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Protein in deadly spider venom blocks "death signal" after heart attack
By Nick Lavars
July 15, 2021
https://newatlas.com/medical/funnel-web-spider-venom-death-signal-heart-attack-hi1a/
As unlikely as it may seem, the venom of the deadly funnel web spider could prove a valuable source of a number of life-saving medicines, including drugs that kill skin cancer and reduce brain damage in stroke victims. Adding to these possibilities is new research demonstrating how a drug candidate built off a molecule in this spider venom can stop the "death signal" that results from a heart attack, potentially providing first responders with a powerful new way to intervene.
The work was carried out by scientists at the Australia's University of Queensland and actually builds off a previous study in which they identified a small protein in the venom of funnel web spiders with some rather exciting potential. Through experiments on rats, the team found that the administering this particular protein after an induced stroke significantly reduced the potential for brain damage as a result, even hours after the event.
“We discovered this small protein, Hi1a, amazingly reduces damage to the brain even when it is given up to eight hours after stroke onset,” says Professor Glenn King. “It made sense to also test Hi1a on heart cells, because like the brain, the heart is one of the most sensitive organs in the body to the loss of blood flow and lack of oxygen."
To explore these possibilities, the scientists tested out the drug on beating human heart cells, on which they simulated the stresses of a heart attack. This led to what they describe as incredible results "decades in the making," with the drug found to block what's known as the "death signal" that is normally spread throughout heart cells in the event of an attack.
“After a heart attack, blood flow to the heart is reduced, resulting in a lack of oxygen to heart muscle,” says study author Dr Nathan Palpant. “The lack of oxygen causes the cell environment to become acidic, which combine to send a message for heart cells to die.”
The team found that Hi1a has this effect by blocking acid-sensing ion channels in the heart, which in turn blocks transmission of the death signal and allows more heart cells to survive. Currently no drug is available to block this so-called death signal, and no drugs are in clinical use that save the organ from this damage following a heart attack.
“For heart attack victims, our vision for the future is that Hi1a could be administered by first responders in the ambulance, which would really change the health outcomes of heart disease," says King. "This is particularly important in rural and remote parts of Australia where patients and treating hospitals can be long distances apart – and when every second counts.”
Further to potentially saving the lives of heart attack victims, the drug could also be used to buy time for transplants of the organ, by increasing the survival of the heart's cells. This could allow crucial extra minutes to transport a viable heart after it has stopped beating and boost the chances of a successful transplant.
The scientists hope to build on these promising early results with human clinical trials investigating Hi1a as both a treatment for stroke and heart disease in the next two to three years.
“This will not only help the hundreds of thousands of people who have a heart attack every year around the world, it could also increase the number and quality of donor hearts, which will give hope to those waiting on the transplant list,” says Professor Peter Macdonald.
The research was published in the journal Circulation. Dr Palpant discusses the research in the following video.
‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: The inside story of Trump’s defiance and inaction on Jan. 6
Terror at the Capitol, delay at the Pentagon, resistance in the Oval Office and democracy hanging in the balance
By Philip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig
Today at 11:59 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/15/jan-6-i-alone-can-fix-it-book-excerpt/
Part two of an excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.” Rucker and Leonnig will discuss this book during a Washington Post Live event on July 20.
As the sun rose over Washington on Jan. 6, electricity hung in the air. The big day had come. Thousands of President Trump’s supporters began gathering on the Ellipse to stake out a good spot from which to see the president, who was scheduled to address the “Save America” rally around noon. Organizers had obtained a federal permit for 30,000 people, but it looked as if the crowd would be even larger than that. Thousands more prepared to make their way toward the Capitol to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s election.
At the White House, Trump set the tone for the day with an 8:17 a.m. tweet: “States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. 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!”
Many of Trump’s advisers knew this would never actually happen. They chalked the president’s tweet up to theater. Vice President Pence could have the courage of a lion, but there was no doubt that he would fulfill his constitutional duty and preside over the pro forma certification of Biden’s win. As one senior official recalled, “All of us knew this was the endgame. The clock had run out. By January 6th, it was game over … We knew we would take the blows. This was date certain. The vice president knew this.”
As Nancy Pelosi left her luxury condo building in Georgetown, she greeted her security agents who would drive her to the Capitol. “This is going to be quite a day,” the House speaker said to them. She kept the rest of her thoughts to herself, but later recalled thinking: “I know the Republicans will try some stunts. But at the end of the day, Joe Biden will be the president of the United States — the ascertained future president.”
In the Oval Office later that morning, Trump huddled with aides and family members. The president went in and out of the dining room to check on TV coverage, hoping to gauge the size of the crowd on the Ellipse. Stephen Miller was there going over the remarks he and his team had prepared for the president to deliver at the rally. Senior White House officials Mark Meadows, Keith Kellogg and Eric Herschmann were there, too, as were the president’s adult children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump Jr.'s girlfriend. Some of those around the president encouraged his fantasy of Pence the hero stepping in to overturn the election. Guilfoyle, referring to the growing crowd on the Ellipse, told him, “They’re just reflecting the will of the people. This is the will of the people.”
Ivanka Trump did not agree and was upset about what attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and others had been advising her father. At one point that morning, she said: “This is not right. It’s not right.”
Trump called Pence, who was spending the morning at his Naval Observatory residence before heading to the Capitol. Pence again explained the legal limits on his authority as vice president and said he planned to perform his ceremonial duty, as prescribed by the Constitution. But Trump showed him no mercy.
“You don’t have the courage to make a hard decision,” he told Pence.
Ivanka Trump, standing next to Kellogg near a grandfather clock in the back of the room, had a hard time listening to her father badger the vice president to do something she knew was not possible. “Mike Pence is a good man,” she said quietly to Kellogg, the vice president’s national security adviser who was close to Trump.
“I know that,” he replied. “Let this ride. Take a deep breath. We’ll come back at it.”
After hanging up with Pence, Trump went back into the dining room to check on the crowd on TV. Ivanka Trump followed her father and tried to convince him to see the situation rationally. But she was unpersuasive. Trump had given Pence instructions and was hellbent on getting him to follow through.
Meanwhile, at the U.S. Capitol Police headquarters near Union Station, Chief Steven Sund had gathered in the agency’s command center to monitor protests. A 25-year veteran of security planning for major D.C. events and protests, Sund suggested that a technician pull up on the center screen a live broadcast of the crowds gathering on the Ellipse. Trump’s supporters were boisterous. Despite the permit for 30,000 people, police estimated that as many as 40,000 could assemble.
Just before 11 a.m., the police commanders heard Giuliani onstage telling the crowd the many reasons Pence should not certify the election results that afternoon: “criminality” in the vote tallies; “corrupt” voting machines; states “begging” for a recount; the “unconstitutionality” of an 1800s election law. But then Giuliani said a phrase, best known from the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” that caught a few of the commanders’ attention: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Why was Giuliani suggesting a fight to the death?
Standing onstage with Giuliani was John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who had been seeding Trump’s mind with the theory that Pence had the power to overturn the results. Screaming into a microphone, Eastman alleged that election officials stored ballots “in a secret folder in the machines” and that, once polls closed and officials determined who had voted and who had not, they could “match those unvoted ballots with an unvoted voter and put them together in the machine” to give Biden just enough votes to win. This was a new far-fetched theory for which the Trump team had no evidence, yet the crowd ate it up.
Under a large tent backstage at the rally, Trump hung out with his entourage before stepping out to deliver his speech. There was a party atmosphere. Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” boomed over the loudspeakers. Trump Jr. recorded the scene with his cellphone to post on Instagram. “I think we’re T-minus a couple of seconds here, guys, so check it out,” the president’s son said. He turned the camera to Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and called him “an actual fighter,” then turned it to Guilfoyle. After realizing she was being recorded, she began dancing to the music and implored Trump’s supporters to “have the courage to do the right thing — fight!”
Ivanka Trump was in the tent, too, tending to her father. Melania Trump had chosen not to attend the “Save America” rally, telling aides that she was not sure it was a good idea for her to participate. The first lady was busy that morning overseeing a scheduled photo shoot of rugs and other decor in the White House residence. Yet the first daughter, who typically was just as careful as the first lady about when and where she appeared in public, attended, which surprised White House officials.
“You, who curates your image, you, who looks down on many of the rest of us, what are you doing there? Honestly,” a Trump adviser later remarked.
Ivanka Trump did not appear onstage, however. Rally organizers repeatedly had asked her to give a speech, but she declined. The first daughter told aides that she decided to attend only because she had hoped to calm the president and help keep the event on an even keel.
At noon, Trump took the stage. Sund and his team at Capitol Police headquarters turned up the volume a bit and heard the thundering applause. At the Pentagon, Gen. Mark Milley was watching on television from his office as well, deeply disturbed by the rhetoric.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff already had been on edge. A student of history, Milley saw Trump as a classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having a stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of 20th-century fascism in Germany were replaying in 21st-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
This and other episodes recounted in this book are based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 140 people, including the most senior Trump administration officials, friends and outside advisers to the 45th president. Most of the people interviewed agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. Scenes were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources and buttressed by a review of calendars, diary entries, internal memos and other correspondence among principals.
In his speech on the Ellipse, Trump said, “Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will ‘stop the steal.’ Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.”
The president repeated more lies about the election outcome, then said, “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.”
He concluded his speech by urging his supporters to march to the Capitol and suggesting that he would join them.
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” Trump said. He added, “We’re going to try and give our Republicans — the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
t noon, the same time Trump began speaking at his rally, police reported that roughly 300 members of the Proud Boys were outside the Capitol. About 20 minutes into the speech, Capitol Police received reports of suspected bombs on Capitol Hill: suspicious packages at the Supreme Court and near the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as a pipe bomb with a timer found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters.
At the Capitol Police’s command center, Sund and his team had turned their attention to the bomb threats and did not hear Trump urge his supporters to march to the Capitol, but within a few minutes of his call, thousands of people started walking along Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues toward the Capitol.
They were pouring into the streets to join the first pack of Trump supporters who had already hit the barricades hard on the Capitol’s western front. That first and more organized group had arrived at 12:45, while the president was still speaking on the Ellipse. They clearly intended to force their way up to the building. The streaming crowds quickly knocked over the temporary fencing that resembled bike racks and stormed onward toward the foundation and series of steps and patios. Many rushed toward the raised platform that had been partly set up for Biden’s inauguration, just two weeks away.
Sund and his team could sense a level of preparation on the part of the protesters. Some of the men leading the first charge and snaking their way up the hill were barking into walkie-talkies in their hands. Many wore backpacks, and some had on battle helmets and bulletproof vests.
Around the same time, Pence arrived at the Capitol to begin the day’s proceedings, set to start at 1 p.m. Just as his motorcade deposited him at the building’s eastern front, the vice president’s office released a three-page letter to members of Congress signed by Pence outlining his interpretation of his legal duties and the limits of his power as presiding officer. In it, Pence wrote, “I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of this election,” adding that he would ensure that they “receive a fair and open hearing.”
But, Pence stressed, “as a student of history who loves the Constitution and reveres its Framers, I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority.”
Pence vowed to hear any objections, and then to count the electoral college votes “in a manner consistent with our Constitution, laws, and history.” His final words: “So help me God.”
Outside the Capitol, the pro-Trump protest was quickly morphing into a battle scene. Demonstrators so outnumbered law enforcement officials that hundreds of Capitol Police officers on the western front of the complex had no chance of holding the crowds away from the grounds. This was no ordinary political protest. It was a riot. Many of those crashing through the outer barricades were wearing military gear and carrying Trump flags, and some were wielding pipes, batons and cans of bear spray. A few had climbing gear, and some even brought night-vision goggles and fire-retardant gloves. Some engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the police officers, who chose not to fire on the crowd for fear of triggering gruesome violence.
Inside the Capitol, the joint session was underway in the House chamber. Lawmakers from both chambers began considering electoral vote counts state by state, in alphabetical order, but were interrupted by a Republican objection to Arizona’s tally and soon disbanded. Senators returned to the Senate chamber for debate, where at 1:35 Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rose to strenuously condemn the move by some of his Republican brethren to block certification.
Reading from a carefully prepared text, McConnell said, “The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves a National Board of Elections on steroids … [If] this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”
McConnell and most of his colleagues did not know about the mayhem building outside. But Sen. Mitt Romney had been more attentive than others. On Jan. 2, the senator from Utah received a call from Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, warning him about unsettling personal and specific threats. Milley had shared with King online chatter he had discovered through an app on his phone called Dataminr.
Pro-Trump rhetoric was interlaced with calls for violence and references to smuggling guns and other weapons into Washington to “stop the steal.” One message said something along the lines of, “Let’s burn Senator McConnell’s house down while he’s in it.”
“We are coming to kill you. Just wait a few days,” read another message, which appeared to be aimed at members of Congress who supported certifying the election.
Romney told his wife, Ann, about King’s call.
“Mitt, you can’t go back,” Ann Romney told her husband. She called his Senate staff and said she feared for his safety.
Mitt Romney tried to reassure her. “It’s the Capitol and I’m careful and I do have precautions and security. I’ll be very, very careful,” he told his wife. He said he had a responsibility to go back to Washington to certify the election.
Romney solidified his plans to fly to Washington while his aides arranged for additional security. He was harassed by Trump supporters at Salt Lake City International Airport on Jan. 5 and aboard his flight; some passengers chanted, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”
As Romney sat in the Senate on Jan. 6, his phone buzzed with a text message from aide Chris Marroletti.
“I’m not liking what’s happening outside the Capitol,” Marroletti wrote to his boss. “There are really big, violent demonstrations going on. I think you ought to leave.”
“Let me know if they get inside the Capitol and I will go to my hideaway,” Romney texted back.
At 2:10, the first rioter entered the Capitol by breaking a window and climbing inside. A stream of Trump warriors followed him.
In the Senate chamber, where Pence was presiding at the rostrum, Romney was the first to move. After Marroletti texted him, “They’re inside the Capitol,” Romney walked off the floor and started to make his way alone toward his small hideaway office in the Capitol. He ran into Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who was guarding the area outside the chamber. “Go back in,” Goodman instructed Romney. “There are people not far. You’ll be safer inside.” Romney turned around and returned to his desk on the Senate floor.
At 2:13, Pence’s Secret Service detail removed the vice president from the Senate floor and took him through a side door to his ceremonial office nearby, along with his wife, Karen, their daughter Charlotte, and his brother, Greg, a congressman from Indiana. The Pences were hurried across one of the Capitol’s many ornate marble hallways to get there, but the path proved eerily close to danger. One or two minutes later, marauders chanting Pence’s name charged up the stairs to that precise landing in front of the hallway, and a quick-thinking Goodman led the rioters in a different direction, away from the Senate chamber. Had Pence walked past any later, the intruders who called him a traitor would have spotted him.
The Senate immediately went into recess. The C-SPAN feed providing live footage of the proceedings was shut off. The same was happening at the other end of the building, where plainclothes Capitol Police officers barricaded the door to the Speaker’s Lobby just off the House chamber to keep the protesters from charging in. The House adjourned at 2:20. Pelosi had been presiding when her security team yanked her from the rostrum. “I thought they were just switching off because of mischief,” she later recalled. “I didn’t know it was because of real danger.”
Capitol Police officers whisked away the leaders of both houses of Congress to an undisclosed safe location in the Hart Senate Office Building. Other lawmakers were evacuated, too, although the process of getting to safety proved chaotic.
“We’re walking down the tunnels and there happened to be two officers there and we said, ‘Where are we going?’ ” Romney recalled. “They said, ‘Well, I’m sure the senators know.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m a senator and I don’t know.’ ”
At the White House, Trump was back in his private dining room watching everything unfold on television. Aides, including Dan Scavino and Kayleigh McEnany, popped in and out. The president was riveted. His supporters had heeded his call to march on the Capitol with “pride and boldness.” For Trump, there was no more beautiful sight than thousands of energetic people waving Trump flags, wearing red MAGA caps and fighting to keep him in power.
“He thought, ‘This is cool.’ He was happy,” recalled one aide who was with Trump that afternoon. “Then when it turned violent, he thought, ‘Oh, crap.’ ”
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham said, “It took him a while to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”
As rioters marauded through the Capitol, it was clear whom they were looking for. Some of them shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump didn’t exactly throw them off the hunt. At 2:24, the president tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
At that moment, Pence was still in his ceremonial office — protected by Secret Service agents, but vulnerable because the second-floor office had windows that could be breached and the intruding thugs had gained control of the building. Tim Giebels, the lead special agent in charge of the vice president’s protective detail, twice asked Pence to evacuate the Capitol, but Pence refused. “I’m not leaving the Capitol,” he told Giebels. The last thing the vice president wanted was the people attacking the Capitol to see his 20-car motorcade fleeing. That would only vindicate their insurrection.
The third time Giebels asked Pence to evacuate, it was more of an order than a request. “They’re in the building,” Giebels said. “The room you’re in is not secure. There are glass windows. I need to move you. We’re going.”
At 2:26, after a team of agents scouted a safe path to ensure the Pences would not encounter trouble, Giebels and the rest of Pence’s detail guided them down a staircase to a secure subterranean area that rioters couldn’t reach, where the vice president’s armored limousine awaited. Giebels asked Pence to get in one of the vehicles. “We can hold here,” he said.
“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”
The Pences then made their way to a secure underground area to wait out the riot.
Back at the White House, Kellogg was worried about Pence’s safety and went to find Trump.
“Is Mike okay?” the president asked him.
“The Secret Service has him under control,” Kellogg told Trump. “Karen is there with the daughter.”
“Oh?” Trump asked.
“They’re going to stay there until this thing gets sorted out,” Kellogg said.
Trump said nothing more. He didn’t express any hope that Pence was okay. He didn’t try to call the vice president to check on him. He just stayed in the dining room watching television.
Around this time, Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.
“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”
Pence had made clear to Giebels the level of his determination and Kellogg said there was no changing it.
“He’s going to stay there,” Kellogg told Ornato. “If he has to wait there all night, he’s going to do it.”
Ornato, through a spokesman, denied having this conversation.
und’s effort to secure the Capitol with military reinforcements hit a major snag. He was shocked to learn that, on that day, Gen. William Walker didn’t have permission to dispatch the National Guard to help him. Only the top official at the Pentagon could order that, because of a memo Chris Miller, the acting defense secretary, had signed a few days earlier. Defense Department leaders were gun-shy after the intense criticism of the military’s role in clearing Lafayette Square in June. Now, in a tense conference call, Sund pleaded with two lieutenant generals to get the Army secretary to send immediate help, but they initially resisted, wary of the “visual” of troops on the Capitol grounds.
At the Pentagon, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy rushed into Miller’s office suite where senior leaders were meeting to try to get a handle on the rapidly deteriorating situation. It was about 2:30 p.m. They had just learned that the crowd outside the Capitol was estimated at 25,000, and that some members were armed and many were violent.
McCarthy gave Miller and the group a rapid update. Police at the Capitol were badly outnumbered by rioters and losing the fight to secure the building. As many as 8,000 protesters had pounded their way through barricades and were streaming through the halls of Congress.
The Pentagon leaders were aghast.
“What do you think, Chairman?” Miller asked Milley.
“Get on the phone with the A.G. right now and get every cop in D.C. down there to the Capitol this minute, all 7[,000] to 8,000 of them,” Milley said. He recommended that National Guard Commander Daniel Hokanson mobilize the entire D.C. National Guard and send out a call for National Guard reinforcements from the nearby states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Most lawmakers had been evacuated from the Capitol for their own safety, but most of their staff members were left to fend for themselves as armed mobs of violent rioters started to roam through hallways and in and out of offices. Some of them punched and kicked doors. They yelled, “Stop the steal!” As if trapped in a building with multiple active shooters, Hill staffers suffered the terror of not being sure whether they would live or die. Many of them were in their 20s and 30s — part of a generation of Americans who had grown up with the scourge of mass gun violence and had learned in school what to do in active-shooter situations.
After first evacuating congressional leaders to the secure area of the Hart Building, Capitol Police decided to err on the side of caution and transported leaders, including Pelosi, McConnell, Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, to Fort McNair, an Army post in Southwest Washington.
At the Pentagon, Miller’s office was a hub of activity. At 2:45 p.m., the acting defense secretary had a group conference call with acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to urge him to deploy all law enforcement officers at his disposal. Milley said the National Guard had to move as soon as possible, too, although he acknowledged that it would surely take longer to mobilize troops than police forces.
At 3:04 p.m., Ryan McCarthy transmitted the decision to call up National Guard units from D.C. and neighboring states. The units would begin to arrive on the Capitol grounds about 2½ hours later — which the Pentagon considered lightning speed.
