So two thoughts:
1) As Jeffrey says, holy shit;
2) I see no one told Trump about Operation Valkyrie. https://t.co/oUiHbqvgGy— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 8, 2022
As they used to say in my old home town, CHROIST JAYSUS. This is an extract from an upcoming book (Baker & Glasser are married to each other.) Well worth reading the whole thing, if only because future historians are gonna need backup testimonials from those of us who lived through it:
… “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.
By late 2018, Trump wanted his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had tired of Joseph Dunford, a Marine general who had been appointed chairman by Barack Obama, and who worked closely with Mattis as they resisted some of Trump’s more outlandish ideas. Never mind that Dunford still had most of a year to go in his term. For months, David Urban, a lobbyist who ran the winning 2016 Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, had been urging the President and his inner circle to replace Dunford with a more like-minded chairman, someone less aligned with Mattis, who had commanded both Dunford and Kelly in the Marines…
Urban, who had attended West Point with Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and remained an Army man at heart, backed Mark Milley, the chief of staff of the Army. Milley, who was then sixty, was the son of a Navy corpsman who had served with the 4th Marine Division, in Iwo Jima. He grew up outside Boston and played hockey at Princeton. As an Army officer, Milley commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, led the 10th Mountain Division, and oversaw the Army Forces Command. A student of history who often carried a pile of the latest books on the Second World War with him, Milley was decidedly not a member of the close-knit Marine fraternity that had dominated national-security policy for Trump’s first two years. Urban told the President that he would connect better with Milley, who was loquacious and blunt to the point of being rude, and who had the Ivy League pedigree that always impressed Trump.
Milley had already demonstrated those qualities in meetings with Trump as the Army chief of staff. “Milley would go right at why it’s important for the President to know this about the Army and why the Army is the service that wins all the nation’s wars. He had all those sort of elevator-speech punch lines,” a senior defense official recalled. “He would have that big bellowing voice and be right in his face with all the one-liners, and then he would take a breath and he would say, ‘Mr. President, our Army is here to serve you. Because you’re the Commander-in-Chief.’ It was a very different approach, and Trump liked that.” And, like Trump, Milley was not a subscriber to the legend of Mad Dog Mattis, whom he considered a “complete control freak.”…
On January 2, 2019, Kelly sent a farewell e-mail to the White House staff. He said that these were the people he would miss: “The selfless ones, who work for the American people so hard and never lowered themselves to wrestle in the mud with the pigs. The ones who stayed above the drama, put personal ambition and politics aside, and simply worked for our great country. The ones who were ethical, moral and always told their boss what he or she NEEDED to hear, as opposed to what they might have wanted to hear.”
That same morning, Mulvaney showed up at the White House for his first official day as acting chief of staff. He called an all-hands meeting and made an announcement: O.K., we’re going to do things differently. John Kelly’s gone, and we’re going to let the President be the President.
In the fall of 2019, nearly a year after Trump named him the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley finally took over the position from Dunford. Two weeks into the job, Milley sat at Trump’s side in a meeting at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss a brewing crisis in the Middle East. Trump had again ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, imperilling America’s Kurdish allies and effectively handing control of the territory over to the Syrian government and Russian military forces. The House—amid impeachment proceedings against the President for holding up nearly four hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine as leverage to demand an investigation of his Democratic opponent—passed a nonbinding resolution rebuking Trump for the pullout. Even two-thirds of the House Republicans voted for it.
At the meeting, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, pointed out the vote against the President. “Congratulations,” Trump snapped sarcastically. He grew even angrier when the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, read out a warning from Mattis that leaving Syria could result in the resurgence of the Islamic State. In response, Trump derided his former Defense Secretary as “the world’s most overrated general. You know why I fired him? I fired him because he wasn’t tough enough.”
Eventually, Pelosi, in her frustration, stood and pointed at the President. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”
“You’re just a politician, a third-rate politician!” Trump shot back…
When she exited the White House, Pelosi told reporters that she left because Trump was having a “meltdown.” A few hours later, Trump tweeted a White House photograph of Pelosi standing over him, apparently thinking it would prove that she was the one having a meltdown. Instead, the image went viral as an example of Pelosi confronting Trump.
