Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

The Biden Administration is considering measures to make it very financially uncomfortable for those refusing the COVID-19 vaccine who would otherwise be able to receive it, especially for public and private institutions refusing vaccine mandates.

The Biden administration is considering using federal regulatory powers and the threat of withholding federal funds from institutions to push more Americans to get vaccinated — a huge potential shift in the fight against the virus and a far more muscular approach to getting shots into arms, according to four people familiar with the deliberations.

The effort could apply to institutions as varied as long-term-care facilities, cruise ships and universities, potentially impacting millions of Americans, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.

The conversations are in the early phases and no firm decisions have been made, the people said. One outside lawyer in touch with the Biden administration on the issue is recommending that the president use federal powers sparingly.

There is a particular focus in the discussions on whether restrictions on Medicare dollars or other federal funds could be used to persuade nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities to require employees to be vaccinated, according to one of the people familiar with the talks.

If the Biden administration goes forward with the plans, it would amount to a dramatic escalation in the effort to vaccinate the roughly 90 million Americans who are eligible for shots but who have refused or have been unable to get them.

The discussion at the highest level of government also signals a new phase of potential federal intervention as the White House struggles to control the delta variant of the virus, which is spreading more rapidly than even some of the more dire models predicted.

But such drastic moves are likely to trigger further backlash from many Republican-leaning regions where vaccine hesitancy has been highest, agitating conservatives already skeptical of the Biden administration and its use of federal power. The administration has already said that federal workers and contractors must be vaccinated or wear masks, and the Pentagon is considering similar requirements.

Several experts noted that even if President Biden’s team could force Americans to begin getting shots as soon as this week, it still takes five to six more weeks for mRNA inoculations — which require a second shot — to be fully effective. That means infection rates could keep rising in the short term no matter what steps are taken on vaccinations.

When asked about vaccine mandates after a Thursday event on electric vehicles, Biden said his administration was looking at its options as he encouraged all Americans to get vaccinated. The White House declined to comment for this story.

The talks within the administration come amid calls from many public health experts for a more aggressive federal approach to vaccinations. The country reported more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases Wednesday, an infection rate on par with early February, before vaccines were widely available. On Thursday, the rolling seven-day daily average of new infections was at 95,000 new cases.

“I think wisely using the federal spending power is absolutely right,” said Lawrence Gostin, who directs Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and said he has discussed the idea of using federal funds as an incentive with Biden administration officials.

Gostin said he has suggested the White House use its power judiciously, not by “bludgeoning the private sector” but rather by “starting with high-risk settings with an absolute ethical obligation and legal obligation to keep your workers and your clients safe.”

Other leading experts have publicly floated the idea of using more federal incentives to push for vaccinations as a lever that Biden and his administration could use.

“If you look through history, there are presidents who — even in the absence of legal authority — influence people, you might say,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who recently organized a joint statement from nearly 60 medical groups urging every health facility to require workers to get vaccinated. “We keep referring to this covid thing like it’s an emergency and then we don’t behave like it’s a wartime emergency.”

 

Time to pull out the big guns then. Expecting others to pay the piper when 100 million Americans still refuse to get the vaccine is immoral, and Biden has an imperative to step in here.

 

Here's hoping it's soon.

 

Get the vaccine, folks.

 

Now.

The Return Of Jobapalooza

The Biden jobs economy is in fact ridin' as the country added 943,000 jobs in July, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.4%, but the rise of delta is almost certainly going to bring this ride to a crawl.

The American economy roared into midsummer with a strong gain in hiring, but there are questions about its ability to maintain that momentum as the Delta variant of the coronavirus causes growing concern.

Employers added 943,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, but the data was collected in the first half of the month, before variant-related cases exploded in many parts of the country.

While the economy and job growth overall have been strong in recent months, experts fear that the variant’s spread could undermine those gains if new restrictions become necessary. Already, some events have been canceled, and many companies have pulled back from plans for employees to return to the office in September.

