Last Call For How To Steal An Election, Con't

The Trump regime plan to steal the election now is to create enough chaos and doubt in the election process to provide cover Republicans in red states that Biden won so that they can then prevent certification of election results, stopping them from being able to send electors to the Electoral College by the December deadline, and forcing the presidential election to go to the House. The test run for this is Michigan, where Republicans began their coup attempt last night, and were foiled, at least for now.

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers unanimously certified its ballot count Tuesday evening, reversing itself just hours after Republicans on the board blocked the typically uneventful task of approving the results of the presidential election.

Democrats and voting rights advocates had expressed outrage after the board, which is made up of two Democrats and two Republicans, deadlocked on party lines over whether to certify. Had it held, that outcome would have punted the question of who won the state's most densely populated region to a state regulatory board that meets Nov. 23.

But the board made a late agreement to conduct an independent audit of the results, which mollified the Republicans, who had been under pressure from Trump’s supporters not to certify the results.

“I appreciate putting our heads together to come to a solution,” Republican board chairwoman Monica Palmer said, with the agreement coming after two hours of back-to-back public comments.

Joe Biden holds a lead of nearly 148,000 votes in Michigan, and Democrats here believe the partisan split of the board in Wayne County — home to heavily Democratic Detroit — simply delays an inevitable official victory for Biden in the state.

The brief period of chaos created when the board failed to certify the results provided a small win to the Trump campaign and a group of Republican lawyers and activists who have questioned the legitimacy of the count in Detroit, which went overwhelmingly for Biden.

“I am proud that, due to the efforts of the Michigan Republican Party, the Republican National Committee and the Trump Campaign, enough evidence of irregularities and potential voter fraud was uncovered resulting in the Wayne County Board of Canvassers refusing to certify their election results. This action will allow more time for us to get to the bottom of these deeply troubling irregularities,” said Laura Cox, the state GOP party chair. “The people of Michigan deserve fair, open and transparent elections, and we will continue to fight for just that.”

Note that the attack here started in Wayne County, Michigan. Detroit, specifically. Racist Republicans all but saying that Black voters and Black votes should not be certified, and to them, it always comes back to race. Always. They hate Black America enough to take everything from us whenever they can get away with it.

But the move in Wayne County being defeated just means Republicans will get a second bite at this poison apple next week at the state level, and you can absolutely bet that Republicans in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona are eyeing exactly how to make this work in order to stop Biden from getting to 270. 

Keep a careful eye on state election certification boards. The Trump regime is clearly indicating it will do anything to win, including destroying America's election system, in order to maintain power. And if they do manage to steal this election through certification delays, well, we'll never actually need elections again, will we?

Just As Corrupt As Trump, Con't

As expected after last month's call from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office for the Feds to take a long, hard look at Paxton himself over multiple possible crimes the office discovered, the FBI is now investigating the allegations of bribery and corruption against Paxton during his current tenure.

The FBI is investigating allegations that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton broke the law in using his office to benefit a wealthy donor, according to two people with knowledge of the probe.

Federal agents are looking into claims by former members of Paxton’s staff that the high-profile Republican committed bribery, abuse of office and other crimes to help Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, the people told The Associated Press. They insisted on anonymity to discuss the investigation because it is ongoing.

Confirmation of the criminal probe marks mounting legal peril for Paxton, who’s denied wrongdoing and refused calls for his resignation since his top deputies reported him to federal authorities at the end of September.

A criminal defense attorney for Paxton, Philip Hilder, declined to comment. Spokespersons in the attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It’s unclear how far the FBI is into investigating the allegations against Paxton. An agency spokeswoman in San Antonio declined to comment.

Paxton is accused of using his position as Texas’ top law enforcement official to benefit Paul in several ways, according to seven senior lawyers in the attorney general’s office and the agency’s head of law enforcement. Central to their claims is the fact that Paxton hired an outside lawyer to investigate the developer’s allegations that the FBI improperly searched his home and offices last year.

Each of Paxton’s accusers has resigned, been put on leave or been fired since reporting him. Last week, four of them filed a state whistleblower lawsuit against the attorney general, claiming he ousted them as retribution.

Paxton has been dancing around legal trouble for his entire run as Texas AG, currently doing everything he can to hold up a securities fraud case against him since 2015, but now he has this as well.

Just a reminder that when you put Republicans in power, they will be corrupt.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Even Mitch McConnell has thrown in the towel on the Trump regime (well, as good as that will get) promising an "orderly" transition of power to the new administration in January.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday said there will be an "orderly transfer" between administrations Jan. 20, though he did not mention President-elect Joe Biden or President Donald Trump, who is refusing to concede, by name.

McConnell, R-Ky., has not yet publicly recognized Biden's victory, but his comments Tuesday following a Senate Republican luncheon signaled he is prepared for a Biden presidency.

