Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

The Trump regime legal circus attempting to overturn and steal the election from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is generally a cavalcade of frivolous lawsuits, legal frippery, and outright fabrication. But the lawsuit in Wisconsin attempting to throw out all the votes in the state's three most Democratic counties, is just pure racism at its worst.

Three voters in northeast Wisconsin have filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to throw out votes in three of the counties that delivered Wisconsin to President-elect Joe Biden: Milwaukee, Dane and Menominee.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Green Bay seeks to change the outcome of Wisconsin's election to President Donald Trump's favor by excluding the presidential votes from the counties in the state's final election certification, alleging without evidence that absentee voting is fraught with widespread fraud.

The plaintiffs allege voters in these counties may have bypassed state law requiring voters to provide photo identification by dubbing themselves "indefinitely confined" due to the coronavirus pandemic. The suit also takes issue with clerks' ability to take corrective actions to remedy errors related to witness’s addresses on absentee ballots.

The suit cites allegations from people who are not named but identified by initials.

"Election workers, overwhelmed by the sudden flood of mailed ballots, have less ability to carefully review them to screen out fraudulent ones, creating a substantial risk that fraudulent votes will be counted and vote-dilution disenfranchisement will occur," the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit is one of several being brought on behalf of Trump in an effort to change the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election, which resulted in the election of Biden.

A Wisconsin election attorney who has worked for the Democratic Party said the lawsuit was without merit.

"Trump continues to file frivolous lawsuits throughout the country to disenfranchise millions of American citizens," attorney Michael Maistelman said. "Trump's lawsuits are not based upon law, facts or reality, which is why courts throughout the country have summarily and at times angrily dismissed his cases."

Wisconsin's result is one of several states Trump is focused on changing, through this lawsuit and also by a potential recount. Biden won in Wisconsin by a margin of about 20,000 votes.

The suit seeks to exclude all the presidential vote totals from the two most populous and heavily Democratic counties in the state when certifying the state's results. Those two counties delivered 577,408 votes for Biden and 213,133 for Trump, a gap of 364,264 votes, according to unofficial results. Other counties also had high levels of absentee voting but were not targeted in the lawsuit.

"Certifying Presidential Electors without excluding certain counties would violate voters’ fundamental right to vote by vote-dilution disenfranchisement," the suit alleges, citing protections provided by the First and 14th amendments.

 

There's racism, GOP racism, Trump GOP racism, and then whatever this is. Milwaukee is home to most of the state's Black population, Dane county is home to Madison and the University of Wisconsin, and Menomonee County is small, fewer than 5,000, but also happens to be the residence of the Menominee Indian tribe, and a county that has voted for Democrats since it was created in 1959.

 

Here's a lawsuit that alleges too many Black people voted by mail.

 

That's it.  More Wisconsin counties had as high or higher rate of voting-by-mail, but it's only the "certain counties" that are the problem.

 

The ones with Democrats, particularly Black, college, and Native ones.

The Tale Of Harrison's Ford

The good news is that current DNC chair Tom Perez isn't going to bother to run for a second term after the complete disaster Dems had in the House and Senate in 2020. The bad news is that the obvious replacement, Stacey Abrams, is running for Georgia Governor in 2022. I'd much rather see Abrams running the DNC, but that's not my choice to make. The worse news is that means the odds-on favorite to run the DNC after Perez is a guy who set fundraising records and all that money meant that he still lost to Lindsey Graham by ten points.

First, Joe Biden has to pick his Cabinet and his White House staff. But after that, there’s only one name on leading Democrats’ list for Democratic National Committee chair: Jaime Harrison, who lost a race for U.S. Senate in South Carolina last week.

If he’s named as chair, Harrison will inherit an organization in significantly better shape than it was when Tom Perez took over in 2017. Under Perez, the DNC has paid off its debt, rebuilt its infrastructure, and boosted employee morale. No one, though, expects that keeping Democrats organized will be easy, especially without a common political enemy in Donald Trump. The next chair will help decide the party’s messaging ahead of the 2022 midterms and play a big role in the fight over which states will hold the first presidential primaries in 2024.

Harrison became nationally known this year during his run against Senator Lindsey Graham, as he set fundraising records and became a cause for Democrats far beyond his state. Graham ultimately won by a much-wider-than-expected 10-point margin, boosted by South Carolina’s partisan lean and his role in confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. But the goodwill that Harrison built up and the coming vacancy at the top of the DNC—Perez confirmed to me yesterday that he won’t be running for another term—has many Democrats thinking that Harrison is a perfect fit for the role. “The timing just seems right, frankly,” said Trav Robertson, a friend of Harrison’s who is now in Harrison’s old role as South Carolina Democratic Party chair.

