photo above: Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen stand as Vice President Mike Pence arrives for a 2019 signing ceremony. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
WN: Don’t look now, but it seems close to half of America has taken leave of its senses, indeed has embraced “pure insanity” (then-deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue) in relation to Trump . . . The more it was clear that “Trump [was] about to lose his grip on the presidency,” the more it was brutally apparent that his senior government handlers had obstinately lost their grip on Reality . . . And they were trying to create an “Alternate Reality“–like Kellyanne Conway’s famous “alternative facts“–ex nihilo.
It turns out that not even Americans can do that (“the greatest nation ever, ever!”– Insurrectionist Jason Riddle of New Hampshire, currently running for the Senate, though slightly confused), that so far, only God has pulled that trick off! Thank God!
For in fact Facts and Reality have always turned out to be stubborn little bastards . . .
So if an election does not yield Trumpist requisite results, insurrection may! And America perdures in facing a clear and present danger. As an American lawyer friend tells me: The only safety from America’s “Public Enemy Number One” is Trump in jail. And I, a penal abolitionist, think he’s right . . .
The documents reveal Trump and his allies’ increasingly desperate efforts between December and early January to push bogus conspiracy theories and cling to power – and the struggle of bewildered justice department officials to resist them.
“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, which released the emails on Tuesday.
At least five times, the documents show, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, instructed justice department officials to investigate false allegations of voter fraud, including a conspiracy theory called “Italygate”, which claims electoral data was changed from Europe by means including military satellites and with the knowledge of the CIA.
On 1 January Meadows, a fierce Trump loyalist, sent Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, a link to a YouTube video detailing the “Italygate” theory. Rosen forwarded the email to the then acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, who replied: “Pure insanity.”
The documents also show that Trump pressured Rosen to make the justice department take up election fraud claims.
excerpts:
By late December and early January, it became clear just how desperate President Donald Trump and his team were to grab hold of something — anything — that could genuinely cast doubt on his election defeat. They had lost in court over and over again. A Supreme Court one-third full of Trump appointees turned them away. The “Kraken” that Sidney Powell promised never arrived. And we were just days away from Congress formally accepting Joe Biden’s victory.
This desperate time apparently called for extremely desperate measures. And that’s precisely what arrived in the inboxes of top Justice Department officials.
That the Trump team would grow particularly desperate with Trump about to lose his grip on the presidency, once and for all, perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. But even in that context, some of the emails are gobsmacking. (The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has a good rundown here.1)
The draft [complaint to be filed on behalf of the federal government at the Supreme Court] mirrored the Texas lawsuit so closely that it included one particularly noteworthy claim.
“The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,” it reads. “For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.”
On Dec. 4, I looked at this jaw-dropping claim. It’s not complicated: The analysis assumes that votes counted before 3 a.m. and after 3 a.m. would not be different. But they were different: The later votes at issue came from large cities that took longer to tally their results — and that were far more heavily Democratic.
In other words, even setting aside the utter lack of evidence of fraud having occurred (that is, the lack of evidence of people actually changing any votes), this statistical analysis was flawed to the point of ludicrousness a week before the Supreme Court rejected the Texas claim. Yet two weeks after the court tossed that case, it appeared in near-whole-cloth in the inbox of the acting attorney general in hopes that it would be treated seriously.
What mattered to Trump wasn’t that the claims be accurate. It was that they be treated as at least potentially accurate and — who knows? — maybe he’d get to stay in the White House. Trump had heard something he wanted to hear, and he wanted the federal government to agree with that, not with reality. His aides did their best to make it happen, despite the various ways in which their time could obviously have been better spent at the moment.
Not for the first time, Trump was stymied by individuals unwilling to accede to his fantasies.[↩]
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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