Milley could also be seen in the photograph, his hands clenched together, his head bowed low, looking as though he wanted to sink into the floor. To Pelosi, this was a sign of inexplicable weakness, and she would later say that she never understood why Milley had not been willing to stand up to Trump at that meeting. After all, she would point out, he was the nonpartisan leader of the military, not one of Trump’s toadies. “Milley, you would have thought, would have had more independence,” she told us, “but he just had his head down.”…
Early on the evening of June 1, 2020, Milley failed what he came to realize was the biggest test of his career: a short walk from the White House across Lafayette Square, minutes after it had been violently cleared of Black Lives Matter protesters. Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.
In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Eventually, Trump was persuaded not to send in the military against American citizens. Barr, as the civilian head of law enforcement, was given the lead role in the protest response, and the National Guard was deployed to assist police. Hours later, Milley, Esper, and other officials were abruptly summoned back to the White House and sent marching across Lafayette Square. As they walked, with the scent of tear gas still in the air, Milley realized that he should not be there and made his exit, quietly peeling off to his waiting black Chevy Suburban. But the damage was done. No one would care or even remember that he was not present when Trump held up a Bible in front of the damaged church; people had already seen him striding with the President on live television in his battle dress, an image that seemed to signal that the United States under Trump was, finally, a nation at war with itself. Milley knew this was a misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a “road-to-Damascus moment,” as he would later put it. What would he do about it?…
By the evening of Monday, November 9th, Milley’s fears about a volatile post-election period unlike anything America had seen before seemed to be coming true. News organizations had called the election for Biden, but Trump refused to acknowledge that he had lost by millions of votes. The peaceful transition of power—a cornerstone of liberal democracy—was now in doubt. Sitting at home that night at around nine, the chairman received an urgent phone call from the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. With the possible exception of Vice-President Mike Pence, no one had been more slavishly loyal in public, or more privately obsequious, to Trump than Pompeo. But even he could not take it anymore…
After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.” Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”…
By late November, amid Trump’s escalating attacks on the election, Milley and Pompeo’s coöperation had deepened—a fact that the Secretary of State revealed to Attorney General Bill Barr over dinner on the night of December 1st. Barr had just publicly broken with Trump, telling the Associated Press in an interview that there was no evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the results. As they ate at an Italian restaurant in a Virginia strip mall, Barr recounted for Pompeo what he called “an eventful day.” And Pompeo told Barr about the extraordinary arrangement he had proposed to Milley to make sure that the country was in steady hands until the Inauguration: they would hold daily morning phone calls with Mark Meadows. Pompeo and Milley soon took to calling them the “land the plane” phone calls.
“Our job is to land this plane safely and to do a peaceful transfer of power the twentieth of January,” Milley told his staff. “This is our obligation to this nation.” There was a problem, however. “Both engines are out, the landing gear are stuck. We’re in an emergency situation.”
In public, Pompeo remained his staunchly pro-Trump self. The day after his secret visit to Milley’s house to commiserate about “the crazies” taking over, in fact, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s defeat, snidely telling reporters, “There will be a smooth transition—to a second Trump Administration.” Behind the scenes, however, Pompeo accepted that the election was over and made it clear that he would not help overturn the result. “He was totally against it,” a senior State Department official recalled. Pompeo cynically justified this jarring contrast between what he said in public and in private. “It was important for him to not get fired at the end, too, to be there to the bitter end,” the senior official said…
Most days, Milley would also call the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who was hardly a usual interlocutor for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In the final weeks of the Administration, Cipollone, a true believer in Trump’s conservative agenda, was a principal actor in the near-daily drama over Trump’s various schemes to overturn his election defeat. After getting off one call with Cipollone, Milley told a visitor that the White House counsel was “constructive,” “not crazy,” and a force for “trying to keep guardrails around the President.”…
On January 6th, Milley was in his office at the Pentagon meeting with Christine Wormuth, the lead Biden transition official for the Defense Department. In the weeks since the election, Milley had started displaying four networks at once on a large monitor across from the round table where he and Wormuth sat: CNN and Fox News, as well as the small pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and One America News Network, which had been airing election disinformation that even Fox would not broadcast. “You’ve got to know what the enemy is up to,” Milley had joked when Wormuth noticed his viewing habits at one of their meetings.