More than just timing is involved. Harrison has the support of James Clyburn, his mentor and former boss, who is the House Democratic whip and whose endorsement during the primary campaign helped power Biden to the nomination. Yesterday, Clyburn pointed out to me that he had supported Harrison when he ran for DNC chair in 2017, and said, “I think he’s better prepared than he was when I supported him the first time.”

Clyburn told me he hasn’t mentioned the DNC-chair race to Biden, but “all of Biden’s friends know what I feel about it.” A Biden spokesperson declined to comment.

Clyburn’s support, Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb said, “means the train has left the station.” Kleeb, who’s from a very different part of the party—she’s the political-committee chair of the Bernie Sanders–aligned group Our Revolution—told me she’s happy to see that support go to Harrison. Like several others I spoke with, she pointed to Harrison’s record as a state-party chair as giving her confidence in the kind of leader he would be. She’s just hoping that as the party elects other officers, members will promote regional and ideological diversity. Kleeb, for example, told me she’s planning to run for vice chair of the DNC herself.

Via text message, Harrison declined to comment, though earlier this week he told The Washington Post that he’d take a “good look” at running if asked.

 

This is one of those things that I'd feel a lot better about if Harrison being in charge of Dem messaging didn't already directly result in a double-digit loss to one of the biggest enablers Trump had in his regime.

But Abrams is doing what Abrams needs to do, and that's go after Brian Kemp. And frankly, Harrison can't do much worse than Tom Perez or -- God help us -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

At this point, Trump's army of armed cultists are publicly declaring their intentions of terrorist attack in order to somehow stop Joe Biden from becoming President in two months, and it looks like nobody is lifting a finger to stop them.

 

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said that he has armed men on standby outside of Washington, D.C., to supposedly prevent the 2020 presidential election from being stolen from President Donald Trump. Echoing elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory during an appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ program, Rhodes said the only way to prevent his men from engaging in a “bloody fight” would be Trump declassifying information to supposedly expose pedophiles in the “deep state” and allow the president to stay in power.

Rhodes also indicated his militia will be involved in a rally to support Trump planned for this weekend in the nation's capital.

Rhodes’ Oath Keepers militia, which comprises “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today.” But, as Rhodes recent public comments have made clear, the organization’s purpose has shifted from opposing the government to instead act as a pro-Trump vigilante group that is willing to violently support Trump’s unjust attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

Rhodes joined Jones and Infowars host Owen Shroyer during the November 10 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show. Rhodes claimed that, in order to stop the election from being stolen from him, Trump needs to declassify information exposing members of the “deep state” so that Americans will “all know exactly who the pedophiles are.” According to Rhodes, judges -- including Supreme Court Justice John Roberts -- politicians, and members of the legal community, academia, and media are all part of the “deep state.” These comments echoed a central tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Trump is engaged in a battle with a cabal of pedophile elites.

Rhodes said Trump should task special forces leaders in the military to gather and process the information because “he cannot trust the normal military intelligence services.” Noting that he has previously been opposed to U.S. military intervention in domestic matters, Rhodes said that in this case Trump should invoke The Insurrection Act to accomplish this goal.

Rhodes then said that, in support of Trump, “we have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it” and emphasized that these men are “armed” and “prepared to go in, if the president calls us up.” In addition to activity outside of the capital, Rhodes said he will have Oath Keepers inside the city this coming weekend to support a caravan of Infowars supporters being led by Shroyer who say they will hold an event on November 14. The Infowars contingent is one of several far-right groups that say that they will rally in the city to support Trump. Stewart added that his group has been doing “recon” for the past week in the Washington, D.C., area.

Rhodes called on supporters of Trump to converge on the capital in the same manner as far-right militia members gathered at a Nevada ranch in 2014 to threaten federal law enforcement officers who were attempting to enforce a court order against rancher Cliven Bundy. He also made it clear during his appearance that the only alternative to Trump staying in power would be violence, saying, “It’s either President Trump is encouraged, and bolstered, [and] strengthened to do what he must do or we wind up in a bloody fight. We all know that. The fight’s coming.”

 

I mean I don't know what else to do here, guys.  Here's a guy openly and publicly declaring sedition and terrorism, and that he and his goons will be at a rally in DC this weekend which will be a gathering of like-minded violent assholes.

FBI, you know where he;s gonna be on Saturday.

Do you have to wait until after he's killed hundreds, maybe thousands?

StupidiNews!

• Daily US COVID-19 cases are approaching 150,000 per day as America continues to set new records for daily cases and number of hospitalizations. 
• Reports find at least eight GOP staffers have contracted COVID-19 nationwide after election events, including White House legal pointman Corey Lewandowski.
• GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell says House Democrats' latest COVID-19 relief proposal is "not a place I think we're willing to go".
• Senate Republicans are moving forward on the nomination of Judy Shelton for the Federal Reserve Board, Shelton is currently a Trump economic adviser.
• The first cruise ship to set sail from the US since the Trump regime let a no-sail order expire at the beginning of the month is in lockdown as five passengers have tested positive for COVID-19.
  

