2020 Election Fallout 15: More Information Is Being Revealed About The Big Lie

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

Shoving past other world leaders to be at the front. Taking a golf cart while everyone else walked. Refusing to come out in light rain to honor people who gave their lives during war. Love letters from North Korean and Russian despots. I had forgotten some of what you guys listed and we could fill at least another page with more. He was such an embarrassment. But tan suit and Dijon mustard, amirite? 🙄

[GreyhoundFan]

Just published by the Washington Post: "Senior Trump official at State met with election denial activists Jan. 6"

Quote

On Jan. 6, 2021, around the time that thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department met with two activists who had been key to spreading the false narrative that the presidential election had been stolen.

The meeting came as Trump’s allies were pressing theories that election machines had been hacked by foreign powers and were angling for Trump to employ the vast powers of the national security establishment to seize voting machines or even rerun the election.

Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University of America then serving as an assistant secretary of state, confirmed to The Washington Post he met with the two men — Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann and Michigan lawyer Matthew DePerno — in the midst of the tumultuous day.

The two men have previously claimed to have huddled on Jan. 6 with State Department leaders, who Oltmann has said were sympathetic to the claims that a “coup” was underway to steal the presidency from Trump. They have not identified with whom they met. Destro’s acknowledgment is the first independent confirmation that they successfully gained the high-level audience. It is unclear whether the meeting led to any action.

Oltmann and DePerno played important behind-the-scenes roles in crafting the baseless allegations that the election was stolen from Trump, a review of emails and public statements from Trump allies shows. The State Department meeting provides new evidence of the success that activists spreading false claims about the election had in gaining access to top administration officials. Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows was in close contact with activists pushing false fraud narratives, as were high-level officials at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Little is known about the origins of the session at the State Department. The department is responsible for international diplomacy, and former officials said meetings that revolve around domestic elections would be highly unusual.

In response to questions from The Post, Destro confirmed in an email that he met with Oltmann and DePerno, now the Republican nominee for attorney general in Michigan. But Destro declined to answer other questions, including what was discussed that day, whether other officials took part and whether anyone took action as a result.

“I met with hundreds of American citizens and foreign nationals during my time at State, all of whom had foreign-focused issues to discuss,” wrote Destro, who served as the assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from September 2019 to the end of Trump’s term. “I won’t talk about any of the details of those meetings, either.”

Before joining the State Department, Destro was a law professor who specialized in religious liberty and had served as an adviser to religious organizations. He has appeared on a podcast hosted by Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council.

Oltmann and DePerno did not respond to questions about the meeting.

As part of his candidacy to become Michigan’s top law enforcement officer, DePerno described the meeting on a questionnaire from a pro-Trump interest group. “On January 6, 2021, I was in the State Department briefing Mike Pompeo’s staff on how the election was stolen,” DePerno wrote. He added in parenthesis: “NOTE to reader: don’t tell the Feds!"

In various podcasts and on social media, Oltmann has also described the meeting, suggesting he had a series of high-level meetings with officials at the State Department and asserting that they were impressed by information he presented that he claimed proved the election was stolen. He has been coy about naming the officials.

“I was actually in the State Department meeting with leadership,” he said in one podcast appearance on Jan. 11, 2021. He said he had not “been cleared” to name the officials with whom he met but added: “I met with leadership at every level. Every level. Bar none.”

Oltmann also described being taken to a secure area of the building that was “cherry wood lined” with “pictures of past presidents and people who have served.” The description appears to match the area of the State Department’s seventh floor known as Mahogany Row, where the offices of the secretary and his top aides are located. The assistant secretary position then-held by Destro does not typically have an office on Mahogany Row.

In a social media post, Oltmann wrote that he had met with “the right people” at the State Department, and, in another podcast appearance, he described how department officials reacted with shock to the information he shared.

“They said, ‘If this is true, this is a coup,’ ” Oltmann recounted. “I said, ‘Well, that’s exactly, that’s what I would call it.’ ”

A spokesman for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to comment about the meeting, including whether the secretary attended the session or had been aware of it. Pompeo’s public schedule indicates that he was attending meetings in Washington that day.

A Trump loyalist, Pompeo expressed sympathy for the then-president’s refusal to concede the election before Jan. 6. Asked by reporters a week after the election whether the department was engaging in a “smooth transition” to Joe Biden’s administration, Pompeo responded that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration, all right” — a remark that some of his aides later characterized as a joke.