Milley and Wormuth that day were supposed to discuss the Pentagon’s plans to draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as the Biden team’s hopes to mobilize large-scale Covid vaccination sites around the country. But, as they realized in horror what was transpiring on the screen in front of them, Milley was summoned to an urgent meeting with Miller and Ryan McCarthy, the Secretary of the Army. They had not landed the plane, after all. The plane was crashing…
That night, waiting for Congress to return and formally ratify Trump’s electoral defeat, Milley called one of his contacts on the Biden team. He explained that he had spoken with Meadows and Pat Cipollone at the White House, and that he had been on the phone with Pence and the congressional leaders as well. But Milley never heard from the Commander-in-Chief, on a day when the Capitol was overrun by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”…
Milley might be able to redeem his reputation, eventually, if this extract is a fair example. Bill Barr seems to have realized that he can oil off into ‘respectable’ retirement as a leading light of the Wingnut Wurlitzer. I’m sure Pompeo still dreams of the Oval Office, but even in today’s Never Say Never environment, one hopes that particular dream will be crushed with extreme prejudice.
sab
I have a RWNJ brother living in California. And yes he was elected to public office in Marin County all you self-righteous lefties in California. He would have been re-elected but his friend gathering signatures lied about how she did it ( signed off on petitions as collected by her when they weren’t) so he had to withdraw because his day job needs him to be clean and those petitions weren’t. Your Republican party at work.
Useful lesson to all the other RWNJ. There are still laws out there.
Elizabelle
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser are reputation-washing for Republicans.
It is what they do.
Baker’s “analysis” of Joe Biden, “one of the most unpopular U.S. leaders in history”, is up in glory on the FTF NY Times
front pagewebsite’s prime top left corner. And: the reader commenters are a bunch of jackals (in a good way). Sentiment is running 90-10, at best, against Baker’s hot takeI am kind of hoping that potential buyers for the book will remember this ridiculous article. Weaken the book’s sales.
Also remember that Susan Glasser, of The New Yorker, is one of the authors of “Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal was a debacle. An utter debacle.” (My paraphrase, but she was awful.)
They are the couple from hell. Recall that Brian Williams could not salivate over Mr. Baker enough, during his paid appearances on MSNBC.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Yeah, when I saw who wrote this book, I immediately raised an eyebrow. I guess it’s good to have this out there, but I don’t trust the authors.
Geminid
Mark Milley will retire soon. I think Milley will give his own account of his service while trump was “Commander in Chief” and I’m looking forward to it.
Spanky
The 25th Amendment
Is worth nothing.
Danielx
@sab:
“Laws? We don’t need no steenkin’ laws!”
Miss Bianca
I literally just finished reading this article, AL. Scary shit.
But yeah, Peter Baker can DIAF as far as I’m concerned.
Elizabelle
@Baud: I am really hoping that today’s Bakerpalooza in the FTF NYTimes will cool sales of his book. It could have that effect, among some readers.
Myself, I will learn what’s in the books, but I cannot read a book about TFG. At all. He stole enough of my attention during his one shabby term. Enough.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Would have been nicer to have it “out there” when the events were taking place.
Jeffro
Twitter is saying that CNN is reporting that a search warrant was just carried out at Mar-a-Lago?
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: yeah
Jeffro
Link
Dan B
News is that the FBI just finished a raid at Mar A Lago. Several reports from different sources that look credible. Who knows
Jeffro beat me to it. CNN seems credible.
