Impeachment Number Two

[Howl]

2 hours ago, thoughtful said:

What is Mike Lee's tantrum about? He was quoted and claims he never said something quoted?

Note: I watched this in real time. The trial did not "devolve into chaos".  Everybody finally figured out what Lee's problem was and his request was eventually honored and Leahy gaveled the trial to an end for the day. 

From Mediaite: Impeachment Trial Devolves Into Chaos Over Mike Lee Objection

Quote

Just as the Trump impeachment trial was set to recess for the night, the Senate erupted over an objection by Senator Mike Lee (R- UT).

Here’s what happened: House impeachment manager David Cicilline brought up reporting about how Donald Trump called Senator Mike Lee, thinking he called Tommy Tuberville instead, on January 6th.

Per one report [Deseret News, see below] at the time:  With a mob of election protesters laying siege to the U.S. Capitol, Sen. Mike Lee had just ended a prayer with some of his colleagues in the Senate chamber when his cellphone rang.

Caller ID showed the call originated from the White House. Lee thought it might be national security adviser Robert O’Brien, with whom he’d been playing phone tag on an unrelated issue. It wasn’t O’Brien. It was President Donald Trump.

“How’s it going, Tommy?” the president asked.

Taken a little aback, Lee said this isn’t Tommy.

“Well, who is this? Trump asked. “It’s Mike Lee,” the senator replied. “Oh, hi Mike. I called Tommy.

Lee told the Deseret News he realized Trump was trying to call Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

Cicilline said on the Senate floor, “Senator Lee describes it, he just ended a prayer with his colleagues in the Senate chamber. And the phone rang, it was Donald Trump.”

He went through more of the reporting and said, “On that call, Donald Trump reportedly asked Senator Tuberville to make additional objections to the certification process. That’s why he called.”

But as the proceedings came to a close later, Lee raised an objection and said, “Statements were attributed to me moments ago by the House impeachment managers. Statements relating to the content of conversations between a phone call involving President Trump and Senator Tuberville were not made by me, they’re not accurate, and they’re contrary to fact.”

He demanded they be stricken from the record.

What unfolded was a slightly chaotic scene on the Senate floor where lawmakers were scrambling to address Lee’s objection. He insisted they be stricken “because they were false.”

Finally House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said Cicilline “correctly and accurately quoted a newspaper account” but said they’re going to withdraw it. Lee again said the comments attributed to him were not correct.

Desert News: How President Trump misdialed Utah Sen. Mike Lee while the Capitol was under siege

2 hours ago, thoughtful said:

Mike needs to work on his pissy face - Bro Gary does it better:

That's actually his normal face.  

Edited February 11, 2021 by Howl

[Howl]

Also this: 

We know the Giuliani call took place because, Lordy, there is audio we all listened to. 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, Howl said:

Also this: 

We know the Giuliani call took place because, Lordy, there is audio we all listened to. 

So Mike Lee made much ado about being misquoted to distract from the real message: what Trump and Giuliani were actually doing during the insurrection. 

What a surprise.

Edited February 11, 2021 by fraurosena
No idea how an exclamation mark randomly got in there

[GreyhoundFan]

"5 takeaways from Day 2 of Trump’s impeachment trial"

Quote

Democratic House impeachment managers on Wednesday began formally laying out their case that President Donald Trump incited the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. They are allowed 16 hours, spread over two days, to make their arguments.

Below are some takeaways from Day 2 of the Senate impeachment trial.

1. The new video

Before Tuesday’s proceedings, the House impeachment team sent word that its presentation would include never-before-seen video.

What they showed was harrowing, illustrating how close several lawmakers came to disaster. Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) were all shown to have come very near harm’s way.

Pence was shown evacuating just across from where the Capitol rioters had penetrated. Schumer was shown heading one way and then quickly running in the other at the direction of law enforcement. Romney was walking through a rope line when he too was told to run by Eugene Goodman of the Capitol Police.

Other lawmakers were also shown evacuating just feet from a rioter being held at gunpoint on the floor.