Lawmakers were horrified as they hid from rioters. People who appeared to be maniacs — some wearing horns, carrying zip ties and chanting about hanging the “traitors” — were coursing through the halls of Congress waving Confederate and neo-Nazi flags. A mob had taken over the Senate floor.
At 3:15 p.m., Dan Sullivan called Milley. “This is really f----- up down here,” said the Republican senator from Alaska.
Sullivan told Milley that the senators were safe in a secure location and that Capitol Police had a tentative plan to evacuate them by bus. Sullivan, who had military training, thought the movement would put them in more danger. “I’m going to tell them it’s a bad idea,” he told Milley. “Can I mention that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs agrees?”
“Yes,” Milley said. The plan never came to be.
At 3:33 p.m., Pelosi and Schumer called Miller, who had other Pentagon leaders standing by listening. There was high anxiety in their voices. They sounded angry, although not panicked.
“We want action now,” one of them said. “We must have active-duty troops.”
Milley spoke up: “We have the Guard coming.”
Miller said the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies were on their way.
Pelosi and Schumer said that wasn’t enough. They needed active-duty troops to get control of the situation. This was a matter of life and limb.
“The country is at stake,” Pelosi said.
At 4 p.m., Pence called Miller from his secure location. The vice president was calm. He had no anxiety or fear in his voice. Pence delivered a set of directives to the defense chief.
“Get troops here; get them here now,” the vice president ordered. “We’ve got to get the Congress to do its business.”
“Yes, sir,” Miller said.
It was the sternest Miller or the other Pentagon officials listening had ever heard Pence.
“Get the Capitol cleared,” he told Miller. “You’ve got to get down here. You’ve got to get the place cleared. We’ve got to do what we have to do.”
“Yes, sir,” Miller answered.
otsford/The Washington Post)
As Pence gave orders to the military, the actual commander in chief was effectively AWOL. Trump spent the afternoon glued to the television watching the drama unfold.
After his tweet castigating Pence amid the height of the attack, Trump had issued two tweets that many of his aides felt still missed the mark. In neither did Trump call on his supporters to leave the Capitol.
As soon as she saw on the television in her second-floor office that the rioters were inside the Capitol, Ivanka Trump said to her aides, “I’m going down to my dad. This has to stop.” She spent several hours walking back and forth to the Oval trying to persuade the president to be stronger in telling his supporters he stood with law enforcement and ordering them to disperse.
Just when Ivanka Trump thought she had made headway and returned upstairs, Meadows would call her to say that the president still needed more persuading. “I need you to come back down here,” Meadows would tell her. “We’ve got to get this under control.” He would clear the room of other aides and say, “I only want Ivanka, myself and the president in here.”
This cycle repeated itself several times that afternoon. As another presidential adviser said, “Ivanka was described to me like a stable pony. When the racehorse gets too agitated, you bring the stable pony in to calm him down.”
Other White House officials also pleaded with Trump to condemn the violence unequivocally.
“You need to tweet something,” Kellogg told the president. “Nobody’s going to be watching TV out there, but they will be looking at their phones. You need to tweet something.”
He added: “Once mobs get moving, you can’t turn them off.”
Kevin McCarthy, who had been trying to reach Trump at the White House, finally succeeded and asked him to publicly and forcefully call off the rioters. Trump falsely claimed that the attackers were members of antifa. McCarthy told the president that in fact they were his own supporters.
“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to the account that Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler said McCarthy gave her.
Other advisers who were away from the White House tried to call Trump, but he didn’t answer. They figured he knew what they were going to say, and he didn’t want to hear it. Plus, he was busy watching TV.
Kellyanne Conway tried to talk to Trump and left a message with his office, asking that her name be added to the chorus of people calling on the president to do something.
“This is really bad,” Conway said. “People are going to get hurt. Only he can stop them. He can’t just tweet. He’s got to get down there.”
Alyssa Farah, watching on television from Florida, was heartbroken and reached out several times to Meadows, her former boss. “You guys have to say something,” she told him. “Even if the president’s not willing to put out a statement, you should go to the [cameras] and say, ‘We condemn this. Please stand down.’ If you don’t, people are going to die.”
Some other White House officials felt helpless. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, watched the riot on television from his second-floor West Wing office. At one point, Chris Liddell, a deputy chief of staff, came in to join him. They were horrified, but they didn’t believe there was anything they could do to stop it. These were two of the most powerful people in the government, yet what could they do if the president refused to act?
Lindsey Graham wanted to get through to the president as well. He had an idea: call Ivanka Trump. The senator rang the first daughter on her cellphone numerous times until she finally picked up.
“You need to tell him to tell these people to leave,” Graham said.
“We’re working on it,” she replied.
n Capitol Hill, most of the senators, along with about 50 staff members, were in a large undisclosed room secured by Capitol Police. Tensions were high. Romney was as upset as he’d ever been. He went up to Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson, two of the dozen Republican senators objecting to the certification.
“This is what you have caused,” Romney told them.
At 4:05 p.m., Biden delivered remarks from Wilmington, Del. The senators stopped what they were doing and silently watched on television screens. Trump still had not appeared on camera since the siege began, but the president-elect stepped in to try to calm the nation.
“At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times,” Biden said. He added: “This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition. And it must end now.”
Biden said, “The words of a president matter, no matter how good or bad that president is. At their best, the words of a president can inspire. At their worst, they can incite.”
Watching from their secure room, the senators stood and applauded — Republicans and Democrats alike. “It was like, wow, we have a leader who said what needed to be said,” Romney recalled.
At 4:17 p.m., Trump posted on Twitter a video of remarks to the nation that he had recorded in the Rose Garden after those closest to him had pleaded for hours. He began by repeating his fraudulent line that the election was rigged.
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt,” Trump said. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everybody knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”
Then the president said: “We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel, but go home, and go home in peace.”
The president’s message was jarringly inconsistent. He had recorded three takes, each time veering off the script his speechwriters had prepared. The version released was the most palatable option.
s the sun began to go down over the city, the Capitol still was not secure.
At 4:39 p.m., Miller gave Meadows an update on the status of removing protesters from the complex. McConnell joined the call at different points and sounded furious.
“I want it clear,” the Senate majority leader demanded. “I want it cleared out now. The Senate needs to get its business done.”
He added: “We’re going back in session at 8 o’clock in prime time. If you haven’t secured the entire area, you have to secure the two chambers, because we’re going to go back on the air in prime time and let the American people know that this insurrection has failed.”
Pelosi also insisted that the House return to session that evening. At one point, defense officials suggested to her they transport House members by bus to Fort McNair and hold their session there, because it could more easily be secured than the Capitol.
“No, you’re not,” Pelosi said. “We’re going back to the Capitol. You just tell us how long it will take to get rid of these people. We’re coming back to the Capitol.”
Pence agreed. He, too, was adamant that the Senate and the House finish their work that evening.
“We need to get back tonight,” he said on a call with congressional leaders and defense and security officials. “We can’t let the world see that our process of confirming the next president can be delayed.”
Despite Milley recommending that the Pentagon call up neighboring National Guard units immediately, Ryan McCarthy hadn’t gotten around to it until more than 2½ hours after the Capitol was breached. About 750 Guard troops from Maryland would soon begin arriving, along with 620 from Virginia.
By 6 p.m., the Capitol was emptied of rioters but not fully secure. Explosives teams were sweeping for bombs and were nearly done. But they still expected that it would take 90 more minutes to give the all-clear for lawmakers to return.
At 6:01 p.m., Trump tweeted again: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
At no time that Wednesday since the Capitol siege began did these government and military leaders hear from the president. Not even the vice president heard from Trump.
At 8:06 p.m., an emotional Pence called the Senate back into session. “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win,” he said. “Violence never wins. Freedom wins, and this is still the people’s house.”
As Pence got to work doing precisely what Trump had ordered him not to do, Romney thought to himself: “High personal cost. Five years of praising the president in every possible way, both visually and verbally, to instead have all of that flipped upon him and be criticized by the president had to be a reversal of historic proportion.
The floor debate picked up where it left off, with Arizona’s electoral votes. And although some Republicans continued to object, there were fewer than before the siege.
Graham gave an animated speech in which he appeared to be grieving for a friend who had lost his way.
“Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way,” he said. “All I can say is: Count me out. Enough is enough. I tried to be helpful.”
When it was Romney’s turn, he had sharp words not only for the president but also for some of his fellow senators.
“We gather today due to a selfish man’s injured pride and the outrage of his supporters, whom he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning,” Romney said.
In the end, six Republican senators objected to the counting of Arizona’s electoral votes and seven objected to counting Pennsylvania’s.
In the House, where Pelosi gaveled the session to order an hour later, at 9 p.m., the Republican resistance was greater still. One hundred twenty-one House members, nearly two-thirds of the Republican conference, voted against counting Arizona’s votes, and even more, 138, voted against counting Pennsylvania’s.
Pelosi could hardly believe it. “That they, in the middle of the night, would say, ‘We still want to [object to] Pennsylvania,’ just showed you the total cavalier disregard they had for our country,” she recalled. They weren’t beholden to country, she said, but to Trump, “this insane person spreading this insanity.” Maybe the House Republicans feared him, maybe they agreed with him, Pelosi said, “or they were just in a cult.”
At 3:24 a.m., Congress completed its duty and voted to confirm Biden’s 306-to-232 electoral win. Pence formally declared him the next president of the United States.
Trump stayed silent through much of the evening. Twitter that night took the extraordinary step of suspending his accounts temporarily, saying that his messages had violated its civic policies against spreading misinformation. Facebook soon followed.
Senior adviser Jason Miller worked with Trump, suddenly deprived of his megaphone, and the first lady to draft a statement that Dan Scavino would release on the president’s behalf once the outcome was official. For Trump, conceding to Biden was out of the question. But Miller pressed him to, at a minimum, commit to an orderly transition of power. After Jan. 6, there could no longer be a peaceful handover. But he argued that the country needed to be assured that Trump would not try any more gambits.
On that, Trump agreed. His statement read: “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th. I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again.”
carol.leonnig@washpost.com
philip.rucker@washpost.com
Copyright 2021 by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Press. All rights reserved.
By Philip Rucker
Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2005 and previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is co-author of "A Very Stable Genius," a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Twitter
By Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/15/jan-6-i-alone-can-fix-it-book-excerpt/
Trump rages over post-presidential books he did interviews for
The avalanche of coming books has caused recriminations. And there is anxiety about what’s to come.
By MERIDITH MCGRAW
Politico
07/15/2021 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/15/trump-post-presidential-books-499741
He knew it was coming. But former President Donald Trump still was not pleased.
He had read a new book excerpt—one of many about his presidency in the last few weeks—that described him telling his former chief of staff John Kelly that Hitler, for all his horrors, “ did a lot of good things.”
The account came from Michael Bender’s work, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” And for weeks, the former president had anxiously anticipated it surfacing. When Bender first approached him about it in the spring, Trump, through a spokesperson, told the Wall Street Journal reporter the anecdote was “defamatory.” Bender said he interpreted it as a legal threat; but like many such threats from Trump, nothing came of it.
Now it was in print. Reading the line for the first time, Trump denied it before engaging in speculation about the story’s origins. “But that doesn’t mean John Kelly didn’t tell Mike Bender that,” he said, according to an adviser. “That doesn’t mean other people didn’t say it.”
The guessing game that Bender’s book sparked added to the schisms and points of tensions that have erupted in Trump’s orbit in recent weeks. As the deluge of Trump-related books has hit the shelves, the already tenuous alliances that bind aides and associates of the former president have been strained further. Ex-aides have publicly attacked one-time allies while others have sought distance from a presidency they once dutifully served.
Fear is mounting, too, about the tea-spilling to come. In particular, Trump officials are anxiously awaiting the books set to be published by actual colleagues, chief among them counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, who plan to write their own accounts of the Trump presidency.
“I think it’s fraught right now as to who is telling the truth,” said a Trump adviser. “They’re all trying to go back in time and curate their own images.”
Privately, former administration officials and top campaign aides have shared concerns about Conway’s upcoming tell-all in particular. The ex-president’s loyal former counselor is expected to give a hold-no-punches account of her time in the White House and those she worked alongside. Conway herself sat down with Trump for her book at Mar-a-Lago.
Every end to a presidency leads to a sprint by the reporters who covered it to tell the definitive history in the form of a retrospective book. But the rush of work related to Trump seems like an avalanche compared to past administrations. In the past four years, there have been more than a thousand unique titles about Trump, according to an analysis shared with The New York Times by NPD BookScan in August 2020. But the most high-profile White House reporters are expected to release their own offerings in the coming year. Already, books about Trump released this week have soared to the top of bestseller lists.
The sheer saturation has forced the authors to release a steady stream of scooplets from their books in advance of publication. And though the Trump White House was known, in real time, for its leaks, the post-mortems have exposed infighting that was previously unknown.
“I know that there are still a lot of major excerpts that will come out in the future,” said a former senior administration official who participated in multiple book interviews. “The most interesting thing to me is how much the big scoops actually hold until publication.”
Eager to put his own positive spin on the books, Trump agreed to sit down with a parade of reporters at Mar-a-Lago. That included interviews with Bender, author Michael Wolff, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and Jeremy Peters, among others.
According to an adviser, Trump, who is sensitive to how history will remember him, “said that I think if you can improve the book 3, 5, 10 percent [by participating], that matters.” But the publications have, instead, further muddied his reemergence on the political scene. After months of keeping a relatively low profile, the former president has hit the trail and done news interviews with friendly outlets in which he not only continued to falsely claim the election was stolen from him, but praised the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol at his encouragement on Jan. 6.
Those who know Trump suspect that he is content to be at the center of conversation, no matter how unflattering the conversation may be, under the mantra that all press is good press.
“He thinks that, ‘Oh, they’re talking about me, me, me,’” said an adviser.
And yet, if Trump is happy with the new books about him, he hasn’t always shown it. In a statement released last week, the former president said sitting down with the authors was a “total waste of time” and insisted that “so many” of the stories were “pure fiction.”
He’s not the only one who has been displeased with the final product. Wolff’s book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” set off fireworks after it revealed that Republican National Committee chief counsel Justin Riemer said Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former campaign attorney Jenna Ellis election fraud arguments were a “joke.”
Since then, Ellis has demanded that RNC chair Ronna McDaniel resign and declared she is quitting the Republican Party for not doing enough to support Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results.
“It’s not surprising that some Republicans are too spineless to stand for the truth,” Ellis told POLITICO. “I don’t care what they think. Anyone siding with Ronna is simply outing themselves as the self-serving politicians that have continued to undermine Trump and America for years.”
People close to Trump dismissed Ellis’ proclamations as a transparent attempt to stay relevant post-election. And through a spokesperson, both the RNC and Reimer defended their work on election integrity. “I will say publicly now what I then said privately: I take issue with individuals who brought lawsuits that did not serve President Trump well and did not give him the best chance in court,” Reimer said.
Trump himself, meanwhile, released a flurry of attacks on his former Attorney General William Barr after the publication of a portion of Karl’s book in the Atlantic. In the excerpt, Barr is quoted as saying he did not believe Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud and felt it was his duty to share his views publicly.
“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
More recently, Trump publicly bristled at another excerpt from Bender’s book, in which it was reported that he and former Vice President Mike Pence got into a heated argument over the hiring of political adviser Corey Lewandowski. Bender stood by his reporting, which he said came from multiple sources.
As the excerpts and subsequent recriminations have piled up, people in Trump’s inner circle have criticized Trump’s decision to cooperate with the book authors. Some recalled Trump giving access to Wolff and veteran reporter Bob Woodward during his time as president, only to then erupt over the material that they ended up publishing.
“I understand the rationale, but it was a strategic mistake to sit down with these folks — you’re giving them credibility. It’s hard to say, ‘I sat down with them and they got it wrong.’ So they’ve created a sense of credibility that makes it harder to critique,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary turned Newsmax host.
Perhaps sensing that it was a mistake to give certain authors content, Trump has, in recent days, taken to promoting the work of MAGA allies. On Wednesday, he issued two glowing reviews about books by friends Mark Levin and Jesse Watters. The Watters one was so glowing that it led to speculation about who wrote the review, only for internet sleuths to point out the book’s own publisher actually wrote the review. Trump had ripped it straight from the promotional web page.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/15/trump-post-presidential-books-499741
I suspect that much of it is true...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=163581835&txt2find=Steele
MI6 spy Christopher Steele 'produced second dossier on Donald Trump for FBI'
The dossier is believed to be raw intelligence that makes claims of Russian meddling and sex tapes
By Robert Mendick, CHIEF REPORTER and Lucy Fisher, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR
3 May 2021 • 9:18pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/03/mi6-spy-christopher-steele-produced-second-dossier-donald-trump/
Kara Swisher @karaswisher The @Liz_Cheney retort to @Jim_Jordan is Fire
3:51 AM · Jul 15, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
The @Liz_Cheney retort to @Jim_Jordan is 🔥 pic.twitter.com/GavwIeW3IA
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) July 15, 2021
Jan Wolfe @JanNWolfe ·14h There's now a congressional investigation into the Arizona election "audit."
House Oversight has given Cyber Ninjas two weeks to turn over documents, including any communications between the firm and Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/2021-07-14.CBM%20JR%20to%20Logan-Cyber%20Ninjas%20re%20Arizona%20Election%20Audit.pdf
8:42 PM · Jul 14, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1415396228402135049
Luke Harding @lukeharding1968 Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia’s plot to put a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump into the White House – my story with
@julianborger
in Washington and
@dansabbagh
in London
11:02 AM · Jul 15, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia’s plot to put a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump into the White House – my story with @julianborger in Washington and @dansabbagh in London https://t.co/rfgD3IfAll
— Luke Harding (@lukeharding1968) July 15, 2021
Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy
Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh
Thu 15 Jul 2021 06.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.
They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.
Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.
By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.
Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.
The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.
The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.
There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.
There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.
The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.
“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.
This extract from a secret Kremlin document gives details of the Russian operation to help an impulsive and ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump to become US president
This would help bring about Russia’s favoured “theoretical political scenario”. A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.
The Kremlin summit
There is no doubt that the meeting in January 2016 took place – and that it was convened inside the Kremlin.
An official photo of the occasion shows Putin at the head of the table, seated beneath a Russian Federation flag and a two-headed golden eagle. Russia’s then prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, attended, together with the veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Also present were Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister in charge of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; Mikhail Fradkov, the then chief of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service; and Alexander Bortnikov, the boss of the FSB spy agency.Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s former director, attended too as security council secretary.
According to a press release, the discussion covered the economy and Moldova.
The document seen by the Guardian suggests the security council’s real, covert purpose was to discuss the confidential proposals drawn up by the president’s analytical service in response to US sanctions against Moscow.
The author appears to be Vladimir Symonenko, the senior official in charge of the Kremlin’s expert department – which provides Putin with analytical material and reports, some of them based on foreign intelligence.
The papers indicate that on 14 January 2016 Symonenko circulated a three-page executive summary of his team’s conclusions and recommendations.
In a signed order two days later, Putin instructed the then chief of his foreign policy directorate, Alexander Manzhosin, to convene a closed briefing of the national security council.
Its purpose was to further study the document, the order says. Manzhosin was given a deadline of five days to make arrangements.
What was said inside the second-floor Kremlin senate building room is unknown. But the president and his intelligence officials appear to have signed off on a multi-agency plan to interfere in US democracy, framed in terms of justified self-defence.
Various measures are cited that the Kremlin might adopt in response to what it sees as hostile acts from Washington. The paper lays out several American weaknesses. These include a “deepening political gulf between left and right”, the US’s “media-information” space, and an anti-establishment mood under President Barack Obama.
The ‘special part’ of a secret Kremlin document setting out measures to cause turmoil and division in America
The paper does not name Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival. It does suggest employing media resources to undermine leading US political figures.
There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.
After the meeting, according to a separate leaked document, Putin issued a decree setting up a new and secret interdepartmental commission. Its urgent task was to realise the goals set out in the “special part” of document No 32-04 \ vd.
Members of the new working body were stated to include Shoigu, Fradkov and Bortnikov. Shoigu was named commission chair. The decree – ukaz in Russian – said the group should take practical steps against the US as soon as possible. These were justified on national security grounds and in accordance with a 2010 federal law, 390-FZ, which allows the council to formulate state policy on security matters.
According to the document, each spy agency was given a role. The defence minister was instructed to coordinate the work of subdivisions and services. Shoigu was also responsible for collecting and systematising necessary information and for “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object” – a command, it seems, to hack sensitive American cyber-targets identified by the SVR.