Asked about the General Services Administration's refusal to ascertain Biden's victory, which triggers important components of the transition, McConnell did not push for the Trump administration to begin that process but said "we're going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one."

"What we all say about it is frankly irrelevant," he said, adding, "All of it will happen right on time, and we will swear in the next administration on January 20th."

Earlier, McConnell described the next steps in the electoral process, pointing to the upcoming certification of results in key swing states.

"Once those certifications occur, if they occur based upon litigation being tried in various places, those will be final," he said. "The Electoral College will meet in December. And the inauguration will be on January 20th."

McConnell added that the president and his legal team are within their rights to present "whatever evidence" they may have to contest the results.

Though he is losing by more than 10,000 votes in at least three swing states he would need to flip in order to win the election — an amount far outside the total overturned in any recount for at least 50 years — the president is hoping that long-shot legal challenges will revive his chances. So far, his campaign's legal effort has fallen short in federal court, and ongoing efforts appear unlikely to alter the results, let alone swing a state.

Only a handful of Republican lawmakers have acknowledged Biden's projected victory.

Now, Mitch is in a tough spot here. We all know he only thing he cares about is power, and he can't admit that Joe Biden is president and that Kamala Harris is Vice President because he still has to win at least one more Senate race in Georgia in order to keep from becoming Senate minority leader. 

But notice, while he's careful not to mention Biden or Harris at all, he's also not mentioning Trump. That's about as good as you're going to get, and the Senate GOP isn't going to even talk to Biden until after the January 5th Georgia elections.

 

Besides, half of Republicans now believe Trump won the election and that Biden stole it.

The Nov. 13-17 opinion poll showed that Trump’s open defiance of Biden’s victory in both the popular vote and Electoral College appears to be affecting the public’s confidence in American democracy, especially among Republicans.

Altogether, 73% of those polled agreed that Biden won the election while 5% thought Trump won. But when asked specifically whether Biden had “rightfully won,” Republicans showed they were suspicious about how Biden’s victory was obtained.

Fifty-two percent of Republicans said that Trump “rightfully won,” while only 29% said that Biden had rightfully won.

Asked why, Republicans were much more concerned than others that state vote counters had tipped the result toward Biden: 68% of Republicans said they were concerned that the election was “rigged,” while only 16% of Democrats and one-third of independents were similarly worried.

Even before winning the 2016 election, Trump kept up a drumbeat of complaints about the process, claiming without evidence that it was unfair to him.

Since Biden amassed enough electoral votes to win the White House on Nov. 7, Trump has ramped up those criticisms, telling his supporters that he is the victim of widespread illegal voting.

Trump has failed to give any proof for his claims and has not been able to back them up in court, however. Republicans announced this week that they were dropping federal election lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The poll showed that more Americans appear to be more suspicious about the U.S. election process than they were four years ago.

Altogether, 55% of adults in the United States said they believed the Nov. 3 presidential election was “legitimate and accurate,” which is down 7 points from a similar poll that ran shortly after the 2016 election. The 28% who said they thought the election was “the result of illegal voting or election rigging” is up 12 points from four years ago.

The poll showed Republicans were much more likely to be suspicious of Trump’s loss this year than Democrats were when Hillary Clinton lost four years ago.

In 2016, 52% of Democrats said Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump was “legitimate and accurate,” even as reports emerged of Russian attempts to influence the outcome. This year, only 26% of Republicans said they thought Trump’s loss was similarly legitimate.

Trump still owns all of them, and they know it. And his antics are pushing his cultists towards the point where they will refuse to recognize the legitimate election of Joe Biden.

The potential for massive, nationwide violence is the highest that it's been in years.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate vote to advance the very controversial nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board failed 47-50 as several Republicans voted against her.
• Several Pentagon officials may break with the Trump regime and meet with Biden-Harris transition team members as soon as next week.
• Senate GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell says he is open to a much smaller $500 billion COVID-19 relief package that targets small businesses, but no stimulus checks for Americans.
• UK and EU Brexit negotiators say they are getting close to a completed deal that could be reached as early as next week.
• Joint Spanish and French commercial spaceflight company Arianespace lost two satellites on Monday after a stage 2 launch failure caused the payloads not to deploy properly.

Last Call For The Pursuit Of Justice

The usual suspects are blowing fuses over this NBC News article that finds Joe Biden doesn't want to dedicate the Justice Department to prosecuting Trump.

 

President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.

Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.

They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."

Another Biden adviser said, "He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them."

Any decisions by Biden's Justice Department regarding Trump, his staff, his associates, his business or his policies wouldn't affect investigations by state officials, including Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who has fought to obtain Trump's tax returns.

