US Capitol attack

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      No time for platitudes as Biden gives sharpest denunciation of Trump yet

      by

      No time for platitudes as Biden gives sharpest denunciation of Trump yetAnalysis: This was the moment the president realized the clear and present danger posed to US democracy by an ex-leader gone rogue Here, at last, was the Joe Biden that anyone on vigil for America’s teetering democracy had been waiting for.In historic National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol, a year to the day after it was overrun by an authoritarian mob, the US president gave his clearest dissection of “the big lie” and his clearest denunciation of his predecessor, Donald Trump.Biden condemns Trump’s ‘web of lies’ a year on from deadly Capitol assaultRead moreIt cannot have been easy for a man who spent 36 years in the Senate, sometimes reaching across the aisle to unsavoury characters, who speaks of bipartisanship with cloying nostalgia and who ran for the White House as an apostle of national unity.Biden could have used Thursday’s anniversary to offer olive branches, finding comfort in the traditional role as head of state as an excuse to rise above political battles of the day. His instinct may have been to be as apolitical and anodyne as a monarch.But this was the moment that the commander-in-chief realised the clear and present danger posed to American democracy by one of its major parties and former leader gone rogue. The alarmed voices of fellow Democrats, activists, journalists and historians about the state of emergency finally seemed to have got through to him.He understood that platitudes and prayers for a miraculous Kumbaya moment will no longer do. You cannot reason with extremists whose premise about a stolen election and the insurrection being the will of the people – wrapped up in the cult of Trump – is fundamentally irrational.You cannot debate Fox News or fascism-curious Facebook users. Instead, the threat must be looked squarely in the eye.“We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden said, his voice at times trembling with anger.“Here’s the truth: a former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle.”He never mentioned the name “Trump” but he did refer to the “former president” often. In a remark that would have stung at Mar-a-Lago, Biden said: “He’s not just a former president; he’s a defeated former president.” He also noted: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”01:43In a 25-minute speech that sounded like campaign-trail Biden, he recalled how the Confederate flag, symbol of the pro-slavery south in the civil war, had been brandished in the halls of the Capitol for the first time a year ago.“We are in a battle for the soul of America,” he acknowledged. “I did not seek this fight, brought to this Capitol … But I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach, I will defend this nation. I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of this democracy.”It was a bracing call to action from a president accused of spending too much of his first year in office cutting deals with Republicans, for example on new roads and bridges, rather than throwing himself into the arena in a bare-knuckle fight over voting rights.It was also clear evidence that Barack Obama’s celebrated 2004 convention speech – “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America” – no longer meets the moment. It would be as naive as claiming that America no longer sees race.But will it make a difference? Most Republicans, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, are not even in town. Rightwing media dismissed the speech as divisive. Trump was quick to issue a statement that said Biden “used my name today to try to further divide America. This political theater is all just a distraction from the fact Biden has completely and totally failed.”With divisions having only calcified since 6 January, that is likely to be the Republican message going forward. But now, at least, they know they have a fight on their hands. Biden is no longer standing by amid the slow-motion coup and white nationalist backlash now taking place.“The way you have to heal, you have to recognise the extent of the wound,” he told reporters at the Capitol just after his speech. “This is serious stuff … You’ve gotta face it. That’s what great nations do, they face the truth, deal with it, and move on.”TopicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden blames Donald Trump’s ‘web of lies’ for US Capitol attack – video

      by

      The US president spoke directly against Trump, saying the former president had created and spread a ‘web of lie’s that resulted in the deadly insurrection.
      On the one-year anniversary of the 6 January Capitol attack, the US president said his predecessor had refused to accept the result of an election, like no former president had ever done

      US politics: latest updates More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      US Capitol attack: Liz Cheney says Mike Pence ‘was a hero’ on 6 January

      by

      US Capitol attack: Liz Cheney says Mike Pence ‘was a hero’ on 6 JanuaryDeputy chair of special House committee hails then-vice-president for ‘doing his duty’ and certifying election results
      US politics: follow live The special House committee investigating the 6 January 2021 insurrection by extremist supporters of then-president Donald Trump are hoping to secure the cooperation of the former vice-president, Mike Pence, who certified Joe Biden’s election victory despite pressure from the White House and the violent mob that broke into the US Capitol.Congresswoman Liz Cheney, deputy chair of the bipartisan panel, called Pence a hero for standing up to Donald Trump’s efforts to “overthrow the will of the people” that day and said that the committee is “looking forward” to working with him.