Still, with schools planning to reopen, at least for now, and Americans continuing to dine out and travel, the economy’s expansion remained on track last month. Some experts foresee a slight cooling on the horizon, but most think unemployment will keep falling as the labor market recovers the ground lost in the pandemic.

“It’s been a sprint in terms of growth, but we may be moving into more of a marathon,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. “Travel season is winding down, and the Delta variant is a big concern.”

The unemployment rate fell to 5.4 percent, compared with 5.9 percent in June. Before the report, the consensus of economists polled by Bloomberg forecast a gain of 858,000 jobs, with the unemployment rate dipping to 5.7 percent.

Despite the hiring gains, many managers report difficulty in finding applicants for open positions. Jeanine Lisa Klotzkin manages an outpatient addiction treatment center in White Plains, N.Y., and has had only limited success in her search for addiction counselors.

“Normally, we’d have dozens of candidates,” she said. But six weeks after posting an online job ad, her clinic has received four applications. The positions pay $50,000 to $63,000 a year, said Ms. Klotzkin, who added: “These aren’t low-wage jobs. I don’t know where the people went.”

 

Things are moving fast for President Biden and America, and now you see why GOP governors are trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears on purpose to slow the economy down heading into 2022. The one thing that could derail the Dems next year and turn it into 2014 or 2010 "shellacking" territory is a massive delta spike that lasts into next year.

Guess what the GOP is trying their dead level best to do?

The Big Lie, Con't

Former Yahoo News WH reporter Hunter Walker now has his own blog, The Uprising (Everything comes around again, does that make me a hipster?) and got a hold of The Former Guy's™ "evidence" of election fraud by apparently asking very nicely, and it's hysterically bad stuff.

The Uprising has obtained an unpublished statement from former President Donald Trump detailing his purported evidence that the 2020 election "was shattered with fraud and irregularities.” The information doesn’t prove any plot to manipulate the vote, but it does clearly show the workings of a complex effort to spread false election narratives.

An analysis of Trump’s evidence demonstrates how instrumental the right wing media ecosystem, dark money, and Republican officials are to fueling and spreading the former president’s so-called Big Lie about the 2020 presidential vote.

First, it’s important to explain why the former president’s inaccurate election diatribes matter.

America's largest social media companies deplatformed Trump during his final weeks as president. After leaving office, Trump has continued to promote false conspiracies about his election loss to Joe Biden and now largely relies on allies and emailed statements to spread his messages.

Some argue that Trump’s false election narratives should be ignored completely, but the former president’s communiques are part of a much larger, influential context.

With Trump hosting rallies and holding meetings with what his allies have dubbed a “Cabinet,” it’s clear that questioning the integrity of President Biden’s election victory is a key part of the strategy and messaging for Trump and the GOP going forward.

As Jane Mayer documented in this week’s New Yorker, the spread of Trump’s conspiratorial narrative by elected officials and partisan outlets is happening in parallel with a pre-existing push by well-financed conservative groups to change election laws and infrastructure around the country. And the Big Lie has already had tragic real-world ramifications: Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were a main driver of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, which is another main subject of misinformation from Trump and other Republicans.

Officials from multiple agencies in Trump’s own administration have confirmed the election was the most secure in American history and that there was no widespread fraud. Trump and his allies filed over forty lawsuits challenging the results. Many were plagued with “elementary errors” and all of them failed. Trump supporters also pointed to statistics to suggest the results were questionable. An analysis by Stanford’s conservative leaning Hoover Institution found none of those statistical claims was “ even remotely convincing.” While experts acknowledge instances of small-scale fraud tend to happen in large elections, it is extremely rare and not a significant enough issue to be decisive on the national level. Nevertheless, conservatives have focused on alleged voter fraud for years as they have advocated for restrictions on voting. And Trump has continued to aggressively promote false claims about his loss last year through personal appearances, interviews with conservative outlets, and written statements emailed to his robust press list.

These email blasts have become Trump’s most frequent mode of communication and effectively replaced his once omnipresent tweets. The former president’s emails sometimes come more than once a day and have covered petty personal feuds, political endorsements, criticism of his successor, and his efforts to cast doubt on the election.

