Trump 57: Stealing Nuclear Documents And Pleading The Fifth

[Xan]

1 hour ago, WiseGirl said:

First, a good reminder. Second, In the spoiler Seth Abramson  has some comments including information that 45 has discussed heading to the Middle East, most likely to whoever paid for the information he had.

I suspected as much but it still makes me feel sick.  He asked for a list of U. S. spies back in 2019 when he was looking for a new intelligence chief.  He might have sold that list to Putin and MBS and they might just be picking off spies and informants one by one.  Frank Figliuzzi has reported on the alarming numbers of people being captured or killed recently.  With Donny, it was always about the money.

Edited August 27, 2022 by Xan

[CTRLZero]

I was reading an article in the Washington Post today and thought this was an interesting quote [excerpted and my bolding]:

Six months after its high-profile launch, the site — a clone of Twitter, which banned Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 — still has no guaranteed source of revenue and a questionable path to growth, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Digital World Acquisition, the company planning to take Trump’s start-up, the Trump Media & Technology Group, public.

The company warned this week that its business could be damaged if Trump “becomes less popular or there are further controversies that damage his credibility.” The company has seen its stock price plunge nearly 75 percent since its March peak and reported in a filing last week that it had lost $6.5 million in the first half of the year.

I followed a couple of the links to the SEC filings of the various Truth Social funding organizations, and it makes me wonder why anyone would throw their cash into a company which uses phrases such as “insufficient liquidity,” “high risk,” and “all bets are off if Trump loses interest or wanders off.”  [Hee hee, last quote is my paraphrase.]  

My eyes gave up after trying to read all the fine print in the SEC filings, but there are some gems buried throughout, especially starting around page 35 (generally - the risks sections).

Washington Post article - may have paywall - re Truth Social financial peril
 

SEC filing re Truth Social

[Xan]

Cheri Jacobus has been reporting on this and the information is interesting.

Spoiler

 

 

[BensAllergies]

I have a feeling that the “stolen documents” story is going to get way worse, because this is Trump and there’s no moral compass in him.

As George Conway says, Trump’s preferred pronouns are “I/me/my/mine.”

[formergothardite]

I keep stalking the social media pages of all the die hard Trump supporters I know and none of them are mentioning anything about the raid. They are now harping on about how people should pay their debts. I’m not sure what this means in regards to their devotion to Trump. None of them seem slightly interested in Truth social. 

[Xan]

Here's what Trump is saying today over on Truth Social:

Spoiler

What's really happening with Truth Social is that they haven't paid RightForge, the web-hosting service, since March and now owes it over a million dollars.  The stock price has plunged 75% since March and it has lost $6.5 million in the first half of 2022.  Since the stock price is plummeting, there are concerns that the company might go bankrupt.

Yeah.  Who would've thought that a company made for the benefit of someone who has filed numerous bankruptcy claims and run by Devin Nunes (who has the business sense of a head of cabbage) would go belly up?

Edited August 27, 2022 by Xan

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

My head is spinning. Thank you all for your research and posting information here. The internet server being owed a large sum of money is actually amusing because anyone who dies business with Trump should just know going into it he will not pay up. 
 

But the prospect that he may have given information on people working as Intel is truly sickening. If it is true he pretty much signed death warrants for everyone he revealed and possibly their families as well because he is not working with honorable people but brutal, ruthless monsters. So many of us saw it before the election. I tried to tell the people in my life who were voting for him. I gave them articles about the connections to Russia and his dependence on Russian money because no one reputable will loan him money. I showed them how bad his finances were and made clear that’s why he wouldn’t release his tax returns. I explained the many ways he is open to being blackmailed into turning over US intelligence and information. One of them said to me a few days ago, “I bet you’re loving getting to say I told you so.” I said that I never wished so much to be so wrong about all the things I said would happen because having them all happen is  doing what I said it would do- wreck our country; set the rights of women, LGBTQ+, and POC back decades; cause major rifts among people; and dumb down people who are already lacking critical thinking skills. Oh I wanted so bad to be wrong. 

[47of74]

7 hours ago, Xan said:

Here's what Trump is saying today over on Truth Social:

  Reveal hidden contents

What's really happening with Truth Social is that they haven't paid RightForge, the web-hosting service, since March and now owes it over a million dollars.  The stock price has plunged 75% since March and it has lost $6.5 million in the first half of 2022.  Since the stock price is plummeting, there are concerns that the company might go bankrupt.

