Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

Scenes From a Brief

 

Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, enthroned, with the Hand Sanitizer of State. Actually, that's an illusion, he was walking into the US Capitol when this was taken, during Trump's second impeachment in January 2021. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AFP via Getty Images, as seen at CBS News.

Miller, P4 in the Jack Smith cast of witnesses (I'm reading his wonderfully vivid brief on the January 6 case and the theory that the president is immune from prosecution if he stages a coup in the course of performing his official duties), was among those who advised the president that the 2020 election had not in fact been stolen by Democrats, that there were not more than 10,000 votes from dead people in Georgia's returns but more like 12 total, which "could not be outcome-determinative" as Smith dryly points out, and that the video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss during the tabulation of ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta did not show them pulling ballots from suitcases under the tables and counting them multiple times or "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around  USB ports [presumably containing fraudulent vote counts] as if they are vials of heroine or cocaine" as Giuliani put it in testimony before the Government Affairs Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives. 

Miller even got a little tetchy about it (p. 25):

(P26 is apparently the Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr, whom Trump had called on December 8, asking him not to discourage the other state AGs from joining in the lawsuit pressed by Texas's Ken Paxton against Pennsylvania and other states including Georgia, to stop them from certifying their elections.)

Official Proceedings

Joseph Fischer in the Capitol, via LebTown.com.

Following the reporting on the arguments in the Supreme Court on behalf of Joseph Fischer, a cop from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, who had already started driving home from Trump's Stop the Steal rally on 1/6/20 when he heard on the radio about the crowd gathered around the Capitol and turned his car around to join the fracas, and made it as far as the East Rotunda where he turned on his phone's video recorder, yelled "Charge!" and went at a group of Capitol police who pepper-sprayed him as he slid to his ass on the slippery floor and into their line, and then hustled him back out of the building.

This behavior, while plainly illegal, did not do a lot of harm: it was already 3:24, well after the congressmembers had fled, and he was only there for about four minutes. How he became one of the 300-odd January 6 defendants, including former President Trump, to be charged with a felony count of "obstruction of an official proceeding" is something else, the insurrectionary violence of his intentions, as revealed in a series of texts and Facebook posts from before and after the riot: 

The Normalizing

Semaphore tower, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The Semafor story ("How Donald Trump learned to love the January 6 prisoner movement") about the lengthy evolution of Trump's views on the January 6 insurgents—

A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.

—is the most classic example I've seen in a long time of the Trump "normalization" narrative, portraying the ex-president as a deliberative thinker, carefully considering how to respond to a problem, right from the lede

On January 7, 2021, as shell-shocked staffers swept up the Capitol and National Guard troops patrolled the Mall, President Donald Trump released a video denouncing the “heinous attack on the United States Capitol.” He declared himself “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem” and promised “to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

As if he'd had anything in particular to do even with writing the text for that video, which he read aloud in his most dead-voiced, resentful fourth-grader manner, making one of his typical reading-disability errors (because the phrase "in so doing" is a little too fancy for him),

1/6 Is What They Claimed 9/11 Was

Re-upping this meditation from two 9/11s ago, in 2021. It keeps getting truer every day:

Confederates under General Jubal Early in Maryland, getting uncomfortably close to the Capitol in 1864. Via Smithsonian.

With regard to that Spencer Ackerman op-ed ("How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6") that Steve is talking about this morning, I have a narratological take: namely, that Ackerman is right to bring the episodes of 9/11 and 1/6 together, but does it the wrong way when he treats one as the cause and the other as an effect. Rather, they belong to two entirely different stories, in paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic relation (that is, to be compared, not connected), and what we can learn about one from the other is not what Ackerman thinks.