The SVR was told to gather additional information to support the commission’s activities. The FSB was assigned counter-intelligence. Putin approved the apparent document, dated 22 January 2016, which his chancellery stamped.
The measures were effective immediately on Putin’s signature, the decree says. The spy chiefs were given just over a week to come back with concrete ideas, to be submitted by 1 February.
Written in bureaucratic language, the papers appear to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the usually hidden world of Russian government decision-making.
Putin has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in western democracy. The documents seem to contradict this claim. They suggest the president, his spy officers and senior ministers were all intimately involved in one of the most important and audacious espionage operations of the 21st century: a plot to help put the “mentally unstable” Trump in the White House.
The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016.
A matter of weeks after the security council meeting, GRU hackers raided the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and subsequently released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign.
The report seen by the Guardian features details redolent of Russian intelligence work, diplomatic sources say. The thumbnail sketch of Trump’s personality is characteristic of Kremlin spy agency analysis, which places great emphasis on building up a profile of individuals using both real and cod psychology.
Moscow would gain most from a Republican victory, the paper states. This could lead to a “social explosion” that would in turn weaken the US president, it says. There were international benefits from a Trump win, it stresses. Putin would be able in clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russia bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf, it says.
Other parts of the multi-page report deal with non-Trump themes. It says sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea have contributed to domestic tensions. The Kremlin should seek alternative ways of attracting liquidity into the Russian economy, it concludes.
The document recommends the reorientation of trade and hydrocarbon exports towards China. Moscow’s focus should be to influence the US and its satellite countries, it says, so they drop sanctions altogether or soften them.
‘Spell-binding’ documents
Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies and author of The Red Web, said the leaked material “reflects reality”. “It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the security council,” he said. “Decisions are always made like that, with advisers providing information to the president and a chain of command.”
He added: “The Kremlin micromanages most of these operations. Putin has made it clear to his spies since at least 2015 that nothing can be done independently from him. There is no room for independent action.” Putin decided to release stolen DNC emails following a security council meeting in April 2016, Soldatov said, citing his own sources.
Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador in Moscow and an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, described the documents as “spell-binding”. “They reflect the sort of discussion and recommendations you would expect. There is a complete misunderstanding of the US and China. They are written for a person [Putin] who can’t believe he got anything wrong.”
Wood added: “There is no sense Russia might have made a mistake by invading Ukraine. The report is fully in line with the sort of thing I would expect in 2016, and even more so now. There is a good deal of paranoia. They believe the US is responsible for everything. This view is deeply dug into the soul of Russia’s leaders.”
Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house
Jan Wolfe @JanNWolfe ·14h There's now a congressional investigation into the Arizona election "audit."
House Oversight has given Cyber Ninjas two weeks to turn over documents, including any communications between the firm and Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/2021-07-14.CBM%20JR%20to%20Logan-Cyber%20Ninjas%20re%20Arizona%20Election%20Audit.pdf
8:42 PM · Jul 14, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1415396228402135049
Afghanistan’s neighbors wary as US seeks nearby staging area
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
today
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-afghanistan-0ec0088765261d41b25125de3f69ae8d
American diplomats are escalating a charm offensive with Central Asian leaders this week as they work to secure a close-by spot to respond to any resurgence of outside militants in Afghanistan after the U.S. military withdraws.
But even as high-level U.S. diplomats head to the region, they’re meeting with more doubts from Afghanistan’s neighbors about any such security partnering with the United States. That stands in contrast to 2001, when Central Asian countries made available their territory for U.S. bases, troops and other access as America hit back for the 9/11 attacks plotted by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
There’s distrust of the U.S. as a reliable long-term partner, after an only partly successful war in Afghanistan and after years of widely fluctuating U.S. engagement regionally and globally, former American diplomats say. There’s Russia, blasting out this week that a permanent U.S. military base in its Central Asia sphere of influence would be “unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, the Taliban leadership, more internationally savvy than it had been in 2001, has been visiting regional capitals and Moscow this summer in a diplomatic push of its own, offering broad pledges that it will pursue regional security, peace and trade whatever comes of its fight with the Kabul government.
“I mean, I personally can see the value of an American base in Central Asia, but I’m not sure the Central Asian states see such value” currently, said John Herbst, who as U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan helped arrange military access in Central Asia in 2001.
“We’ve taken a hit through our failures in Afghanistan” in credibility, Herbst said, after the U.S. neutralized al-Qaida in Afghanistan but struggled in fighting against the fundamentalist Taliban and in trying to strengthen a Kabul-based state. “Is that a mortal hit? Probably not. But it’s still a very powerful factor.”
The former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which neighbor Afghanistan, watched years of fervent democracy-building calls abroad by the United States, then watched President Barack Obama disengage to an extent, and then President Donald Trump almost entirely, says Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a former U.S. Agency for International Development official in Central Asia, now a researcher on the region at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I think it made the U.S. seem sort of aimless,” Murtazashvili said. “The U.S. hasn’t had a very strong strategy, or a strong presence, in Central Asia for a long time.”
But relations with Central Asia are now a security issue for the Biden administration as it seeks to make sure the fundamentalist Taliban doesn’t again allow foreign Islamist extremists to use Afghanistan as a base to mount attacks on the United States or other outside targets.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Wednesday that the Central Asian nations “will make sovereign decisions about their level of the cooperation with the United States” after the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“It’s not only in our interests and, in fact, it is much more and certainly in the immediate interests of Afghanistan’s neighbors” that Afghanistan be stable and secure, Price said.
The administration has given few details of what kind of security access it is seeking in the region, or from which countries. While the U.S. can manage strike and counterterror capability for Afghanistan from Gulf nations or from U.S. aircraft carriers, closer is much better. That’s especially true for intelligence operations to track developments in Afghanistan.
Any such agreement would likely be discreet.
The U.S. also reportedly looked at neighboring countries for the temporary relocation of Afghan translators and other U.S. employees.
Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby confirmed this week that the United States still was actively courting countries in Central Asia. “We are talking about and discussing with countries in the region about the possibilities of being able to use facilities and infrastructure” closer to Afghanistan, he said.
To that end, the Biden administration invited the foreign ministers of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to Washington earlier this month, shining the bright light of U.S. diplomacy on them.
And Biden’s homeland security adviser, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, joined by U.S.-Afghanistan special representative Zalmay Khalilzad, headed with other Americans to a conference opening Thursday in Uzbekistan’s capital drawing foreign ministers and presidents of almost all the regional countries and powers.
All are countries urgently and directly affected by whether Afghanistan again becomes a refuge for extremism upon the U.S. withdrawal.
For landlocked Uzbekistan, hopes of rapidly reaching outside markets hinge on completing a railroad to Pakistan’s seaports — through Afghanistan.
“For us, it is vitally important,” Uzbekistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Javlon Vakhabov, said. Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government in Kabul has promised its support for the project, and probably more importantly, so have Taliban leaders, in two visits to Uzbekistan.
“We’ve been reassured that these people would not attack or ... harm” the project, Vakhabov said.
Uzbek law meant to keep the former Soviet republic from aligning with any bloc now prohibits the country from hosting any foreign base or counterterror effort, he said, while stressing his country’s positive feelings for the United States.
The region waits now to see if the Taliban makes good on its pledge to be a good neighbor, despite what may happen among Afghanistan’s rival forces. If not, cooperation with U.S. security aims will likely increase, former diplomats said.
“All the countries in the region, they have to worry about Taliban intentions. If the Taliban behaves, than great” for them, Herbst, the former U.S. ambassador, said. “If the Taliban doesn’t behave, they need some help — and help from us.”
___
AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-afghanistan-0ec0088765261d41b25125de3f69ae8d
Two drug companies fined £260m for swindling NHS over 'life-saving medicines'
For a decade, the firms overcharged the NHS for steroid tablets, costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.
By Ed Clowes, Business reporter
Thursday 15 July 2021 09:37, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/two-drug-companies-fined-260m-for-swindling-nhs-over-life-saving-medicines-12356252
Two pharmaceutical companies have been fined more than £260m by the UK’s competition watchdog after the pair colluded to overcharge the NHS for almost a decade.
Drugmakers Auden McKenzie and Accord UK, formerly called Actavis UK, charged the NHS excessively high prices for hydrocortisone tablets, costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds, according to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Hydrocortisone is used to treat inflammation and irritation, often in people whose bodies do not produce enough cortisol.
The two companies hiked the price of a single pack of tablets from 70p in 2008, to £88 in 2016, increasing the cost of the drug by more than 10,000%.
“These were egregious breaches of the law that artificially inflated the costs facing the NHS, reducing the money available for patient care,” the CMA said.
The regulator added that these were “some of the most serious abuses we have uncovered in recent years”, giving the NHS “no choice but to pay huge sums of taxpayers' money for life-saving medicines”.
Auden McKenzie paid off its rivals in a bid to discourage them from bringing out their own versions of the drug, allowing the company to retain a monopoly on production, the CMA said.
“To protect its position as the sole provider of the tablets, and enable it to continue to increase prices, Auden McKenzie also paid off would-be competitors AMCo (now known as Advanz Pharma) and Waymade to stay out of the market,” the watchdog said.
After Auden McKenzie stopped selling the drug, investigators at the CMA found that Actavis UK continued to pay off AMCo after taking over the sale of the medicine in 2015.
https://news.sky.com/story/two-drug-companies-fined-260m-for-swindling-nhs-over-life-saving-medicines-12356252
Yes, Donald Trump's final days in office were even worse than we thought
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 3:25 PM ET, Tue July 13, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/donald-trump-books-last-days-2020/index.html
(CNN)Donald Trump's final days as president were defined by near-total chaos as House Democrats moved to impeach him for his action (and inaction) during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol even as the soon-to-be-former president sought to use the power of his office to settle scores and reward loyalists.
And yet, even amid those last, wild days, there was a sense that for as bad as everything we could see was, there was even worse stuff going on behind closed doors that wouldn't be made public until Trump left office, and the true reportorial digging began.
Which brings me to Tuesday, when two highly anticipated Trump books -- Michael Bender's "Frankly We Did Win This Election," and Michael Wolff's "Landslide" -- went on sale, with a third book -- " I Alone Can Fix It" by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker -- scheduled to be released in seven days' time.
All three books focus on Trump's last year in office. And all three present what can only be described as a terrifying picture of a president consumed by personal hatred and unwilling to even consider the limits his predecessors had placed on themselves in office.
The stories that have already emerged paint a scary picture. Trump calling for the execution of whoever leaked that he had been taken to the White House bunker while Black Lives Matter protesters were marching through the streets of Washington in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. His volcanic reaction when Arizona was called for Joe Biden on election night. Trump raging at then-Attorney General Bill Barr about (nonexistent) voter fraud. A shouting match between Trump and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley over the appropriate response to the BLM protests engulfing the country in the summer of 2020.
There are more stories that have emerged from these books. And there will be even more once readers -- and reporters -- get their hands on the hard copies and are able to do their own digging into Trump's final days.
But these stories also present a problem: Each one is, yes, appalling. But the nature of our news cycle is such that even as I was writing this piece, I was struggling to remember the individual stories that had already come out of the books.
The stories that come out of these books -- released to gin up excitement and, more importantly, sales in advance of their releases -- tend to be fleeting, shining bright for a brief moment when the political universe is all staring at them but quickly disappearing into the vastness of our broader news consumption.
That fact is why it's important not to get too caught up in any one revelation that has or will emerge from these books and instead take a step back and see the broader reality being painted here.
And that reality is this:
* Faced with a once-in-a-century public health crisis, Donald Trump not only drastically mishandled some of the basics (rapid testing for Covid-19, mask-wearing) but also actively worked to undermine public confidence in the very doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts who were working to keep Americans safe.
* Unable to accept that he had lost the election, Trump sought to use the official powers of the government -- including the Justice Department -- to try to find non-existent evidence of fraud. He created an environment in which a large chunk of Americans believed this Big Lie about the election and then not only incited the January 6 crowd but also stood by for hours as they ransacked the Capitol.
* Trump, who repeatedly told crowds during the campaign that he had done more for Black people than any president since Abraham Lincoln, failed to grasp either the gravity or the goals of the Black Lives Matter protests. He saw the racial justice protests as nothing more than an uprising against HIM -- and tried to force the military to deploy to states where the marches were most prevalent.
This is, in sum, a man deeply unfit for the presidency. (That is not a partisan statement. It is a statement of fact based on the clear portrait we have of how Trump behaved while in the most powerful office in the country.) A man who, by his inability to understand the sanctity of the office he held, threatened to destroy that sanctity for those who would follow him into the White House. And a man who was, without any question, an active danger for every single American -- whether they supported or opposed him.
THAT needs to be the takeaway from these books. THAT is the forest through the trees. And THAT is the truth that voters needs to hear if and when Trump tries to reclaim the presidency in 2024.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/donald-trump-books-last-days-2020/index.html
Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power
By Reis Thebault
July 14, 2021|Updated today at 10:48 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joint-chiefs-chairman-feared-potential-reichstag-moment-aimed-at-keeping-trump-in-power/2021/07/14/a326f5fe-e4ec-11eb-a41e-c8442c213fa8_story.html
In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.
As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”
Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”
A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.
Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.
The episodes in the book are based on interviews with more than 140 people, including senior Trump administration officials, friends and advisers, Leonnig and Rucker write in an author’s note. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, and the scenes reported were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and multiple other sources whenever possible.
Milley — who was widely criticized last year for appearing alongside Trump in Lafayette Square after protesters were forcibly cleared from the area — had pledged to use his office to ensure a free and fair election with no military involvement. But he became increasingly concerned in the days following the November contest, making multiple references to the onset of 20th-century fascism.
After attending a Nov. 10 security briefing about the “Million MAGA March,” a pro-Trump rally protesting the election, Milley said he feared an American equivalent of “brownshirts in the streets,” alluding to the paramilitary forces that protected Nazi rallies and enabled Hitler’s ascent.
Late that same evening, according to the book, an old friend called Milley to express concerns that those close to Trump were attempting to “overturn the government.”
“You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff,” the friend told Milley, according to an account relayed to his aides. Milley was shaken, Leonnig and Rucker write, and he called former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether a coup was actually imminent.
“What the f--- am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.
The conversations put Milley on edge, and he began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.
If someone wanted to seize control, Milley thought, they would need to gain sway over the FBI, the CIA and the Defense Department, where Trump had already installed staunch allies. “They may try, but they’re not going to f---ing succeed,” he told some of his closest deputies, the book says.
In the weeks that followed, Milley played reassuring soothsayer to a string of concerned members of Congress and administration officials who shared his worries about Trump attempting to use the military to stay in office.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he told them, according to the book. “We’re going to have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to land this plane safely. This is America. It’s strong. The institutions are bending, but it won’t break.”
In December, with rumors circulating that the president was preparing to fire then-CIA Director Gina Haspel and replace her with Trump loyalist Kash Patel, Milley sought to intervene, the book says. He confronted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the annual Army-Navy football game, which Trump and other high-profile guests attended.
“What the hell is going on here?” Milley asked Meadows, according to the book’s account. “What are you guys doing?”
When Meadows responded, “Don’t worry about it,” Milley shot him a warning: “Just be careful.”
After the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Milley to ask for his guarantee that Trump would not be able to launch a nuclear strike and start a war.
“This guy’s crazy,” Pelosi said of Trump in what the book reported was mostly a one-way phone call. “He’s dangerous. He’s a maniac.”
Once again, Milley sought to reassure: “Ma’am, I guarantee you that we have checks and balances in the system,” he told Pelosi.
Less than a week later, as military and law enforcement leaders planned for President Biden’s inauguration, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol.
“Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power,” he told them. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”
At Biden’s swearing-in on Jan. 20, Milley was seated behind former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, who asked the general how he was feeling.
“No one has a bigger smile today than I do,” Milley replied. “You can’t see it under my mask, but I do.”
By Reis Thebault
Reis Thebault is a reporter covering national and breaking news. He has worked on the local desks of the Boston Globe and the Columbus Dispatch. He joined The Washington Post in June 2018. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joint-chiefs-chairman-feared-potential-reichstag-moment-aimed-at-keeping-trump-in-power/2021/07/14/a326f5fe-e4ec-11eb-a41e-c8442c213fa8_story.html
Biden administration launching operation to help relocate Afghans who helped United States
By Jennifer Hansler, CNN
Updated 1730 GMT (0130 HKT) July 14, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/14/politics/afghanistan-operation-relocation/index.html
(CNN)The Biden administration is launching "Operation Allies Refuge," an effort to relocate thousands of Afghan interpreters and translators who worked for the United States throughout its nearly two-decade military campaign in Afghanistan and now fear for their safety.
Flights for Afghan special immigrant visa (SIV) applicants "who are already in the pipeline will begin in the last week of July," according to a senior administration official.
"At President Biden's direction, the United States is launching Operation Allies Refuge to support relocation flights for interested and eligible Afghan nationals and their families who have supported the United States and our partners in Afghanistan and are in the SIV application pipeline," the official said.
The administration said it would not have additional details about the timing or destination of the flights for operational security. News of the operation was first reported by Reuters.
Amb. Tracey Jacobson, who served as US ambassador to Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kosovo, "is leading the State Department Coordination Unit that will deliver on the President's commitment under Operation Allies Refuge," the senior administration official said, noting the task force will include representatives from the Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security.
Russ Travers, a senior adviser at the National Security Council, will coordinate the interagency policy process on the operation.
The administration has faced criticism from bipartisan lawmakers and advocates for not doing enough to protect the Afghans who helped the US and now fear their lives are in danger as the Taliban gains ground and the US nears full withdrawal from Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden announced last week that the military drawdown from Afghanistan would be finished by the end of August, and US Central Command said Tuesday the US had completed "more than 95% of the entire withdrawal process."
In his remarks, the President vowed "to make sure that we take on the Afghan nationals who work side-by-side with US forces, including interpreters and translators."
"Our message to those women and men is clear: There is a home for you in the United States if you so choose, and we will stand with you just as you stood with us," he said.
The State Department has said that there are 18,000 SIV applicants in the pipeline, and the administration had previously suggested it would focus on the 9,000 in the later stages of the application process.
'Offer to relocate'
"We have identified a group of SIV applicants -- that is to say, individuals who were already somewhere in that SIV processing chain -- whom at the right time before the military withdrawal is complete later this year, relocate or at least offer to relocate to a third country as they go through their SIV application processing. We have been in conversations, diplomatic discussions with a number of countries around the world," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said Monday.
As CNN reported in earlier this month, the US is in discussions with Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to take in some of the Afghans who worked alongside US troops and diplomats while their visa applications are processed.
Homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall is leading a high-level delegation to Uzbekistan this week, the NSC announced Wednesday, where she will join with US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad for discussions with leaders of Afghanistan and regional countries on "how to promote peace, security, and development in Afghanistan, and advance shared regional security interests, including counterterrorism cooperation."
The US is also looking at the possibility of relocating the applicants to US territories or military installations in other countries, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing last week.
Advocates and lawmakers have pressed the administration for more concrete details about their plans to save the Afghans and their families amid what the former top US military commander in Afghanistan said was a concerning pace of Taliban gains on ground.
One organization that works to help Afghan translators and their families settle in the US is taking matters into its own hands, raising over $1 million to purchase airfare for the 1,250 Afghans who have already received visas and are part of the group that Biden said last week had not yet flown to the US.
James Miervaldis, the chairman of "No One Left Behind," explained to CNN that the details are still being figured out, but flights could begin as soon as next week.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to accurately reflect the name of "Operation Allies Refuge"
CNN's John Harwood, Kylie Atwood, Nicole Gaouette and Oren Liebermann contributed to this report.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/14/politics/afghanistan-operation-relocation/index.html
Meet the new tea party, same as the old tea party
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist
July 14, 2021|Updated today at 11:37 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/14/new-tea-party-infrastructure-irs/
Has a new version of the tea party unleashed itself on our politics?
In recent weeks, as Republicans and right-wing personalities have ramped up the vaccine derangement, the attacks on critical race theory and the whitewashing of the insurrection, it’s become clear that we’re witnessing a virulent new version of the movement that arose amid the last Democratic presidency.
Both mobilized the grass roots with crackpot conspiracy theories, racial dog whistles and apocalyptic depictions of the impending liberal destruction of the American life.
But still another similarity deserves more attention. Just as before, the new tea partyism is functioning as a kind of front-line energizing force that could help enable a series of GOP donor-class and plutocratic interests to grind the current progressive economic moment to a halt.
