2020 Election Fallout Part 16: Public Hearings Are Underway

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump called ‘within the last week’ to overturn Wis. election results, speaker says"

Quote

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin’s Republican house speaker said Tuesday that former president Donald Trump called him “within the last week” seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.

Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) told WISN in Milwaukee that he received a call from Trump after the state Supreme Court ruled on July 8 that most absentee ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin are illegal. The ruling addresses future elections, not the one Trump lost in 2020 by more than 20,000 votes in Wisconsin.

“It’s very consistent. He makes his case, which I respect,” Vos said to WISN. “He would like us to do something different in Wisconsin. I explained that it’s not allowed under the constitution. He has a different opinion.”

Vos said Trump then posted about him on social media. In a July 13 post on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, the former president repeated his baseless claims of election fraud and falsely accused the speaker of letting Democrats “get away with ‘murder.’ ”

“What a waste of a brilliant and courageous decision by Wisconsin’s Highest Court,” Trump wrote.

On Tuesday night, Trump said on Truth Social that Vos’s Republican primary opponent, Adam Steen, could benefit if Vos does not take action. The primary is Aug. 9. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

“This is not a time for him to hide, but a time to act!” Trump wrote. “I don’t know his opponent in the upcoming Primary, but feel certain he will do well if Speaker Vos doesn’t move with gusto. Robin, don’t let the voters of Wisconsin down!”

After facing criticism from Trump last year, Vos hired former state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman to review the 2020 election, even though recounts and court rulings had found Biden won the election. Gableman in March said Republicans who control the legislature should consider decertifying the 2020 election. Vos rejected the idea, because legal experts, including Gableman’s own attorney, James Bopp Jr., have said doing so is impossible.

Over the past year, Vos has said he talks to Trump regularly, even though they do not see eye to eye on how to deal with the 2020 election. Vos did not immediately respond to a request for an interview Wednesday morning.

Steen said that he has not talked to Trump but that the former president’s comments are lending fuel to his primary campaign. He criticized Vos for not advancing the resolution that seeks to undo the 2020 results.

“If you really want the people to know that their vote counts, you want to find the answer, so what he is doing to me is spitting in the face of men and women who have given their life to this country,” he said.

The continued push from Trump to overturn the 2020 election results comes as the hearings for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have shown that Trump’s actions put the country on a path toward violence that day. Evidence from the committee indicates that Trump chose to escalate rather than dial down tensions surrounding the election on at least 15 occasions. The committee’s next hearing, scheduled for Thursday night, will focus on Trump’s actions while the U.S. Capitol was under attack and breached.

The Wisconsin case the state Supreme Court ruled on this month was brought by two suburban Milwaukee men represented by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty after about 2 million people voted by absentee ballot in the November 2020 election, largely because of the coronavirus pandemic. There were 528 drop boxes in use across 430 state municipalities for the 2020 election, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

After the conservative group argued in a lawsuit that nothing in state law indicated that absentee drop boxes were allowed, the case made its way to the state Supreme Court. On July 8, the Wisconsin high court ruled 4 to 3 against the use of drop boxes, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in the minority.

“An absentee ballot must be returned by mail or the voter must personally deliver it to the municipal clerk at the clerk’s office or a designated alternate site,” Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote for the majority.

Some Republicans have seized on the ruling as a way to try to reverse the 2020 results, but the court’s ruling focused only on future elections, not ones that have passed.

The same court declined to take up a lawsuit brought shortly after the 2020 election that sought to invalidate those results because of the use of drop boxes. In a decision from that time, the justices wrote that challenges to election procedures must be brought before elections are held, not afterward.

In his interview with WISN, Vos played down Trump’s latest push to change the results in Wisconsin.

“I think we all know Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” Vos said. “There’s very little we can do to control or predict what he will do.”

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wonder if Rudy is already sweating brown streaks down his face:

 

I'm not sure that Rudy is sweating as much as we think he should be. He just won't be able to remember anything about that time period. 

"Is your name Rudy Giuliani?"

"I do not recall."

"Have you ever met Donald j Trump?"