Last Call For The Most Taxing Explanation, Con't

If you had thought that NY AG Letitia James was somehow out of the picture in the pursuit of tossing various Trumps in state prison, you thought wrong, as Caleb Melby Bloomberg News reports.

 

New York’s attorney general continues to gather information about President Donald Trump’s business, obtaining financial records this month from the family of the Trump Organization’s CFO that could provide further insights into the company’s operations and tax strategies.

The office of Attorney General Letitia James is reviewing tax records associated with a son and ex-daughter-in-law of Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, according to a person familiar with the matter. James’s office is conducting a civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization falsely reported property values to secure loans or tax benefits, she has said.

Bloomberg News reported on Nov. 2 that members of the Weisselberg family, including Trump Organization manager Barry Weisselberg and his now ex-wife, Jennifer, had received perks including years of free rent in a company-owned building adjacent to Central Park and use of the company’s accountant for personal tax filings. The Bloomberg report was based, in part, on documents provided by Jennifer Weisselberg.

Mary Mulligan, a lawyer for Allen Weisselberg, said that her client had done nothing wrong.

The attorney general’s office and Alan Garten, general counsel of the Trump Organization, declined to comment. Barry Weisselberg didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Many of the benefits could create tax liabilities for the Weisselbergs, the Trump Organization or both, according to legal experts.

For example, employers normally can’t take a gift exemption for things of value provided to employees, according to tax and compensation lawyers who reviewed the transactions for Bloomberg but didn’t want to comment publicly about Trump’s business. Also free rent would constitute taxable income for employees unless an exemption applies, they said. Barry and Jennifer Weisselberg’s tax returns for four of the years they lived on Central Park South don’t appear to account for the perk.

Allen Weisselberg, who managed finances for Trump as well as his father, Fred, is the company’s highest-ranking non-family employee and was appointed to help oversee the trust set up by the president while he’s in the White House.

 

Flip Wesselberg, get Trump(s).  That was always the plan, and Tisha James is following it to a T. I'm telling you, don't be surprised if she has indictments ready to go on January 20 or January 21. And don't be surprised if Donald Trump isn't in the US at that point, having already skipped town.

 

The Boys Club, Con't

The entire Epstein saga over the last two years began in earnest when the Miami Herald broke the news in December of 2018 that the US Attorney that originally gave Epstein his odious plea deal in 2008 was at the time, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who was US Attorney under Dubya for the district of Miami. Acosta was forced to resign in July of 2019 after a disastrously bad press conference in the wake of Epstein being arrested and charged for the crimes that Acosta let him skate on.

But now, it seems Acosta gets the last laugh, as the Barr "Justice Department" is letting Acosta and his team at the time avoid any real responsibility for their devil's bargain.

In a 13-page executive summary of the investigation’s findings reviewed by NBC News, the Office of Professional Responsibility said it was Acosta who “made the pivotal decision to resolve the federal investigation of Epstein through a state-based plea and either developed or approved the terms of the initial offer to the defense that set the beginning point for the subsequent negotiations that led to the” non-prosecution agreement.

“The NPA was a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest that caused the government to open its investigation of Epstein,” the report says.

In the course of the review, the office said members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office had concerns about “legal issues, witness credibility, and the impact of a trial on the victims” that led them to ultimately go for the non-prosecution agreement and avoid trial.

As a result, “OPR does not find that Acosta engaged in professional misconduct by resolving the federal investigation of Epstein in the way he did or that the other subjects committed professional misconduct through their implementation of Acosta’s decisions.”

The report also says that Acosta’s decision to bring charges against Epstein through the state led to a lack of transparency and left victims “feeling confused and ill-treated by the government.”

“In sum, OPR concludes that the victims were not treated with the forthrightness and sensitivity expected by the department.”

Acosta could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

Acosta was naughty but he didn't break the law, even though it was perfectly clear that a quid pro quo was in play. Acosta's defense was that he was waiting for a better deal, following Justice Department policy under Dubya AG Michael Mukasey, where Epstein would pay restitution to his victims. Of course, that never materialized, because Acosta never pursued it.

And Epstein got what he wanted, a 13-month sentence where he spent the majority of time on "work release".

Of course, Epstein is gone now, and his protege and victim wrangler, Ghislaine Maxwell, is facing decades of prison time. Another round of documents in that case could be publicly released as soon as Friday.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Whoever had November 7 on their online politics pool for "When do Republicans officially call for seceding from the United States rather than recognize Biden's win" congratulations, it took literally less than hours after CNN and the networks called it for Biden that the New Confederacy was born.

