#select committee to investigate the january 6th attack on the us capitol

[tomorrowusa]

Cassidy Hutchinson spoke with Rachel Maddow in her first live interview since her testimony before the House January 6th Committee. In case you missed her testimony on 22 June 2022, it is still available here.

She was an assistant to Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who has since been indicted for election fraud in Georgia.

Ms. Hutchinson spoke about the current mindset of the GOP and also described the less than professional behavior of other Trump White House staffers as well as some GOP members of Congress including Matt Gaetz.

One phrase she used in the interview was: "Mr Trump's attempt to overthrow the government to stay in power"

Her book "Enough" has just been published.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 26, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 27, 2024

Today President Joe Biden pardoned more than 2000 former military personnel who had been convicted of engaging in consensual sex under a gay sex ban in the military that has since been repealed. People covered under the pardon can apply to have their military discharges corrected and to recover the pay and benefits the convictions cost them. “[M]aintaining the finest fighting force in the world…means making sure that every member of our military feels safe and respected,” Biden said in a statement. 

Biden said he was “righting an historic wrong.” “This is about dignity, decency, and ensuring the culture of our Armed Forces reflect the values that make us an exceptional nation,” he said.

On this date in 2015, the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which said that states must license and recognize same-sex marriage because of the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that citizens must have the equal protection of the laws and cannot be deprived of rights without due process of the laws.  

In the New York Times today, Kate Zernike explained how the public conversations about abortion have shifted in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion. The state bans that went into place have illustrated that abortion is indeed healthcare, as people suffering miscarriages have been unable to obtain the imperative medical care they need. 

Zernike quoted pollster Tresa Undem, who estimated that before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe, less than 15% of Americans thought that abortion was relevant to them personally. Now, though, Undem said, “it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant. It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”

In the three weeks since Biden announced restrictions on asylum applications for undocumented immigrants, the number of people trying to cross the border has dropped more than 40% to its lowest level since he took office. This information will likely come up in tomorrow’s scheduled debate between the president and presumptive Republican nominee Trump, who has made it clear he intends to accuse the president of promoting immigration policies that bring criminals into the United States.

Former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a military veteran who joined the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has fiercely criticized Trump, today endorsed Biden for president. 

In a video, Kinzinger said: “[W]hile I certainly don’t agree with President Biden on everything, and I never thought I’d be endorsing a Democrat for president, I know that he will always protect the very thing that makes America the best country in the world: our democracy. Donald Trump poses a direct threat to every fundamental American value. He doesn’t care about our country. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. And he’ll hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.” 

On CNN tonight, Georgia governor Brian Kemp told Kaitlan Collins he did not vote for Trump in his state’s Republican primary, although he said he would “support the ticket” in November so that Georgia would remain in Republican hands. It was an interesting statement, since he could easily have deflected the question or simply said he voted for Trump if he cared about avoiding Trump’s wrath. But he appeared not to care, suggesting that Trump’s power even with prominent Republicans is slipping. 

Two Republican voters from Pennsylvania told MSNBC tonight that they are voting for Biden. When asked whether they think there is “a silent Biden voter out there,” one said, “I do. I know there is…. We don’t want to talk about it, but we’re all going to vote for Joe Biden.” 

By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court today blessed the practice of taking “gratuities” as a gift for past behavior by an official, distinguishing them from “bribes,” which require proof that there was an illegal deal in place. The case involved a former mayor from Indiana who helped a local truck dealership win $1.1 million in city contracts and then asked for and received $13,000 from the dealership’s owners. The mayor was found guilty of violating a federal anti-corruption law that prohibits state and local officials from taking gifts worth more than $5,000 from someone the official had helped to land lucrative government business.

For the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the law prohibited officials from accepting “gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos or the like” in thanks for an official’s help, although David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times noted that the law came into play only when the gift was worth more than $5,000. 

Savage pointed out that as the federal law in question covers about 20 million state and local officials, the decision could have wide impact. This decision that officials can accept “gifts” so long as they are not “bribes” might have something to do with the fact that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have accepted significant gifts from donors—Thomas’s count is upward of $4 million—and it doesn’t relieve the sense that this Supreme Court, with its three right-wing Trump-appointed justices, is untrustworthy.

Writing for justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and herself, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions.” 

Yesterday, House Republicans released draft legislation to fund the Justice Department and the Commerce Departments for fiscal year 2025, which starts October 1. They propose to slash nearly a billion dollars from the Department of Justice in retaliation for its bringing cases against Trump, and both to cut funding for the FBI and to block the construction of its new headquarters. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the cuts “unacceptable” and said that the “effort to defund the Justice Department and its essential law enforcement functions will make our fight against violent crime all the more difficult.”

In a secret vote yesterday  by a House panel that fell along party lines, House Republicans also agreed to say that the last Congress’s construction of the January 6th committee was invalid and illegal. This enabled them to back a last-ditch effort by Trump ally Steve Bannon to stay out of jail. After Bannon refused to respond to the committee’s subpoena for documents and testimony about the January 6 attack, a jury found him guilty of being in contempt of Congress. 

Today, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying that Bannon was right to ignore the subpoena because the committee was illegally organized. Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out that the lawyer for the brief is not a House lawyer but rather comes from America First Legal, a public interest organization put together by Trump loyalist Stephen Miller to challenge the legal efforts to rein in Trump’s orders when in office. 

