Iraq snapshot Thursday, October 3, 2024.

Iraq snapshot

The Common Ills 

Thursday, October 3, 2024.  New details emerge about Donald Trump's attempted January 5th coup.

Starting with the news regarding Donald Trump's attempted coup.   Madeline Halpert (BBC NEWS) reports on Special Counsel  Jack Smith's new filing,  "The new 165-page document presents the clearest view yet of how Mr Smith's team would pursue their case, having tweaked the wording of their charges after the Supreme Court's intervention.  It gives details of Trump's alleged scheme, including his actions when his supporters rioted at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. It also outlines the efforts of Mike Pence, the vice-president at the time, to talk him down."  It outlines a lot more than just that and, in being released raises a central question that will get to in a bit.  But let's all remember that in Tuesday's vice presidential debate, Miss Sassy JD Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Tim Walz: There's one, there's one, though, that this one is troubling to me. And I say that because I think we need to tell the story. Donald Trump refused to acknowledge this. And the fact is, is that I don't think we can be the frog in the pot and let the boiling water go up. He was very clear. I mean, he lost this election, and he said he didn't. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died. And it wasn't just in there. In Minnesota, a group gathered on the state capitol grounds in St. Paul and said we're marching to the Governor's residence and there may be casualties. The only person there was my son and his dog, who was rushed out crying by state police. That issue. And Mike Pence standing there as they were chanting, hang Mike Pence. Mike Pence made the right decision. So, Senator, it was adjudicated over and over and over. I worked with kids long enough to know, and I said, as a football coach, sometimes you really want to win, but the democracy is bigger than winning an election. You shake hands and then you try and do everything you can to help the other side win. That's, that's what was at stake here. Now, the thing I'm most concerned about is the idea that imprisoning your political opponents already laying the groundwork for people not accepting this. And a President's words matter. A President's words matter. People hear that. So I think this issue of settling our differences at the ballot box, shaking hands when we lose, being honest about it, but to deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a President or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power. And here we are four years later in the same boat. I will tell you this, that when this is over, we need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the winner. This has got to stop. It's tearing our country apart. 

[. . .]

Tim Walz: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?

JD Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

Tim Walz: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.

And it's even more of a damning non-answer as a result of the release of Straw's filing.  Here's last night's NEWSHOUR (PBS).

Here's the transcript.

• Amna Nawaz:

  We're learning previously undisclosed details tonight about former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

  A newly unsealed 165-page court filing from the Department of Justice argues the former president should still face trial even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled presidents have immunity for official acts.

  NPR's Carrie Johnson and former U.S. attorney Mary McCord are following the latest developments. They join me now.

  Welcome to you both.

  So, Carrie, what do we know about why this filing was unsealed now by Judge Tanya Chutkan, and what stood out to you as you made your way through it?

• Carrie Johnson, NPR:

  Yes, the Justice Department made this filing in response to what the Supreme Court did this past summer.

  The Supreme Court ruled that Trump and future presidents do enjoy substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts. But the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team maintain that Trump was acting as a political candidate and not the president of the United States when he allegedly attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

  And this court filing today was filed under seal a short while ago. There's been some back-and-forth about how much the public should be able to see. And just this afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan mostly sided with prosecutors and released this filing with some redactions.

  There are some new details in here based on grand jury testimony and notes that people like former Vice President Mike Pence took about his interactions with former President Donald Trump. There's some really interesting mentions of notes that Pence took about this all being up to Pence in the later part of 2020 and early 2021 as people prepared to count the electoral votes on January 6.

  And there's some new detail from prosecutors, who maintain that Trump himself was in the dining room near the Oval Office tweeting on January 6 as Mike Pence was in danger from rioters in the Capitol. And Trump allegedly said to an aide who asked him about all this: "So what?"

  So there's a lot of new color and vivid detail about Trump's alleged actions and his state of mind and his knowledge in those waning weeks of 2020 and early 2021.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Mary, we knew this was an argument that Jack Smith was going to lay out, saying, even though Trump was holding the official office of president, his scheme, as he writes in the filing — quote — "was a fundamentally private one."

  Just broadly speaking, how does he make that case here and how compelling a case is that?

• Mary McCord, Former Justice Department Official:

  He goes through all of the different facets of the scheme the pressure on state legislatures, the pressure on his own vice president, the efforts to orchestrate the fraudulent electors scheme, and his comments not only at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, but in the lead-up to that, including public speeches and tweets.