‘I was there’: Democrat recalls horror and fury on day of Capitol attackRead more“We look forward to continuing the cooperation we’ve had from members of the former vice-president’s team and look forward to his cooperation,” Cheney said in an interview with the NBC Today show on Thursday morning.She said: “Former vice-president Pence was a hero on 6 January. He refused the pressures of the former president, he did his duty and the nation should be very grateful for the actions he took that day.”The panel is chaired by the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who told CNN: “We came perilously close to losing our democracy” when thousands of supporters of Trump, egged on by the then-president in the dying days of his one-term presidency, charged the US Capitol on 6 January last year trying to stop members of Congress, who had to flee, from officially certifying Biden’s election victory in November 2020.The election result was certified hours later after the Capitol had been cleared, with the official act being presided over by Pence, in the vice-president’s role as president of the Senate.Cheney, the Republican congresswoman representing Wyoming, and the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, who served in the George W Bush administration, spoke of Trump putting Pence under pressure to refuse to certify Biden’s victory and of the then-president’s failure to demand that the mob leave the Capitol even as he watched the violent insurrection on live television at the White House.Asked if the panel was considering recommending criminal charges against Trump, Cheney said: “Certainly we will be looking at that, there are important questions in front of the committee such as whether the action or inaction of former president Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, attempted to delay the count of electoral votes.”She added: “We also know that it was a supreme dereliction of duty, the president of the US refuses to take action to stop a violent assault on the Congress, to stop a violent assault on any of the co-equal branches of government, that’s clearly a dereliction of duty.”Trump has asked the US supreme court to block the release by the National Archives to the committee of relevant materials relating to his conduct on 6 January last year and in the run-up to that event, the most serious assault on the US Capitol since the war of 1812. Trump claims he is protected by executive privilege because he was president at the time, a claim rejected by the Biden White House and lower courts.Cheney said: “We will not let the former president hide behind these phony claims of privilege and we will get to the bottom of … everything that was going on that day.”Asked if the US came close to the results of the valid presidential election being overthrown, Cheney said the country “came very close”.“Our institutions held but they only held because of people who were willing to stand up against the pressure from former president Trump, people in his own Department of Justice … elected officials at the state level who stood up to him and the law enforcement officers here at the Capitol. We need to recognize how important it is … that it never happens again.”TopicsUS Capitol attackMike PenceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      When American democracy crumbles, it won’t be televised | Bhaskar Sunkara

      by

      When American democracy crumbles, it won’t be televisedBhaskar SunkaraDon’t expect a dramatic fascist storming of the Capitol building or a military takeover when our crisis comes to a head Americans are not exactly known for nuance. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us then that the rightwing protests that turned into a riot at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 were immediately described as a coup attempt.For most Democrats, the participants were at the very least insurrectionists guilty of sedition, or perhaps even domestic terrorists. Wall-to-wall coverage at the time on broadcast television and magazine thinkpieces waxing eloquent about the attack on “the people’s house” confirmed the assessment.For establishment Republicans, the protesters were the worst slur they could think of: they were “foreign”. George W Bush compared them to people in a “banana republic” and the Republican congressman Mike Gallagher agreed that “we are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United States Capitol right now.” The Florida senator Marco Rubio described the events in a tweet as “3rd world style anti-American anarchy”.But despite all the fears, the pro-Trump rioters on 6 January didn’t exactly look like hardened fascists. Most wandered disorganized to the Capitol, looked on from a distance, took selfies and then trotted back to their hotel rooms after they got bored. These weren’t the street fighters we’ve come to associate with the rise of the far right internationally.Perhaps the strongest sign that the United States wasn’t actually in danger of falling to fascism that day was the response to 6 January from American elites. It is well established that big business interests have historically aligned both with fascism, as was the case in the 1930s, and rightwing authoritarianism, and authoritarianism more generally, during moments of crisis. As the Columbia law professor Tim Wu wrote in his recent book on monopolies: “The monopolist and the dictator tend to have overlapping interests.”Trump, of course, has something in common with fascists. He uses mass communications to stoke already widespread disaffection, directing anger not at economic power brokers but at minorities and perceived cultural elites. He has encouraged violence and threats of violence against his enemies, culminating in the mobilization one year ago today.But what he didn’t have was elite buy-in. Trump gave business what it wanted while he was in power, deregulating and cutting taxes while keeping the power of labor in check. But unlike in 1920s Italy or 1930s Germany, major commercial interests didn’t feel nearly threatened enough by workers’ organizations and the left to allow the president to overturn democratic norms. Indeed, by 6 January, they seemed to see an unstable White House as a bigger threat to their profits.In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, the pro-Trump National Association of Manufacturers called for the president to be impeached. The highly influential Business Roundtable, which represents the country’s largest corporations, issued a condemnation of the actions almost as strong. Finance capital, that great historic ally of fascism in its initial variant, wasn’t too far behind.Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said on 6 January itself: “Our elected leaders have a responsibility to call for an end to the violence, accept the results, and, as our democracy has for hundreds of years, support the peaceful transition of power.”None of this is to impute intrinsic democratic motives to the American elites. They are, after all, helping to bankroll gerrymandering efforts across the country that dilute democracy and skew results in their favor. They are pouring in millions to support the campaigns of politicians who would roll back voting rights. And they are rallying their resources to oppose legislation that would give working-class people greater power in the economy.But, for all their anti-democratic efforts, they are far from ready to openly abandon liberal democratic norms. Why risk the turmoil when their slow dismembering of democracy from the inside is protecting their profiteering even better than shock troops would?In other words, US politics is indeed in crisis – but the crisis is a slow-moving one. It’s not as dramatic as a fascist storming of a Capitol building or a military takeover. But it’s almost as harmful to democracy