The story of 9/11 is the story that begins in the years from 1979, when the USSR lost its war in Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards took the hostages in the US embassy, to 1990, when Saddam Hussein attempted to conquer Kuwait as the USSR hurtled toward dissolution; it's the story of how the American rightwing sought an enemy to replace the Cold War Soviets and discovered it in militant Islam. It was a terrible story, in its ignorance of the diversity and conflict among Muslims and its narcissistic certainty that everything is "about us", but when Osama bin Laden finally succeeded in destroying the World Trade Center in 2001 it seemed, for a while, to be really true.

Bad January 6 Takes

Image by Quinta Jurecic.

Jason Willick, opinionist, in The Washington Post:

The strongest part of Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment has its own weaknesses

You see, the indictment makes a whole big deal of how Trump totally had a First Amendment right to tell all the lies he wanted about the 2020 election, and yet:

Yet the bulk of the indictment is devoted to recounting instances where Trump did just that. It summarizes at length his false tweets, his false retweets, and his false statements to supporters, advisers, state politicians and his own vice president. The indictment shows that after losing the 2020 election, the former president launched a malicious campaign of political lies.

Trump’s many lies, the indictment says, were “integral to his criminal plans” to overturn the 2020 election. But if Trump “had a right” to lie about the election, by the indictment’s own admission, then which acts make him subject to prosecution? The charges are at their weakest for failing to clearly disentangle the two.

Sit down, kid, and I'll see if I can explain.

You see, in our happy constitutional republic, may God bless it, we actually have many rights. For instance every American individual has a right (discovered by Justice Scalia in 2008—apparently it was right there in the Second Amendment all the time! it just looked like it was saying something completely different) to keep and bear firearms for personal use. And yet we do not have a right to take our firearm to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and shoot some random person dead with it. How, you ask, can that be? Because your right to keep and bear firearms does not mean you are allowed to use it to commit crimes, such as homicide. So keep it in your pants.

The same goes for your God-given right under the First Amendment to tell all the fool lies you want. You can! But you cannot use a lie to commit a crime, such as libel or perjury. I bet you already knew that, if you thought about it. So does Trump, for that matter: for example, Trump never sat in a courtroom under oath and told the judge that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He saved that, wisely, for his patsies in the press and his rally audiences.

He's not so good on the defamation side, having just lost $5 million last April for his lies about the author E. Jean Carroll, and being likely to lose more in the near future.

In the same way, you also cannot use a lie to commit fraud, and Trump seems to have some trouble grasping that. For instance, if you own a multilevel marketing scheme disguised as a university, you are allowed to brag to your friends, falsely, about what a great university it is, but not to the rubes who are shelling out the money for the worthless classes. When you lie to them about the quality of the classes and they believe you to the extent of giving you the money, you are setting yourself up to be forced to pay a $25-million settlement, as then-President Trump finally did in the Trump University case in 2018, after he'd exhausted all the avenues of appeal.

Lies are to fraud what guns are to homicide. Constitutionally speaking. You can keep and bear them, absolutely, but you need to watch what you do with them. 

That's why Trump's lies about the 2020 election are mentioned in the indictment, because of what he used them for. He falsely claimed that he had won the election ("by a lot") and Democrats had fraudulently stolen it, not just for fun, or wounded pride, but as an essential part of his conspiracies to defraud the United States and to obstruct and disrupt official proceedings and to deprive people of their rights. Allegedly. He had to tell his lies to make these things, the things with which he is charged in the indictment, happen.  

The lies he told are listed in the indictment because they are the weapons he used (and there is no "stand-your-ground" exception). The caution about First Amendment free speech rights is provided in the indictment to make it clear that Trump's charges have nothing to do with that. Obviously the prosecutorial team knows that Trump's lawyers will claim his free speech rights are being assaulted, so they are carefully foreclosing that as a defense. If you really can't understand that, you need to look for another job.

His Head Is Bloody and Unsound

 

A somewhat reassuring first snapshot of reaction to indictment no. 3, from CBS/YouGov.

That's not exactly a majority accepting Trump's criminal intent—it's well inside the MOE of 2.9 points—but more a reflection of the partisan division, with Independents split down the middle.

His Wonders to Perform

Photo via petguide.com.