Yeah.  Who would've thought that a company made for the benefit of someone who has filed numerous bankruptcy claims and run by Devin Nunes (who has the business sense of a head of cabbage) would go belly up?

I just read about the Orange Fuckmuppet's twitter replacement having some rather serious woes.  And looks like the orange fuck may be in even more legal trouble with the SEC and Federal prosecutors on the case;

Quote

The SEC and federal prosecutors are investigating the origins of a deal through which a so-called special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), called Digital World Acquisition Corp., was set up to eventually take over Trump’s company. The feds appear to be looking into whether the deal was negotiated before the SPAC went public, which would be illegal.

New subpoenas served on the firm in June suggest the probe could be expanding. News of the federal scrutiny has contributed to the company’s stock price falling 75 percent since its peak, with reported losses to the tune of $6.5 million. 

The Trump company has also stopped paying a key vendor. Fox Business reported this week that Truth Social owes a web-hosting company called RightForge $1 million and has failed to make contractually required payments since March.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

How damned true, the GQP thinks "butter emails" is a legal defense.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

This is sad, but true.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a disturbing, yet good, read: "Inside Trump’s war on the National Archives"

Quote

In the nearly three weeks since the FBI searched former president Donald Trump’s Florida home to recover classified documents, the National Archives and Records Administration has become the target of a rash of threats and vitriol, according to people familiar with the situation. Civil servants tasked by law with preserving and securing the U.S. government’s records were rattled.

On Wednesday, the agency’s head sent an email to the staff. Though academic and suffuse with legal references, the message from acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall was simple: Stay above the fray and stick to the mission.

“NARA has received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiring against the former President, or congratulating NARA for ‘bringing him down,’ ” Steidel Wall wrote in the agencywide message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Neither is accurate or welcome.”

The email capped a year-long saga that has embroiled the Archives — widely known for being featured in the 2004 Nicolas Cage movie, “National Treasure” — in a protracted fight with Trump over classified documents and other records that were taken when he left office.

Archives officials have emailed, called and cajoled the former president and his representatives to follow the law and return the documents. When the Archives recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January, agency officials found a mess of disorganized papers lacking any inventory. Highly classified material was mixed in with newspaper clippings and dinner menus. And Archives officials believed more items were still missing.

What happened next was an extraordinary step for America’s record keepers: they referred the matter to the Justice Department, opening a dramatic new chapter in what had been a quietly simmering dispute.

Following the Aug. 8 FBI search, Trump and his allies unleashed a torrent of attacks on one of the most apolitical arms of the federal bureaucracy. “They could have had it anytime they wanted — and that includes LONG ago,” Trump wrote Aug. 12 on his Truth Social website. “ALL THEY HAD TO DO IS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”

Trump was referring inaccurately to unclassified records stored at an Archives facility in suburban Chicago for potential use in Barack Obama’s future presidential library. On Friday, the Hoffman Estates, Ill., Police Department increased patrols around the building after a spike in online chatter regarding the facility, according to a person familiar with the situation. The police department declined to comment. Steidel Wall did not respond to requests for comment.

The political firestorm has revealed the machinations of a central but overlooked part of American democracy — pulling back the curtain on record-keeping practices enshrined into law in 1978 following the Watergate scandal.

“Without the preservation of the records of government, and without access to them, you can’t have an informed population, and without an informed population, you lack one of the basic tools to preserving democracy,” said former acting archivist Trudy Peterson, who expressed concern that Trump’s rhetoric is damaging the public perception of the Archives. “The system won’t work if the neutrality of the National Archives is not protected.”

This portrait of an agency under siege by a former president and his supporters is based on interviews with 14 current and former Archives employees, Trump advisers, historians and others familiar with the escalating dispute, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

Trump’s recent actions have whipped his followers into a fervor against the Archives, and he has empowered some of his most politically combative allies to represent him in negotiations with the agency. Former presidents’ representatives have typically been lawyers, historians or family members without clear political agendas. The representatives usually deal with issues such as negotiating privilege claims, setting up presidential libraries or researching presidential memoirs.

But this was yet another norm that Trump broke. In June, around the time the Justice Department stepped up its hunt for documents at Mar-a-Lago, Trump assigned two new Archives representatives who focused on publicizing documents they claimed would vindicate Trump and damage the FBI: Kash Patel and John Solomon.

