Trial of the Century 2.0, Con't

It's easy to get angry at Democrats today for their roller-coaster 180 on witnesses in Trump's impeachment trial, and lord knows they make it easy to do so, but the problem remains that the GOP refuses to convict.

When Senate Democrats stepped onto the floor on Saturday morning, they had no idea the House impeachment managers were about to drop a political grenade in their laps.

But after a brief schism that threatened to throw Donald Trump's trial into chaos, House and Senate Democrats quickly agreed to put the pin back in. House Democratic managers and the former president's lawyers ducked the issue of witnesses nearly as soon as it was raised, and Senate Democrats approved the turnaround.

Instead of a weeks-long drama over trial witnesses that risked upending the Senate schedule, a widely known statement from one House Republican was entered into the record. Trump’s team declined to dispute it. And amazingly, both sides decided to move on.

But that speedy resolution came after several hours of utter uncertainty.

While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his members had prepared for the possibility of voting on witnesses, they got no warning that the lead House prosecutor was about to force a vote that could have prolonged the trial for days or weeks. The impeachment managers spent Friday night and Saturday morning wrestling with the question themselves, according to Democratic sources.

Then Senate Democrats held a 9 a.m. Saturday conference call where members still indicated they were in the dark about House Democratic managers’ plans. The managers didn’t make the final call to force a Senate vote until minutes before the Senate gaveled in at 10 a.m., Democrats said.

“We don’t coordinate with the managers,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), adding that Democratic senators "have social conversations" with their House counterparts but "don’t talk strategy. So we did not know that they were going to request witnesses or not. And that’s how it should have been.”

Summing up the position Democratic senators decided on, Cardin said: “If the managers believe it would help their presentation, we should let them have witnesses.”

As Senate Democrats huddled on their call, their party's impeachment managers initiated outreach to at least some of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, according to multiple sources. The exact nature of those conversations remains unclear -- but what happened next shocked everyone.

The Senate quickly moved to a bipartisan 55-45 vote to consider possible witnesses. Schumer had long deferred to the managers: If they wanted to call witnesses, he said Democrats would support it. Still, the vote on witnesses personally surprised the Senate majority leader, Democrats said.

The Senate ultimately devised a fast solution to help the chamber avoid trekking down a long path of depositions that could drag the trial into March. Instead of calling witnesses, a statement from Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) that reiterated her month-old account of a call between the former president and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Jan. 6 was entered into the record. And the trial headed toward a close.

Now everyone's mad at the Democrats over witnesses, instead of being mad at the Republicans for making this a foregone conclusion weeks ago.

But that's the way the political universe works in America.

Trump acquitted 57-43, short of the 67 needed. Republican Senators Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Toomey, Murkowski, Toomey and Romney all voted guilty, along with all 50 Democrats and Independents.

It's more guilty votes than I thought he'd get, but it was still preordained.

On to the courts now for justice.

A Little Sinema Verite

Why should Sen. Joe Manchin get all the attention when Arizona Blue Dog Dem Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can equally extort anything she wants from the 50+1 caucus?

Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t often make big policy pronouncements. But when she does, Democrats had better listen.

Take the $15 hourly minimum wage that Democratic leaders want to add to a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. Sinema, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in once deep-red Arizona in 30 years, is crystal clear: She’s against including it.

“What’s important is whether or not it’s directly related to short-term Covid relief. And if it’s not, then I am not going to support it in this legislation,” Sinema said in a telephone interview this week. “The minimum wage provision is not appropriate for the reconciliation process. It is not a budget item. And it shouldn’t be in there.”

Sinema’s opposition is a blow to Democrats’ hopes of bumping up the federal minimum wage through budget reconciliation to avoid a GOP filibuster, complicating follow-through on a campaign promise from Democrats and President Joe Biden. And her defense of the Senate’s age-old rules is likely to frustrate progressives eager to use every tool at their disposal to advance their priorities in a Senate where one wayward Democrat can mean the difference between a policy breakthrough and utter failure.

Her breaks with her liberal colleagues are both a reflection of her state, which she won by a narrow margin in 2018, and her temperament. But the former state legislator, House member and now first-term senator has literally never served in the majority before — so she feels the minority’s pain.

It’s just one of the things that makes the 44-year-old Democrat one of the most quirky and interesting members of the stodgy Senate. She often wears a bright-colored wig to vote, drawing wide eyes from her colleagues. She waits for a single elevator most of the time, once peeking into a jam-packed vessel and declaring it a “Covid elevator.” The walls of her office are a loud purple, accented by leopard patterns.

And though she’s more attentive to Democratic Caucus meetings than she was in the minority, she still keeps Republicans at least as close as members of her own party. She was a pretty lonely Democrat during former President Donald Trump’s last State of the Union speech, standing and applauding at times. Now she talks to President Joe Biden’s team just about every day.

