Vice President did not have the authority to act as the memo proposed. More importantly, Dr. Eastman admitted more than once that “his proposal violate[d] several provisions of statutory law,” including explicitly characterizing the plan as “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act. In addition, on January 5, Dr. Eastman conceded that the Supreme Court would unanimously reject his plan for the Vice President to reject electoral votes.

 

* 

You “would just have the same party win continuously.” 

Cutting through a thicket of legal language, Carter’s conclusion is easy to grasp. Trump knew he was plotting to break the law. 

Eastman knew it too.

 

Dr. Eastman’s views on the Electoral Count Act are not, as he argues, a “good faith interpretation” of the law; they are a partisan distortion of the democratic process. His plan was driven not by preserving the Constitution, but by winning the 2020 election [emphasis added]: [Dr. Eastman] acknowledged that he didn’t think Kamala Harris should have that authority in 2024; he didn’t think Al Gore should have had it in 2000; and he acknowledged that no small government conservative should think that that was the case. Dr. Eastman also understood the gravity of his plan for democracy – he acknowledged “[y]ou would just have the same party win continuously if [the] Vice President had the authority to just declare the winner of every State.” The evidence shows that Dr. Eastman was aware that his plan violated the Electoral Count Act. Dr. Eastman likely acted deceitfully and dishonestly each time he pushed an outcome-driven plan that he knew was unsupported by the law.

 

Carter concludes:

 

President Trump and Dr. Eastman participated in numerous overt acts in furtherance of their shared plan. … Based on the evidence, the Court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

 

Together, the president and his lawyer,

 

launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower – it was a coup in search of a legal theory [emphasis added]. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.

 

This blogger fears and suspects that large portions of Rejected-President Trump’s base will miss the point, because the group-think is strong – but Judge Carter is brutally frank. This case, he writes,

 

is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.

 

(For more on Jeffrey Clark, see: 6/23/22.) 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: We won’t know this until later, but on this day, for the first time, wind power in the U.S. produces more energy than either coal or nuclear energy, 19% of the total. 

We still have a long way to go, if we expect to be able to rely on “green energy,” but every advance helps.

___ 

 

3/30/22: Last week, we worked diligently to put together a story about Justice Clarence Thomas and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, his wife. 

We suggested that some of Justice Thomas’s opinions from the bench were questionable, in light of the impact his wife’s political activities might have had on his findings. 

We said Mrs. Thomas refused to face reality, when she kept insisting, in the face of dozens of recounts and court rulings, that the 2020 presidential election had been pilfered for Joe Biden.

 

Then, bam, the free press – not “Enemies of the People” as her orange hero, Donald J. Trump liked to paint them – revealed that the behavior of Justice Thomas’s wife teetered on illegality. 

First, let us reiterate. At this most excellent blog, we try to give people the benefit of the doubt, barring clear evidence of wrongdoing. 

Second, zero evidence of significant voter fraud has ever been shown to have occurred in the last presidential election. 

Third, in light of that fact, above, the importance of 29 text messages (so far) revealed, from Mrs. Thomas, and to Mrs. Thomas, take on a dark cast. If felonious activity was not afoot, un-American, un-democratic, unbalanced, ill-informed behavior clearly was. These texts have leaked from a report by the House Select Committee, which is examining events related to the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill. More damaging revelations may be to come.

 

For now – and perhaps for good reason, if your intent had been criminal – former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the recipient of 21 of these 29 messages, has decided not to cooperate further with the congressional investigation. 

So: To recap. Is the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas a felon – only waiting to be indicted and tried? 

The evidence is not clear. 

Is she a crazy person? Is she married to a member of the U.S. Supreme Court – and yet unable to grasp the fundamentals of the rule of law? 

Here, the evidence is damning. 

For starters, we learn that the poor woman will believe almost anything she finds on the internet. The first message in the trove of 29, comes on November 5, two days after the election – with the outcome still very much in doubt. She sends Meadows a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.” 

If nothing else, Thomas’s message is of note since Pieczenik, was never an employee of the C.I.A., let along Director. Like many who find fame on the internet, he did so by spinning fables. He claimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, was a “false-flag” operation, designed and instigated by the Obama administration, so they could push a gun-control agenda. 

(You don’t need a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda. All you really need is to direct voters’ attention to the hundreds of school shootings that have occurred in the last thirty years.)

 

As the Washington Post notes, the video Thomas shared is no longer available on YouTube. Because it was nuts. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???” 

According to Pieczenik, as Thomas explained, “Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states.” 

And Thomas hopes it was true. She hoped the U.S. military was dabbling in U.S. elections – and what could possibly go wrong? 

That same day, after surfing the idiot corners of the internet, or drinking too much at home, or possibly both, Mrs. Thomas offered up another bizarre claim. Once again, the wife of a U.S. Supreme Court justice, was excited to think the military might be deeply involved in picking the winner of the 2020 election:

 

Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.

 

Take note, Trump lovers. Mrs. Thomas is claiming that the folks at the Pentagon are going to send enemies of President Trump to “GITMO.” That is: Guantanamo Bay, where 9/11 terrorist types are held. 