But Pompeo was also one of the first Trump Cabinet members to forcefully denounce the Jan. 6 attack, tweeting at 6:16 that evening that the storming of the Capitol had been “unacceptable.”

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has expressed interest in the origin and weaponization of false claims that elections machines were hacked.

Trump’s outside supporters sought out potential allies across the government, including officials whose normal portfolios did not include elections. At the Justice Department, for instance, Trump allies worked closely with a mid-level official named Jeffrey Bossert Clark who was otherwise responsible for environmental civil litigation. Clark has said his communications were lawful.

The State Department’s designated point person on a White House deputies group that dealt with the possibility of foreign interference in the 2020 election was then-Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun.

In an interview, Biegun said that by Jan. 6, top government officials were convinced that theories such as those circulated by Oltmann and DePerno that held that foreign forces had hacked voting machines were “just complete and utter nonsense.”

“The information that has been at least disclosed by advocates of this theory has absolutely zero correlation with anything that was available to senior government officials, who had access to every bit of information within the United States government,” Biegun said.

Biegun said that, because of the coronavirus pandemic and street closures in Washington as a result of the events at the Capitol, he was one of the few employees working at the State Department on Jan. 6. He said he was not aware of Oltmann and DePerno’s meeting.

Virginia Bennett, a former career Foreign Service officer who was Destro’s predecessor as acting assistant secretary at the start of the Trump administration, said the job generally involves meeting with foreigners, as well as American activists involved in human rights advocacy overseas. But, she said, it would be atypical for the assistant secretary to hold meetings about U.S. elections.

“I cannot understand why anyone who was examining U.S. election practices and who was not foreign would have had a meeting at the State Department,” she said. “The Department of State has no authority from statute or other mandate over U.S. elections. Period. End of sentence.

“I don’t understand how anybody could have thought that was a good idea,” she added.

The department previously faced scrutiny when two State Department officials in the Obama administration met with former British spy Christopher Steele in October 2016 to discuss his opposition research alleging ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Steele’s work came on behalf of a subcontractor for the Clinton campaign, and his claims were ultimately not substantiated.

In that case, the Justice Department inspector general later found that one of the State Department officials quickly detailed the meeting to the department’s liaison to the FBI, which has responsibility for investigating foreign interference in elections, including flagging a piece of information provided by Steele that she knew to be incorrect.

How Oltmann and DePerno reached Destro is not clear. But the path the two men took to the inner sanctum of the State Department provides insight into how Trump’s desperate desire for evidence to prop up his false claims helped elevate previously unknown characters into national prominence when they asserted evidence of a stolen election.

A Kalamazoo-area attorney, DePerno had run once unsuccessfully for local office when he filed a lawsuit in November 2020 that argued a quickly corrected election night tabulation error in Michigan’s Antrim County provided evidence of a vast conspiracy to hack voting machines made by the company Dominion Voting Systems.

In December 2020, a judge agreed to give DePerno’s team access to voting machines for review. They produced a report that argued the machines showed signs of manipulation. Experts quickly denounced the report as riddled with errors — a finding later confirmed by a Republican-led state legislative committee in Michigan, and DePerno’s lawsuit was dismissed. But as Jan. 6 approached, Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani and others used the document to argue the election was rigged.

Oltmann was a businessman and activist little-known outside of Colorado when he stepped forward on his daily podcast with a wild claim days after the election. He alleged that weeks earlier, he had infiltrated a secret meeting of “antifa journalists” and overheard a man identify himself as Eric “the Dominion guy” and then tell the others: “Don’t worry about the election. Trump is not going to win. I made f---ing sure of that.”

Oltmann went on to name a Dominion employee who he alleged had made the promise to rig the election: Director of Strategy and Security Eric Coomer. Oltmann then circulated anti-Trump writings Coomer had posted to his friends on Facebook. Coomer has denied taking part in a call like the one Oltmann described or promising that Trump would not win the election. In December 2020, Coomer filed a defamation lawsuit against Oltmann in Colorado. A judge has fined Oltmann for refusing to name the person he claims gave him access to the meeting. On Friday, Colorado District Court Judge Marie Avery Moses declined to dismiss the case, ruling that Coomer has a reasonable likelihood of prevailing.