Senate Democrats just announced a deal on a $3.5 trillion spending target for “human infrastructure” in the reconciliation bill. Though details are scarce and there’s a long way to go, passage is now more plausible.
With a $579 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill and $2 trillion in spending from the covid-19 relief package, we could be looking at expenditures in the multiple trillions. The possibilities for progressive economic transformation appear vast.
But behind all the right-wing culture-warring you can see a right-wing economic countermobilization against this progressive momentum that looks a lot like the one arrayed behind the tea party in 2010.
Case in point: Conservative groups are now organizing against an effort to beef up IRS enforcement to go after tax avoidance, largely by the wealthy and corporations. This is a key progressive provision to help fund the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
This effort to prevent the IRS from cracking down on wealthy tax cheats is being sold in language that echoes the lurid lunacy of the Obama years.
Back then, right-wing media constantly hyped “scandals” involving the IRS. This time, opponents are referencing some of those same “scandals” and painting a similarly dire picture of jackbooted IRS thugs invading the finances of ordinary Americans.
And in almost comically perfect symmetry, here’s Grover Norquist — who famously wanted to drown government in the bathtub — vowing to make this a huge vulnerability in the midterms, while employing the same old tea party golden oldies:
“If you put your fingerprints on ‘audit more,’ everyone who gets audited, fairly or unfairly, is going to think, ‘You did this to me.’ Your fingerprints are on the murder weapon.”
Once again, “antitax activism” functions as a smokescreen for other interests. To be fair, this time the interests are a bit scrambled: Business groups do want an infrastructure bill, and may tolerate this as a pay-for.
But the core idea behind this new proposal is that the budgetary underfunding of IRS enforcement has enabled corporations and the wealthy to get away with years and years of tax avoidance, because they have the resources to exploit that underenforcement.
That’s why we’ve seen a sharp drop in auditing of corporations and the rich. Blocking this proposal would help preserve this status quo.
On another front, Punchbowl News reports that GOP donors are lining up in the expectation of a House GOP takeover. McCarthy just announced a monster new fundraising total for House GOP candidates.
To be fair, much of this appears fueled by small donors. But as Punchbowl flatly declares, “GOP donors are giving to McCarthy like he could be speaker in 2023.” The GOP donor class clearly sees the possibility of a restoration here, or at least a check on the progressive agenda.
McCarthy has carefully avoided going too far in alienating hard rightists in his caucus. Members such as Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) face little censure for vaccine derangement, depicting the opposition as existential threats and downplaying the insurrection.
All this — along with attacks on critical race theory — plainly serves to energize the base in service of that restoration sought by GOP donors and other right-wing economic interests to block the progressive advance.
Meanwhile, the advancing of the reconciliation measure will usher in a huge debate about President Biden’s proposed progressive tax changes for the bill. This may include raising corporate tax rates to at least 25 percent, a minimum tax on corporations that pay almost nothing, and efforts to crack down on multinationals sheltering profits abroad.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) isn’t merely denouncing these ideas as a “red line” that Republicans cannot cross. He’s also insisting the ideas underlying them are “socialist.” And Republicans are telegraphing a 2022 campaign attacking House Democrats for an alleged “socialist agenda.”
For the old tea party, the lurid claims of impending destruction of the American way of life bled effortlessly into charges of socialism about Barack Obama’s economic policies — in that case, a government expansion of health insurance that conservatives once championed. In practice, the energized base meant a House GOP takeover — and a check on progressivism that led to years of grueling austerity.
The same is happening again. The charges of “Marxism” and “socialism” are being hurled at both the right’s new cultural bugaboos and at Democratic economic policies. The same blend of pathological fearmongering could again energize the base in a way that could enable right-wing economic interests to stage a check on economic progress.
Meet the new tea party, same as the old tea party.
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/14/new-tea-party-infrastructure-irs/
I make it a point never to argue with people for whose opinion I have no respect.
— Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794, English historian
Arguing and Dispute
https://best-quotations.com/catquotes.php?categ=1417
Adam Schiff @RepAdamSchiff I don’t know about you, but I’m pro-vaccines and anti-COVID, anti-flu, anti-HPV ... well, really anti-diseases killing people.
How on earth is that partisan opinion now?
Brett Kelman
@BrettKelman
SCOOP: Tennessee Department of Health halts all vaccine outreach to kids – not just for COVID-19, but all diseases – amid pressure from GOP. Staff ordered to remove the agency logo from any documents providing vaccine info to the public, per internal dox.
Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to minors — not just for COVID-19
BRETT KELMAN | Nashville Tennessean
21 hours ago
https://eu.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/
4:53 PM · Jul 14, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
I don’t know about you, but I’m pro-vaccines and anti-COVID, anti-flu, anti-HPV ... well, really anti-diseases killing people.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) July 14, 2021
How on earth is that partisan opinion now? https://t.co/L2uFkBG3qh
Tucker Carlson’s First-Grade Teacher Calls Bullshit on His ‘Crazy’ Origin Story
SEE ME AFTER CLASS
Jamie Ross
News Correspondent
Published Jul. 14, 2021 8:20AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlsons-first-grade-teacher-calls-bs-on-his-crazy-origin-story?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition
Tucker Carlson has been told off by his first-grade teacher for telling tales. In one of his books, the Fox News host blamed his ex-teacher—who he named as Mrs. Raymond—for his long-running hatred of liberals, writing that she was “a parody of earth-mother liberalism” who “wore long Indian-print skirts” and was so bad at teaching that his father was forced to hire a private tutor for him. At one point, Carlson accused his teacher of sobbing at her desk and wailing: “The world is so unfair! You don’t know that yet. But you’ll find out!”
Well, when contacted by The Washington Post, Mrs. Marianna Raymond was pretty shocked by Carlson’s recollections. “Oh my God,” the now 77-year-old said. “That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard.” She denied crying at her desk, wearing Indian skirts, or ever sharing her politics in class—and said the young Carlson was “very precious and very, very polite and sweet.” Raymond did confirm that Carlson’s father hired a tutor for him—but said that she was that tutor.
Read it at The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tucker-carlson/2021/07/13/398fa720-dd9f-11eb-a501-0e69b5d012e5_story.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlsons-first-grade-teacher-calls-bs-on-his-crazy-origin-story?via=newsletter&source=CSAMedition
Reuters @Reuters More than 150 companies urge U.S. Congress to pass voting rights act
http://reut.rs/2UNsvqU
3:10 PM · Jul 14, 2021·True Anthem
THREAD
More than 150 companies urge U.S. Congress to pass voting rights act https://t.co/sdHb4Ux6VJ pic.twitter.com/V2A5VnkOne
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 14, 2021
There’s a Word for What Trumpism Is Becoming
The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy.
By David Frum
JULY 13, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/theres-word-what-trumpism-becoming/619418/
About the author: David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
“I became worse.” That’s how double impeachment changed him, Donald Trump told a conservative audience in Dallas last weekend, without a trace of a smile. This was not Trump the insult comic talking. This was the deepest Trump self. And this one time, he told the truth.
Something has changed for Trump and his movement since January 2021. You can measure the difference by looking back at the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Trump made three statements about those events over four days. He was visibly reluctant to speak negatively of the far-right groups. He praised “fine people on both sides” and spread the blame for “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.”
Trump’s evasions triggered a national uproar. As Joe Biden complained in an essay for The Atlantic at the time:
Today we have an American president who has publicly proclaimed a moral equivalency between neo-Nazis and Klansmen and those who would oppose their venom and hate.
But if Trump refused to single out the far-rightists for criticism, he also refrained from praising them. Whatever he felt in his heart, he was constrained by certain political and practical realities. His non-Twitter actions as president were filtered through bureaucracies. He had to work with Republican congressional allies who worried about losing seats in Congress in the next election. He himself was still basking in the illusion of his supposedly huge victory in 2016, and hoping for a repeat in 2020. Outright endorsement of lethal extremism? That was too much for Trump in 2017. But now look where we are.
Shadi Hamid: Americans are losing sight of what fascism means
In the first days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump supporters distanced themselves from its excesses. The attack had nothing to do with Trump, they argued. He had urged only a peaceful demonstration. If anybody did any harm, that person was a concealed agent of antifa. But in the months since, the mood has shifted. Once repudiated, the attacks are now accepted, condoned, and even endorsed.
In the past few days, leading pro-Trump figures and even non-Trump conservative figures have endorsed a startling Twitter thread by a previously boutique podcaster, Darryl Cooper. Tucker Carlson read the thread aloud on his show.
The thread argued that the January 6 protesters were right to believe that they had been cheated out of power they deserved. They were right to believe that the government and the law were conspiring against them. They were right to believe that their opponents were capable of anything, even assassinating Trump. The implication: They themselves were equally entitled to go just as far. It’s long, but I’ll quote two key passages.
* The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media. 34/x
* They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov't is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might've kept him alive. /end
The tweet thread began by claiming that Donald Trump himself shared these beliefs. You might wonder how the podcaster would know. The answer arrived on Sunday morning, when Trump phoned into Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show to deliver his most full-throated endorsement yet of the January 6 attack on Congress.
The ex-president praised Ashli Babbitt, the woman slain as she attempted to crash through the door that protected members of Congress from the mob that had invaded the Capitol: “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman.” He praised the insurrectionist throng: “great people.” He denounced their arrest and jailing as unjust. And he implied that Babbitt had been shot by the personal-security detail of a leading member of Congress. “I’ve heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official. A Democrat. It’s gonna come out.”
The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy. Before the 2020 election, about 60 percent of Democrats and Republicans expected the election to be fair. Since Trump began circulating his ever more radical complaints, Republican confidence in the election has tumbled by half, to barely more than 30 percent, according to polling supported by the Democracy Fund.
The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.
Is there a precedent? Not in recent years. Since the era of Redemption after Reconstruction, anti-government violence in the United States has been the work of marginal sects and individual extremists. American Islamic State supporters were never going to seize the state, and neither were the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan killers of the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists, the German American Bund, nor the Communist Party USA.
But the post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them. Once it might have been hoped that young Republicans with a future would somehow distance themselves from the violent lawlessness of the post-presidential Trump movement. But one by one, they are betting the other way. You might understand why those tainted by the January 6 attacks, such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, would find excuses for them. They have butts to cover. But Hawley is being outdone by other young politicians who weren’t in office and seemed to have every opportunity to build post-Trump identities—including even former Trump critics like the Ohio Senate aspirant J. D. Vance. Why do people sign up with the putschists after the putsch has failed? They’re betting that the failed putsch is not the past—it’s the future.
What shall we call this future? Through the Trump years, it seemed sensible to eschew comparisons to the worst passages of history. I repeated over and over again a warning against too-easy use of the F-word, fascism: “There are a lot of stops on the train line to bad before you get to Hitler Station.”
Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.
Zeynep Tufekci: America’s next authoritarian will be much more competent
If a big-enough movement agrees with Trump that Babbitt was “wonderful”—if they repeat that the crowd of would-be Nancy Pelosi kidnappers and Mike Pence lynchers was “great”—then we are leaving behind the American system of democratic political competition for a new landscape in which power is determined by the gun.
That’s a landscape for which a lot of pro-Trump writers and thinkers seem to yearn.
You are living in territory controlled by enemy tribes. You, and all like you, must assume the innocence of anyone remotely like yourself who is charged in any confrontation with those tribes and with their authorities—until proven otherwise beyond a shadow of your doubt. Take his side. In other words, you must shield others like yourself by practicing and urging “jury nullification.”
Those words are not taken from The Turner Diaries or some other Aryan Nation tract. They were published by a leading pro-Trump site, the same site where Trump’s former in-house intellectual Michael Anton publishes. They were written by Angelo Codevilla, who wrote the books and articles that defined so much of the Trump creed in 2016. (Codevilla’s 2016 book, The Ruling Class, was introduced by Rush Limbaugh and heavily promoted on Limbaugh’s radio program.)
We are so accustomed to using the word fascist as an epithet that it feels awkward to adjust it for political analysis. We understand that there were and are many varieties of socialism. We forget that there were varieties of fascism as well, and not just those defeated in World War II. Peronism, in Argentina, offers a lot of insights into post-presidential Trumpism.
Juan Perón, a bungling and vacillating leader, attracted followers with a jumble of often conflicting and contradictory ideas. He had the good luck to take power in a major food-producing nation at a time when the world was hungry—and imagined that the brief flash of easy prosperity that followed was his own doing. The only thing he knew for certain was the target of his hatred: anybody who got in his way, anybody who questioned him, anybody who thought for himself or herself. An expatriate Argentine who grew up under Perón’s rule remembered the graffiti on the walls, the Twitter of its day: Build the Fatherland. Kill a student. As V. S. Naipaul astutely observed, “Even when the money ran out, Peronism could offer hate as hope.”
After Perón lost power, Peronism became a myth of a lost golden age—a fantasy of restoration and redemption—and always a rejection of the frustrations of normal politics, of the tedium of legality. Who needed policies when the solution to every problem was a magic name? Politicians who hoped for the old leader’s blessing trudged to his place of exile, were photographed with him, and then sabotaged by him. The only plan he followed was somehow to force himself again upon his country, one way or another.
It was pathetic and terrifying, a national catastrophe that produced a long-running international musical.
In the United States, the forces of legality still mobilize more strength than their Trumpist adversaries. But those who uphold the American constitutional order need to understand what they are facing. Trump incited his followers to try to thwart an election result, and to kill or threaten Trump’s own vice president if he would not or could not deliver on Trump’s crazy scheme to keep power.
We’re past the point of pretending it was antifa that did January 6, past the point of pretending that Trump didn’t want what he fomented and what he got. In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.
*" I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918."
Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.
Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.
David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/theres-word-what-trumpism-becoming/619418/
Spiro Agnew’s Ghost @SpiroAgnewGhost ·10h NEW: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday rejected an emergency request to block Biden administration's Covid-19 mask requirement for public travel.
2:48 AM · Jul 14, 2021 from Los Angeles, CA·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
NEW: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Tuesday rejected an emergency request to block Biden administration's Covid-19 mask requirement for public travel.
— Spiro’s Ghost (@AntiToxicPeople) July 14, 2021
Taliban ‘executes 22 unarmed Afghan commandos’ after they surrendered as Biden’s pullout sparks criticism
Shweta Sharma 2 hrs ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/taliban-e2-80-98executes-22-unarmed-afghan-commandos-e2-80-99-after-they-surrendered-as-biden-e2-80-99s-pullout-sparks-criticism/ar-AAM8han?ocid=uxbndlbing
In a shocking incident purportedly captured on camera, Taliban fighters executed 22 surrendering members of Afghan special forces who had run out of ammunition, according to reports.
The video obtained by CNN shows Afghan soldiers emerging from a building in a public square with their arms in the air as some men wielding guns screamed, “surrender, commandos, surrender.” Soon, gunfire shots rang out as cries of "Allahu Akhbar" are heard.
Nearly two dozen commandos were allegedly executed in a town market of Dawlat Abad in Faryab province on 16 June, reports said.
The Taliban has denied carrying out the execution to CNN, saying the videos are fake and they still have the captured soldiers from Faryab province. They called it propaganda of government so that people do not surrender.
However, the Red Cross and the Afghan Ministry of Defense have confirmed the 22 deaths. The defence ministry denied that the members were in detention and said they have been killed.
An eyewitness told the news outlet that the commandos had run out of ammunition and received no air support or reinforcement after fierce fighting of about two hours with the Taliban.
VIDEO
Warning: the video could be disturbing to some
The video emerges even as the Taliban continue to make significant territorial gains in Afghanistan with at least 212 districts in their control, according to an assessment by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Long War. The Afghan government controls 70 districts while 116 remain contested.
Even as Joe Biden set 11 September as the deadline for the US’s exit from the country, a vast majority of troops have already left.
The viral video sparked concerns from human rights groups and intensified criticism of Joe Biden’s government. Questions are being raised by members of opposition in the US over the rapid pullout of troops from conflict-ridden Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war.
"This deeply disturbing footage is horrific and gives insight into the increasingly desperate situation enveloping in Afghanistan. What we are witnessing is the cold-blooded murder of surrendering soldiers -- a war crime," Amnesty International UK said.
Republicans are aiming at Mr Biden for exit of troops from Afghanistan amid clashes between Taliban and Afghanistan security forces and fears of reemergence of al Qaeda and ISIS in the country.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday described Mr Biden’s troops' withdrawal as a “reckless rush for the exits” and “a global embarrassment.”
"President Biden and his team are desperate to duck hard questions about Afghanistan,” Mr McConnell said. “But the American people deserve answers. They deserve to understand the risks of this trajectory and how the commander in chief plans to keep us safe against a terrorist enemy that his own senior advisers admit will be allowed to regroup thanks to his actions.”
Republican representative from Illinois Adam Kinzinger, also a US Air Force veteran who took missions in Afghanistan, called the video “horrible-yet.”
"This is horrible-yet it’s the reality of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Removing the peacekeepers and leaving the Afghan people without support is a grave mistake, Mr President," he said in a tweet.
Army General Austin "Scott" Miller, who has relinquished his post as the top US commander in Afghanistan, previously said, "civil war is certainly a path that can be visualised if it continues on the trajectory it’s on."
Mr Biden also acknowledged last week that a continued presence of military in Afghanistan would not alter the future of the country but said the Afghan people must decide their own fate.
But the US’s departure has forced Kabul to seek help from external partners such as Russia, and China to carry out anti-terrorism operations in the region.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/taliban-e2-80-98executes-22-unarmed-afghan-commandos-e2-80-99-after-they-surrendered-as-biden-e2-80-99s-pullout-sparks-criticism/ar-AAM8han?ocid=uxbndlbing
US COVID-19 cases rising again, doubling over three weeks
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and JOSH FUNK
today
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-us-cases-rising-03150d6404004711b80e9bd6ff0d410d
The COVID-19 curve in the U.S. is rising again after months of decline, with the number of new cases per day doubling over the past three weeks, driven by the fast-spreading delta variant, lagging vaccination rates and Fourth of July gatherings.
Confirmed infections climbed to an average of about 23,600 a day on Monday, up from 11,300 on June 23, according to Johns Hopkins University data. And all but two states — Maine and South Dakota — reported that case numbers have gone up over the past two weeks.
“It is certainly no coincidence that we are looking at exactly the time that we would expect cases to be occurring after the July Fourth weekend,” said Dr. Bill Powderly, co-director of the infectious-disease division at Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis.
MORE ON THE VIRUS
– Immunized but banned: EU says not all COVID vaccines equal
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– The Latest: LA County has 5th straight day of 1,000 cases
At the same time, parts of the country are running up against deep vaccine resistance, while the highly contagious mutant version of the coronavirus that was first detected in India is accounting for an ever-larger share of infections.
Nationally, 55.6% of all Americans have received at least one COVID-19 shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The five states with the biggest two-week jump in cases per capita all had lower vaccination rates: Missouri, 45.9%; Arkansas, 43%; Nevada, 50.9%; Louisiana, 39.2%; and Utah, 49.5%.
Even with the latest surge, cases in the U.S. are nowhere near their peak of a quarter-million per day in January. And deaths are running at under 260 per day on average after topping out at more than 3,400 over the winter — a testament to how effectively the vaccine can prevent serious illness and death in those who happen to become infected.
Still, amid the rise, health authorities in places such as Los Angeles County and St. Louis are begging even immunized people to resume wearing masks in public. And Chicago officials announced Tuesday that unvaccinated travelers from Missouri and Arkansas must either quarantine for 10 days or have a negative COVID-19 test.
Meanwhile, the Health Department in Mississippi, which ranks dead last nationally for vaccinations, began blocking posts about COVID-19 on its Facebook page because of a “rise of misinformation” about the virus and the vaccine.
Mississippi officials are also recommending that people 65 and older and those with chronic underlying conditions stay away from large indoor gatherings because of a 150% rise in hospitalizations over the past three weeks.
In Louisiana, which also has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, officials in the city of New Orleans said Tuesday that they are likely to extend until fall virus-mitigation efforts currently in place at large sporting and entertainment gatherings, including mask mandates or requirements that attendees be vaccinated or have a negative COVID-19 test. State health officials said cases of the coronavirus are surging, largely among nonvaccinated people.
But the political will may not be there in many states fatigued by months of restrictions.
In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is facing a drive to repeal a law that she used to set major restrictions during the early stages of the pandemic.
And Republican Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama pushed back against the idea that the state might need to reimpose preventive measures as vaccinations lag and hospitalizations rise.
“Alabama is OPEN for business. Vaccines are readily available, and I encourage folks to get one. The state of emergency and health orders have expired. We are moving forward,” she said on social media.