On November 6 she sent Meadows this message:  “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” 

She really liked that idea – soldiers with bayonets and bullets, backed up with tanks, would pull a U.S. version of Tiananmen Square. 

And crush the enemies of Trump. 

On November 10, she sends the following message to the White House Chief of Staff: ““Mark, I wanted to text you and tell you for days you are in my prayers!! Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” 

She adds, helpfully, “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta.” 

None of those four, Limbaugh, Steyn, Dan Bongino, or Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, has proven anything yet in court.

 

Meadows replies, “I will stand firm. We will fight until there is no fight left. Our country is too precious to give up on. Thanks for all you do.” 

Nine minutes later, she responds: “Tearing up and praying for you guys!!!!! So proud to know you!!” 

That night, she was at it again. “House and Senate guys are pathetic too... only 4 GOP House members seen out in street rallies with grassroots... Gohmert, Jordan, Gosar, and Roy,” she grumbled. 

Her references appear to be to GOP House members Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Paul A. Gosar, and Chip Roy. 

“Where the heck are all those who benefited by Presidents coattails?!!!” she adds. She then suggests that Meadows watch a YouTube video about the power of never conceding. 

(She really likes YouTube.)

 

On November 13 she puts in a plug for Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was busy spreading conspiracy theories about the election. “Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am,” she writes. “Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved.” Powell, Mrs. Thomas believed, was doing God’s work, despite the mockery she was facing in the news. “Don’t let her and your assets be marginalized instead...help her be the lead and the face,” she advises Meadows. Powell was great! 

The Washington Post explains:

 

The following day, Nov. 14, Thomas sent Meadows material she said was from Connie Hair, chief of staff to Gohmert. It is not clear if she was passing on a message from Hair or sharing Hair’s perspective as guidance for Meadows. The text message seems to quote Hair’s belief that “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war.”

 

“This war is psychological. PSYOP,” the text from Thomas states.

 

Hair said Thursday that she did not have any specific recollection of that text message.

 

Five days pass. On November 19, Thomas plugs Powell again: “Mark (don’t want to wake you)…Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” 

She adds: “Suggestion: You need to buck up your team on the inside, Mark. The lower level insiders are scared, fearful or sending out signals of hopelessness vs an awareness of the existential threat to America right now. You can buck them up, strengthen their spirits.” Monica Crowley, who worked for another president in Watergate days, “may have a sense of this [from] her Nixon days.”

 

Thomas fails to realize what a poor example she has suggested – advice from the aide to one impeached president – to the White House Chief of Staff of another, who will in January 2021, be impeached for a second time.

 

Thomas continued, “You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all. Lots of intensifying threats coming to ACB and others.” Here, she appears to be referring to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, often called “ACB” by supporters. It’s not clear what threats Thomas might be referencing.

 

Meadows finally replied to Thomas’s long text message, saying, “Thanks so much.”

 

That same day, Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Rudy Giuliani appeared on TV to claim that they could prove there was a vast conspiracy to steal the presidential election. Rudy started sweating profusely, and color from his recently-dyed hair started running down his cheeks. It was like a parody. Mrs. Thomas watched, but it seems she was still thrilled: “Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!”

 

Or was she distraught?

 

Either way, Meadows replied, innocuously, “Glad to help.”

 

On November 22, Powell was officially dumped from his legal team by President Trump. He denied she ever was a part of his legal team – after having said days earlier that she was.

 

Even Ginni was confused. “Trying to understand the Sidney Powell distancing,” she texted.

 

“She doesn’t have anything or at least she won’t share it if she does,” Meadows replied.

 

“Wow!” Thomas responded.

 

Two days later, Meadows contacted the judge’s wife. He wanted her to know he was not giving up, and hit on a religious note. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” he said. 

Actually, it was a question of counting the votes accurately, as per election law – often counting them more than once. 

“Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs,” Meadows assured her. “Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.” 

And f**k the U.S. Constitution, right?

 

Thomas replied: “Thank you!! Needed that! This plus a conversation with my best friend just now… I will try to keep holding on. America is worth it!”

 

It remains unclear who her “best friend” might have been. We do know Justice Thomas and his wife consistently refer to each other as best friends.

 

Mrs. Thomas continued to buck up Meadows for the fight. “If you all cave to the elites, you have to know that many of your 73 million feel like what Glenn [Beck?] is expressing.” Many of the MAGA faithful may become disenchanted. They may throw away their emblematic red baseball hats and walk away from politics for good. “Me included,” she warns. “I think I am done with politics, and I don’t think I am alone, Mark.”

 

Meadows sent a text three minutes later: “I don’t know what you mean by caving to the elites.”

 

Thomas replied: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences... the whole coup and now this... we just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.”

 

Meadows wrote back, “You’re preaching to the choir. Very demoralizing.”

 

Then the messages appear to stop. There’s a gap, ending with a single known text from Thomas on January 10:

 

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” she tells Meadows. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams. Those who attacked the Capitol are not representative of our great teams of patriots for DJT!!”

 

“Amazing times,” she added. “The end of Liberty.”

 

She was wrong again.

 

Dangerously so.