 

As the dust settles from the 2020 presidential election, one disappointed Mississippi lawmaker has a proposition for the Magnolia State. Instead of being governed by President-elect Joe Biden, state Rep. Price Wallace (R) reportedly said on Twitter that Mississippi should “succeed” from the rest of the United States and form its own country.

Despite the misspelling, his since-deleted tweet on Saturday afternoon, posted hours after the election was called for Biden, appeared to be an overt throwback to the Confederacy — in a part of the Deep South that only voted to remove the Confederate battle flag symbol from its own state flag earlier this year.

Although a small but growing number of GOP lawmakers have congratulated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris on their victory, many others — including most of the state’s top Republicans — have backed President Trump’s efforts to challenge the results, according to the Mississippi Free Press.

On Monday, the state’s attorney general became one of 10 across the country who pledged to join Trump’s attempt to stop Pennsylvania from counting mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day. Even before the race was called, Mississippi’s five Republicans in Congress released a joint statement that warned, without evidence, about the existence of “voting irregularities” across the country.

But Wallace, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post, made a far more extreme claim: The Magnolia State should simply leave the United States.

It started with a Twitter thread from Robert Foster, a former Mississippi state representative and 2019 gubernatorial candidate who, in response to Biden’s victory, said that more votes needed to be counted before settling the race.

“The majority does not rule, the law derived from a Constitution has the final say,” Foster wrote, claiming the United States is a constitutional republic and not a democracy. “Democrats and their Fake News Cheerleaders are about to get a hard lesson in civics.”

 

The seething hatred and racism apparent in this entire narrative is just disheartening, but it's also good to remember that these asssholes are losing the war.

 

But anyone who doesn't think it's a war, I remind you that one side definitely believes it to be one, and they are now openly operating as such.

Infighting has broken out between two leading members of the Proud Boys group, with one announcing he will be taking control of the far-right organisation to address "White Genocide" and the "failures of multiculturalism."

White nationalist Kyle Chapman—who set up the "tactical defense arm" of the Proud Boys, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK)—has criticized the group's chairman Enrique Tarrio while announcing a so-called rebranding of the organization.

Writing on encrypted messaging app Telegram, Chapman used racial slurs against Tarrio and other neo-Nazi rhetoric while announcing that the "grifting leaders" had been deposed and the group would be renamed the Proud Goys. The term "goy"—a Hebrew word for a non-Jewish person—is sometimes used by white supremacists to signal their anti-Semitic beliefs, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"Due to the recent failure of Proud Boy Chairman Enrique Tarrio to conduct himself with honor and courage on the battlefield, it has been decided that I Kyle Chapman reassume my post as President of Proud Boys effective immediately," Chapman wrote. "Our logo will forthwith be changed to reflect the core beliefs of Proud Boy members.

"We will no longer cuck to the left by appointing token negroes as our leaders. We will no longer allow homosexuals or other 'undesirables' into our ranks. We will confront the Zionist criminals who wish to destroy our civilization.

"We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."

Chapman, who goes by the nickname "Based Stickman" after he was photographed beating a protester with a stick at a Trump rally in Berkeley, California, in March 2017, went on to say the Proud Goys would fight for white people to "have their own countries where White interests are written into law."

The message was posted one day after Chapman criticized Tarrio's "inaction and fear" over a video that appeared to show the moment Tarrio and two other people were injured during a knife attack in Washington, DC in the early hours of November 4.

So yeah, at this point Trump has his splinter faction of Neo-Nazi brownshirts ready to go.

 

Unfortunately, as they lose, they will destroy as much of the government as they can to make sure that nobody wins, and that will be America for the next several decades.

StupidiNews!

• President-elect Joe Biden is expected to start naming his White House and Cabinet picks soon, starting with Biden's former VP Chief of Staff Ronald Klain as White House Chief of Staff.
• California seismological researchers believe oil field fracking operations may have triggered several small earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault over the last decade.
• UN human rights officials are warning Yemen is facing another famine in 2021 as 80% of the population are unable to feed themselves and require food aid.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is facing the resignation of communications director Lee Cain, Johnson faces a growing revolt from Tory lawmakers over his response to the UK's growing COVID-19 crisis.
• Google says it will stop offering an unlimited storage plan for its Photos app, after May 2021 new high quality photos will now count against a user's Google Drive quota.
  

Last Call For Elector Defector Detector Director

Axios games out the "new slate of electors/faithless electors" scenario that seems to be Trump's best chance of actively engineering an illegal coup to nullify the presidential election, and while I'm seriously infuriated that this appears to be happening, you can't say I wasn't warning folks around here that this was going to be a distinct possibility.