 

I don't have a Hardcore email account like Edroso's, but I do get some crazy off Twitter, from nuts there who have followed me at one time or another (I always follow back), for reasons I can't generally reconstruct. One of whom goes by "Question Ray Epps". It's also come to me that outside the depths of the Slough of Paranoia most people don't have a very clear idea of why Ray Epps is a thing, whereas, because of my Twitter connection, I've spent some time trying to figure it out, so I probably have a slightly clearer concept than most of you of who Ray Epps is, and the enjoyable Ray Epps news that has surfaced this week, and I thought I should share that.

Epps was an ex-Marine, the owner with his wife of a wedding-venue business in Arizona, and a pretty high-ranking  Oath Keeper, president of the Arizona chapter, who didn't get charged in the January 6 investigations, although he was captured on video during the rally the night before, telling an interviewer and later a crowd that "We've got to go into the Capitol! That's where our problems are!"—"Peacefully! Peacefully!" he added the second time,  leading the crowd to begin chanting, "Fed! Fed! Fed!" And the next afternoon just at the moment of the breach on the Capitol itself, where he's briefly seen whispering to an unidentified person outside the barriers, who then joins the others knocking the barriers down and punching the cops on the other side, while Epps disappears. There's a pretty good mashup of these glimpses in this story at The Independent.

Then, as Ted Cruz was telling the FBI's representative in a Senate hearing on January 11 2022, a mysterious development:

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.”

I can tell you something about that one: the FBI wasn't looking for him any more, because when the first poster went up and Epps realized they were looking for him, he immediately called them and gave them whatever evidence he had to give (The New York Times checked his phone records and found he'd spoken to them for an hour), so it's really not all that magical.

All My Trials

 

Breaking wind ground in Aberdeen. Nobody seems to know how to credit this photo of TFG keeping his ears covered, may have originated here. 

While Donald Trump hides in Scotland from the trial for the defamation and battery (under New York's new Adult Survivor Law) of the writer E. Jean Carroll for raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then lying about it 20 years later—as it winds toward its close (today Lisa Birnbach, the writer friend Carroll called after the rape, and Jessica Leeds, the woman he assaulted in the first-class section of a flying plane, offered their testimony), I thought it might be fun to do a quick survey of where he stands in his legal situation and, given that there are now a few declared Republican presidential candidates, what effect it might have on the race.

I don't see how there's any possibility he wins this first case. The witness testimony is really compelling, Trump's attorney is nasty and disrespectful, both to plaintiff and to judge (evidently following his client's instructions) and looks like a thug, Trump won't be testifying at all, not that it would help him if he did, and since it's a civil trial the jury's doesn't need to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but only "by a preponderance of the evidence." On the other hand I imagine he files an appeal immediately, or a whole raft of appeals, indefinitely delaying the actual end of the case, and I'm afraid we won't really feel it's over for months or years.

For the Record: Pompeo's Memories

 

Photo by Photo by John Anvik on Unsplash, via.

He really did: https://t.co/owis5SEVKJ

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) February 6, 2023

For instance that White House meeting where Milley was warning about the possibility of violence on January 6 pic.twitter.com/ityjSC9vCa

— Beep Beep Yer Yas (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2023

Cancel Me

 

Album cover by the Japanese-American ska punk band Kemuri.

This is kind of hilarious but also important, from a team at Washington Post: the January 6 committee found, in extensive interviews with social media employees, according to a memo prepared by committee staffers but not among the things the committee made public (the Post has posted it here), that, far from censoring rightwingers, the companies worked really hard at not doing it, violating their content moderation rules to avoid offending Trump and his supporters:

Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.

“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.”

For the Record: January 6 Meets Mar-a-Lago

Posted this expansion of the January 1 post as a Twitter thread,  but I've messed up the threading in at least a couple of places. What follows is a more or less unformatted version.