While the content is quite similar to Trump’s past social media streams, his emailed statements don’t generate nearly as much coverage. (That is, in part, due to deliberate decisions by mainstream media outlets who are wrestling with how to handle disinformation spread by Trump and his allies.)

Nevertheless, Trump’s statements reach his base through his personal website and by being laundered through his Republican allies and conservative media. As the following analysis illustrates, Trump’s claims would not be possible without the inspiration and support of opaquely-funded partisan groups and websites, as well as major figures in conservative media and politics.

The Uprising’s journey down the rabbit hole of Trump’s election conspiracy theory industrial complex began on August 1, when the former president issued an emailed statement railing against media outlets who note his fraud claims are made without evidence when covering his remarks.

Trump described this contextualization by journalists as the work of a “crooked and collusive media” and insisted there is “irrefutable evidence” the vote was rigged. But Trump’s 280-word public statement insisting there is “massive and unconditional evidence” contained no actual specific evidence.

The Uprising reached out to Trump’s new spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, to ask if he had any specific evidence for his claims. Harrington, who has her own history of promoting false claims about the election and January 6, responded with a statement — which she described, somewhat paradoxically, as “a recent release we have yet to send out” that includes “numerous examples” of Trump’s evidence. Harrington subsequently confirmed that the document was directly attributable to Trump.

That document, which you can read in full here, included at least 9 individual claims. All of them are baseless, and almost all of the faulty evidence cited by Trump drew on the work of right-wing activists and media outlets. Before (and after) being amplified by Trump himself, many of these false and mischaracterized claims about the election were spread by Republican officials and influential pillars of the conservative media ecosystem — outlets including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and The Federalist — as well as websites further out on the fringe. The result is a massive disinformation feedback loop capable of reaching millions of Americans.

 

As usual, Trump's biggest weakness is his ego: he can't help but reveal his grand plan to anyone in earshot because he thinks he's the smartest man alive and he has just the plan to prove that if you'll stick around and listen to his 23 hours of garbage.

 

But as Walker points out, this is being devoured by Trump's death cult, and they believe every word of it, up to and beyond the point that it justifies whatever brutal action that they will undeniably choose to take next. It's not evidence, it's a terrorist manifesto.

 

It's time we start treating Trump like he's the man who, I dunno, fomented an armed insurrection at the US Capitol.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

As Louisiana faces the tide of delta variant cases with the state's vaccination rate well under 50%, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards is instituting a mask mandate indoors and in schools and workplaces, and begging residents to get vaccinated. Some folks are finally listening.

 

Demand for the shots has nearly quadrupled in recent weeks in Louisiana, a promising glimmer that the deadly reality of the virus might be breaking through a logjam of misunderstanding and misinformation.

The new push for vaccinations has been driven by an explosion in coronavirus cases. But it takes time for vaccines to bolster immune systems, and the state — which now leads the country in new cases — could still be weeks away from relief.

Hospitals are overflowing with more Covid-19 patients than ever before. Even children’s hospitals have packed intensive care units. And the Delta variant has alarmed doctors, who described seeing patients in their 20s and 30s rapidly declining and dying.

“These are the darkest days of our pandemic,” said Dr. Catherine O’Neal, the chief medical officer at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge.

The Delta variant has unleashed a rush of diagnoses across the United States, but Louisiana has emerged as a troublesome hot spot, with the highest per capita rate of cases in the country and a beleaguered health care system straining to keep up.

“That’s a miserable place to be, I know it,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said, describing the swirl of frustration and shame expressed by government officials, epidemiologists and frontline medical workers as their state suffers the catastrophic consequences of a failure to vaccinate more people.

The state is averaging more than 4,300 new cases per day, according to New York Times data. Resources have been taxed — especially in the state’s southeastern corner — as cases have surged from the Gulf Coast into the northern reaches of the state.

In Baton Rouge, one hospital called in the kind of federal emergency support staff usually reserved for the aftermath of a hurricane. In Hammond, a city of some 21,000 people in the toe of Louisiana’s boot, nurses were ordered to pick up extra shifts.