“She’s not someone who cares about convention and the way things were,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), a friend and ally. “She recognizes the real tradition of a Republic, which is that we are elected not to put our finger in the air to determine the direction of the wind.”

 

In other words, if Joe Manchin won't block it, Sinema will. 

Get used to it.

Her career Trump score: 50.4%, matching Manchin's career total.

New York Goes Viral, Con't

Really not a good look for NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo on COVID-19 and nursing homes, and frankly yes, the Justice Department should step in if New York Dems don't impeach first.

New York Republicans assailed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration on Thursday night in response to new revelations about his stonewalling the release of information about nursing home deaths, with several calling for him to resign or be impeached.

The New York Post reported that top gubernatorial staffer Melissa DeRosa told Democratic state legislators in a meeting on Wednesday that the administration “froze” when asked to release data about the number of nursing home residents who had died of Covid-19. A March directive from Cuomo calling on nursing homes to admit patients who tested positive for the coronavirus has been blamed for contributing to high death rates.

DeRosa said the administration resisted the release of data because of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to turn the tragedy “into a giant political football,” according to the Post. “Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation," DeRosa said, according to the Post.

Nearly every top Republican in the state pounced on the Post's report, subjecting Cuomo to a barrage of criticism arguably unparalleled at any point during his decade in office.

"For over six months, day after day, in briefing after briefing, Governor Cuomo stood before New Yorkers and lied about his directive that contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors,” said Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, Cuomo’s 2018 challenger. “In the coming days he will cynically try to convince us that it was for our own good — that it was someone else's fault. This is another lie. What is true, is Andrew Cuomo has proved himself unworthy of our trust, and unfit for public office."

“Prosecution and impeachment discussions must begin right away,” state GOP Chair Nick Langworthy said. “If the Governor is involved, he should be immediately removed from office,” said state Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt. And Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) called for other members of Congress to call for “an independent and thorough investigation by the Biden Department of Justice into Governor Cuomo and New York State.”

Numerous Democrats have attacked Cuomo following the recent release of a report from state Attorney General Tish James saying the governor undercounted the number of deaths. So far, however, the leaders of the state Legislature have avoided going to war with Cuomo by issuing subpoenas or reducing his emergency powers.

Some Democrats who have been the most vocal critics of Cuomo joined Republicans in responding to the Post article: “You’re only sorry that you all got caught,” tweeted state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi (D-Westchester). “Because of your decisions, thousands of people died who did not have to die.”

 

There may actually be enough votes to remove Cuomo from office, but he's also not going anywhere voluntarily, either. In the end, voters will decide in 2022.

He is kind of a dick though.

Trial Of The Century 2.0, Con't

After three days of brutal evidence presented by House impeachment managers, Trump's defense is expected to wrap up Friday night in a matter of a few hours total. He doesn't need a defense of course, because his enablers are the jurors.

 

Former President Donald Trump's defense team expects to finish its arguments in the Senate's impeachment trial by Friday night, two sources tell CNN. 

His lawyers will take the Senate floor on Friday after impeachment managers wrap up on Thursday, but they are not currently expected to use all of their allotted time. Each side gets 16 hours for presentations. 

Attorneys David Schoen, Bruce Castor, Michael van der Veen and William Brennan are all expected to speak during Friday's arguments, according to a person familiar with the latest plan. Using videos of Democratic lawmakers, they plan to argue that Democrats glorified violence by recreating the January 6 riot, will claim the trial is unconstitutional and stress Trump's First Amendment rights. 

Because the legal team is so disorganized, Trump's allies are apprehensive about how the defense will go. Trump erupted Tuesday as Castor made a meandering opening argument during which he praised the prosecutors. 

Several of Trump's allies lobbied him to get rid of Castor that day, which Trump briefly considered, according to two people. Trump was upset as he watched multiple people, including his usual allies on Fox News, trash Castor's performance. But Castor has remained on the team and is expected to present, at least in part, on Friday. He has told people he wasn't planning on speaking Tuesday, which led to the muddled speech. Castor also admitted on the Senate floor that he swapped speaking roles with David Schoen because Democrats presented such a strong opening argument. 

Allies reassured the angry former president by reminding him he's still headed toward acquittal. President Joe Biden told reporters he thought grim new footage presented Wednesday could have changed the minds of some senators, but conceded, "I don't know." 

 

Nobody expects enough Republicans to vote to acquit, and next week Trump will declare victory after the vote and then unleash his cultists in a wave of deadly rhetoric. It will be up to the states to administer justice, as our Senate is infested with evil GOP idiots. Hell, GOP senators are falling asleep and leaving the chamber during the trial because it bores them.