Finally, Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer reported in The Recombobulation Area today that event bookings expected for the week of the Republican National Convention, which is set to begin on July 15, four days after Judge Juan Merchan sentences Trump for his 34 criminal convictions, have not materialized. Estimates were that the convention would bring $200 million in economic impact to Milwaukee, but that now appears to be optimistic. “[This is] certainly nothing like we were told or promised,” chef Gregory León told Shafer. With locals staying home to avoid the downtown area during the convention, “[i]f the [reservation] book stays the way it is, we’re not going to make enough money to cover costs.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ramon Antonio Vargas at The Guardian:

US senator Lindsey Graham has said officials who investigated Donald Trump supporters’ deadly attack on the US Capitol in 2021 should not be imprisoned – despite what his fellow Republican has argued in advance of his second presidency. During an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, show host Kristen Welker asked Graham whether he agreed with Trump’s assertion on the program seven days earlier that those involved in the investigation of the January 6 Capitol attack “should go to jail”. “No,” said Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator as well as a ranking member of the chamber’s judiciary and budget committees. Welker directed the question at Graham during a segment meant to elicit quick answers, which she acknowledged by replying: “OK – that was very clear and concise.” The exchange offered an example of Graham’s occasional willingness to publicly disagree with Trump while still generally serving as a staunch ally – and it came amid a broader political dialogue about who should receive pardons in connection with an attack on Congress that was linked to multiple deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers.

Trump has promised to begin his second presidency in January 2025 by issuing pardons to those who carried out the attack, though there may be some exceptions. He spoke to Welker on 8 December about how supporters of his were pressured into accepting guilty pleas in connection with the violent, desperate attempt to keep him in the White House after losing the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020.

On NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that officials on the House Select Committee who investigated the January 6th Insurrection should not face jail time.

From the 12.15.2024 edition of NBC's Meet The Press:

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6

December 5, 2023 (Tuesday)

A new filing today by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election shows Smith’s office establishing that Trump has a longstanding pattern of refusing to accept election results he dislikes.

As early as 2012, the filing notes, Trump baselessly alleged that voting machines had switched votes intended for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. In the 2016 campaign he “claimed repeatedly, with no basis, that there was widespread voter fraud,” and publicly refused to commit to accepting the results of that election. This pattern continued in 2020, but in that election he took active steps to seize power.

The filing introduced information that Trump, an agent, and an unindicted co-conspirator tried to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit as vote counting showed Biden taking the lead. As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out, this scheme sounds much like the Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 that stopped vote counting in Miami-Dade County in Florida. Roger Stone was a participant in the Brooks Brothers Riot; in 2020 he was working to keep Trump in office.

Smith’s team shows how this pattern continued to play out in the 2020 election, with Trump urging supporters like the Proud Boys to back him, falsely asserting that the election had been stolen, and attacking former supporters who denied that the election had been stolen. The pattern has continued until the present, with Trump calling those who were found guilty of offenses related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol “hostages” and claiming they were “treated horribly.”

Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6, but his identification of a longstanding pattern indicates it would be a grave mistake to think Trump has any intention of campaigning fairly or accepting any result in 2024 other than his return to the White House.

New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has endorsed Trump for president and was a key organizer of the congressional effort to keep Trump in office, has promised to release all the surveillance footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump supporters insist that the full tapes will reveal that the attack was not as bad as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol showed. Johnson said that the tapes must be shared publicly for “transparency.”

Today, Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. "We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems," he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.”

Also today, Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s national security team and is widely expected to return in a second Trump administration, expanded the authoritarian threats Trump people have been making to include the media. On former Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel promised that the Trump team would fill government positions from top to bottom with loyalists and would use the Department of Justice to go after those perceived to be Trump’s enemies.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Yesterday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is promoting her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, called out Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for his continuing hold on military appointments that kept more than 450 routine promotions from taking effect over the past ten months. Tuberville claimed his refusal to permit the nominees’ confirmations was an attempt to change Pentagon policy of permitting leave for service members in states that ban abortion to obtain abortion care elsewhere. But on NPR yesterday, Cheney wondered: “Why is Tommy Tuberville doing that? Is he holding those positions open so that Donald Trump can fill them?”

Today, under great pressure from members of his own party who worried the Democrats would change the rules to weaken the power of the Senate minority, Tuberville released his hold on most of the nominees. The Senate promptly confirmed 425 of them.

Still, Tuberville retained holds on 11 officers of the most senior rank. According to congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Andrew Desiderio, the positions left vacant are commander of Pacific Air Forces, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Air Component Command for the United States Indo-Pacific Command, commander for Air Combat Command, the head of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program, the head of Northern Command (which defends the United States and coordinates defenses with Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas), the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, vice chief of staff of the Army, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, vice chief of Space Operations, and vice chief of Naval Operations.

Last night, Cheney explained to political commentator and television host Rachel Maddow exactly what a second Trump presidency would look like, Cheney said: "He would take those people who are the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of supreme power. That's a risk that we simply cannot take."

Mark Joyella of Forbes took note of Maddow’s introduction last night, in which the host stressed the importance of protecting democracy. She began by emphasizing how much she and Cheney disagreed about everything in politics, so much so that it was as if they were on different planets at war with each other.