What we're watching: In this long-shot scenario, Trump and his team could try to block secretaries of state in contested states from certifying results. That could allow legislatures in those states to try to appoint new electors who favor Trump over Biden.

"It's basically hijacking the democracy," one lawyer familiar with the process tells Axios. "They've got nothing else; you'd be trying to deny Joe Biden 270." If Trump were to pursue this course, it likely would become apparent the week leading up to Thanksgiving, as states face deadlines to finalize election results.

Between the lines: Trump has not directly said he would pursue this strategy. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo each noted on Tuesday that the election results don't become official until electors cast their votes next month. To date, Biden's status as president-elect is rooted in media projections based on raw vote totals reported by individual states. 

Those totals don't become official, though, until states certify them. The Constitution prescribes that those official results will be used to apportion electors who officially pick the president.  “At some point here, we’ll find out finally who was certified (the winner) in each of these states, and the Electoral College will determine the winner and that person will be sworn in on January 20," McConnell said. "No reason for alarm.”

One Senate leadership aide said McConnell was not signaling an elector strategy and was simply noting that it's not uncommon for there to be litigation before the Electoral College results are complete. 

Pompeo, who raised eyebrows with a line about how there would be a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration," independently raised the Electoral College during a State Department news conference. “When the process is complete, there’s going to be electors selected," he said. "There’s a process; the Constitution lays it out pretty clearly.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

How it works: If a lawsuit successfully stops certification of results in a state, legislators there could step into the void and pick a pro-Trump slate of electors. The lawyer, who requested anonymity to speak about the scenario, said Trump's team now appears to be trying to throw enough dirt at the process for counting late ballots to argue that accurate results can't be ascertained.

The next step could be to try to get federal or state courts to enjoin secretaries of state from certifying results. Any move to provide an alternative slate of electors could force the first real test of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and could land before the Supreme Court. Among the key swing states, Arizona and Georgia have GOP governors and legislatures. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have Democratic governors but GOP legislatures.

"This is a horrible idea, one that should be morally repugnant to every American," elections law expert Edward B. Foley wrote recently in The Washington Post. "For a state legislature to reclaim this power after voters have already cast their own ballots would be an even more egregious intrusion into the democratic process."

 

Now this definitely sounds like Axios is laying scaffolding here for making mountains out of molehills, it's what they do. But at the same time, this is how the coup would play out.

It's why this particular Supreme Court hearing a case on state legislatures and appointing slates of electors is so very dangerous. We already know there's at least three votes on the court to embrace former Chief Justice William Rehnquist's crackpot theory that state legislatures get the final say in electors and elections.

If there's two more, who knows? We shouldn't be anywhere near this point, but here we are.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

Despite former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder's arrest for bribery and corruption charges, despite evidence that the Ohio GOP received millions in slush fund money in order to vote for a corrupt energy bill that made Ohio's largest energy company billions of dollars at direct taxpayer expense, Ohio voters simply reelected everyone involved in the mess, and actually gave even larger margins to the state's GOP supermajority.

 

The scandal surrounding House Bill 6 took out the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. It has dominated the news pages and airwaves for months. It was the subject of countless campaign attack ads.

In the end, voters didn’t seem to care.

The scandal implicating former Speaker Larry Householder and his effort to get a nuclear bailout enacted into law emerged as a major theme in the 2020 Statehouse elections, but seemingly had little impact on the results.

In total, there were 46 lawmakers who voted for House Bill 6 and were on the ballot this November for a seat in the Ohio House or Ohio Senate. The unofficial results show that every single one of them won their election: 46-for-46. That includes Householder himself, who won reelection to his 72nd District over a slate of write-in opponents.

In contrast, there were 35 “no” votes who were up for election. Four of them have been voted out, and a fifth lawmaker’s race is too close to call.

That’s a striking result considering the extent to which the scandal has enveloped Ohio politics since the July arrests of Householder and four political operatives.

In recent months, news outlets have extensively covered an 81-page affidavit outlining the years of alleged corruption and bribery that went into HB 6 being enacted to benefit the former FirstEnergy Solutions of Akron. So too did news stories highlight the vote to remove Householder as the House leader; the ensuing trials; and the ongoing effort to get HB 6 repealed.

Voters got one last reminder last week, when two people charged in the alleged scheme pleaded guilty.

The yearslong plot, as alleged by federal investigators, involved FirstEnergy Solutions funneling “dark money” toward a group controlled by Householder. These resources were used to get Householder and a number of other Republican allies elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. These allies joined with more than two-dozen Democrats to elevate Householder as House speaker in 2019.

 

In fact, even more Ohio lawmakers have been arrested by the FBI over the FirstEnergy Solutions scam, including Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Pastor, just this week, as the guilty pleas and evidence pile up.

