Breaking from CNN:
The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has decided to make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, the panel’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, told reporters Tuesday.
Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said the committee has not narrowed down the universe of individuals who may be referred.
Asked whether Thompson believed any witnesses perjured themselves, he said, “that’s part of the discussion.”
The committee is expected to meet later Tuesday.
Well now!
Open thread.
Mike R
Very nice news, criminal referrals by the bucket full would just be peachy.
Origuy
Hi, I have a comment in moderation in the On The Road thread because my email got messed up. I’m responding to some comments about my pictures. Could a front-pager please release it and delete my second message, which was about the first message being in moderation, but it also went into moderation. I shouldn’t post right when I wake up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I don’t know how much difference a criminal referral will make to a jury, which is what counts.
UncleEbeneezer
Allison Gill (MuellerSheWrote) has a new podcast called “You Don’t Know Jack” co-hosted by former FBI head, Andrew McCabe. It’s really good and this is one of the things they noted in their first episode. The Special Council provision gives Jack Smith very broad range of power for considering indictments including not just 1/6 Events, False Elector Scheme and MAL Stolen Documents, but even for Obstruction with respect to the 1/6 Committee. They also talked at length about how fast Smith is moving already, how long it will be before we likely see indictments on the Stolen Documents and the many, many reasons why this SC is NOT THE SAME as the Mueller Investigation (which McCabe was a part of) and why it’s foolish to make predictions of this SC based on Mueller.
Old School
Does this go the Special Prosecutor (Jack Smith) or just to the Justice Department at this point?
Sandia Blanca
Well now indeed!!!
MisterForkbeard
I figure this will have little actual effect, but I do think we’re going to get a fair amount of lower level people (like Trump’s Valet) who’ve been caught in lies get referred for that.
Probably nothing like Trump getting referred for criminal conduct.
The Moar You Know
Awww, I came here for more Eeyore bitching about why Garland sucks and everyone will escape justice. Where is the hopelessness?
H.E.Wolf
In honour of valued commenter and polyglot Amir Khalid:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MisterForkbeard:
Why do you think that?
Old Man Shadow
I’d like to urgently request that you indict the presidential candidate who just said he wanted to get rid of our Constitution. That seems like it would make a conviction for seditious conspiracy a lot easier.
Elizabelle
Good news. The prosecutors can play the defendants off against each other, and get a better look at the interconnected ties.
Remember: the J6 Committee wants to go after whole systems that foment/accelerate Trumpism/fascism. And this is going to a prosecutor with experience from The Hague.
cain
@The Moar You Know: hold on, I have a patreon, can feed it for me to do my eeyore take on this. :)
Mike in NC
After the Fat Orange Clown recently called for “terminating” the Constitution to install himself as dictator-for-life, will any Republican object to criminal referrals about the J6 insurrection? Didn’t think so.
cain
@Old Man Shadow: Dude literally said so in writing on truth social and then said “oh wait nevermind, just kidding”.
kindness
Republicans in the House are going to blow their tops over this news. Since that’s an every day occurrence, how are we going to tell the difference. Anger and vitriol as performance art is all they got.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@UncleEbeneezer: I’m listening now. Thanks for the link.
Ken
@Old Man Shadow: Also, recall that being in prison did not prevent Eugene Debs from running for President; nor the other way around. The latter perhaps being more important as a precedent.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just for starters, and IANAL, neither Rod Rosenstein, the toilet salesman, nor Fat Willie Barr is involved.
Cameron
There will be indictments and trials; how many convictions there are will have a lot to do with # of MAGAs on juries, won’t it?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
UncleEbeneezer
Also on the You Don’t Know Jack podcast, McCabe pointed out that MAL/Stolen Documents is much simpler and much further along than anything regarding 1/6. He predicts MAL indictments as soon as January-February. He also noted one of the reasons why it would have been really foolish to indict Trump on MAL before getting the rest of the documents back: those non-classified docs were intermingled with the classified ones and some of them have recent dates, some from even after Trump was no longer President. This is substantial to undercut any attempt to claim that Trump just forgot they were in there, because it shows he was accessing the docs on a regular basis and was doing so even after NARA and even his own attorneys had warned him that they were government property. It’s a big point that could be crucial for obtaining a conviction.