We already knew that the rioters targeted lawmakers and chanted threats about Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). We also knew that people died that day and in the aftermath. But until Wednesday, we didn’t have a full picture of how close some high-profile lawmakers came to the mob.

Whether that makes Trump’s conviction any more likely is yet to be seen. But it became clearer that Jan. 6 could have been much worse if events shifted by just a few seconds or a few feet.

2. Raskin’s extended fire-in-a-theater metaphor

It’s one thing to remind viewers that bad stuff happened, as Democrats did Tuesday. But to prove incitement, you need to show Trump actually caused what happened.

Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), the lead impeachment manager, sought to do that early. Trump’s team has broadly referred to Trump’s claims of free speech while ignoring the established limits on it, which include incitement and defamation. The generic example is shouting fire in a crowded theater.

Raskin rode that metaphor:

“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief who’s paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire, and who then when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department asking for help, does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.

“So then we say this fire chief should never be allowed to hold this public job again, and you’re fired and you’re permanently disqualified.”

There are limits to the metaphor. Trump’s response was delayed, even by the accounts of GOP senators and some former White House aides. He also offered words of praise for the rioters, expressing “love” for them as it was happening and later saying it would be a day for them to remember. But he did, in the same “love” video, tell them to go home peacefully.

Trump often mixes his messages like this, giving himself plausible deniability while seeming to send a deliberate message. His team will focus on the “go home” stuff rather than the “We love you” stuff. It’s up to Democrats to argue that his encouragement and negligence outweighed those messages.

3. Connecting the dots on Trump’s actions

Democrats’ impeachment article focused mostly on one event: Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. It also mentioned Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in which he asked him to “find” enough votes to flip the state (which, as of Wednesday, is the subject of a criminal investigation), as well as a broad reference to Trump’s “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of” election results.

Given that, there was a real question about how far back in history they would go to prove incitement — including whether and how much they would lump in Trump’s past references to violence by his supporters.

Early on, they did go through some of that history, while focusing more on Trump’s subversion of the election.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) laid out a timeline of events dating to the spring, noting Trump laid a predicate for claiming the election was stolen as far back as May.

“The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump,” Castro said. “And if you look at the evidence, his purposeful conduct, you’ll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable.”

Castro pointed to Trump’s tweets and comments saying that the only way he would lose the election was if it was rigged — despite polls at the time repeatedly showing his loss was likely. He played clips of Trump supporters who took that at face value. He also played clips of people, even as the votes were being counted, rising up in protest.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said Trump sought to “prime” his supporters for Jan. 6 for months.

“That took time,” Swalwell said, revisiting the fire metaphor. “Just like to build a fire, it doesn’t just start with the flames. Donald Trump for months and months assembled the tinder, the kindling, threw on logs for fuel to have his supporters believe that the only way their victory would be lost was if it was stolen — so that way President Trump was ready, if he lost the election, to light the match.”

There is no question that Trump’s claims about the election have been routinely bogus; the courts have ruled as such. Claiming an election will be stolen months before it’s held also speaks to the idea that he was planning for a specific eventuality.

The challenge for Democrats, from there, is to argue that this wasn’t just an effort by Trump to save face — to pretend he never lost when that seemed likely. To continue the fire metaphor, playing with it is different from deliberately lighting it.

4. Making the case on Trump and violence

Democrats highlighted Trump’s past rhetoric encouraging and suggesting violence by his supporters, while keeping it focused on events surrounding the election. Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) was given an unusually large platform for a nonvoting member of Congress to make the case.

She noted that Trump endorsed his supporters surrounding a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway just before the election, leading to a collision. According to some accounts, they attempted to drive the bus off the road. Trump tweeted a video with fight music behind it and said at the time, “These patriots did nothing wrong.”

An organizer of that caravan was later involved in encouraging people to storm the Capitol, pointing out flimsy fencing around it and using a bullhorn to urge people to enter.

