One of the parties in our two-party system threatens our democratic institutions by endorsing, accepting, or giving a pass to authoritarian, undemocratic, and conspiratorial activities -- and the lies that undergird them. These reports are from the past week:
1. Karoun Demirjian and Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post offer a sampling of Trump’s crazed, desperate abuse of the authority granted to presidents, as he scrambled to stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election decisively.
On the same day the electoral college met to certify the election results — which was also the day Trump announced that William P. Barr would be stepping down as attorney general — the president’s assistant sent Rosen an email with a list of complaints concerning the way the election had been carried out in Antrim County, Mich.
The file included a “forensic analysis” of the Dominion Voting Systems machines the county employed, alleging they were “intentionally and purposefully” calibrated to create fraudulent results. It also included “talking points” that could be used to counter any arguments “against us.”
“It’s indicative of what the machines can and did do to move votes,” the document Trump sent to Rosen reads. “We believe it has happened everywhere.”
. . .
The email about Antrim County was sent by the White House to Rosen shortly before 5 p.m. on Dec. 14. Two minutes later, a Justice Department official forwarded the materials to the U.S. attorneys for the Eastern and Western districts of Michigan, according to the documents released by the House Oversight Committee.
. . .
On Jan. 1, Meadows forwarded Rosen a YouTube link with a subject line suggesting it was a video in which a retired CIA station chief argued that the 2020 election totals were altered by the Italians. Rosen appeared to forward the email to his acting deputy, Richard Donoghue, who responded simply: “Pure insanity.”
Nonetheless, the pressure campaign from Trump’s White House staff continued unabated, as aides sent Rosen purported evidence of fraud in states from New Mexico to Pennsylvania during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and in the earliest days of 2021.
. . .
On Dec. 29, Molly Michael, an assistant to Trump, emailed Rosen, Donoghue and then-acting solicitor general Jeffrey B. Wall a draft of a Supreme Court brief seeking to make the challenge.
“The President asked me to send the attached draft document for your review,” Michael wrote, adding that she had also shared the document with Trump’s chief of staff and the White House counsel.
That month, the Supreme Court had thrown out an effort by the state of Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over how they conducted their elections, asserting that Texas had not shown a legal interest “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” The brief would have essentially had the U.S. government take Texas’s place, and also challenge elections in Arizona and Nevada.
Election maven Rick Hasen's comments on the last item (the Supreme Court brief) neatly summarize the whole schmear: "It is brazen, and dangerous, and an affront to the rule of law."
2. Mitch McConnell, who said of Obama, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” and of Biden, “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” continues to confirm my considered judgment of the Kentuckian:
What has distinguished Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is his willingness (sometimes expressed gleefully) to trample democratic norms. It is his determination to violate the spirit of parliamentary rules to score partisan victories. He has boasted of his legislative stratagems focused on winning the next election cycle, not on doing the right thing, or enacting legislation to make Americans’ lives better, or living up to . . . a higher calling than partisanship.
In a conversation with Hugh Hewitt this week – during which he said (as he has in the past) that killing the Garland nomination was “the single most consequential thing I’ve done in my time as majority leader of the Senate” and boasted at the skill he employed to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed before Trump’s defeat last November – McConnell declared that if he is majority leader in 2024, and if there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the Senate will not confirm any nominee of a Democratic president. And if there were a vacancy in 2023? “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.”
Jonathan Bernstein puts McConnell’s repudiation of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to advise and consent (“for McConnell, if it’s not nailed down, it’s up for grabs”) into perspective:
Since 1969, Democratic-majority Senates have confirmed Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy (in an election year), David Souter and Clarence Thomas, all nominated by Republican presidents. The last time a Republican Senate confirmed a Democratic president’s nominee was in the 19th century.
Although there were few Democratic presidents throughout the long stretch after the Civil War until FDR’s inauguration, the point stands: McConnell pledges to trash democratic norms whenever he sees a partisan advantage for Republicans.
3. Tucker Carlson has launched a new conspiracy theory: that FBI operatives organized the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Two members of the House Republican caucus, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, have already begun to promote the theory.
A two-minute sampler from Carlson's soliloquy:
. . . For example, one of those unindicted co-conspirators is someone government documents identify only as Person 2. According to those documents Person 2 stayed in the same hotel room as a man called Thomas Caldwell, an insurrectionist, a man alleged to be a member of the group the Oath Keepers. Person 2 also, quote, stormed the barricades at the Capitol on January 6 alongside Thomas Caldwell.
The government indictment further indicates that Caldwell – by the way is a 65-year old man, this dangerous insurrectionist – was led to believe there would be a, quote, quick reaction force also participating on January 6. That quick reaction force, Caldwell was told, would be led by someone called Person 3, who had a hotel room and an accomplice with him.
But wait! Here’s the interesting thing. Person 2 and Person 3 were organizers of the riot. The government knows who they are, but the government has not charged them. Why is that?
You know why. They were almost certainly working for the FBI. So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6 – according to government documents.
And those two are not alone. In all, Revolver News reported there are, quote:
“… upwards of twenty unindicted co-conspirators in the Oath Keeper indictments, all playing various roles in the conspiracy, who have not been charged for virtually the exact same activities …”
“and in some cases much, much more severe activities – as those named alongside them in indictments.”
HUH!?
So it turns out that this white supremacist insurrection was, again, by the government’s own admission in these documents, organized at least in part by government agents.
Are you shocked? We’re shocked. We shouldn’t be shocked. Because in March the FBI director admitted that the bureau was infiltrating as many dissenting groups that opposed the regime as it possibly can.
Huh?
I am grateful to Aaron Blake, who outlines Carlson's methodology in weaving this "tangled, conspiratorial web" (so I don't have to). The morass includes suggestive questions, sketchy sources, claims that are often easily disputed, implausible speculations, and leaps to conclusions that are ungrounded in reality.
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" is often the highest-rated program on Fox, while topping the competition on CNN or MSNBC. Even though it may be absurdly loopy, and even more often is untrustworthy, FNC commands greater influence among the Republican base and GOP elected officials than the Congressional leadership of the party.