Dr. James Lawler, a leader of the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, said bringing back masks and limiting gatherings would help. But he acknowledged that most of the places seeing higher rates of the virus “are exactly the areas of the country that don’t want to do any of these things.”
Lawler warned that what is happening in Britain is a preview of what’s to come in the U.S.
“The descriptions from regions of the world where the delta variant has taken hold and become the predominant virus are pictures of ICUs full of 30-year-olds. That’s what the critical care doctors describe and that’s what’s coming to the U.S.,” he said.
He added: “I think people have no clue what’s about to hit us.”
President Joe Biden is putting a dose of star power behind the administration’s efforts to get young people vaccinated. Eighteen-year-old actress, singer and songwriter Olivia Rodrigo will meet with Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday.
While the administration has had success vaccinating older Americans, young adults have shown less urgency to get the shots.
Some, at least, are heeding the call in Missouri after weeks of begging, said Erik Frederick, chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital Springfield. He tweeted that the number of people getting immunized at its vaccine clinic has jumped from 150 to 250 daily.
“That gives me hope,” he said.
___
Associated Press writers Leah Willingham in Jackson, Mississippi; Ed White in Detroit; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Sophia Tareen in Chicago; Kevin McGill in New Orleans; and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-us-cases-rising-03150d6404004711b80e9bd6ff0d410d
Zoe Tillman @ZoeTillman · 14h Stephen Calk — who you may remember from Paul Manafort's trial as the bank CEO who approved millions in loans for Manafort while angling for a Trump admin job, see:
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/a-bank-ceo-who-approved-16-million-in-loans-for-paul — was convicted today of crimes in connection with all of that
Bank CEO Stephen M. Calk Convicted Of Corruptly Soliciting A Presidential Administration Position In Exchange For Approving $16 Million In Loans
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/bank-ceo-stephen-m-calk-convicted-corruptly-soliciting-presidential-administration
7:05 PM · Jul 13, 2021·TweetDeck
THREAD
Stephen Calk — who you may remember from Paul Manafort's trial as the bank CEO who approved millions in loans for Manafort while angling for a Trump admin job, see: https://t.co/iSlrvAUQ21 — was convicted today of crimes in connection with all of that https://t.co/FFKlYmOSDr
— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) July 13, 2021
REvil websites down after governments pressured to take action following Kaseya attack
Biden said last week that he expected the Russian government to "act" if given information on who and where ransomware actors are.
By Jonathan Greig | July 13, 2021 -- 18:04 GMT (19:04 BST) | Topic: Security
https://www.zdnet.com/article/revil-websites-down-after-governments-pressured-to-take-action-following-kaseya-attack/
Security researchers are reporting that all of the dark web sites for prolific ransomware group REvil -- including the payment site, the group's public site, the 'helpdesk' chat and their negotiation portal -- are offline.
It is still unclear what caused the outages but dozens of theories were floated online. On Friday, US President Joe Biden made news when he said he spoke directly to Russian President Vladmir Putin following REvil's massive ransomware attack on Kaseya that affected almost 1,500 organizations.
"I made it very clear to him that the United States expects when a ransomware operation is coming from his soil, even though it's not sponsored by the state, we expect them to act if we give them enough information to act on who that is," Biden said.
"And secondly, we've set up a means of communication now on a regular basis to be able to communicate with one another when each of us thinks something is happening in another country that affects the home country. And so it went well. I'm optimistic."
White House officials are expected to meet with members of the Russian government to discuss ransomware this week.
While some security researchers believe the group may have taken their own websites down, either because of internal squabbles or fear over increased law enforcement scrutiny, others think it may be the result of official actions taken by government agencies.
"We all want to believe it is law enforcement, but this is a pretty extensive takedown across multiple providers," said Allan Liska, a ransomware expert and CSIRT at Recorded Future.
"This early on the more likely scenario is that it is a self-directed takedown. But I wouldn't rule out 'self-directed after a conversation with the Kremlin.' We've been speculating about this since the Kaseya attack: Biden gets a win because a major ransomware gang is gone, Putin gets a win because he 'helped' and REvil gets to keep all of their money (and their heads). The timing, the day before the next ransomware summit tomorrow, also lines up. But, that is all speculation."
Jake Williams, CTO at BreachQuest, added that Ransomware gangs operating in Russia "were on borrowed time the second Colonial was hit," explaining that the Russian government didn't care about the cybercrime occurring within its borders as long as it didn't impact Russia itself.
"That has clearly changed – the Russian government can clearly see they are being impacted by the actions of these actors. Whether REvil was taken out of commission by the Russian government, saw the writing on the wall and took infrastructure down, is simply rebranding like so many groups have (likely including REvil itself), or something else is unknown at this point," Williams said.
The Digital Shadows Photon Research Team has been scouring Russian-language forums for chatter about the outage and said that while discussion is limited, "some threat actors have speculated that even if law enforcement agencies have successfully targeted REvil, this will not spell the end of the group's activities."
"Some predicted that the group will reappear under another name or split into smaller groups to attract less attention," the team said.
"The inaccessibility of the REvil ransomware group's websites is unusual because the group's infrastructure has historically been more stable than that of other ransomware groups. The outage could be down to temporary technical issues or upgrades, or it could signify a law enforcement disruption of the group's operations. REvil's representatives have not appeared on high-profile Russian-language cybercriminal forums for several days."
Others, like Check Point Software spokesperson Ekram Ahmed, compared the situation to the DarkSide ransomware group, which shut down its operations in May after their attack on Colonial Pipeline drew global headlines and outrage in the US. DarkSide also saw some of its infrastructure disrupted by US law enforcement agencies after the attack.
"Though it might be too early to celebrate, another viable possibility is that the ransomware gang has decided to lay low, given all the attention and spotlight they've underwent recently from the Kaseya, Colonial Pipeline and JBS attacks," Ahmed explained.
"It's possible that REvil has gone into 'retirement', or at least a temporary one, as they did with the GandCrab ransomware a few years ago."
REvil has attacked at least 360 US-based organizations this year, according to Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow. The RansomWhere research site says the group has brought in more than $11 million this year, with high profile attacks on Acer, JBS, Quanta Computer and more.
Egnyte cybersecurity evangelist Neil Jones said people should be wary of celebrating the group's potential downfall because new ransomware infrastructure can be brought online quickly.
Steve Moore, chief security strategist at Exabeam, theorized that the outage "could be criminal maintenance, planned retirement, or, more likely, the result of an offensive response to the criminal enterprise."
"If the outage is the result of an offensive response, this then sends a new message to these groups that they have a limited window in which to work," Moore said. "Furthermore, if a nation responds to criminals backed by and hosted in another country, this will change the definition of risk for affected private organizations."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/revil-websites-down-after-governments-pressured-to-take-action-following-kaseya-attack/
Trump Org CFO began resigning his positions days before he was indicted, documents show
By David A. Fahrenthold and Shayna Jacobs
July 13, 2021|Updated today at 8:10 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-org-cfo-began-resigning-his-positions-days-before-he-was-indicted-documents-show/2021/07/13/aa698b8e-e41e-11eb-a41e-c8442c213fa8_story.html
Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg resigned from his positions at dozens of the company’s subsidiaries in late June — several days before he was indicted on charges of tax fraud and grand larceny — according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
“Effective immediately, I, Allen Weisselberg, resign from each and every office and position that I hold” in the subsidiaries, Weisselberg wrote in the letter, dated June 25. What followed was a two-page list.
The Trump Organization submitted the letter to New Jersey liquor regulators last week, asking to remove Weisselberg’s name from the liquor licenses for two golf courses. New Jersey officials released it to The Post on Tuesday.
The list obtained by The Post was largely redacted, so that only a few company names were visible. But, from looking at other corporate records in the United States and Scotland, The Post has identified at least 54 Trump entities where Weisselberg has recently resigned from his positions.
On Tuesday, a person familiar with the Trump Organization said Weisselberg had resigned from every subsidiary at which he had held a title.
The Trump Organization’s operations are run by a web of interconnected corporate entities, overseen by a small cadre of executives at Trump Tower in New York. For more than two decades, Weisselberg has been a key member of that leadership.
It is unclear what his role in the larger company is now. The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about Weisselberg on Tuesday.
Weisselberg’s attorney, Mary Mulligan, declined to comment.
The resignation letter — and the reshuffling of responsibilities that has followed it — has shed new light on the impact of Weisselberg’s indictment on 15 felony counts in Manhattan on July 1.
New York prosecutors said Weisselberg had helped organize a 15-year “scheme to defraud,” in which the Trump Organization hid some of its executives’ pay from taxing authorities. Two Trump companies were also indicted. Former president Donald Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Weisselberg pleaded not guilty and his lawyers said he would fight the charges, giving no indication he intends to cooperate with investigators.
The date of the resignation letter shows that Weisselberg seemed to anticipate the indictments. On June 24, Weisselberg’s lawyers made a last-ditch effort to talk prosecutors out of charging him. They failed.
The day after, Weisselberg signed his resignation letter.
The Trump Organization has not said why he resigned, and Weisselberg’s brief letter did not give a reason. But legal experts have said that this move could assuage potential concerns from regulators, vendors or lenders about dealing with a company whose officer had been indicted.
The shifts in leadership that have followed his resignation — detailed in other corporate filings — show that the Trump Organization appears to be increasingly reliant on Trump’s adult sons to manage a company facing several difficulties, including the indictments, the coronavirus pandemic and the toxic politicization of the Trump brand.
When Trump entered the White House in 2017, he kept ownership of his company but handed day-to-day leadership to a triumvirate: Weisselberg and his sons Eric and Donald Jr.
That arrangement showed up in corporate filings. At most subsidiaries, Weisselberg was listed as an officer alongside one or both of the sons. When Trump left office in January, Trump left that setup in place — largely declining to retake his old titles.
Now, as Weisselberg has resigned his roles at the subsidiaries, no new executive has stepped up to take his place.
Instead, corporate filings show, in most cases Trump’s sons just added Weisselberg’s old jobs to their own. On paper, their three-person leadership team shrank to just two.
Or, in some cases, one.
At one company connected to Trump’s golf club in Northern Virginia, Donald Trump Jr. is now “President, Vice President, Chief Executive Officer, Secretary, Treasurer [and] Chief Financial Officer,” according to papers the Trump Organization recently filed with the state of Virginia.
The filings also hint at one potential complication for that strategy: Donald Trump Jr. has become a well-known conservative activist and provocateur, buying a home in Florida and frequently speaking at pro-Trump events. His brother Eric has played a much larger role in running the company, according to people who know the Trump Organization well.
In the new corporate filings that laid out his larger role at Trump companies, Trump Jr. also said his mailing address is no longer Trump Tower, the company’s longtime headquarters.
Instead, he said, his mail should be sent “care of” a Trump golf course in Jupiter, Fla., close to his new home.
By David Fahrenthold
David A. Fahrenthold is a reporter covering the Trump family and its business interests. He has been at The Washington Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment and the D.C. police. Twitter
By Shayna Jacobs
Shayna Jacobs is a federal courts and law enforcement reporter on the national security team at The Washington Post, where she covers the Southern and Eastern districts of New York. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-org-cfo-began-resigning-his-positions-days-before-he-was-indicted-documents-show/2021/07/13/aa698b8e-e41e-11eb-a41e-c8442c213fa8_story.html
Trump Reportedly Lost His Shit Over Story on Bunker Stay: Leaker ‘Should Be Executed!’
Corbin Bolies
Breaking News Intern
Updated Jul. 13, 2021 1:44PM ET /
Published Jul. 13, 2021 11:41AM ET
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-reportedly-fumed-over-story-on-his-bunker-stay-leaker-should-be-executed?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
Donald Trump wasn’t happy about a story on his stay at an underground bunker during racial justice protests at the White House last year. In fact, according to reporter Michael Bender’s Frankly, We Did With This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, Trump was so upset about the leak that he called in top West Wing and military advisers and ordered them to find out who was behind it. “Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!” Trump said, according to Bender. “They should be executed!”
Trump, his wife Melania, and his son Barron were all taken down to the bunker for almost an hour after protests over the killing of George Floyd erupted outside the White House. The next Monday, White House staffers were told to hide their entry passes until they reached a Secret Service checkpoint, further highlighting the perceived threat to safety. Still, Trump later tried to downplay the trip as an “inspection” versus a precaution.
Read it at CNN https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/politics/trump-white-house-bunker-leak-executed-treason-book-claims/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-reportedly-fumed-over-story-on-his-bunker-stay-leaker-should-be-executed?via=newsletter&source=CSPMedition
Biden to tap ex-Sen. Jeff Flake as ambassador to Turkey
Hans Nichols, author of Sneak Peek
22 mins ago - Politics & Policy
https://www.axios.com/jeff-flake-turkey-ambassador-biden-e80189fb-2ff1-4e37-9abc-e535dad20aa5.html
President Biden will nominate former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake as his ambassador to Turkey, bringing in a senior Republican to help emphasize his bipartisan instincts on foreign policy.
Why it matters: In picking Flake, Biden is putting his trust in a former politician to handle one of America’s most challenging relationship in NATO.
“Given the strategic importance of the United States’ relationship with our long-time NATO Ally, the Republic of Turkey, I am honored and humbled by the trust President Biden has placed in me with this ambassadorial nomination,” Flake said in a statement.
“This is a pivotal post at an important time for both of our countries."
Flake, along with Cindy McCain, had long been considered potential picks to help Biden show his commitment to bipartisanship, Axios reported in February.
The big picture: Flake, a two-term senator from Arizona, endorsed Biden at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, after deciding he wouldn’t run for reelection in 2018.
He clashed frequently with then-President Trump and openly questioned his future in the party.
"There may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican Party," he told the Arizona Republic.
https://www.axios.com/jeff-flake-turkey-ambassador-biden-e80189fb-2ff1-4e37-9abc-e535dad20aa5.html
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews NEW: Texas family of 5 charged in US Capitol breach
Facebook posts galore referenced in court filings against the Munns, including Dad's saying Trump asked Americans to be in DC on Jan 6, per feds
One Munn also posted, "F*ing great! Holy s** we were inside the f*ing capital”
THREAD
NEW: Texas family of 5 charged in US Capitol breach
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 13, 2021
Facebook posts galore referenced in court filings against the Munns, including Dad's saying Trump asked Americans to be in DC on Jan 6, per feds
One Munn also posted, "F*ing great! Holy s** we were inside the f*ing capital” pic.twitter.com/MSUdYDuGse
JM Rieger @RiegerReport MCCONNELL: I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have in finishing the job…we need to keep preaching getting the vaccine is important…
REPORTER: It isn’t all that perplexing. There are Republicans who are casting doubt on the vaccines…
MCCONNELL: I can only speak for myself.
VIDEO
MCCONNELL: I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have in finishing the job…we need to keep preaching getting the vaccine is important…
— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 13, 2021
REPORTER: It isn’t all that perplexing. There are Republicans who are casting doubt on the vaccines…
MCCONNELL: I can only speak for myself. pic.twitter.com/Oq51pbfUMe
MCCONNELL: I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have in finishing the job…we need to keep preaching getting the vaccine is important…
— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 13, 2021
REPORTER: It isn’t all that perplexing. There are Republicans who are casting doubt on the vaccines…
MCCONNELL: I can only speak for myself. pic.twitter.com/Oq51pbfUMe
Trump said he'd praise a CPAC poll if it came out in favor of him, otherwise he'd call it fake
Tom Porter Jul 12, 2021, 10:58 AM
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-call-cpac-poll-fake-if-doesnt-win-2021-7
Donald Trump delivered a speech at the CPAC conference on Sunday.
[b" ]Now, if it's bad, I just say it's fake," Trump said of polls he doesn't like. "
The cynical approach fits Trump's track record, but the admission was unusually frank.
Former President Donald Trump in his speech at the CPAC conservative conference Sunday made a frank admission: that he judges the reliability of poll results on whether he wins them.
If he didn't like the result of a poll he'd call it fake, but if he approved of the result he'd lavish it with praise, he said.
Speaking at the event in Dallas, Trump discussed the straw poll recording the popularity of potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates in the hours before its results came out.
"By the way, you have a poll coming out," Trump said during his hour and a half-long speech. "I want to know what it is. You know they do that straw poll, right?"
...
"Now, if it's bad, I just say it's fake," Trump said, drawing laughter from the crowd. "If it's good, I say that's the most accurate poll, perhaps ever."
Trump then tried to cajole CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp to give him the results early.
"I guess it gets announced after, I want to find out, are you going to — oh, he won't. He won't tell me," said Trump.
Critics saw in the remarks an admission from Trump of his playbook when dealing with unfavorable data: attacking its authenticity when it doesn't suit his agenda.
It notably matches his handling of the 2020 presidential election results, the integrity of which he has attacked repeatedly since losing to Joe Biden.
Trump has claimed, wrongly, that the contest was stolen from his as a result of mass fraud. Despite a concerted attempt to substantiate the claims, attempts by Trump and his allies to challenge the results have all failed.
The claim inspired his supporters on January 6 to attack the US Capitol in a bid to halt Joe Biden's certification as president.
It turned out that Trump had no reason to seek to discredit the CPAC straw poll.
70% of conference attendees said they'd vote for him if he were the primary candidate. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came second on 21%.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-call-cpac-poll-fake-if-doesnt-win-2021-7?r=US&IR=T
Trump unloads on Kavanaugh in new Michael Wolff book
Mike Allen, author of AM
6 hours ago - Politics & Policy
https://www.axios.com/trump-kavanaugh-supreme-court-michael-wolff-fd429590-57ab-4a7f-a648-9a3fd50d25f3.html
Former President Donald Trump, in a book out Tuesday by Michael Wolff, says he is "very disappointed" in votes by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, his own hard-won nominee, and that he "hasn’t had the courage you need to be a great justice."
Driving the news: "There were so many others I could have appointed, and everyone wanted me to," Trump told Wolff in an interview for the cheekily titled "Landslide."
"Where would he be without me? I saved his life. He wouldn't even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him."
Between the lines: After the election, as Axios' Jonathan Swan reported in his "Off the Rails" series, Trump saved his worst venom for people who he believed owed him because he got them their jobs.
He would rant endlessly about the treachery of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, reminding people of how he shot up in the primary polls after Trump endorsed him.
Over lunches in the private dining room adjoining the Oval Office, Trump used to reminisce about how he saved Kavanaugh by sticking by him.
For Kavanaugh to not do Trump’s bidding on the matter of ultimate importance — overturning the election — was, in Trump's mind, a betrayal of the highest order.
Wolff writes that Trump feels betrayed by all three justices he put on the court, including Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, but "reserved particular bile for Kavanaugh."
Recalling the brutal confirmation fight, Trump said: "Practically every senator called me ... and said, 'Cut him loose, sir, cut him loose. He’s killing us, Kavanaugh.' ... I said, 'I can’t do that.'"
"I had plenty of time to pick somebody else," Trump continued. "I went through that thing and fought like hell for Kavanaugh — and I saved his life, and I saved his career. At great expense to myself ... okay? I fought for that guy and kept him."
"I don’t want anything ... but I am very disappointed in him, in his rulings," Trump said.
"I can’t even believe what's happening. I'm very disappointed in Kavanaugh. I just told you something I haven’t told a lot of people. In retrospect, he just hasn't had the courage you need to be a great justice. I’m basing this on more than just the election."
Wolff gives an entertaining account of what it was like for the book authors who were given Trump interviews at Mar-a-Lago:
It's called the Living Room, but it's in fact the Mar-a-Lago lobby, a vaulted-ceiling rococo grand entrance, part hunting lodge, part Renaissance palazzo. But it is really the throne room. ... He sits, in regulation dark suit and shiny baby-blue or fire-red tie, on a low chair in the center of the room, his legs almost daintily curled to the side, seeing a lineup of supplicants or chatting on the phone, all public conversations.
And why would Trump talk to Wolff, who wrote two earlier bestsellers with devastating accounts of Trump dysfunction?
"The fact that he was talking to me might only reasonably be explained by his absolute belief that his voice alone has reality-altering powers," Wolff writes.
Trump told Wolff: "I don’t blame you. I blame my people"
https://www.axios.com/trump-kavanaugh-supreme-court-michael-wolff-fd429590-57ab-4a7f-a648-9a3fd50d25f3.html
‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: Inside Trump’s Election Day and the birth of the ‘big lie’
At the end of a tumultuous day, the defiant president refused to accept the signs that he was losing the White House contest to Joe Biden. “I won in a landslide and they’re taking it back,” Trump told advisers.
By Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker
July 13, 2021|Updated today at 6:01 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/13/book-excerpt-i-alone-can-fix-it/
Part one of an excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.” Leonnig and Rucker will discuss this book during a Washington Post Live event on July 20.
Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f------ guy,” Trump told aides.
Around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where campaign manager Bill Stepien and the senior leadership briefed Trump in the conference room. Stepien outlined what to expect that night — when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied and which states would probably have the first projected winners. He explained that because of the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.
Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.
“It’s going to be good early,” Stepien told the boss. But, as he cautioned the president, those numbers would be incomplete and the margins probably would tighten later in the evening.
Trump then stepped out of the conference room and into the big open floor of cubicles to give a brief pep talk to scores of assembled staffers, who greeted him with raucous applause. A pool of journalists stood nearby to cover his remarks, and a reporter asked whether he had prepared an acceptance speech or a concession speech to deliver that evening.
“No, I’m not thinking about concession speech or acceptance speech yet,” Trump said. “Hopefully, we’ll be only doing one of those two. And, you know, winning is easy. Losing is never easy. Not for me it’s not.”
As Trump thought about winning or losing, the Pentagon brass was focused on keeping the peace. That morning, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper; Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and other defense officials were briefed about security concerns around the nation. If Trump won, officials expected large crowds of protesters to assemble in Washington, perhaps as many as 10,000 or 15,000 people. Law enforcement officials were monitoring cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Norfolk, Philadelphia and San Diego, for likely protests.
Meanwhile, White House cooks and ushers were busy preparing to receive hundreds of guests for an election night viewing party. Trump’s original plan had been to stage his “victory” party at the Trump International Hotel a few blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue. But that plan had been scotched a few days earlier, as the president’s wishes for a celebration at his luxury hotel ran headlong into the District’s public health regulations for the coronavirus. No more than 50 people could gather at an indoor venue in the city.
Trump’s campaign and his White House political team had nearly 400 people they wanted to invite for election night, so they moved the party to the White House, which is on federal property and therefore not subject to local ordinances. The choice of location broke with a solemn tradition of never using the White House for overt political purposes, a norm Trump had already tossed aside in August by delivering his Republican National Convention acceptance speech from the South Lawn.
Trump also used the White House to house his political operation, setting up two “war rooms” with computers, large-screen televisions and other equipment where campaign staffers would monitor election returns. The larger of the two war rooms was in government office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is next to the West Wing and part of the White House campus, where roughly 60 staffers would have work stations from which to receive up-to-the-minute information from battleground states and track precinct data. The smaller war room was in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House residence. Steeped in history, the Map Room took its name from World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned it into a situation room with maps to track troop movements and to receive classified information on the war’s progress. Trump’s most senior aides planned to work through the night in the Map Room, now transformed into the campaign’s command center, where Stepien and his top deputies could analyze data and stay close to the president to brief him in person as needed.
This and other episodes recounted in this book are based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 140 people, including the most senior Trump administration officials, friends and outside advisers to the 45th president. Most of the people interviewed agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. Scenes were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources and buttressed by a review of calendars, diary entries, internal memos and other correspondence among principals.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been working toward this night for four years. For her, election night in 2016 had been a nightmare, and she was determined not to allow a repeat in 2020. “That night was like getting kicked in the back by a mule over and over again,” she said in an interview. The California Democrat recalled thinking that night about Trump’s surprise victory: “It can’t be true. It can’t be happening to our country.”
Pelosi added: “You understand that this is not a person of sound mind. You understand that. You know that. He’s not of sound mind … When he first got elected, I was devastated because I thought Hillary Clinton was one of the best prepared people to be president — better than her husband, better than [Barack] Obama, better than George W. Bush. Maybe not better than George Herbert Walker Bush, because he had been a vice president. I don’t think any of the people I just mentioned would deny that she was better qualified, experienced, all the rest of it. So, the idea that he would get elected was shocking. It was shocking.”
Mitt Romney had been less shocked by Trump’s election — he had watched firsthand as the Republican Party was radicalized by the far right — but was just as determined to prevent a second Trump term. The senator from Utah said in an interview that he watched the election returns in California with his wife, Ann, son Craig and other family members, and felt a pit in his stomach. The early numbers looked surprisingly good for Trump. Biden was struggling in the quadrennial bellwether of Florida, even in Democrat-rich Miami-Dade County.
“I think he’s going to win,” Romney recalled telling his family. “Those polls were way off. I think he’s going to pull it out.”
At the White House, people liked what they were seeing. There was a party atmosphere. Staff hung out in West Wing offices chatting at least until 9 p.m. National Security Council officials celebrated in the Roosevelt Room. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows served beer and food in his corner office. Another group of aides lingered outside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s office, known as Upper Press. In the residence, scores of guests — Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, television stars and other dignitaries — were drinking and milling around, mostly without masks save for Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who kept his on. After a few too many swigs of wine and beer, some guests became rather animated as the night progressed.
Upstairs in the first family’s private quarters, Trump was glued to the television. He alternated between watching from his bedroom alone and from a family room with Melania, other family members and some of his most trusted aides, including Hope Hicks. Senior advisers including Stepien, Meadows, McEnany, Jason Miller, Stephen Miller and Ronna McDaniel were in the Map Room. Members of the president’s family — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, who worked on the campaign — came in and out much of the night, as did a pair of special party guests, Fox News stars Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro.
They all turned to Matt Oczkowski for updates, sometimes as often as every few minutes. As the campaign’s top data cruncher, Oczkowski sat in front of a computer and performed real-time analysis of precinct data to stay ahead of state calls and to spot any trouble on the horizon. He liked what he saw early on. Florida offered the first good indicators. Trump was overperforming with Blacks and Latinos, especially among Cuban Americans in South Florida. Miami-Dade was going gangbusters for Trump. And turnout among the president’s base of rural Whites was high. Meadows, meanwhile, paid close attention to precinct returns out of North Carolina, which he had represented in Congress, and he felt confident about Trump’s chances there. And early returns out of Pennsylvania were encouraging.
At this point in the evening, Stepien tried to temper Trump’s optimism and keep the president’s mind from racing too far ahead of reality. “Stay calm,” the campaign manager told him. “We won’t know for some period of time.”
One Trump confidant who mostly stayed out of the Map Room was Rudolph W. Giuliani. That’s because the president’s personal attorney had set up his own command center upstairs on the party floor. Giuliani sat at a table in the Red Room with his son, Andrew, who worked at the White House in the Office of Public Liaison, staring intensely at a laptop watching vote tallies. The Giulianis made for an odd scene, as partygoers swirled around them. After a while, Rudy Giuliani started to cause a commotion. He was telling other guests that he had come up with a strategy for Trump and was trying to get into the president’s private quarters to tell him about it. Some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much and suggested to Stepien that he go talk to the former New York mayor. Stepien, Meadows and Jason Miller took Giuliani down to a room just off the Map Room to hear him out.
Giuliani went state by state asking Stepien, Meadows and Miller what they were seeing and what their plan was.
“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.
They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.
“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.
Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.
“We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”
Some competitive races were falling into place for Republicans. In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham faced a tough challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, an impressive candidate who had garnered national attention and raised a record-shattering $109 million. But South Carolina, long a bastion of Republicanism, stayed true to form. The race was called early, with Graham winning 54 percent to Harrison’s 44 percent.
Trump was watching TV as news networks projected Graham’s victory, and within minutes he called his friend.
“You got yours,” Trump told Graham. “I’ve got a fight on my hands.”
“Well, Mr. President, hang in there,” Graham said. “It’s looking pretty good for you.”
As the night wore on, some of Trump’s advisers began to worry. Public polls, as well as the Trump campaign’s internal surveys, had long projected that the race was Biden’s to lose, and that prediction was bearing out as more precincts reported votes from battleground states. Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, stepped away from the party in the East Room and saw McDaniel pacing in the hallway.
“Ronna, good to see you!” Farah said to the Republican National Committee chairwoman.
“Hey, good to see you,” McDaniel said. Then, as she turned away, McDaniel said, “Things are not looking good.”
William P. Barr had the same feeling. The attorney general had shown up for Trump’s election night party, even though he had thought for months that Trump was destined to become a one-term president. Trump didn’t seem able to get out of his own way and deliver a disciplined message. Barr hung around the party for a bit, but a little after 10 p.m. decided to call it a night. He went home to get some sleep.
The Pentagon’s top two leaders stayed away from Trump’s party, still hypervigilant about avoiding any suggestion that they were politicizing the military. Esper and Milley had learned that lesson back on June 1 in Lafayette Square. Milley watched the returns on TV from his home at Fort Myer in Arlington. A history buff, Milley memorialized the night by keeping his own scorecard of states in his journal. Around 10:30 p.m., with results from most key states still far too close to call, Milley received an interesting call from a retired military buddy who reminded him of his apolitical role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“You are an island unto yourself right now,” the friend said, according to the account Milley shared with aides. “You are not tethered. Your loyalty is to the Constitution. You represent the stability of this republic.”
Milley’s friend added: “There’s fourth-rate people at the Pentagon. And you have fifth-rate people at the White House. You’re surrounded by total incompetence. Hang in there. Hang tough.”
Esper was at home in Northern Virginia feeling at peace that he had survived this long without getting fired and without having acquiesced to Trump’s wishes to order troops to break up domestic protests. The defense secretary had had a target on his back all fall, but Trump had not axed him.
Esper had a scare the night before, Nov. 2, when NBC’s Courtney Kube planned to report that he was preparing to be fired the day after the election, had updated his resignation letter and was quietly advising members of Congress about renaming Army bases named for Confederate generals as a sort of mic drop to fortify his legacy. Esper believed that if NBC published the story, it would signal that he was on the verge of resigning and prompt his premature firing — so he raced to stop it. He directed his aides to try to convince Kube that her information could be overhyped. It was true that Esper had been consulting with Congressional committees about renaming the bases. It also was true that he had prepared a resignation letter, as many Trump appointees had, but he had no imminent plans to submit it. In truth, Esper expected that Trump would fire him after the election, but was hoping to hold on if he could, at least for a few days after the election. He was worried about what Trump might try to do with the military if he were not at the helm. Esper warned Kube that publishing her story could result in a more compliant acting secretary of defense, which could have worrisome repercussions. The story was held as they tussled back and forth.
Esper was a lifelong Republican and had worked at the conservative Heritage Foundation as well as for Republican senators Bill Frist and Chuck Hagel. But he told his closest colleagues that as he watched TV news anchors cover the election results, he found himself rooting for the Democrat. Esper had worked with Biden and his secretary of state in waiting, Antony Blinken, when he was a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He had confidence that they were serious, stable people who cared deeply about shoring up national security. Esper couldn’t say the same about Trump. In fact, Trump had privately indicated that he would seek to withdraw from NATO and to blow up the U.S. alliance with South Korea, should he win reelection. When those alliances had come up in meetings with Esper and other top aides, some advisers warned Trump that shredding them before the election would be politically dangerous.
“Yeah, the second term,” Trump had said. “We’ll do it in the second term.”
Esper had known that Trump had wanted to fire him ever since their June 3 argument over the Insurrection Act, but had heard that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, campaign officials and other advisers had talked the president out of doing so before the election. They had argued that he couldn’t afford to rupture his relationship with a second defense secretary, not after Jim Mattis’s rocky departure and the sharp public criticism he later leveled at Trump.
Esper had lived through the strain of the 2000 recounts and the Bush v. Gore case. He had repeatedly told his deputies that he wanted this election to be “clean and clear,” as in free of any suggestion of corruption and indisputably clear who had won. He had feared that anything less might give Trump some shred of a reason to call out troops. Later in the evening, as returns posted in Biden’s favor, Esper told a friend, “It looks good.” The defense secretary went to bed comforted by signs that the country would get a divided and stable government — a Democratic president and, he hoped, a Republican Senate.
At 11:20 p.m. on Fox News, Bill Hemmer was standing before his giant touch screen in the network’s Studio F in New York, guiding viewers through electoral college scenarios when Arizona turned blue on his map. The sudden change in color caught Hemmer off guard. “What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue? Did we just call it? Did we just make a call in Arizona? Let’s see,” he said.
Co-anchor Martha MacCallum said that indeed Fox had called Arizona, a hotly contested battleground state with 11 electoral college votes.
Co-anchor Bret Baier chimed in. “Time out,” he said. “This is a big development. Fox News’s decision desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden.” Baier added, “Biden picking up Arizona changes the math.”
Trump, who had been watching Fox, was livid. He could not fathom that the conservative news network he had long considered an extension of his campaign was the first news organization to call Arizona for Biden. This was a betrayal. His top advisers, who had been in the Map Room at the time, rushed upstairs to see the president. Giuliani followed them.
“They’re calling it way too early,” Oczkowski told Trump. “This thing is close. We still think we’ll win narrowly — and not just us. Doug Ducey’s modeling people show us winning.” Ducey, Arizona’s Republican governor, and his political team had kept in close contact with Trump’s aides.
That hardly reassured the president. “What the f--- is Fox doing?” Trump screamed. Then he barked orders to Kushner: “Call Rupert! Call James and Lachlan!” And to Jason Miller: “Get Sammon. Get Hemmer. They’ve got to reverse this.” The president was referring to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, as well as Bill Sammon, a top news executive at Fox.
Trump’s tirade continued. “What the f---?” he bellowed. “What the f--- are these guys doing? How could they call this this early?”
Oczkowski again tried to soothe the president. “They’re calling this way too early,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”
Giuliani pushed the president to forget about the Arizona call and just say he won — to step into the East Room and deliver a victory speech. Never mind that Meadows had earlier snapped at Giuliani and said the president couldn’t just declare himself the winner.
“Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani told Trump. “You’ve got to go declare victory now.”
Giuliani’s interjection of his “just-say-you-won” strategy infuriated Trump’s campaign advisers.
“It’s hard to be the responsible parent when there’s a cool uncle around taking the kid to the movies and driving him around in a Corvette,” one of these advisers recalled. “When we say the president can’t say that, being responsible is not the easiest place to be when you’ve got people telling the president what he wants to hear. It’s hard to tell the president no. It’s not an enviable place to be.”
Once they got away from the president, Kushner called Rupert Murdoch. Jason Miller tried Sammon but couldn’t reach him. Other Trump aides pitched in, too. Counselor Kellyanne Conway reached out to Baier and MacCallum, who were on the air. Hicks, who had worked under Lachlan Murdoch at the Fox Corp. between her White House stints, reached out to Fox Corp. Senior Vice President Raj Shah, a former Trump spokesman, to track down a number for Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News.
Conway talked to Brian Seitchik, a longtime Trump adviser based in Arizona, who assured her: “This is irresponsible. Here in Arizona, we just have way too many votes left to count.”
Ducey called the Trump team and was put on speakerphone. The governor told them that the Fox call was premature and that, according to his analysis, Trump still had a chance to win because so many votes remained to be counted.
Typically, most news organizations call states around the same time because they tend to have similar standards for when it is safe to project winners and losers. But with Arizona, other major news organizations held back on joining Fox’s call. In fact, Jason Miller received text messages from contacts at other networks. “I can’t believe Fox is doing you guys dirty,” one of them wrote.
Trump and his family became apoplectic as the night ticked on and his early leads over Biden in Pennsylvania and other states kept shrinking. As additional votes were being counted, Biden inched closer to Trump. Pennsylvania was too close to call, as was Georgia. Trump decided to deliver remarks to his viewing party and came down into the Map Room, where he yelled at Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager.
“Why are they still counting votes?” Trump asked. “The election’s closed. Are they counting ballots that came in afterward? What the hell is going on?” Trump, through a spokesman, denied saying this.
The president told Conway that he thought something nefarious was at play.
“They’re stealing this from us,” Trump said. “We have this thing won. I won in a landslide and they’re taking it back.”
Of course, nobody was taking anything. Election officials were simply doing their duty, counting ballots. But Trump didn’t see it that way. He seemed to truly believe he had been winning. As one Trump adviser later explained, “The psychological impact of, he’s going to win, people were calling him saying he’s going to win, and then somehow these votes just keep showing up.”
Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room.
“The election is being stolen,” the president’s 36-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”
He yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. ”“We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?
Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.
Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden.
Shortly after 2 a.m. on Nov. 4, “Hail to the Chief” played at the East Room party. Out walked Trump, followed by Melania Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence. Stephen Miller and the speechwriting team had prepared remarks for Trump to deliver, but the president veered from his teleprompter script to instead deliver stream-of-consciousness thoughts.
“We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said. He added, “Literally, we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”
Trump rattled off states he had won — Florida! Ohio! Texas! — and then claimed that he had already won states that were too close to call, including Georgia and North Carolina. He bragged about his leads in some states — “Think of this: We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania. Six hundred ninety thousand!” — and falsely claimed to be winning Michigan and Wisconsin.
Neither Trump nor Biden was declared the overall winner because Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania remained too close to call. Yet Trump insisted that he was the actual winner, and that his sweet victory had been somehow snatched from him.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” the president said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”
This was an extraordinary accusation for any political candidate to make about any election, much less for a sitting president to make about the country’s most consequential election. Trump was telling the 74 million people who voted for him not to trust the results.
Watching from California, Romney was heartsick. “We’re in a global battle for the survival of liberal democracy in the face of autocracy and autocratic regimes attempting to dominate the world,” he recalled in the interview. “So saying something and doing things that would suggest that in the free nation of the United States of America and the model of democracy for the world, that we can’t have a free and fair election would have a destructive effect on democracy around the world, not just to mention here.”
Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.
“It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level — on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was [as] surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”
Following his speech, Trump hung around the Green Room next door to the East Room talking to some advisers and VIP guests, asking them what they thought. Ingraham, whose prime-time show was off the air that night because of Fox’s election coverage, was overheard giving the president some advice. She expressed general doubt that the outcome would change in the days ahead, given the historical reluctance of federal courts to intervene in elections, a contrast to what she considered unrealistic scenarios being painted by some others around the president.
“Give up on Arizona,” Ingraham told him, apparently confident in her network’s decision to project Biden the winner there.
Giving up wasn’t in Trump’s repertoire. “Fox shouldn’t have called it,” he told her.
Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush strategist and Fox commentator, had just come off the air when he got a call from a Trump adviser. “He’s in a meltdown,” the adviser told Rove. “Can you call him and tell him that all is not lost?”
Rove phoned the president and tried to give him a pep talk.
“Hang in there,” he told Trump. “There’s a lot of ballots to be counted and it’s not going to be done for some time. You fought a good fight … You’re not out yet.”
Rove and Trump briefly discussed the state of the race in Arizona. “I know premature calls,” he said, reminding the president of the fiasco on election night in 2000, when some networks projected Al Gore would win Florida only to have to retract their call a couple of hours later. “Hang in there. You gave it your all. You came down to the end. You upset them in 2016. You can do it again. Just hold on.”
Trump then retreated to the Map Room to talk to his campaign team. He stayed up until 4 a.m. chewing over the incoming results. The president was fixated on Pennsylvania, where Biden kept cutting into his lead. There were enough votes still to be counted in Philadelphia, which were sure to favor the Democrat, for Biden to overtake Trump. And indeed, Democrats were optimistic that once all the votes were in, Biden would win the state.
Conway and Meadows both preached patience.
“Mr. President, you’re ahead in Pennsylvania by 700,000 votes,” Conway told him. “We won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes last time. Just let them count the votes. Let them get through the votes.”
Meadows said: “Just count the votes, Mr. President. You probably have enough to keep those leads.”
Trump wasn’t having any of it. He thought Democrats were rigging the vote totals.
“If I wake up in the morning and they say Trump is ahead by 100,000, they’ll find 100,001 votes in the backyard,” the president said.
“Mr. President, it stings,” Conway said. “It just hurts to have lost Pennsylvania.”
“Honey, we didn’t lose Pennsylvania,” Trump replied. “We won Pennsylvania.”
Conway, who often was quick with a rejoinder to lighten the mood at tense moments, invoked the security cameras that some homeowners install at their front doors to monitor for stolen packages or unwanted visitors. “Then your campaign should’ve invested in Ring and Nest cameras,” she quipped.
carol.leonnig@washpost.com
philip.rucker@washpost.com
Copyright 2021 by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Press. All rights reserved.
By Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Leonnig is an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her work on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. Twitter
By Philip Rucker
Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2005 and previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is co-author of "A Very Stable Genius," a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/13/book-excerpt-i-alone-can-fix-it/
‘This is really fantastical’: Federal judge in Michigan presses Trump-allied lawyers on 2020 election fraud claims in sanctions hearing
By Rosalind S. Helderman July 12, 2021|Updated today at 9:24 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sidney-powell-disciplinary-hearing/2021/07/12/61d44ac4-e0c9-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html
The latest effort to hold former president Donald Trump and his allies accountable for months of baseless claims about the 2020 election played out Monday in a Michigan courtroom, where a federal judge asked detailed and skeptical questions of several lawyers she is considering imposing sanctions against for filing a suit seeking to overturn the results.