As Biden tries to balance his own inclinations with pressures from within his party, his advisers stressed that he is seeking to reset the dynamic between the White House and the Justice Department from what it has been under Trump.

Biden wants his Justice Department to function independently from the White House, aides said, and Biden isn't going to tell federal law enforcement officials whom or what to investigate or not to investigate.

"His overarching view is that we need to move the country forward," an adviser said. "But the most important thing on this is that he will not interfere with his Justice Department and not politicize his Justice Department."

 

OK, so what does this mean? If you're getting SEE BIDEN REFUSES TO SEND TRUMP TO PRISON HE'S COMPLICT out of this, you're not getting the point.

 

The point is Biden wants an independent Justice Department again, who operates under federal law.

 

The point is Trump will almost certainly pardon everyone he can, including himself. 

 

The point is the NY state investigations from Cyrus Vance and Letitia James will proceed.

 

Trump was never going to be prosecuted by the Justice Department, guys.  Trump was always going to issue pardons, and as Marcy Wheeler reminds us:

New York state already has a tax investigation into Trump, so a federal one would be duplicative. And the pardon power is absolute; there’s little likelihood DOJ could investigate the pardons that Trump grants, because doing so would be constitutionally suspect.

 

But there are still a number of federal investigations at the DoJ that are ongoing.  If Barr kills them or Trump pardons everyone involved as a subject of those investigations, that's not Biden's fault.

 

The money was always on Trump facing state charges, and I'm sure red states will be licking their chops to return the favor. Biden's right about it being divisive.

It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, but Biden does have to go on record as saying that the DoJ does have to be returned to independence here, and most importantly that he want no appearance of Biden ordering new investigations or charges against Trump.

This has got to happen, guys.  Good for Biden getting it out of the way now.

Biden, His Time, Con't

President-elect Joe Biden continues to put together his White House staff, and the latest addition is New Orleans Congressman Cedric Richmond as senior public engagement advisor, the same role Valerie Jarrett played for all eight years of the Obama administration.

 

Cedric Richmond will join Joe Biden’s administration in a senior role overseeing public engagement, leaving his seat in the House of Representatives just after being elected to his sixth term, according to people familiar with the situation.

Richmond, who was one of the national co-chairs of Biden’s campaign, will be one of the highest-ranking Black officials in the White House. Richmond, whose district includes New Orleans, has a news conference scheduled for Tuesday where he is expected to announce he is leaving Congress.

The Biden transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richmond represents a safe Democratic district, so it’s unlikely the House will lose another Democratic seat after several incumbents were defeated by Republicans in this month’s election. 

 

Indeed, Richmond won his LA-2 race by nearly 40 points.  Democrats will be fine here.

So what does Richmond bring to the table? Quite a bit, and then some.

 

Richmond is a former Congressional Black Caucus chairman and was Biden's campaign co-chair starting all the way back in April 2019 and helped him get the unprecedented primary victory he needed over Bernie Sanders and more.

Richmond, 46, has been with Biden every step of the way as a member of the campaign’s inner circle. No one from Louisiana has been closer to him over the past 18 months.

On Saturday, the Biden campaign named him as one of five co-chairs of its presidential transition team.

“He’s going to be a powerful person, come January, if Biden wins. It’s that simple,” said James Carville, who knows something about how being a close adviser to the winning candidate can elevate your status, thanks to his work for Bill Clinton in 1992.

“In Washington, basically, unless you’re a committee chairman, the perception of influence is your access to the president,” Carville said. “That’s the way power flows. It’s the most valuable coin there is. It just confers enormous prestige. He’ll have that. He’ll be a big deal.”

The typical politician would be eager to trumpet his or her access to someone who could be the next president. Not Richmond.

“I’m not trying to overstate my importance and blow my horn,” he said during a recent interview. He didn’t make himself available for a follow-up interview.

Richmond did say his title as campaign co-chairman is not an honorary one.

“It’s day to day for me,” he said. “It’s everything you would expect a person on a campaign level to do — senior level. Anything from previewing ads to debate prep to general nightly strategy calls and other stuff. Talking to members of Congress, recruiting supporters. It’s overwhelming. It’s a lot.”

 

In other words, Richmond has already been doing this job for nearly two years, just on the campaign trail.  Now he'll continue in the White House. And yeah, I have no issue with Richmond keeping Biden honest about the folk that won him the primary and the presidency: Black voters.

And Richmond has a long career ahead of him too, he's only 47.  He's going to go far.

Keep an eye on him. Joe Biden will certainly be doing so.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

After four years of a man in the Oval Office openly supporting white supremacists and calling on them to "stand by" and to "be ready", it's no wonder that the US has now reached the highest number of hate crimes since 2008 according to the FBI.