Maddow made that point, she said, because “in civic terms, in sort of American citizenship terms, I think it's really important how much we disagree. It's important how far apart we are in every policy issue imaginable. It is important that Liz Cheney is infinity and I am negative infinity on the ideological number line. It's important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life.”

The Rachel Maddow Show was the most watched news show on cable television last night, with 3.15 million viewers. The Fox News Channel’s show Hannity, hosted by personality Sean Hannity, had just under 2 million viewers.

It seems clear Americans are waking up to Trump’s threats to stack the government with loyalists, weaponize the Justice Department and military, deport 10 million people, and prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies in politics and the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity tried to downplay Trump’s statements about his authoritarian plans for a second term by getting him to commit to staying within the normal bounds of a president should he be elected in 2024. The first time he was asked, Trump sidestepped the question. So Hannity asked again. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” he asked.

“Except for day one,” Trump responded.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson 

[mreyc]

Trump Attacks Biden in Christmas Morning Messages, Trump Issues Remarks Addressing Biden

Trump Fires Christmas Barbs at Biden, Accusing Him of Corruption and 'Madness & Doom'.

Former President Donald Trump used Christmas Day as a platform to launch into a verbal attack on President Joe Biden, accusing him of incompetence, corruption, and contributing to a national state of "madness & doom."

Trump's criticisms, posted on his social media platform Truth Social, centered around allegations of election interference, biased law enforcement, and mishandled situations like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also lashed out at special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump, and the House Select Committee probing the January 6th Capitol attack.

While offering some general holiday greetings, Trump's Christmas Day messages predominantly focused on attacking Biden and his administration, showcasing a continuation of his political rivalry despite the holiday season.

FULL VIDEO

[mariacallous]

The first thing that struck me in reading the executive summary of the Jan. 6 select committee’s final report last month was footnote number 50. The text it supports in the main document is the following bald statement: “As the Committee’s hearings demonstrated, President Trump made a series of statements to White House staff and others during this time period indicating his understanding that he had lost” the 2020 election.

But wait a minute, I thought as I read this. I don’t recall from the hearings Trump’s making statements indicating that he acknowledged privately that he had lost. He had seemed to me, rather, quite delusionally confident of the fraud he was alleging. Willful blindness, definitely, but actual knowledge that he had lost? I didn’t remember that. 

Yet there, in footnote 50, were four different references to transcripts that the committee claimed supported the sentence:

See, e.g., Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of General Mark A. Milley (Nov. 17, 2021), p. 121; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Alyssa Farah Griffin, (April 15, 2022), p. 62; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Continued Interview of Cassidy Hutchinson, (Sep. 14, 2022), p. 113; Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Kellyanne Conway, (November 28, 2022), pp. 79-84.

One of them, with Kellyanne Conway, was even recent—having taken place after the hearings this summer. 

I couldn’t look up the transcripts at the time because neither the full report nor the underlying material was available publicly yet. But in the weeks since, the committee has released both. 

The release of the full report reveals that this remarkable claim exists only in the executive summary. The committee does not allege in the report itself that Trump acknowledged his loss in repeated conversations to staff. The underlying material, meanwhile, allows us to check up on this arresting statement allegedly made by President Trump. 

So did he really admit privately he had lost? The answer, as I’ll explain, is yes-ish. But the evidence isn’t all that strong, which explains why the committee did not focus on this in its hearings or in the body of the report itself. Only one of the transcripts cited clearly supports the claim. Two sort of do, but it’s a matter of interpretation. And one—at least in my view—really does not. 

It is a very rare thing for a government body to show its work to the extent the Jan. 6 committee has done in its final report. 

The select committee did not just release a narrative report. It also released a huge trove of material that underlies that report. That trove includes hundreds of deposition and interview transcripts and also untold numbers of documents. The notes also navigate the reader through a giant public record, consisting of court filings, newspaper articles, public statements, and, yes, a great many tweets. It’s hundreds of thousands of pages all told.

Normally, notes in an investigative report point to interviews the reader can’t access. They point to grand jury transcripts, internal memoranda of interviews, or other materials the reader cannot simply click on and search.

But the committee here has given not just its interpretation of events and not just the raw material from which it drew its judgments, but also thousands of connections between the two. Those connections are the report’s endnotes.  

It’s a powerful model for future investigative bodies, one that allows anyone to check up on the committee’s interpretation of its evidence and one that offers pointers to journalists as to where to find the good stuff in the pile of material the committee has released. 

Reading the notes carefully reveals a number of different themes. 

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson 12.9.24

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.

Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.

Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.

Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.

[misfitwashere]

December 9, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 10

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.

Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.

Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.

Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.

—

[roboe1]

News and Headlines: 4/15/2024.

In The News Today: Star Jan. 6 Witness Changed 47 Answers After Testifying, Document Shows Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during the sixth hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2022. (Photo by Andrew Harnik / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW…

[arpov-blog-blog]

A wolf should not be embraced by those it might turn on and devour. Who is the Campaign Manager for the Democrat Challenging Biden? Steve Schmidt. The guy who gave us Sarah Palin. Cheney has intimated that she might run as a third-party challenger....."During her last term as Wyoming’s representative in the House, Cheney was an admirable truthteller as she excoriated Donald Trump with key facts and deft rhetoric. Her attacks on Trump as a dire threat to American democracy rang true. But the Democratic establishment’s embrace of Cheney could actually end up damaging the Biden campaign by reducing the turnout of voters who believe in the Democratic Party’s core precepts.