In the heated weeks after the election, Trump supporters seized on Oltmann’s story of a supposed high-level Dominion official who had pledged to swing the election, and Oltmann’s profile quickly rose. He appeared on numerous pro-Trump national media programs and filed a sworn statement in lawsuits to overturn the election that were spearheaded by the lawyer Sidney Powell, a Trump ally. Oltmann’s claim was also cited by Powell and Giuliani during a joint news conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in November 2020.

Oltmann was also a featured speaker at a rally at Washington’s Freedom Plaza on the evening of Jan. 5. During his speech, he presented a chart that he claimed proved Dominion machines had been hacked and concluded, “God will protect us, and God will make sure that President Trump is in office for another four years.”

Social media posts and emails produced in the litigation show that Oltmann and DePerno had joined forces by the morning of Jan. 6 and were working to spread their information to other Trump loyalists and, ultimately, to the president himself.

“I am publishing the Dominion audit raw data from Antrim County machines… Sitting with Matt DePerno and his information overlays this diagram.. perfectly,” Oltmann wrote in an email at 7:46 that morning to several people, including a reporter for the pro-Trump outlet Newsmax.

At 9:11 a.m., an Oltmann employee tweeted, “We are in DC and can explain exactly how Dominion fixes it. No one will pass the truth up to @POTUS Joe Oltmann and Matt DePerno can explain it all perfectly. We are in Trump Hotel. Bob Destro won’t give us an audience with anyone. Whats going on?” He added: “#WWG1WWA,” a variation on a hashtag standing for “Where We Go One We Go All,” the motto of adherents of QAnon conspiracies.

At some point after the tweet, Destro met with the two men, he told The Post.

Destro, who was confirmed to his job in 2019, was in charge of the bureau that produces an annual report on the state of human rights around the world. He was also named a special representative for Tibetan issues, a role in which he was critical of the Chinese government.

From 2004 to 2006, Destro had also served as a special counsel on election issues to the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, Ken Blackwell. But Destro’s State Department role had no responsibilities for U.S. elections.

In a post on Parler, a social media platform then popular with Trump supporters, Oltmann wrote on Jan. 6 that he had met with the “right people” at the State Department.

“They get it, and then this was shared with me there,” he wrote.

Attached was a photo of a document signed by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, in which McInerney claimed he had evidence that results from the Georgia Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5 had been manipulated by China to allow Democrats to win. “This is 100% true. Share,” Oltmann wrote.

A Trump supporter and associate of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, McInerney had endorsed some of the most fantastical claims about the 2020 election in the weeks before Jan. 6. He said that U.S. Special Forces had violently seized computer servers in Germany where the CIA had been holding election data. And he had called on Trump to declare martial law, set up military tribunals, prevent the electoral college from meeting to confirm Biden’s victory and cancel the Inauguration.

While in Washington that week, Oltmann has said he had a series of other high-level meetings, including huddling with Trump lawyers Giuliani and John Eastman. Oltmann said in a podcast appearance last year that on the evening of Jan. 6 — after the Capitol had been stormed — he met with Giuliani at the Trump legal team’s war room at the Willard hotel. Giuliani remained interested in his information about the stolen election, Oltmann said.

“I was like, ‘Look, just put me in front of President Trump and I’ll walk through it,’ ” Oltmann recounted.

Other Trump aides intervened, Oltmann said, and a meeting planned for Jan. 7 with Trump never took place.

 

[Cartmann99]

This is about Dinesh D'Souza's movie.

A pro-Trump film suggests its data are so accurate, it solved a murder. That's false

Quote

A conservative "election integrity" group called True The Vote has made multiple misleading or false claims about its work, NPR has found, including the suggestion that they helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Atlanta.

The claims appear in a new pro-Trump film called "2,000 Mules," which purports to have "smoking gun" evidence of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election in the form of digital device location tracking data. Former president Donald Trump has embraced the film, which has gained popularity on the political right, along with the claim about the murder case.

Trump's official spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said True The Vote "solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes." Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media.

That claim is false.

Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021.

In response to NPR's inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments.

It's not the only false or misleading claim that True The Vote and Dinesh D'Souza, the director behind "2,000 Mules," have made, NPR found.

Fact-checkers from the Associated Press and PolitiFact have examined the central voter fraud allegations in "2,000 Mules" and found that the film makes many dubious claims. A Washington Post analysis summarized the film's allegations as a leap of faith - "we're just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found." True The Vote and D'Souza have disputed those fact-checks.