Jeffro
trumpov has an “official” statement out…
…it’s ON
TheronWare
Breaking: FBI raid on Mara Lago.
zhena gogolia
@Dan B: I’m afraid it’s just about classified material ending up there
Geminid
@Elizabelle: trump was magnified by the office of President, both for those who he inspired and those he repelled. My take was that once he was out of office, trump’s hold on people would have a half-life, like a very toxic but unstable radioisotope.
I don’t know what that half-life is and I think we’ll only know in retrospect, but right now I’d say 30 months.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Just give it away for free?
Socialist.
Jeffro
start the countdown to see when, and how, this gets reported on Faux News dot com…
The Moar You Know
Huh. Nobody had anything to do with the insurrection. I guess it was all Donnie, a guy who is incapable of dressing himself. Sure.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Whatever it is, it’s good. They got Capone on tax evasion.
CaseyL
@zhena gogolia: “Just” about classified material there? Trump has no authorization to have any classified material in his possession. If he has it, he’s been selling it. If he’s been selling it, that is at the very least an espionage charge.
HumboldtBlue
Trump’s response to the noose tightening after the FBI served a warrant at his shitty compound.
This is too funny. Clinton, Obama, Biden.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
so much for “support the troops”
btom89
In response to the FBI raid on Mar-a-lago: *gif of Nelson Muntz’s guffaw* Haw-haw!!!
Baud
Maybe the FBI will find child porn at Mar-a-Lago
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Raid on
EntebbeMoron LagoSiubhanDuinne
I did not know that.
Not a fan of Peter Baker, but I must say the New Yorker extract was such a compelling read that I’m mightily tempted to read the whole book when it’s released.
Suzanne
This could be the headline for literally every piece ever written about that dumbshit motherfucker.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne: Get it from the library! Do not buy it! And then tell us the juicy stuff.
artem1s
maybe they FBI’s seize some private/burner phones he and his pet SS Agents were using.
Bex
@Jeffro: FBI searching Mar a Loco. Joyce Vance on MSNBC says this is SERIOUS.
dmsilev
@Jeffro: It’s about those clogged up toilets. Don’t fuck with the White House Plumbers. Ever.
Baud
@Bex: Are we sure it’s not once of those FBI raids that isn’t serious?
artem1s
@Suzanne: sounds like a nomination for a rotation tag
Suzanne
@Bex: Let’s go, Brandon!
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Even in ….. [checks notes] … Nebraska
Elizabelle
Top of TFG’s statement, edited by moi, to bring it closer to reality:
Spanky
@Baud: You mean besides the pics of young Ivanka?
Elizabelle
@Bex: You are going to get me to watch MSNBC online for the first time in two years, aren’t you?
But this might be worth it!
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@dmsilev:
Plumbers union is one tough pipe hitting outfit
Baud
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Wait, a filibuster works in our favor???
Wow.
HumboldtBlue
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
A Nebraska DA has decided to chare a teenager with an illegal abortion after detectives searched her social media and medical records.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Elizabelle:
Or follow Abbie Hoffman’s advice steal that book (in present day context, downloading it from a torrent site)
Villago Delenda Est
That is, an ignorant fascist pig.
Anyway
@Baud:
Hate the gossipy style of these two and the other MSM reporters shilling Trumpov dirt. Can’t get over how they kept quiet and normalized him and his administration during his term. Fuck ’em all.
dmsilev
Andrew Abshier
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Credit where credit is due. The R’s can read polls. Nice to have them running scared in the opposite direction now. Let’s keep it up.
dmsilev
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: The Plumbers ™ made Nixon their fall guy.
Elizabelle
Might the FBI agents have taken a knife to slash the portrait of TFG in tennis garb, to look for documents and data hidden behind it? One can hope.
Look forward to what Hillary Clinton has to say about this one. TFG mentioned her 33,000 acid-washed emails (!) in his screed.
I hope the agents are raiding Jarvanka’s residence(s), too.