The second major event Plaskett spotlighted was Trump being asked at a September presidential debate to repudiate extreme elements of the conservative movement, prompting him to tell the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, to “stand back and stand by.” The comment was criticized at the time as promoting potential violence. The Proud Boys adopted it as a mantra. They figured prominently in the storming of the Capitol.

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said in her presentation later: “This was not just one reference or a message to supporters by a politician to fight for a cause. He’d assembled thousands of violent people, people he knew were capable of violence, people he had seen be violent. They were standing now in front of him. And then he pointed to us [in Congress], lit the fuse and sent an angry mob.”

5. The deliberate-negligence argument

One way to drive home the above point is to note that Trump didn’t just light the fire — he declined to snuff it once it started burning. That shows that, at the very least, this was an outcome he was okay with.

Democrats made that deliberate-negligence argument Tuesday.

Beyond Raskin’s allusion to Trump deciding to “sit back” and let it happen, Castro and Swalwell noted that some officials had warned about the possibility of such scenes weeks beforehand, but Trump did little.

“‘Stop the count.’ ‘Stop the steal,’” Swalwell said, referring to Trump’s post-election tweets alleging fraud. “President Trump was never shy about using his platforms to try and stop something. He could have very easily told his supporters: Stop threatening officials. Stop going to their homes. Stop it with the threats. But each time he didn’t. Instead, in the face of escalating violence, he incited them further.”

Democrats signaled this will be a focal point of the case against Trump, including Trump’s tweet attacking Pence.

“You will see his relentless attack on Vice President Pence, who was, at that very moment, hiding with his family as armed extremists were chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence!’ calling him a traitor,” said Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), another impeachment manager. He added: “If as soon as this had started, President Trump had simply gone on to TV, just logged on to Twitter and said, ‘Stop the attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said, ‘Stop the steal,’ how many lives would we have saved? Sadly, he didn’t do that.”

My mom and I were talking about the case the Impeachment Managers were making yesterday. At one point, she asked the rhetorical question, "How can any sensible person even consider acquitting him?" (meaning OFM) My reply was that, unfortunately, she answered her own question. Sense doesn't seem to be a requirement to be a senator in the R party.

[Destiny]

She is Stacey Plaskett.
I thought she did a good job.

And yet she has no vote in the congress. I’m thrilled she is getting to do this, but the lack of representation of the territories at the federal level makes my blood boil.

[clueliss]

Thanks for explaining what happened at the end of yesterday.  I had my weekly WW Zoom meeting during that time.  And then took a shower (because I had already missed coverage - that I'm watching right now - thank you C-Span online).  I came back to the very end of things and from that perspective - it looked like chaos because I had no context to what had happened.  And the talking heads at CNN were more interested in moving on rehashing rather than explaining what had just happened.

[GreyhoundFan]

Every time I think I couldn't despise Lindsey more, he does something like this:

[clueliss]

I saw that - mainly because multiple folks on my feed are blasting him for that and also quoting what he said after 1/6/21. 

[Howl]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Every time I think I couldn't despise Lindsey more, he does something like this:

Lindsey and all of them.  It's business as usual using the dismissive "nothing to see here move along" approach.  Sadly, this will work for tens of millions of Trump's followers. 

However, some others are watching, understanding and with the footage of the riots and testimony, will turn their backs on the Republican party forever. That will be a small percentage, however. 

[fraurosena]

Apparently McConnell has officially stated that everyone should vote with their conscience. In other words, he won’t be whipping votes.

Either this means he knows how everyone will vote and is fine with it, or he knows he cannot whip them to do what he wants. If it’s the latter, it means he has lost control to the Trumplicans.

[SeekingAdventure]

Well, I found some parts offensive and absurd, but it wasn't a matter of presentation, it was the subject...

[Howl]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

So Mike Lee made much ado about being misquoted to distract from the real message: what Trump and Giuliani were actually doing during the insurrection. 

but also this: 

However a Jan. 28th  article posted on Deseret.com, a conservative Utah news outlet,

What Trump’s inner circle told Utah Sen. Mike Lee in the days before Jan. 6

notes that Utah Senator Mike Lee, who "advised Trump on his legal challenges to the election results"...

