This is the second excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It”: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by Phillip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, published in the Washington Post this week. This excerpt is the account of events leading up to and including the insurrection on January 6, and it is chilling to the bone just how close we came to Trump and his goons taking down the government. This is a must read.
Trust me.
Wendy Davis and others have sued Trumpists for their dangerous conduct last October when they disrupted Biden campaign rallies and harassed a campaign bus as it attempted to travel on public roads. One suit is against 7 people who drove their flag festooned trucks dangerously close to the bus and even attempted to run it off the road. The suit was filed in federal court and claims the Trumpists violated the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act that made it a federal offense to obstruct, intimidate, or harass to stop political activities. The defendants were identified through their own social media posts including live video. Two of the defendants were also identified at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Here’s a good recap of the attack on the campaign bus:
A second suit was filed against the San Marcos Department of Public Safety and the San Marcos Marshal’s Department for failing to respond to desperate 911 calls begging for assistance. You’ll recall during the time that a Trump Train of trucks chased and harassed the Biden campaign bus the entire time they were touring South Texas and police were nowhere to be found.
This kind of behavior by political conservatives has been going on for years; I remember Nick Lampson being harassed years ago by thugs at his announcement event when he ran for Tom DeLay’s old seat. That was nothing compared to today where intolerance and hate are raised to an art form after 5 years of Trump’s influence on his party. Add that to the continuous stream of bile flowing out of social media, Fox Noise, OAN, and other propaganda sources and the result can be literally explosive. When the police stand aside during these events the result can be deadly.
The real tragedy here is that we have to depend on the federal courts in many of these cases since local and state courts in Red States can no longer be trusted to enforce laws against political allies. Hopefully the federal courts will give the plaintiffs a fair hearing.
So let’s be crystal clear about this issue. Ashli Babbit, brainwashed by bullshit from Trump and his sycophants, was part of the mob that unlawfully stormed the US Capitol to stop the Electoral College count, violently confronting police who were defending the buildings, the politicians, and staff who worked there. She was part of the lead group of extremists who was attempting to smash there way into the Speakers’ lobby where US Representatives and their staff were trying to escape. These extremists smashed the doors to the lobby, and when the windows were broken, Babbit was the first one to attempt jumping through to pursue those representatives. A security officer just behind the smashed door fire one shot, killing Babbit. Babbit was violently breaking the law, endangering herself and everyone around her. She was killed for that, because the security personnel had one job, and that was to protect the Congress and the Vice President. Unfortunate, certainly, but she bears 100% responsibility for the consequences of her violent criminality.
There are several videos of the incident and all of them show Babbitt being shot while breaching the door of the Speaker’s Lobby her actions were unquestionably criminal and endangering federal officials. Shortly after the shooting, though, The Noise Machine cranked up, and has been slowly building momentum to recast Babbitt as a “martyr”. I even ran across a right-winger on social media last week who said that Babbitt was “executed” for “doing nothing”. There’s a lot of words for what Babbitt did that day, but “nothing” isn’t one of them. Trump co-conspirator, Paul Gosar, has gone out of his way to defend Babbitt, even saying last week that officers were “lying in wait” to kill her. Setting aside the fact that he and other Teabagging Q Republicans should be brought up on insurrection charges, Gosar is playing with fire by repeating Fox Noise-OAN bullshit, and it’s all part of the orchestrated effort by Republicans to downplay the actual insurrection and felony violence committed by Babbitt and thousands of others that day.
It’s important that everyone else relain clear-headed and focused on bring all these people, including the Inciter-in-Chief to justice.
It’s all out war right now in Arizona, specifically Maricopa County, where Republicans have been presiding over an audit shitshow of the 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 election. We’ve talked about the sham that was cooked up by the Arizona State Senate, where they decided that it would be a really good idea to pander to Trump by pretending to count ballots and look for Chinese bamboo in the paper. The Arizona secretary of state has opposed the audit from the beginning, and now the Maricopa Board of Elections has weighed in with an open letter to the senate demanding that the audit be halted immediately. The letter was sent after Karen Fann, president of the senate, accused the board on Twitter of deleting the entire data base from the 2020 election, which, of course, is completely false.
Jack Sellers, the chairman of the elections board, both in public statements and in the letter ripped Fann, senate Republicans, and especially the “auditor”, Cyber Ninjas, for their incompetence. He also has refused to answer any more questions and demands. Here’s a quote from Sellers in that regard:
Jack Sellers, chair of Maricopa county board of supervisors, ends meeting by saying he is not responding to any more requests from state senate on Arizona audit. "Finish your report and be ready to defend it in a court of law," he says.