"I do not recall. "

[Ozlsn]

Followed in my timeline by:

Spoiler

 

 

[Alisamer]

Hopefully it's not the entire secret service, but there were just too many things done Jan. 6 that could not have been done from the outside. Somebody is complicit. I just hope there are enough people who aren't compromised to keep the government functioning. I feel like Republicans in government are just rotten the whole way down, with one or two outliers here and there like Liz Cheney. 

It's like the Republicans are no longer a political party, they have become a crime syndicate. 

[47of74]

Looks like some fecal material is about to hit the rotating blades

Quote

The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog has opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of Secret Service phone text messages related to the days around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The Secret Service was informed of the investigation Wednesday night by the office of the Inspector General of DHS, which said the probe is now criminal and that the agency had been ordered to stop internal investigations into the deleted text messages, NBC reported.

The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot last week issued a subpoena to the Secret Service seeking text messages after learning from the Inspector General that messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, had been erased, purportedly as the result of a “device replacement program.”

On Wednesday, the committee said the Secret Service may have violated federal records-keeping law in deleting the messages. That statement came a day after the Secret Service said it gave just one text message thread in response to the subpoena.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The only way Qevin would tell the truth is by accident: "Kevin McCarthy accidentally tells the truth about the GOP and Jan. 6"

Quote

With the Jan. 6 House select committee about to deliver some of its biggest revelations about Donald Trump’s coup attempt, it’s fitting that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy just let slip a big truth about the GOP’s propaganda regarding the proceedings.

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday night, the California Republican essentially came right out and said it: We Republicans refused participation in the committee’s investigation for the express purpose of enabling us to cast it as a partisan exercise and therefore illegitimate.

We can learn something from McCarthy’s buffoonish candor — and from the broader GOP response to the hearings. When the focus is on the raw truth about the scale of the Trump-GOP betrayal of democracy, this bad-faith attempt to pollute revelations of great force by casting Democratic investigators as mere partisan actors shrivels toward irrelevance.

Hannity, surprisingly, did us a service by questioning McCarthy’s decision to pull all Republicans from the committee. Recall that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nixed two McCarthy picks — Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jim Banks (Ind.), both obvious Trumpist saboteurs — but greenlighted three other picks, whereupon McCarthy yanked them as well.

Here’s the key exchange:

HANNITY: Once they pulled Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, why didn’t you replace them with other people? In retrospect, should you have?

McCARTHY: No, not at all. Because nothing would be different. Think of this. It’s only the majority who has subpoena power. They would never allow Republicans into those meetings when they interview the individuals.

All they would be is, the American people would sit up there, and they would think, this is a fair process.

McCarthy then spewed misdirection about Republicans wanting the committee to examine leftist violence. That was always an absurd false equivalence tactic, given that this was an actual coup attempt by one party’s president, backed by much of that same party.

Then McCarthy said: “If you allow that to go forward, people would think this is a fair process, it’s the minority having a say. No, we would not.”

In other words, if McCarthy permitted Republicans onto the committee, voters might see it as bipartisan, and therefore more legitimate. That couldn’t stand, so even though Pelosi actually did create a process for bipartisan input, Republicans had to decline it, to magically make it “partisan” and therefore “illegitimate,” a word McCarthy throws around constantly.

McCarthy’s account is mostly baloney. True, a GOP minority on the commission could not have unilaterally subpoenaed, say, Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden. But a ranking GOP member picked by McCarthy would have had input into who was deposed, and how. McCarthy declined this.

What’s more, a Republican does have input into this whole process: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chair. You may have noticed that, contra McCarthy, this Republican actually has done plenty of witness-questioning. So has Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.

McCarthy, of course, would say that doesn’t count. But that gives away the game: The only “bipartisan” committee McCarthy really wanted was one that could be derailed by Republicans who don’t actually want the voting public to learn the full truth about Trump’s coup attempt.

When Pelosi nixed the Trumpist saboteurs, some observers rushed to proclaim this would give McCarthy a weapon to discredit the proceedings as “political.” A glance at the explosive headlines and brutal media dissections of the committee’s revelations suffices to show what a failure McCarthy’s attempt to do that has been.

