I believe the question circulating was: What's the harm in letting him vent through his last days?A New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.
[...]
Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.
Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.
In the Senate, he got early room to maneuver from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell. As he sought the president’s help in Georgia runoffs that could cost him his own grip on power, Mr. McConnell heeded misplaced assurances from White House aides like Jared Kushner that Mr. Trump would eventually accede to reality, people close to the senator told The Times.
[...]
Likewise, during the campaign, Attorney General William P. Barr had echoed some of Mr. Trump’s complaints of voter fraud. But privately the president was chafing at Mr. Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses — including his idea to end birthright citizenship in a legally dubious pre-election executive order. And when Mr. Barr informed Mr. Trump in a tense Oval Office session that the Justice Department’s fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way.
For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.
[...]
As Election Day approached, Mr. Trump and those closest to him believed that his lead would be insurmountable, their views swayed by the assurances of pro-Trump pundits and the unscientific measure of the size and excitement of the president’s rally crowds. Yet for months he had also been preparing an argument to dispute a possible loss: that it could only be due to a vast conspiracy of fraud.
[...]
Gathered in the East Room of the White House on election night, Mr. Trump and his entourage fell into enraged disbelief as his lead inexorably dissipated, even in formerly red states like Arizona, which Fox called for Mr. Biden at 11:20 in what the president took as a stinging betrayal. Eric Trump goaded him on — a dynamic that would play out in the weeks to come.
[...]
[I]n a brief televised address shortly before 2:30 a.m. [November 4], Mr. Trump furiously laid down his postelection lie. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election — frankly, we did win this election,” the president declared. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
[...]
On Fox, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, predicted that Mr. Trump’s supporters would erupt in rage “as they watch Joe Biden’s Democratic Party steal the election in Philadelphia, steal the election in Atlanta, steal the election in Milwaukee.” On Thursday night, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told Laura Ingraham on Fox: “Everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet, do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.”
[...]
On Oct. 31, an obscure website, The American Report, had published a story saying that a supercomputer called the Hammer, running software called Scorecard, would be used to steal votes from Mr. Trump.
The story’s authors had spent years spreading false claims that the Obama administration had used the Hammer to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign — in their telling, a central part of the deep-state conspiracy that spawned the Russia investigation and Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
Their reports were sourced to Dennis Montgomery, a onetime national security contractor described by his former lawyer as a “con man,” and were often backed by Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general whose military résumé could lend credibility to the fantastical tales.
Mr. McInerney was just emerging from conservative media purgatory. Two years earlier, Fox had banned him after he falsely stated that Senator John McCain had shared military secrets while he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. But he was finding new exposure through social media and new outlets, like One America News and Mr. Bannon’s podcast and radio show, “War Room: Pandemic,” that had elastic ideas about journalistic standards of verification.
The Hammer and Scorecard story came together with disparate conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems that had been kicking around on the left and the right, most forcefully on the Twitter feed of a Republican congressman from Arizona, Paul Gosar.
[...]
On ABC’s “This Week” on Nov. 8, the senior Republican senator overseeing elections, Roy Blunt of Missouri, declared that the old rules no longer applied. “The media can project, but the media doesn’t get to decide who the winner is,” he said. “There is a canvassing process. That needs to happen.”
The senator who mattered most, whose words would have the greatest bearing on Mr. Trump’s odds-against campaign, was the majority leader, Mr. McConnell of Kentucky.
Mr. McConnell was playing a long game.
[...]
McConnell knew that by [contradicting Trump], he would endanger his own overriding political goal — winning the two runoffs in Georgia and maintaining Republican control of the Senate, which would allow him to keep his power as majority leader. If he provoked Mr. Trump’s anger, he would almost certainly lose the president’s full support in Georgia.
[...]
The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.
NYT
Barr's pathetic attempts to control the monster he helped create should not get any kudos.Mr. McConnell said, “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” He added, “A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.”
[...]
That night, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then the Judiciary Committee chairman, went on Sean Hannity’s program to share an affidavit from a postal worker in Erie, Pa., who said he had overheard supervisors discussing illegally backdating postmarks on ballots that had arrived too late to be counted. He had forwarded it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned — I’ve had it with these people. Let’s fight back,” Mr. Graham said. “We lose elections because they cheat us.”
Earlier that day, however, the postal worker had recanted his statement in an interview with federal investigators — even though he continued to push his story online afterward.
[...]
But another allegation had just captured the presidential imagination: A truck driver on contract with the Postal Service was claiming that he had delivered many thousands of illegally filled-out ballots to Pennsylvania from a depot on Long Island.
Federal investigators had determined that that one, too, was bunk. Court records showed that the driver had a history of legal problems, had been involuntarily committed to mental institutions several times and had a sideline as a ghost hunter, The York Daily Record reported.
Now, with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”
But before Mr. Barr left the building, the president tweeted out the truck driver’s account, which quickly gained 154,000 mentions on Twitter, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs. The driver would appear on Newsmax, Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” and “Hannity,” among the most-watched programs on cable.
