Two weeks after the 2020 election, lawyers closely allied with Donald Trump’s re-election campaign held a news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington, where they laid out a bizarre theory claiming that Dominion Voting Systems had worked with Smartmatic, a voting software firm, as well as financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential election from Trump and hand it to Joe Biden. Among the problems with their bizarre claims: the lawyers must have known they were false.
Rudy Giuliani explained the legal basis of his claims about voter fraud. “I know crimes,” said the former prosecutor. “I can smell them. You don’t have to smell this one, I can prove it to you 18 different ways. I can prove to you that Trump won Pennsylvania by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan, probably by 50,000 votes.” Needless to say, he provided no such proof.
Fellow attorney Sidney Powell stepped forward to present a jaw-dropping collection of claims that included how Democrats had engaged in a multistate conspiracy to “inject” hundreds of thousands of Biden votes by using voting machines built to appease Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez with the help of wealthy Jew George Soros and sent American votes overseas to servers in Germany, where they could be altered according to orders from antifa, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (9/22). “Powell was detailed, if little short of deranged, in her claims about connections between Dominion and Smartmatic, the origins of their systems as a means of ensuring the election of long-dead dictator Hugo Chavez, the control of mysterious figures from antifa, and a connection to this Biden-Venezuelan-Jewish-Cuban-antifa conspiracy and the Clinton Foundation.”
Former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, in his defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign and most of its principals, recently entered into the record an internal Trump campaign memo from November 2020 that showed officials in the Trump campaign knew the bizarre theory was baseless.
The documents suggest the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Trump, the New York Times reported (9/21)
The memo rebutted a series of allegations that Powell and others were making in public. It found:
• Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.
• Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or Soros.
• And there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Powell and others had claimed.
As Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Coomer.
Just three days after the Nov. 19, 2020, press conference, Giuliani issued a statement in which he made another false claim: “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” wrote Giuliani. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”
Unfortunately for them, Sumner noted, not only had Giuliani introduced Powell and appeared with her in front of the nation’s cameras while she went on her everything-but-the-kitchen sink rant; Powell had been introduced by Trump attorney Jenna Ellis as part of “an elite strike team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign to make sure that our Constitution is protected.”
And there was some other fellow. Some guy on Twitter. What did he say?
“I look forward to Mayor Giuliani spearheading the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS! Rudy Giuliani, Joseph diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, a truly great team, added to our other wonderful lawyers and representatives!”
Within days of Trump’s “distancing” from Powell, she was right back at the center of his representation, acting as the lead attorney on lawsuits filed in December and January. Any claim that she was not connected to the Trump campaign is less believable than Hugo Chavez and George Soros counting votes in Spain using an antifa-branded server.
COUP PLAN CALLED FOR PENCE TO DECLARE TRUMP WINNER BY LEAVING OUT 7 STATES. Mike Pence tried “over and over” to find a way to satisfy Trump’s demand that he overturn the election’s outcome, ending with a phone call in which even Dan Quayle informed him that he had “no power” to do anything. Legally, Pence’s entire role was to gavel the session into order, listen to the roll call of states reporting their electoral results, and make a formal announcement of the totals. That’s it.
So precisely what illegal action was it that Trump wanted Pence to take on Jan. 6? Now we know, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (9/21), after CNN made public a six-point memo from one of the attorneys who represented Trump in his failed lawsuits against various states, John Eastman.
Eastman was previously best known for writing an op-ed claiming that, somehow, Kamala Harris was not an American citizen and was ineligible to be vice president. That op-ed was initially run by Newsweek, which then scrambled to issue an apology after other outlets made clear how Newsweek was spreading racism, xenophobia, and lies that the US Constitution doesn’t provide citizenship to the children of immigrants.
After the 2020 election, Eastman met with Pence and Trump in the White House and put forward a six-point plan: The goal on Jan. 6 was to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner of the election by simply leaving out seven states. And if anyone objected to that tactic, there was a backup plan for Pence to hand Trump the election through a second route.