UncleEbeneezer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yup. That was part of the many differences. Mueller was on a very short leash and Rosenstein/Barr were pressuring him behind the scenes to stick to the DOJ policy that he couldn’t indict a sitting President. Garland is doing no such thing with Smith and DOJ’s position is that it absolutely CAN charge a former POTUS.
MisterDancer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That was BRUTAL. I don’t think I could show my face in the District after that diss.
piratedan
@Cameron: I wouldn’t think so if the crimes committed happened in the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia.
If there are criminal referrals, we get to play the speculation game once again regarding who will be charged and then see if the 45 Administration pieces fall like a jenga tower because as Kay has told us numerous times, these are low quality hires and low quality hires are not known for their collective loyalty, so we may watch even more details unfold regarding the coordination of events, where the money came from and who else in the government was aiding and abetting.
none of that may happen either (and to be fair, even if it does, the Media is more wired for Hunter Biden dick pics than they are with people overthrowing the government, but it would make access more rigid by having to access these folks in a federal criming facility…..
Ken
@MisterDancer: Ah, but you have shame.
geg6
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Hahahahahaha, good for them. Exactly how it should be done.
Betty Cracker
Dahlia Lithwick wrote a great piece on the jackassery that took place during yesterday’s SCOTUS hearing on the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, in which a homophobe wants permission to discriminate against a class of hypothetical clients. Here’s an excerpt:
That’s how they’ll come after marriage equality, fair housing, etc., too — theoretical cases that cast whiny evangelicals as the only “victims.” The radical clerics of the court are entitled pricks, but the way they set these hypotheticals up indicates they understand public opinion is against them. Maybe that’s why they’re so damned bitter.
Jackie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just watched it. McCarthy pissed on the MTG’s of the House with his effusive praise for the Capitol and Metro police officers’ heroism.
frosty
@The Moar You Know: Read comment #7above yours.
Hitchhiker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
McConnell standing there with his hand out and his usual ugly smirk while adults ignore him … he’s earned that disrespect, and so much more.
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That was brutal, with so many of them walking by and not even looking at those two. Message delivered!!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Police culture in this country is sick
RaflW
Yeah, the video of the family of officer Brian Sicknick refusing to shake hands with Sen McConnell and Rep McCarthy at the congressional gold medal ceremony, wow.
I’ve seen this happen to Turtle once before, and it just delights me. He deserves every once of shunning he got today. He had the chance to put the shiv in Trump in the weeks after J6, but totally failed. F***k him.
And McCarthy is so far beneath contempt, the fewer words written about him the better
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good for them! Joe and McTurtle can go fuck themselves.
(Apologies to any respectable McCarthys)
WV Blondie
Some new news! Wapo is reporting that the Special Counsel has issued subpoenas to particular county officials in AZ, MI, and WI for their communications with TFG and others, presumably about the attempts to get alternate electors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/06/jack-smith-trump-communications-subpoenas/
MisterForkbeard
@cain: He followed it up with another “but totally we should terminate the constitution guys” statement, too.
RaflW
@Betty Cracker: They’re probably bitter because they know that whatever they decide in the next months and years – or decades if we can’t reform the court or improve it via timely vacancies – will surely follow the arc from Plessy to Brown v Board of Education. Though I fervently hope the timeframe is much compressed.
Assholes like Alito and Thomas know that the next generations are not nearly as hateful, bigoted and constipated as they are, and it eats at them. May they feel the gnaw on their souls more sharply!
mrmoshpotato
@WV Blondie: They fucked around. Now they’re finding out.