Talking about mishandled classified documents, did I ever tell you about the time Mark Meadows stole a large number of photocopies of classified docs from the White House, some to give to well-known rightwing journalists, some for purposes unknown? On or about January 19 2021?

 **

Actually I did, in a blogpost of January 1 this year http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2023/01/narratology-new-on-mar-lago-documents.html, but that was more for the fun of scooping the real journalists who, I assumed, would be jumping on the story in the next couple of days. Only they didn't.

So I'm pushing it out On Here.

**

The material is basically from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the J6 Committee of 5/17/22, just after she's been talking about Meadows improperly burning documents in his fireplace in 12/21, after discussions with Scott Perry about "election matters". https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041.pdf 

**

Starting p. 44, Cheney turns the discussion to whether Meadows ever took any documents home, and on p. 46, gets more specific:

**

Narratology: What They Want From Kevin

 

This story apparently emanating from Rupert World (Tucker Carlson via NYPost)

McCarthy gives firm 'yes' to creating new Church Committee to investigate FBI/spy agency politicization after night of talks@RepThomasMassie, who participated in GOP speaker race talks tonight, told me he would 'love' to chair it, an idea floated last night by @TuckerCarlson pic.twitter.com/Sq8mX3KOAn

— Steven Nelson (@stevennelson10) January 5, 2023

Named after the Senate committee in the mid-1970s examining the abuses of the Cold War intelligence community after a series of revelations in the press ranging from J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to get Dr. King to commit suicide through a series of CIA assassination attempts at various international political figures to Nixon's multi-agency war on the hippies as exposed by Seymour Hersh at the end of December 1973; chaired by Frank Church (D-ID), and the direct answer of today's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Narratology: New on the Mar-a-Lago Documents

 

Happy New Year!

Hutchinson testified on May 17 that “boxes of documents on dollies” were delivered from the Intel Committee to Meadows, and that he copied them and gave some to people in the private sector. This was when she was describing how Meadows also burned documents in the fireplace.

— Diana Manister (@DianaCialino) December 31, 2022

I really wasn't planning to take on any new cases from the January 6 Committee releases, at least not right away. There's so much to read! And the interview transcripts aren't even searchable, at least this one isn't.  But Mark Meadows doing something funky—trafficking?—with classified documents in the White House was too much to resist, and I had to look. What kind of classified documents? What kind of folks in the private sector? What the hell?

Obviously I had to take a look, and I did find something that may be pretty significant, in regard to an issue we're already officially interested in, and literally nobody knows about it other than probably Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the Committee, who, if I'm getting this right, want us, or Jack Smith, to figure it out without their having to say it out loud. Serious, it looks an answer to some pretty big questions.

It's from the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony, as noted, and it seems to be a conversation about Meadows doing stuff with papers incuding throwing them into the fireplace, specifically things having to do with "the vice president's role on January 6th" and a conversation with Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania congressman at the center of the conspiracy to make Jeffrey Clark the attorney general and IMO the most likely candidate in the House for an indictment, and then it takes a kind of startling turn:

Christmas Present

 

I fell in love with this opening to the January 6 Report the moment I saw it last week. Telegraphing the ending instead of jumping into the medias res, it's not Dickens or Tolstoy, but it's the powerful jolt of narrativium I've been longing for in all these productions for the last three or four years. And the report is Dickensian or Tolstoyan in the extreme length of the thing, the panoply of grotesque characters among the occasional sincere and tormented person you can identify with, caught up in the war and seeking redemption.

In fact it's Christmas! It's a big fat novel your parents put under the tree when you're big enough—I know I was pretty young when I first read David Copperfield or Ivanhoe—where you come back from sledding or skating or whatever and you curl up on the couch with it and a cup of cocoa. It's really what I'd want to do over the next week or so, if only there were some snow and a print edition (I'm ordering mine from bookshop.org, an anti-Amazon gesture, but it'll be a while before I get it) and an actual vacation to work with.

No Foul, No Harm

 

Vintage Space Jam T-shirt via.