NPR's reporting has raised additional questions about True the Vote and the film's trustworthiness. Dinesh D'Souza did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

A filmmaker with a controversial past

Dinesh D'Souza has provoked controversy for decades. In 2007, D'Souza drew widespread criticism for writing that "the cultural left is responsible for causing 9/11," citing, among other things, liberal support for same-sex marriage. In 2014, D'Souza pleaded guilty to allegations that he made illegal contributions to a U.S. Senate campaign and was sentenced to five years' probation for committing campaign finance fraud. Trump gave D'Souza a presidential pardon in 2018.

For "2,000 Mules," D'Souza teamed up with True The Vote. The group's executive director, Catherine Engelbrecht, and one of its board members, Gregg Phillips, feature prominently in the film. They are also credited as executive producers.

After the 2020 presidential election, True The Vote said it purchased a trove of geolocation data obtained from electronic devices. Marketers often use that kind of data for targeted advertising, and privacy advocates have raised alarms about just how much information companies are collecting and selling.

True The Vote said it used the data to track the movements of people in key swing states around the time of the 2020 election. D'Souza, Engelbrecht and Phillips claim this location-tracking data show thousands of people making suspiciously large numbers of stops at mail-in vote dropboxes in the 2020 election. They allege those individuals, the "mules" of the title, were making multiple stops because they were actually stuffing the dropboxes with stacks of completed ballots - a practice that critics call "ballot harvesting."

The film also features video surveillance footage of some ballot dropboxes. But, as D'Souza himself has acknowledged, the film does not show any person on camera going to multiple dropboxes. So the film primarily relies on their claims about geotracking data, which D'Souza has argued are "more reliable than video footage."

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, a Republican, said his office had already examined one instance flagged by True The Vote, in which a man delivered multiple ballots to a dropbox. Raffensberger said they found no wrongdoing. "We investigated, and the five ballots that he turned in were all for himself and his family members," said Raffensperger.

Despite the criticisms, Trump has embraced "2,000 Mules." The former president even hosted a premiere event for the film at his Mar-a-Lago resort, featuring Republican politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas. Breitbart reported that Trump called on the crowd to "do something" about the problems allegedly exposed in the film.

Misleading claims about a murder investigation

The film suggests that True The Vote's analysis is so reliable that it helped investigate homicides.

"We chose to look at two murders that were ebbing on cold case status," Engelbrecht says in one scene of the film. The film then describes just one case: the killing of Secoriea Turner on July 4, 2020 in Atlanta.

Phillips says he and his team obtained device data from the area of the shooting, which showed "only a handful of unique devices that could have pulled the trigger...each of these devices has a unique device ID, and we turned the bulk of this information over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"Now, I read they've arrested two suspects," D'Souza responds to Phillips.

"They have," Phillips says.

In an episode of his podcast promoting the film, D'Souza said Phillips and Engelbrecht provided their analysis to the FBI, which turned the data over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). "Shortly after that," D'Souza said, "boom" - there were two arrests and indictments.

NPR contacted the GBI to fact-check this claim.

"The GBI did not receive information from True the Vote that connected to the Secoriea Turner investigation," said Nelly Miles, the GBI's Director of the Office of Public and Governmental Affairs.

An attorney for Secoriea Turner's family told NPR they had never heard of Engelbrecht's and Phillips' analysis either.

"I am not aware that any of this occurred," said the attorney, Mawuli Davis.

Engelbrecht and Phillips told NPR they did not have time for an interview, and Engelbrecht responded to NPR's questions by email.

Engelbrecht wrote that she "called a contact at the FBI" and Phillips gave him the information about the Turner case "on or about October 25, 2021."

But the Fulton County District Attorney announced the indictment of both defendants more than two months earlier, on Aug. 13, 2021.

The timeline directly contradicts D'Souza's claim and means Phillips' analysis could not have played any role in the arrest of the two men for Turner's murder.

In her email to NPR, Engelbrecht noted that "the DA issued a press release [on Aug. 13, 2021] asking for help, which is when we got involved." She did not address the false claims by D'Souza or the misleading implication in "2,000 Mules," except to say that the film "did not have the benefit of full context."

In addition, NPR was unable to confirm Engelbrecht's claim that she and Phillips had provided any information about Turner's case to the FBI.

"I will not provide names of the FBI agents, as I do not want them harassed," Engelbrecht told NPR.