  And he — and Jack Smith emphasizes at every step how many private actors, private attorneys, and advisers, including some of his co-conspirators, were involved in so many of these efforts. He also makes the point about there not being executive branch officials involved in these various efforts.

  And he also adds, I think, some really interesting details, to go to Carrie's point about showing his capacity as a candidate. He adds details about, when he's pressuring state legislatures, for example, and state government officials, he is, for one, only pressuring Republicans. He never calls, for example, the Michigan Democratic governor or secretary of state to complain about election fraud.

  He only pressures Republicans. And in those states that are led by Democrats, he instead pressures state legislatures. He constantly refers only to his own race when he talks about fraud in the election and never to the election more generally. So, in other words, claims of election integrity, you would expect to be calling into question a number of different facets of the election, but, instead, he focused only on himself.

  So, Jack Smith really does paint quite a vivid picture throughout not only the first part of this motion, which includes this extensive factual recitation, but particularly in his legal analysis and his application of the law, the law that the Supreme Court laid down in Trump v. United States, to the facts of this case.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Carrie, I want to underscore here that moment you briefly mentioned about Mr. Trump's reaction to learning that his vice president had been taken to a secure location. Here is what is actually written out in the filing related to that.

  Jack Smith writes that: "Upon receiving a phone call, learning that Pence had been taken to a secure location, a redacted person rushed to the dining room to inform the defendants in hopes the defendant would take action to ensure Pence's safety. Instead, after he delivered the news, the defendant," in this case, former President Trump, "looked at him and said only: 'So what?'"

  What else do we learn from this, Carrie, about the many efforts Vice President Pence made to offer then-President Trump an off-ramp from these false claims of election fraud?

• Carrie Johnson:

  Yes, we learned a lot about conversations that Pence had with Trump, as well as Pence's aides, who met with some of Trump's alleged co-conspirators, people we believe to be former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, law professor John Eastman, and others who were advancing these bogus claims.

  And after they tried all kinds of other efforts in the courts and with the states, they basically failed at all of those things, and it came down for them to Mike Pence. And so they placed enormous pressure on Pence, tried to signal that he had the power to overturn the will of millions of voters.

  And Pence wasn't buying it. Nor was one of his legal aides who's testified before the house January 6 Committee. And we get a lot of detail about that. Pence basically says to Trump, why don't you try again? Take this — sit this one out. You can try again in 2024. And Trump and his top aides were just not having it.

  In fact, Trump called Pence on January 5 and the morning of January 6 asked him to be tough. And Pence was under enormous pressure, as we saw in that period, but, still, he held firm and refused to go along with this alleged scheme.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Mary, there are some newly disclosed details in here, some newly confirmed details. Much of it was also known from the results of the January 6 hearings. But the big question is, now what?

  What kind of impact will this filing have on the case moving forward?

• Mary McCord:

  Right.

  So now it will be Mr. Trump's legal counsel's turn to file a response to this and make arguments in opposition to Jack Smith's arguments.

  So he has argued that, for each facet of the scheme, Mr. Trump's conduct — well, first of all, for his pressure on his vice president, where the Supreme Court said that could — that's official, they have made a showing and an argument that they can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing through the evidence that prosecution for this illegal pressure on Mike Pence would not create any danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.

  For every other category, he argues that acts are private and not official. And even if the court were to find they were official, again, he can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing prosecution would have no danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.

  And this is something that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her concurring opinion, she pointed out some areas that she thought were private and said if she had — she thought the majority should have said so in its opinion, and some areas where she thought the presumption was rebutted.

• Amna Nawaz:

  That is former U.S. attorney Mary McCord and NPR's Carrie Johnson joining us tonight.

  Thank you to you both.

Here's ABC NEWS zooming on Donald Trump insisting immediately after the 2020 election that the actual results -- HE LOST! -- do not matter.

 

And here's Chris Hayes discussing it on MSNBC  with Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow and Chris focuses on the Tweet  Donald used to put a target on then-Vice President Mike Pence's back.

The released court filing (here) contains a lot of newly released facts and it also provides a timeline of the attempt by Donald Trump to attack our democracy.  There's so much in there that anyone should be able to find new details and facts.  