Vaccination rates are increasing in many states, as employers and universities have started requiring the shots to return to work and class. In the Southeast, where vaccinations have lagged behind the national rate, those upticks have come in states like Mississippi and Florida just as reported cases began spiking.

In an effort to help temper the spread of the virus in Louisiana while pushing for more vaccinations, Governor Edwards reinstated a statewide mask mandate that went into effect on Wednesday, requiring anyone 5 or older to cover their face indoors.

But the governor’s orders have produced fierce resistance from the outset of the pandemic. On Monday, exasperation bled into his voice as he urged residents to heed the mask order and listen to the parade of doctors and hospital officials he had summoned to describe the growing crisis.

“Do you give a damn?” Mr. Edwards asked. “I hope you do. I do. I’ve heard it said often: Louisiana is the most pro-life state in the nation. I want to believe that.”

 

It didn't take a virologist or public health expert to tell you that the delta variant was going to be a disaster, it just needed anyone with eyes open enough to see the politicization of vaccination by the GOP to the point where it was worth dying in order to own Biden and the libs.  But that's where we are with Republicans.

Florida Man Pretends State Is On The Border

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to talk about anything else other than his plummeting approval ratings and rising delta variant COVID cases, the worst in the nation by far, by pretending the real issue is President Biden's "failure" on "illegal" immigrants in Texas, or something. Steve Benen:

So, a few things.

Right off the bat, it's worth emphasizing that Biden didn't single out Florida; Florida singled out Florida with its intensifying crisis. As NBC News reported, "The state has become the new national epicenter for the virus, accounting for around a fifth of all new cases in the U.S."

In fact, roughly a year and a half into the pandemic, conditions in Florida are effectively as bad now as they've ever been, which is bound to get noticed, whether the governor of the Sunshine State likes it or not.

But more broadly, what we saw from DeSantis was a clumsy effort, not to defend his record, and not to help protect his own constituents, but to dramatically change the subject. The COVID crisis isn't the story the Republican wants to talk about, so the governor, embracing "whataboutism" to an absurd degree, tried to shift the focus to a story he likes better.

Forget the pandemic; forget Florida's maxed out hospitals; forget rapidly rising infection tallies; forget lagging vaccination rates. Ron DeSantis would prefer to talk about immigrants and the U.S./Mexico border.

In fact, the ambitious GOP governor's political operation even sent a fundraising letter to his supporters yesterday, suggesting "migrants" are responsible for climbing COVID numbers.

At this point, we could explain that the border is not, in reality, the problem. We could also explain that Florida is one of the hemisphere's largest peninsulas -- it's largely surrounded by water -- and it shares a border with Georgia and Alabama, not Mexico.

But there's ultimately no real point in even taking DeSantis' rhetoric seriously as a substantive argument, because it's not. The governor doesn't have a plan to deal with his state's intensifying public-health crisis; he opposes policies that might help for purely political reasons; and he's on the defensive after the president helped expose his indifference.

And let's not pretend DeSantis cares about his constituents, either. He's facing 100,000 new cases per week in his state alone and he won't lift a finger to stop it, but he'll yell at Biden all day, and send out STOP THE FAUCISTS emails to fundraise.

He honestly doesn't care if people die, he can blame Biden.

That's what makes him the non-Trump frontrunner in 2024 in the Death Cult party.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

President Biden has called on New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign in the wake of yesterday's investigation report finding the sexual harassment allegations of 11 female former Cuomo staffers and other state employees to be credible.

President Joe Biden called on Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign Tuesday, following a report that Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women.

“He should resign,” Biden told reporters at the White House.

Asked whether Cuomo should be removed from office if he refuses to resign, Biden said, “I understand the state legislature may decide to impeach, I do not know that for a fact.”

Shortly after Biden’s response, New York State House Speaker Carl Heastie (D) announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry.

In calling on Cuomo to step down, Biden joined nearly every other major Democratic lawmaker in both Albany and Washington. But from atop the party leadership, Biden’s demand carries more weight than others.