— Sam Levine (@srl) May 17, 2021
I had the opportunity to read the letter today and it’s a long, but fantastic read. Once choice paragraph I reproduce here:
“Next, let’s consider the County’s two separate forensic audits conducted in February of this year. You suggest that the Dominion proprietary password would have been necessary to conduct those audits. You are correct: it was. The forensic audit firms that the County hired, Pro V & V and SLI Compliance, are both accredited by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission as voting system testing laboratories. Because of that accredited status, signifying that these firms are specialists who have expertise with voting systems and understand how to audit them, Dominion Voting Systems provides Pro V & V and SLI Compliance with the necessary passwords to audit their machines.
Your chosen “auditors,” the Cyber Ninjas, are certainly many things. But “accredited by the EAC” is not one of them. Regardless, we cannot give you a password that we do not possess any more than we can give you the formula for Coca Cola. We do not have it; we have no legal right to acquire it; and so, we cannot give it to you.”
So Republicans are eating their own. Sellers and the Maricopa County Elections Board see the handwriting on the wall. They KNOW there was no material fraud in the election and KNOW that Arizona Republicans are walking straight off The Big Lie cliff in subservience to Trump. They KNOW that this shitshow will most certainly make all Republicans look like idiots, and they’re trying stop it before that happens.
I believe the Dems should take a different strategy. They should demand that the “audit” be completed, then demand that the results be made public and laid down next to the original count and the two recounts. Only then could everyone see what a sham this whole thing was and will show the Republicans for the morons that they really are.
Trump, even as late as this weekend, repeated the lie on his blog that the election was stolen from him by non-existent voter fraud. He bragged that 80% of Republicans believed that lie as he desperately tries to keep his iron grip on the party that he wants destroyed. Trump is nothing, if not obsesively vindictive. What’s telling, though, have been his actions. How do we know? Trump tried to wreck as much of the US government as he could on the way out the door. I don’t think he would have done that had he truly believed he won.
On November 9th, John McEtee, aide to Trump, told Douglas Macgregor, new acting defense secretary Chris Miller’s senior advisor, that Trump wanted full military withdrawal, by Inauguration Day, from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, all of Africa, and…wait for it…Germany. Recall that Miller had just taken on the defense job after Trump fired Mark Esper by tweet just a few days earlier. This, as you would imagine, was an impossible task, and worse, it was from out in left field. A written order followed two days later that commanded the Pentagon to withdraw troops from Somalia by December 15th, and Afghanistan bay January 15th. It was personally signed by Trump in his idiotic scribble. The order sent shockwaves through the Pentagon as leaders realized that this was an “off the books” operation with none of the usual planning, table top simulations, or alternatives. This was just Trump being Trump, and luckily the Pentagon held the line, slow walking the order to run out the clock.
At the same time, Trump tried to wreck the CIA and dig dirt on his enemies by installing loyalists at the top of the agency trying to get the director, Gina Haspel, to resign. Mercifully, that effort also failed as Pence and WH counsel Pat Cipollone came to Haspel’s defense. Switching tactics, Trump then installed a Nunes staffer and Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to the general counsel position at the NSA, a position difficult to terminate by the new administration. In an appropriate end to his short career, Ellis resigned in April after he had been sidelined by an IG investigation into his role in the handling of classified information and placed on indefinite leave.
It’s now just coming out that Trump’s DOJ tried to get the courts to unmask a Twitter user who had gotten under Devin Nunes skin with a parody account @NunesAlt. Barr’s attorneys sought a grand jury subpoena of Twitter to reveal the user’s actual name, and Twitter had fought the subpoena until the demand was dropped after Biden took office.
These are just a few examples of the lengths to which Trump went in the waning days of his infestation to wreck as much of the government that he could, install loyalists as his spies, and punish his supporters’ enemies. Luckily the actual public servants in these agencies kept their oaths to the Constitution, and repelled Trump’s attacks. Next time (if there is a next time) we might not be so lucky.
Having found nothing in their sham “audit” of 2020 election ballots from Maricopa County, they’re now using 5g cameras and black lights searching for bamboo in the paper of the ballots. Because presence of bamboo is the smoking gun that the ballots came from China, right? The Arizona GOP is hanging their entire Big Lie premise on the unfounded conspiracy theory that China flew in 40,000 fraudulent ballots on a Korean airliner on election day and then smuggled them into polling places all over Maricopa County. No matter that China LIKED Trump being president since he handed them Pacific Trade dominance, international markets because of his idiotic trade war, and allowed them to run rampant in the South China Sea during his entire infestation of the WH.
Not only is the Arizona GOP’s efforts to overturn the election dangerous, it makes them look like idiots.