Cincinnati Councilman Jeff Pastor has been arrested, according to sources. Pastor, a Republican, is expected to face federal charges including bribery, extortion and money laundering.

A press conference is scheduled at the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati at 2:30 p.m. featuring U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers and Chris Hoffman, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI’s field office.

As previously reported by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, the FBI may have been running an operation in Cincinnati last year involving two mysterious men identifying themselves as real-estate developers. The two men made the rounds there, seeking help from local public officials with a planned hotel project.

They also ended up hiring Columbus lobbyist Neil Clark, ostensibly for his help changing state law to benefit the planned hotel by amending a pending sports-betting legalization. But the amendment ultimately did not make its way into the bill. Chinedum Ndukwe, a former Cincinnati Bengals player who now is a real-estate developer in Cincinnati, was involved with the hotel project and attended some of the meetings, which Clark said he felt appeared to give it legitimacy.

After his and others' arrest in July on corruption charges linked to the passage of a nuclear bailout bill, Clark said quotes of his that appeared in the indictment were recorded during meetings he held with the Cincinnati hotel developers. He said he suspects they were either undercover FBI agents, or at the least, informants working with the FBI. Clark has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Efforts by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer to locate the men who hired Clark were unsuccessful. Officials in Cincinnati recalled interacting with the men, believing they were from Nashville and either North Carolina or Georgia, but said they haven’t heard from them since last summer. Federal officials declined to comment on any ongoing investigation.

 

But again, every Republican who voted for Householder's corrupt kickback bill, and every Republican who made Householder Speaker before he was forced to step down, was reelected by Ohio voters.

 

But that's also proof of how moribund and useless the Ohio Democrats are, they couldn't beat a single Republican, with several indicted. Outside Sherrod Brown, the state's Democrats are 100% worthless, useless, and pointless.

You know, kind of like the KY Democrats.

Corruption means nothing in this state. I guess we'll have to wait until the Biden Justice Department gets around to actually trying the cases in court.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

NY Times Upshot pollster Nate Cohn talks to The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner about what the polls got wrong this year compared to 2016, and it's a long, long list, and a fair amount of "I don't knows" in that list.

Isaac Chotiner: In a lot of preelection polling, Trump was running ahead of Republican Senate candidates. But Republicans seemed to do better than Trump in the generic House vote, and in some of these Senate races. Why do you think that was?

Nate Cohn: I don’t know why that turned out to be the case. I think one of the most interesting parts of the polling error this year is that it was greater down-ballot than it was as at the top of the ticket, and in 2016 it was the opposite. And so while a lot of our explanation for what went wrong in 2016 was searching for things that were mainly about the President, I’m not sure that the pollsters would be right to suppose that this year’s polling error is unique or specific to the President.

IC: In 2016, the national polls were off a couple points, and then Midwestern polls, especially polls that didn’t weight by education, were off more. This year with your polling for the New York Times, with other polling, there were a lot of misses. And these were the polls that really took weighting by education seriously and took a lot of steps after 2016 to fix errors, and in your case nailed the 2018 midterms. Do you know what happened this time?

NC: I don’t. I can offer you some theories.

IC: Yeah, please.

NC: But, before I say that, I do want to agree that this was a much bigger polling miss, in important ways, than in 2016. It was a bigger polling miss in the national surveys. It was a bigger polling miss for the industry’s most prominent and pricey survey houses. The state polling error will be just as bad, even though, as you mentioned, many state pollsters took steps to increase the number of white voters without a degree in their surveys. And state polls look a lot like they did in 2016.

But, if the state polls are just as bad as they were in 2016, despite steps that we know improved the President’s standing in the surveys, we can say with total confidence—and I know this was true in our data—that the underlying survey data has to be worse than it was in 2016. Or, if you prefer, if all the pollsters were using the 2016 methodology, the polls would have been far worse this year than they were in 2016. And that is really interesting. As I said, I can list a bunch of theories for you.

IC: Yeah. What are your theories?

NC: Well, the key framing is what’s changed since 2016. What would make the polls worse now than they were then? So one possibility is that it’s four more years of Trump, and that as American politics grew more and more defined along the lines of your attitudes about the President, and as old political allegiances sort of fell away, that non-response bias in polling became more and more correlated with Presidential vote choice.

Another possibility is that “the resistance” is what broke the polls. Think of all of the political engagement on the left, the millions of dollars that were spent to help Jon Ossoff in 2017 or to help Jamie Harrison in 2020. This portrays a tremendous increase in the level of political participation on the part of progressives. We know that politically engaged voters are more likely to respond to surveys. And so it may be that as the Trump Presidency has totally energized the Democratic base, it has also led those same kinds of voters to increase their propensity to respond to political surveys.