Jenna Sellitto, a public affairs specialist for the FBI's Atlanta field office, declined to comment, noting that the Atlanta Police Department led the investigation and Department of Justice policy "would not permit us to disclose communications between the FBI and private citizens."

The Atlanta Police Department declined to comment.

'It is highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact'

In an interview promoting "2,000 Mules," D'Souza said that True The Vote had even obtained information showing that the "mules" participated in antifa rioting.

"There is an international organization called ACLED [Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project] that monitors the cell phones of all violent rioters around the world," D'Souza said on the Dan Bongino Show. "What True The Vote did was they took the cell phone data on the mules and matched it against the ACLED data on the rioters. And guess what? There's a pretty big overlap."

In the film, Phillips also cites ACLED, which is a nonprofit research organization.

"There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world. We took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta and, sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases," Phillips says in the film. "This is not grandma out walking her dog, these are, you know, violent criminals sometimes."

ACLED told NPR both claims are categorically false.

"This is not the type of analysis you can use ACLED data for, and it is highly unlikely that these conclusions have any basis in fact," said Sam Jones, senior communications manager at ACLED.

"This is not what we do - we do not track device IDs," Roudabeh Kishi, the director of research and innovation at ACLED, told NPR in an interview.

ACLED does track violent incidents around the world, including riots, as well as peaceful protests. Their data do not include specific locations inside a city - such as neighborhoods or city blocks - where protests took place. ACLED does not track the time of day of those incidents or generally note individual participants, except for high-profile leaders.

Kishi said ACLED welcomes input and questions from researchers who might be interested in using ACLED's data. "We never heard from the filmmakers," said Kishi.

"Seeing things like this is quite frustrating, because this is really the direct opposite of what we're trying to do," said Kishi.

In an email to NPR, Engelbrecht said that Phillips was not actually referring to ACLED when he said, "There's an organization that tracks the device IDs across all violent protests around the world" and then mentioned ACLED. She would not specify what organization Phillips was citing, and said Phillips relied on "multiple databases" to reach the conclusion included in the film.

When NPR pointed out that D'Souza had explicitly claimed that ACLED tracks cell phone data, Engelbrecht wrote "If you have questions about Dinesh's comments, my suggestion would be to ask Dinesh."

As with the other claims NPR asked about, D'Souza did not respond to NPR's question.

Claims about the use of 'high-powered computers'

Phillips said in another interview with right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk that it took "12 people, 16 hours a day, for 15 months" to conduct their data analysis. To help with that effort, Phillips said, "We actually do have access to several very high-powered computers."

"We do most of the work in Plano, Tex., and part of the work in the High Performance Computing Center on the campus of Starkville, Miss.," Phillips told Kirk in the interview, which has more than a million views on Rumble.

It appears that Phillips was referring to the Portera High Performance Computing Center, which houses the High Performance Computing Collaboratory at Mississippi State University in Starkville. NPR contacted the university to learn more.

"Mississippi State University, to our knowledge, has done zero analysis or computing on behalf of True The Vote," said Sid Salter, Chief Communications Officer and Director of the Office of Public Affairs at Mississippi State University.

The closest Phillips got to the computing center, Salter said, was a "publicly available tour" of the facility.

Another corporate entity associated with Phillips, called OpSec Group, LLC, did lease space in a separate building in the same research park.

Salter said that office space "appeared to us to be sporadically used, if at all."

Even after NPR provided Salter's comments to Engelbrecht, she continued to claim that Phillips "leased an office in the Portera High Performance Computing Center."

Mississippi State University then provided NPR with a copy of OpSec's lease agreement, signed by Phillips, which shows that his office was actually in a separate facility called the Industry Partners Building.

When NPR asked True The Vote to respond to the discrepancy, Engelbrecht said simply, "I got the building wrong."

 

[Howl]

A few years ago I was at Barnes and Noble and noticed a new Dinesh D'Souza book on the end cap at eye level. 

I neither confirm nor deny that minutes later, those books were on the bottom shelf and copies of a book by a progressive author had taken their place. 

He'll never be as good at it, but D'Souza certainly aspires to Roger Stone-level rat f**kery.  

ETA: Just came across a Rick Wilson story on Instagram -- he refers to 2,000 Mules as a "hilarious mockumentary". 

 

 

 

Edited May 18, 2022 by Howl

[fraurosena]

Oh, this is good! Tom Barrack is Trump's longtime 'friend'...

 

[fraurosena]

This I do not understand...

