Like the need to have Stephen Stills and David Crosby join the Spotify boycott, Trump now wants a banana republican coup, complete with violent resistance. Trump names cities where he wants 'protests' (like 1/6): New York, DC, and Atlanta to intimidate prosecutors, but he also wants to signal the same kind of racial animus that inhabits the choice of a new SCOTUS member.
It’s apparently ancient history to demand truth in public. The second impeachment is also not ancient history, even for Senators Susan Collins or Josh Hawley, who echo strange yet familiar GOP rationalizations to criticize the SCOTUS nominee.
Trump’s trigger word was to call prosecutors, “racist”, which signals to trumpian supremacist followers that they should prepare to protest for what Ronald Reagan called a “bloodbath” with the kind of illegal force associated with what used to be call a “race war”.
This is like most Trump messaging — an attempt to divert attention from what now will still circle around to the attempted overthrow of the government and the erasure of American democracy.
A Georgia county prosecutor has reportedly asked the FBI for security help following former President Donald Trump’s calls for protests in cities where he’s being investigated.
Trump is being investigated for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
In a letter on Sunday to the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, J.C. Hacker – which was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution – Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis wrote, “We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
“Security concerns were escalated this weekend by the rhetoric of former President Trump at a public event in Conroe, Texas that was broadcast and covered by national media outlets and shared widely on social media,” she added. “His statements were undoubtedly watched by millions.”
During the Saturday rally, Trump railed against the investigations of him nationwide and called for protests.
“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt,” he said.
www.mediaite.com/...
The beating heart of Donald Trump’s 2020 coup attempt was his effort to use the machinery of government to manufacture pretexts for delaying the electoral count in Congress. To this end, as we know, Trump extensively pressured the Justice Department to issue statements and investigations, to create the phony impression of widespread election fraud.
This provides a big opening to flesh out key unknowns about Trump’s scheme. While some will focus on what seizing machines itself might have accomplished, potentially more interesting is what this says about how far Trump and his co-conspirators went to create smokescreens to justify the procedural coup that unfolded over weeks leading up to Jan. 6.
The crux of the New York Times’ new report is that Trump went farther than previously known in entertaining the use of law enforcement and national security agencies to seize voting machines to cast Joe Biden’s victory as illegitimate.
Trump’s pressure on Barr unfolded as follows:
The meeting with Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.
It appears Trump was listening to more conspiratorial-minded allies — lawyer Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn — about how to thwart the transfer of power, and tried to enlist the Justice Department in the scheme.
Barr told Trump that the department had no basis for seizing the machines, per the Times. But these efforts continued.
Indeed, soon after that, the Times reports, Powell and Flynn tried to prevail on Trump to use the military to seize the machines, but this was resisted by Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a longtime Trump ringleader who for some reason suddenly decided to defend the rule of law.
www.washingtonpost.com/...