Senators are tuning out as former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial grinds into its third day, with many falling asleep and more than a dozen Republicans exiting the chamber at various intervals.

As many as 15 seats of Republican senators were empty during the first few hours of the trial Thursday, compared to just a handful of Democrats who were outside of the chamber, according to pool reports.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) were both away from their desks, for instance, while Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) was in the basement on his phone, CNN’s Manu Raju reported.

Many within the chamber were preoccupied with other activities: Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were reading papers, while, according to CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) “had a blank map of Asia on his desk and was writing on it like he was filling in the names of the countries.”

On both sides of the aisle, a general malaise was setting in, with many senators reportedly appearing to struggle to stay awake, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.).

Even Trump’s lawyers were checked out, with David Schoen and Bruce Castor reportedly not taking notes and Schoen even leaving the chamber to speak to reporters and participate in several TV news interviews.

Asked by Raju why he was breaking from the trial to do interviews, Schoen said impeachment managers’ arguments are “more of the same thing,” labeling their use of footage of Capitol rioters citing Trump as their inspiration, “offensive, quite frankly.”

“It’s the same as yesterday and the same as the day before… it’s just redundant. The same thing, over and over again,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) told reporters of impeachment managers’ arguments on Thursday. “To me, the more you hear it, the less credibility there is in it.” 

 

They're bored because the outcome is assured. It's a mobster trial where the jurors are accomplices of the criminal. 

 

As to justice, well, even if a miracle happens and Trump is indicted in a state trial, he'll never be convicted because rich people never go to jail in this country.

Besides, there's no way jurors in any Trump trail can be kept safe. Not when the cultists are police, prosecutors, and federal law enforcement agents at all levels. They will be found, and they will pay the price, and they will acquit, or they and their families will be "accidentally" killed in police raids.

That's how America works.

The impeachment trial will be over in a matter of days.

The trial of America begins when Trump is acquitted.

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

When I say that further domestic terrorism attacks against Democrats and Republican "traitors" by violent Trump cutists are not only likely but inevitable, this new AEI poll is exactly why I believe that.

The mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol may have been a fringe group of extremists, but politically motivated violence has the support of a significant share of the U.S. public, according to a new survey by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

The survey found that nearly three in 10 Americans, including 39% of Republicans, agreed that, "If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions."

That result was "a really dramatic finding," says Daniel Cox, director of the AEI Survey Center on American Life. "I think any time you have a significant number of the public saying use of force can be justified in our political system, that's pretty scary."

The survey found stark divisions between Republicans and Democrats on the 2020 presidential election, with two out of three Republicans saying President Biden was not legitimately elected, while 98% of Democrats and 73% of independents acknowledged Biden's victory.

The level of distrust among Republicans evident in the survey was such that about eight in 10 said the current political system is "stacked against conservatives and people with traditional values." A majority agreed with the statement, "The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."

The survey found that to be a minority sentiment — two out of three Americans overall rejected the use of violence in pursuit of political ends – and Cox emphasized that the finding reflected "attitudes and beliefs" rather than a disposition to do something.

"If I believe something, I may act on it, and I may not," Cox says. "We shouldn't run out and say, 'Oh, my goodness, 40% of Republicans are going to attack the Capitol,' But under the right circumstances, if you have this worldview, then you are more inclined to act in a certain way if you are presented with that option."

No, not all 40% of Republicans are going to pick up Ar-15s and try to kill Democrats.

But some of them will resort to violence.

We know this because they have before.

On top of all that, we know exactly where these terrorists are being radicalized: online, and at American churches.

The AEI survey found that partisan divisions were also evident along religious lines. About three in five white evangelicals told the pollsters that Biden was not legitimately elected, that it was not accurate to say former President Donald Trump encouraged the attack on the Capitol, and that a Biden presidency now has them feeling disappointed, angry or frightened.

On all those questions, Cox says, white evangelicals are "politically quite distinct." Majorities of white mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, Catholics, followers of non-Christian religions and the religiously unaffiliated all viewed Biden's victory as legitimate.

The AEI survey found that white evangelicals were especially prone to subscribe to the QAnon movement's conspiracy theories. Twenty-seven percent said it was "mostly" or "completely" accurate to say Trump "has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites." That share was higher than for any other faith group and more than double the support for QAnon beliefs evident among Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics and non-Christians.

"As with a lot of questions in the survey, white evangelicals stand out in terms of their belief in conspiracy theories and the idea that violence can be necessary," Cox says. "They're far more likely to embrace all these different conspiracies."

A quarter of white evangelicals believe in QAnon conspiracy theories.

One-quarter.

The violence is guaranteed, and once Trump reemerges on the news scene like the political and societal herpes virus he is, the cultists will follow his lead and another attack is preordained. More than anything else, I fear a Trump indictment will absolutely lead to massive, massive violence.