in the long run.This brings us to the question of institutional reform.In the United States, a party doesn’t just win an election and then govern (either alone or in coalition). Rather, after a successful election they often must deal with a myriad of veto points. Due to the Senate filibuster, 60 votes (derived undemocratically with two senators from each state, including the least populated ones) are necessary to pass most legislation. And in the House of Representatives, the more democratic lower house of the legislature, elections are held every two years, often making it out of sync with Senate elections, held every six years, and presidential elections, held every four years.A two-party system with this kind of structure all but guarantees that divided government is the norm rather than the exception – and that’s not to mention the role of a powerful judiciary. It was a political arrangement built by America’s founders to muzzle popular passions and ensure elite rule and that changes to the constitution through amendments are almost impossible to bring about.Contrary to myths about American stability, it hasn’t actually worked out that well. In the 19th century, the structure of US government, particularly its devolution of power to states, protected slavery and the power of plantation owners, which led directly to a bloody civil war. In the 20th century, things were more stable, but this required an unusual amount of elite consensus and cross-party cooperation.But that consensus became harder to maintain after the exodus of northern liberals from the Republican party and southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic party created a more ideologically coherent system. We had a center to center-left party incorporating some business interests, as well as the labor movement and a disproportionately racial-minority base of workers, on the one hand, and on the other a rightwing party of business with a solid popular base among conservative southern whites. The resulting level of polarization was not unusual by world standards, but the American political system was uniquely ill-equipped to handle polarization.In a rational system, elections would have consequences, the winning party would be able to govern, and if people disapproved of their actions, they would be voted out to allow the opposition to do the same. In the American system today, elections almost always result in divided government and the opposition can use the system’s many chokepoints to hamper the ruling party’s attempts to govern.It’s no wonder so many Americans lack faith in the ability of politics to change their lives for the better.Polarization has happened in both directions, and as Ezra Klein argues in his 2020 book Why We’re Polarized, we shouldn’t follow standard talking points and denounce it as inherently bad. The anti-democratic political system in the United States functioned only with labor and Black Americans, in particular, muzzled in the last century, and some of the political tension decried by observers is coming from oppressed people asserting their rights and interests more vocally.However, it’s clear that the Republican party has moved rightward at a much faster speed than the Democrats have moved leftward. Republican distrust of state institutions – reflected both in their skepticism of election results as well as vaccine safety – has grown more intense. Tens of millions of Trump voters justified the 6 January riot at the Capitol, think the 2020 vote was stolen, and fear the same will happen in the 2022 midterms, in which Republicans are expected to make major gains.If Trumpism was the counter-revolution inaugurated by eight years of tepid liberalism under President Obama, what kind of response would a more confident leftwing government inaugurate? That’s a question that every progressive should ask themselves, especially as they attempt to push Biden to become “the new FDR”. After all, we can expect reactionary forces to become even more aggressive if faced with a more assertive leftwing foe.How does one defuse the situation? To begin with, Democrats need to focus less on conjuring nightmares about the future (even if some of those fears are warranted) and more on offering dreams that people can believe in. That means clearer bread-and-butter messaging about the material gains that politics can offer people. They should lead with this program, while being willing to take measures to pursue institutional reform to carry out this program once in power, such as eliminating the Senate filibuster and weakening the power of the courts.The future of US politics is bleak: it’s hard not to imagine, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp does, continued instability, a lack of trust in elections, a gridlocked Congress, and the growth of extremist groups. 6 January 2021 may have been a riot and not a coup, but there will be far more riots to come until the left figures out a way to resolve the contradictions that plague US society. And if we don’t, the specter of the right breaking the impasse through authoritarian measures will become far more present.For now, however, the problem isn’t that American democracy is about to be overthrown; it’s that America isn’t much of a democracy to begin with. We need to create one people can believe in.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS Capitol attackcommentReuse this content More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      The insurrection is only the tip of the icebergSidney BlumenthalBehind the insurrection of 6 January was a coup plot that was months in the making, and which involved a dastardly cast of characters After thousands of posts appeared for weeks on a website called TheDonald.win detailing plans for the 6 January attack on the Capitol, including how to form a “wall of death” to force police to abandon defensive positions; after Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned his senior aides of “a Reichstag moment” like the 1933 burning of the German parliament that Hitler used to seize dictatorial power; after insurrectionists smashed several ground floor windows of the Capitol, the only ones out of 658 they somehow knew were not reinforced, that allowed rioters to pour inside; after marching to the chamber of the House chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”; after pounding on the locked doors; and as the Capitol police led members in a run through the tunnels under the Capitol for safe passage to the Longworth Building, Congressman Jody Hice, a Republican of Georgia, raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: “You screwed it up, y’all screwed it all up!”A year after the Capitol attack, what has the US actually learned? | Cas MuddeRead moreHice, an evangelical minister, professor of preaching at a Southern Baptist seminary, and radio talkshow host before his election in 2014, has notably declared that freedom of religion should not apply to Muslims and that the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people at an elementary school by a deranged shooter occurred because liberals were “kicking God out of the public square”.He was tasked to present a challenge to Georgia’s electors before the joint congressional session convened on 6 January to certify the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Hice performed his assignment as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself. Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber, with the caption, “This is our 1776 moment.”To whom was Hice shouting that “y’all” had screwed it all up? It seems likely it was Meadows. And what had they screwed up? They had screwed up the coup that led to the insurrection.The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months to claim that the votes in the key swing states were fraudulent, for Mike Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session of the Congress to declare on that basis that the certification of the presidential election on the constitutionally mandated date could not be done, to force that day to pass into a twilight zone of irresolution, for House Republicans to hold the floor brandishing the endless claims of fraud, to move the decision to the safe harbor of the House of Representatives, voting by states, with a majority of 26 controlled by the Republican party, to deny both the popular vote and the electoral college vote to retain Trump in office, for protests to breakout at federal buildings, and for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose law and order.Presumably, any gesture to forestall the coup by the joint chiefs would be communicated at once to Trump from his agent, Kash Patel, a former aide to far-right representative Devin Nunes), sworn enemy of the “Deep State”, embedded as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and presidential orders would be issued to countermand. The rally on 6 January – “will be wild”, Trump promised – was a last-ditch attempt to intimidate the vice-president with the threat of violence into fulfilling his indispensable role in the coup, to lend support to the Republicans objecting to certification, and to delay the proceedings into a constitutional no man’s land.The insurrection may also have been intended to provide a pretext for precipitating clashes with anti-Trump demonstrators, following the example of the street violence and multiple knife stabbings perpetrated in Washington by the neo-Nazi Proud Boys chanting “1776” on 12 December, and which would then be an excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act. In the criminal contempt citation of Meadows for his refusal to testify before the select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, the committee noted that Meadows sent an email the day before the assault to an unnamed individual “that the national guard would be present to ‘protect pro-Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby”. From whom would “pro-Trump people” be protected?In the midst of the attack, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, managed to reach a preoccupied Trump, who was riveted viewing the unfolding chaos on television at the White House, closely monitoring whether the coup would finally succeed, taking phone calls from Jim Jordan and a host of collaborators, and fending off urgent pleas to call it off from his daughter Ivanka. Trump’s first reply to McCarthy was to repeat “the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol”, according to the Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler.McCarthy argued: “It’s not Antifa, it’s Maga. I know. I was there.” “Well, Kevin,” said Trump, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?” McCarthy inquired in an uncharacteristic display of testosterone that soon was replaced with his regular order of servility before Trump and Jordan. The absence of antifa, and McCarthy’s refusal in the heat of the moment to lend credence to the phantom menace, may have condemned any false-flag thought of invoking the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, the bayonet-ready national guard idly awaited orders for hours to quell the actual insurrection.The coup was thwarted by the justice department’s rejection of Trump’s strong-arm tactics, the Pentagon’s denunciation of any hint of imposing martial law, the rebuff by state election officials to Trump’s claims of fraud, and, finally, Pence’s refusal to utter his scripted lines. At the 6 January rally, Trump said: “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” But Pence had already stated that he would do no such thing. Then, Trump said: “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more … So, we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol …” The insurrection was on.The coup was hardly Trump’s full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. Trump eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A “Political Process Working Group” focused on “election law and ballot integrity” was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers’ dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust.Nelson is also a member of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), composed of more than 400 rightwing Republican leaders, a roster that includes Ginni Thomas, the ubiquitous rightwing zealot and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the conservative Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, “a $250m dark money operation” to pack the federal courts and deny Democratic appointments to the bench, according to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehead.The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives”.A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. She is also a board member of the Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of conservative organizations, including Alec and the CNP. Most importantly, she has directed the Bradley Foundation to serve as the chief funder of a group of which she is chairman, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), a principal conservative organization seeking to purge voter rolls of minorities and immigrants, file suits that accuse local election officials of “fraud”, and attempt to overturn election results. At a February 2020 meeting of the CNP devoted to election tactics, the Pilf president, J Christian Adams, advised: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.”Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:
      The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states – as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups – violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President Donald J Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.”
