I’m sure you’ve all had a close call in your automobile from time to time where by some miracle you managed to take it out of a skid, somehow braked before the car went into a tree or off the road, yes? You recall that awful feeling, maybe your life even flashed before your eyes? That is the sensation that you should be having now as you contemplate the 2020 election. Democracy was careening out of control and we damn near lost it.
It wasn’t pilot error, it was deliberate sabotage of the system, by people who were varied and high up in the food chain of government. We had not only crazy, crooked lawyers, we had the scheming political vigilante wife of a Supreme Court justice and the 11th richest man in the world, Larry Ellison, all sticking their thumbs in whatever pies they could to end a democratic system which heretofore had been respected all over the world.
They wanted fascist rule. They wanted an authoritarian, Donald Trump, to remain in power against the clear will of the American people. Eight million votes is not a slim margin in anybody’s book. And even if it had been eight votes, God forbid we ever get that close, the results should be honored. These people had no intention of honoring the election results, they were plotting a coup d’etat.
On Thursday night, John Eastman once again filed a brief arguing that he should be able to hide documentation associated with an attempt to overthrow the government by overturning the results of the 2020 election. Once again Eastman claims that he has attorney-client privilege with Donald Trump and therefore he should be able to keep hidden documentation of communications pertaining directly to the insurrection.
It is positively comical that he is doing this, because in no way does attorney-client privilege apply when the statements made are done to conceal or further a crime. Yet, and I grow weary of saying this, once again, Eastman is trying to float that proposition. And he’s under court order to produce the documents he’s trying to protect, as he does it. Unbelievable. He needs to lose his license to practice law at the very least and if there is any justice in this country he belongs behind bars. Heather Cox Richardson:
The filing is a litany of grievances against the court, but it does offer some new information. Eastman’s team is seeking to protect communications between Eastman “and one or more of six conduits to or agents of the former President with whom Dr. Eastman dealt.” The filing goes on to specify that three of those people worked on Trump’s campaign and that the other three were “members of former President Trump’s immediate staff.” The filing says, “While Dr. Eastman could (and did) communicate directly with former President Trump at times…, many of his communications with the President were necessarily through these agents.”
Among the documents he wants to protect are “[t]wo…hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation,” as well as documents from state legislators, “a party committeewomen” [sic], and someone who was “coordinating information sessions for state legislators.”
The filing tries to assert that these documents are covered by the attorney-client privilege because Eastman was justified in believing the election was fraudulent, even though reams of evidence have proved it was not. But what it has revealed is that there is written evidence that Trump himself was directly involved in the plotting to overturn the election.
Spin this around in your mind. The sitting president of the United States was directly involved in the plotting to overturn the election. Ask your MAGA friends if they think that’s cool and the way that we should proceed from here on out, if a sitting president should just decide to ignore democracy and attempt to stay in power against the will of the people.
Then we get to Ginni Thomas and how she did everything in her power to influence the Arizona vote. As you well recall, Trump went ballistics when Fox News called Arizona in the Biden blue column and then after that we had the total farce in Maricopa County with the recount. The breaking story last week about Ginni Thomas revealed the extent of how she got personally involved in all that.
This is not normal advocacy. She was calling friends, cronies, including a woman who is running for Arizona secretary of state and if elected would be in charge of certifying elections in the future, to convince these people to overturn the election and select a fresh slate of electors. Ginni Thomas did everything in her power to keep Trump in power against the will of the people. And she’ll probably walk for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she does. Here are the facts. Run these past your MAGA friends.
Today, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story that Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was even more deeply involved in the attack on the election than we knew. Ginni Thomas sent emails to two Arizona lawmakers on November 9, 2020, urging them to ignore the legitimately elected presidential electors for Democrat Joe Biden and replace them with “a clean slate.” Using a platform that provided prewritten emails, she urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure,” and “to fight back against fraud.”
One of the people to whom she wrote, Shawnna Bolick, is married to Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick. The Bolicks are close to Clarence Thomas, who is godfather to one of the Bolicks’ children. Shawnna Bolick responded to Thomas: “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” In 2021, Bolick introduced a bill to allow the Arizona legislature to choose its own electors, regardless of the will of the voters. She is now running for secretary of state, where she would oversee the state’s elections.
Justice Thomas was apparently talking about the leak of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade when on May 6 he told a group of judges and lawyers that our justice system is in danger if people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with.”
I love the irony of that. Yes, we agree, that not only our justice system but our way of life is in grave danger if people are unwilling to live with outcomes that they don’t like. Why don’t you tell that to your wife, aka best friend? It appears that she never learned that lesson.
Coming out of Clarence Thomas’ mouth it is truly comical. People demonstrating is one thing, people plotting to overthrow the government is something else altogether.
And then we get to Larry Ellison, the Oracle tech magnate. His doings are most interesting.
And then, this afternoon, [Friday] Isaac Stanley-Becker and Shawn Boburg, also of the Washington Post, reported that the billionaire co-founder, chair, and chief technology officer of the computer technology corporation Oracle, Larry Ellison, also participated in a call about the 2020 election. Legal filings in a court case against True the Vote, an organization that has spread lies about widespread voter fraud, contained a note from True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht that read: “Jim [Bopp, a lawyer for True the Vote] was on a call this evening with [Trump lawyer] Jay Sekulow, [South Carolina Senator] Lindsey O. Graham, [Fox News Channel personality] Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison…. He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that’s what I’m working on now.”
“It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.” [according to the Post]
Ellison, whom Stanley-Becker and Boburg identify as the 11th richest person in the world, gives significant money to right-wing causes and candidates, including Lindsey Graham, to whom he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2018. More recently, he pledged $1 billion of the $44 billion deal for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.
Interesting how all the ducks line up in a row, isn’t it? You’ve got Ellison dealing with True the Vote, the proselytizer of lies about the election, and they’re dealing with Fox News, the proselytizer of lies about everything, and Ellison also funds good little lap dog Lindsey Graham, no surprise there. And the one billion bucks to help Elon Musk take over Twitter is the absolute cherry on the freaking sundae.
Share these facts with your MAGA friends. Tell them not to think so much about Italian satellites and mules stuffing mail boxes with phony ballots. None of that is the problem. That’s the colorful diversion. Tell them to follow the money and check out the cronyism of the rich and the powerful. That’s what went wrong in this election. Nothing less.
There’s reason to think that the ab*rtion draft decision was leaked by either Alito or Ginni Thomas.