In his role as the president of the Senate, Pence was to call the roll of states normally until he got to Arizona, at which point Pence was to claim “that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States.” Pence was then to repeat this claim for the six other states that Trump lost but claimed to have won.
When the count was complete, this would mean that only 454 of the electors had been recognized. Pence was then to say that, of this 454, Trump had won 232. So, big smack of the gavel, Trump wins.
Eastman’s memo anticipates “Howls, of course, from the Democrats.” However, Pence was to quiet any howling by moving to elect Trump through another means. That involved declaring that “no candidate has achieved the necessary majority” and taking the 12th Amendment remedy of polling the states by asking for a single vote from each slate of representatives. Since Republicans have a majority of House representatives in 26 states, and they were all expected to fall in line, Trump wins again.
All of this was based on not one but two Big Lies.
First, they required Pence to pretend that there was some question about the outcome in the seven states. There wasn’t. Pence knew there wasn’t. And that undisputed outcome gave President Joe Biden a decisive victory. In fact, Biden’s 306 to 232 victory exceeded Trump’s margin in 2016.
Second, they required Pence to ignore the Electoral Count Act, in effect since 1887, which has no provision for Pence to take any of the actions in Eastman’s memo. When coming to Arizona or any other state, Pence’s total options under the Act are to call the name and listen to the results. The whole declaration of “multiple slates,” or the idea that any state could just be set aside, is not allowed.
That was okay, according to Eastman, because Trump’s team believed the 134-year-old law, which has governed every election since that of Benjamin Harrison, was unconstitutional. In pointing out why he considered the law unconstitutional, Eastman uses the same arguments about how state electors are certified by the governor that had already been rejected in dozens of court hearings.
The goal wasn’t just to turn the Jan. 6 electoral count into chaos—though that certainly would have been the result—but to turn it into chaos while allowing Republicans to walk out of the room claiming that Trump won the election. And to litigate any follow-on action with Trump sitting in the White House.
VIOLENCE FROM FAR RIGHT ANTI-VAX/ANTI-MASKERS KEEPS RATCHETING HIGHER. In Michigan, an anti-vaccination fanatic tried to run a county health official off the road at 70 mph. In Germany, a service station attendant enforcing a mask mandate was shot and killed by a customer who objects to the rule. In Japan, an angry anti-vaccination activist sent a faxed letter to authorities threatening a Yakuza “bloodbath” at a coronavirus vaccination center. In Australia, protest crowds featuring an amalgam of neo-Nazis, vaccine conspiracists, and construction workers attacked the headquarters of the local maritime union in Melbourne over a recently announced vaccine mandate.
The threat of violence has lurked just under the surface of most right-wing anti-vaccination/anti-masking protests that have erupted over the past year. But as pressure continues to mount for unvaccinated people to get their COVID-19 vaccine shots, the fanatical ideologues among them are increasingly ratcheting up violence as their form of resistance. And it has become a global problem, David Neiwert noted at DailyKos (9/23).
The threats have been an ongoing feature of the misinformation-fueled right-wing resistance to pandemic health measures since protests first began breaking out in 2020. The result has been a steady exodus of health care workers from the profession that was observed nearly a year ago.
“Some of our public health officials have been physically threatened, politically scapegoated,” said Lori Freeman of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Their roles have been diminished, their authorities have been in some cases taken away.”
At least 248 public health leaders resigned, retired or were fired between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, according to an ongoing investigation by the Associated Press and Kaiser Health News.
Among the threatened officials was Adam London, director of Michigan’s Kent County Health Department, who detailed the nature of the threats in a letter to county commissioners. He told them that a woman driving more than 70 mph tried twice to run him off the road. Another person called him an expletive and yelled, “I hope someone abuses your kids and forces you to watch!”
London said he had been labeled a traitor to the nation and to liberty, and accused by anti-vaccination fanatics of being a “deep state agent of liberal-progressive-socialist powers that are working to undo the America they love.”
The threats and violence are not confined to the United States, but the violence has become more widespread in the United States, and has been spiraling upward with a litany of incidents in every corner of the country. The incidents also have been occurring with greater frequency and intensity.