      Mitchell was by then a Trump campaign legal adviser, with direct access to Trump and working on the Georgia challenge to the results. The Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit a week earlier, on 4 December, claiming there were “literally tens of thousands of illegal votes”. On 30 December she sent the petition to Meadows with 1,800 pages of exhibits of supposed fraud, which Meadows promptly forwarded to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, who was under tremendous pressure from Trump to intervene on his behalf to throw out the election results.“Pure insanity,” the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Rosen. Meadows pressured Rosen again on 1 January. “Can you believe this?” Rosen wrote Donoghue. “I am not going to respond …” The next day, Trump called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to instruct him to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the vote deficit] we have, because we won the state”. Cleta Mitchell was on the call with Trump. “Well, Cleta, how do you respond to that? Maybe you tell me?” asked Trump. She accused Raffensperger of withholding records that would prove there were more than 20,000 fraudulent votes and rigged voting machines. “All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” said Trump.On 4 January, Trump brought Pence to the Oval Office to be pressured not to certify the results by a former Chapman University law professor, John Eastman, who was also a director of the Pilf that Mitchell chaired, and had been recruited to play professor to the slow-learning Pence, the Pygmalion of the putsch. Eastman had written a memo, “January 6 scenario”, laying out precisely how Pence should conduct the stoppage of the electoral college count to “create a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors …”Eastman’s memo filled in stage directions for Pence that followed the well-developed coup plot. All Pence had to do was repeat the lines he was given: the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. His general counsel, Greg Jacob, however, informed him that if he obeyed Trump he would “betray his oath to uphold our laws and the constitution of the United States. That was a fool’s errand.”Trump electors in the swing states had already met on 14 December to prepare to usurp the Biden ones. That day Trump summoned William Barr to the White House to demand his support for claims that the election returns in the swing states were fraudulent. Barr would have undoubtedly been aware of the meeting of the Trump electors rehearsing their part in the coup. Long having done Trump’s bidding from consciously lying about the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to aid Trump onward, he now reached a line he would not cross and told Trump that his assertions of fraud were “bullshit”. And then he resigned. He would have no part of the coup. In came Rosen, who was subjected to rounds of coercion.When Mitchell’s role was disclosed, the Washington law firm of Foley & Lardner where she was a partner forced her to resign on 5 January, the day before the insurrection. She had neglected to tell her partners of her work for Trump. The Senate judiciary committee, in its report, released on 7 October 2021, Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DoJ to Overturn the 2020 Election, recommended that Mitchell’s activities “warrant further investigation”.The sweeping nature of the coup, involving Republican operatives, major Republican donors, organizations and members of the Congress is starkly laid out in documents the House investigating committee has obtained under subpoena.The production of documents from Meadows revealed a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled Options for 6 JAN, prepared by Phil Waldron, a retired army colonel expert in psychological warfare and proliferator of conspiracy theories who worked with Trump’s lawyers. Waldron said he spoke with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed members of Congress. Besides reiterating the basic elements of the coup – “VP Pence rejects the electors” – Waldron added that China and Venezuela had “INFLUENCE and CONTROL over US Voting infrastructure in at least 28 States”. He urged that all electronic ballots be declared “invalid” and that Trump should “Declare National Security Emergency”.Bernard Kerik, working with Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani to spin fantasies of fraud, turned over to the House committee under subpoena a document, Strategic Communications Plan, “to educate the public on the fraud numbers” and “to disregard the fraudulent vote count and certify the duly-elected President Trump”. Replete with fallacious assertions (“Fulton County, GA, video of suitcases of fraudulent ballots”), it detailed the extensive reach of the “big lie” campaign, encompassing “Identified Legislative Leaders in each swing state”, legal teams in the key states, and ranked social media influencers to spread the message: “YOU CANNOT LET AMERICA ITSELF BE STOLEN BY CRIMINALS.” Kerik, a convicted felon, guilty of numerous crimes from tax fraud to lying under oath, rose from Giuliani’s driver to New York City police commissioner and incredibly the minister of the interior of Iraq, before serving a four-year sentence in Rikers Island jail. Like convicted felons Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, he was granted a pardon by Trump that allowed him to participate in the coup with impunity.Though under subpoena, Kerik refused to turn over to the House committee a document entitled “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS”. The date on Kerik’s letter, 17 December 2020, was the day that former general Mike Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser, gave an interview to the far-right Newsmax calling on Trump to “seize every single one” of the voting machines “around the country”, and “take military capabilities” in the key states to “basically rerun an election”. Flynn’s notions were echoed in the Waldron PowerPoint and in the Kerik letter.On 18 December, Flynn met at the White House with Trump at which he proposed invoking the National Emergency Act. (Flynn had circulated a call for “Limited Martial Law To Hold New Election” weeks earlier, on 1 December.) The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, and the army chief of staff, Gen James McConville, issued a statement on the day Flynn met with Trump disavowing Flynn and any suggestion of martial law. “There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election,” they stated.The criminal citation of Meadows for contempt from the House committee to the justice department notes that he was in “nonstop” communication “throughout the day of January 6” with Kash Patel at the Pentagon, and “among other things, Mr Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the national guard’s response to the Capitol riot.” The House resolution also references Meadows’ contacts with Republican state legislators, “private individuals who planned and organized a January 6 rally”, and members of Congress prepared to object to the election certification – a panoply of people involved in the coup. The committee also released texts from Fox News personalities to Meadows on 6 January imploring him to get Trump to stop the insurrection. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” wrote an anxious Laura Ingraham. The familiar relationship suggested the intertwining of Fox News as the chief outlet for Trump messaging about the “big lie” up to the insurrection. But the ties went further.On 4 January 2022, the House committee requested the voluntary testimony of Sean Hannity as a “fact witness”. The committee wrote him that it had in its possession dozens of texts from Hannity to Meadows “indicating that you had advance knowledge regarding President Trump’s and his legal team’s planning for January 6th”, and “that you were expressing concerns and providing advice to the president and certain White House staff regarding that planning”. On the evening of 5 January, Hannity texted Meadows: “Pence pressure. WH counsel will leave.” He also appeared to have had “a conversation directly with president on the evening of January 5th (and perhaps at other times) regarding his planning for January 6th”. What did Sean Hannity know and when did he know it?When the riot was finally subdued and the Congress reconvened to certify the election, the House Republicans still rose to object. Hice, with QAnon proponent representative Marjorie Taylor Greene standing at his side, declared: “Myself, members of the Georgia delegation and some 74 of my Republican colleagues object to the electoral votes from the state of Georgia on the grounds the election conducted on November 3 was faulty and fraudulent due to unilateral actions by the secretary of state to unlawfully change the state’s election process.”Of the thousands involved in the Capitol riot, 725 so far have been charged with various crimes. But those sentenced, mostly true believer foot soldiers of the Trump mob, were not the originators of the coup, the most dangerous sedition against the constitutional order since secession. Nor were the leaders of the militias, of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, present at the creation.The 6 January attack was a spawn of the coup; it was its effect, not its alpha and omega. Only those incited to sacrifice themselves in the Pickett’s Charge of the insurrection have paid the price, but none of those who conceived the coup a year earlier have been brought before a federal grand jury, charged, or apparently are even being investigated by the Department of Justice.It would be as if only the Watergate burglars were prosecuted and that was the end of the affair. All of the higher-ups involved in the scandal – chief of staff Bob Haldeman, his deputy John Ehrlichman, attorney general John Mitchell, the entire cast of complicit characters and President Richard Nixon – would have remained untouched in power.There will be more to know about the coup from the House investigation. The committee has gathered more than 30,000 documents and interviewed more than 300 witnesses. Two, three, many John Deans may testify before the cameras. Criminal referrals will probably be made.The coup of 2020 gestated within the central organizations of the Republican right, and it was a learning experiment for the Republican party as a whole. Hice has announced he will run in the Republican primary against Raffensperger for Georgia secretary of state. He is only one of the Republicans focused on taking over the states’ electoral apparatus to ensure that the next time there will be no obstacles. By December, Republicans had proposed 262 bills “to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with the non-partisan administration of elections”, with 32 becoming law in 17 states, according to the non-profit Protect Democracy group.The threat of intimidation, coercion and intimidation hangs over American politics. The coup may have failed, but it rolls on.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
      TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansThe far rightcommentReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘I was there’: Democrat recalls horror and fury on day of Capitol attack

      by

      ‘I was there’: Democrat recalls horror and fury on day of Capitol attack Representative Dean Phillips describes the day that ‘changed him’ after a pro-Tump mob overran police and reached the doors of the House chamberIt was a visceral cry at the moment of maximum peril for American democracy.A furious mob had overrun police and was nearly at the door of the House of Representatives. Inside the chamber, Republican Paul Gosar was launching a spurious challenge to Joe Biden’s election victory in Arizona.Then, at the back of the gallery on the second floor, Democrat Dean Phillips rose to his feet and screamed at the top of his lungs at Gosar: “This is because of you!”The outburst was out of character for a “Minnesota nice” congressman with a reputation for moderation and working across the aisle. But a year later, Phillips remains convinced it was an urgent and necessary response to the deadly insurrection inspired by then president Donald Trump.“It’s not my style to break decorum and to scream,” he told the Guardian, “but I have to say at that moment I felt the way that tens of millions of Americans did, which is there were people responsible for what was about to transpire and there are moments where you do what you got to do, and I had to do it. I don’t regret it one bit because it’s true.”Phillips, 52, comes from a business background. He led a family-owned distillery – producing vodka, gin, rum and other liquors – and ice cream company. He was elected to Congress in 2018, representing Minnesota’s third congressional district, and is vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.“I never imagined I’d be doing this,” he admits. “I woke up the morning after the 2016 election, saw the reaction of my daughters, who were 18 and 16 at that time – their fear, their tears – and I promised them right then and there I would do something, and here I am.”On 6 January 2021, he had been advised that there could be trouble so told his staff to stay home. He watched his office TV “horrified” as Trump gave a speech urging supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat. He then walked to the House to begin certifying Biden’s election victory. But soon he received text messages from anxious family members showing video of protests forming outside.“I asked my colleague, Tom Malinowski from New Jersey, to walk from the House chamber with me to look out the windows and a Capitol police officer literally screamed at us to get away from the windows and get back into the House chamber. We asked if everything was OK, and – I’ll never forget it – she said, ‘You’re in the United States Capitol. It’s the most secure building in the country’.”They returned to the House chamber just as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer were being evacuated. Gosar was at the microphone, leading efforts to subvert his state’s electoral college vote, when the sergeant-at-arms urged members to take cover behind seats and prepare their smoke hoods – prompting Phillips to feel “fury” and let rip at the Trump loyalist.While members on the House floor were able to escape, there was no way out for 20 sitting up in the gallery due to coronavirus safety measures. “I screamed at my colleagues at that moment to follow me to the Republican side of the chamber because I thought it would be safer,” Phillips says. “I thought the insurrectionists were coming for us.“First, it was almost impossible to get through these railings; you either had to go under or over. But more than that, I recognized at that very moment that a lot of my colleagues couldn’t blend in. I’m talking about those of color. It really left an indelible mark on me.