It is small wonder that in the last days of the reign of Trump that Bill Barr couldn’t wait to get away. Yet more evidence is pouring out of an investigation started by the House Oversight Committee that Trump knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on with respect to providing widespread election fraud but that didn’t worry him in the slightest. The man never heard of abuse of power. That’s a concept for pussies.
Yes, we know you’re numb, so are we all, but try to wrap your mind around the fact that Trump was literally asking the Department of Justice to become co-conspirators with him in a plot to overthrow the results of a free and fair election — ergo, democracy. New York Times:
“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement.
Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus on overturning the election results. At one point, Mr. Trump claimed voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted elections.” Mr. Donoghue pushed back.
“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Mr. Donoghue said, adding that the department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and had not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Mr. Trump, according to the notes.
The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063 percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it found no evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes.
Mr. Trump, undeterred, brushed off the department’s findings. “Ok fine — but what about the others?” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes describing the president’s remarks. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Donoghue to travel to Fulton County to verify signatures on ballots.
The people “saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt,” Mr. Trump told the officials, adding that they needed to act. “Not much time left.”
At another point, Mr. Donoghue said that the department could quickly verify or disprove the assertion that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there are voters.
“Should be able to check on that quickly, but understand that the D.O.J. can’t and won’t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes.
The officials also told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no evidence to support a lawsuit regarding the election results. “We are not in a position based on the evidence,” they said. “We can only act on the actual evidence developed.”
Mr. Trump castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.”
This is a lengthy article and if you only have time to read one in its entirety today, pick this one. It’s vintage Trump all the way, total unawareness of protocol, complete lack of concern that what he’s asking career professionals to do is unethical and illegal as hell.
For the nth time I marvel at how close we came to losing the republic. Somehow the guard rails held, but we can’t let another situation like this develop or the next time we won’t be so lucky.
The shock isn’t that Trump did this. As with all his other crimes, it remains how terrible he was at covering them up. Make no mistake…this is the sort of power play Liz Cheney’s dad would have gotten behind with enough of the right prep and plausible deniability. I’ve a feeling that the sane Republicans (exiled or otherwise) will curse Trump’s name in the same way they now forget W’s. He gave away far too much of the game.
Sadly, only if (or, if there’s any justice left WHEN) he’s down, proverbially in a coma and only kept “alive” via machines will most in the GOP find enough “courage” to finally kick him – when he’s down and they know he not only can’t fight back but won’t even know he’s being kicked, much less who’s doing the kicking!
Geese, DJT the dumbest ass in History … just think, a guy that knows nothing about anything and how it works … he’s responsible in so many ways for how bad the virus has become and the high number of deaths in the US, millions of dollars wasted money, just playing golf on our dime …
I guess he could have been worse … what if he really new stuff, like getting through a door with his umbrella, he might have known how to use his power of the pen to destroy more than just the sacred lands of the Indians, his border wall fiasco, money laundering, accepting gifts from international sources to allow them to enter his lair of abused young girls … Mar-o-golf.
Sometimes I forget, he plays up the number 45, is that the IQ rating or is that two much credit?
ehhhhhh, it’s close. I mean, an I.Q. of 45 would explain his diapers…
Traitor has an IQ of -45! and there are no “sane” republicans…they are all republiQanons now!
Have they ever done it any other way, delliot? Myself, I’m content enough that they got so weak as a party that a rank incompetent like him could skyrocket to the top. The Pharoah treatment of erasing his name and legacy seems an apt punishment.
This is modus operendi for the Trumpster. It was the same deal in Saudi Arabia not that the allied government needed to actually launch an investigation into Hunter Biden, the presidents son, they need only proclaim their intentions to open an investigation. Thats all Trump and Company, needed just make the announcement, and Trump and his loyal rats would do the rest. And of course the arms would flow again! Trump would say to staffers to spread I cant imagine that arms deal getting held up? What arms deal?
Someone pointed out that when we requote the sound byte in the title we are leaving something out – he actually said “Leave the rest to me AND OUR ALLIES IN CONGRESS.” I maintain that, since most of us are literate, we are forgetting that last phrase because Lady Macbeth didn’t say it. Shakespeare trained our ears and brains to stop after “to me.” But regardless, it’s a point which deserves our attention, not merely the attention of the Select Committee.