WV Blondie
@mrmoshpotato: Yep! And I love FAFO when it happens to such deserving people.
gwangung
On topic?
Jack Smith issues subpoenas on Trump Communications with AZ and other election officials
Jackie
Jackie
@gwangung:
PaulWartenberg
I WANT PERP WALKS FROM TRUMP ON DOWN BEFORE CHRISTMAS, PLEASE AND THANK YOU SANTA.
UncleEbeneezer
PaulWartenberg
@UncleEbeneezer: How the hell was trump still getting classified documents AFTER January 20th 2021? I thought Biden cut off his clearance.
MisterForkbeard
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Honestly, I think it’s just too hard to name/prove a criminal statute that Trump explicitly broke.
Is he responsible? Yeah, absolutely. What exact law did he break? I couldn’t tell you. :/
UncleEbeneezer
@PaulWartenberg: Not classified items. Ones that aren’t classified. But they were stored with the classified ones so the date proves that he was using that storage drawer (or whatever) regularly.
MisterDancer
I think there’s something there. I was watching a riveting video essay on the Life and Death of Disco, and the echoes to today’s world are more than a little terrifying.
But one of the things I dimly recall from the last 1970s was that no one of note was vigorously pushing back on the implication that Disco (and associated cultural elements) was toxic to the culture. And I say this because also knowing that, living in those moments, I wasn’t aware there were Homophobic chants used at the infamous Disco Demolition Night — much less the Racist implications I also understand came out of that, and similar, events.
I wasn’t aware. But I bet a lot of these bitter people, are very aware.
Because those acts of prejudice were NORMAL. And now, they are…less normal. This has these asshats really upset, because now people push back eagerly and happily against some (still too little) of this bullshit. There’s an effort to build a culture that isn’t desperate for White Men to bless every aspect of it.
So now, they shoot up people and powerstations out of that bitterness, that rage that “we” won’t just do what “they” say, anymore. Drag Queens aren’t curling up in fear, Trans folx aren’t being quiet…and Black folx are helping to vote in people to protect not just ourselves, but all the above people in harm’s way, and more.
It’s not perfect. Just not a repeat of the total flip I (again, dimly) recall from decades ago…or what I read about, when I hit the Compromise of 1877 and how it opened the door to Jim Crow.
UncleEbeneezer
@MisterForkbeard: INAL but it seems like Attempted Obstruction (of both the election certification and the 1/6 investigation itself), is a possible charge.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
There’s a subset of people, who not only want to win, but also want the person they beat to bow down before them and bask in the victor’s glory or beg for mercy or some other subservient act.
A lot of conservatives have this attitude.
The SCOTUS Six most definitely have this attitude. Alito’s mad because people aren’t falling down all over themselves to acknowledge how right he was in overturning Roe. Rather, he’s pissed there’s so much pushback. He can’t enjoy his win, because the opposition isn’t bowing down to his genius.
I speculate that part of this is how conservatives have had to toe the line and not bad mouth Brown v. Board of Education, for example, since the 1970’s and risk hurting their careers, if they openly came out as pro-racial segregation. They want us to feel that constrained, if we try to critique Dobbs.
Matt McIrvin
@MisterDancer: Above the cultural waterline, all I remember hearing was that we suddenly collectively decided that disco sucked and had always sucked and we didn’t know what we had been thinking. As a kid, I didn’t get the subtext either. But part of it was clearly the idea that disco was unmanly and men needed a more macho kind of music. And that was part of the whole giant gender backlash that was happening in the wider culture at that moment.
The oddest part of it is that there was popular music in the aftermath that was pretty clearly still disco, it just wasn’t called “disco” because disco sucked.
Soprano2
@MisterDancer: People like the Clerical 6 are CERTAIN they know the best way for EVERYONE to live their lives, and it makes them angry and bitter when most people don’t agree with them. These people, though, have the opportunity to force a lot of the way they live onto the rest of us whether we want it or agree with it or not.