Another possibility is the high turnout this year. We in the polling world have tended to assume that higher turnout makes polling easier, because we think of turnout as something that’s an additional variable that the polls have to get right beyond just taking a nice sample of the population. This year, though, we have this huge increase in turnout, and most people have supposed that it was good for Joe Biden. Maybe it was good for Joe Biden. But I think we also have to be open to the idea that it was not good for Joe Biden. In Florida, where we were collecting turnout data live on Election Day, I can tell you with certainty that the electorate was more Republican than it was in 2016, more than our polls projected, no matter your likely voter methodology. That may be true elsewhere in the country. I don’t know. It may not be. We just don’t have that data yet.

But I would note that many of the late polls stopped showing a gap between the preferences of registered and likely voters, and in some cases it went into reverse, where the Democrats were faring better among likely voters and registered voters. A few late examples—the CNN poll showed Biden up ten in Pennsylvania, but only up five among registered voters. I believe the final ABC News/Washington Post poll in Pennsylvania showed Joe Biden doing better among likely voters than registered voters.

And then a final thing I would raise is that maybe it was the coronavirus. You may recall that, one year ago, at the time we published a series of polls that showed Biden narrowly ahead of Trump and Elizabeth Warren trailing Trump, and those polls were a lot more accurate than the polls that we did since then.

 

There are a lot of factors, but the big one was education. Education, not race, is now the single biggest predictor of partisan voting, but race is still a close second.

And Democrats did badly with Latino men and White college-educated women in particular. The polls had support for Biden from these groups overestimated by double-digits at the minimum. 

But the major problem is this: you can't fix voter suppression with turnout. You just get turnout that favors the suppressors.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

You knew Bill Barr had to make an appearance in this dangerous farce somewhere, and when he did, it was a classic example of authoritarian coup tactics.

Attorney General William P. Barr, wading into President Trump’s unfounded accusations of widespread election irregularities, told federal prosecutors on Monday that they were allowed to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.

Mr. Barr’s authorization prompted the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, to step down from the post within hours, according to an email Mr. Pilger sent to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”

Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election.

“Given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions,” Mr. Barr wrote.

A Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr had authorized scrutiny of allegations about ineligible voters in Nevada and backdated mail-in ballots Pennsylvania. Republicans have circulated both claims in recent days without any evidence emerging to back them.

Mr. Barr did not write the memo at the direction of Mr. Trump, the White House or any Republican lawmakers, the official said.

Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said.

But critics of Mr. Barr immediately condemned the memo as a political act that undermined the Justice Department’s typical independence from the White House.

 

The legal reasoning from Team Trump now, thanks to this horsecrap:

 

1. Because the Justice Department has authorized US attorneys to investigate fraud that doesn't actually exist, 
2. election results then can't be certified until the investigation by US attorneys is exhausted, 
3. and this will take as long as it takes, 
4. and if it takes so long that electors to the Electoral College can't give either candidate 270 votes,
5. because not enough state elections have been certified and for electors to be elected by the states,
6. or faithless electors vote for Trump,
7. then the Supreme Court has to step in and stop the election process for President,
   
8. then the Presidential contest has to go to the majority of House state delegations where Trump wins, or
9. state legislatures elect faithless electors anyway, and
10. enough faithless electors abandon Biden and give Trump 270 electoral votes,
11. and the Supreme Court orders all-new elections for the House and Senate races in disputed states,
12. which would simply be annulled by SCOTUS until enough Republicans win.
    

 

Now that is a 12-step program to hell, yes?

 

It would effectively be the end of free and fair elections in the US, which is kind of funny actually because America didn't have universal suffrage for roughly the first 180 years of its existence thanks to non-white folk not being able to vote, women not being able to vote, and Jim Crow laws, and the major mechanism for enforcing universal suffrage, the Voting Rights Act, was effectively dismantled by Chief Justice John Roberts seven years ago, and kept dismantled by Mitch McConnell.

 

Free and fair small "d" democratic elections in America are literally a younger concept than the Zandarparents. America has been an actual "symbol of freedom" for maybe six decades out of 25, and that's being amazingly generous.

And Bill Barr is helping Trump put an end to that.

The Battle Of Georgia

Biden won Georgia and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were able to force runoffs in January in large part thanks to the herculean efforts of Stacey Abrams and other voting rights activists working to overcome massive voter suppression. Now Abrams has her sights set on winning both runoffs, and she's going to have a cornucopia of resources to get the job done and win the Senate for the Dems.

Voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said Sunday that Democrats are going to have unprecedented financial support for the two possible January Senate runoff elections in her state — contests that could also determine control of Congress.

Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are battling GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler for the seats. NBC News has not projected an outcome in the Ossoff-Perdue race, but Perdue's campaign said Friday that it's preparing for a runoff. The Senate currently shows Democrats and Republicans each in control of 48 seats, with four races still outstanding.

"This will be the first time we've had three things happen," Abrams said. "One, we've got Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock at the top of these tickets, working together to make certain that voters come back."

"Number two, we will have the investment and the resources that have never followed our runoffs in Georgia for Democrats," she continued. "And number three, this is going to be the determining factor of whether we have access to health care and access to justice in the United States. Those are two issues that will make certain that people turn out."

It appears the money is already flooding in to the Georgia contests. A spokesman for Abrams' group Fair Fight told NBC News that, in the past 48 hours, they have raised more than $3.6 million dollars.

 

And she's right. Ossoff and Warnock winning are the difference between being able to actually fix the problems in this country, and another two years of frustrating gridlock with Mitch McConnell blocking every piece of legislation he can. 

We'll get to that battle in 55 days or so, but the time to prepare is now, and Abrams is already on it.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime is opening up dangerous efforts this week to try to de-legitimize Joe Biden's win, and will challenge the election itself starting this week with multiple recounts in multiple states, attacking the election process in various state courts, and a nationwide media blitz on cable channels to engage Trump supporters to mobilize. Axios's Alayna Treene:

 

President Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.

What we're hearing: Obits for those who cast ballots are part of the "specific pieces of evidence" aimed at bolstering the Trump team's so-far unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud and corruption that they say led to Joe Biden’s victory. Fueling the effort is the expected completion of vote counting this week, allowing Republicans to file for more recounts.

What's next: Team Trump is ready to announce specific recount teams in key states, and it plans to hold a series of Trump rallies focused on the litigation.

• In Georgia: Doug Collins, the outgoing congressman who lost to Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a special election to fill former Sen. Johnny Isakson's seat, will be leading the campaign's recount efforts. The team has also redeployed 92 staffers from Florida to Georgia, doubling its group on the ground.
• In Arizona: Kory Langhofer, former counsel for Trump's 2016 transition, will serve as lead attorney.
• In Pennsylvania: Porter Wright's Ron Hicks is heading up the legal effort.
• Nationwide: They're assembling additional surrogates and lawyers.

"We want to make sure we have an adequate supply of manpower on the ground for man-to-man combat," one adviser said.

The group is also staffing a campaign-style media operation. The team led by Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh is now a surrogate messaging center. It will pump out "regular press briefings, releases on legal action and obviously things like talking points and booking people strategically on television," one adviser said. They'll also make a big play to raise money for their legal defense fund.

Trump's formal legal team includes 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, lawyer Justin Clark, and senior advisers Jason Miller and David Bossie. Reps. Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, are also advising.

 

This is all going to end up extremely badly for the country, especially when Trump cultists decide that maybe obstacles to Trump's "win" need to be removed by any means necessary. The damage is going to be incalculable, and please note all the dozens of Republicans lining up to help Trump do this.

 

Well, the ones that are left, anyway.

 

Mike Allen follows up as Republicans are worried however that Trump's long, futile fight will cost them Georgia's Senate runoff.

GOP leaders and confidants of President Trump tell Axios his legal fight to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory — which they admit is likely doomed — could last a month or more, possibly pushing the 2020 political wars toward Christmastime.

Why it matters: Most top Republicans have followed Trump’s orders not to accept the Biden victory, and to allow all legal options to be exhausted. That could mean weeks of drama — and, more importantly, distractions from the vital work of transitioning government for a change of power.

Axios is told an internal effort is underway to dissuade Trump from pursuing a blitz (with Rudy Giuliani as the tip of the spear) that could mean three to six weeks of legal challenges, discovery and rulings — at the same time that Biden is talking daily about a message of healing. 

Some top sources tell Axios that Trump has no plan to call for national unity. "No chance," says a person who talks often to the president. A senior Republican who talks often to Trump said the president is "angry ... volatile ... disconsolate."

The problem was never Trump.

The problem was always the GOP and the people who support them.

StupidiNews!

• The latest White House COVID-19 outbreak has now spread to Trump legal team pointman David Bossie, Bossie took over for WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after Meadows tested positive.
• The US has now passed 10 million total COVID-19 cases according to Johns Hopkins medical center officials, with more than 237,000 deaths and counting.
• Disney's parks division has furloughed an unknown additional number of Disneyland employees this week, on top of the 28,000 furloughed across Disney Parks in the US in September.
• Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra was ousted Monday by the country's lawmakers in a 105-19 vote, Manuel Marino, head of Peru's congress, will be sworn in as interim president this morning.
• Commercial spaceflight company Relativity Space says test-firing of its Aeon 1 3D-printed rocket engine was a success, running at full power for over 3 minutes.