Days later, that allegation was featured in a lawsuit with an extraordinary request: that the court decertify the Pennsylvania result and strip Mr. Biden of the state’s delegates — a call to potentially disenfranchise nearly seven million voters.
[...]
Contradicting the president, the campaign lawyers — and even Mr. Giuliani — had in several cases acknowledged in court that they were not alleging fraud. Rather, they argued that in bending rules to make mail voting easier during the pandemic — extending deadlines, striking requirements for witness signatures — secretaries of state or state courts or election boards had improperly usurped their legislatures’ role.
Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.
As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.
If the theory was short on legal or factual merit, it was rich in the sort of sensational claims — the swirl of forged ballots and “deep state” manipulation of voting machines — that would allow Mr. Trump to revive his fight, give his millions of voters hope that he could still prevail and perhaps even foment enough chaos to somehow bring about an undemocratic reversal in his favor.
[...]
Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.
As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.
[...]
The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).
[...]
The obvious choice to bring the suit was Ken Paxton of Texas, an ardent proponent of the president’s voter-fraud narrative who had filed a number of lawsuits and legal memos challenging the pandemic-related expansion of mail-in voting.
[...]
Condemnation, some of it from conservative legal experts, rained down. The suit made “a mockery of federalism” and “would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles,” read a brief from a group of Republican office holders and former administration officials. Putting a finer point on it, Richard L. Hasen, an election-law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, called it “a heaping pile of a lawsuit.”
One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
That prompted a call from the president, who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed.
[...]
The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
[...]
At Mr. Trump’s urging, the Republican Attorneys General Association made one final play, asking Mr. Barr to back the suit. He refused.
On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no right to challenge other states’ votes.
[...]
If the highest court in the land couldn’t do it, there had to be some other way.
And so they came the next day, by the thousands, to a long-planned rally in Washington, filling Freedom Plaza with red MAGA caps and Trump and QAnon flags, vowing to carry on. The president’s legal campaign to subvert the election might have been unraveling, but their most trusted sources of information were glossing over the cascading losses, portraying as irrefutable the evidence of rampant fraud.
[...]
Within hours of the last poll closings on election night, Women for America First had started organizing, forming one of the first major “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups — shut down within 22 hours for posts that the platform said could lead to violence — and holding the first major rally on the Mall, on Nov. 14. The rally permit predicted 10,000 protesters; the crowd was far larger.
[...]
The group tapped new veins of financing, with sponsorships from Mr. Bannon’s “War Room,” which paid $5,000, and Mr. Lindell, who said he believed he gave $50,000. It helped the group lease the bus and paint it MAGA red, with a huge photo of Mr. Trump and the logos of MyPillow, “War Room” and other sponsors emblazoned on the sides.
As they made their way across the country, they reached out to local elected officials and branches of the Republican National Committee. But with the social media platforms starting to block groups promoting the stolen-election theory, Ms. Lawrence explained, the bus tour would also give “people the outlet that if they’d been de-platformed, they were able to come out and be around like-minded people.”
[...]
There were early warning signs of the explosion to come.
In Tennessee, a church that was to host a rally canceled after threats of violence.
[...]
Following a rally in Des Moines, an armed and armored protester shot a Black teenager in the leg after she and some friends drove by taunting the crowd.
[...]
In an interview, [My Pillow CEO Mike] Lindell said he had sponsored the bus tour so that he could share the findings of investigations he was financing — he was spending $1 million in all — to produce evidence of voter fraud, including for Ms. Powell’s Dominion lawsuits.
“Donald Trump got so many votes that they didn’t expect, it broke the algorithms in the machines,” he told the crowd in Des Moines. “What they had to do was backfill the votes.” Ms. Powell, he said, had “the proof, 100 percent the proof.”
Mr. Trump was watching and, seeing the tour’s success, even helicoptered above the Dec. 12 rally on Marine One.
[...]
The day after the Electoral College certified the votes as expected, Mitch McConnell moved to bring the curtain down. He called the president’s chief of staff, Mr. Meadows, to say that he would be acknowledging Mr. Biden as president-elect that afternoon on the Senate floor.
Mr. McConnell had been holding off in part because of the earlier assurances from Mr. Meadows and Mr. Kushner, and he had been inclined to believe them when Mr. Trump finally freed the General Services Administration to begin the transition. Yet even now, the president was refusing to concede. “This fake election can no longer stand,” he wrote on Twitter. “Get moving Republicans.”
[...]
Mr. Trump was still searching for ways to nullify the results, soliciting advice from allies like Mr. Flynn, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.
On Dec. 18, he met with Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell in a four-hour session that started in the Oval Office and ended in the White House residence.
[...]
Earlier, Mr. Flynn had publicly raised the notion that the president should use martial law to force a revote in swing states.
The meeting descended into shouting as a group that included Mr. Cipollone, who had absorbed most of Mr. Trump’s frustrations for weeks as he tried to stop a number of legally questionable ideas, tried to dissuade the president from entertaining a range of options the visitors were proposing.
[...]
By then, even Mr. Bannon had turned on the Dominion theory he’d helped push — it was time to present “evidence” or move on, he said on his show a few days later. And ultimately Mr. Trump agreed, at least for the moment, to focus on a different goal: blocking congressional certification of the results on Jan. 6.
