Even with the previous guy distractions, we await that Bigly shoe to drop at DoJ, despite something, something Texas election audits even though Trump won the state.
Remember that Robert Mueller said that once Trump was no longer president, he could be prosecuted for 10 counts of obstruction of justice. Slowly we turn, step by step...
Former Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, and criminal defense lawyer, Richard Signorelli, came on Narativ Live and in a long-form interview with Zev, pulled no punches. He referred to Donald J. Trump as a “madman,” a “sociopath,” “not that bright” and a continuous danger to America. In addition, Signorelli blamed Trump for hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths.
Zev opened the interview with the question on everyone’s mind: just what exactly is taking so long to prosecute Trump?
Signorelli said it’s a very complex case, and we won’t know what’s going on behind closed doors in relation to the investigation of the Insurrection, the planning, and the overthrowing Democracy.
”The hope is that things are going on behind the scenes,” he said. “At the right time and in the right way, indictments will be filed, arrests will occur, and hopefully Trump will be brought to justice.”
He revealed an interesting take on Attorney General Merrick Garland, predicting he will either go down in history as failing the country in its time of need or he is brewing up a massive federal case against Trump.
“There are cases he could bring now,” he said. “The Mueller Report lays out a case of obstruction of justice, and that should have been brought by now. Even Bob Mueller testified that this is a criminal case that could be brought. The second case is campaign finance fraud involving Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.”
narativ.org/…
Trump took at face value rumors that Putin was the richest man in the world and told close associates that he admired Putin for his presumed wealth and for the way he ran Russia as if it were his own private company. As Trump freely admitted, he wanted to do the same thing. He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at its disposal. This was a troubling perspective for a U.S. president, and indeed, over the course of his time in office, Trump came to more closely resemble Putin in political practice than he resembled any of his American predecessors.
At times, the similarities between Trump and Putin were glaringly obvious: their shared manipulation and exploitation of the domestic media, their appeals to their own versions of their countries’ “golden age,” their compilation of personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia and conservatism—and their attendant compilation of personal lists of enemies to do the same for their voters’ darker sides. Putin put statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Trump tried to prevent the removal of statues of Confederate leaders and the renaming of American military bases honoring Confederate generals. The two men also shared many of the same enemies: cosmopolitan, liberal elites; the American financier, philanthropist, and open society promoter George Soros; and anyone trying to expand voting rights, improve electoral systems, or cast a harsh light on corruption in their countries’ respective executive branches.
Trump also aped Putin’s willingness to abuse his executive power by going after his political adversaries; Trump’s first impeachment was provoked in part by his attempt to coerce the government of Ukraine into smearing one of his most formidable opponents, Joe Biden, ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And Trump imported Putin’s style of personalist rule, bypassing the professional civil servants in the federal government—a nefarious “deep state,” in Trump’s eyes—to rely instead on the counsel and interventions of cronies. Foreign politicians called in chits with celebrities who had personal connections to the president and his family, avoiding their own embassies in the process. Lobbyists complained to whomever they could reach in the West Wing or the Trump family circle. They were quick to set attack dogs on anyone perceived as an obstacle and to rile up pro-Trump trolls on the Internet, because this always seemed to work. Influence peddlers both domestic and foreign courted the president to pursue their own priorities; the policymaking process became, in essence, privatized.
[...]
It would have been impossible for any close observer of recent Russian history to not recall those episodes on January 6, when a mob whipped up by Trump and his allies—who had spent weeks claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him—stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to stop the formal certification of the election results. The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of four years of conspiracies and lies that Trump and his allies had fed to his supporters on social media platforms, in speeches, and on television. The “Big Lie” that Trump had won the election was built on the backs of the thousands of little lies that Trump uttered nearly every time he spoke and that were then nurtured within the dense ecosystem of Trumpist media outlets. This was yet one more way in which, under Trump, the United States came to resemble Russia, where Putin has long solidified his grip on power by manipulating the Russian media, fueling nationalist grievances, and peddling conspiracy theories.
www.foreignaffairs.com/...
"If Republican leaders don't stand up and condemn what happened then [1/6], the voices in the party that are so dangerous will only get louder and stronger," Liz Cheney.
A Brookings Institution report by multiple legal experts (summarized for The Post) looks at former president Donald Trump’s possible criminal liability in Georgia, stemming from his call after the 2020 election demanding that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” just enough Trump ballots to flip the state’s electoral votes. We should consider what the basis for charges would be, why it is more critical than ever to pursue prosecution and why, regardless of Georgia’s actions, the Justice Department must pursue a wide-ranging investigation and, if warranted, prosecution based on Trump’s entire scheme.
The Brookings report makes a strong case. “We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes,” the authors find. “These charges potentially include criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations.”
www.washingtonpost.com/…