SUPREME COURT BRIEF GIVES AWAY THE RIGHT’S ABORTION GAME. The stakes on what the new conservative majority might do to existing law and precedent got immeasurably higher recently, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (9/20). “In the middle of the very strange We Are Not Hacks Over America Tour that has featured both Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Clarence Thomas protesting far too much about what a clear and objective institution the Supreme Court is, an amicus brief in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization landed in the news with a deafening thud, and with an impact that blew away a giant sequoia of conservative fig leafs that had been accumulating for four decades.
“Dobbs is the case in which Mississippi is appealing to the Supreme Court directly to reverse Roe v. Wade. This would be ghastly enough on its merits but, as illustrated by this one amicus filing, the conservative project is far more sweeping than that. For 40 years, the unspoken truth behind the ‘pro-life’ movement has been that its real target is not Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, which, in the context of information about birth control, established a right to individual privacy. This has stuck in the conservative craw ever since it was applied to birth control, and abortion, and gay rights, and a number of other things that make the conservative id feel all icky. The basic line of attack is that there is no specific right to privacy in the Constitution, that it is a judicial concoction. Keep that latter phrase in mind. It will be useful later.
“Anyway, people generally like privacy, and they generally like the things they do in private, especially as regards sexy time, so directly attacking Griswold was (rightly) deemed to be a political loser. The specter of heartless women killing their little babies was much easier to sell. But that basic goal always was there, the engine thrumming away in the back room as Roe was chipped away at, little by little.”
What gave the game away, Pierce noted, was a brief filed back in July on behalf of Texas Right to Life, “and the counsel of record was one Jonathan F. Mitchell, the clever dick behind the new vigilante-adjacent anti-choice law on which the Court inexcusably took a dive. This Mitchell guy is a real beauty. His CV reads like a road map through the wingnut-welfare legal terrarium—including, inevitably, the Federalist Society. He clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The previous administration tried to make him chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an obscure government agency tasked with improving government efficiency, but the Senate gagged on Mitchell’s work as a union-busting attorney and refused to consent to his nomination.”
Mitchell gets right to it in the first sentence:
“In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), seven members of this Court invented a ‘right’ to abortion and imposed it on the nation, despite the fact that there is no language in the Constitution that even remotely suggests such a right, and despite the fact that there was no pedigree for it apart from the justices’ personal beliefs that pre-viability abortions should be legal on demand.
“The freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights have nothing to do with sexual liberation or reproductive freedom. And despite the fact that many members of high society believe that abortion should be protected as a constitutional right, there has been no point in our nation’s history where the right to have an abortion has obtained the supermajoritarian support needed to enshrine that right into a constitutional amendment.”
Later on, he reveals what the right is really after: “The news is not as good for those who hope to preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage. These ‘rights,’ like the right to abortion from Roe, are judicial concoctions — [Ed. Note: Ding, ding, ding!], and there is no other source of law that can be invoked to salvage their existence. This is not to say that the Court should announce the overruling of Lawrence and Obergefell if it decides to overrule Roe and Casey in this case. But neither should the Court hesitate to write an opinion that leaves those decisions hanging by a thread. Lawrence and Obergefell, while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.
Pierce concludes: “See this bag right here? See the cat over there? It’s hard to believe that the Court would engage in a sweeping evisceration of privacy rights, but it’s not as hard to believe as it was five years ago.”
COVID CASES, DEATHS RISING AMONG CHILDREN ACROSS US. As the Delta variant continues to spread and state and local officials enforce uneven safety measures in schools across the US, several states are reporting that children are accounting for more COVID-19 cases than ever—with both hospitalizations and deaths on the rise, Julia Conley noted at CommonDreams.org (9/24).
The states’ rising cases are on track with a report that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association released (9/21), which showed nearly one million children have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past month, following a return to in-person learning in school districts across the country.
In states with low vaccination rates, hospitals are reporting that pediatric intensive care units have become overwhelmed in recent weeks.