“That whole day changed me, of course, as it would anybody, to recognise that privilege and the fragility of democracy and also a significant increase in my empathy for those who have endured trauma in their lives, which is life-changing.”Rioters reached the doors of the House chamber but found their way blocked by an improvised barricade and Capitol police with guns drawn. After an ordeal lasting about 25 minutes, Phillips recalls, members in the gallery were led out by a Capitol police officer and through a maze of tunnels.“We ran into the Rayburn lunch room and it was a bizarre moment because there were people just having lunch at the tables. The sun was shining in from the big plate glass windows and here we are, an officer with a rifle running with us into the lunch room and people just stunned, looking at us like, what the heck’s going on? Of course, the TVs moments later would sure change that.”The group was then moved on to a committee room where they were finally safe. But their shared ordeal would stay with them. They now call themselves “the gallery group” and still meet regularly, sometimes with facilitators or therapists. “It’s been the most wonderful support group imaginable because we endured it together,” Phillips says.On the night of 6 January, with the Capitol finally secured, they and other members returned to the House and Senate to finish the job and ratify Biden as president. For a fleeting moment, it seemed that Democrats and Republicans were united in completing the work of democracy and jettisoning the authoritarianism of Trump. But it was not to last.In the year since the insurrection, some Republicans have embraced Trump’s “big lie” and his portrayal of the mob as patriots driven by a noble cause; others have simply remained tight-lipped and failed to denounce it. Phillips, who sees them up close during sessions of Congress, believes they are motivated by self-preservation of both position and personal safety.“That’s perhaps the saddest part of all this. Many of my colleagues – especially those who voted to impeach, those who voted to impanel the January 6 commission, those who voted to certify the election – have received horrifying threats to their safety and the safety of their loved ones. It’s an unenviable position but it’s also our responsibility and duty. I understand self-preservation but I do wish principle would take precedence,” he says.It has been difficult for Phillips to witness 6 January denialism as Republicans and rightwing media attempt to rewrite the history of what happened that day, variously characterising it as a “normal tourist visit” or an FBI “false flag” operation designed to entrap Trump supporters. The former president himself insisted that his followers were “hugging and kissing” police.The Democrat says: “This is one of those rare occasions where I was there. I was inside. I heard the gunshot. I saw the remnants of the insurrection in the rotunda and went with [Congressman] Andy Kim at midnight that night to help clean it up when I saw him on his hands and knees alone.”“I saw the body armour. I saw the clubs. I saw faeces. I saw the speaker’s office ransacked. I saw with my own eyes people on the ground under arrest. I saw the mob breaking in. I met with the officers who were subject to it since. I was there to bear witness to it and to hear people say it didn’t happen or it wasn’t a big deal or it’s time to move on, shame on them.”Republicans’ denial of reality, and continued addiction to Trump, has raised fears that 6 January was the beginning, not the end, of American democracy’s near death experience. The party is imposing sweeping voter restrictions across the country and seeking to put “big lie” believers in charge of future elections. Trump could mount another bid for the White House in 2024 with many checks and balances no longer in place.Phillips comments: “We are at the precipice of a very slippery slope and it’s a long way up the mountain when you’re building a democracy but it’s a fast ride down when it slips away. We collectively have to make a choice and a decision here, starting with the simple fact that this is not something that one side or the other can win.”“If one side upends democracy and destroys its institutions and disrespects the rule of law, chaos will result, violence will result and everything that those propagating this claim is important to them – a strong, stable, secure, prosperous country – will have been lost. That’s why I try to be a voice of reason and a bridge builder, not a destroyer.”A self-described eternal optimist, Phillips believes there is still a cohort in the Republican party that can find a way back to the mainstream. He describes Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Trump critics serving on the House select committee investigating 6 January, as “heroic”.“I know there are more that share that sentiment that simply are not as public. I have confidence that we will see some type of restoration of principle, assuming American voters find that important.”The congressman’s efforts to lower the political temperature include a series of “common ground” get-togethers in his home district that encourage mutual understanding between constituents across the ideological spectrum.He says: “They’ve inspired me and made me more optimistic because I’ve discovered when, with some intention, you bring people together with disparate political perspectives and break bread, get to know each other and share life stories, common ground is readily available and easily discoverable.”But in this age of polarisation and negative partisanship, there must be some awkward conversations? “We had an experience just a few weeks ago in which someone pulled up in what would be considered a vehicle that a Donald Trump supporter might be driving and someone who was on the far left of that person – in a very uncomfortable moment but it turned out to be a very productive one – acknowledged what she felt when she saw that vehicle pull into the parking lot and what she expected of the person who drove it.“It took courage to share that. It took courage for the driver of the vehicle to listen to it. At the end of the evening, for both of them to recognise their shared humanity and shared interest in a safe and secure country, was a moment of great reassurance but one that can only occur if people stop stereotyping and actually start breaking bread together.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans are laying a path back to power – and paving it with lies | Rebecca Solnit

      by