The question is do we do the right thing anyway?

Operation Redline, 2022 Edition

Republicans are exceedingly confident that they will have the House back in GOP hands two years from now, and frankly there's very little to make me think Nancy Pelosi will be able to keep her gavel with just five seats to spare against the triple threat of Republicans being the out-of-power party, 2022 being a midterm cycle, and Republicans having control in a majority of states over redistricting.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for House Republicans, announced Wednesday morning the 47 districts it is targeting as pickup opportunities in the 2022 midterms.

The group, led by Chairman Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, is targeting many of the same districts it did in 2020, as well as the exurban New York City 18th Congressional District, home to new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who won reelection by about 12 points in 2020.

Midterms are widely considered a prime opportunity for the party not in the White House, and Republicans are setting their sights on some of the nation’s most competitive districts. In light of the 2020 Census and redistricting, Republican prospects for regaining control of the House appear even brighter, as the GOP controls about two-thirds of the states’ redistricting processes, according to FiveThirtyEight.

In 2018, Democrats managed a 40-seat gain as a part of the referendum vote against the Trump administration.

The NRCC indicated it was going to stick to its 2020 playbook after the GOP made massive cuts into the Democratic majority, flipping 15 seats from blue to red and reducing the Democratic control to just a handful of votes.

“We are just a few weeks into the Biden Administration and Americans are already seeing the job-killing initiatives House Democrats support,” said NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer in a press release accompanying the target districts.

“House Republicans start the cycle just five seats short of a majority and are prepared to build on our 2020 successes to deliver a lasting Republican majority in the House. We will stay laser-focused on recruiting talented and diverse candidates, aggressively highlighting Democrats’ socialist agenda and raising enough resources to win,” Emmer added.

The NRCC is targeting Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the Atlanta suburbs, which is now represented by Democrat Carolyn Bordeaux. The seat was the only competitive pickup Democrats had in 2020, notwithstanding two North Carolina districts that were redrawn heavily in Democratic favor following court-ordered redistricting.

Yeah you read that right, Democrats picked up a grand total of one competitive district, and lost 15 others from 2018, and that's with Trump being hung around the necks of the GOP. Hell, Republicans will probably be able to redistrict out a dozen Democrats without having to actually run in anything close to being competitive.

In other words, yes, there's the very real possibility that Dems to lose the House by dozens, if not scores, or House seats. If they couldn't gain seats against Trump, the headwinds may just be too strong come November 2022.

We'll see, but Sean Patrick Mahoney has the defense of a lifetime to coordinate, and I don't think anyone's up to the job, let alone Mahoney.

It's About Suppression, Con't

If you're still wondering why Republicans are turning back to mass voter suppression of Black and brown votes in red states they control, it's because the difference between the Democrats controlling the federal government and the Trump regime gaining complete and total control of the country was only a matter of 90,000 votes in the right districts and states.

The 2020 election was bad for Republicans, full stop. For the first time since 1932, a president came into office with both chambers of Congress under his party’s control, and lost both of them and reelection. Democrats also have unified control of all three levers of power for the first time in a decade.

That said, post-election analysis often overstates just how dire the situation is for a political party. And that’s certainly the case for Republicans and 2020, as they confront their post-Trump reality.

The reality, though, is far from that. In fact, Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power. And that will surely temper any move toward drastic corrective action vis-a-vis former president Donald Trump.

We got the final results from the last outstanding House race on Monday, with former congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R) returning to Congress after defeating Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D) in New York by 109 votes. The result means the House stands at 222 to 213 in favor of the Democrats. (These numbers include three vacancies for which the seats are very unlikely to change hands.)

The Democrats’ narrow retention of the House is surely one of the biggest surprises of 2020. In an election in which most analysts expected the Democrats to gain seats, they wound up losing 14, including virtually all of the “toss-ups.” While the GOP lost the presidential race and control of the Senate, we very nearly had a much different outcome.

While Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than four points and the electoral college 306 to 232, the result was much closer to flipping than that would suggest. Biden won the three decisive states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by 0.6 percentage points or less, which was similar to Trump’s 2016 victory. If you flip fewer than 43,000 votes across those three states, the electoral college is tied 269 to 269. In that case, Trump would probably have won, given that the race would be decided by one vote for each House delegation, of which Republicans control more.

There are several reasons to argue that Biden has a mandate, including that he won more eligible voters than any candidate in half a century and won the highest percentage for any challenger to an incumbent president since 1932. But the fact remains that we weren’t that far away from a second Trump term.

The number of votes to flip the result was similar in the House. As the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted in light of Tenney’s win, fewer than 32,000 votes could have flipped the five seats that Republicans would have needed to win the House majority — Illinois’s 17th District, Iowa’s 3rd, New Jersey’s 7th, Texas’s 15th and Virginia’s 7th.

