The president’s comments, as ill-conceived and self-serving as they may have been, were not the impetus for what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. Let’s be perfectly clear, the people who forced their way into the Capitol building and tried to storm the House and Senate chambers were engaged in criminal behavior and need to be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Conversely, if we’re willing to go that far with these people, then we can apply the same set of standards to those who burned, looted and destroyed their way through the summer and fall of 2020. If it’s supposed to be all about justice and fairness, then this would be the just and fair thing to do, right?
Social media. Twitter permanently banned the president. Although not as harsh, Facebook took similar steps in the wake of the Capitol Hill incident. Quite a few conservatives, upset at the stifling of conservative speech by these social media giants, quietly made the switch to an alternative platform, Parler. Apparently, the app stores at Apple and Google want Parler to start policing its platform much the same way that Facebook and Twitter do. The justification for such a request lies with the claim that some of what occurred in Washington was planned out using Parler. Someone please correct me here, but the idea behind the protections that these glorified “bulletin and chat boards” received, courtesy of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, was to ensure the free flow of ideas and opinions on a nascent means of communications called the World Wide Web, or am I missing something? There is no free flow of anything where censorship is involved. Rather than beat the drum on first Amendment issues, and there are plenty, let’s take a completely different approach. These communications occurred on an open platform, meaning anyone involved in the discussion knew in real time what was happening. Should Parler start exercising editorial authority, then there is a pretty good chance that these individuals would find alternative means of communicating. Those means already exist in the form of the dark web and encrypted chat apps. These are used by criminal gangs and terrorists who most certainly don’t want to be discovered. These are the sorts of things that make the job of law enforcement agencies more difficult. Are we sure we want to push these folks in that direction?
Congressman Dan Crenshaw was spot on in his assessment of what needs to happen next and what should have happened at the rally in Washington. The election is over folks, whatever happened, happened. There is no amount of pressure that can be applied to overturn the results. If those who are still angry at what occurred really want to make a difference, then that difference needs to be made by them engaging their respective state legislatures. The Constitution vests the authority and responsibility for the conduct of our elections in these bodies. So, it stands to reason that if they are the ultimate arbiters of the process, then they bear the brunt of what went wrong, whether it was through their actions or negligence. The only way that things get fixed, is if these legislatures fix them. The only way politicians fix things (that can be either an oxymoron, a scary thought, or both), is if pressure from the public is so great that they have no other choice but to do their jobs. That pressure can be applied in various ways, such as: letter writing campaigns, petitions, town halls, and ultimately, at the ballot box (i.e., do your job and you get to keep it).
About the election and the battleground states. This was, as one television commentator put it, defeat by a thousand cuts. The election laws in these states were circumvented by what can only be described as a series of procedural end-arounds. In Georgia, the Secretary of State agreed to enter into a consent decree over signature verification requirements that weakened a safeguard put into place via state law to minimize the potential for fraudulent ballots to be cast. In Pennsylvania, it was a ruling handed down by the State Supreme Court changing the date that absentee and mail-in ballots had to be postmarked to be considered valid. This set the stage for large dumps of ballots that would have been considered questionable or invalid at any other point in time. Then there were the other states besides Georgia and Pennsylvania, that had a litany of issues to deal with, such as ballot curing, voter rolls with inaccurate or outdated information, out of state, underage, or dead voters casting ballots, and election day “on-the-spot” registration, despite having no way to verify the true identities and residency of those voting.
For those who may not know him, Peter Navarro is the Director on Trade and Manufacturing Policy for the outgoing administration. In his previous life, he was an economist and author. He recently published a report titled “The Immaculate Deception”. This point paper, which is what it really is, breaks no new ground and makes no earth-shattering discoveries, but what it does do, is catalog a lot of the findings of election irregularities and claims of potential voter fraud. It should be considered a ready reference with which Americans can judge for themselves whether or not there needs to be further investigation into the events surrounding the 2020 election.
As reprehensible as the president’s conduct may have been the past few weeks, it may be a function of his anger finally boiling over at what has transpired over the course of the last four and a half years. It’s one thing for your political opposition to rally all of its forces against you, but when members of your own party start stacking the deck against you, then something is definitely wrong. I discussed the House Intel Committee’s role in getting to the bottom of possible Russian interference in the election and claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. What hasn’t been discussed yet, are the findings of the committees (Judiciary and Oversight) whose task it was to investigate the origins of the Steele Dossier. These committees decided to hold joint sessions where witnesses were interviewed in a closed-door venue (committee members and staffers only).