The current problem was foreshadowed in early January 2022, when Liz Cheney’s father Dick Cheney visited the House floor to mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. While showing up to support his daughter’s brave anti-Trump stand, the former vice president was met with profuse accolades from top Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went out of her way to ignore past differences, shaking the elder Cheney’s hand and later telling reporters, “We were very honored by his being there.”

But many Democrats don’t want to see their leadership embracing prominent Republicans just because they speak out against Trump. When Liz Cheney was a member of Congress, she voted in line with President Trump 93 percent of the time. On matters like abortion rights, environmental protection, racial justice, civil liberties and national security, the younger Cheney has consistently fought for positions that the vast majority of Democrats see as inimical to the best interests of the country.

It’s one thing to strive for a united front — which will be necessary — to defeat Trump if he is the GOP nominee. But if Democratic leaders are seen as aligning themselves with Cheney, her record of voting against virtually everything that the Democratic base believes in could add to the alienation that’s already felt by millions of young people who voted for Biden in 2020 but now see him as an unprincipled compromiser undeserving of their vote next year.

If Trump is the Republican nominee, Cheney will likely be a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention, complete with a primetime TV slot. But for many Democratic voters, coziness with the likes of Cheney could be a turnoff.

If Trump is defeated in November 2024, it will not be because Democrats wooed Republican luminaries and conservative voters willing to defect from their own party. It will be because of a sufficiently large turnout from the Democratic base.

“While her work on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been exemplary,” John Nichols noted last year, “she has an ugly history of exploiting political divisions by promoting Big Lies, as Cheney did when she refused to reject Trump’s vile ‘birther’ lies about former President Barack Obama, and when she claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris ‘sounds just like Karl Marx.’”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Horsey

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 11, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 12, 2024

“We’re producing more energy than ever before in this nation. We have the strongest economy in the world, and we are beating China for the first time in decades. More people went to work this morning in America than at any other time in our nation’s history. So I’ve got a message to Donald Trump and all his negativity and his whining: Stop sh*t talking America. This is the greatest country on earth, and it’s time that we all start acting like it.”

Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s words to Jen Psaki on MSNBC yesterday illustrated that Democrats are flipping the script on the MAGA Republicans. 

Since he decided to run for president in 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, Trump’s narrative has been that the United States is in terrible decline and that only he can “make America great again.” In his speech announcing his candidacy on that June day in 2015, he claimed that “our country is in serious trouble” and complained that China, Japan, and Mexico were all “beating” the U.S. and “laughing at us, at our stupidity…. The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” he said before launching into the idea that Mexico was sending criminals and rapists across the border. “Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger…, and we as a country are getting weaker,” he said. “Even our nuclear arsenal doesn’t work.”

Trump claimed—falsely—that the nation’s gross domestic product was below zero, that the labor participation rate was “the worst since 1978,” that unemployment was between 18 and 20 percent, and that while Obamacare was “amazingly destructive,” he would replace it with something cheaper and better. 

Trump continued this theme of decline and what he called “American carnage” in his inaugural address. He described “[m]others and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

Trump initially seemed to blame inept politicians and bureaucrats for what he claimed was America’s decline, assuring the audience at his 2015 campaign announcement: “Well, you need somebody, because politicians are all talk, no action. Nothing’s gonna get done. They will not bring us—believe me—to the promised land. They will not.” But when then–FBI director James Comey refused to drop the investigation into the relationship between Russian operatives and the 2016 Trump campaign, Trump and his loyalists began to warn of a secretive “deep state” that was working to undermine Trump and, with him, the nation. 

Trump’s narrative that he is the true defender of the United States, under attack by dark forces, maps beautifully over white evangelical narratives of religious decline. Trump continued that storyline even after voters turned him out of the White House, insisting that a nefarious conspiracy of Democrats, undocumented immigrants, and foreigners stole the election from him. 

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol estimated that Trump raised $250 million in donations from supporters for an “election defense fund” to pay the legal fees to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But the Trump team never actually set up that fund. Instead, the money went to the Save America political action committee founded and controlled by Trump, and from there the money went to Trump loyalists and pro-Trump organizations.

And therein lies a key reason for Trump’s story of an apocalyptic America: describing the nation as a hellhole that only he can fix also maps over a common pattern of American grifters. So long as supporters send him money, he claims, they will be able to defend the country against dark forces: communists, Marxists, atheists, immigrants, pedophiles, feminists—just what the dark forces are matters far less than that they are a foil for the grifter. 

When Trump made that argument in 2015, it was not all that far-fetched. Economists estimate that the supply-side economics of the past 40 years had shifted $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. Schools had been chronically underfunded, and the opioid epidemic, which began in 1999, was claiming more than 10,000 Americans a year (a number that has continued to rise ever since). And by weaponizing the filibuster and gerrymandering states, Republicans had made it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to accomplish anything that would address these issues.

When Biden took office, he was in the unusual position of signing executive orders to establish policies that were not unpopular, like Trump‘s, but that were extraordinarily popular. This began the process of showing that the government could, in fact, represent the people. 