Cuomo’s press office did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC on the president’s remarks.

 

Cuomo tried to dismiss the report Tuesday afternoon, but that was before Biden dropped the hammer later in the day.

A somber but defiant Cuomo strongly denied some of those allegations later Tuesday, and said that other examples of his alleged misconduct had been mischaracterized or misinterpreted.

The 165-page report, which comprises interviews with 179 witnesses and a review of tens of thousands of documents, also said that Cuomo’s office was riddled with fear and intimidation, and was a hostile work environment for many staffers.

The women Cuomo is accused of harassing included members of his own staff, members of the public and other state employees, one of whom was a state trooper, the report found.

The wave of demands that Cuomo resign Tuesday represented a stunning fall from grace for a politician who made no secret of his national ambitions, and was widely seen as a potential 2024 Democratic presidential nominee should Biden decide not to run for re-election.

 

Multiple New York state legislators and politicians are calling for Cuomo to step down, and frankly he's in real danger of facing expedited impeachment and removal.

Speaker Carl Heastie says that, following a conference involving the Attorney General's report concerning sexual harassment allegations against Governor Cuomo, the governor has "lost the confidence of the Assembly Democratic majority and that he can no longer remain in office."

This, after the New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced the findings of a five-month investigation into the governor Tuesday morning.

Heastie also says that once they "receive all relevant documents and evidence from the Attorney General, we will move expeditiously and look to conclude our impeachment investigation as quickly as possible."

 

I think should that become abundantly clear later this week, Cuomo will hang it up and let Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul take over. Or not, Cuomo will probably force them to do it,

Understand that New York Republicans will immediately declare Hochul as worse than Cuomo the day after his resignation, but I'm pretty sure she can take it.

Last Call For School Of Hard Right Knocks, Con't

As I said before, the true goal of Republicans screeching endlessly about Critical Race Theory is to criminalize the teaching of accurate American history to the point where teachers simply refuse to even bring up the "bad parts" at all. Slavery? What's that? In Tennessee schools, Republicans want discussing race to carry up to a five million dollar fine.

Tennessee aims to levy fines starting at $1 million and rising to $5 million on school districts each time one of their teachers is found to have “knowingly violated” state restrictions on classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and sexism, according to guidance proposed by the state’s department of education late last week.

Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel “guilt or anguish” because of past actions committed by their race or sex.

The guidance received immediate backlash from advocates of students of color in the state who say it would have a disproportionate impact on already underfunded, majority Black and Latino school districts.

“There’s also a fear for young students of color who are in districts that are majority white and now there’s no protection for them and their white student peers in learning about truthful history and racism,” said Cardell Orrin, the executive director of Stand for Children Tennessee, a group that advocates for historically disenfranchised students.

The new guidance lays out the complaint process that a current student, parent, or employee can initiate against a district if they believe an educator has violated the law, but it does not elaborate on what specifically school districts are banned from teaching, as many teacher advocates had hoped. Instead, it cites 11 broad concepts that teachers can’t teach or use materials to promote. For example, students can’t be told that they are “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,” or bear responsibility for past actions committed by members of their race or sex. Experts have called the language of these laws vague.

Tennessee’s department of education will allow the public to weigh in on the rules until Wednesday, Aug. 11, according to the Tennessean.

Tennessee is one of 11 states this year that have drastically curtailed the ways that districts can fight systemic and individual acts of racism, homophobia, and sexism in the classroom and how teachers can talk to students about the ways America’s government has historically discriminated against minorities. Another 16 states have similar bills that are set to be considered during next year’s legislative session.

Advocates of the bills argue that public school districts are indoctrinating students with teachers’ political agendas and, through their equity initiatives, giving students of color an unfair advantage over white students.

Opponents of the bills argue that school districts can no longer ignore longstanding academic disparities between white students and students of color and are obligated to teach all students a more complete and nuanced version of America’s racist past.