In the discussion above in the MSNBC clip, Rachel noted:

One of the things that I never connected before is something that's provided on page 63 of this document.  We knew from Pence's memoir, that when he was really making clear, as of New Year's Day, as of January 1st, that he was not going to go along with this, that all of the lobbying of him was not working,  we know from his memoir that Trump threatened him and said that, "Hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts."  We knew he had done that.  What I did not know before reading this today is that he's threatening him that hundreds of thousands of people are going to effectively come after him for what he's doing here and then immediately after he says that to Pence, immediately afterwards, he Tweets a reminder to all of his supporters to make sure you're going to be in Washington, DC on January 6th.  I mean when he makes that threat to Pence, he's already announced "will be wild, come for January 6th," he tells him hundreds of thousands of people will come for you and then he hits a reminder in Twitter telling people that they need to show up so that they can make good on the threat.  It is just wielding the promise of an angry mob as a deliberate threat and as as one that he is planning to make good on.  And I have never seen it laid out that way before even though I knew the individual pieces and it just sent a chill down my spine.

And as you hear about the filing, as you read about it, read it and/or watch videos about it, you'll probably have a similar reaction.  Erik De La Garza (RAW STORY) notes:

“I don’t usually gasp at things,” said MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin during an appearance with host Nicole Wallace on Wednesday on her show “Deadline: White House," but added, “We are learning facts that weren’t previously known to us.”

“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” Wallace said before going on to read from page 142 of the massive document, including a portion where Trump reportedly responded with, “So what?” when delivered the news that Mike Pence was taken to a secure location because of fears over his safety.

“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said, adding that the new court filing contains more information than what has previously been released by the Jan. 6 committee investigation. “There is a whole lot of new content here Nicole and that is just one part of it.”

MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman took it a step further when he called Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and in the lead-up to Jan. 6 the most serious crime “in American history.”

“What you have here is chapter and verse over and over again about an effort, a conspiracy – a criminal conspiracy – to thwart the will of the American electorate,” Weissman, a former FBI general counsel, told Wallace. “There is no more serious crime in American history than that.”

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling (THE NEW REPUBLIC) digs into the report and notes: 

At one point, Smith details how a Trump campaign employee was informed that a final batch of ballots at a Detroit vote-counting center would favor Joe Biden. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the staffer said. “Give me options to file litigation.”

When a colleague warned doing so could spark unrest, the staffer replied, “Make them riot.”

Smith’s motion also indicates that the special counsel intends to prove Trump and his allies baselessly invented claims that noncitizens were voting in U.S. elections, and ignored indications that their theory that dead Americans were casting their votes was flat-out wrong.

The motion further reveals that the MAGA politicos failed to deliver on their own election fraud theories. They promised to “package up” evidence of the election-stealing crime and then never delivered it to its intended recipients, namely former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, where two prongs of the scheme have resulted in sprawling election conspiracy cases.

Here are two more videos that should be streamed on this important topic.

At MOTHER JONES, Dan Friedman observes:

The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court in its controversial July 1 decision.

But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.

Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does consider Trump’s status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings, rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews, grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though parts of that could also be made public before election day.

Combine that with this from Katelyn Polantz, Tierney Sneed, John Fritze, Hannah Rabinowitz, Devan Cole, Holmes Lybrand and Marshall Cohen (CNN):

       

More evidence could come out in coming days. A hefty appendix accompanying Wednesday’s filing remains under seal, and the judge has asked both sides to weigh in on how much of it should be made public. Among the documents in the appendix are grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.

    

Donald staged a coup.  He should be in prison.  But he's not our only issue.  U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon needs to be removed from the bench immediately.  Her constant delays in this case and her eventual dismissal of it were questioned by other justices and legal scholars.  Now knowing some of what we do -- things Cannon already knew -- we see that she worked to deprive the American people -- ahead of an election -- of the details and facts that they needed.  They needed to know how the coup was staged, they needed to Donald Trump's involvement.  The right of a citizenry to be informed, to be informed voters, didn't matter to Aileen.  She saw her position on the bench as running interference for the man that got her that post.  She betrayed the law, she betrayed our judicial system.  

These shocking things that we're learning -- and more may be coming -- were shielded by her.  She refused to allow the American people to know what went down as our democracy was attacked.

Her rulings have been questionable from the beginning; however, it is no longer speculation about what she was doing.  Her intent some can argue.  But her decisions and her actions prevented the American people from knowledge they should have had, from facts they should have known.  She did not pursue justice, instead she worked to cover up a crime.  She should be removed from the bench.  

Winding down with Will Bunch.  Over the weekend, Donald Trump advocated for a lawless purge period attacking people in the United States.  Many outlets have ignored it.  Will Bunch covers it below:

This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.

That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.

And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”

Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...

And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.

“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”

America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.

Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?