Christopher Steele was a former British Intelligence operative and was a partisan actor who had been let go by the FBI as a confidential source, due to his proclivity to leak information to the press. He had been the individual who met with Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr to push the dossier. More to the point, was the fact that the dossier wasn’t just being pushed by Steele to Mr. Ohr. Various individuals were also pushing the dossier to the FBI and DOJ. Among them were David Korn of Mother Jones Magazine and Michael Sussman, a partner at Perkins Coie. In fact, Sussman wasn’t just peddling the dossier, but also information on the Trump Russia investigation (Crossfire Hurricane) being conducted by the FBI. This particular investigation, just like the Clinton email investigation (Mid-Year Exam), was considered a Sensitive Investigative Matter, since it involved two candidates who were running for political office. It boggles the imagination as to how a civilian organization could wind up in possession of this kind of information. Perkins Coie was the same firm that hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research work on the Trump campaign. Fusion GPS was the company that contracted with Mr. Steele for work that would eventually become the now infamous dossier. Ohr’s wife Nellie, was also a researcher under contract with Fusion GPS at the same time.
It was Ohr’s time before this joint session that illuminates a lot of what transpired. We know, for instance that Steele was desperate to keep Trump from being elected and could not vouch for the authenticity of the information in the dossier. We also know that Glenn Simpson, the founder and President of Fusion GPS, had claimed while before a congressional committee, that he had not met Ohr until after the election. Ohr, being a lawyer, kept contemporaneous notes. Referring back to them, he was able to refute Simpson’s claim of when they first met (it had actually been during the summer of 2016). When confronted with this information by congressional investigators, Simpson pled the fifth.
Ohr was also asked about who, if anyone, he had shared his concerns about Steele and the dossier with. He responded that there had been two other individuals, one of them worked in the criminal fraud division at DOJ. His name was Andrew Weissmann. The same Andrew Weissmann who became the lead prosecutor on the Mueller Investigation. Under normal circumstances, most prosecutors, given their knowledge of the dossier, might have felt conflicted trying to prosecute a case built around a document with such flimsy credibility, but not Mr. Weissmann. He had a history of prosecutorial abuses stretching back to the early 2000’s.
George Papadopoulos was interviewed as well. His story of what happened in the runup to his troubles with the FBI reads like a story from a cheesy spy novel, but will most definitely have to be catalogued in the “strange but true” category. Rather than waste space expounding on what happened, it’s best for you, dear reader, to experience it firsthand. It’s a little lengthy, but worth the read.
Most damning of all though, was the interview with Bill Priestap, the counterintelligence chief of the FBI during Crossfire Hurricane. Since all of the goings on were already expounded upon in a previous post on this blog, I’m going to redirect you to it.
The Republicans, unlike the Democrats, aren’t used to springing October surprises on their political opposition. They’re usually in more of a reactive mode because those things are being done to them. But, had they chosen to go down this path, they could have held onto the House, given that:
- 1. By the end of the summer of 2018, there had been enough testimonies given before the Intel Committee to prove that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. In fact, the very people who had testified before the committee, turned around and went on various news programs and lied to the American people about what they knew. Worse yet, there were committee members who lied as well in their public comments concerning the Trump campaign and the Russians.
- 2. By late October, the Judiciary and Oversight Committees knew that the Mid-Year Exam had been a whitewash. The Steele Dossier’s credibility had been questionable at best. There had been leaks at the FBI and/or DOJ about Crossfire Hurricane. There was an unethical prosecutor working for the Mueller team, who was already conflicted, based on what he knew about the dossier. And finally, a Trump campaign advisor was set up by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of this country, who used foreign proxies, in order to circumvent U.S. laws.
There was more than enough information for the Republicans to embarrass their Democrat counterparts with, and confront the Mueller team over the sham investigation they had been conducting, but that never happened. Consequently, the Mueller Report was released to the Attorney General in March of 2019. Major portions of the report were made available to the general public and we watched as the legacy media and their conservative counterparts sparred over what the findings really indicated. It wasn’t until two congressional committees called Mr. Mueller to testify before them, that we got to see who the little man behind the curtain really was. Mueller’s performance was, to say the least, embarrassing. He had almost no grasp as to what was in the report that bore his name, which begs the question as to who really wrote and oversaw the project. Again, none of this would have ever happened if Republicans had taken the high road and shut all of this down once it became evident it was all a sick plot to remove a duly elected president. Add the impeachment hoax to this witches’ brew, where we saw a congratulatory phone call between two world leaders being used as the pretext to remove a sitting president for simply stating his concerns. Those concerns circulated around an individual, whose already spotty track record ,has now come into full public view with the revelation that federal authorities have been investigating him and his business dealings for the past two years. Of course, I’m referring to one Robert Hunter Biden.
Is it any wonder why Trump and his supporters, along with a lot of conservatives (Republican or otherwise) have questioned the motivations of the Republican establishment? It’s against this backdrop that the most extreme elements of the far right, planned and launched one of the most ignorant, futile, and dangerous attempts to fix a system many considered broken. To be honest, the system isn’t broken. There are specific institutions and processes that have been corrupted and co-opted by individuals, who themselves may be broken, given the amount of time they’ve spent in government, but the system itself works properly in the hands of responsible individuals. Per Lord Acton, power usually corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