U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker said she would rule on a request to discipline the lawyers in coming weeks. But over and over again during the more than five-hour hearing, she pointedly pressed the lawyers involved — including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — to explain what steps they had taken to ensure their court filings in the case filed last year had been accurate. She appeared astonished by many of their answers.
While their suit aimed to create a broad impression that the vote in Michigan — and specifically Detroit’s Wayne County — had been troubled, the affidavits filed to support those claims included obvious errors, speculation and basic misunderstandings of how elections are generally conducted in the state, Parker said.
“There’s a duty that counsel has that when you’re submitting a sworn statement .?.?. that you have reviewed it, that you had done some minimal due diligence,” she said.
As the hearing concluded, a defiant Powell told the judge that she took “full responsibility” for the case’s pleadings and said she would file them again. She and the other lawyers “had a legal obligation to the country” to raise issues with the election, Powell said.
If Parker decides to discipline the lawyers, she could require them to pay the fees of their opponents in the case, the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials. But she could also go further — assessing additional monetary penalties or recommending grievance proceedings be opened that could result in banning the attorneys from practicing in Michigan or disbarring them altogether.
The Michigan hearing is part of a broad move underway nationally to hold responsible Trump and his backers who spread falsehoods about the election, the so-called “big lie” that led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The push for accountability has been advancing in the nation’s courts in recent months, even as Republicans have embraced Trump’s baseless claims and blocked an independent commission to scrutinize the failures that contributed to the Jan. 6 riot.
The effort, playing out in several states, includes attempts to punish attorneys who pursued dozens of failed efforts to use the courts to overturn the election, the filing of defamation lawsuits against key figures who falsely claimed voting machine manufacturers tipped the election, and the launch of criminal investigations examining whether Trump and his allies broke the law by trying to interfere with the official administration of the election.
One of the first substantial repercussions came last month, when a committee of judges in New York state suspended the law license of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal attorney. The committee found that Giuliani had “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large” in violation of his ethical obligations as an attorney.
Representatives for Giuliani have called the action “unprecedented” and expressed confidence that his law license will be restored after a hearing to determine whether to revoke his license permanently.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers (D) has asked a federal judge to order Trump and three of his attorneys to pay the state’s attorneys’ fees in a case the former president filed in December unsuccessfully challenging President Biden’s win there. Trump and his lawyers told a judge in a court filing Monday that the request for attorney’s fees was “untimely and unwarranted.”
Authorities in several states have also opened criminal probes related to the post-election period, including in Fulton County, Ga., where District Attorney Fani Willis launched a criminal investigation in February, in the wake of Trump’s calls to state officials to try to persuade them reverse Biden’s victory in the state.
Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Willis, said Friday that the investigation is ongoing.
Earlier this year, Willis said her office was investigating whether “attempts to influence” the administration of the 2020 election in the state violated state law. She said she would examine contacts made with the offices of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Gov. Brian Kemp and Attorney General Chris Carr, as well as with the General Assembly, which held hearings where Giuliani and others made unfounded allegations of fraud. Under Georgia law, it is illegal to lie under oath to the General Assembly.
An individual with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is an active case said that the “voluntary phase” of the investigation is winding down and that subpoenas are likely to be issued soon to those who did not agree to be interviewed or turn over documents.
A separate investigation is now under underway in Michigan. A spokeswoman for state Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) last week confirmed her office has opened a case exploring the activities of individuals who have been raising money by circulating false claims that the election results in Antrim County were manipulated, an allegation that has been widely touted by Trump allies. Nessel’s spokeswoman said the Michigan State Police are involved in the case.
Nessel’s announcement came after a state Senate committee led by Republican Sen. Ed McBroom concluded last month that had been “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan and recommended Nessel “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”
In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) wrote a letter to Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) last week, asking that his office open an investigation into whether Trump and allies — including Giuliani and Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward — might have violated a state law that makes it illegal to knowingly interfere with an election officer.
Her letter cited text messages and voice mails recently obtained via public information laws by the Arizona Republic that detailed a pressure campaign aimed at persuading members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors not to certify Biden’s victory in the county, which is home to Phoenix.
In one voice mail, Giuliani told one Republican supervisor: “I’d like to see if there’s a way that we can resolve this so that it comes out well for everyone. We’re all Republicans, I think we have the same goal.”
Another message showed that Ward texted the board’s chairman four days after the election — a time when ballots were still being tallied that ultimately confirmed Biden’s narrow in the county. “We need you to stop the counting,” she wrote.
A spokeswoman for Brnovich said he had received the letter and would review it, declining to comment further.
Meanwhile, a series of $1.3 billion defamation suits filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Giuliani, Powell and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell are moving through the civil courts. The company argues that the three Trump allies lied repeatedly about the company, creating a “viral disinformation campaign” that convinced the public that Dominion’s voting machines were used to flip Trump votes to Biden and swing the election.
A judge in Washington held a four-hour hearing in the matter last month and could decide whether to grant a motion to dismiss the suit at any time.
The focus of the Michigan hearing Monday was a lawsuit that involved nine lawyers, including Powell and Wood, that was brought on behalf of six local Republicans in late November after Biden’s victory in Michigan had been certified.
One of series of lawsuits known as the “Kraken” cases — after Powell promised her lawsuits would amount to releasing the mythical creature in Trump’s defense — the Michigan suit filed by the Trump allies argued the election had been marred by widespread fraud. The suit had asked Parker to order that Biden’s win be decertified and require that Trump be declared the winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.
Parker, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, formerly served as the director of Michigan’s Department of Civil Rights.
In a stinging opinion in December, she rejected the request, writing that the relief the plaintiffs had sought was “stunning in its scope and breathtaking in its reach.”
“If granted, the relief would disenfranchise the votes of the more than 5.5 million Michigan citizens who, with dignity, hope, and a promise of a voice, participated in the 2020 General Election,” she continued, adding that the plaintiffs had advanced “nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden.”
Lawyers for the city of Detroit, as well as Nessel, acting on behalf of the state’s governor and secretary of state, later moved for the lawyers to be disciplined, arguing the case the lawsuit was frivolous and relied on false evidence. Legal rules and federal law require lawyers be truthful in court and avoid filing cases “unreasonably and vexatiously.”
David Fink, a lawyer for the city of Detroit, told the judge Monday that the suit had helped undermined faith in the election and helped lead directly to the Jan. 6 attack. “We can’t undo what happened, but this court can do something to let the world know that attorneys in this country are not free to use our courts to tell lies,” he said.
The lawyers rejected that claim and said their suit was a good-faith effort to use the court system to address concerns with the election.
“Civil complaints do not foment revolution,” said Donald Campbell, a lawyer representing the group. Instead, he argued that denying access to the courts to people who believe an election has been compromised“is what is dangerous.”
During the hearing, Powell took primary credit for writing the complaint, along with New York lawyer Howard Kleinhendler. (Wood argued he should not face sanctions because, according to Wood, he played no role despite the inclusion of his name on the complaint.)
Parker quizzed the lawyers about whether there is any legal basis to ask a judge to decertify an election and name a new winner. And she spent hours asking the attorneys to explain how closely they had reviewed and vetted information submitted in hundreds of pages of sworn declarations that they had told the court constituted evidence of purported fraud and irregularities.
The judge noted that one observer stated in an affidavit that she believed she saw election workers switching votes from Trump to Biden. Parker asked whether any of the lawyers had spoken to the witness and inquired what exactly she saw that led her to believe that votes had been switched. She was greeted with silence.
“Anyone?” she asked again.
When no one answered a second time, she said: “Let the record reflect that no one made that inquiry, which was central to [the] allegation.”
She focused on another statement from a witness who swore he saw individuals placing clear plastic bags into a mail truck — and said he believed the bags “could be ballots” headed for Detroit’s counting facility.
The judge called that allegation “really fantastical” and “speculative.”
“I don’t think I’ve really ever seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps,” she said. “My question to counsel here is, how could any of you as officers of the court present this type of an affidavit?”
Julia Haller, one of the lawyers who filed the original suit, responded that the statement accurately reflected what the man believed he had seen and that the affidavits should be viewed collectively as suggesting a “pattern of fraud.”
She and the other lawyers repeatedly asked to be allowed an opportunity to bring their witnesses into court and have them be questioned about their evidence and qualifications before being disciplined over their sworn statements.
One declaration came from a witness referred to by the lawyers in court documents only as “Spider.” In his sworn declaration, he claimed to be a former military intelligence expert who had discovered server traffic revealing that Iran and China had tampered with the election. But The Washington Post revealed in December that “Spider” was actually a 43-year-old Texas-based information technology consultant named Joshua Merritt who never worked in military intelligence.
Records show he enrolled in a training program with a military intelligence battalion but never completed the entry-level course, an Army spokeswoman told The Post. Records show that Merritt spent most of his decade in the U.S. Army as a wheeled vehicle mechanic.
In court Monday, Kleinhendler told Parker that Merritt had done training with the intelligence unit and was prepared to testify about his qualifications — but only in a sealed hearing because of the confidentiality of his work.
In another instance, a cybersecurity analyst based in Texas stated in a sworn declaration that more than 139 percent of registered voters in the city of Detroit had cast ballots — a dramatic irregularity that, if true, would have signaled obvious problems or fraud in the predominantly Democratic city.
However, city records showed that just under 51 percent of registered voters cast ballots.
While that error was corrected in later filings in the case, Fink noted to the judge that among those who would go on to echo the claim was Trump, who mentioned the false statistic in a Jan. 2 phone call to the secretary of state of Georgia as he sought to overturn Biden’s win in that state.
“The suggestion that this is some kind of harmless error because it was ultimately corrected flies in the face of the reality of what actually happened,” Fink said. “These lies were put out into the world. When they were put out into the world, they were believed.”
Amy Gardner and Emma Brown contributed to this report.
By Rosalind Helderman
Rosalind Helderman is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2001. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sidney-powell-disciplinary-hearing/2021/07/12/61d44ac4-e0c9-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html
Microplastic Myths
https://plasticsparadox.com/microplastic-myths/
Introduction
Microplastics have attracted a huge amount of attention. People tend to be afraid of the unknown and especially so about things that they cannot see with their own eyes. As a scientist, I decided to review all the science I could find on the topic to see whether or not we have genuine cause for concern. That meant reading a huge amount of material, not just skimming through but also checking how the science was done, to make sure that it was professionally conducted. What I found shocked me…
What are microplastics?
Microplastics are defined as plastic fragments of 5mm or less across. They first came to the public’s attention when articles started showing up about the polyethylene microspheres used in some facial scrubs as a mild exfoliant. There was a huge uproar, as this was perceived as a major problem and now the PE spheres are no longer used. A recent report gives an excellent overview (see Primary Microplastics in the Oceans- a Global Evaluation of Sources IUCN 2017). The report says that the global release of primary microplastics in the oceans is estimated to be about 1.5 Mtons/year.
So, we know that microplastics are real and the quantities are enough to be concerned about. I looked for the data and it turns out that just 2% of the plastic particles in the sea were from in facial scrubs. I was surprised at how low the amount was, in light of the huge amount of attention the topic received. If not facial scrubs, what is responsible for the microplastics in our oceans?
Microplastics are abundant – but are they causing harm?
For a substance to present a danger, it has to be toxic and there has to be an exposure route. For example, a bottle of poison on the moon would not be a threat to people on Earth so there would be no danger. In that example, there is toxicity but no exposure. Conversely, we may be exposed to something but if it turns out to be harmless, then there is no cause for concern.
I looked at many studies and we know for sure that birds and fish do eat plastic. Microplastics can be found in their digestive system.
“Plastic was detected in 49 out of 64 fish (77%), with 2.3 pieces on average and up to 15 pieces per individual” and “Most were polyethylene (52.0%) or polypropylene (43.3%).”
Source: Microplastic fragments and microbeads in digestive tracts of planktivorous fish from urban coastal waters
So, the exposure component is there. What about the toxicity aspect? Are these plastic particles harmful to the marine wildlife?
It is interesting to see that PE and PP are the main plastics. It should not be too surprising, as they are the two most commonly used plastics and they both float on water, making them more visible and more likely to be ingested by fish. PE and PP are also two very safe plastics that we use all the time to package food. PE is used for sealable food bags in the kitchen and PP is used for sealable food containers. Both have been used safely for several decades.
The press has drawn the public’s attention to studies claiming that plastics leach toxins, but when we look at those studies, it turns out that the plastic was shown to be safe and only released toxins after the plastic was intentionally soaked in toxins by the experimenters. These studies are not only misleading but irresponsible. We could soak more or less anything in poison and then show that it released some poison once placed in clean water. Interestingly, other workers showed that plastics absorb toxins from water and hold them tightly so that even when ingested by fish, they are able to protect the fish. Have you ever seen a headline highlighting those studies? I have not. Why is that?
So, it is a myth that microplastics are toxic. You can see details of the various studies in the myths tab in the section below. To summarize, having read many studies, here is what they say:
* Several studies show that microplastics are non-toxic to marine life
* Some studies show that microplastic intentionally pre-soaked in poison are somewhat toxic – but so is any substance
* Some studies state that microplastics protect marine life by binding poisons from the ocean and preventing exposure
* Other studies claim microplastics cause harm but none of them are credible because they use the wrong type of plastic, they use the wrong shape of particle, they use 100-10 million times too much plastic and they use fluorescent colored plastic which is completely unrealistic
Conclusion – microplastics are not toxic
Careful consideration shows no credible evidence that microplastics are causing harm. Some of the data even points to a protective effect whereby the plastic particles absorb toxins in the sea and shield marine animals from exposure.
There is a shocking amount of bad science whereby the experiments were so poorly designed that they should never have been accepted for publication. I have refereed articles for major publishers and I would not have allowed many of the environmental papers to be released. I would encourage people to take the challenge of doing good quality research so that we can learn more about the facts and take appropriate action.
Specific scientific articles
I made a statement that much of the microplastics works is not credible. Having reviewed many studies, it is some of the worst “science” I have ever seen. Those are bold statements, so now I will explain why I made them by looking at several publications individually and explaining why the science is either invalid or, in some cases, fraudulent.
First comes this warning from scientists who point out that many of the studies are not done under realistic conditions.
Microplastic exposure studies should be environmentally realistic
R. Lenza, K. Endersa, and T. G. Nielsen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(29), E4121 – E4122 . [201606615]. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606615113
The authors warn that:
“Experimental exposure concentrations tend to be between two to seven orders-of-magnitude higher than environmental levels.”
Meaning that many articles are using 100x and 10 million times more more plastic and toxin than are found in the environment. Dose is very important for toxicity. For example, breathing 20% oxygen keeps us alive where 100% oxygen is lethal. Therefore, they go one to say:
“Microplastic research is an emerging field, and there is a lot of misunderstanding and in some cases over- reaction or misinterpretation of results from MP science in the public. We therefore strongly suggest that future studies of MP impact on marine ecosystems should also include concentrations that have been documented in the environment to yield more realistic estimates of sublethal effects.”
Another article points out that the studies are usually done on the wrong kinds of plastic. Many studies are done on polystyrene when that is not at all common in the ocean. Polystyrene is just 1% of microplastic in the ocean so why focus on that? The reason is that polystyrene particles are easily obtainable making it convenient for the scientists to order them.
Studies of the effects of microplastics on aquatic organisms: What do we know and where should we focus our efforts in the future?
“Analysis of the available data revealed that 1) despite their widespread detection in field-based studies, polypropylene, polyester and polyamide particles were under-represented in laboratory studies; 2) fibres and fragments (800–1600 µm) are the most common form of MPs reported in animals collected from the field; 3) to date, most studies have been conducted on fish; knowledge is needed about the effects of MPs on other groups of organisms, especially invertebrates. Furthermore, there are significant mismatches between the types of MP most commonly found in the environment or reported in field studies and those used in laboratory experiments.”
They correctly noted that studies are done on the wrong plastics and on the wrong shapes. In the oceans fibers and fragments are found, whereas all the studies are on perfectly round particles.
Now let’s look at a couple of studies that make plastics out to be a problem…
Chemical Pollutants Sorbed to Ingested Microbeads from Personal Care Products Accumulate in Fish
The abstract for the article states:
“This work provides evidence that microbeads from personal care products are capable of transferring sorbed pollutants to fish that ingest them.”
Later, the article says:
“The bioavailability of PBDEs sorbed to microbeads that did accumulate in the fish is of concern, considering the large volume of MBs (and other microplastics) entering the aquatic environment and their largely unknown environmental fates. Implications for the food chain, including the human diet, from this very fine fraction of plastic debris demand further investigation.”
That sounds like it could be a problem, so I read the article in detail. First, they showed that polyethylene beads from facial wash had no effect on fish that ate them. Then they soaked the beads in known toxins so that they beads absorbed the poison. They fed the toxin loaded beads to the fish and confirmed that a small proportion of the toxins was transferred to the fish.
What does this mean? Let’s picture what would happen in the ocean. The PE beads (proven to be harmless alone), will absorb toxic chemicals. That means less toxic chemicals in the water that the fish are in. That’s great news. What happens if the fish eat the plastic beads? Just 0-12% of the toxin is released by the beads because the toxic chemicals prefer to stay inside the beads. That’s more good news! The plastic beads are purifying the water and protecting the fish. The title of the article could have been “Microplastics miraculously effective at sequestering toxins and purifying seawater”.
I hope this shows you how desperate the environmentalists are to do studies that are unrealistic, improperly performed and incorrectly interpreted. It’s shocking.
In fact, at least two studies have proven that microplastics are very effective at binding toxins and protecting marine wildlife (polypropylene study, nylon study). Yet another study directly tested the hypothesis that microplastics (MP) would lead to accumulation of toxins in fish. What they found instead was:
“Contaminant concentrations in the muscle tissue were unrelated to the MP levels in fish, suggesting a lack of direct links between the levels of HOCs and MP ingestion. Thus, despite their ubiquity, MP are unlikely to have a measurable impact on food intake or the total body burden of hydrophobic contaminants in Baltic herring.”
Source: Hydrophobic organic contaminants are not linked to microplastic uptake in Baltic Sea herring, M. Ogonowski, V. Wenman, S. Danielsson and E. Gorokhova
Oyster reproduction is affected by exposure to polystyrene microplastics
Sussarellu et al., PNAS March 1, 113 (9) 2430-2435 (2016)
The authors state:
“This study provides evidence that micro-PS cause feeding modifications and reproductive disruption in oysters, with significant impacts on offspring.”
I then noticed this:
“analyses on extracted micro-PS particles detected bibenzyl and 1(2H)naphthalenone,3,4,dihydro4phenyl with >90% correspondences”
This means that the PS spheres they used contained toxins not found in household polystyrene. The beads used contain added surfactant and are cross-linked with divinyl benzene, which explains the toxic extractibles found (see manufacturer’s description).
In conclusion, this experiment cannot be trusted because it was not performed properly. They used polystyrene beads when only 1% of plastics in the ocean is polystyrene. They also used a special type of polystyrene that contains toxic chemicals not found in normal polystyrene.
Next is a study on worms that feed on sediment.
“Biouptake in worms was lower by 76% when PCBs were associated with polypropylene compared to sediment. The presence of microplastics in sediments had an overall impact of reducing bioavailability and transfer of HOCs to sediment-ingesting organisms. Since the vast majority of sediment and suspended particles in the environment are natural organic and inorganic materials, pollutant transfer through particle ingestion will be dominated by these particles and not microplastics. Therefore, these results support the conclusion that in most cases the transfer of organic pollutants to aquatic organisms from microplastic in the diet is likely a small contribution compared to other natural pathways of exposure.”
Differential bioavailability of polychlorinated biphenyls associated with environmental particles: Microplastic in comparison to wood, coal and biochar
Another study states the following about microplastics (MP):
“Thus, despite their ubiquity, MP are unlikely to have a measurable impact on food intake or the total body burden of hydrophobic contaminants in Baltic herring.”
Hydrophobic organic contaminants are not linked to microplastic uptake in Baltic Sea herring
Both polyethylene, and polypropylene, by far the most abundant microplastics in the ocean, have been proven to absorb toxins from water and sequester them, thereby protecting marine wildlife. Nylon has been shown to do the same, the PA (polyamide) particles were themselves harmless and reduced the amount of BPA in the water:
“The PA particles themselves did not induce negative effects, while the effects of BPA alone followed a typical dose-dependent manner. Sorption of BPA to PA particles prior to exposure led to a reduction of BPA in the aqueous phase.”