HumboldtBlue
@dmsilev:
RNC plumbers are inept, bumbling doofuses.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anyway: The Village is totally about gossip nowadays. Policy is MEGO to these incompetents.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and no leaks, nobody knew it was coming except fumbling, timid old establishmentarian Merrick Garland who I have been assured for two years is not the “wartime consigliere” we need
sab
@zhena gogolia: That has severe penalties.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Associated Press worldwide wire:
So far, nothing on WaPo or BBC. Meanwhile, the FTFNYT is focusing on Jenifer Lopez’s boobs (no joke) (photo)
gene108
The fact so much of this country still supports TFG, and will vote for any Big Lie advocate over a more mainstream politician is nightmare fuel.
There tens of millions of Americans, who would rather over throw the government and end what we know as the United States of America, rather than let people they don’t like take office after winning the election.
dmsilev
Popehat has an explainer (click through for full thread):
Spanky
Have Snowden or Greenwald piped up yet about how this FBI raid is deeply un-American?
Elizabelle
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Dark Merrick!
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Last I checked, Baker is a salaried employee.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia:
Dorothy A. Winsor
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Spanky:
Pretty funny deciding what is or isn’t American when you’re sitting in a different hemisphere
HumboldtBlue
@dmsilev:
Good thread, thanks.
Fred Figliuzi on MSNBC is doing a great job explaining how the warrant is obtained and served.
Sure Lurkalot
It seems we will get these cowardly-too late-after the fact-not necessarily believable exposes and revelations for decades. Seriously, are we to believe these accounts of Trump toadies as voices of reason just sticking around to be guardrails against what they knew was happening but could do nothing about in real-time?
Uncle Cosmo
Bullshit. You’re just throwing a tantrum because it couldn’t do what you wanted it to. And why is that? Because it was never intended to.
The 25th was designed to provide for continuity of command when the President is incapacitated, to prevent any adversary from taking advantage of the situation, It’s been invoked when POTUS was under general anesthesia, and it’s operated exactly as intended.
What it was never intended to do was offer a method of sidelining a sitting President who’s gone off the rails. Anyone with an IQ over 80 who reads Section 4 of the amendment will recognize that trying to use it for that purpose would be a cluster-fuck. And that clearly was intentional. Because the Constitution had already specified a means of redress – impeachment and removal – and Section 4 was deliberately phrased to make it even more difficult to apply (requiring 2/3 of both houses of Congress, versus a simple majority in the House for impeachment and 2/3 of the Senate for conviction and removal).
FTR this was explained (by me and others) on this blog years ago. I guess you never got the memo, Bunky.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I’m sure Axis Maggie got straight from the horse’s ass
Steeplejack
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Roy Edroso dubbed her “Access Sally.” I like that!
Steeplejack
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
And:
Frankensteinbeck
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
…the dumb fuck kept some of the most incriminating records. That’s it. I bet that’s it. He hid them instead of destroying them or handing them over.
Brachiator
As I noted in an earlier thread I continue to be astounded that so many people who appear to be sane were willing and eager to work for Deranged Man Baby Trump.
SiubhanDuinne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Curious that the FBI raid takes place on the same day that those photos were released of TFG memos in toilets.
Mike in NC
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Trump’s boobs are much bigger than J-Lo’s. He might even agree.
eversor
This entire thing is so insane I feel like I’m in a dream. “I want the Nazi generals, they were loyal” “you know they tried to kill him”.
Our nation has been saved from the religiosty of the many by the stupidity of a few.
Jeffro
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: LOVE. IT.
run for the hills, GQP officials!
no, wait…your rabid MAGA base will just follow you, up and over the hills…better to just resign now, change your names, and hope for the best!
LOLOL
Jeffro
Yes, hence making him open the safe.
I love it. What was it, 17 boxes of classified documents? I’m sure Y’all Qaeda would be fine with that if it had been Clinton or Obama (eyeroll extreme)
Villago Delenda Est
If I had pulled this shit with classified documents when I had access to them, I wouldn’t be here talking with y’all. I’d be in Leavenworth.
eversor
@Villago Delenda Est:
Al Capone had taxes, Trump had, well, theft of TS stuff. If I had carried stuff out of any of the places I worked I’d have been caugh instantly and the results would have been ugly. If I’d had made it home with them all hell would have broken loose. And if I was at another place I would have been at gunpoint there.
