2020 Election Fallout 14: Arrests And The Big Lie

[Dandruff]

17 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is so important! Follow the money and you find who is behind the curtains pulling at the strings.

I'm in the DC area and word was going around that something might happen on or around Jan. 6th.  Folks around here were wary, but there had also been warnings around Election Day and nothing had happened. 

Aside from the money and corresponding string-pulling, I'm also wondering why things stayed so relatively quiet until all hell broke loose.  Why wasn't there more security around the Capitol, given that the word had getting around about potential trouble?  Who were the local enablers?  And why were the participants so able to keep their intentions under wraps?

[Maggie Mae]

9 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I'm in the DC area and word was going around that something might happen on or around Jan. 6th.  Folks around here were wary, but there had also been warnings around Election Day and nothing had happened. 

Aside from the money and corresponding string-pulling, I'm also wondering why things stayed so relatively quiet until all hell broke loose.  Why wasn't there more security around the Capitol, given that the word had getting around about potential trouble?  Who were the local enablers?  And why were the participants so able to keep their intentions under wraps?

I'm almost as far as you can get from DC and even I knew that something was planned. They planned it out in the open. ANYONE with a Parler account could see them "planning" and scheming. People were sending links, screenshots, and more to the FBI since November. They talked about shooting them as they came out of "the tunnels" and had maps. 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[fraurosena]

5 hours ago, Maggie Mae said:

I'm almost as far as you can get from DC and even I knew that something was planned.

I’m even further away from DC than you are; there’s a whole ocean in between DC and where I live. And I too knew violence was being planned. It was all over social and mainstream media. Trump was as good as screaming it from the rooftops. In December he notably and very publicly said: come to DC on January 6, “… it’s going to be wild!”

At the very least preparations should have been made for the possibility of an out of control crowd. Instead it’s clear someone went out of their way to not prepare, or even act quickly and adequately once violence had begun.

 

[Xan]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

At the very least preparations should have been made for the possibility of an out of control crowd. Instead it’s clear someone went out of their way to not prepare, or even act quickly and adequately once violence had begun.

I think there was an active "stand down" order that went out.  Maybe, in the beginning, it was described as trying to improve the optics of the way DC handled crowds and protesters.  But people in higher levels had to actively be denying extra help.  No way would it ordinarily be okay to have that many people protesting with so few police around.

I'm sure Trump and his minions had told the military not to interfere.  I hope we find out which other dark money interests were behind it all.  And they need to investigate the upper echelon of the Pentagon to see who refused to send troops when they were first requested.

[Cartmann99]

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Colbert I. King: "Republicans on the insurrection? Don’t confuse them with the facts."

Quote

In 1974, Washington collectively shook its head and suppressed laughter when Republican Rep. Earl Landgrebe of Valparaiso, Ind., a die-hard champion of President Richard M. Nixon, said this the day before Nixon resigned:

“Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment. I’m going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.”

Now hold on. Everybody’s got an Uncle Earl up in the attic. That might help explain why the Republican Party was never held to account for Landgrebe, a colorful right-wing loner, who once voted no on a quorum call but could not later remember why.

After being named by New Times Magazine one of the “10 dumbest” members of Congress in the run-up to the 1974 elections, and because of his slavish embrace of the disgraced Nixon, Landgrebe earned himself a one-way ticket home, courtesy of voters who turned to the opposing Democratic candidate in droves.

Many of us who lived through the Watergate era thought we would never again see the likes of Earl Landgrebe. We had not accounted for the current crop of House Republicans.

Comes now a dawning reality: Though Landgrebe died in 1986, his spirit lurks in the House chamber, blanketing the Republican side of the aisle.

And the evidence?

It’s all there in antics displayed by House Republicans since President Donald Trump was fired by the American people nearly a year ago.

Only a party infused with Landgrebe’s recalcitrance could have voted against officially certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. But it happened when 139 House Republicans stood with Trump over the electoral college — and against more than 81 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden.

And when the House voted to establish a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, every Republican present but two voted to sweep the insurrection under the rug.