Then, thanks to the election of Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in a runoff election on January 6, 2021—that was the seismic shift of January 6, 2021, that is often forgotten—the Democrats continued to demonstrate that the government could work for the people. They passed the American Rescue Plan to shore up the U.S. economy after the pandemic shutdowns, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to rebuild roads and bridges and improve broadband access, the CHIPS and Science Act to promote semiconductor manufacturing, the Inflation Reduction Act to invest in climate change mitigation and permit the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to close loopholes in gun purchases.  

Those changes have created a roaring economy with an unemployment rate that has just last month ticked up to 4% after 27 months below that number, with wages growing faster than the inflation that plagued the U.S.—and the world—after the pandemic eased. The highest wage growth has gone to the lowest earners, helping to cut the nation’s extreme wealth inequality.

That booming economy might be partly what’s behind another significant change: for all that Trump and MAGA Republicans still talk about Democratic cities as hellholes, the FBI yesterday released a report showing that violent crime in fact dropped by more than 15% in the U.S. during the first three months of 2024.  As Jim Sciutto of CNN pointed out today, “Murders fell 26.4% and rapes decreased by 25.7%. Aggravated assaults decreased by 12.5%, according to the data, robberies fell 17.8%.” In his own assessment, Biden attributed those dropping numbers to “putting more cops on the beat, holding violent criminals accountable, and getting illegal guns off the street.” 

On June 1, top sports talk host Colin Cowherd anticipated Shapiro’s pro-American stance when he pushed back on the Republican idea that the country is a dystopian nightmare. “[Trump’s] trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Stop trying to sell me on ‘everything’s rigged, the country’s falling into the sea, the economy’s terrible,’” he continued. “The America that I live in is imperfect. But compared to the rest of the world, I think we’re doing okay.”

Today, Biden pointedly illustrated one more difference between Trump and the real world. In the wake of his own conviction on 34 criminal counts, Trump has amped up his insistence that the Department of Justice is rigged against him and must be purged of nonpartisan civil servants and repopulated with his own loyalists. Biden today underscored his own respect for the rule of law. 

This afternoon a jury found Biden’s 54-year-old son Hunter Biden guilty on three charges of lying on a form required to purchase a gun in 2018 when he checked the “no” box that asked if he was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to,” drugs. That lie permitted him to buy the gun that he owned for 11 days. His lawyer argued that he did not consider himself an addict because he was trying at the time to end his drug dependence. 

The news made the Trump team rush back to their narrative. “This trial has been nothing more than a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family, which has raked in tens of millions of dollars from China, Russia and Ukraine,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. Echoing the false allegations MAGA Republicans have made about President Biden, she added: “Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit.”

But there is no Biden family business, and Hunter Biden is not in the administration. President Biden has kept his distance from the case. Today he said, “I am the president, but I am also a dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery. As I…said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[ausetkmt]

The next two years are likely to see a test of what may turn out to be the most legally consequential recommendation—other than the suggestion of criminal charges—made by the January 6 committee in its final report. Namely, the committee’s view that

“those who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and then, on January 6th, engaged in insurrection can appropriately be disqualified and barred from holding government office…pursuant to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

While the committee addressed congressional vehicles for enforcing that constitutional provision at the federal level, there are also existing provisions and processes to do so on a state-by-state basis. Those vehicles include states’ quo warranto laws. In this essay and our accompanying survey of those laws, we outline their applicability in all 50 states and four additional jurisdictions.

We come to this topic just over two years after a violent mob, alongside organized militia groups, stormed the Capitol building, the seat of American government. They disrupted the January 6 congressional certification of presidential electoral votes with the aim to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As a result, various institutions—from the Justice Department to Congress to civil society organizations—have been holding actors of all levels of culpability to account for the assault on our democracy. Over 900 individuals have been charged by the Justice Department in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Federal prosecutors have also secured historic, back-to-back seditious conspiracy convictions against leaders of the far-right Oath Keepers militia for helping foment the insurrection. And in December, the House January 6 select committee culminated their months-long investigation and series of public hearings by issuing several criminal referrals to the Justice Department against former President Donald Trump and some of his closest associates based on their involvement in different parts of the multi-prong effort to overturn the election.

But criminal prosecution is not the only means of January 6 accountability.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment can also serve that general purpose. Section 3 provides that no person shall hold any state or federal office “who[] having previously taken an oath…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion…or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” In an initial detailed report published at the Project on Government Oversight, we examined the different avenues for modern-day enforcement of Section 3 with an eye toward holding accountable those who participated in the January 6 attack and in the events that precipitated it. As we discussed in that earlier analysis and an accompanying essay at Just Security, one of the main enforcement mechanisms for a Section 3 disqualification is a quo warranto lawsuit. (Quo warranto is Latin for “by what warrant.”) Through this type of lawsuit, an individual’s right to hold public office can be challenged.

Our purpose is to provide a comprehensive current survey of the nation’s quo warranto laws, and to build on the recent successful use of the doctrine. Despite that fact, the doctrine has been recently used to litigate against a public official who participated in the attack on the Capitol and resulted in his being removed from office. In that landmark ruling last fall, a New Mexico judge removed a state county commissioner from office under Section 3 for his participation in the January 6 attack. Since then, the House select committee in its final report has issued a recommendation that Section 3 disqualification actions be brought against other public officials who engaged in insurrection.

