AG Garland Should File Charges Against Trump

The following post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

After today’s explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson — who served as chief assistant to Mark Meadows and was literally and figuratively in the middle of Trump’s White House — I don’t see how Attorney General Merrick Garland can avoid prosecuting Trump, as well as Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani.

If you didn’t hear or see her testimony, Hutchinson portrayed a plot, in which Trump was directly involved, to stop the counting of electoral ballots on January 6. Meadows, Giuliani, Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone were also directly involved. Trump knew rioters were coming to Washington with weapons, and knew they had weapons on January 6. He knew they were threatening the life of Mike Pence. He knew they were dangerous. He wanted to be on Capitol Hill when they stormed the Capitol. He could have stopped them at any point, but he chose not to.

It was the most chilling depiction yet of a president in charge of an attempted coup. Trump knew exactly what was happening and what he was doing. He knew he was acting in violation of his oath of office and inciting violence in order to stay in office. He repeatedly refused to listen to reason, or to change course.

More than any other hearing to date, the audience for today’s hearing was not just the American public but also the Attorney General. Time and again, Hutchinson gave testimony about serious federal crimes. 

Hutchinson testified that (in rough chronological order):

1.  As early as December, a plan was emerging that was considered “potentially dangerous for our democracy” and with “dangerous repercussions,” John Ratcliffe, Trump’s director of national intelligence, told Hutchinson at the time.

2.  When Attorney General Barr said publicly that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election, Trump exploded – throwing lunch against the wall of the dining room off the Oval Office, breaking plates. When she attempted to help the valet clean up, the valet warned Hutchinson to stay clear of him.

3.  On the evening of January 2, Giuliani asked Hutchinson, “Cass, are you excited for the 6th? It’s going to be a great day. We’re going to the Capitol. Talk to the Chief about it.” When she spoke with Meadows, he said “there’s a lot going on Cass … things may get real, real bad on January 6.”

4.  On January 4, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien asked if he could speak with Meadows about potential violence on January 6. Tony Ornato, Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of all security, also had reports of potential violence on January 6.

5.  On January 5, Trump asked Meadows to speak with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn; Hutchinson believes they talked. Flynn had set up a “war room” at the Willard Hotel. Meadows wanted to join their meeting but Hutchinson advised against it. He dialed into the meeting instead.

6.  On the morning of January 6, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asked Hutchinson to “please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” He was “concerned we were obstructing justice or obstructing the electoral count” and “look like we were inciting a riot.”

7.  Moments before his January 6 rally on the ellipse, Trump was angry because he wanted the area to be filled with his supporters and worried that camera shots would show it sparsely filled. When told that Secret Service wasn’t letting people with dangerous weapons through the metal detectors (magnetometers), Trump said: “I don’t fucking care they have weapons. Let my people in. They aren’t here to hurt me. Take the magnetometers away” and “they can march to the Capitol after the rally is over.”

8.  Later, when Trump was finishing his speech and rioters were on the way to the Capitol, Ornato asked Hutchinson to let Meadows know of the danger. But Meadows didn’t want to hear it. Sitting in a secure vehicle near the ellipse, Meadows repeatedly shut the door on her. Almost a half hour later, when she was finally able to tell him of the danger, he said “Alright, how much longer does the president have left in his speech?”

9.  When Trump was back in his limousine (“the beast”) after the rally, he wanted to go to the Capitol but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. When chief Secret Service agent Bobby Engle refused, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel and then lunged at Engle. 

10.  When the riot began, and they were back in the White House. Hutchinson heard Meadows tell Cipillone, “The President doesn’t want to do anything about it.” Moments later, when Cipillone and Meadows met with Trump, Hutchinson heard them talking about the “hang Mike Pence chants.” A few minutes later, when Cipillone told Meadows, “Mark we need to do something more, they’re literally calling for VP to be hung,” Meadows said, “you heard him, he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong, and Mike deserves it.”

11.  As rioters stormed the Capitol, many people phoned Meadows, urging that Trump tell rioters to stop. He could easily have walked down to briefing room just steps from the Oval Office. But Trump did nothing until 4:17 pm when he released a video, telling the rioters “go home, we love you, you’re very special … go home in peace.”

12.  The next day, on January 7, many of his advisers wanted Trump to give remarks about national healing, but Trump resisted. Hutchinson said “he didn’t think he needed to do anything more” and “didn’t think the rioters had done anything wrong, that the person who did something wrong was Mike Pence.” Concerned that his cabinet might otherwise invoke the 25th amendment and relieve him of his duties, Trump ultimately delivered remarks, but still refused to use the words “this election is now over.”

13.  Both Giuliani and Meadows wanted presidential pardons.

***

A final note: Liz Cheney, vice-chair of the committee, noted that several potential witnesses had been warned not to testify or to testify in ways that would not implicate Trump. She reminded the public (and any potential witnesses) that this attempted interference was itself a federal crime.

The Most Irresponsible Performance By Presidential Lawyers

(The image of Trump's election attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was painted by Jim Carrey.)

Donald Trump is the biggest sore loser in this nation's history. Instead of conceding defeat and helping the incoming administration (as all presidents in the past have done), he has whined, lied, and even gone to court numerous times to have the election results overturned.

All of those efforts have failed, and many of his election attorneys have resigned. Trump has replaced them with the clownish and incompetent Rudy Giuliani -- a man who seems determined to completely destroy his already besmirched reputation and image.

On Thursday, Giuliani held a news conference, spewing lies and making outrageous claims for which he has no proof. Calling that "news" conference ludicrous would be a vast understatement.