That GOP vote to tank the probe was reminiscent of Landgrebe’s logic for becoming the lone voice against a cancer research appropriation bill. Landgrebe dismissed the idea of working to cure cancer because it would only change “which way you’re going to go.” That a Jan. 6 inquiry won’t change the outcome may have figured into GOP thinking. But then, maybe not.

Lest there’s any doubt that Landgrebe’s “closed mind” approach to evidence has hold of the Republican caucus, look no further back than a week ago, when the House voted to hold Stephen K. Bannon, former chief White House strategist and Trump confidant, in contempt for defying a congressional subpoena.

The case was open and shut. Bannon, a private citizen during the period in question, refused to comply with the House select committee investigation, though he didn’t have a legal leg on which to stand. His refusal was clearly a thumbed nose at Congress. Yet that was not enough to overcome the mutinous mind-set gripping the former president’s party. Only nine House Republicans had enough respect for their own institution to vote yes.

Asinine and disgusting, yes. But more than that, dangerous, because House Republicans have been doing nothing less than obstructing attempts to learn the facts behind the Jan. 6 insurrection.

There’s no shaking of heads and suppression of laughter when thoughts turn to that day in January when Trump stirred up the crowd at the White House Ellipse.

Those U.S. Capitol invaders weren’t just a ragtag group of disappointed Trump supporters in town to blow off a little steam. On that day, the country witnessed a deliberately violent attack on the cradle of our democracy by Trump-inspired rioters intent on stopping the certification of a presidential election and the peaceful transfer of power. It was a blatant attack on the rule of law and the Constitution, and an irrevocable national disgrace.

Making the Capitol insurrection worse is the refusal of Landgrebe-minded Republicans to support bona fide attempts to discover the facts behind the attack, to learn what happened and why, and to make certain a repeat of that shameful day never happens.

A full accounting of Jan. 6 and its causes also requires learning the extent to which members of Congress might have been involved in Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election’s legitimate results, and in the violence that erupted in the Capitol.

Landgrebe vowed he would rather be taken out of the building and shot than cast a stone in his hero’s direction. House Republicans need not go that far. Just join in the exercise of the House’s constitutional authority and make sure our democracy remains strong. That’s not too much to ask or expect. Democratic values ought to override devotion to another disgraced president.

 

[Cartmann99]

MAGA rioter's lawyer hints her client will spill dirt on organizers during House select committee testimony

Quote

Heather Shaner, an attorney representing several MAGA rioters, hinted to NBC News' Haley Talbot on Friday that one of her clients would soon spill dirt on rally organizers to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

While discussing her client's plans to testify, Shaner said that "we want to see the queens and kings prosecuted not the pawns," with the implication being that her client could provide information that would help send some higher-ups to jail.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol"

Quote

As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.

The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.

Jacob, Pence’s chief counsel, included Eastman’s emailed remarks in a draft opinion article about Trump’s outside legal team that he wrote later in January but ultimately chose not to publish. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the draft. Jacob wrote that by sending the email at that moment, Eastman “displayed a shocking lack of awareness of how those practical implications were playing out in real time.”

Jacob’s draft article, Eastman’s emails and accounts of other previously undisclosed actions by Eastman offer new insight into the mind-sets of figures at the center of an episode that pushed American democracy to the brink. They show that Eastman’s efforts to persuade Pence to block Trump’s defeat were more extensive than has been reported previously, and that the Pence team was subjected to what Jacob at the time called “a barrage of bankrupt legal theories.”

Eastman confirmed the emails in interviews with The Post but denied that he was blaming Pence for the violence. He defended his actions, saying that Trump’s team was right to exhaust “every legal means” to challenge a result that it argued was plagued by widespread fraud and irregularities.

“Are you supposed to not do anything about that?” Eastman said.

He stood by legal advice he gave Pence to halt Congress’s certification on Jan. 6 to allow Republican state lawmakers to investigate the unfounded fraud claims, which multiple legal scholars have said Pence was not authorized to do.

Eastman said the email saying Pence’s inaction led to the violence was a response to an email in which Jacob told him that his “bull----” legal advice was why Pence’s team was “under siege,” and that Jacob had later apologized.