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose to the highest level in more than a decade as federal officials also recorded the highest number of hate-motivated killings since the FBI began collecting that data in the early 1990s, according to an FBI report released Monday.

There were 51 hate crime murders in 2019, which includes 22 people who were killed in a shooting that targeted Mexicans at a Walmart in the border city of El Paso, Texas, the report said. The suspect in that August 2019 shooting, which left two dozen other people injured, was charged with both state and federal crimes in what authorities said was an attempt to scare Hispanics into leaving the United States.

There were 7,314 hate crimes last year, up from 7,120 the year before — and approaching the 7,783 of 2008. The FBI’s annual report defines hate crimes as those motivated by bias based on a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation, among other categories.

Some of the 2019 increases may be the result of better reporting by police departments, but law enforcement officials and advocacy groups don’t doubt that hate crimes are on the rise. The Justice Department has for years been specifically prioritizing hate crime prosecutions.

The data also shows there was a nearly 7% increase in religion-based hate crimes, with 953 reports of crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions last year, up from 835 the year before. The FBI said the number of hate crimes against African Americans dropped slightly to 1,930, from 1,943.

Anti-Hispanic hate crimes, however, rose to 527 in 2019, from 485 in 2018. And the total number of hate crimes based on a person’s sexual orientation stayed relatively stable, with one fewer crime reported last year, compared with the year before, though there were 20 more hate crimes against gay men reported.

As the data was made public on Monday, advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, called on Congress and law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to improve data collection and reporting of hate crimes. Critics have long warned that the data may be incomplete, in part because it is based on voluntary reporting by police agencies across the country.

Last year, only 2,172 law enforcement agencies out of about 15,000 participating agencies across the country reported hate crime data to the FBI, the bureau said. And while the number of agencies reporting hate crimes increased, the number of agencies participating in the program actually dropped from the year before. A large number of police agencies appeared not to submit any hate crime data, which has been a consistent struggle for Justice Department officials.

“The total severity of the impact and damage caused by hate crimes cannot be fully measured without complete participation in the FBI’s data collection process,” the Anti-Defamation League’s president, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

 

Improving FBI hate crime data collection, as well as having a Justice Department with an actual Civil Rights division again, is something Biden will have control over immediately when he gets into office.

It''ll be nice having a government that cares about stopping hate crimes more than protecting those who commit them again.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Iota has made landfall as a strong Category 4 storm along the northeastern Nicaraguan coast, the storm's westerly path will take it through several Central American countries.
• Government COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci is calling a second possible virus vaccine from pharma startup Moderna "stunningly impressive" in preliminary trial results.
• New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Ohio are among several states announcing new COVID-19 health restrictions this week on schools and businesses in response to record US case numbers.
• President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will receive national security briefings from former NSC officials as the current regime continues to block transition authority.
• Chevy has announced a recall of its US 2018 and 2019 Bolt electric vehicles after five confirmed battery fires, Chevy is offering a software patch for the cars starting today.

Last Call For Demography, Destiny, And Democrats

The Republican response to Demography as Destiny has proven effective in 2020. The GOP has turned a healthy percentage of Latino, Asian, and Black voters against the Democrats, enough to stay in the political game and to gain state legislatures and US House seats, and to defense Senate seats they need to stay in power, and unless Democrats can counter those messages, the next fascist that comes along in 2024 will destroy the country.

California's failed Proposition on restoring affirmative action to education, a vote that went down in flames by 14 points, is the perfect example of how Democrats are completely failing on messaging and engagement with multiple non-white communities.

Again. And GOP misinformation is filling in the gaps.

“We should not think of demography as destiny,” said Professor Omar Wasow, who studies politics and voting patterns at Princeton University. “These groups are far more heterogeneous than a monolith and campaigns often end up building their own idiosyncratic coalition.”

Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. A striking number of East and South Asian students have gained admission to elite state universities, and their families spoke to reporters of their fear that their children would suffer if merit in college selection was given less weight. That battle carried echoes of another that raged the past few years in New York City, where a white liberal mayor’s efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino students in selective high schools angered working- and middle-class South and East Asian families whose children have gained admission to the schools in large numbers.

“There’s more texture to California blue politics than you might think,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. “Identity politics only go so far. There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by progressives.”

Latinos, too, appear sharply divided. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down.

Latinos make up more than half of San Bernardino County’s population, although significantly fewer turn out to vote. More residents there voted on the affirmative action proposition than for president, rejecting it by a margin of 28 percentage points. In rural Imperial County, in the southeastern corner of the state, 85 percent of the population is Latino. The voters there who gave Joseph R. Biden Jr. a nearly 27-point margin of victory went against the affirmative action measure by 16 percentage points.