 

[CTRLZero]

9 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

This I do not understand...

 

I could totally be wrong, but the legal term “work product” may indicate they are still looking through the documents, formulating theories, and basically just at the sorting and note taking step of the legal process.  Eventually they will likely need to turn them over, but not at the preliminary review.  Just a guess, but the term work product is legally specific.  🤷‍♀️ 

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

I could totally be wrong, but the legal term “work product” may indicate they are still looking through the documents, formulating theories, and basically just at the sorting and note taking step of the legal process.  Eventually they will likely need to turn them over, but not at the preliminary review.  Just a guess, but the term work product is legally specific.  🤷‍♀️ 

Then… I still don’t understand. Oh, not your explanation, I get that perfectly fine. But if they’re still in the sorting and taking notes stage after almost a full year of investigating… good grief.

[fraurosena]

Oh myyyy!

 

[47of74]

34 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh myyyy!

 

Loudermilk had earlier not only denied that Republicans gave tours but also filed an ethics complaint against the Democrats who saw the terrorists being given tours of the Capitol prior to the terrorist attack.

Quote

The committee noted that Republicans on the House Administration Committee, who had previously reviewed security footage from that day, had publicly claimed that there were “no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on.” The GOP comments called into question allegations made by three dozen Democrats in the days after Jan. 6 that they observed suspicious, “unusually large” groups, perhaps led by Republican lawmakers or staffers, walking through the Capitol complex in the days preceding the attack.

No evidence had emerged to support that view since then, leading Republicans to criticize the allegations as baseless and in bad faith. Loudermilk led a group of Republicans in criticizing Democrats for accusing them of leading “reconnaissance tours” through the Capitol and filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee against the group of Democratic lawmakers.

The select committee noted that Loudermilk is a member of the House Administration Committee. And they said their review of the evidence “directly contradicts that denial.”

 

[fraurosena]

Sooooo... does this mean things are finally ramping up and heading towards Trump?

Eastman provides new details of Trump’s direct role in legal effort to overturn election

Quote

John Eastman, the attorney who architected Donald Trump’s last-ditch legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election, revealed Friday that he routinely communicated with Trump either directly or via “six conduits” during the chaotic weeks that preceded the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In a late-night court filing urging a federal judge to maintain the confidentiality of his work for Trump, Eastman provided the clearest insight yet into the blizzard of communications between Trump, his top aides, his campaign lawyers and the army of outside attorneys who were working to help reverse the outcome in a handful of states won by Joe Biden.

The filing also describes the direct role of Trump himself in developing strategy, detailing “two hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation.” Those notes are among the documents Eastman is seeking to shield via attorney-client privilege. Eastman said he would also speak directly with Trump by phone throughout his legal challenges to the election.

Eastman described these contacts and records as part of an effort to prevent the Jan. 6 select committee from accessing 600 emails that describe his efforts to build Trump’s legal gambit to reverse the 2020 election outcome — and, when that failed, urge state legislatures to simply overturn the results themselves. He argues that the documents are protected by attorney-client and attorney work product privileges that Congress has no business probing, even as the panel investigates the circumstances that led a mob of Trump supporters to attack the Capitol.

Eastman is also urging the judge, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter of California, to shield dozens of contacts with state legislators, some of whom he advised to appoint slates of pro-Trump electors, overriding the certified results of the popular vote in their states.

Eastman provides few details about the White House officials and attorneys with whom he was communicating, leaving their names out of the filing. But several of the attorneys filed declarations supporting Eastman’s descriptions of his work for Trump. Those declarations, filed under seal with the court, include attestations from Kurt Olsen, the lead lawyer in a Supreme Court lawsuit that Trump backed to overturn the election results, as well as Bruce Marks, a Pennsylvania lawyer who worked on Trump’s election litigation.

In making his case to Carter, Eastman provided an overview of the legal apparatus that mobilized to keep Trump in power after the election was called for Biden. He ticked through a series of cases that he worked on and described his contacts with the lawyers involved.

For example, in the Supreme Court case — Texas v. Pennsylvania — Eastman noted that “[t]en of the attorneys included on the communications (in addition to Dr. Eastman) were working on behalf of then-President Trump or his campaign committee directly), and the other three were assisting Dr. Eastman separately.” In addition, “21 of the documents contain work product as well as attorney-client privileged communications … transmitted to then-President Trump through his executive assistant,” Eastman contends.