      Republicans are laying a path back to power – and paving it with liesRebecca SolnitDespite having fled the mob on 6 January, many congressmen are openly fleeing the truth about what happened that day When the insurrectionists of 6 January rampaged through the Capitol, congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia helped barricade a door, and he fled when the rest of Congress did. A photograph shows him looking panicky, mouth wide open and arm gesticulating wildly, behind what appears to be a security team member with a gun drawn, defending him. But a few months later he declared: “Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from 6 January, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Clyde’s account of 6 January might be a little more preposterous than those of his fellow Republican legislators. But they all joined him in pretending nothing much had happened and objecting to the investigation of the day’s events. After all, they were partly responsible, most of them. It was elected Republicans who supported and spread the earlier lies that Donald Trump had won the election, the lies that fed the insurrection; and then they lied some more about their own words and actions before, during and after. In the immediate aftermath, the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was angry and shaken, declaring: “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president.” Then he too began the project of walking it all back.What has ensued is a cover-up in plain sight. When Trump took office in 2016, Republicans faced a crisis: their party had won, but only by ushering to a minority victory one of history’s most extravagantly dishonest men. They had to stand with him or against him, and most chose to stand with him. Others chose to fade away by resigning or going home when their terms were up.Almost none of them stood up against him. The famously vindictive Trump punished any signs of disloyalty, so they were loyal. And to be loyal meant joining him in corruption and lies. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it,” Lindsey Graham tweeted in the spring of 2016, before becoming one of Trump’s most grovelling sycophants. In a way, the sycophants got stronger: if truth restrains us and links us together, they unchained themselves. We make contracts with each other with words; we share information, make agreements and commitments, hold each other accountable and show who we are. Lies are broken contracts, in which words misrepresent what the speaker knows; they aim to delude, exploit and divide. The liar may get stronger, but the social fabric gets weaker. That strength is precarious, so lies have be piled atop lies to keep accountability at a distance.Of course, politicians of all stripes are notoriously shifty, and the Republican party had no great reputation for honesty previously. Many of their campaigns long before Trump could politely be called misleading. But after 2016, they clustered around the gaslighter-in-chief like bugs around a streetlight. I often think of what Trump did as disinhibition: the pallid, bashful untruths of yore were replaced by baldfaced outrages. They lost any compunction about openly contradicting themselves, and did so often, never more than with the insurrection of 6 January.As the mob was smashing its way into the building, congressman Jim Jordan had been on the house floor accusing election officials in six states of corruption. A week later he declared: “I’ve never said that this election was stolen.” But, as CNN noted: “Jordan claimed in October that Democrats were working to steal the election and spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Pennsylvania two days after the election. In December, he said he didn’t know how he could be convinced that ‘Trump didn’t actually win’ the election.”During the hours when the mob rampaged through the US Capitol building, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called up Trump, reportedly furious. “The president bears responsibility for the attack,” he said shortly thereafter. Then he devoted himself to winning back Trump’s favour and playing down what had happened. “Pressed on whether he regretted working to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory, Mr McCarthy took the position that he did no such thing,” the New York Times reported in April.Then he worked hard to sabotage the investigation into what had happened, by trying to put two congressmen most loyal to the big lie, Jim Banks and the ever-disruptive champion shouter Jim Jordan, on the committee. The house majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, blocked their appointment. Banks was later caught sending out letters, seeking information from government agencies, claiming he was the ranking Republican on the 6 January committee, of which he was never in fact a member.By September, McCarthy was full team cover-up: the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell noted that McCarthy “threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests” of the congressional committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. That’s not technically lying, but it’s certainly an attempt to prevent the truth from being known. There’s a lot to cover up, especially if you don’t want the committee to find out the extent to which Congress itself was involved in the attack on Congress.The politicians who fled in fear thereafter threw themselves into denying the threat and protecting its chief instigator. No one did so more slavishly than the then vice-president, Mike Pence, who was pressured before and during 6 January to violate the law and exercise a power he did not possess to change the election outcome. “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency,” Trump had tweeted early that day; and then, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”. At Trump’s instigation, the mob was chanting: “Hang Mike Pence!”Pence trivialised the event when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network: “I’m not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration.” Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonnell, who was seriously injured defending the politicians, told NPR: “That one day in January almost cost my life. And we did everything possible to prevent him [Pence] from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now he’s telling us that that one day in January doesn’t mean anything. It’s pathetic. It’s a disgrace.”One of the first lies to explode out of the insurrection was that somehow the attack on the Capitol was the work of Antifa. The very idea of Antifa, as they used it, was an older lie, a transformation of scattered individuals and impromptu groups of antifascists into a cohesive sinister gang that could be blamed for pretty much anything, anywhere. The New York Times described how on 6 January the right was claiming that the insurrection had been led by Antifa, not Trump supporters.By the end of the day, Fox was promoting it, the claim was all over Twitter, and: “Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters ‘were members of the violent terrorist group antifa’.” The claim, the Times added, “has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party”That is, they took the position that the riot, which at the time Republican legislators begged the president to stop, was instead a riot by an essentially imaginary leftwing organisation with no conceivable motive to prevent the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Now the investigation is closing in on the role that many in Congress played in the attack on Congress. Having fled their own mobs, they are now trying to flee the truth, and relying on the fact that a significant portion of the country prefers the lies.The Republicans who helped the failed coup along and then dismissed its import are preparing to do it better next time. The Democratic senator Brian Schatz tweeted on Tuesday: “They are organizing the next one, not as a secret conspiracy, but as a central organizing principle for the next election.” The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “Donald Trump has infected, and that’s the appropriate word, the Republican party with his big lie and with his desire to stop democracy. We have no choice but to move forward,” by which he meant overturn the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. 6 January was one confrontation; there’s another one coming. The lies may implode at some point, but the liars have to be defeated.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionRepublicansUS politicsDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More