As a continuation of our previous analysis and the work of the House committee, we surveyed the quo warranto procedures in 55 different jurisdictions—the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and nationally, including some limited instances of federal common law. We did so to map the potential for future uses of quo warranto lawsuits to bar public officials from office. Our analysis of these procedures demonstrates that quo warranto lawsuits can be used by a variety of stakeholders—from private parties such as individual citizens to public entities such as state attorneys general, county district attorneys, municipal or county governments, and even U.S. attorneys. What’s more, it shows that quo warranto lawsuits are an accountability tool that is not only widely accessible but also practically meaningful. Such actions hold the potential to disqualify sitting public officials who have violated their oath by engaging in insurrectionist activity. In that way, quo warranto lawsuits can serve as a powerful means of furthering legal accountability against some of the highest-ranking individuals who participated or aided in the assault on January 6.

Our analysis interprets the wide array of state and territorial laws that establish the procedural framework for quo warranto actions by categorizing them according to how they empower different parties, both in bringing actions and in managing them. In some jurisdictions, private parties can supply the government with information to serve as the basis of the government’s quo warranto complaint against a public official. These private parties are often referred to as “relators.” In Texas, for example, prosecuting attorneys may file a motion “at the request of an individual relator.” While such an action is not technically a private action, some jurisdictions also allow relators to manage a case pursuant to the government’s oversight. For instance, Missouri law empowers relators to control a case after obtaining leave from the prosecuting attorney.

In other jurisdictions, private parties can themselves file quo warranto lawsuits against public officials without governmental permission. Some jurisdictions, such as Connecticut, allow parties to do so in their own name. In others like North Carolina, however, the government must be the named party. In the latter scenario, the private party, not the government, manages the case; and, indeed, the government possesses no management authority. For example, should the prosecuting attorney decline to bring a quo warranto case in New Mexico, the relator is afforded full control of the suit despite the government being the named party. We identify both these types of quo warranto procedures as private actions, since both enable private parties to bring the suit.

Some jurisdictions have similarly codified which public authorities may initiate a quo warranto lawsuit. Unlike the regulations that empower private relators to issue broader complaints, many regions specify which authorities can litigate against particular officeholders. For example, in Arkansas, prosecuting attorneys may bring quo warranto suits against county officials, while the state’s attorney general handles cases against all other officers. Other jurisdictions such as Massachusetts and New York place the onus entirely on the attorney general, while others task other officials such as county or U.S. attorneys with bringing quo warranto suits.

Beyond empowering specific parties, quo warranto laws also impose other and highly varied procedures in these kinds of lawsuits. In New Jersey, for example, the attorney general carries the burden of proof. But in Hawaii, the respondent—that is, the public official whose conduct is in question—bears the burden of proof in lawsuits initiated by the attorney general. Other laws establish a duty upon public officials, usually either the local or state prosecutor, to bring a quo warranto action when, as in Arizona, for example, “they have reason to believe there is a cause.” California, Idaho, and Montana, to name a few, impose such a duty upon prosecutors.

Disqualification actions can be brought against public officials who have violated their oath of office by engaging in insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists. The House select committee recognized that in their final recommendations. Our comprehensive survey of quo warranto procedures is intended to serve as a guide to the various private and public stakeholders empowered by state and territorial law to file quo warranto lawsuits so they can continue the House committee’s work—holding public officials whom voters have entrusted to lead their government accountable for their wrongdoing.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Political Cults and the Use of Cultic Tactics in the Recruitment and Mobilization of Participants in the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.

Statement for the Record 
by Dr. Alexandra Stein
 Visiting Research Fellow, London South Bank University

Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol 31 March 2022

A link to a PDF of the complete report is below

Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron Ministries is one of the three examples given in this report.

I would like to thank the members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol for the privilege of presenting a statement for the record regarding cultic mechanisms involved in recruiting and mobilizing those involved in the Jan 6 attack.

Introduction I am a social psychologist specializing in the study of cults and totalitarian systems, and currently a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University in the department of Law and Social Sciences. I have over 30 years experience studying this phenomenon. My most recent book is Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in cults and totalitarian systems1. I would like to acknowledge the research and feedback assistance of Grace Connoy in preparing this document.

There is a great variety of ways in which certain political actors and groups are using cultic methods to influence the current social and political environment. The use of such methods is much more prevalent in our society than is generally recognized. This is important to understand in order to make sense of what may otherwise appear to be irrational behaviour at best, and certainly dangerous and destructive behaviour at worst, threatening our democratic social and political norms.

This statement doesn’t claim to explain all these destructive behaviours and forces undermining democratic practices, but there is clear evidence that cultic leadership and methods are at work to a larger extent than is often understood as there is a lack of public knowledge about what constitutes cultic mechanisms. I will briefly highlight the key features of these systematic coercive methods and discuss selected exemplar cases contributing to the Jan 6 Capitol attack.

Background Cults typically thrive in times of social fragmentation and breakdown2. There has been increasing social fragmentation in recent decades with rapid demographic movement, job instability, loss of social and community structures such as unions and social clubs3, unstable communities, and a sharp increase in relative inequality. Adding to this has been the rapid change in the role of women and minorities, along with a change of relative status due to job displacement. Decades of unmitigated cult formation and growth in both the US and internationally have laid a groundwork for the current situation where cultic influence is felt throughout society and, I would argue, has become endemic. The internet provides an accelerant to cult formation and recruitment.

