Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Terrorism Problem, Con't

A Provo, Utah man who made multiple online threats against President Biden was shot and killed by FBI agents trying to serve a warrant for those threats.
 
A suspect shot and killed by FBI agents early Wednesday in Provo was connected to alleged threats against President Joe Biden and other officials.

The FBI says its agents were attempting to serve arrest and search warrants in Provo when they shot and killed a suspect, now identified as Craig Deleeuw Robertson, at around 6:15 a.m.

Court documents show Robertson threatened to "inflict bodily harm" on Biden during his visit to Utah in a social media message sent on or about Aug. 7.

"I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old Ghille suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle," Robertson allegedly wrote.

President Biden is scheduled to arrive in Salt Lake City on Wednesday afternoon for an overnight stay.

In March, Robertson had also claimed he was heading to New York to kill New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was overseeing the criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump.

"I’ll be waiting in the courthouse parking garage with my suppressed Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm to smoke a radical fool prosecutor that should never have been elected," he posted. "BYE, BYE, TO ANOTHER CORRUPT B______!!!”

While conducting surveillance on Robertson's home on March 19, a special agent attempted to speak with Robertson about his posts, to which Robertson replied, "I said it was a dream!"

Robertson then told the agent that they shouldn't return without a warrant.
 
They came back with the warrant, and apparently a gunfight ensued. It's tragic, but the MAGA terrorists are apparently willing to die for their master.

As I said all during the Obama administration and the thousands of threats he got as President: the bad guys only have to get lucky once.

 

Burning Lake Of Fire, Con't

Arizona Republican and professional election denier Lari Lake is stepping in to the 2024 US Senate race against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, and the primary field just got a whole lot more interesting.
 
Former Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake is staffing up for a Senate campaign in anticipation of an October launch, making Arizona ground zero to replay — and relitigate — GOP losses in the last two elections.

Why it matters: A potential three-way battle, with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema running as an independent, will expose deep divisions in both parties on whether to appeal to their bases or independents in a critical 2024 battleground state.The race will have implications in the presidential campaign and give President Biden an opportunity to run against the "ultra MAGA" mindset that Lake represents, even if former President Trump isn't Biden's opponent in November 2024.
Lake, who has not conceded her gubernatorial loss in 2022, is one of Trump's most ardent defenders and frequently amplifies the false election claims at the heart of the former president's most recent indictment.

Between the lines: The race also offers a state-level experiment on the implication of a possible three-way presidential contest, with Sinema playing the role of a No Labels candidate.

Driving the news: Lake is expected to spend most of September in Arizona interviewing potential staff and consultants, a source familiar told Axios.The former TV news anchor has hit the campaign trail with Ohio GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno in recent days, drawing a crowd of more than 650 people in a rural area.
"I'm really, really excited about [Sen. J.D. Vance], I'm super excited that Bernie Moreno's going to be in the Senate. And if they're in the Senate, I just might have to join them," she said during a Monday fundraiser in Cleveland with Vance and Moreno.

What they're saying: "When President Trump gets back in the White House he's going to need fighters like Kari Lake in Washington, DC to help enact his Agenda 47," Caroline Wren, a senior adviser to Lake, told Axios. "Kari Lake is seriously considering a run for the United States Senate and will be making a final decision this fall."
 
We'll see if Lake entering the race makes it easier to split the Democratic vote, but as awful as Sinema's poll numbers are right now, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego could benefit greatly.

Voters were presented with a potential list of candidates for the 2024 Republican U.S. Senate Primary. A plurality of Republican state primary voters, 42%, support former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Eleven percent support Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, 7% support former Senate candidate Blake Masters, 2% support Brian Wright and Jim Lamon respectively. Twenty-eight percent are undecided.

In the Democratic US Senate Primary, a plurality of Democratic primary voters (48%) plan to support Rep. Ruben Gallego, while 40% are undecided.

In a head-to-head matchup between Gallego (D), independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, and Mark Lamb (R), 36% support Gallego, 29% support Lamb, 21% support Sinema, and 15% are undecided. Without Sinema on the ballot, 42% support both Gallego and Lamb, while 16% are undecided.

In the same two ballot tests with Brian Wright, 37% support Gallego, 26% support Sinema, and 25% Wright, and 12% are undecided. Without Sinema on the ballot, 41% support Gallego, 38% Wright, and 21% are undecided.

“It appears Senator Sinema pulls more support from Republican voters than Democrats on the ballot. About 21% of Republicans would vote for Sinema with Lamb on the ballot, and 34% of Republicans would support Sinema with Wright on the ballot,” Kimball said. “By contrast, Sinema only pulls about 8% of Democratic support from Gallego.” 
 
 I'll take a Gallego win any day of the week here.


Orange Meltdown, Con't

So it turnes out that the Trump legal brain trust were indeed dumb as hog shit, because yes, they were, in fact, taking notes on the criminal fuckin' conspiracy.


A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.

The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end.

But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”

The memo had been a missing piece in the public record of how Mr. Trump’s allies developed their strategy to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. In mid-December, the false Trump electors could go through the motions of voting as if they had the authority to do so. Then, on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally count those slates of votes, rather than the official and certified ones for Joseph R. Biden Jr.

While that basic plan itself was already known, the document, described by prosecutors as the “fraudulent elector memo,” provides new details about how it originated and was discussed behind the scenes. Among those details is Mr. Chesebro’s proposed “messaging” strategy to explain why pro-Trump electors were meeting in states where Mr. Biden was declared the winner. The campaign would present that step as “a routine measure that is necessary to ensure” that the correct electoral slate could be counted by Congress if courts or legislatures later concluded that Mr. Trump had actually won the states.

It was not the first time Mr. Chesebro had raised the notion of creating alternate electors. In November, he had suggested doing so in Wisconsin, although for a different reason: to safeguard Mr. Trump’s rights in case he later won a court battle and was declared that state’s certified winner by Jan. 6, as had happened with Hawaii in 1960.

But the indictment portrayed the Dec. 6 memo as a “sharp departure” from that proposal, becoming what prosecutors say was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect.”

“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on Jan. 6,” Mr. Chesebro wrote. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on Dec. 14.”
Three days later, Mr. Chesebro drew up specific instructions to create fraudulent electors in multiple states — in another memo whose existence, along with the one in November, was first reported by The Times last year. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot also cited them in its December report, but it apparently did not learn of the Dec. 6 memo.

“I believe that what can be achieved on Jan. 6 is not simply to keep Biden below 270 electoral votes,” Mr. Chesebro wrote in the newly disclosed memo. “It seems feasible that the vote count can be conducted so that at no point will Trump be behind in the electoral vote count unless and until Biden can obtain a favorable decision from the Supreme Court upholding the Electoral Count Act as constitutional, or otherwise recognizing the power of Congress (and not the president of the Senate) to count the votes.”

As an American, I demand that our national political conspiracies are held to the standards of terrifyingly powerful evil seen in Mission Impossible and James Bond films and Tom Clancy novels, not this middle school class "And I'll put soda vending machines in all the homerooms" president bullshit.

We nearly lost the country to magical thinking cartoon evil.  We may still lose it unless this blunderfuck ends up in prison, for the love of God.  The trials cannot come quickly enough, and the convictions and sentencings require even more alacrity.