Technically, this would have required a bigger shift, because Texas’s 15th was decided by nearly 3 percentage points in a low-turnout district. But even just looking at percentages, Republicans could have flipped the House by moving five districts just 2.2 percentage points to the right.

The closest of all, of course, was the Senate. Democrats won effective control of the chamber by getting to a 50-50 split and having Vice President Harris break the tie. But even fewer votes could have led to a different result.

While incumbent David Perdue (R-Ga.) lost the closest Senate race in a runoff last month with now-Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) by about 55,000 votes, he previously came very close to avoiding the runoff altogether. On Election Day, he took 49.7 percent of the vote — fewer than 14,000 votes from winning the race outright. That would have foreclosed any chance Democrats had at winning the Senate.

So, 43,000 votes for president, 32,000 votes for the House and 14,000 votes for the Senate. Shifts of 0.6 percent for president, 2.2 percent for the House, and 0.3 percent for the Senate.

 

That's it.

 

89,000 votes going the other direction.

 

Less than 0.06% of the total votes cast.

That's how close we came to becoming a completely authoritarian regime with no going back.

Just a bit more suppression next time and we lose everything.

StupidiNews!

• Chicago teachers will remain on the job after their union negotiated an in-person teaching agreement with Chicago schools, avoiding what would have been a strike as early as Monday.
• Adult film and magazine mogul Larry Flynt has died at age 78, Flynt was most famous for winning a historic free speech case for Hustler Magazine, which he owned and ran for decades.
• The Biden administration is announcing new sanctions against the military government of Myanmar after the country's leaders were deposed by a coup last weekend.
• Fed Chair Jerome Powell says America need to make a "society-wide" push to achieve full employment again in the wake of the Trump depression.
• United Airlines is investing in electric-powered aircraft with a billion-dollar order from startup Archer for 200 VTOL small electric planes that could act as flying taxis.

Last Call For Georgia On Trump's Mind, Con't

The Georgia state investigation into Donald Trump's post-election pressuring phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find the votes" to overturn the presidential election in the state is now a full-fledged criminal probe of Trump, as expected.

Prosecutors in Fulton County have initiated a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to help him reverse his loss.

On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to Mr. Trump’s call, according to a state official with knowledge of the letter. The letter explicitly stated that the request was part of a criminal investigation, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The inquiry comes as Mr. Trump faces a second impeachment trial in Washington this week, on a charge of “incitement of insurrection” for his role in stirring up the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan 6. The violence that day followed weeks of false claims by the former president that election fraud deprived him of victory, including in Georgia, where he lost by about 12,000 votes.

For two months after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Trump relentlessly attacked election officials in Georgia, including Mr. Raffensperger and the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, claiming they were not doing enough to uncover instances of voting fraud that might change the outcome. In addition to the phone call to Mr. Raffensperger, he also called Gov. Brian Kemp in early December and pressured him to call a special legislative session to overturn his election loss. Later that month, Mr. Trump called a state investigator and pressed the official to “find the fraud,” according to those with knowledge of the call.

The inquiry makes Georgia the second state after New York where Mr. Trump faces a criminal investigation. And it comes in a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County encompasses most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly supported President Biden in the November election.

The Fulton County investigation comes on the heels of a decision Monday by Mr. Raffensperger’s office to open an administrative inquiry.

Ms. Willis has been weighing for several weeks whether to open an inquiry, after Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2 alarmed election experts who call it an extraordinary intervention into a state’s electoral process.

Former prosecutors said Mr. Trump’s calls might run afoul of at least three state laws. One is criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which can be either a felony or a misdemeanor; as a felony, it is punishable by at least a year in prison. There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, bars “intentional interference” with another person’s “performance of election duties.”

 

I know my standing prediction is that Trump will never be indicted, let alone convicted, so that applies to Georgia even more than New York. I absolutely believe Gov. Brian Kemp will move against Fani Willis and openly interfere in the case, with Willis most likely being removed from the investigation, or the investigation being moved out of her hands to another Trump-friendlier prosecutor.

 

And as with New York, prosecutors could decide that it's simply too dangerous to prosecute safely, arguing that Trump supporters are in fact deadly armed domestic terrorists who are liable to harm prosecutors, officers of the court, journalists, and regular people.

That's going to be fun, huh?

But there's the chance I will be wrong and Trump really is indicted by a state court.

We'll see what happens, but again, I would not get your hopes up for any accountability.

Fetterman, Not The Better Man

And there goes the career of Pennsylvania Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who I talked about yesterday as a possible rising star in the party, crashing to earth in less than 24 hours later.

At the height of protests last year over police violence against Black people, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, called for police officers to be better trained to defuse incidents where those involved did not threaten public safety.