Patel, a former White House and Pentagon aide, has sought for years to discredit the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian interference in the 2016 election. He recently has been promoting a children’s book about the scandal that features himself as a wizard who unravels a plot against “King Donald.” He also sells “K$H”-branded swag to raise money for a legal “offense” fund.

After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, Patel claimed in social media posts and right-wing media interviews that the search was part of an ongoing effort to cover up those materials.

“It’s always been all about Russia Gate,” Patel said on Trump’s Truth Social platform.

Solomon, who runs the JustTheNews conservative website, published Steidel Wall’s letter to Trump’s legal representatives notifying them of her decision to allow the FBI access to the boxes retrieved in January. He claimed the letter was proof of the White House’s “effort to facilitate a criminal probe of the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election.”

The Archives battle to secure records from Trump began while he was still president, according to records reviewed by The Post. Gary M. Stern, the agency’s top lawyer, began asking the former president’s attorneys to return two dozen boxes in the residency of the White House before he left. In an email Stern wrote to others, Trump’s counsel, Pat Cipollone, agreed with him. But Trump did not return them.

For months, Stern emailed and called Trump representatives, urging them to simply send them back, using a mix of pleading and an occasional threat. “We know things are very chaotic,” he wrote in one email in May, after describing all the items the Archives wanted back. “...But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.”

Inside the Archives, the decision to provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes — uncharted territory for the 2,800-person agency — was not made lightly, officials said. Steidel Wall deliberated and consulted with the agency’s tightknit senior leadership team consisting of career civil servants. There are no political appointees currently in leadership. Steidel Wall started at the agency in 1991 as an archivist trainee, working on issues from establishing data standards to digitizing records on floppy disks.

The daughter of a police officer and a nursery schoolteacher on Long Island, she came to Washington to study history and government at Georgetown University, where she developed an interest in silent film, according to an interview with her hometown Suffolk Times. She eventually rose to become the agency’s chief of staff and deputy archivist.

“The people handling this … are career civil servants and have handled many sensitive issues, both for Democratic presidencies and Republican presidencies,” said one former Archives official. “We always tried to walk away from the politics of the situation and do our friggin’ job. … If records are alienated, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican, we need to get them back into the government’s custody. And if there’s wayward classified material, materials are classified for a reason.”

On Saturday, the heads of the House oversight and intelligence committees released a statement saying that Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, had confirmed that the Justice Department and the intelligence community were working to assess the potential damage caused by the improper storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. An affidavit unsealed Friday showed that 184 classified documents were found in the initial 15 boxes of Mar-a-Lago records reviewed by the FBI.

“The DOJ affidavit, partially unsealed yesterday, affirms our grave concern that among the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago were those that could endanger human sources,” Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “It is critical that the IC move swiftly to assess and, if necessary, to mitigate the damage done — a process that should proceed in parallel with DOJ’s criminal investigation.”

For most of American history, presidents kept their own papers and their personal ownership had never been challenged, according to a 2006 article co-written by Stern, NARA’s general counsel since 1998.

When Nixon resigned, he made plans to destroy White House records, including the Oval Office tapes that had become central to the Watergate scandal. Congress stepped in and passed the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve all written communication related to a president’s official duties — memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other material — and turn it over to the Archives.

Disputes over the Nixon tapes continued into the 1990s, with lawsuits by former aides and Cabinet members seeking to block disclosure and from public-interest groups demanding access, according to the article. At the end of the Reagan administration, Stern, then with the American Civil Liberties Union, led a groundbreaking lawsuit seeking to preserve White House records related to the Iran-contra scandal.

Research by presidential representatives have in the past raised security risks. In 2005, former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to removing and destroying classified documents from the Archives related to the 9/11 Commission’s investigation. That case was overseen by Christopher A. Wray, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the Trump-appointed director of the FBI.

“This is not a sleepy agency — NARA staff are used to records-related controversies,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at NARA. “This matter, however, is unique. No piece of paper that’s a presidential record should be at Mar-a-Lago. It is clear that NARA staff made extraordinary efforts to recover presidential records and was rebuffed on numerous occasions.”

Trump’s disdain and disregard for the presidential record-keeping system he was legally bound to adhere to is well-documented. And while advisers repeatedly warned him about needing to follow the Presidential Records Act early in his presidency, his chaotic handling of the documents prevailed.