One element that has fed into the environment leading up to the Jan 6 attack has been the contribution of groups that fit closely to a definition of what constitutes a cult, as well as more dispersed movements that use cultic methods. The definition I use in my work consists of five points:

1) A cultic or totalist system is formed and controlled by a charismatic authoritarian leader (which in later generations may become a leadership group).

2) It is a rigidly bounded, dense, steeply hierarchical and isolating social system. Looser front groups may exist for the purpose of recruitment, gaining resources and spreading propaganda.

3) The structure is supported and represented by a total, exclusive and isolating ideology.

4) The leader sets in motion processes of brainwashing or coercive persuasion designed to isolate and control followers. This involves social and psychological isolation, engulfment within a supposed benevolent cultic system, and the chronic arousal of stress and fear.

5) As a result followers are able to be exploited and potentially become deployable agents, demonstrating “hyper-credulity”4 and uncritical obedience to the group, regardless of their own survival needs.

The Jan 6th attack included groups that fit this definition. They include among others, a classic cult: Sean Moon’s Rod of Iron ministries, and one of the many far-right hate groups present: The Proud Boys. Others attended who may have been influenced by cultic propaganda, although not themselves yet consolidated into a specific group, such as those radicalised either by Trump’s rhetoric or through the QAnon channel. In general attendees came from a population that in many ways is already fully or partly recruited into a world saturated with cultic influence and, importantly, where fiction is presented as fact.

Further, there is extensive and long-standing intrusion into the highest levels of the government through the late Doug Coe’s The Fellowship, also known as The Family, a group that has many cultic elements5. Much of Trump’s base came from a wide network of mega-churches, televangelists, prosperity gospel and purity culture churches, such as the those led by Paula White, who gave Trump’s inaugural invocation in 2016, or Kenneth Copeland’s Word of Faith church. These, and many others, operate in a cultic manner and over decades have gained considerable influence in both government and among large sections of the public.

Charismatic authoritarian leadership Totalistic, ideologically extremist groups are controlled by a charismatic and authoritarian leader (or leadership group). Both charisma and authoritarianism are required as they are the source of the group’s central organizing dynamic of “love” (or perceived benevolence) and fear. Charisma alone is not sufficient, but when combined with authoritarianism, a highly controlling, bullying system that entraps followers can emerge. Such leaders are also sometimes referred to as malignant narcissists.

...

Full report here:

https://www.alexandrastein.com/uploads/2/8/0/1/28010027/select_cmte_on_jan_6_statement_for_the_record_a_stein.pdf

https://www.alexandrastein.com/blog

___________________________________

a further extract:

In 2021 the Rod of Iron Ministries purchased a 40 acre property in rural Texas supposedly as a “safe haven” for its “patriots”. Another isolated property in Tennessee houses families with children, dedicated full-time to the group. Many more such compounds are currently being planned. Among other activities, they are training members as part of their armed “Peace Police Peace Militia”12. This suggests increasing physical isolation in addition to an existing isolating, hierarchical structure inherited from the Unification Church.

In a cultic group the structure serves to isolate followers socially, psychologically, and sometimes physically, from the outside world. They are also isolated from fellow followers in that any doubts or critiques about the group are prohibited from being shared within the group. It is well known that Trump was quick to fire anyone who disagreed with him. Healthy debate and respect for minority opinions, normally important elements of democratic decision-making, are disallowed in a cultic environment.

Exclusive ideology

The exclusive ideology or belief system exists to justify and reinforce the position of the leader and the structural isolation of followers. The important feature of these ideologies is not so much whether they are left, right, religious or any other ideology, but it is rather the structure of those beliefs. That is: the ideology is total and exclusive allowing no other thought system to intervene, and claiming to have the single “Truth” and the answers to all possible questions for all time.

The source of all this “Truth” resides solely in the supposedly benevolent leadership: the leader is always right even when the leader is wrong. Cultic, totalistic ideologies paint the outside world in a highly fearful manner as the enemy, satanic, impure, or generally holding back the cause. Fear-arousing, Us versus Them narratives dehumanise outsiders and present apocalyptic visions. The leader is then positioned as the saviour from these fictional threats.

Along with other means, some methods of delivery of the belief system serve to confuse followers by either highly complex (and circular) or over-simplified, highly repetitive types of rhetoric. Critical thought is reduced to “thought-stopping cliches”13. The goal of the ideology is in fact to impose the group’s fictional interpretation of the follower’s experience so as to prevent followers from being able to think about their own feelings and experience independently. They are encouraged to “trust the leader” at all times as he has the plan and will disclose it as the follower is deemed ready.

...

continued here:

https://www.alexandrastein.com/uploads/2/8/0/1/28010027/select_cmte_on_jan_6_statement_for_the_record_a_stein.pdf

https://www.alexandrastein.com/blog

___________________________________

How Cult Relationships Work with Dr. Alexandra Stein

Chris Shelton: Sensibly Speaking Podcast #348

16 July 2022

comment: Excellent interview with Dr. Stein! I’ve heard her before, but there was a lot more information here than in other interviews. Thanks Chris and Alexandra!