The emails in question are all among 90,000 pages of correspondence Eastman sent from his account at Chapman University, where he worked during his bid to help Trump overturn the election. The select committee subpoenaed Chapman for the documents, and Eastman sued to prevent the school from complying.

But Carter has rallied to the select committee’s cause, repeatedly rejecting Eastman’s attempts to scuttle the panel’s demands. He forced Eastman to undertake a review of all of his emails and turn over tens of thousands of pages. And in a March ruling that continues to resonate, Carter held that Eastman and Trump “more likely than not” engaged in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election by obstructing Congress’ ability to count electoral votes. He ruled that Eastman’s efforts to pressure Mike Pence to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election crossed legal lines, particularly as he urged Pence to attempt to avoid getting the courts involved.

Eastman argues in his new filing that Carter’s earlier ruling was flawed and that multiple attorneys in Trump’s orbit had a genuine belief the election results were illegitimate. That belief, he said, should not be the basis for a finding of criminality, even if it turned out to be wrong.

While most of Eastman’s Friday filing pertains to Trump’s broad legal effort, Eastman also described a set of far lower-profile contacts he is seeking to shield from the select committee, including a dozen emails he appears to have exchanged with Fox News host Mark Levin.

Eastman doesn’t identify Levin by name, but describes his contacts with a figure he describes as a “dual role” attorney — one who is also a member of the media. Eastman says this figure is “an individual who, in addition to his role as a radio talk show host, is also an attorney, former long-time President (and current board Chairman) of a public interest law firm, and also a former fellow at The Claremont Institute.” Levin has held all of those roles and has also long been an Eastman ally. In fact, The New York Times reported that Trump first became aware of Eastman after he appeared in a segment on Levin’s show in 2019.

“Dr. Eastman has collaborated on litigation matters with him in the past, and the twelve documents at issue here, addressed to his personal email address rather than his media address, were communications in that capacity,” Eastman’s attorney, Charles Burnham, argues.

Levin could not immediately be reached for comment. The select committee has previously described other Fox commentators’ contacts related to Trump’s actions around Jan. 6, revealing communications from hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade pleading with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to get Trump to directly call off the rioters. The committee has previously requested an interview with Hannity but it’s unclear if he has responded.

Eastman is also seeking to shield 50 emails reflecting contacts with state legislators and GOP officials who he said sought out his legal representation.

“Those 50 documents include attorney-client privileged communications with 9 different clients or potential clients who were seeking Dr. Eastman’s legal advice regarding the constitutional authority of state legislatures to deal with election illegality and fraud,” Burnham writes.

“Seven were themselves state legislators; one was a party committeewomen and also agent of one of the legislators; and the last was a citizen coordinating information sessions for state legislators,” according to Eastman’s filing. “Confidential communications between an attorney and his client are protected even if unrelated to litigation.”

Last week, emails from another Eastman account — at University of Colorado-Boulder, where Eastman worked as a visiting professor — revealed direct contacts between Eastman and Pennsylvania lawmaker Russ Diamond. Eastman advised Diamond on crafting a resolution to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s and to justify it by simply retabulating the popular vote to put Trump on top.

 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Sooooo... does this mean things are finally ramping up and heading towards Trump?

I expect some circling to go on, which may or may not eventually converge on him in a meaningful way.

[Howl]

A great reflection from Jim Rigby, my favorite transcendent Presbyterian pastor, all around sage, philosopher and mystic, about these totally nuts times with guest appearances by Lin Yutang, Thomas Paine and Plato. 

SHADOWS

I know a lot of people who look at the strange characters rising to political power in our time and feel tempted to give up hope. The Trump movement seems to be made up of disingenuous carnival hucksters that would have been laughed off the stage not that long ago. The Democratic Party is infested by a corporate element whose greatest fear seems to be that progressive Democratic policies would actually be enacted. If those were our only two choices, what rational person would not give up hope?

At times like this it is helpful to remember the bigger picture. As Lin Yutang put it, “When small people begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.” Strange figures haunt our political life, not because our situation is hopeless, but because the sun is setting on the ages of colonialism, predatory capitalism, racism, patriarchy and prescientific religion. Until we can let go of those gravestones of dead systems we will be haunted by the horrific shadows cast by the little hearts and minds still serving them.

The new sun that is rising has been prophesied by great souls since the beginning of time. Thomas Paine had a different idea of national greatness when he said: "When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government. Independence is my happiness, the world is my country and my religion is to do good.”