NARA’s motto, Littera Scripta Manet, translates from Latin to “the written word remains.” But in Trump’s White House, the written word was often torn, destroyed, misplaced or hoarded.

“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him,” explained Stephanie Grisham, a former senior White House staffer. “Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump or someone from the outer-Oval at the end of the day. They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”

Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.

“There was no rhyme or reason — it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized,” Grisham said. “He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in refusing to turn over documents, at times suggesting that the records are his and should not be given back to the Archives.

However, not even some of Trump’s closest advisers anticipated that what they viewed as a bureaucratic dust-up with archivists would snowball into a serious FBI investigation for potentially violating federal law in removing and retaining classified documents without authorization — a felony punishable by five years in prison.

Archives official John Laster told one Trump adviser late last year that since the Presidential Records Act came into existence, someone had accidentally taken things with them at the end of every presidency.

So when Trump finally agreed to return the 15 boxes to the Archives in January, one adviser involved in the process said: “I really thought that was the end of the story. We assumed he’d given the boxes back.”

Trump’s advisers only realized it was ballooning into a bigger issue when the Archives said that they suspected even more items were missing. “But they wouldn’t tell us what, they said they weren’t entirely sure — they just thought everything hadn’t been given back,” this person added. “No one saw the Archives referring anything to the FBI.”

But the Archive’s work may not yet be done: Some NARA officials believe that there might still be more records missing, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Our fundamental interest is always in ensuring that government records are properly managed, preserved, and protected to ensure access to them for the life of the Republic,” Steidel Wall told her staff in her email. “We will continue to do our work, without favor or fear, in the service of our democracy.”

 

[47of74]

In the Episcopal Church here were today's epistle and gospel readings.

Spoiler

And the gospel reading was the same in the Roman church.  I think if the Donnie Dumbfuck heard today's epistle reading he'd spontaneously combust and hearing the gospel would make more than a couple Roman Branch Trumpvidians squirm in their seats - especially if they've been whining about student loans as of late. 

(Now I'm wondering if President Biden picked this time to announce his student loan plan knowing what would be coming up for Sunday for a fair number of conservative "Christians" on Sunday.  The readings in churches like the Roman church and the Episcopal church are planned out in advance with multi-year cycles.  If the President did not pick it with today's readings in mind I'd say there was a bit of divine inspiration going on here).

And you all know what got my immediate attention in the epistle reading.  (If you not you sure as fornicate should by now).  Same thing that'll get my attention in any bible reading at church.  The presence of a certain F word that I use on a regular basis and where I often have a shit eating grin on my face as I type it out.

Edited August 28, 2022 by 47of74

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

In the Episcopal Church here were today's epistle and gospel readings.

  Reveal hidden contents

And the gospel reading was the same in the Roman church.  I think if the Donnie Dumbfuck heard today's epistle reading he'd spontaneously combust and hearing the gospel would make more than a couple Roman Branch Trumpvidians squirm in their seats - especially if they've been whining about student loans as of late. 

(Now I'm wondering if President Biden picked this time to announce his student loan plan knowing what would be coming up for Sunday for a fair number of conservative "Christians" on Sunday.  The readings in churches like the Roman church and the Episcopal church are planned out in advance with multi-year cycles.  If the President did not pick it with today's readings in mind I'd say there was a bit of divine inspiration going on here).

And you all know what got my immediate attention in the epistle reading.  (If you not you sure as fornicate should by now).  Same thing that'll get my attention in any bible reading at church.  The presence of a certain F word that I use on a regular basis and where I often have a shit eating grin on my face as I type it out.

The problem is, many of these Trump "Christians" are evangelicals, who attend "Gospel According to Me" churches, that do not follow the lectionary (the readings). Instead, the pastor preaches on whatever he feels like, usually 6-8 week sermon series on a few pet topics in rotation. Those readings wouldn't be popular with the pastor or congregation, so they'd never be used.

[47of74]

4 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

The problem is, many of these Trump "Christians" are evangelicals, who attend "Gospel According to Me" churches, that do not follow the lectionary (the readings). Instead, the pastor preaches on whatever he feels like, usually 6-8 week sermon series on a few pet topics in rotation. Those readings wouldn't be popular with the pastor or congregation, so they'd never be used.

Very true.  The bible most of the GQP follows seems to be the special GQP version, with most of those pesky words in red redacted.  They ignore most of the actual teachings of Jesus Christ and only focus on those few words that fit with their worldviews.  Of course if today's readings in the Roman and Episcopal churches made a few Republicans sweat that's always a good thing.