___________________________________

Alexandra Stein on cults

[eagletek]

The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee said it was hard to interview witnesses when '30 minutes later' their cooperation would leak

Kevin Marino (C), lawyer for former Trump campaign manager William Stepien, talks to Tim Heaphy (L), January 6th Committee lead investigator, before the second hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee told The New York Times it was…

[blackmagicspecialist786-blog]

Many Republicans Against McCarthy Sought to Overturn 2020 Election

WASHINGTON -- The members were able to in the effort to ensure that the former president Donald J. Trump in his position after he lost the 2020 presidential election. They refused to declare that Vice President Joe Biden was the legitimate winner. They used lies to inflame a crowd of Trump supporters to take over the Capitol on January. 6 2021. On Friday, which was the second anniversary marking the two years since 6th of January. 6. attack a number of the same lawmakers who were top lieutenants under Trump were in attendance. Trump during the buildup to the attack spent all day stifling the campaign of Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California to be speaker, and demanding major concessions from McCarthy. Although some were served with subpoenas during January. 6 investigation and were later transferred for review by the House Ethics Committee, their abilities showed they were by no means marginalized and paid no cost for their actions. In both the attempt to block the efforts of Mr. McCarthy and the push to change the 2020 presidential election included the Representative Scott Perry, the leader of the ultra-right Freedom Caucus, and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar from Arizona. (On Friday the 13th, the Reps. Gosar and Mr. Perry were seen to be adamantly supporting McCarthy. McCarthy after he caved to their demands to weaken the authority of the post that he wants and increase their influence inside the House.) Other hard-right wingers who for days refused to support the candidate Mr. McCarthy were Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Harris of Maryland. Three of them met with Mr. Trump or White House officials to discuss ways to combat the results of the election as evidenced through the House committee that was investigating the attack on Jan. 6 , attack. Understand the Events on Jan. 6 (Mr. Harris flipped his vote in favor of his fellow senator Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon however Mrs. Boebert and Mr. Gaetz remain in opposition to Mr. Harris.) Democrats ensured that they singled them out. "This date, January 6, should be a wake-up call at the G.O.P. to reject M.A.G.A. radicalism that keeps making G.O.P. failings." senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York posted on Twitter. "But the chaos created through House Republicans last week was just one more illustration of the way M.A.G.A. radicalism is making it hard for them to be a leader." None of the hard-right wing attended the bipartisan celebration at Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary. One Republican of any kind attended Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, an ex- F.B.I. agent, who is also the chairman of the center-right Problem Solvers Caucus. The ceremony began with an oath of silence for House lawmakers on the steps to the Capitol to pay tribute to those Capitol Police officers who died in the year following the attack. "We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers," said Representative Hakeem Jeffries from New York, the top Democrat in the House and cried as tears poured into certain House members their eyes. Witnesses who presented evidence to the House inquiry committee, including police officers who protected the Capitol and were honoured in the White House, including Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of Washington's Metropolitan Police Department and Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, and Eugene Goodman of the U.S. Capitol Police. Perry. Perry, who was one of the principal creators of a plan to appoint Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as acting attorney general following he seemed to be a friend of the president. Trump's false accusations of widespread voter fraud declared on Friday that he opposed Mr. McCarthy's selection for speaker until he was able to extract concessions from him that would give members of the House Freedom Caucus and rank-and-file Republicans greater influence over the direction. "This place is broken," Mr. Perry said. "We weren't going to move from that position until the change is made." The Rep. Biggs, who was still arguing with McCarthy, who was still arguing against. McCarthy on Friday afternoon He was also involved in various initiatives in 2020 which included meetings with the aim of the attraction of demonstrators towards Washington the week of Jan. 6 as per the House Jan. 6 committee. He. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to back his campaign on Friday, spewed many lies regarding the 2020 election. He also was a speaker at "Stop the Steal" rallies organised through Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. The House committee that was investigating this incident in January. six attack sent to the Ethics Committee Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs to the Ethics Committee for refusing to follow the subpoenas it issued. Not all Republican was involved in preventing Biden's ascension. McCarthy's ascension was among those who opposed certifying the legitimacy of. Biden's election victory. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas started out as a passionate fan to Mr. Trump's claim of a rigged election. However, he slowly became concerned over the campaign in the direction of invalidating results. He eventually voted against Mr. Trump's plan to force Congress to annul the results on Jan. 6 2021. The speaker, Mr. Roy, an initial resistance to McCarthy, an initial defender of. McCarthy, led negotiations in an effort to reach an agreement which could allow Ms. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for modifications on House rules. "We believe that there ought to be fundamental changes about and limits on spending after the massive bloated omnibus spending bill in December," Mr. Roy said, referring to the $1.7 trillion federal funding package that was approved by Congress in December. "And we've discussed these. We've put many of these items in into." Read the full article

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Looking For Some Light Reading In The New Year? Here's Robin Vos' Jan 6th Congressional Testimony.

Looking For Some Light Reading In The New Year? Here’s Robin Vos’ Jan 6th Congressional Testimony.

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet…I need to get some popcorn stocked in first. Any idea where I can get some decent popcorn?? Select Committee To Investigate The January 6th Attack On The US Capitol: Interview of Robin Vos [ht to Dan Shafer for the link]