I've been thinking about sports lately, partly no doubt because it's that one time in a quadrennium when I start following a sport myself with some assiduity (maybe should be twice in a quadrennium now that I've found out about the women's game), and wanting to say something about how Republican politics relates to sports, but it wasn't coming together until this remarkable series on Mark Meadows texts from the effort to overturn the 2020 election began coming out at Talking Points Memo, and then something Hilzoy said (Hilzoy is the philosopher Hilary Bok, one of the great bloggers until she quit blogging in 2009, and still a really valuable presence on Twitter) crystallized it for me:

... and the point is not to reflect people's actual will but to see whether, if you torture the rules badly enough, you can see, or pretend to see, a way that YOU can win.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 14, 2022

Narratology: Eastman's First Draft

 

Video (no longer new) of Roger Stone and his boys at a rally on December 11 2020, via Just Security. 

Christian Vanderbrouk of The Bulwark has turned me on to a fascinating document issued by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation a couple of weeks before the 2020 election, in a kind of Bizarro-World counterpoint to a paper of August 2020 by the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project, "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition", reporting on a scholarly gaming out of what the nation might do to deal with the likely event that Donald Trump lost the November election and refused to concede defeat, making some kind of attempt to stop Biden's inauguration.

The Claremont/Texas paper, in contrast, "79 Days to Inauguration", presents a literal "wargame" simulation of how such an attempt might succeed, starting with an ambiguous election night in which an apparently easy call of victory for Biden yields to confusion, as Texas (initially an upset Biden victory) reports its systems have been hacked by a foreign power, Pennsylvania and Florida remain too close to call, and in Michigan, where Trump is ahead, thousands of those pesky mail-in ballots are destroyed in an unexplained fire in Detroit. 

The Calls Weren't Coming From Inside the Bureau

The Washington Post decries the flawed investigation of a crime without suggesting that a crime necessarily took place. Photo via bendydiaries.

This may turn out to be kind of unimportant and boring, but I've put too much into it to stop—about an old January 6 story that came up in a dust-up between esteemed commenters on Wednesday's post—and it touches on some general matters that have been preoccupying me for a long time, on how we're to go about looking at reality.

The story, which appeared in competing versions in Mother Jones and The Guardian on Halloween Day 2021, was extracted from a massive investigative piece (16 reporters are listed in the byline) that had come out earlier that day in the Washington Post, laying out everything they could learn about the insurrection considered as a security failure, as far as their sources understood it at that point, and it  focused, as The Guardian wrote it up, on one particular dereliction attributed to the FBI:

Among information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau documents obtained by the Post.

The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.

On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said....

Merrick Garland Did Something

 

Via The New York Times.

My narratological take is that it started on Friday, when ABC reporters spotted Marc Short, Mike Pence's vice presidential chief of staff, coming out of a federal courthouse in Washington with his lawyer. They asked him if he'd been testifying to the January 6 grand jury meeting there, and of course he had indeed, though he wasn't allowed to say about what. Then over the weekend The New York Times learned that another Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had been testifying as well, making it clear to anybody who's been thinking about it that the Justice Department has indeed been looking at Donald Trump's activities as part of its criminal investigation, because what else would they be talking about with Short (who'd testified to the Select Committee on Pence's January 4 meeting with  Trump and Eastman where Trump screamed at Pence, calling him a wimp and a pussy) or Jacob (who'd testified to telling Pence that Eastman's scheme for refusing to certify the election results was illegal)?

And after that the dam seems to have broken, and by last night we were all learning that that was in fact the case, not just recently in the wake of the House Select Committee's TV appearances but quite a bit earlier:

How to Coup

 

Exit Liberté à la François! ... or... Buonaparte closing the Frace of Égalité at St-Cloud near Paris, November 9, 1799; caricature by James Gilray, via Napoléon & Empire.

Which is one of the things that drove them into the arms of ragtag militia organizations and ultimately January 6.

— Woke Mob For Disempowering Joe Manchin--Vote '22! (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2022