“We must fall on the side of de-escalation every time,” Mr. Fetterman wrote, citing his experiences as mayor of the town of Braddock, outside Pittsburgh.

But as Mr. Fetterman — one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent Democrats — enters the race for U.S. Senate this week, an incident from his past highlights his own judgment in the heat of one such moment.

In 2013, when he was mayor, Mr. Fetterman used his shotgun to stop an unarmed Black jogger and detain him, telling the police that he had heard shots fired near his home and spotted the man running, according to the police report. “Fetterman continued to yell and state that he knows this male was shooting,” the police report says.

An officer who patted down the man, Christopher Miyares, then 28, found no weapons. The officer noted that Mr. Miyares was wearing running clothes and headphones. Mr. Miyares was released.

On Tuesday, in response to questions from The Times, Mr. Fetterman’s campaign shared a new two-and-a-half minute video in which the candidate described the incident and defended himself — a sign that his campaign anticipated that the events from eight years ago would resurface with potential political fallout for his Senate bid.

In the video, Mr. Fetterman says that he was outside his home with his 4-year-old son when he heard “this crushing burst of gunfire,” and “I immediately made a series of split-second decisions.”

He said he saw someone “dressed entirely in black and a face mask” running in the direction of an elementary school. Noting that the date, in January 2013, was not long after the Sandy Hook school shooting, Mr. Fetterman said, “I made the decision to stop him from going any further until the first responders could arrive.”

According to accounts Mr. Fetterman gave in 2013 to local media, he chased the man in his pickup truck and used a 20-gauge shotgun he kept in the truck to hold him until the police appeared.

“I believe I did the right thing,” Mr. Fetterman told WTAE-TV at the time. “But I may have broken the law in the course of it. I’m certainly not above the law.” 

 

At no point in the video or in the article does Fetterman apologize for what he did to an unarmed Black man, aiming a shotgun to him because Fetterman thought he must have been a criminal.  Worse, Fetterman was not a police officer but he believed he had the right to aim a shotgun at another human being and detain him anyway.

 

He doesn't even try to apologize.

So yeah, thus ends the Senate aspirations of John Fetterman, because I will gladly donate to his Democratic primary opponent, even if the leading contender is a Blue Dog like Conor Lamb.

Didn't even make it 24 hours. Never should have been Lieutenant Governor, either.

He finished a distant third in the 2016 Senate primary for a reason, turns out.

Location Israeli A Problem

Even if Joe Biden wanted to move the location of the main US Embassy in Israel back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem after Trump moved it in 2019, the Senate wouldn't approve it, so it looks like for the foreseeable future, the embassy will remain right where it is.

The White House confirmed Tuesday that President Joe Biden intends to keep the U.S. embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, where it was relocated during the Trump administration. The issue of where to locate the embassy has been a fixture of negotiations over Israeli and Palestinian territory and authority for decades.

A White House spokesperson confirmed to CQ Roll Call the administration’s intentions, following up on a query from last Friday’s White House press briefing.

“The U.S. position is that our embassy will remain in Jerusalem, which we recognize as Israel’s capital,” the spokesperson said. “The ultimate status of Jerusalem is a final status issue which will need to be resolved by the parties in the context of direct negotiations.”

The Senate voted 97-3 last week during the budget vote-a-rama in favor of an amendment supportive of the location of the embassy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in response to questioning during his Jan. 19 confirmation hearing that the embassy would remain in Jerusalem, but White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had not been definitive on Friday.

Still, the lack of clarity from the White House had prompted criticism over the weekend from freshman Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., who had been U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Donald Trump.

“This question was posed because, on the previous day, the United States Senate had sent an unequivocal signal on this topic,” Hagerty wrote in a Saturday letter to Biden. “In order to correct the discrepancy that unfortunately now exists between our two branches of government and send an unequivocal message to our allies in Israel, I urge you to confirm — immediately and publicly — that your Administration will continue to implement U.S. law and maintain the American Embassy’s location in Jerusalem.”

The amendment to the budget resolution was led by Oklahoma Sen. James M. Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. Only Sens. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., opposed the amendment.

In moving the embassy, the Trump administration followed through on provisions of a 1995 law known as the Jerusalem Embassy Act. Implementation had previously been suspended by presidents of both parties, which had kept the U.S. embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv.

 

In other words, the president who really tied Joe Biden's hands on this was Bill Clinton, not Donald Trump. Clinton, Obama, and you can argue Clinton actually had his hands tied by Congress in 1995, the bill passed with overwhelming veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate, and Clinton let it pass unsigned and kicked this particular diplomatic can down the road for 25 years.