Careers are ruined just by mishandling things. People get arrested for innocent mistakes. This crosses the line into “the hell are you thinking” but he doesn’t fucking think.
Matt McIrvin
@eversor: While he was President, he didn’t have to think because he was effectively above the law. In the United States, if you’re the President and you have enough absolutely loyal members of the Senate that an impeachment trial cannot result in a conviction, that means you are King; you can do anything you want. He literally could have started gunning down people on 5th Avenue and there would have been no recourse.
Of course, Presidential terms end. But I think he was in the process of convincing himself that his wouldn’t, that somehow he’d be President for life. Remember all those rallies where he said he deserved a third term, a fourth term, a fifth term?
eversor
@Matt McIrvin:
Let me give you a hint, there is no “law” it’s nebulous. There are only arguments about rules. That’s it. Hell I could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, there would be more caveats, but it’s not like the law would apply if I was slick.
And that’s the catch.
Then there is the other catch. As president he is the classifying authority. This is also nebulous as all hell but the rules apply less the higher up the ladder you go. Just as rules and laws always are.
Justice isn’t blind, she can see straight through that blindfold and those scales are weighted in gold. Decorum, rules, laws, seek to matter the farther you go up. And only fools trust them.
BruceFromOhio
That my fellow citizens, any of them, think this man should be the commander in chief just frosts me fucking ice cold.
...now I try to be amused
@Brachiator:
Appeared to be sane, anyway. I think there some of both chicken and egg here. You’d have to be crazy to let yourself get near Trump, and if you do then Trump will bring all the crazy in you out into the open. It’s one of his superpowers.
StringOnAStick
Take a look at the last few Popehat tweets in the thread. He mentions that this stuff has been at Mar aLardo since Jan2021, to which a judge would say “it’s been there for over a year, why do you wait to raid right NOW?”. Popehat suspects actionable intelligence forced the raid, and that sounds like tRump perhaps sold some documents and they have proof they came from him. That is a huge deal if true.
YY_Sima Qian
All the juicy & damning stuff always come out years later in a tell-all book. Most of the political reporters are utterly useless, & are themselves damaging to democracy.
Another Scott
@StringOnAStick: Yup, Popehat is very level-headed to the point of being a wet blanket about legal stuff that we want to be true.
I doubt very much that Garland has overplayed his hand, but we’ll see!
Cheers,
Scott.
Carlo Graziani
So, just to put an oar back in: Those of you who recall Part 4 of The Resumption of History may note that as I suggested, the coup attempt, which the January 6 Committee Hearing narratives present as such a near-run thing, were nothing of the sort. Had matters progressed beyond the farcical efforts by the Trumpian mob to overturn the merely procedural, ceremonial constitutional procedures, the US Civil Service and the Pentagon leadership, including political appointees such as Pompeo, would have revolted against Trump. He would have been lucky if the Secret Service had taken him to Mar-a-Lago, rather than doing a chain-of-custody of him to the FBI.
Chris Johnson
@StringOnAStick: Wouldn’t it be something if FBI or whoever claimed to be Russians and bought the documents from Trump? I too am trying to work out what could be new enough to cause this, what could happen that would prompt this sudden move out of nowhere. Something happened.
So either they learned of the presence of something they didn’t know before (i.e. my notion that somebody went ‘he kept his instructions from Putin and they are provably right HERE’) or something new happened (i.e. FBI did a sting where they impersonated Russians and Trump went ‘cool, what took you so long? I fucking need the money, here’s the papers, tell Vladimir he’s weak and let me down after all his promises’)
Whatever it is it can’t be boring or a Federal judge appointed by Trump wouldn’t have authorized a raid. The only question is HOW not-boring…