A person familiar with the emails said Jacob apologized for using profanity but still maintained that Eastman’s advice was “snake oil.” That person, like several others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said that it plans to subpoena Eastman as it investigates his role in Trump’s efforts, which included two legal memos in which Eastman outlined how Republicans could deny Joe Biden the White House.

In the days before the attack, Eastman was working to salvage Trump’s presidency out of a “command center” in rooms at the Willard hotel near the White House, alongside such top Trump allies as Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Jacob wrote in his draft article that Eastman and Giuliani were part of a “cadre of outside lawyers” who had “spun a web of lies and disinformation” in an attempt to pressure Pence to betray his oath of office and the Constitution.

Jacob wrote that legal authorities should consider taking action against the attorneys.

“Now that the moment of immediate crisis has passed, the legal profession should dispassionately examine whether the attorneys involved should be disciplined for using their credentials to sell a stream of snake oil to the most powerful office in the world, wrapped in the guise of a lawyer’s advice,” he wrote in the draft.

Robert Costello, a lawyer for Giuliani, said Jacob had a right to his opinion. “This is an opinion piece, and not surprisingly, he agrees with his own opinion,” Costello said.

A bipartisan group of former government officials and legal figures, including two former federal judges, has asked the California bar association to investigate Eastman’s conduct.

Eastman’s memos gave several options for Pence to use the vice president’s ceremonial role of counting electoral college votes to halt Trump’s defeat. Eastman has argued that the 1887 Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional, and that the vice president has power under the 12th Amendment to decide whether electoral votes are valid.

Under the most drastic of the options outlined in the memos, Pence would have rejected electoral votes for Biden from states where Republicans were claiming fraud, making Trump the winner — a proposal that Eastman has more recently tried to disown as a “crazy” suggestion he did not endorse.

Eastman made the case for Pence to act during a meeting in the Oval Office with Trump, Pence, Jacob and Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, on the afternoon of Jan. 4, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The meeting was reported in the media soon after. Pence advisers said they had never heard of Eastman before January.

The meeting was called, the people said, because Trump was frustrated that Pence was not acceding to his demands, and wanted the vice president to hear arguments from Eastman, whom he viewed as having more credibility in legal circles than some of Trump’s other legal advisers.

Eastman argued that Pence should at least try the maneuver of not certifying electors on Jan. 6, because it had never been done before, and so had not been ruled on by the courts, one of the people familiar with the discussions said. Eastman told The Post he did not recall making “any such statement.”

Eastman said that, in response to a question from Pence, he said in the meeting that it was an “open question” whether Pence had the ability to unilaterally decide which electoral votes to count.

During a little-noticed radio interview that evening, Eastman said that although it would be politically impossible for a vice president to certify his “favorite slate of electors” without any evidence of fraud, the “level of corruption” in the 2020 vote could not be allowed to stand.

“I think that makes the exercise of the vice president’s power here very compelling,” Eastman said.

In a meeting the following day with Short and Jacob at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Eastman began by arguing that Pence should reject Biden electors, according to the two people. He did not share his memos outlining how to stop Biden’s victory with Pence’s team at either the Jan. 4 or the Jan. 5 meetings, according to the people familiar with the discussions. Eastman’s memos were first reported in the book “Peril” by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Jacob wrote in his draft article that a Trump lawyer conceded to him in a Jan. 5 meeting that “not a single member of the Supreme Court would support his position,” that“230 years of historical practice were firmly against it,” and that “no reasonable person would create a rule that invested a single individual with unilateral authority to determine the validity of disputed electoral votes for President of the United States.”

The two people familiar with the matter said Eastman was the only lawyer in the Jan. 5 meeting.

By the end of the two-hour meeting, the people said, Eastman had conceded that having Pence reject Biden electors was not a good plan.

Eastman denied to The Post that he made concessions and said he never advocated for Pence to reject the electors outright. “That is false,” he said. “And distorting the conversation, which depends heavily on what scenario was being discussed.”

In telephone calls later on Jan. 5, Eastman proposed to Pence advisers that he take a less drastic option outlined in the memos of “sending it back to the states” for the unfounded fraud claims to be examined. Eastman also suggested on several occasions, according to the people with knowledge of the meetings, that Pence could intervene because the courts would invoke “the political question doctrine” and not intervene.

