Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the recent Nobel Peace Prize given to Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, as both a warning and a "do better" for American journalists:

It’s fitting that — thanks to Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize — world history will likely cherish Ressa, Muratov, and their brand of death-defying journalism far longer than it will remember the totems of modern U.S. media like recently retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron — whose uninspiring response to the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump was, famously that “we’re not at war … we’re at work” — or the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, who doesn’t see journalism as activism but something he blandly calls “sophisticated true objectivity.”

Huh? [snip]

For all the Beltway journalists so eager to restore a breathless access journalism and the most cynical, “savvy” form of politics-as-a-game news coverage, the embrace by both the Nobel committee and the wider world of the more daring vision of journalism as a chief weapon in the war against rising neo-fascism — the stance so boldly adopted by Ressa and Muratov — ought to serve as a wake-up call. [snip]

The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in “the work” of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war. We need to glom onto Maria Ressa’s vision — that when the truth is under attack, truth-telling is not a clinical science. Journalism is activism.

Sadly, due to the existential need to get clicks, ad dollars and subscriptions, we don't see the basic business model of American journalism changing, with the occasional exception for an investigative piece that makes a splash but is soon forgotten.  How far from their examples our "journalists" are.  

Speaking of American "journalism," Fox "News" recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.  Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple takes a few well- deserved swipes at the one institution news sewer that can claim responsibility for the poisonous, divisive, downward- spiraling state of American politics today:

If nothing else, Fox News had a talent for self-promotion, even before there was anything to promote.

“Fox News Channel to stress fairness” read the headline on the July 1996 story the Houston Chronicle published in the run-up to the Oct. 7, 1996, launch of Fox News, under the management of network chief Roger Ailes and News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It’s not too late for a retraction, Houston Chronicle!  [snip]

... It’s one thing to corral a constituency; it’s quite another to poison that constituency. We won’t belabor the extensive and atrocious misadventures of Fox News, which this blog and many, many other sources have highlighted to our mutual exhaustion. There’s enough to fill a mammoth website.

For the sake of brevity, we’ll just highlight a development that so happens to coincide with the big 25th anniversary: The ongoing lawsuits against Fox News by voting-tech firms Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Both of these companies claim they were the subject of false coverage in the aftermath of November’s presidential election, and both sued the network for the efforts of key hosts — Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs (who no longer has a show on Fox Business Network) are among the offenders — to associate their work with election-rigging. [snip]

It’s a machine, in other words — promoting lies, and then reporting their traction as national news. That’s what Fox News has done with the vocal plurality of Americans in its corner, 25 years running.

Their business model is stoking white grievance, racial hate, fear, all in service to their cult leader in his on- going coup.

On that on- going coup, laying the foundation for the next coup -- voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, allowing legislatures to overturn election results, etc. -- requires the willingness of elected Republican "leaders" to maintain the Big Lie.  Rep. Steve Scalise (Coup- LA) at your service:

The House’s second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, standing by Donald Trump’s lie that Democrat Joe Biden won the White House because of mass voter fraud.

More than 11 months after Americans picked their president and almost nine months since Biden was inaugurated, Scalise was unwilling during a national television interview to acknowledge the legitimacy of the vote, instead sticking to his belief that the election results should not have been certified by Congress.

“I’ve been very clear from the beginning,” he said. “If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president. That is what the United States Constitution says. They don’t say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules,” the Louisiana congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.” 

These are human weasels (no offense to weasels).  In Scalise's case, his description of himself as KKK leader "David Duke without the baggage" tells you exactly who he is.

This is the sub- moronic cult leader they're so desperate to re- install in the White House:

A new book reports that former President Donald Trump asked his top intelligence official to investigate an absurd conspiracy theory that Chinese thermostats changed votes in the 2020 election.

In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released Betrayal by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, which was shared on Sunday’s edition of This Week, the former president was said to be “intrigued” by the theory – which was presented to him by Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as acting attorney general.

“[Clark] believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia,” Karl wrote. “The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”

Some tinfoil hats should take care of it!  Also, Jeffrey Clark, the skunk willing to subvert the Department of Justice to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election, appears to be as nuts as his cult leader.

Lastly, for the best collection of links to posts from around the Internet, please visit Infidel 753's link round- up, which appears to get more comprehensive every week.  Keep it coming; we can handle it!.

Senate Report Details Trump's Attempts To Get DOJ To Overturn Election

 

In a nearly 400- page report released this morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee memorializes information (some of which has already seeped out since the election) that the malignant loser was pulling every lever he could get his hands on, including at the Department of Justice, to stage a coup to remain in office:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released a sweeping report about how former President Donald Trump and a top lawyer in the Justice Department attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump directly asked the Justice Department nine times to undermine the election result, and his chief of staff Mark Meadows broke administration policy by pressuring a Justice Department lawyer to investigate claims of election fraud, according to the report, which is based on witness interviews of top former Justice Department officials.

