Trump and Mark Meadows.
December 20, 1922
Lex Anteinternet: The Post Insurrection. Falling chips. Part IV.: December 19, 2022The January 6 committee has referred Donald Trump to the U.S. Attorney General on charges of obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement and inciting, assisting or providing aid and comfort to an insurrection. It has also referred Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry and Andy Biggs to the ethics committee for failure to honor a subpoena to the committee.
The committee has completed its work and issues its report.
The U.S. Attorney General is unlikely to specifically act on the committee's referral, as it is conducting its own investigation.
The committee's report declared Donald Trump "unfit for any office". Truly, he is unfit for any office and was unfit to occupy his last office, at least after the November election.
In addition to those noted above, Trump lawyer John Eastman was included in the referral on two of the charges.
As noted, I feel it's unlikely that the Attorney General will act on the referred charges, which does not mean that it will not independently charge Trump. Given the current pace of US justice, that risks being so slow as to being meaningless. It'll happen, but my guess is that it will actually occur in late 2023 or in 2024.
For that reason, the Committee's findings and referral are significant.
The committee's work was significant, even though it has been generally discounted by Republicans and wholly discounted by Trump loyalist. Wyoming's GOP, which has some figures who were at the insurrection, has actually bellied up to the bar and had repeated shots of the Kool-Aid. Wyoming has set itself on the path of conservatives who are destroying conservatism through their obstinate insistence on being tied to Trump, who ironically may not really be a conservative at all.
Nonetheless, nationally, it appears the bloom may finally be off the rose. After Trump's third (or fourth, depending upon how you read it) election defeat for the GOP, Republicans have been pulling away. It'll be interesting to see if they manage the break. Kevin McCarthy, who briefly broke away from Trump immediately after the election before running back into his embrace, is in real trouble in his bid for Speaker of the House and might not make it. He's been referred for charges, and he just received a Trump endorsement for the position, something aimed at Trumpites in the House who may no longer really listen all that much to Trump either, the Führerprinzip having now exceeded even Trump.
The message there is that even as Trump has crashed into the GOP and caused it to burn down in a recent election, the House, for two terms threatens to lurch to the right, thereby pouring gasoline on the fire the Trump flame out has caused.
Mirroring that, Rona McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, is facing opposition from Trumpites and may lose her seat to even more hardcore populist Republicans, thereby virtually guaranteeing a 2024 electoral disaster for the party.
On an illuminating personal note, as I am generally usually (if not wholly relably) conservative myself, I was recently included in an email chain of a set of highly educated conservatives regarding an article by a conservative columnist who was writing that Trump, while in the author's view having been a really good President, was destroying his legacy. He clearly is doing that, which is no surprise in these quarters. What was a surprise was the reaction of some of "why are the Democrats so fixated on Trump?"
That was an illumination.
May on the Republican right truly believe that the reason that Trump remains in the news is that the Democrats and a Democratic press are focused on him as they have nothing to offer themselves. They are flat out wrong.
Like it or not, the GOP is a minority party and, through its current adherence to Trump, is likely to make itself a very tiny one. Elections right now are decided by independents who disdain Trump and who lean towards the Democrats for the most part. Trump remains in the news as Trump insists on being the leader of the party, and he makes himself rather difficult to ignore.
Witness, he's running for the Oval Office again, as somebody who tried to steal the election, and he resorts to such drivel as this:
Why are Democrats fixated on Trump? Because large numbers of Republicans won't recognize that the man threatened to end American democracy and failed to do so only because a few stood in his way. He's lied about the result of the election and, moreover, while President, we now know, was so internally unstable that no matter what a person thinks of his implemented policies, to a significant degree it was only the restraint that his employees showed that kept some truly scary things from potentially happening.
Democrats are fixated on Trump because the Republicans are. He commands a significantly loyal based that worships him in the mold of men on horseback.
Want to restore conservative election hopes, and move past Trump? Republicans can do that by openly moving past Trump themselves.
March 19, 2023
Donald Trump, the subject of a New York state grand jury, has announced he expects to be arrested Tuesday. He additionally posted:
PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!IT'S TIME!!!WE JUST CAN'T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE, THEY'RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!
Given what occurred last time he called for action, it's reasonable to regard this as an incitement to insurrection.
March 20, 2023
Secretary of State Buchanan, in order to counter claims that the election was tainted, published a set of facts on the Secretary of State's website demonstrating that it wasn't. When he abandoned his post for the judiciary, the Interim Secretary of State left it up.
The new Secretary of State, Chuck Gray, who campaigned on "election integrity", is now in office and its gone. Of course, by "election integrity" he meant the fable he campaigned on, that there was something amiss with the 2020 election.
March 30, 2023
Frank Eathorne, head of the state GOP and an individual who has taken the party deep into populist GOP territory, is running for an unprecedented third term as head of the party.
Repeatedly failed far right GOP candidate Rex Rammell is suing the Sublette County Sheriff's Office for its actions searching his horses for brand inspection. That inspection resulted in his being cited and convicted in a jury trial.
An early prediction on this is that Rammell is going to lose this suit.
March 31, 2023
A New York Grand jury has indicted Donald Trump in connection with the hush money he paid to pornographic actress Stephanie Clifford, "stage" name Stormy Daniels, which as an aside might be noted as the least effective hush money of all time.
That apparently isn't the actual crime, and while asking for hush money probably is, paying it very well might not be. This is apparently connected with something else in the nature of being a campaign violation due to the way the money was handled.
There is, it might be noted, a second film femme fatale, in the form of a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who also received hush money which might be part of this or which might end up in a separate charge.
My prediction is that this is only the first of what will be several indictments, and this may prove to be an unfortunate one. Prosecutions for campaign violations are rare, and New York's legal system can be accused of having taken on prosecutions for political reasons in recent years.
Wyoming Congressman Hageman decried the prosecution as a "witch hunt", which brings about the embarrassing flip side of this. Trump is personally icky, and his payoffs in this area expressed a fear that Americans still had some sense of shame, which proved to be an inaccurate fear. They should. The party that generally associates itself with "family" and values is now really cosied up with a guy who had at least two affairs with women who had prostituted their image for cash, something that in any prior era would have been the end of his political fortunes. Granted, he apparently denies the affairs.
April 4, 2023
Donald Trump was indicted by the State of New York. He plead "not guilty"
And so we conclude this installment.
Last edition of thread:
No comments:
Post a Comment