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:

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.

Reuters, the NY Times, and Axios are all reporting that 100 prominent Republicans, sick of Trumpism, are threatening to form a new party.  In a letter titled “A Call For American Renewal,” which may come out as soon as today, outlines the positions of these Republicans, who are alarmed at the iron grip Trump continues to exert on the once great party.  The as yet unnamed Republicans are threatening to start a new party if the GOP does not break with Trump and his lies.  Clearly the situation is seen as dire, and the group, said to include prominent figures such as Tom Ridge, is ready to break with the GOP, saying “The Republican Party is broken. It’s time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals.'”

This move, if undertaken, will be a seismic shift from our status quo two party system, and hopefully will restore a loyal opposition and isolate the insurrectionists and screwballs who now control the GOP.

Mike Lindell, the founder of My Pillow, which sells ripped up foam in a bag, has been banned from Vimeo for posting content from another banned user, Trump.  Being de-platformed from other social media and cut off from major online sales outlets, Lindell is presiding over the Titanic of pillow companies.  His biggest problem is that he enthusiastically embraced the Big Lie, and is now paying the price, having to defend against a $1 billion plus lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for perpetuating Trump’s lie, along with facing plummeting sales.

He’ll never learn, though, and will be just more cannon fodder for Trump’s reputational funeral pyre of formerly respected people who made the wrong choice.

File under Gravity Makes Things Fall Down:

Stating the obvious, federal judge ruled this week that former AG Bill Barr misled her, Congress, and the American people about the Mueller report, using an internal DOJ memo as the excuse to not charge Trump with obstruction of justice in the investigation.  Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the DC Circuit ordered the DOJ to release the memo saying that it was more of a strategy memorandum and not a legal opinion protected by attorney client privilege.

I would say there’s a good chance that Barr’s going to get his for letting Trump off the hook, lying in public, and then politicizing the DOJ to protect Trump and punish his enemies (and career staff).  This is long overdue, and I’ll be popping popcorn for this show.

Facebook’s oversight board just announced it is upholding Facebook’s ban of Trump from the platform, but there is a Big But. The Big But is that it is giving Facebook 6 months to determine Trump’s actual punishment; that is, the board said that they can’t just indefinitely ban him, that Facebook must treat him like other users with definite punishment communicated to him.  That seems pretty easy, since he egregiously violated numerous policies; incite to violence by itself is reason to permanently ban him. Zuckerberg now just need to grow a spine and do it.