Jim Dean
It has been almost three weeks since I wrote this. I had left off with Trump’s call to the Georgia Secretary of State, where he hounded him endlessly to find “11,780 votes” to swing the GA electoral vote his way, “which is one more than we needed”. The Secretary of State’s office released a recording of the hour long call when Trump attacked the Secretary of State on Twitter that afternoon.
Trump had insisted during the call that he had won the state by 400,000 votes but had been cheated somehow, and the vote had to be “re-calculated.” Secretary of State Raffensperger, a Republican, with his lawyer sitting beside him, told Trump that his people “were giving him bad data, and that the vote count was correct”. Georgia had three vote counts, including one by hand of all the paper ballots.
Department of Justice election fix fails
Trump is not a quitter. He was not finished with planning to somehow flip the election by hook or crook, and with hindsight, we now know he had two more cards up his sleeve. The last to be revealed, after the Capitol attack, was his attempt to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with the head of the Department of Justice (DoJ) civil litigation department Jeffery Clark.
Mr. Clark was obviously an ambitious man hoping to ride Trump’s coattails into another four years as head of the DoJ by ordering the Georgia legislature to throw their election to Trump on DoJ authority.
The plot failed when the entire upper echelon of the DoJ threatened to resign if the dirty deal was done, and Trump’s attorney advised him that there was a high probability of election interference charges, if he proceeded. Many legal pundits feel that due to Trump’s endless attempts to reverse the election outcome, those charges might still be pending. Fortunately, the top leadership’s threatening to resign saved the reputation of the DoJ, and their own reputations in the process.
A January 6th, 2021 that will never be forgotten
The nationally humiliating debacle has been splashed all over world media for two weeks now. American exceptionalism has a new twist to it as the hunt continues for the Capitol rioters and conspirators, their lives to be changed forever, but not as much as the five counted dead so far, including two suicides of Capitol police officers, with many injured who are lucky to be alive.
Drunk with bravado, Trump rioters, seemingly sure of their success, posted selfies of themselves online during and after the attack, wanting historical credit for having been there. The FBI thanked them immensely for all their social media postings. Then there were the endless video clips put on social media with the FBI now saying it has 250,000 pieces of media evidence.
The initial charges for quicker court processing of the arrests were mainly trespassing and illegal entry of a restricted area, then upgrading later to felony property damage as more evidence emerged. This week the FBI began charging those in direct combat with Capitol Police with assault felonies, with potential 20 year sentences and six figure fines, which will hurt their families terribly. We can expect a lot of divorces.
Some children have turned in their parents, with one son collecting the FBI reward and opening a Go Fund Me to cover his college expenses. An ex-boyfriend turned a former girlfriend in.
Another more difficult legal battle will involve charging organizers who planned the assault ahead of time and/or were coordinating it while in progress. They will be charged with sedition, with the testimony largely being their cell phone texting, social media video posting, and of course others testifying against them to get a reduced sentence.
Trump faces his second impeachment trial
The big battle this current week has been the ongoing dispute of whether a former president can be convicted in the Senate for impeachment after he has left office, which incurs the major penalty of being banned from running for future office, something the Democrats want to do as a going away present to Trump for unleashing an incited mob on a poorly defended Capitol.
The Federalist Society submitted a report signed by dozens of legal scholars that Trump can, be convicted after leaving office, and submitted legal precedent. Circumstantially, if this were not the case, any President fearing an impeachment conviction could resign office the day before and then be able to run again, an escape hatch the Founding Fathers would have never left open.
The Senate Republicans voted 45 to 5 today ruling that it is not constitutional, and claiming their vote makes a conviction vote, where 17 Republican would have to join all the Democrats, something deemed a lightning strike chance event.
Trump has come out of reclusion after the vote, seemingly wanting the option to run for office again, and has threatened political retribution against any Republican who votes for conviction. Those Republicans who voted to certify the election are being publicly censured by their Republican state parties, revealing that they want the Trump voters to replace them in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
New polls show Capitol insurrectionists have major Republican support
Worst of all comes the news that 45% of Republicans polled this week said they were OK with the attack on the Capitol June 6th, thus putting a wooden stake in the heart of any Biden plans to heal the nation. More shocking has been the revelations that police, veterans and even some active duty military were arrested as a result of the riots.
We have had news every day of the above groups having been infiltrated by white supremacists and political seditionists who trashed their oath to defend the Constitutional with the excuse that they could not support a Biden Communist government being installed. They are being called ‘Banana Republicans’ now for this kind of thinking, where they interpret the rules and laws to serve their cause.
Trump vandals leave gutted agencies
While all of this political chaos is going on, President Biden is struggling to get his cabinet approved by a divided Congress, after the Trump regime stonewalled the transition process to leave them less prepared when they took over.
We have learned transition stonewalling by Trump included national security areas, like Afghanistan, where the Biden people will not know the current status of their Defense departments until after they move into office, which was a risk to the national security
Biden’s team did not receive their first Covid briefing until December. Operation Warp Speed’s head, General Perna attended, but did not answer any questions. Biden’s people learned almost nothing, a slight that could be viewed as negligence, since it endangered lives..
One disaster that did become public is the non-existent Trump vaccine program, where no accounting software seems to have been set up for tracking the location and amount of vaccines.
The Trump administration virtually abandoned the pandemic to work on trying to win the election by throwing the problem onto the back of the states. I live in Michigan with the big Pfizer plant, built with heavy state tax subsidies, and it appears we are at the end of the line on distribution. The allotment for my area came in today and was booked in 15 minutes by those winning the luck of the draw for logging in at the right time online.
But the Biden team is learning that the pandemic and vaccine programs are just the beginning of its problems of getting off to a good start. They are learning that departments deemed not supportive of Trump politically were staffed by replacing professionals with political hacks whose loyalties were to Trump, not their country. Many others were just fired.
President Biden has made an early feature of his administration to rejoin the Paris climate accords. But the Environmental Protection Agency in their briefing to the new Biden people explained that the Trump Administration had gutted their personnel, and they were 600 short of what they had when Trump came in.
The shortage resulted in research grinding to a halt and laboratories sitting unused, and all kept quiet while Trump was in office. It seems other departments whose work was viewed as liberal and ‘socialist’ suffered the same fate.
History might view this Trump to Biden change of government as that of the Vandals to the Age of Enlightenment.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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