 

The Democratic-led committee also revealed that White House counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to quit in early January as Trump considered replacing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a DOJ lawyer who supported election fraud conspiracies.  [snip]

 

After the eight-month investigation, the findings highlight the relentlessness of Trump and some of his top advisers as they fixated on using the Justice Department to prop up false conspiracies of election fraud. The committee report called Trump's repeated demands an abuse of presidential power.

Clark was a particularly active player in the plot:

 

Clark had pushed Rosen and Richard Donoghue, then the second-in-command at the Justice Department, to use the Justice Department to announce election fraud investigations and and ask state leaders in Georgia to appoint electors, potentially disregarding the certified popular vote. Clark began making the pitch in late December after speaking with Trump directly, the committee found.

 

The Senate committee wrote he may have had assistance from "lower-level allies" within the Justice Department and even attempted to bargain with Rosen on his plan, saying he would turn down a chance at taking Rosen's place if Rosen would agree to support his Georgia elector initiative.

 

"Clark's proposal to wield DOJ's power to override the already-certified popular vote reflected a stunning distortion of DOJ's authority: DOJ protects ballot access and ballot integrity, but has no role in determining which candidate won a particular election," the committee wrote.

 

The Committee has made a referral to the DC Bar regarding Clark's despicable, seditious actions.  That's the least jeopardy he should be facing.

 

Of course, the malignant loser's  interactions with Rosen and Donoghue (which have been previously reported) indicate the extent of his desperation to get others to cast doubt on the outcome and rely on his fascist friends in Congress take it from there:

 

In multiple calls, Trump claimed there was election fraud in Pennsylvania and Arizona -- both states he lost -- telling Rosen "people are saying" and asking the Justice Department to look into the rumors, according to the committee.

 

Trump also told the DOJ leadership, "You guys aren't following the internet the way I do," according to both Donoghue and Rosen.

 

Rosen told the President the department "can't and won't just flip a switch and change the election." That prompted Trump to simply ask for an official Justice announcement that the election was corrupt and then "leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen," the committee report noted.

 

Again, much of this has been reported earlier, but the value lies in the documents and testimony that are now available for the January 6 select committee's work, as well as putting this unprecedented act of sedition formally into the historical record.  Add the ongoing investigation by the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney's investigation into the malignant loser's attempts to manipulate Georgia's election results, where he's potentially facing criminal charges (including engaging in election fraud, conspiracy and state RICO violations), he'll be facing plenty of legal peril -- as long as the "system" remains steadfast in seeking accountability and meting out justice.

 

Trump DOJ Lackey May Face Conspiracy Charges

 

Speaking on MSNBC, former U.S. District Attorney for Eastern Michigan Barbara McQuade commented on the deepening legal problem for mentally unstable seditionist Donald "Loser" Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election through a willing lackey, Jeffrey Clark:

"''So President Trump was urging the leadership of the justice department like Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Clark, and they wouldn't play ball. Donald Trump did find a willing participant in the assistant attorney general for the Civil Division, Jeffrey Clark, and the public reporting is that Clark met privately with President Trump; completely forbidden under the department policies. communications are to be done in a formal way.

The idea that the president is talking with an underling, planning a strategy is, alone, is highly irregular. Then we have seen this letter he drafted for the signature of the acting attorney general to send out to all the states, including Georgia, where the elections were close. This is so far out of the lane of the Justice Department -- providing legal advice to states about how they could engineer a different result in their state.

He [Clark] laid out that road map for them. So I think Jeffrey Clark and anyone else involved should be concerned with conspiracy charges.'"  (our emphasis_

The "anyone else involved" would be Trump and whomever else he enlisted in his attempted steal of the election by negating millions of Biden votes. The Senate Judiciary Committee has chosen this seditionist scandal to bore into, and former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue need to make sure that their sworn testimony is complete and accurate.

(photo: Jeffrey Clark; Susan Walsh/AP)

Official Planned DOJ Takeover, Overturning Georgia Election

By now, you may have seen the report, first published in the New York Times, that a Justice Department official conspired with one- term loser Donald "Impeached Twice" Trump to overturn the election results in Georgia.  Here are some key grafs:

The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

Fortunately, the threat of mass resignation foiled Clark's plan. 

Here's how it was conceived:

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Emboldened, Clark planned to have Trump remove Rosen and be named the new Acting Attorney General in order to carry out the voiding of the election results in Georgia.  When Rosen got wind of the maneuver, he demanded a meeting with Trump and Clark the evening of January 5:

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

The quintessential Trumpist weasel, Clark is now trying to deny what multiple sources have reported about his seditious actions, hiding behind legalisms about needing "sworn testimony" and attorney- client privilege.  If he's not fired immediately charged, there's no "justice."

(Image:  Trump, Clark and Rosen/ Getty Images)