[GreyhoundFan]

Of course TFG shared this. It's his dream to have idiots rioting in his name.

 

[bea]

Whatever riots there are, the GQP politicians will sit it out, they don’t do riots.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump Tries Mobster-In-Chief Role With Attacks On Law Enforcement"

Quote

WASHINGTON ― America can have peace and tranquility. Or it can have a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. It cannot have both.

Presenting this mob-like ultimatum appears to have become the former president’s strategy as the FBI and the Department of Justice close in on Trump’s possession of and refusal to return top secret documents he took with him to his Florida social club when he left the White House following his failed coup attempt.

“Nice store you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it,” said Glenn Kirschner, a federal prosecutor who spent more than two decades in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., comparing it to “protection rackets” used by organized crime. “Nice country you got here. Be a shame if a civil war destroyed it.”

In near daily statements on his social media platform, in fundraising emails and in interviews, Trump has called law enforcement officials corrupt, illegitimate and reminiscent of Soviet Russia as he demands that prosecutors drop their investigations.

Even more ominously, Trump, via his legal team, delivered a message to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Aug. 11, three days after the search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, that might have been lifted from the film “The Untouchables”:

“President Trump wants the attorney general to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry,’” Trump’s lawyers revealed in a lawsuit trying to block release of the seized documents to prosecutors. “The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”

“It’s the language he uses,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime GOP consultant who left the party after it fell under Trump’s sway. “Trump is a gangster.”

Trump’s inflammatory language has already forced the FBI and prosecutors to guard against violence from Trump followers. One Trump supporter is dead after a shootout with police following his attempt to attack the FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Trump’s office did not respond to HuffPost’s queries for this story.

Danya Perry, a former prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, a center for mob investigations, called Trump’s message “a lightly veiled threat” delivered only after he had first stoked rage among his followers.

“It also lays bare that he knows he easily could calm down his supporters but actively chooses not to, just as the 187 minutes of purposeful inaction during the insurrection,” she said, referring to the three hours that Trump allowed the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol to continue before asking his people to leave. “His message to AG Garland is that he can do it the easy way or the hard way. And that does sound like a scene out of an old mob movie.”

A Long History Of Stoking Violence

Neither Trump’s connections to actual organized crime figures nor his glorification and support of violence on his behalf is new. As a New York City developer, Trump boasted about working with mob-connected businesses in his construction projects. One of his early mentors was Roy Cohn, an actual mob lawyer.

Trump during his 2016 campaign frequently encouraged his supporters to physically attack protesters at his rallies. As president, he encouraged police officers to rough up criminal suspects as they arrested them.

At his Jan. 6, 2021, pre-insurrection rally, he told his followers to march on the Capitol to intimidate his own vice president and Congress into letting him remain in office ― even though he knew many in the crowd he had assembled in Washington that day were armed.

And not long after his departure from office, Trump was already priming his followers to respond aggressively if prosecutors charged him.

“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt,” he said at a Texas rally in January.

Trump has never explained what he meant by “racist,” but Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg, the district attorneys of Fulton County, Georgia, and Manhattan, respectively, are both Black.

His attacks on law enforcement only increased as the scope of the investigations against him became clearer and reached a fever pitch after the Aug. 8 search of his tennis and croquet club in Palm Beach.

On Aug. 11, Trump posted the message: “STOP COMMUNISM IN OUR COUNTRY!” The next day, he accused the FBI of “planting information” during the search. On Aug. 14, he wrote: “The FBI has a long and unrelenting history of being corrupt.”

On Aug. 16, he claimed the FBI agents had “opened their arms and grabbed everything in sight, much as a common criminal would do.”

And on Aug. 19, he posted on his Truth Social site a series of statements that edged close to advocating revolt: “The law enforcement of our Country has become that of a Third World Nation, and I do not believe the people will stand for it ― between Fraudulent Elections, Open Borders, Inflation, giving our Military to the Enemy, and so much more ― how much are we all expected to take?”

“Trump continues to use a wink-wink, nod-nod approach to political violence, attacking his target as being corrupt and treating him viciously and unfairly,” said Mary McCord, a former top official at the Justice Department. “We’ve seen for years now that Trump’s followers interpret this as a call to action, and many respond, as they did on Jan. 6. Now his targets are the FBI and DOJ. It’s reasonable to ask whether Trump is attempting to wield his own ‘mob,’ the supposedly angry people all over the country, to influence law enforcement action and, potentially, the courts.”

