Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

If you're wondering why former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows hasn't been indicted yet, even after telling the January 6th Commission to piss off last December and then getting hit with a contempt charge for refusing a subpoena, the answer is he's been cooperating with the Justice Department and yes, he showed up for their subpoena after all. 

 

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has complied with a subpoena from the Justice Department's investigation into events surrounding January 6, 2021, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN, making him the highest-ranking Trump official known to have responded to a subpoena in the federal investigation. 

Meadows turned over the same materials he provided to the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, one source said, meeting the obligations of the Justice Department subpoena, which has not been previously reported. 

Last year, Meadows turned over thousands of text messages and emails to the House committee, before he stopped cooperating. The texts he handed over between Election Day 2020 and Joe Biden's inauguration, which CNN previously obtained, provided a window into his dealings at the White House, though he withheld hundreds of messages, citing executive privilege. 

In addition to Trump's former chief of staff, one of Meadows' top deputies in the White House, Ben Williamson, also recently received a grand jury subpoena, another source familiar with the matter tells CNN. That subpoena was similar to what others in Trump's orbit received. It asked for testimony and records relating to January 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Williamson previously cooperated with the January 6 committee. He declined to comment to CNN. 

Meadows' compliance with the subpoena comes as the Justice Department has ramped up its investigation related to January 6, which now touches nearly every aspect of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss -- including the fraudulent electors plot, efforts to push baseless election fraud claims and how money flowed to support these various efforts, CNN reported this week. 

An attorney for Meadows declined comment. The Justice Department did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

 

Getting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee is something that Meadows could fight, or delay. Meadows folded on that fight anyway earlier this year. But a subpoena from the Justice Department, with the investigations into Trump well into the multiple grand jury stage and dozens of subpoenas issued for his lackeys?

Meadows knows he can cooperate now or go to prison, and that Trump won't save him even if he could. Turning over all his January 6th evidence to the DoJ directly is pretty huge, which means whatever the DoJ told him was coming was serious enough to make him stop playing games.

We're after the 60 days before the election deadline, meaning indictments won't be going out until after the midterms. But I guarantee you they are coming.

Again, everything that has been made public about the Trump regime's criminality has been done in order to prepare the American public for Trump's indictment, and Meadows fully cooperating and turning over material evidence means we're a lot closer to that happening in mid-November.

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Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

When I say that there are parts of red state America where being a large Black man means I take my own life and safety in my hands if I go there, I mean places like "a couple miles north of Oklahoma City" where white supremacist prison gangs ruthlessly control the meth trade and kill everyone who gets in their way.

The caller had news but warned LaVonne Harris not to get her hopes up.

Harris’s son, 33-year-old Nathan Smith, had vanished along a dirt road in Oklahoma one freezing night more than two years earlier. Detectives had long stopped checking in with her, and Harris could feel her search growing lonelier with each passing month.

The call in April, from an advocate for families of the missing, wasn’t encouraging, but it was a lead: Authorities in rural Logan County, just north of here, had discovered human remains belonging to more than one person. Also, the caller added delicately, the remains weren’t intact.

Harris, 58, sat down to steady herself. She listened, then hung up to tell her daughter.

“I said, ‘Lou, they found these bodies,’ ” Harris recalled. “ ‘They’ve been burned and cut.’ ” 

Smith is among a dozen or more people who have disappeared in recent years from the wooded, unincorporated terrain outside the Oklahoma City metro area, a rural haven for drug traffickers. Some families said they’re scared to call police or even to put up “missing person” signs because they suspect the involvement of violent white-supremacist prison gangs.

In April, authorities acting on a tip said they found charred piles of wood and bone on a five-acre patch of Logan County, opening one of the grisliest and most sensitive criminal investigations in Oklahoma’s recent history.

Behind the 10-foot metal walls of a compound with links to the Universal Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist prison gang, officers found what they believe to be a body dumping ground where multiple people ended up dismembered and burned, according to four Oklahoma officials with knowledge of the investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the extraordinary security precautions around the case.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI, which is leading the multiagency state and federal probe, confirms that remains have been found but will not say how many. An April 29 report in the Oklahoman newspaper — the first news of the discovery — quoted the state medical examiner and other sources as saying agents were investigating “whether a white supremacist prison gang is behind nine or more disappearances” after the discovery of “the comingled remains of possibly three people.” The report said remains also were found at a second site, near an oil well about 18 miles away in the tiny town of Luther.