The results suggest that Democrats may need to adjust their strategy as the complexities of class, generation and experience, and the competing desires of these demographic groups become clear. Since the dawn of the 21st century, it has become commonplace for party leaders to talk of a rising demographic tide that is destined to lift the Democrats to dominance. That liberal coalition is seen as resting on a bedrock of upper-middle-class white voters, alongside working- and middle-class Black, Latino and Asian voters.

In broad strokes, that narrative held. Black voters, along with a shift in the white suburban vote, played a pivotal role in delivering Georgia to the Democratic column (although so closely that a statewide audit is taking place). So, too, Black voters in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia voted overwhelmingly for Democrats — as did well-to-do majority-white suburbs — and gave Pennsylvania and therefore the national election to President-elect Biden.

In Arizona, Latino voters piled up large margins for Mr. Biden and tipped the state narrowly into the Democratic column for the first time since 1996. Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democratic congressman from Phoenix who is a former Marine and a Harvard graduate, noted that several decades of aggressive tactics by Republican governors and white sheriffs had stirred activism among the young Latinos who dominate politics there.

“The Republicans caught Latino lightning in the bottle in Florida and South Texas, but not here,” Mr. Gallego said. “We are very politicized. It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us.”

 

The problem is there's a big difference between what various Asian, Latino, and Black communities actually want, and what white liberals assume they do, and Democrats did a fantastically bad job of actually asking these communities in 2020, just assuming "Well, you'll help us stop Trump, right?"

We did. But negative partisanship only goes so far when you have existential issues of race and wealth inequality on top of everything else. For a lot of us, that can take priority. It's easy to be mad at Rio Grande Valley Latino voters for instance that voted for Republicans, but all Trump's attention to the region over his goofy wall project actually did improve the economy significantly there, when Democrats just kinda assumed things.

Republicans are spotting wedge issues: religion, affirmative action, socialism, economic issues, and using them on the Obama Coalition to great effect. And Democrats aren't doing a great job of countering those wedge issues.

Talk to us, guys. Control of the Senate is down to two races in Georgia. Biden actually won the Electoral College by 50,000 votes in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, without those it's a 269-269 tie that would have gone to Trump. The massive voter suppression and messaging machine the GOP wields still works. It's stuff in the margins, and the GOP is optimizing their attacks every time.

Stop taking non-white voters for granted.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

The saga of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder continues as the FBI raided the home of the chairman of the state's public utilities commission, Sam Randazzo, this morning, carting off various boxes of evidence in the case against multiple Ohio Republicans accused in a $60 billion slush fund scheme allegedly involving Ohio power company FirstEnergy.

FBI agents were seen outside the home of Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Chairman Sam Randazzo Monday morning.

Agents were going in and out of 645 S. Grant Ave. in German Village, which is owned by Randazzo, according to Franklin County auditor records.

"FBI agents are conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity in that area in relation to a sealed federal search warrant," FBI spokesman Todd Lindgren told The Enquirer, adding no arrests have been made and none are planned at this time.

Randazzo was appointed to the PUCO, which regulates Ohio utilities, and designated chairman by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019.

“We are aware of the search warrant," DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney said. "We are monitoring this as it progresses."

Before leading the commission, Randazzo was a lobbyist and an attorney for energy companies and the Industrial Energy Users-Ohio, which represents some of the state’s largest industries.

Randazzo’s company Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio, Inc. was listed as a company used by FirstEnergy subsidiary FirstEnergy Solutions on the company’s December 2018 bankruptcy report.

PUCO is currently auditing FirstEnergy Corp., the company allegedly at the center of a nearly $61 million bribery scheme to pass a nearly $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants then-owned by FirstEnergy Solutions.

I can't imagine Randazzo won't be charged at some point and pressured to flip. Householder is almost certainly toast too. But that brings us to the big target here, Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine himself. With so many of the state's most powerful Republicans involved in the FirstEnergy scandal, DeWine is eventually going to have to have a little chat with the FBI, and the sooner the better for DeWine, who faces re-election in 2022.

Of course, Republicans gained seats in 2020 in Ohio's House and Senate, and all the lawmakers who voted for the corrupt pay-for-play bill that cost Ohio ratepayers a billion bucks kept their jobs thanks to voters.

Every single one of them.

So who knows?

Retribution Execution, Con't

Blaming China for both COVID-19 and for economic damage from tariffs that the US is imposing on Chinese goods by making US businesses and consumers pay for, Team Sore Loser is drafting a pile of good old-fashioned executive order protectionist Occidentalism to dare Joe Biden to reverse, proving he's a puppet of Beijing or something.

President Trump will enact a series of hardline policies during his final 10 weeks to cement his legacy on China, senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the plans tells Axios.