There's nothing Biden can do, it's been preordained for a quarter-century.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is "unhappy" with the performance of his defense team after the first day of his second impeachment trial, the Senate voted 56-44 that the trial was Constitutional.
• The Justice Department has dropped its case against former Melania Trump aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, whose tell-all book about the Trump family was released last September.
• Minnesota police have arrested a suspect in a medical clinic shooting that wounded five, the 67-year-old suspect was a "disgruntled" former patient of the clinic and was known to police.
• The US Postal Service has named Democrat Ron Bloom as Chairman of its Board of Governors as calls for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's resignation grow louder.
• Disney is shutting down former Fox animation studio Blue Sky and moving personnel to its own animation division, Blue Sky was behind the Ice Age and Rio franchises.
  

Last Call For The Journey Of Turning Attorneys

As with Dubya, Obama, and Trump before him, Joe Biden is mostly cleaning house at the various DoJ US Attorney offices with the goal of Senate appointments for new federal prosecutors. However, Biden is leaving several in place, including the one trying to railroad his own son Hunter.

The Justice Department, as soon as Tuesday, is expected to ask US attorneys appointed by former President Donald Trump to submit their resignations, a turnover expected to spare two top prosecutors in Delaware and Connecticut overseeing two sensitive Trump-era investigations, a senior Justice Department official said. 

In a call Monday night, acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson asked Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to remain in office, where he is overseeing the tax probe of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son. John Durham, appointed as special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr to reinvestigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, will also continue his work, but he is expected to resign as US attorney in Connecticut, the Justice official said. 

The resignation request is expected to apply to 56 Senate-confirmed US attorneys appointed by Trump. 

Justice officials have scheduled a call with US attorneys around the country to discuss a transition that is expected to take weeks. The Justice official didn't say when the resignations would take effect.

The changeover of US attorneys is routine, but is often fraught with political overtones. In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked 46 Obama-appointed US attorneys to submit their resignations. A handful were allowed to stay on for a brief period, but most had to leave immediately.

Distrust of Trump-era appointees led the Biden administration to appoint a career Justice Department official as acting attorney general while it waits for the US Senate to confirm Merrick Garland, the President's nominee to lead the department. 

Garland's confirmation hearing was expected to begin on February 8, but it has been delayed by former Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham who, until this week when Democrats took formal control of the Senate, opposed moving quickly on Garland's hearing. 

Graham said he needs time to question Garland on current investigations and wrote a letter on Tuesday to Wilkinson urging him "not to interfere in or call off" the investigations. 

Of the 94 US attorneys serving in districts across the country, 25 are serving in acting positions after some Trump appointees resigned ahead of the Biden inauguration. 

Among those the Biden administration may keep for a while, according to people briefed on the matter, are Michael Sherwin, acting US attorney in Washington, DC, who is overseeing the sprawling probe of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Sherwin is a career prosecutor from Miami, but was installed in DC by former Attorney General William Barr, and among the options Biden administration officials have discussed is having him continue to lead the insurrection probe, perhaps from Justice headquarters, while making room for Biden's own appointee in the DC office. 

Less certain is how long acting US attorneys in New York City will remain in their posts: Seth DuCharme in Brooklyn and Audrey Strauss in Manhattan. 

Some high-profile US attorneys who had not resigned ahead of Biden's inauguration included US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio David DeVillers, Utah US Attorney John Huber and Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady. 

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown had made clear to a local news outlet that DeVillers is going to be replaced and has put out a call for resumes, according to Cleveland.com. DeVillers is currently overseeing two high-profile corruption investigations involving a former Republican lawmaker and Cincinnati council members that includes a Democrat.

Biden's a lot nicer than I'd be about this, but Chuck Schumer needs to pay a visit to Lindsey Graham's office and get Merrick Garland as AG done already.

And yes, the Democrat that the article mentions at the end there here in Cincy is P.G. Sittenfeld, who is almost certainly going to prison for bribery and fraud for a few years instead of being the city's next Mayor.

Still, we'll see what becomes of all these leftover Trump regime "investigations". I doubt Garland will have much in the way of patience for the usual political nonsense.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Democrats aren't wasting any time in looking ahead to 2022 US Senate races, knowing that there are several seats they have an opportunity to pick up. Arguably the big one is retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey's seat in Pennsylvania, and a popular Democrat is stepping in already: current Lieutenant Gov. John Fetterman.

 

“I’m running for the United States Senate for the same reason I ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and mayor of Braddock 16 years ago—because I believe in a set of core truths,” John Fetterman said in a statement, before listing off priorities such as the “dignity of a paycheck,” unions and healthcare as a “fundamental, basic human right.”