Four months later, the scope of the case remains murky. A law enforcement official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said they were informed the count was up to “12 different DNA profiles.” One family of a missing person said they were told of eight; another heard about three.

The OSBI has taken significant steps to keep the investigation opaque, including advising families of the missing to stay quiet.

“We’re just trying to keep some people alive at this point,” a second official said, describing the struggle to protect potential witnesses.

That level of danger is a jarring reminder of the unseen threat of white-supremacist prison gangs, whose leaders run crime syndicates from behind bars through a network of “enforcers” on the outside, according to extremism monitors and Justice Department court filings.

The gangs have carried out hate-fueled attacks both in and out of prison, with the bulk of their free-world violence targeting rivals and informants, authorities say. Because the gangs typically keep their business within the criminal underground, the attacks go largely undiscussed in the broader national conversation about rising violence by far-right groups.

Oklahoma is a “problem state,” with at least five significant white-supremacist prison gangs, said Mark Pitcavage, an Anti-Defamation League researcher who has monitored the groups for decades. He co-authored a 2016 study that called prison gangs the fastest-growing and deadliest sector of the U.S. white-supremacist movement, noting that they “combine the criminal intent and know-how of organized crime with the racism and hate of white supremacy, making them twice as dangerous.”

This, by the way, is why Republicans are always screaming about THE BLACKS in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, etc. and portraying cities that had BLM protests as having been "completely destroyed" by crime and looting.

It helps them cover up the stench of the armed Aryan killers in their own backyards.

Ridin' With Biden, Railroad Edition

President Biden has announced a tentative deal to avoid a crippling national rail strike that would devastate the economy...and to be perfectly honest, any chance the Democrats would have had in November along with it.

 

President Joe Biden said Thursday a tentative railway labor agreement has been reached, averting a potentially devastating strike before the pivotal midterm elections.

He said the tentative deal “will keep our critical rail system working and avoid disruption of our economy.”

The Democratic president believes unions built the middle class, but he also knew a rail worker strike could have badly damaged the nation’s economy. That left him in the awkward position of espousing the virtues of unionization in Detroit, a stalwart of the labor movement, while members of his administration went all-out to keep talks going in Washington between the railroads and unionized workers in hopes of averting a shutdown.

But after a long night, the talks succeeded and Biden announced Thursday that the parties had reached a tentative agreement to avoid a shutdown that would go to union members for a vote. He hailed the deal in a statement for avoiding a shutdown and as a win for all sides.

“These rail workers will get better pay, improved working conditions, and peace of mind around their health care costs: all hard-earned,” Biden said. “The agreement is also a victory for railway companies who will be able to retain and recruit more workers for an industry that will continue to be part of the backbone of the American economy for decades to come.

It looked far more tenuous for the president just a day earlier.

United Auto Workers Local 598 member Ryan Buchalski introduced Biden at the Detroit auto show on Wednesday as “the most union- and labor-friendly president in American history” and someone who was “kickin’ ass for the working class.” Buchalski harked back to the pivotal sitdown strikes by autoworkers in the 1930s.

In the speech that followed, Biden recognized that he wouldn’t be in the White House without the support of unions such as the UAW and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, saying autoworkers “brung me to the dance.”

But back in Washington, officials in his administration at the Labor Department were in tense negotiations to prevent a strike — one of the most powerful sources of leverage that unions have to bring about change and improve working conditions.

Without the deal that was reached among the 12 unions, a stoppage could have begun as early as Friday that could halt shipments of food and fuel at a cost of $2 billion a day.

 

Needless to say, food and gas prices skyrocketing as long lines, shortages, and suffering among those who could least afford the price hikes spreading nationwide would have most likely been the end of the Dems' chances in November.

But Biden got the deal done, and averting this rail strike and getting rail workers whet they deserved for keeping America running is a complete win for this administration, bar none.

Former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, as Labor Secretary, just earned himself a StupidiTag™ with this one. He was instrumental in brokering the deal over a 20-hour session that was a total success.

I was a young kid when Reagan broke the air traffic controller's strike in 1981 in a move that almost completely crushed unions in the US. Now four decades later, Biden's successful treatment of rail workers may herald in a new era of union growth.

That's the Joe Biden I voted for.