[...]
Now, Women for America First had a purpose, too. Objectors were already lining up in the House. So the group planned a new bus tour, this one to travel from state to state helping to sway persuadable senators — 11 by their count.
The cavalry “is coming, Mr. President,” Kylie Kremer tweeted to Mr. Trump on Dec. 19.
This tour took on an edgier tone. Before heading out, the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton visited the Tactical Response marksman training center in Nashville.
I often wonder who starts all those chants. They all have three words, easy for MAGAts to remember and shout.By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.
The emcee of the Louisiana stop, the Tea Party activist James Lyle, announced that the next day’s event in Missouri was now going to be a thank-you — Senator Josh Hawley had just become the first senator to announce that he would object.
[...]
On Saturday, Jan. 2, Kylie Kremer posted a promotional video for Wednesday’s rally on Twitter, along with a message: “BE A PART OF HISTORY.”
The president shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.”
Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.
[...]
The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.
[...]
That Saturday, Mr. Trump had called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressed him, unsuccessfully, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to win the state.
Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.
That left the congressional certification as the main event.
[...]
When Mr. Hawley stepped forward, according to Republican senators, Mr. McConnell hoped at least to keep him isolated.
But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.
[...]
It was coming down to a contest of wills within the Republican Party, and tens of thousands of Trump supporters were converging on Washington to send a message to those who might defy the president.
[...]
Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.
The president’s involvement also meant that some speakers from the original Women for America First lineup would be dropped from the main event. So, Mr. Stockton said, he arranged to have them speak the night before at a warm-up rally at Freedom Plaza.
That event had been planned by a sister group, the 80 Percent Coalition, founded by Cindy Chafian, a former organizer with Women for America First.
“What we’re doing is unprecedented,” Ms. Chafian said as she kicked off the rally. “We are standing at the precipice of history, and we are ready to take our country back.” Addressing Mr. Trump, she said: “We heard your call. We are here for you.”
[...]
Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”
“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”
Wow. Aides finally stepped in. They must have been shaken to their cores.As the rally wound down in a cold drizzle, groups of young men wearing Kevlar vests and helmets began appearing toward the back of the plaza. Some carried bats and clubs, others knives. Some were Proud Boys, but more sported the insignia of the Three Percenters.
One of the men, with a line of stitches running through his ear, told a reporter: “We’re not backing down any more. This is our country.” Another, holding a bat, cut the conversation short. “We know what to do with people like you,” he said.
Mr. Trump took the stage at the Ellipse the next day shortly before 1 p.m., calling on the tens of thousands before him to carry his message to Republicans in the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
As he spoke, some protesters, with Proud Boys helping take the lead, were already breaching the outer security perimeter around the Capitol. Inside, when Mr. Gosar stood to raise the first objection, to results in his home state of Arizona, several Republican lawmakers gave him a standing ovation. Less than an hour later, the lawmakers would flee to a secure location as the mob streamed into the building.
[...]
Women for America First put out a statement. “We are saddened and disappointed at the violence that erupted on Capitol Hill, instigated by a handful of bad actors, that transpired after the rally,” it read. (The Kremers did not provide comment for this article.)
At least one of those actors had been part of their tour — Mr. Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump founder, who was later arrested and charged with knowingly entering a restricted building. The federal charging documents cited a Facebook post in which he vowed to return and leave “blood running out of that building.”
[...]
On Jan. 15, Mr. Trump acquiesced to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Lindell, who arrived with two sets of documents. One, provided by a lawyer he would not name, included a series of steps Mr. Trump could take, including “martial law if necessary.” The other, Mr. Lindell claimed in an interview the next day, was computer code indicating that China and other state actors had altered the election results — vetted by his own investigators after he found it online.
“I said: ‘Mr. President, I have great news. You won with 79 million votes, and Biden had 68 million,’” he recalled. (Mr. Biden had more than 80 million votes, to Mr. Trump’s 74 million; Homeland Security officials have rejected the allegations of foreign meddling.)
A couple of minutes later, Mr. Trump directed his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to escort Mr. Lindell upstairs, to Mr. Cipollone’s office. He told the MyPillow founder to come back afterward.
After a perfunctory discussion, aides directed Mr. Lindell to the exit. “I say it loud, ‘I’m not leaving,’” he recalled telling them. He eventually left when an aide made it clear there would be no Oval Office follow-up. The president was done.
White supremacy dies hard.In the Senate, Mr. McConnell, who lost his majority leader’s gavel with dual defeats in Georgia, initially indicated that he might vote against Mr. Trump in an impeachment trial. But amid rising fury in the Republican ranks, he ultimately voted with most of his colleagues in an unsuccessful attempt to cancel the trial altogether. With only five defectors, though, any thought of a conviction seemed dead on arrival.
In the House, moves were afoot to recruit primary challengers to the 10 Republicans who had voted for impeachment.
[...]
And Mr. Stockton recently announced a new plan on his Facebook page: a “MAGA Sellout Tour.”
“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”
UPDATE:
No comments:
Post a Comment