The Republicans in Congress won't speak up to stop this ridiculous charade. But that is not true of everyone on the right-wing. The following is part of an editorial from the National Review -- the prestigious conservative magazine started by William Buckley.

The Rudy Giuliani–led press conference at the RNC yesterday was the most outlandish and irresponsible performance ever by a group of lawyers representing a president of the United States.

If Giuliani’s charge of a “national conspiracy” to produce fraudulent votes in Democratic cities around the country wasn’t far-fetched enough, attorney Sidney Powell ratcheted it up with the allegation that Communist-designed election machinery was used to change the vote from a Trump landslide to a narrow Biden victory. An obvious question is why, if you can manipulate the vote count via machine, you’d need to bother with old-fashioned fraudulent ballots. Powell’s story is that the surprisingly strong Trump turnout “broke the algorithm” of the corrupted machines, and then the fraudulent ballots were desperately hauled in to make up the difference.

This is lawyering worthy of the comments section of Breitbart News.

If there’s serious evidence for any of this, Giuliani and co. need to produce it immediately. Waving around affidavits at a press conference without allowing anyone to examine them doesn’t count. . . .

This magazine has always taken voter fraud seriously, and we hope that any that occurred in this election is exposed and prosecuted. But it’s important to recognize that the broad contours of the 2020 presidential vote make sense. At the RNC press conference, Giuliani made much of how the count switched against Trump after he established initial leads on Election Night in key states. Yet this was expected and a function of the fact that same-day ballots strongly favoring Republicans were counted first, and early votes strongly favoring Democrats were counted last.

Across the country, the basic picture is the same, without any notable anomalies — Trump excelled in rural areas, got wiped out in urban areas but often by slightly smaller margins than in 2016, and lost soundly in suburban counties, which proved decisive. . . .

Getting nowhere in court, the White House appears to be shifting to a political strategy based on blocking the certification of results and getting state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in states Trump lost. This is a profoundly undemocratic gambit that, if it were to enjoy any success, would precipitate a major constitutional crisis. The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to appoint electors, but it has been the norm for legislatures to appoint those electors on the basis of state elections for about 200 years. For any legislature to turn around now — solely because its party’s candidate lost and refuses to accept the result — and appoint electors in defiance of the public will would lack all legitimacy. It’d also be legally dubious, at best, to bypass state laws establishing elections as the mechanism for selecting presidential electors.

The most obvious way to prevent this travesty is for Republican state legislators to continue to reject it, the way almost all have done to this point. But they haven’t yet experienced a potential full-court press from Trump and his supporters (the Republican leaders of the Michigan state senate and house have been summoned to a White House meeting today). It’s also important for Republican senators to speak out against this effort and make it clear that they won’t stand for it when it comes time for Congress to consider electors. Finally, it’d be best of all if the president reconsidered going down this route.

He’s turning a narrow election defeat into a bid for infamy.

Giuliani Trashed His Own Reputation In Defense Of Trump

(Cartoon image is by Tim Campbell in the Independent Tribune.

Rudy Giuliani was once a respected and feared U.S. Attorney. Those days are long gone. And by becoming Donald Trump's attack-clown, he is insuring that his last shred of respect is now gone.

The following is just a tiny part of an article on Giuliani by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:

The addition of Giuliani to Trump’s legal team has been part of a larger change in the President’s strategy. During the first year of the Mueller investigation, which began in May of 2017, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, the lawyers leading Trump’s defense, took a coöperative approach, turning over as many as 1.4 million documents and allowing White House staffers to be interviewed. Their public comments were courteous, even respectful. But, just as the cautious and deliberate style of Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, and H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national-security adviser, eventually frustrated the President, so, too, did that of Trump’s legal team. Trump wanted a more combative approach. Giuliani told me, of the early defense, “I thought legally it was getting defended very well. I thought publicly it was not getting defended very well.”

Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt” and the prosecutors as “thugs.” He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.

This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the President has found him. . . .

At one point, I asked Giuliani whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his legacy.

“I don’t care about my legacy,” he told me. “I’ll be dead.”

The Three Biggest Liars In The United States

 (These caricatures of Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Rudy Giuliani are by the inimitable DonkeyHotey.)

There is no doubt who the king of all liars  is in this country. Without a doubt, it's Donald Trump. Trump has told more than 3,100 lies in only about 500 days in office.

The truth means nothing to Trump. He just says whatever he thinks will resonate with his base -- regardless of whether it's just a slight departure from reality or whether it's miles away from the truth. He doesn't care. He lies incessantly and about everything.

But while Trump is the king of all liars, the question remains -- who is the second biggest liar in the country. My nominees are Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lies to reporters (and the nation) several times a week in her official capacity as White House press spokesperson, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump's attack lawyer, who tells outrageous lies daily on any TV program that will give him a pulpit. Neither has any regard for the truth, and will tell any kind of lie to keep their boss happy.

I think both have seriously damaged their reputations. By endlessly exhibiting their dishonest buffoonery to the nation, they have shown they cannot be trusted. After Trump is gone, I don't think either of them could be hired by any reputable person or organization for any kind of job.

NOTE -- Honorable mention as outrageous liars also go out to Kellyanne Conway and Devin Nunes, both of whom have shown a willingness to lie for Trump at the drop of a hat.

Jim Carrey's Satirical Paintings Of Trump And His Allies

Comedian and actor Jim Carrey has taken up painting. His paintings are as effective as satire as anything he could say or write. Below are his paintings of Donald Trump (2), Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, John Bolton, Scott Pruitt, and Rudy Giuliani.