“But if the courts stayed out of a standoff between the Vice President and Congress over the fate of the presidency, then where would the issue be decided? In the streets?” Jacob wrote in his draft op-ed.

Eastman told The Post: “I did not push for electors to be thrown out, but for the disputes to be referred to state legislatures, as had been requested by key legislators in several states, for assessment of the impact of the acknowledged illegality in the conduct of the election.”

Around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, as Trump addressed supporters at a rally near the White House, Pence’s office released a letter to Congress stating that he would not block the certification. Thousands of Trump supporters marched to the Capitol and rioted.

“What the lawyers did not tell the crowd — and to the best of my knowledge, never told the president — is that they were pushing an abstract legal theory that had overwhelming drawbacks and limitations,” Jacob wrote in the op ed.

Jacob wrote that Pence never considered a different course of action.

After the unrest began on Jan. 6, Jacob sent an email to memorialize his conversation with Eastman from the day before, according to the two people with knowledge.

After Pence was escorted out of the Senate, Jacob emailed Eastman to criticize the legal advice he had pushed to Pence on stopping certification.

“Thanks to your bull----, we are now under siege,” Jacob wrote, according to Eastman. Eastman, while willing to discuss the email, declined to provide a copy to The Post. One of the other people with knowledge of the matter confirmed the content of Jacob’s email.

That led to Eastman sending the email stating that Pence’s decision led to the “siege.”

The two exchanged further messages in which Jacob apologized for his expletive, but not his critiques, and Eastman said that he had wanted Pence to postpone the count to allow states to investigate, according to Eastman and the two people familiar with the exchange.

That evening, Eastman told Jacob in another email that Pence should still not certify the results, according to Eastman and one of the people familiar with the emails. That email from Eastman came after the rioters had been cleared from the Capitol and Pence had returned to the chair to preside over the proceedings and vowed to continue.

Pence allowed other lawmakers to speak before they returned to counting the votes, and said he wasn’t counting the time from his speech or the other lawmakers against the time allotted in the Electoral Count Act.

Eastman said that this prompted him to email Jacob to say that Pence should not certify the election because he had already violated the Electoral College Act, which Pence had cited as a reason that he could not send the electors back to the states.

“My point was they had already violated the electoral count act by allowing debate to extend past the allotted two hours, and by not reconvening ‘immediately’ in joint session after the vote in the objection,” Eastman told The Post. “It seemed that had already set the precedent that it was not an impediment.”

Eastman, 61, is a veteran conservative legal activist who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A longtime member of the Federalist Society, he has spent much of his legal career fighting same-sex marriage.

He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank based in Upland, Calif., whose leaders stridently defended Eastman from criticism over his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and attacked the media’s coverage of it.

Eastman was sharply criticized by Democrats in August last year for writing an article for Newsweek that questioned then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s eligibility to be vice president on the grounds that her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born. He said his understanding was that Trump first noticed him arguing against birthright citizenship on Fox News.

Eastman has said that he first made contact with lawyers working on Trump’s election challenges during the weekend after the election in Philadelphia, where he happened to be attending an academic conference. The law firm Jones Day had just withdrawn from representing Trump and, Eastman said in a podcast interview in June, “somebody had heard I was in town and brought me over to the headquarters.”

Eastman’s visit to Trump’s team was brief, but “long enough to catch covid,” he said on the podcast hosted by David Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor who is well known in election-denial circles.

Eastman testified via video about purported fraud to Georgia state senators at a Dec. 3 hearing where Giuliani also spoke. Giuliani said state legislators were given copies of a paper by Eastman that argued they could reject election results and directly appoint electors.

Eastman’s seven-page paper featured theories about voter fraud published by the right-wing blog the Gateway Pundit and an anonymous Twitter user named “DuckDiver19,” according to a copy Eastman shared with The Post.

Eastman has said that Trump asked him to draft a brief calling for the Supreme Court to allow Trump to intervene in a case filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), which sought to block the electoral college votes from four states. Eastman submitted his brief on Dec. 9 and the high court rejected the case two days later.