“The best way to protect kids that can’t be vaccinated is to have all the adults around them vaccinated,” Dr. Eliza Hayes Bakken, a medical director at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, told The Oregonian.
Following Pfizer’s announcement (9/21) that preliminary data showed a “strong immune response” to its vaccine among five-to-11-year-olds, public health experts are optimistic that more children will be able to receive safe and effective vaccines in the coming months.
Approval of the vaccines for children could come in late October or early November.
Other methods of protecting children—including adherence to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance calling for universal masking in schools—is being applied unevenly.
As of 9/14, nearly 60% of statewide cases in Georgia were in schools; Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has refused to mandate public health measures. Face coverings are also optional in schools in Colorado, where school cases nearly doubled over just seven days last week. In Denver schools, 220 schoolchildren were quarantined Wednesday after 35 staff members and 170 students tested positive.
“The risk to children right now is higher than it’s ever been during the pandemic because of the delta variant being more transmissible,” Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist for Colorado, told Bloomberg.
Following Pfizer’s announcement (9/21) that preliminary data showed a “strong immune response” to its vaccine among five-to-11-year-olds, public health experts are optimistic that more children will be able to receive safe and effective vaccines in the coming months.
Approval could come as soon as late October or early November.
MEDIA STILL PLAYS DOWN AFGHAN EVACUATION. Mainstream media continue to discount the success of the Afghanistan evacuation, calling it “chaotic,” even though the US military flights got more than 123,000 people out of the country, including 6,000 US citizens. The US is expected to admit at least 50,000 Afghans, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.
An Aug. 26 suicide bombing attributed to ISIS killed 170 people, including 13 US soldiers who were examining people hoping to enter the airport complex. That was a tragedy, but considering that the evacuation took place after the Taliban swept through Afghanistan when the Afghan government troops threw down their arms and fled, and US forces faced ISIS missile attacks during the last few days of the evacuation, the evacuation went as well as could be expected.
The White House said as many as 200 American citizens who delayed their departures until the last week of the evacuation may have been left behind, but as flights out of the Kabul airport resumed they were allowed to leave.
HACKER GROUP ‘ANONYMOUS’ SPILLS SECRETS OF EXTREME RIGHT. The notorious hacker collective Anonymous broke into Epik, an Internet services company beloved by the armed and angry new Republican base, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (9/27). They purloined a massive amount of data on the people who used the company, right down to names and addresses, and they dumped it into the public view. From the Washington Post:
“Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.
“Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.
“Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.”
“Well, everybody needs a clubhouse, I guess, PIerce noted. “But these documents, however they were obtained, are a gold mine for the people doing the hard and necessary work of keeping tabs on what has become a more serious threat to the republic than many people are comfortable admitting. And did I mention that the company founder’s name is … Monster?
“[Robert] Monster also used the moment as a marketing opportunity, saying the files were now ‘effectively uncensorable,’ according to screenshots of his tweets and Gab posts from the time. Monster also urged Epik employees to watch the video, which he said would convince them it was faked, Bloomberg News reported.
“Monster has defended his work as critical to keeping the Internet uncensored and free, aligning himself with conservative critics who argue that leading technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube have gone too far in policing content they deem inappropriate …
“Extremism researchers urge careful fact-checking to protect credibility, but the data remains tantalizing for its potential to unmask extremists in public-facing jobs. Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack ‘the Panama Papers of hate groups,’ a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away. ‘A lot of research begins with naming names,’ Best said. ‘There’s a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they’re in for the long haul with some of this data.’”
There are some serious questions concerning what use the mainstream press should make of all this data, given its provenance, Pierce noted. A real-estate agent in Florida already lost his job when his online activity, which included trying to register several domain names apparently connected to Holocaust denialism, was made public. “It’s a one-stop shop. It’s an open window into one of the most serious threats to the stability of the republic since South Carolinians got annoyed with the folks inside Fort Sumter. Given the cross-pollination between the militant right and the anti-vaccination community, you can even argue that there is a public-health aspect to the leak. You can say what you will about how we know what we know, but you cannot say that it’s not a story. More, I am sure, to follow.”
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021
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