Why it matters: He'll try to make it politically untenable for the Biden administration to change course as China acts aggressively from India to Hong Kong to Taiwan, and the pandemic triggers a second global wave of shutdowns. Watch for National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe to publicly describe in granular detail intelligence about China's nefarious actions inside the U.S.

Details: Trump officials plan to sanction or restrict trade with more Chinese companies, government entities and officials for alleged complicity in human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, or threatening U.S. national security. The administration also will crack down on China for its labor practices beyond Xinjiang forced labor camps. But don't expect big new moves on Taiwan or more closures of Chinese consulates in the U.S., officials say.

National Security Council spokesperson John Ullyot told Axios, "Unless Beijing reverses course and becomes a responsible player on the global stage, future U.S. presidents will find it politically suicidal to reverse President Trump’s historic actions."

Behind the scenes: Senior administration officials are discussing expanding a Defense Department list of Chinese companies deemed to have ties to the Chinese military. An executive order issued last week barred U.S. investment in 31 such companies, and any additions would likely face a similar restriction. 

Officials plan to target China's growing use of forced labor in the highly competitive fishing industry. Coerced and unpaid labor isn't just a human rights concern — it can also give Chinese fisheries an advantage over rivals in an industry with geopolitical significance. Trump officials have been looking to move more hawkish China experts into senior roles across the government, another senior official added.

What they're saying: "Director Ratcliffe will continue playing a leading role, in coordination with other national security principals, in delivering a necessary mindset shift from the Cold War and post-9/11 counterterrorism eras to a focus on great power competition with an adversarial China," DNI senior adviser Cliff Sims tells Axios.

This is Trump 101 right here: sabotaging and sandbagging the Biden administration with an aggressive new anti-China policy that Biden can't touch without handing Republicans exactly the excuse they need to attack him on Day one. It's a crafty plan, forcing Biden to spend his election political capital on cleaning up deliberate Trump messes rather than concentrating on Biden's actual policy goals. 

Considering Biden will almost certainly have to have some GOP cooperation on a COVID-19 package on day one that he takes office, it's a hostage-taking situation that should look depressingly familiar to all of us after the last six years of the Obama administration.

Expect a lot more of this level of international and domestic sabotage in the weeks ahead. As I've been saying for months, Trump can do an impressive amount of damage in the last two months he's in office to drown an incoming Biden team in multiple crises that would all but guarantee the first year or two of Biden's term would be nothing more than firefighting while Republicans cut the hoses.

StupidiNews!

• UK PM Boris Johnson is self-isolating after coming into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, Johnson was hospitalized and recovered from the disease earlier this year.
• At least two people are dead in Peru after government police clashed with protesters demonstrating against the sudden impeachment and removal of President Martin Vizcarra last week.
• Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga will meet with the International Olympic Committee this week to discuss hosting the Tokyo Summer Games, delayed until 2021 by COVID-19.
• President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will make remarks on the economy Monday discussing the Biden team's economic recovery plans for 2021.
• Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk says he has tested positive for COVID-19 after taking multiple tests using an antigen detection method.

Last Call For Biden, His Time, Con't

Joe Biden understands exactly who elected him, and he's putting together a transition team that looks like America in 2020.

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office in January, nearly half of the transition team laying the groundwork for his administration is made up of people of color, and women are in the majority. 

Forty-six percent of the transition staff are people of color, according to new diversity data of the transition team provided to CNN, and 41% of the senior staff are people of color. The majority of transition staff -- 52% -- are women, and 53% of the senior staff are women. 

The new diversity figures come as Biden is set to announce his Cabinet picks and senior staff for the White House in the coming weeks -- one of the first tests of his campaign pledge to build an administration that will "look like America." 

Biden's first major step toward diversity in his administration came when he selected Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, as his vice president. In his first staffing announcement, Biden chose a White man and longtime adviser -- Ron Klain -- as his chief of staff for the White House. 

The transition team's diversity also extends to its advisory board -- where 43% are people of color and 52% are women. Nine of the 13 members of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board are people of color and five of the members are women, according to the data. 

Last week, the transition team announced its agency review teams despite the General Services Administration not yet recognizing Biden as the winner of the election. The teams consist of roughly 500 people, more than half of whom are women. About 40% of the team "represent communities historically underrepresented in the federal government," a transition official said, which includes people of color, individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities. 

"For months, the Biden-Harris transition has laid the groundwork for a Biden-Harris administration, and at the core of that work is an unrelenting commitment to diversity," said Ted Kaufman, co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition. "As we continue working full-speed ahead to Inauguration, our diverse group of leaders and staff are reflective of America -- upholding President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris' belief that through diverse voices we can develop and implement a policy vision to tackle our nation's toughest challenges."