Eastman was previously a professor of law at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. A week after the Jan. 6 attacks, Chapman President Daniele Struppa announced that Eastman had agreed to retire from the school after what Struppa called a “challenging chapter for Chapman.”

At the time of the Capitol attack, Eastman was on leave from Chapman and serving as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado, which subsequently stripped him of some of his duties there.

 

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

[Cartmann99]

Updated 'Trump Train' 911 transcripts reveal Texas cops refused to send escort to Biden bus

Quote

As supporters of then-President Donald Trump surrounded and harassed a Joe Biden campaign bus on a Central Texas highway last year, San Marcos police officials and 911 dispatchers fielded multiple requests for assistance from Democratic campaigners and bus passengers who said they feared for their safety from a pack of motorists, known as a "Trump Train," allegedly driving in dangerously aggressive ways.

"San Marcos refused to help," an amended federal lawsuit over the 2020 freeway skirmish claims.

Transcribed 911 audio recordings and documents that reveal behind-the-scenes communications among law enforcement and dispatchers were included in the amended lawsuit, filed late Friday.

The transcribed recordings were filed in an attempt to show that San Marcos law enforcement leaders chose not to provide the bus with a police escort multiple times, even though police departments in other nearby cities did. In one transcribed recording, Matthew Daenzer, a San Marcos police corporal on duty the day of the incident, refused to provide an escort when recommended by another jurisdiction.

"No, we're not going to do it," Daenzer told a 911 dispatcher, according to the amended filing. "We will 'close patrol' that, but we're not going to escort a bus."

The amended filing also states that in those audio recordings, law enforcement officers "privately laughed" and "joked about the victims and their distress."

Former state Sen. Wendy Davis, who was running for Congress at the time, is among the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The new complaint also expands the number of people and entities being sued to include Daenzer, San Marcos assistant police chief Brandon Winkenwerder and the city itself. A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday. Daenzer and Winkenwerder could not immediately be reached.

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

9 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

  Hide contents

 

See, that’s kinda the problem of being POTUS rather than a businessman or even a reality tv show personality. A businessman can hide things like really immoral treatment of others such as refusing to pay bills for services rendered or trying to using eminent domain to kick an elderly lady out of her home. A reality tv show personality can get away with keeping secrets like “allegedly” needing his diaper changed on set due to abuse of pseudoephedrine over a course of years or “alleged” sexual abuse of participants and racist comments.  But even a high school junior knows that pretty much everything a sitting POTUS has documented becomes part of the National Archives. Every 3 am Tweet; every note to the Press Secretary;  every daily schedule no matter how much it embarrassingly emphasizes a person is not coming anywhere close to putting in an 8 hour day, much less the hours an actual functioning POTUS works; every item that demonstrates the framework of that particular administration and its inner workings. Only a complete dolt totally unaware of very basic ideas of the Office of the President of the United States would fail to understand that he would be under scrutiny and that being POTUS is not like being a dictator. See also: Donald Trump.

[Howl]

I had this epiphany in the middle of the night, when it seemed crystal clear. 

Contemplating this, it made me realize that the genesis of the CRT crazy (like all the current crazy going on)  is astroturf (not grass roots) and it's all of a piece making the punitive/unconstitutional voting laws at the state level seem...logical.  I can't draw a straight line between these two things, but it's all part of same effort.  

Edited October 31, 2021 by Howl

[Xan]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

I had this epiphany in the middle of the night, when it seemed crystal clear. 

Contemplating this, it made me realize that the genesis of the CRT crazy (like all the current crazy going on)  is astroturf (not grass roots) and it's all of a piece making the punitive/unconstitutional voting laws at the state level seem...logical.  I can't draw a straight line between these two things, but it's all part of same effort.  

The concept of the Overton Window:  The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

I think what I'm feeling is that the Overton Window is (and has been) pushed very far to the right.  The purpose, of course, was to keep the Republicans in permanent majority and enable them to continue to be good to corporations and rich people and to punish ordinary citizens, women, people of color, etc.  Yes, it's all of a piece.  The CRT nonsense is just an extension of Lee Atwater's "Southern strategy".  They can't say the "n" word aloud anymore but they can use buzzwords and phrases like "CRT" and they mean the same thing.  It's a dog whistle.  Most of this crap is astroturfed.  That's why it's important to always follow the money.