GOP Eager To Join In The FBI-Bashing

Former Republicans, meanwhile, said that even more worrisome than Trump’s statements attacking law enforcement are all the Republicans who are siding with him against the FBI and Justice Department.

Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, called the Mar-a-Lago search “corrupt and an abuse of power,” comparing it to actions by President Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal. “What Nixon tried to do, Biden has now implemented: The Biden Admin has fully weaponized DOJ & FBI to target their political enemies,” the Texas Republican wrote.

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel also compared the search to Nixon’s behavior in a Fox News interview: “President Trump is right when he compared this to Watergate. This is the government using an agency to spy on a potential opponent’s campaign. And this is truly frightening. It is not what our democracy stands for.”

David Jolly, a former GOP congressman from Florida, said the party’s transformation has been depressing. “It’s just an awful moment. Would have been unbelievable 10 years ago,” he said, adding that the comparison to organized crime falls short. “I think ‘mob behavior’ fails in its description of an individual willing to burn down the republic for his own vanities.”

Stevens, a top aide in the George W. Bush presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 and the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012, said Republicans’ willingness to repeat Trump’s attacks on law enforcement no longer surprises him.

“The reality is we’re a democracy sliding into autocracy. And it’s what the Republican Party, the vast majority of it, really wants,” he said. “It’s a systematic effort to degrade and discredit every institution of a civil society. You attack the voting systems. You attack law enforcement. You attack the judiciary…. That is how you destroy a democracy. That is their goal. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can deal with it and try to stop them.”

In addition to the probe into his mishandling of classified documents, Trump is also under investigation by the Justice Department for his attempted coup to remain in power, including the plan to create fraudulent slates of electoral votes from states he had lost. A Georgia prosecutor is separately investigating his and his allies’ attempts to coerce state officials into falsely declaring Trump the winner there.

Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol ― his last-ditch attempt to remain in office ― led to the deaths of five people, including one police officer; the injury of an additional 140 officers; and four police suicides.

Nevertheless, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.

And that, to authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat, remains baffling.

“I don’t know of another case where a coup leader who got together a bespoke thug army to overthrow the democratic order is at liberty and thinking of running for president again,” the New York University history professor said. “Sitting authoritarian leaders do stage ‘shock events’ if their power is threatened, but it is specific to the U.S. that an individual in private life could have so many extremists who possess private arsenals and are ready to do his bidding.”

 

[Alisamer]

How much more obvious does it need to be that Trump is a traitor? He's committed espionage, been bought by adversaries, and openly kissed up to dictators. His son in law took a massive payment from the Saudis.

I mean, do they need to find a written reciept? A KFC receipt with "$10 billion rubles received in exchange for list of US intelligence agents" scrawled on the back? 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, Alisamer said:

How much more obvious does it need to be that Trump is a traitor? He's committed espionage, been bought by adversaries, and openly kissed up to dictators. His son in law took a massive payment from the Saudis.

I mean, do they need to find a written reciept? A KFC receipt with "$10 billion rubles received in exchange for list of US intelligence agents" scrawled on the back? 

Sadly, he was absolutely correct when he said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters. There is no line he can cross that will stop them from believing and worshiping him. Frankly, the only hope is the dwindling number of independents. I'm hoping they are sickened enough by the ever-increasing horror being revealed almost daily to consider voting a straight Dem ticket.

One of my big fears is this stupid new third party being formed by Andrew Yang and Christine Whitman. I worry that it will pull just enough votes to hand the 2024 election to the orange monster.

[GreyhoundFan]

He's getting more unhinged:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree, the media needs to start covering TFG and his sycophants better. No more pussyfooting around.

 

[Dandruff]

54 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He's getting more unhinged:

 

The election isn't what's irreparably compromised.

[GreyhoundFan]

[SassyPants]

The people who anger me aren’t the +/- 30% of Trump’s diehard cult followers, but rather the people in charge of our legal system at the highest levels (Congress, DOJ, SCOTUS) who apparently are wavering on right vs wrong because of Trump’s former executive role. Criminal actions are criminal. Treason is treason. Espionage is espionage and inciting violence is inciting violence, no matter the perp’s former job. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW! Those in charge need to get their ducks in a row and send a clear message that criminal behaviors will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law!