 

This is just the beginning.  Expect the most diverse executive branch leadership in America's history, and at every step of the way.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Never forget that the people who voted for Donald Trump did so not only because his racism, misogyny, and bigotry never bothered their consciences (along with his criminality) but because he gave them tacit permission to engage in their own racism, bigotry, and misogyny.  And they loved every minute of it. They see Joe Biden as the substitute teacher they don't have to obey, and that they can do whatever they want to him...and his supporters.

 

On Monday in Dallas, hundreds of Mr. Trump’s supporters gathered outside the city’s election office in a “Stop the Steal” protest promoted by the state Republican Party. The message from speakers and attendees went further than expressing fears of election fraud, amounting to a wholesale rejection of a Biden presidency and of the Republican elected officials who acknowledged it. One speaker said of the Republican lawmakers who had called Mr. Biden the president-elect, “Remember who they are when you go to the polls next.”

“This is contempt of half of the country by the other half of the country,” said Paul Feeser, 61, who attended the protest in Dallas. “So if the conclusion was for Biden, I would look at it as illegitimate, and I and many others expect to be part of the so-called resistance — as Trump resisted.”

Karen Bell, who was also at the rally, said her distrust centered on mail voting.

“In these swing states, he was ahead, and then all of a sudden in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, they stopped counting,” Ms. Bell said, echoing conspiracy theories about vote counting. “And then we wake up and suddenly Biden is ahead. These mystery votes all came in for Biden and zero for Trump. Something is definitely fishy there.”

Asked for any evidence of widespread election fraud, in light of the fact that election officials including Republicans have consistently dismissed such claims, Ms. Bell cited conspiratorial right-wing sites like Infowars. Election officials have made it clear: There is no evidence of widespread election fraud.

No matter what happens next, “I will not believe that the election was fair,” Ms. Bell said. “I will not believe that he is a legitimate winner.”

The feeling that Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede is justified, and that Mr. Biden’s rise to the presidency should not be recognized, is not universal for Republicans. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly 80 percent of Americans believe Mr. Biden won, including about 60 percent of Republicans.

But other polling has provided mixed results, including a survey from Politico/Morning Consult showing that the number of Republicans who do not believe this year’s election was free and fair has doubled, from 35 percent before Election Day to 70 percent.

 

Expect four years of the Trump cultist version of "the resistance." Some of it will be violent, and some of it will be deadly.  But it will absolutely be constant. They are the victims here. And they want restitution in blood.

Ms. Smith, 67, and her husband, Dennis, 69, tied their unequivocal support for the president — even in defeat — to larger cultural concerns.

Like Mr. Biden and his supporters, the Smiths saw this election as a battle for the country’s soul. To unify with Mr. Biden would be an admission that the battle is lost, and that the multicultural tide powering his victory will continue its ascension.

“Everything I worked for, Biden wants to give to the immigrants to help them live, when they don’t do nothing but sit on their butts,” Mr. Smith said.

“And if those protesters come here, if they go tearing up stuff, I guarantee you they won’t be in this town very long,” he added. “We’ll string them up and send them out of here — and it won’t be the same way they came in.” 

 

Above all, they can't wait for permission to begin indulging in the violent fantasies they've been feasting on for 30 years or longer, some of them. And Trump is the one who will absolve them of their sins when the blood showers down like rain.

There most likely won't be reconciliation without violence. That's how history nearly always turns out.

 

 

Sunday Long Read: Orange Is The New Trump

As Jane Meyer at the New Yorker reminds us in our Sunday Long Read this week, Donald Trump knows full well he is headed for indictments, both federal and state. He will almost certainly pardon himself, or resign on the last day and have Pence pardon him and his family and all of his co-conspirators, of federal crimes. But the state crimes, particularly in New York, are enough to put him in prison for the rest of his natural life. And nobody is more aware of this than Donald Trump himself. (Keep in mind the piece was published before the election, too. The results would have been the same with a large Biden win, or a close one.)

The President was despondent. Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options. He wasn’t especially religious, but, as daylight faded outside the rapidly emptying White House, he fell to his knees and prayed out loud, sobbing as he smashed his fist into the carpet. “What have I done?” he said. “What has happened?” When the President noted that the military could make it easy for him by leaving a pistol in a desk drawer, the chief of staff called the President’s doctors and ordered that all sleeping pills and tranquillizers be taken away from him, to insure that he wouldn’t have the means to kill himself.

The downfall of Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1974, was, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein relate in “The Final Days,” one of the most dramatic in American history. That August, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon—who had been cornered by self-incriminating White House tape recordings, and faced impeachment and removal from office—to resign. Twenty-nine individuals closely tied to his Administration were subsequently indicted, and several of his top aides and advisers, including his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison. Nixon himself, however, escaped prosecution because his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon, in September, 1974.

No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.