Microplastics Reduce Short-Term Effects of Environmental Contaminants. Part I: Effects of Bisphenol A on Freshwater Zooplankton Are Lower in Presence of Polyamide Particles
For the next article, I did a search of the title to find a link to share here and Google revealed this hit, which was quite a surprise:
“We wish to report a strong suspicion of research misconduct in the following study by researchers at Uppsala University, published in the journal Science on June 3 2016”
Lönnstedt OM and Eklöv P (2016) Environmentally relevant concentrations of microplastic particles influence larval fish ecology. Science 352: 1213-1216. doi: 10.1126/science.aad8828
“Regarding point #4 above, we have evidence including witness reports, photos of the experimental setup, and email correspondences that the experiments reported in the paper were not performed as described by the authors. To be clear, there is a significant mismatch between what is described in the paper and how the experiments were actually performed. Examples include:
* The exposure times of eggs and larvae reported in the paper are longer than the actual duration of the experiment at the Ar research station in Gotland, Sweden.
* The actual number of replicate tanks and fish is lower than what is stated in the paper.
* Aquaria maintenance and monitoring were not conducted as described in the paper.
For these and other reasons, we strongly suspect that this study constitutes a case of research misconduct.”
You read that correctly. Apparently, these researchers were so desperate to make plastics look bad that they falsified their results. After an investigation, the article was retracted.
I have many more articles that I will be reading and commenting on here.
There is one meta-analysis on this topic but unfortunately, they did not properly screen the articles they included. I checked with the lead author and she admitted that even the studies where they intentionally soaked the plastic in toxins were included. I hope that they do a new meta-analysis only on articles that have been conducted properly. Even with the inclusion of those suspect studies, the meta-analysis showed surprisingly few adverse effects.
Microplastics in fisheries and aquaculture – Status of knowledge on their occurrence and implications for aquatic organisms and food safety
One may wonder whether creatures containing plastic could be eaten by people and whether any harm would result. I found one detailed report on that topic and they concluded:
“As an example, a worst case estimate of exposure to microplastics after consumption of a portion of mussels (225 g) would be 7 µg of plastics. Based on this estimate and considering the highest concentrations of additives or contaminants reported in microplastics, and assuming complete release from microplastics, the microplastics will have a negligible effect on the total dietary exposure to PBTs and plastic additives. These contaminants are estimated to contribute only <0.1 percent of the total dietary exposure to these compounds.”
I have not seen a single credible article showing microplastics to be toxic. When reading such studies we should ignore studies based on polystyrene, ignore studies using 100-10 million fold more particles than are actually present in the ocean and ignore studies where the plastic used was intentionally loaded with poison. Realistic, professionally designed experiments are needed if we are to draw meaningful conclusions and so far those realistic studies show no harmful effects.
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Are Jan. 6 rioters traitors? So far, criminal charges say no
By MICHAEL TARM
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-capitol-siege-61007f50fb3ebe15a07982112f05730c
CHICAGO (AP) — Plotted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory: Check. Discussed bringing weapons into Washington to aid in the plan: Check. Succeeded with co-insurrectionists, if only temporarily, in stopping Congress from carrying out a vital constitutional duty: Check.
Accusations against Jan. 6 rioter Thomas Caldwell certainly seem to fit the charge of sedition as it’s generally understood — inciting revolt against the government. And the possibility of charging him and others was widely discussed after thousands of pro-Trump supporters assaulted scores of police officers, defaced the U.S. Capitol and hunted for lawmakers to stop the certification. Some called their actions treasonous.
But to date, neither Caldwell nor any of the other more than 500 defendants accused in the attack has been indicted for sedition or for the gravest of crimes a citizen can face, treason. And as an increasing number of lesser charges are filed and defendants plead guilty, those accusations may never be formally levied.
Some legal scholars say that sedition charges could be justified but that prosecutors may be reluctant to bring them because of their legal complexity and the difficulty historically in securing convictions. Overzealousness in applying them going back centuries has also discredited their use. And defense attorneys say discussions of such charges only add to the hyperbole around the events of that day.
Overall, the bar for proving sedition isn’t as high as it is for the related charge of treason. Still, sedition charges have been rare.
The last time U.S. prosecutors brought such a case was in 2010 in an alleged Michigan plot by members of the Hutaree militia to incite an uprising against the government. But a judge ordered acquittals on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial, saying prosecutors relied too much on hateful diatribes protected by the First Amendment and didn’t, as required, prove the accused ever had detailed plans for a rebellion.
Among the last successful convictions for seditious conspiracy stemmed from another, now largely forgotten storming of the Capitol in 1954 when four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the House floor, wounding five representatives.
Treason is one of the few crimes specifically defined in the Constitution. It’s defined as “levying war” against the U.S. or “giving aid and comfort” to its enemies. Legal scholars say the Founding Fathers, who were themselves accused of treason by the British, sought to clearly articulate it because they knew the potential to misapply it to legitimate dissent.
In a landmark ruling in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote that treason required a citizen actually go to war against the United States, not to just brainstorm or draw up plans for it. Even recruiting and training rebels for war, he argued, isn’t treason if war is never engaged.
In the history of the U.S., the government has convicted fewer than 10 people for treason, according to the FBI.
Among the last treason cases was of American-born Iva Toguri D’Aquino — known as “Tokyo Rose” during World War II for her anti-American broadcasts — convicted in 1949 of “giving aid and comfort” to Japan. President Gerald Ford pardoned her in 1977 after reports U.S. authorities pressured some witnesses to lie.
The only American charged with treason since the World II era was Adam Gadahn, indicted in 2006 for giving “aid and comfort” to al-Qaida. Before he could be tried, he was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan.
Carlton Larson, a University of California law professor and author of “On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law,” ruled out treason for the Jan. 6 rioters. But he believes some qualify for a provision of seditious conspiracy on “hindering” the execution of U.S. laws. “I think it easily fits,” he said.
Last summer, then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen sent a memo allowing federal prosecutors to consider sedition charges against police reform demonstrators, particularly in Portland, Oregon, where clashes between rioters and federal authorities raged outside a federal courthouse. It was never used.
But the memo said the Justice Department believed the statute doesn’t require proof of a plot to overthrow the government and could also be used when a defendant tries to oppose the government’s authority by force.
In the weeks after the Capitol attack, federal prosecutors said they were looking at all possible charges. Washington’s then-acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on March 17 that prosecutors were mulling seditious conspiracy charges against some rioters.
“I believe the facts do support those charges,” Sherwin said. “And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that.”
He had first floated the possibility in January, saying a special group of prosecutors was examining whether they would apply to any rioters. The Justice Department did not respond to questions about what happened to that group, or why no sedition charges were ever brought. And Sherwin’s comments were criticized by a federal judge and defense lawyers who said it was inappropriate to discuss ongoing investigations publicly. He left the Justice Department soon after.
The Justice Department is continuing its work to prosecute a record number of cases. But they have so far opted for comparatively run-of-the-mill charges, like entering a restricted area and obstructing an official proceeding. Caldwell faces those charges, as well as conspiracy, which, like sedition, carries a maximum 20-year prison term. Treason carries a possible death sentence.
He has been charged alongside other members and associates of the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group with conspiring to block the vote certification. He later boasted in a message to a friend about grabbing an American flag, joining the crowd that surged toward the Capitol and saying “let’s storm the place and hang the traitors.” The 65-year-old from Virginia told his friend, “If we’d had guns I guarantee we would have killed 100 politicians.”
Defense attorneys say hyperbole has been a hallmark of the Jan. 6 prosecutions.
“If grandiose rhetoric was evidence, the Government’s case would be very strong,” Caldwell’s lawyer, David Fischer, wrote in one filing. He didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
In filings, Fischer also said prosecutors took his client’s words out of context to falsely accuse an ailing 20-year military veteran. He said Caldwell, like many veterans, was prone to puffery and enjoyed portraying himself in recounting his actions on Jan. 6 as a movie character who picks up a battle flag to lead the charge.
Fischer also asked Caldwell’s Washington judge this month to transfer Caldwell’s case to another city on grounds Sherwin’s comments regarding sedition would prejudice jurors.
On Jan. 5, another rioter, Guy Reffitt, allegedly spoke of “dragging … people out of the Capitol by their ankles” and installing a new government. The 48-year-old Texan came prepared for battle on Jan. 6, carrying a gun and wearing body armor as he pushed through Capitol police lines as officers shot him with rubber bullets, prosecutors said.
Charges against Reffitt include entering a restricted building with a deadly weapon, as well as obstructing justice by threatening his teenage children. The oil industry consultant allegedly told them later in January they’d be traitors if they turned him in. He added, “Traitors get shot.”
In an unapologetic note written from jail and filed with the court in May, Reffitt denied there had ever been a conspiracy, and provided a chilling reason.
“If overthrow (of the government) was the quest,” Reffitt wrote about Jan. 6, “it would have no doubt been overthrown.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.
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Follow Michael Tarm on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mtarm
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-capitol-siege-61007f50fb3ebe15a07982112f05730c
COVID-19: PM's easing of England's restrictions is 'irresponsible', BMA says
The medical body says the government is "throwing caution to the wind" by scrapping all regulations at once.
Tuesday 13 July 2021 03:23, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-pms-easing-of-englands-restrictions-is-irresponsible-bma-says-12354633
Boris Johnson's decision to press ahead with easing coronavirus restrictions in England is "irresponsible", senior doctors say.
The prime minister announced on Monday that most of the last remaining restrictions in England would be axed from 19 July.
This was despite modelling showing that there could be 1,000 to 2,000 hospital admissions per day, with deaths reaching between 100 and 200 per day by mid-August, when the peak of the current wave is expected.
The British Medical Association said easing restrictions risked "potentially devastating consequences".
BMA council chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: "It's irresponsible - and frankly perilous - that the government has decided to press ahead with plans to lift the remaining COVID-19 restrictions on 19 July.
"The BMA has repeatedly warned of the rapidly rising infection rate and the crippling impact that COVID-related hospitalisations continue to have on the NHS, not only pushing staff to the brink of collapse but also driving up already lengthy waiting times for elective care.
"The prime minister repeatedly emphasised the importance of a slow and cautious approach, but in reality the government is throwing caution to the wind by scrapping all regulations in one fell swoop - with potentially devastating consequences."
Mr Johnson had earlier admitted the pandemic "is not over" and that people should still proceed with caution, as figures showed a further 34,471 laboratory-confirmed infections in the UK in the 24 hours to 9am on Monday.
Professor Adam Finn, a member of the government's Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said: "I sympathise with the political message that (restrictions) can't go on forever but on the other hand we really don't want to get to a situation where things get so bad that we have to reimpose restrictions and it's a very delicate balancing act to get that right.
"The more you let the genie out of the bottle the harder it is to put it back in, though there is a large amount of uncertainty."
But Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, was more optimistic, saying: "Although hospitalisation rates are rising rapidly at present, we can expect these to have slowed substantially within the next week or two.
"That does not mean that relaxing restrictions has no risk. But I would argue leaving Step 4 (lockdown lifting) till the autumn carries a far greater risk."
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-pms-easing-of-englands-restrictions-is-irresponsible-bma-says-12354633
British teenager becomes youngest person to circumnavigate globe solo
Travis Ludlow, 18, set a new Guinness World Record on Monday after touching down in the Netherlands following a 26,675-mile solo flight
ByAnita Singh, ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
12 July 2021 • 7:39pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/british-teenager-becomes-youngest-person-circumnavigate-globe/
A British teenager has become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe, after Covid setbacks almost cost him the record.
Travis Ludlow set a new Guinness World Record when he touched down in the Netherlands on Monday after a 26,675-mile solo flight.
Aged 18 years and 150 days, he beat the previous record-holder, Mason Andrews from the US, who was 13 days older when he completed his journey in 2018.
Travis had intended to set the record last year, when he was 17, but his plans were thwarted by Covid travel restrictions.
He took off in the Cessna 172R Diesel from Teuge airport in the Netherlands on May 29 and arrived back after traversing four continents, 15 countries and 63 stops. He then flew home to High Wycombe, Bucks, where he was presented with his world record certificate.
Travis took his private pilot licence while sitting his GCSEs, and his instrument rating qualification while studying for his A-levels at Great Marlow School in Buckinghamshire. He left school four days before beginning his adventure.
Travis’s grandfather was a photographer with the RAF, but that was his only family link to aviation. Yet his fascination with planes was evident from an early age.
His proud father, Nick Ludlow, told The Telegraph: "When he came to me at 10 and said he wanted to do this, I just patted him on the back and said, 'Off you go'. I thought, 'I’m sure you want to be an astronaut or a tank driver too.' But he’s just never given up.
"He doesn’t give up on anything. I bought him a unicycle and he taught himself to ride it in three days, and three month later he rode it in a triathlon. He flew a glider on his 14th birthday and it just escalated.
"Travis has been doing amazing things for quite some time now. If anyone’s going to do this sort of thing, it’s him. He’s that type of kid."
Mr Ludlow and his wife, Loryn, endured sleepless nights as they tracked Travis’s journey.
"There were periods of the trip when my wife and I were taking it in turns to have two hours’ sleep. It was very stressful. I’ve been working with Travis on this for three years but I didn’t expect to be so exhausted. I’m glad it’s over," he said.
Mr Ludlow said that Travis’s ambition now was "to motivate young people to follow their dreams". But his immediate plan was to celebrate his return with a meal at Nando’s.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/british-teenager-becomes-youngest-person-circumnavigate-globe/
‘Chaotic’ queues at Heathrow after security staff forced to self-isolate
By Lizzie Roberts
12 July 2021 • 5:27pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/chaotic-queues-atheathrow-security-staff-forced-self-isolate/
Passengers at Heathrow Airport were faced with "chaotic" queues of up to two and a half hours on Monday after security staff were forced to self-isolate, delaying 15 flights.
Images posted on social media showed long lines of travellers inside Terminal 5, with little room for social distancing.
British Airways delayed around 15 flights by 30 minutes to allow travellers extra time to make it through the airport due to the long waits, it is understood.
Airport staff reportedly told travellers that "120 security staff" had been told to isolate after just one colleague tested positive. Heathrow later confirmed that some staff had been told to self-isolate, causing "passenger congestion" in the terminal.
But the airport was unable to confirm how many staff were isolating, how many had tested positive and whether they were contacted by the NHS Test and Trace team or pinged by the smartphone app.
Heathrow said contingency measures to bring in extra staff were stepped up as soon as the shortages were flagged.
Kathryn Wylie, from Glasgow described her experience at Terminal 5 as "chaos", saying: "Both security points in T5 were queued back the full way of the terminal. People easily waiting an hour to get through, flights delayed after boarding to wait for passengers to get on who were caught up at security."
Ms Wylie said there were "easily over 2,000" people in Terminal 5 while she was there and water was being handed out to passengers.
Laurence Modiano, who was due to fly to Malpensa, said check-in staff told him the staff shortages was "due to 120 security staff being told on their NHS apps to self-isolate".
He later received an email from BA apologising for the "inconvenience" and confirming that the delays were "due to security staffing issues at Heathrow".
Keaton Stone, a BBC producer on The Sky at Night, tweeted that he had "tried to stay at home or at least deploy maximum social distancing all week" ahead of his flight on Monday morning. "Seems slightly redundant when this is what greets you at the airport," he said, showing pictures of the packed terminal.
Extra staff were brought in to make up the shortfall, a Heathrow spokesman said, adding that the security waiting times had returned to normal by the afternoon.
A spokesman for the airport said: "Earlier today we experienced some passenger congestion in Terminal 5 departures, due to colleagues being instructed to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace. We have activated additional team members to assist passengers with their journeys and the operation has now returned to normal. We apologise to our passengers for any inconvenience caused."
Passengers flying business or first class were also unable to use the fast track lane and the dedicated Gold Wing because its security lane was closed.
Many passengers arriving at Heathrow in recent months have suffered long delays due to extra Covid checks.
British Airways is also facing a "significantly under-resourced period", according to a BA staff union memo. "This has been caused by a combination of factors, increased self-isolation, higher than expected customer loads, and of course an increase to the flying programme," it said.
The airline said it was operating its flights as planned.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/chaotic-queues-atheathrow-security-staff-forced-self-isolate/
Texas House Democrats preparing to flee the state in move that could block voting restrictions bill, bring Legislature to a halt
A majority of Democrats in the Texas House plan to fly to Washington, D.C., on Monday afternoon in a bid to again deny Republicans the quorum needed to pass new voting restrictions with 27 days left in a special legislative session called largely for that purpose.
BY ALEXA URA AND CASSANDRA POLLOCK JULY 12, 202112:15 PM CENTRAL
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/07/12/texas-democrats-voting-bill-quorum/
Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives plan to leave the state and fly to Washington, D.C., on Monday afternoon, according to sources with knowledge of the plan, in a bid to again deny Republicans the quorum needed to pass new voting restrictions with 27 days left in a special legislative session called largely for that purpose.
Upping the ante in both the legislative fight at home and the national debate over voting rights, most House Democrats are expected to board a flight out of Austin headed for the U.S. capital without a set return date. They’ll need at least 51 of the 67 Democratic representatives to flee for their plan to work. The House is set to reconvene Tuesday morning, but the absent Democrats could mean there will not be enough members present to conduct business under House rules.
With the national political spotlight on Texas’ efforts to further restrict voting, the Democratic exodus offers them a platform to continue pleading with Congress to act on restoring federal protections for voters of color. In Texas, the decamping will mark a more aggressive stance by Democrats to block Republican legislation further tightening the state’s voting rules as the GOP works against thinning statewide margins of victory.
Ultimately, Democrats lack the votes to keep the Republican-controlled Legislature from passing new voting restrictions, along with the other conservative priorities on Gov. Greg Abbott’s 11-item agenda for the special session.
Some Democrats hope their absence will give them leverage to force good-faith negotiations with Republicans, who they say have largely shut them out of negotiations over the voting bill. Both chambers advanced their legislation out of committees on party-line votes after overnight hearings, passing out the bills early Sunday morning after hearing hours of testimony mostly against the proposals and just a few days after making their revived proposals public. They are expected to bring the bills to the House and Senate floors for votes this week.
Even if Democratic lawmakers stay out of state for the next few weeks, the governor could continue to call 30-day sessions or add voting restrictions to the agenda when the Legislature takes on the redrawing of the state’s political maps later this summer.
Monday’s mass departure follows a Democratic walkout in May that kept Republicans from passing their priority voting bill at the end of the regular legislative session. For weeks, Democrats had indicated that skipping town during the special session remained an option as Republicans prepared for a second attempt at tightening the state’s voting laws.
House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, whose office did not immediately respond for a request for comment Monday, has signaled he may take a harder line against his Democratic colleagues than he did when members walked out in May.
“My Democratic colleagues have been quoted saying all options are on the table,” Phelan told KXAN-TV in an interview that aired the day before the special session began. “Respectfully, all options are on the table for myself as well.”
According to House rules adopted at the beginning of the regular session, two-thirds of the 150-member chamber must be present to conduct business. When the House is in session, legislators can vote to lock chamber doors to prevent colleagues from leaving and can order law enforcement to track down lawmakers who have already fled.
If a quorum is not present when the House convenes Tuesday, any House member can move to make what’s known as a call of the House to “to secure and maintain a quorum” to consider a certain piece of legislation, resolution or motion, under chamber rules. That motion must be seconded by 15 members and ordered by a majority vote. If that happens, the missing Democrats will become legislative fugitives.
“All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested, wherever they may be found, by the sergeant-at-arms or an officer appointed by the sergeant-at-arms for that purpose, and their attendance shall be secured and retained,” the House rules state. “The house shall determine on what conditions they shall be discharged.”
It’s unclear, though, what options Phelan may have to compel Democrats to return to the Legislature if they’re out of state.
The House voting bill as passed by committee over the weekend would rein in local voting initiatives like drive-thru and 24-hour voting, further tighten the rules for voting by mail, bolster access for partisan poll watchers and ban local election officials from proactively sending out applications to request mail-in ballots.
The Democrats’ departure also calls into question other items included on Abbott’s special session agenda, including legislation to provide funding for the Legislature. Last month, Abbott vetoed a section of the state budget that funds the Legislature for the two-year budget cycle that starts Sept. 1. He did so in retribution for Democrats’ walkout in May. If the Legislature does not pass a supplemental budget before the new cycle begins, more than 2,100 legislative staffers and individuals working at legislative agencies could be impacted.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/07/12/texas-democrats-voting-bill-quorum/