In most instances, the laws spell out which anti-racist initiatives districts are no longer allowed to practice and what “divisive” concepts teachers are no longer allowed to discuss, but state legislatures left room for state departments of education to determine how to enforce the laws.

 

Criminalizing what can and can not be taught to students involving accurate history because of purely political reasons is quite literally textbook fascism, guys. 

Of course, Republicans aren't being subtle about their intent, either.

Naked hatred will be on a Kansas election ballot Tuesday.

Josh Wells, a Hutchinson-area man with Proud Boys and other alleged right-wing extremist ties, is nostalgic for the good old days when the U.S. was a “pro-white country with a protected white majority.” He’s running for the Haven USD 312 Board of Education.

A group calling itself the Midwest Youth Liberation Front unearthed Wells’ avowed longing to establish a “white nationalism and or a pro-Western Christian theocracy with a protected white majority status. Whichever one is more obtainable.” Because “every race deserves a homeland.”

“Wells’ admitted goal of his new Midwest Nationalist Party is to establish a white ethno-state,” the liberation front wrote on Twitter. “Wells openly praises the death of Black people, spreads Nazi Germany symbolism, and thinks non-White people don’t belong in America.”

It’s another hot, sleepy August election. Turnout is always low. But “you wouldn’t want somebody with that mix of hate and anger and misinformation preferably in any kind of leadership, let alone on a school board,” says state Sen. Cindy Holscher, Democrat of Overland Park, who has been monitoring political races for extremism, especially in school board elections. “I suspect there are more individuals like this person, maybe not quite as vocal. And that’s concerning.”

 

The white supremacist terrorists are openly running for school boards, folks. Get involved or they will win.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

"America's CEO" ran the country like a business, which apparently entailed trashing the place, blaming everyone else, and running away with the loot.

It was the whopping-yet-still-disappointing 6.5% annualized growth number for the second quarter that got most of the attention when the U.S. gross domestic product report came out Thursday. But the data release from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis also included revisions to GDP and related measures back to 1999, making this an opportune time to take another look at economic growth under Donald Trump and his predecessors.

This is, let’s be clear from the start, not a perfect way of measuring presidential economic performance. There are lots of things that determine economic growth rates other than who is in the White House, and when a president does make a difference the results may be felt long after he’s left Washington. Still, it’s a widely used metric and Trump was downright obsessed with it, so here goes.






OK, maybe that GDP obsession didn’t work out so well for Trump. The chart starts with Dwight Eisenhower because his was the first presidency for which the BEA has full quarterly GDP data. Annual GDP numbers go back to 1929, and if you measure from Herbert Hoover’s first year in office (1929) to the year he left (1933), annualized growth was negative 7.4 percent. So Trump did a lot better than that! But his was the worst GDP performance since then (measured the same way as with Hoover, annualized GDP growth was 9.1% under Franklin Roosevelt and 1.8% under Harry Truman).

This does seem a bit unfair, given the pandemic and all. Trump didn’t always rise to the challenges posed by Covid-19, but thanks in part to legislation he signed and a vaccine-development program his administration put in motion, the U.S. economy has experienced one of the world’s quicker recoveries. Lots of other presidents have suffered economic setbacks due to events outside their control, of course, and you can’t just ignore a quarter or two because they were affected by bad economic luck. But there is something to be said for trying some other ways of measuring growth during his term.

One is to adjust the timing. For the above chart I’ve taken real GDP in the quarter a president entered office and the quarter he left, and calculated the compound annual growth rate from one to the other. Here’s what it looks like if you shift that back or forward by a quarter.



It looks a lot better for Trump (not to mention Barack Obama, and Gerald Ford) if you shift a quarter later, although this still puts him behind everyone but George W. Bush. There’s an argument for shifting the measurement period even later, given how long it can take for the effects of economic policies to be felt, but there’s also a point beyond which that starts to get a little ridiculous, plus we don’t have the data yet to do that for Trump.

 

Trump was the worst in my lifetime by far, economically, morally, and criminally.  And unless you've hit the century mark yourself (and if you have, gratz!) he's been the worst economic president at least in your lifetime too.