Fetterman initially earned recognition for his attempts to revitalize the small, western Pennsylvania town of Braddock, which saw a steep decline after the steel industry collapsed there in the 1970s and 1980s. A 2011 New York Times Magazine article coined Fetterman as the “Mayor of Rust,” noting his creative efforts to bring back the town of just several thousand people. “We’ve lost 90% of our population and 90% of our buildings,” Fetterman told the Times then. “Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. So we took a two-pronged approach. We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists’ studios. We did public art installations. And, I don’t know if you consider it ‘arts,’ exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”

Big Number: $1.4 million. That’s how much Fetterman has raised from small-money donors in the weeks before officially launching his bid.

Fetterman is a big proponent of marijuana legalization and criminal justice reform. On Twitter Monday, the day he launched his candidacy, Fetterman wrote: “If you’re cool with Pennsylvania minting 20,000 NEW criminal records every single year for getting caught sipping some weed, I am not your dude for 2022.”

Two unions, which carry big influence in Pennsylvania, have already endorsed Fetterman: United Steelworkers District 10 and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776. The two unions together represent more than 80,000 workers, according to Politico.

Other candidates to enter the race. Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) is seen as another potential Democrat to run for Toomey’s seat. Prospective GOP candidates include: Rep. Ryan Costello, real-estate developer Jeff Bartos, former Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Paul Mango, among others.  

 

Also, at 6'8", Fetterman would be the tallest US Senator since Alabama Republican Luther Strange (6'9") and Alan "Simpson-Bowles" Simpson at 6'7".

Personally, I like Fetterman. He played the public foil to the PA GOP's circus efforts to overturn the election and made them look like the clowns they are, and he did it on several occasions over the last two months.

We'll see how he does in the primaries.

Trial Of The Century 2.0, Con't

 Nobody seems happy with the Trump impeachment trial, on the right (who want to trial dismissed on "constitutional grounds") and on the left, who want Democrats to call Sen. Lindsey Graham's bluff and call witnesses to testify not only against Trump, but against the Republicans who enabled him, as Greg Sargent explains.

The Democrats’ fear appears to be that if the full GOP is implicated, that makes conviction less likely. To be fair, there are genuine complexities here: Trump is the one on trial, and drawing out the GOP’s role might be challenging (though hardly undoable) in a trial context.

Calling out the GOP might also give GOP senators a (bad faith) way to scream that Democrats politicized the trial, giving them cover to acquit.

But the idea that refraining from this will make it more plausible that 17 Republican senators will vote to convict is at odds with everything we know. Republicans are publicly saying in every which way that acquitting Trump is key to their party’s future, so he’ll keep the voters he brought into politics in the GOP coalition.

So acquittal is a foregone conclusion. If anything, Democrats need to make it as politically uncomfortable for Republicans as possible to acquit — and to extract a political price for it among the suburban moderates whom the GOP continues to alienate with its ongoing QAnon-ification.

It’s hard to see how insulating the GOP from Trump’s effort to overturn U.S. democracy helps accomplish that.

Separately, Politico reports that some of the impeachment managers want witnesses at the trial, and that some Senate Democrats are leaning against it.

This is more complex than it appears: A person familiar with ongoing talks over the trial structure between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and McConnell tells me there will be a vote on whether to have witnesses, if the managers want them.

So this is up to the managers. And it’s still unclear whether the managers do or do not want witnesses. Many of their aides declined to tell me.

The case for witnesses is strong. There’s a lot we don’t know about Trump’s behind-the-scenes conduct during the rampage: He reportedly refused entreaties to call off the mob, even from terrified lawmakers under siege, because he was enjoying watching it on TV.

People like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who is now spinning away Trump’s culpability, should be forced to testify to what Trump was doing during that time. A trial with witnesses could also probe the role of some House Republicans in the “Stop the Steal” movement leading to the insurrection, and any of Trump’s communications with them.

A full accounting is critical. Republicans on the state level are racing forward with new voter-suppression efforts, and Democrats have proposed national reforms that expand voting rights and curb counter-majoritarian tactics. They must be prepared to nix the filibuster to make these reforms law.

A big political battle is coming over all this as well. Democrats must fully dramatize the GOP’s continuing radicalization when it comes to embracing such tactics, so the public understands the stakes of what will be nothing less than a full-scale war over the future of our democracy.

That won’t be helped by any failure to create a full record of the most sustained effort to overturn an election and our democracy in modern times, including via intimidation and violence, or any failure to implicate the GOP in it.

 

Sargent is correct that Democrats should call witnesses and make it hurt. I also agree with him that the GOP will acquit Trump, and that the conclusion is foregone. But the fact remains that they need Trump regime people testifying under oath in front of the country as to what Donald Trump did, because the country has to have the truth. 

I don't have high hopes, however. Being honest, I believe zero Republicans will vote to convict, and the moment he is acquitted he'll announce his 2024 candidacy and use that run to shield himself from any state or federal charges against him.

We'll see.