The Green Bay Sweep of Peter Navarro makes the Insurrection(s) still quite engaged with external influencers no different than the unpursued elements of the Mueller Report.
So what was the Green Bay Sweep? The plot, Navarro writes, was named after a famous football play designed by storied 1960’s NFL coach Vince Lombardi, in which a Packers running back would pound into the end zone behind a “phalanx of blockers.”
For the 2021 Green Bay Sweep, Navarro writes, Bannon played the role of Lombardi. The plan was to have members of the House and Senate raise challenges to the counts of Electoral College votes from six pivotal battleground states.
“The political and legal beauty of the strategy,” Navarro writes, is that the challenges would force up to two hours of debate per state, in each chamber of Congress. “That would add up to as much as 24 hours of nationally televised hearings,” Navarro writes. The hearings would enable Republicans to “short-circuit the crushing censorship of the anti-Trump media,” Navarro hoped, and broadcast their Big Lie that Democrats had stollen the election “directly to the American people.”
The goal was not to get the election overturned on Jan. 6. Instead, they aimed to create such a spectacle that Pence would be forced to exercise his authority as president of the Senate to “put the certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks” while Congress and the state legislatures pursued the “fraud” allegations. The dark particulars for how Trump would remain in office after that are not spelled out, and Navarro did not immediately answer an email seeking clarification. But he writes that the Green Bay Sweep was the “last, best chance to snatch a stolen election from the Democrats’ jaws of deceit.”
The problem with the plot was that its success hinged on “Quarterback Mike” — and Pence wasn’t solidly on board. Navarro writes that he tried, with Trump’s backing, to brief Pence on his claims of election irregularities, but that Pence was kept off-limits by his chief of staff, Marc Short. (Navarro seethes that Short was part of the Koch brothers wing of the GOP, having previously worked for a nonprofit backed by the Kochs. When Short came to work for the vice president, Navarro writes, “it was like the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe. As an Iron Koch Curtain fell over the vice president, the only way you could speak to VPOTUS was to go through Short.”)
www.rollingstone.com/...
Madison Cawthorn does a solid for Russian state TV news while calling speculation about his marriage a conspiracy theory.
Representative Madison Cawthorn has criticized a "conspiracy theory" that his soon-to-be ex-wife is part of a Russian plot following the resurfacing of a video where he discussed how the two met.
In a 2020 interview with Stephanie Hamill of right-wing site The Daily Caller, Cawthorn told a story of how he was introduced to his wife, Cristina Bayardelle Cawthorn, at a fake CrossFit competition after being invited to the event by a U.S. army captain he had originally met in a casino in St. Petersburg, Russia.
[...]
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who has long been the subject of strong criticism by conservatives, suggested on Twitter that Cawthorn appeared "nervous" at one point during the interview and that "[w]e lack a lot of context."
"But it's clear there's something unusual—whether he's nervous or lying or something else—about how he found himself in St P," Strzok said. "Is he some nefarious Russian penetration? Almost certainly not. Is there something more here? Almost certainly yes."
www.msn.com/...
In the years since, the United States has become one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Experts say that hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the US every year. As Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) noted last year, “[I]t’s illegal for foreigners to contribute to our campaigns, but if you launder your money through a front company with anonymous ownership there is very little we can do to stop you.”
About a year ago, Congress took on this threat by including the Corporate Transparency Act in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act. It undercut shell companies and money laundering by requiring the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file a report that identifies each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercises substantial control over it. That report, including name, birthdate, address, and an identifying number, goes to FinCEN. The measure also increases penalties for money laundering and streamlines cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities.
Now, of course, the Biden administration has made addressing corruption a centerpiece of its attempt to shore up democracy both at home and abroad. In June, Biden declared the fight against corruption a core US national security interest. “Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” he wrote. “But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.”
In early December, two days before the Biden administration hosted the Summit for Democracy, a gathering of 110 countries to consider ways to strengthen democracy, it announced a comprehensive strategy for countering corruption. The plan pulls together the Departments of State, Treasury, and Commerce, along with the US Agency for International Development, to expose global financial shenanigans, hold corrupt actors to account, and protect journalists who dig into stories of corruption.
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/...
In some ways, the collapse of the USSR thirty years ago helped to undermine the Cold War democracy that opposed it. In the past thirty years, we have torn ourselves apart as politicians adhering to an extreme ideology demonized their opponents. That demonization is escalating now as Republican radicals who were born after the collapse of the USSR and who therefore see their primary enemies as Democrats, are moving the Republican Party even further to the right. North Carolina representative Madison Cawthorn, for example, was born in 1995.
That demonization has also helped to justify the deregulation of our economy and then the illicit money from the rising oligarchs it attracted, money that has corrupted our democratic system. It appears the Biden administration is trying to cut off the flow of that poison. Removing it, and thus the finger it puts on the scales for certain politicians, might also help to address the extreme polarization that has come to characterize our politics and society in the years since Gorbachev resigned.
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/...
When a replicated version of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) website surfaced on the internet suggesting that President Joe Biden had proposed plan for COVID concentration camps, Senate candidate J.D. Vance fired back with critical remarks aimed at the president. However, there is just one problem with his criticism: the website was completely fake.
Now, the gullible Trump-supporting Senate hopeful is on the receiving end of the criticism. According to The Daily Beast, there were a number of elements on the site that indicated it was a parody but apparently, the "Hillbilly Elegy" author and Yale Law School graduate overlooked those details and immediately launched his attack.
One of the most glaring details is the DHS Secretary listed on the parody. Instead of listing the correct person, the site features the name of an actor.
"The venture capitalist and would-be politician perhaps should have noticed that the site—which claimed to outline government intentions to restrict cross-state travel and set up Australia-like "quarantine centers"—listed the DHS Secretary not as present officeholder Alejandro Mayorkas but as Tim Woods, otherwise known as the DHS secretary in two seasons of the TV show 24," the news outlet wrote.