Indeed, the public doesn’t seem to be letting the process drama overshadow the substance of the findings. Majorities of Americans blame the Jan. 6 violence on Trump and are paying attention to the hearings, and 50 percent believe he committed crimes. A solid majority views the hearings as fair and impartial.

As Brian Beutler writes for the New York Times, Trump’s coup attempt exposed a profound truth: Trump and all the Republicans trying to erase the insurrection with propaganda are, at the most fundamental level, threatening “the American experiment in self-government” and are “unfit to hold public office in a democracy.”

The surprise in the Jan. 6 hearings has been how vividly this truth is crystallizing for the public. So there’s no sense for people who want to defend democracy — small-d and large-D Democrats alike — to run down rabbit holes to defuse bad-faith GOP claims about unfair processes. Nor is there any reason to let credulous punditry about GOP displays of phony outrage shape their approach.

The force of the revelations themselves has blown right through all that frivolous nonsense. There’s a pretty big lesson in that.

 

[fraurosena]

To my chagrin, I won’t be able to watch today’s hearing live, as it will be 2am in the morning over here when it starts. But I’ll be sure to read all about it here when I wake up tomorrow. Is anyone expecting any wild new revelations? Or will it be a well told summation of what we already know?

[GreyhoundFan]

15 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

To my chagrin, I won’t be able to watch today’s hearing live, as it will be 2am in the morning over here when it starts. But I’ll be sure to read all about it here when I wake up tomorrow. Is anyone expecting any wild new revelations? Or will it be a well told summation of what we already know?

I have a feeling that most of it will be a well told summation with a few new revelations.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump White House aide goes on sexist tirade, calls Jan. 6 panel ‘anti-White’"

Quote

A Trump administration aide who met with the House Jan. 6 committee this week unleashed a 27-minute inflammatory tirade, calling the lawmakers’ investigation into the Capitol riot racist against White people and using sexist slurs to describe his former colleagues who also testified.

Garrett Ziegler, a former aide to President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, revealed on his Telegram page that he appeared Tuesday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Hours later, Ziegler said without evidence that he was being targeted due to his race and posted a lengthy audio file calling the probe “a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign.”

“If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed,” Ziegler said. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League noted that Ziegler’s words are “often used as a code for Jews.”

“They see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right? And so, today was just a lot of saying that I invoke my right to silence,” Ziegler said, while insisting he is “the least-racist person that many of you have ever met, by the way. I have no bigotry.”

Ziegler also lashed out at former White House colleagues Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, an ex-White House communications director, who have both testified before the committee.

He used sexist and offensive slang words to describe them and said they are “just terrible.”

The audio circulated online late Wednesday after it was posted by the Republican Accountability Project, a group previously dedicated to opposing Trump. The House committee plans to hold its eighth public hearing this summer on Thursday.

Griffin has not publicly commented but reshared a post from ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt on Twitter that called Ziegler’s language offensive.

In the clip, Ziegler said he was speaking from Illinois and had received a subpoena on April 28 but didn’t “throw a tantrum” about it. He said flying in to Washington for the hearing was “a pain” and that he found the whole experience “so one-sided” and lacking a Republican presence. Committee members “loathe my former boss and by extension me,” he added.

He said that he invoked his right to silence “over 100 times” in response to questions from the committee.

Hutchinson appeared before the committee in late June in an explosive and vivid day of testimony. She testified that Trump knew his supporters were carrying weapons the day of the riot but urged them to go to the Capitol anyway.

She also said she had cleaned up Trump-strewn ketchup off a White House wall and pleaded with Meadows to get off his phone and help quell the Capitol riot, among other claims. Trump has dismissed her testimony as “fake” and “fraudulent.” The former president has also called the committee a “Kangaroo Court.”

CNN first reported news of the Ziegler audio clip, prompting a reply from him online: “Total liars! I cherish women,” he said.

Ziegler also posted on Trump’s social media platform Truth Social that the media reports were “hit pieces” and “vicious” — and repeated his misogynistic insults of Hutchinson.

Even a day after Jan. 6, Trump balked at condemning the violence

Trump condemned the Jan. 6 attack in a three-minute speech the evening of Jan. 7 after aides told him that members of his Cabinet were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

However, according to individuals familiar with the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, he struggled to do so.