Two of the investigations into Trump are being led by powerful state and city law-enforcement officials in New York. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, are independently pursuing potential criminal charges related to Trump’s business practices before he became President. Because their jurisdictions lie outside the federal realm, any indictments or convictions resulting from their actions would be beyond the reach of a Presidential pardon. Trump’s legal expenses alone are likely to be daunting. (By the time Bill Clinton left the White House, he’d racked up more than ten million dollars in legal fees.) And Trump’s finances are already under growing strain. During the next four years, according to a stunning recent Times report, Trump—whether reëlected or not—must meet payment deadlines for more than three hundred million dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed; much of this debt is owed to such foreign creditors as Deutsche Bank. Unless he can refinance with the lenders, he will be on the hook. The Financial Times, meanwhile, estimates that, in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets—or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties—especially his hotels and resorts—have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. “It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me.

The White House declined to answer questions for this article, and if Trump has made plans for a post-Presidential life he hasn’t shared them openly. A business friend of his from New York said, “You can’t broach it with him. He’d be furious at the suggestion that he could lose.” In better times, Trump has revelled in being President. Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former life as a real-estate developer. As the Cabinet secretary recalled, the two men were gliding along in a motorcade, surrounded by throngs of adoring supporters, when Trump remarked, “Isn’t this incredible? After this, I could never return to ordering windows. It would be so boring.”

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Trump’s national poll numbers have lagged behind Biden’s, and two sources who have spoken to the President in the past month described him as being in a foul mood. He has testily insisted that he won both Presidential debates, contrary to even his own family’s assessment of the first one. And he has raged not just at the polls and the media but also at some people in charge of his reëlection campaign, blaming them for squandering money and allowing Biden’s team to have a significant financial advantage. Trump’s bad temper was visible on October 20th, when he cut short a “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl. A longtime observer who spent time with him recently told me that he’d never seen Trump so angry.

The President’s niece Mary Trump—a psychologist and the author of the tell-all memoir “Too Much and Never Enough”—told me that his fury “speaks to his desperation,” adding, “He knows that if he doesn’t manage to stay in office he’s in serious trouble. I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” She described the “narcissistic injury” that Trump will suffer if he is rejected at the polls. Within the Trump family, she said, “losing was a death sentence—literally and figuratively.” Her father, Fred Trump, Jr., the President’s older brother, “was essentially destroyed” by her grandfather’s judgment that Fred was not “a winner.” (Fred died in 1981, of complications from alcoholism.) As the President ponders potential political defeat, she believes, he is “a terrified little boy.”

Barbara Res, whose new book, “Tower of Lies,” draws on the eighteen years that she spent, off and on, developing and managing construction projects for Trump, also thinks that the President is not just running for a second term—he is running from the law. “One of the reasons he’s so crazily intent on winning is all the speculation that prosecutors will go after him,” she said. “It would be a very scary spectre.” She calculated that, if Trump loses, “he’ll never, ever acknowledge it—he’ll leave the country.” Res noted that, at a recent rally, Trump mused to the crowd about fleeing, ad-libbing, “Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country—I don’t know.” It’s questionable how realistic such talk is, but Res pointed out that Trump could go “live in one of his buildings in another country,” adding, “He can do business from anywhere.”

It turns out that, in 2016, Trump in fact made plans to leave the United States right after the vote. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump supporter who served briefly as the White House communications director, was with him in the hours before the polls closed. Scaramucci told me that Trump and virtually everyone in his circle had expected Hillary Clinton to win. According to Scaramucci, as he and Trump milled around Trump Tower, Trump asked him, “What are you doing tomorrow?” When Scaramucci said that he had no plans, Trump confided that he had ordered his private plane to be readied for takeoff at John F. Kennedy International Airport, so that the next morning he could fly to Scotland, to play golf at his Turnberry resort. Trump’s posture, Scaramucci told me, was to shrug off the expected defeat. “It was, like, O.K., he did it for the publicity. And it was over. He was fine. It was a waste of time and money, but move on.” Scaramucci said that, if 2016 is any guide, Trump would treat a loss to Biden more matter-of-factly than many people expect: “He’ll go down easier than most people think. Nothing crushes this guy.”

Mary Trump, like Res, suspects that her uncle is considering leaving the U.S. if he loses the election (a result that she regards as far from assured). If Biden wins, she suggested, Trump will “describe himself as the best thing that ever happened to this country and say, ‘It doesn’t deserve me—I’m going to do something really important, like build the Trump Tower in Moscow.’ ”

 

Again, it's exile or indictment. Trump knows Cy Vance and Letitia James aren't going to let him go without a fight. Trump knows he is cornered, and he knows he has lost. 

 

He's looking for the exit as we speak, and buying time through bravado, bluffing, and bullshit. But his clock runs out at noon on January 20, and Trump can hear the ticking in his nightmares.