 

[Howl]

Mike Flynn is a dangerous loose cannon.  Very dangerous.  He's deep into Q Anon wing-nut territory, has a lot of influence and power on the alt reich and he's bat shit crazy.  Never forget that his brother, a general in the US Army, was probably involved in stopping a response to control the Jan. 6 insurgency. 

GOP candidate: Michael Flynn trying to run extortion plot on U.S. officials to reinstall Trump    Pennsylvania Senate candidate Everett Stern made the bombshell accusation in a press conference Saturday

Everett Stern owns a private intelligence firm called "Tactical Rabbit" 

excerpt: 

Spoiler

Because of his intelligence background, Stern claims at least two people representing a Flynn-linked group called "Patriot Caucus" approached him earlier this year after a speech with an offer to hire his firm to gather "dirt" on officials and recruit others to assist in the plot. At one point, one of the men allegedly told Stern that they had retained the services of active intelligence officials "both domestic and foreign."

"They wanted to gather intelligence on senators, judges, congressmen, state Reps, to move them towards the audit. The word 'move' was emphasized tremendously," Stern said. "It was clear to me what they wanted was not traditional opposition research — what they wanted was to extort and to literally move people towards the audit with dirt."

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Howl]

Lindsay Graham better be careful. This information coming out has just painted a bullseye on his back. 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Howl]

Twitwaffle Jenna Ryan being sentenced to prison for two months makes my heart sing.  She's a supposedly hot real estate agent in Dallas, IIRC.  She's gonna lose some M.O.N.E.Y. 

This isn't relevant to the topic at hand, but love this Lyle Lovett song

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

19 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

I am thoroughly enjoying that one of the reasons she received incarceration is her Tweet that because she is blonde and white she won't get any jail time.  Another reason was her ongoing public statements insisting she did nothing wrong.  If she had just shut her cakehole she probably would have avoided any jail/prison.  She's a match for our Jilldo- bleached blonde, overly made up, grifting, pretend Christian, Trumpanzee who can't help bleating about herself so much that she ends up being the biggest cause of her own problems.  Those two really should get together and cry on each other's shoulders about how they are so persecuted for their beliefs. 

[Alisamer]

I hope every person incarcerated for their role in the insurrection is put in a very diverse general population. It might not help, but I think time outside their echo chambers being forced to acknowledge the fact that their life experience is not the only life experience there is, might be good for them.

[Howl]

Jenna, Jenna, Jenna

 

[Ozlsn]

Spoiler

 

I knew about the Quayle calls, but not about the deactivation. This is seriously organised. 

[fraurosena]

29 minutes ago, Ozlsn said:

  Hide contents

 

I knew about the Quayle calls, but not about the deactivation. This is seriously organised. 

If things were this egregious and Pence was deliberately put in harm's way (along with mother, I might add!), and Pence seems to have at least somewhat been aware of the danger he was put in, I am even more astounded by his recent statement that the sixth was "... just another day in January." Unless he knows he is actually still in danger right now and he was attempting to show he poses no threat.

[Xan]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

If things were this egregious and Pence was deliberately put in harm's way (along with mother, I might add!), and Pence seems to have at least somewhat been aware of the danger he was put in, I am even more astounded by his recent statement that the sixth was "... just another day in January." Unless he knows he is actually still in danger right now and he was attempting to show he poses no threat.

I'm thinking along the lines of "I wonder what he's been promised".  He asked to not release the photos of himself in the parking garage so he knows how damning they are.  Are there dark money sources who plan to pay him for his cooperation?  Has he been offered lucrative position on corporate boards or Republican speaking engagements?  When politicians are willing to pretend things are fine at this level, I think there is money involved.

Of course, he could still be worried about his safety.  The Trumpies are crazy and violent.  I think he gets some Secret Service protection but I'm not sure for how long.  

The most interesting thing to me was how Pence refused to get in the Secret Service car.  It looks as if he was afraid they were in on it and would take him somewhere and, I don't know... kill him?  He flatly refused so he has a bit more street smarts than I've previously believed.