 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I have a feeling that most of it will be a well told summation with a few new revelations.

I'm looking forward to it, but the real question is what will come of it.  If the answer is nothing but noise by the Rs to distract, and anything short of effective steps by the Dems to bring justice and positively affect future elections, then what will have been gained?

Sorry for the gloom.  I'm cynical.

[meep]

PBS has the primetime hearing on their youtube channel: 

 

[Ozlsn]

I'm "watching" via various live tweets. This was interesting.

They need to get Pence to testify.

[Ozlsn]

I feel bad for laughing.. oh wait, no I don't.

 

[Ozlsn]

This is... concerning.

Spoiler

 

Also interesting.

[front hugs > duggs]

I wish the media would ask every single Republican they are interviewing (ABC had Chris Christie on) - okay but would you vote for him again? Because the answer is yes and I want them on record saying so. 

[thoughtful]

I am holed up in my bedroom, to try to only run one small air conditioner during this heat wave. So I was lying down in bed to watch the hearings.

I will have to catch up with some of it, because I dozed off for a while (from tiredness, not disinterest!). I was still hearing the audio, I think, and dreamed that I was in a room with Trump and a bunch of his supporters, none of whom seemed to realize I was an infiltrator, or even who I am, because dreams are weird.

They were reading transcripts and listening at the same time, and I was trying to hide my satisfaction with their being shown for the pieces of shit they are, while they all panicked and worried (and argued over the transcripts, because there weren't enough copies for everyone).

The only identifiable person in the dream was Trump himself, who, at one point, decided I was a nice girl who was supportive of all of his goals, and made some stupid speech about me being one of the little people he could trust.

Oh, and I wasn't wearing shoes - I have a clear memory of looking down at my feet and seeing socks at one point in the dream, while I sat at Trump's desk (not the Resolute - we weren't in the Oval, but somehow I knew it was his desk), thinking "If only you knew what I really think of you."

[Becky]

As disturbing as last night's hearing was, I rather watching Josh Hawley running from the mob he "riled up" and hearing laughter from the audience.  I ran that part back over a couple of times, just for kicks. He deserves every bit of humiliation.

However, my favorite part was seeing video of both McConnell and McCarthy assigning responsibility for the violence directly to President Trump - - they will obfuscate and decline to take their own responsibility for their words now, but those videos show the Republicans KNOW Trump is guilty.  They KNOW he put them all at risk of their very lives, and would do so again.

Merrick Garland, do your duty.  Congress, put laws and procedures in place to ensure this never happens again.  Somebody, anybody, make sure Donald Trump never gets close to public office again.  

[47of74]

Sir Hawley bravely running away to various sound tracks...

 

[47of74]

Someone decided to be a moron with the House GOP twitter account.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

9 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

I feel bad for laughing.. oh wait, no I don't.

 

Rick Wilson has a funny reply to the run, Joshy, run video:

 

 

[Howl]

The J6 hearings have been fantastic, the timing and supporting evidence (testimony interwoven with supporting facts and video)  has been brilliant but last night - damn.  I don't know how you throw shade and burn someone at the same time but Josh Hawley was torched and I'm here for it.  Damn. Damn damn damn. And I'm not the only one: 

 

[47of74]

 

[fraurosena]

If you don't know what this is referring to, watch this:

 

[fraurosena]

True.

 

[Alisamer]

11 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

This is... concerning.

  Hide contents

 

Also interesting.

That is pretty interesting. Like you'd have expected a major shutdown the second a gun was spotted within range of the president. I wonder what the thought process was? Like, did some of the secret service go "nah, dude's clearly on Trump's side" and then a few were like "Oh damn. But if he shoots the president... he's already on his way out of office..." 

All this truth-telling and video proof is great, but we need to see some actual consequences for people. Not the little people doing the dirty work, the people pulling their strings. 

5 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

True.

 

I hadn't thought about that, but it is a good point. If that happened during any other administration the president would be on Air Force 1 as quickly as possible, the VP would be secured somewhere separately,  and the military would have been ON IT.