Quote

...received a memorandum from former President Donald Trump’s legal team on the weekend before Congress met to finalize the presidential election suggesting that seven states had decided to or had submitted a different slate of electors than the ones they sent to Washington in December.

When Lee called election officials in those states, he found that those states were NOT changing their slates of electors to vote for Trump.  

So, one thing to note here is that Lee seemed unfazed that the WH was LYING and continued to lie about states changing slates of electors to vote for Trump and apparently didn't think to wonder why. 

Interesting article. 

Anyway,

Lee's clear that he does not believe the election was stolen, he does believe Biden is the legit president, he does believe that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional, so of course won't vote to convict.  However, his antics yesterday show he's still 100% Trump. 

Lee is walking a thin line.  He wants Trump to to think he's on the crazy train but everybody else to think he's on the not crazy train. 

So my vote on Mike Lee?  Fuck. That. Guy. 

 

 

Edited February 11, 2021 by Howl

[Ticklish]

Forgive my ignorance, but could they do a secret ballot to convict? Like the vote they did to keep Liz Cheney seemed a lot more lopsided than originally thought because people could secretly vote. 

On the one hand, I don't want to give them that cover and deniability because they should own this mess they've been complicit in. But on the other hand, I'd really like to see Trump barred from future office which only seems to happen if he's convicted. 

I'm not sure they'd get to 17 even with a secret ballot, but I feel like it'd be more likely to happen secretly than in the open. 

[clueliss]

4 minutes ago, Ticklish said:

Forgive my ignorance, but could they do a secret ballot to convict? Like the vote they did to keep Liz Cheney seemed a lot more lopsided than originally thought because people could secretly vote. 

On the one hand, I don't want to give them that cover and deniability because they should own this mess they've been complicit in. But on the other hand, I'd really like to see Trump barred from future office which only seems to happen if he's convicted. 

I'm not sure they'd get to 17 even with a secret ballot, but I feel like it'd be more likely to happen secretly than in the open. 

No.  It's public record.  Just like any other vote in the Senate or House. 

What happened to Liz Cheney was specific to the Republican Members of Congress and had to do with her leadership role in the House within the party. 

As a result of public record - as a native Kansan and history nerd.  I can tell you  - the Senator who kept Andrew Johnson from being removed from office - was from Kansas.   Edmund G Ross

 

[Howl]

Deleted my post because Clueliss clarified! 

Edited February 11, 2021 by Howl

[fraurosena]

Here's today's link:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

I have no words to describe how much I despise Hawley.

[clueliss]

This is from Hawley's press office twitter.  "Kangaroo Court"

 

[AmazonGrace]

It's not like coups delegitimize anyone's votes

[GreyhoundFan]

Would one of our friends in Australia please invite Hawley to a REAL kangaroo court? I'm thinking one where a large kangaroo kicks him repeatedly in his minuscule balls.

I think there are many of us who would get a great deal of joy from that kangaroo court.

[fraurosena]

Lindsey Graham is utterly despicable and irredeemable.

 

[clueliss]

Wait wait wait - I heard a whole analysis somewhere - maybe Maddow - it's been a few weeks - that said the Capitol Police are trained to NOT use lethal force etc because they are around monuments, the Capitol etc - Congress - as well as all sorts of art/statues and the like.  Which was why Officer Goodman did what he did and led them away. 

[Ticklish]

Do you think they will dig into why there wasn't a stronger police presence or why it was finally Pence who activated National Guard? I know they touched on it a bit yesterday, but it seems like there could be more in terms of Trump appointees blocking the Guard from being present sooner. Maybe this was addressed thoroughly and I missed it since I'm watching and working. 

[Shrubbery]

Daaaamnnn, Jamie Raskin is on fire. And I mean that in an absolutely positive way. 

[SeekingAdventure]

They all are..!

As an outsider, (as not US citizen, I mean) it's unimaginable to me how people could say: yeaaah no, he didn't do anything wrong..