The criminal and moral part isn't up for debate.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

We know Trump had the Rosen Justice Department interfere with Arizona's election certification process, now we find out he did the same in Georgia through former acting Civil Rights division head Jeffrey Clark.

 

Top members of the Department of Justice last year rebuffed another DOJ official who asked them to urge officials in Georgia to investigate and perhaps overturn President Joe Biden's victory in the state -- long a bitter point of contention for former President Donald Trump and his team -- before the results were certified by Congress, emails reviewed by ABC News show.

The emails, dated Dec. 28, 2020, show the former acting head of DOJ's civil division, Jeffrey Clark, circulating a draft letter -- which he wanted then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to sign off on -- urging Georgia's governor and other top officials to convene the state legislature into a special session so lawmakers could investigate claims of voter fraud.

"The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States," the draft letter said. "The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."

The draft letter states: "While the Department of Justice believe[s] the Governor of Georgia should immediately call a special session to consider this important and urgent matter, if he declines to do so, we share with you our view that the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors."

The vote count in Georgia became a flashpoint for Trump and his allies and Trump at one point falsely claimed that it was "not possible" for him to have lost the state.
MORE: Statewide audit results reaffirm Biden winner in Georgia

But to date, the Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would tip the results of the presidential election. Attorney General William Barr also announced in December that the department had "not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election." A statewide audit in Georgia last year also affirmed that Biden was the winner.

The emails were provided by the DOJ to the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating efforts to overturn the election results. And they come as the DOJ investigator general looks at whether any officials in the department sought to overturn the outcome of the election.

Donoghue's notes about Trump telling Republican members of Congress to "leave it to him" when it came to the January 6th coup attempt was bad enough, but now we see that the efforts to manufacture a coup came about because Trump couldn't get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to bite on saying the elections were fraudulent.

And yes, Trump absolutely had acting DOJ employees who wanted to publicly trash the 2020 elections as fraud, as we can see here.

We came this close to a coup, folks.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

With the investigation into his misconduct now complete, NY Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is almost certainly not going to last until the end of the year as the state's chief executive, he may not make it until the end of the month.

 

An investigation found that Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women inside and outside state government and worked to retaliate against one of his accusers, New York’s attorney general announced Tuesday in a finding that is certain to renew calls for the Democrat’s resignation or impeachment.

The nearly five-month investigation, conducted by two outside lawyers who spoke to 179 people, found that the Cuomo administration was a “hostile work environment” and that it was “rife with fear and intimidation.”

People interviewed included complainants, current and former members of the executive chamber, State troopers, additional state employees and others who interacted regularly with the governor.

“These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said at a press conference on Tuesday.

James said her investigation has concluded. There were no referrals to criminal prosecutors, though that wouldn’t preclude local authorities from using the evidence and findings of the report to mount their own cases.

On at least one occasion, the investigation found, Cuomo and his senior staff worked to retaliate against a former employee who accused him of wrongdoing. Cuomo was also found to have harassed women outside of government, the investigation found.

The report also detailed, for the first time, allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed a female state trooper on his security detail. It said that the governor ran his hand or fingers across her stomach and her back, kissed her on the cheek, asked for her help in finding a girlfriend and asked why she didn’t wear a dress.

“These brave women stepped forward to speak truth to power and, in doing so, they expressed faith in the belief that although the governor may be powerful, the truth is even more so,” Joon Kim, one of the lawyers leading the investigation, said at the press conference.

Investigators said they found all 11 women were credible, noting that their allegations were corroborated to varying degrees, including by other witnesses and contemporaneous text messages.

 

Cuomo's last grip on the side of the cliff was "We need to wait until the investigation is completed, which will exonerate me."

 

The investigation damned him instead. The victims deserve justice.

 

A long fall for a man who deserves to not only be removed from office, but put in prison. 

Al Franken did the right thing and resigned for less.

At the absolute minimum, Cuomo has to step down and await the criminal investigation and charges, and face those in a court of law, and then there's the entire nursing home COVID disaster he has to answer for too.

No, Cuomo has to go.