Despair is not an ethical option. We need not cower before the gigantic shadows cast by shriveled souls still serving old oppressions. It was Plato in his allegory of the cave that warned us not to be fooled by the shadow play of world events. The real world is not found in any political or religious theory, but in serving the web of life, the temple of nature and our beloved human family. Such service gives our lives meaning and hope no matter what the shadows appear to do.

[fraurosena]

Interesting, very interesting…

 

[formergothardite]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Interesting, very interesting…

 

Well, he actually is a complete idiot, but I hope he has cut a deal and is turning on Trump. 

[GreyhoundFan]

On 5/19/2022 at 4:17 PM, fraurosena said:

Oh myyyy!

 

I hope they nail Loudermilk and the rest of the treason caucus.

 

[Howl]

Watching Maddow right now interviewing US Rep. Mikie Sherill (Dem, NJ). When Rep. Sherill came to work on Jan 5th, 2021, she was shocked to see visitor groups in the Capitol Complex, because tours had been suspended since Spring of 2020. 

Rep. Mikey Sherill spent 10 years in the military as a helicopter pilot and discussed how she had been consistently schooled in security and to always be aware of things that were out of place or seemed odd.  She was already so concerned by types of groups descending on the capitol that she instructed her staff to work from home on Jan. 5th, 2021. 

When she saw these tour groups in the capitol complex, she was so alarmed that she directed her chief of staff to ask the congressional police (Sargent at Arms?) what the heck was going on.  On January 12, 2021 she stated that lawmakers led "reconnaissance tours" the day before the capitol riot.

 

 

 

[Cartmann99]

No big surprise there...

 

[Howl]

No surprise, indeed!  This is totally on-brand for Trump.   In fact, it's extremely Trump-y. 

[Cartmann99]

 

[47of74]

22 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

If it was up to me I'd tell Gym if he didn't obey the subpoena he'd be arrested, hauled down to jail, dressed in prison orange, placed in handcuffs, and then marched back to the House to testify. 

[Ozlsn]

3 hours ago, 47of74 said:

If it was up to me I'd tell Gym if he didn't obey the subpoena he'd be arrested, hauled down to jail, dressed in prison orange, placed in handcuffs, and then marched back to the House to testify. 

Same. Don't want to turn up? Fine, sit your arse in jail until you're happy to do so or the Investigation is completed - and if the latter you will be charged and additional time added for refusing. Fines don't bother them but I suspect imprisonment might.

[thoughtful]

4 hours ago, 47of74 said:

If it was up to me I'd tell Gym if he didn't obey the subpoena he'd be arrested, hauled down to jail, dressed in prison orange, placed in handcuffs, and then marched back to the House to testify.

And, just for him, since he hates wearing one, I'd have an uncomfortable jacket made from the same fabric as the prison jumpsuit. Complete with pocket square.

Or maybe just make him wear this:

https://www.halloweencostumes.com/deluxe-orange-tuxedo.html

[47of74]

Good 

Quote

A federal judge has ordered that the former national chairman of the right-wing Proud Boys organization remain held until his trial following his arrest and indictment in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Releasing Enrique Tarrio before his trial would not reasonably assure the safety of the community, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in a ruling, denying his request for release while awaiting trial. He ordered Tarrio be held at a federal detention center in Miami, Florida, the state where Tarrio was arrested in March.

Kelly said the charges against Tarrio were "very serious" and involved an "alleged conspiracy to obstruct the certification of the Electoral College vote and thus to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, one of our Nation’s crown jewels."

While he "was not physically present near the Capitol" on the day of the riot, Kelly wrote, "Tarrio’s alleged leadership and organizational role in the conspiracy — as well as his alleged experience using encrypted communications channels to conceal his activity from law enforcement — suggests that he has skill set, resources, and networks to plan similar challenges to the lawful functioning of the United States government in the future."

I hope that fuck stick never has a day where he is not behind bars of some sort for the rest of his fucking useless life.

[thoughtful]

Here's how the utterly disgusting Jon McNaughton pictures those poor, pitiful Capital-stormers (NSFWS - not safe for weak stomachs):

Spoiler

https://jonmcnaughton.com/solitary-confinement/

 

What a deluded piece of excrement that man is. And what a waste of his former art teachers' time.

Edited May 31, 2022 by thoughtful
riffle