Burnspbesq
@Cameron:
All such cases will be brought in DC, and DC juries have earned the benefit of the doubt based on their performance in 1/6 trials to date.
MisterForkbeard
@UncleEbeneezer: Attempted Obstruction makes a lot of sense for the election certification. The alternate electors, the explicit plans for intimidate congressfolk into delaying the vote certification on 1/6, trying to get Pence to overturn the votes even after he stated that he didn’t have the legal power to do so, etc.
Burnspbesq
Trump has stepped in it again. It’s bad enough that Save America PAC is paying the legal fees of people like Patel, but paying the legal fees of a potential prosecution witness smells a lot like witness tampering and obstruction.
JoyceH
@WV Blondie:
I like to see the Special Counsel getting busy, but occurred to me to wonder. These subpoenas are for communications, but what if a person in AZ was subpoenaed to testify at a grand jury in DC – would they be on the hook for travel expenses or is that provided?
(BTW, there’s a parody Jack Smith account on Twitter – yesterday it tweeted ‘Had the intern park a DOJ van in front of Mar A Lago, because that’s just how I Monday’. )
UncleEbeneezer
@MisterDancer: And I think they are deeply scared by the fact that so many of the people who are supposed to be on their side (white people, men, Cisgender people etc.) are showing solidarity with marginalized groups, amplifying their voices and centering them in our political goals. Somewhere in his book Stamped From The Beginning, Ibram X Kendi wrote that racists have a deep and special hatred for Race Traitors™ and I think it’s because they realize that White People refusing to support White Supremacy is its’ death knell. Same for Men ditching (or actively supporting the dismantling of) Patriarchy. Etc. The last ten years has seen the Dem Party talking openly about Racial Justice/Equality, Passing the ERA, Equality Act for LGBTQ people etc. (call co-signed by Millions of white/male/cis etc. voters) and incorporating all this stuff into the Dem platform. That’s a major problem for the other side and one of the reasons I think we’ve seen such a horrific backlash.
Burnspbesq
@Ken:
See 18 U.S.C. § 2071(b).
UncleEbeneezer
@MisterForkbeard: And for the Oathkeepers verdict every one of them were convicted of Obstruction. Even Rhodes who claims he never entered the Capitol. So it’s not a huge stretch that a jury would convict Trump and others of attempted Obstruction.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Matt McIrvin: I was a child too, when disco was declared dead, and I barely remember that era. Its so weird to me that the ‘macho’ music that replaced it was 80’s big hair rock. Those men wore glitter, makeup, and sequins, yet this was somehow more toxic manly than disco? When think back to my childhood, none of it makes any sense. I mean both disco and rock were chock full of misogyny, so its not like there was any difference there.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yeah, 80s hair metal still had all these gender-bending elements that were still carried over from 70s glam, but it was somehow OK with otherwise reactionary fans. A lot of stuff was just incoherent.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I used to think disco sucked. But there is an oldies station local to me now that I listen to. The music they play from the 50s and 60s has held up well. Once they get very far into the 70s, though, I’m like, “Wow, does that stuff ever suck!” Except for the disco.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@MisterForkbeard:
I mean, he clearly had stolen classified documents in his possession, didn’t he?
...now I try to be amused
@UncleEbeneezer: I think it’s worth studying the moods, politics, and acts of the Afrikaner minority in South Africa in the last years of apartheid; it’s a pretty good parallel of what’s going on here.
MisterForkbeard
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah, but that’s not 1/6 related. That’s different, and I expect him to get nailed pretty hard on that. But not by the 1/6 commission.
Citizen Alan
@Geminid: I love seventies disco on Sirius XM. I appreciate all those lush orchestral harmonies supporting the singer. So much better than all those glorified garage bands of the 1980s who just screamed their lyrics over the sound of electric guitars that sounded like chainsaws.
lowtechcyclist
@UncleEbeneezer:
His second visit in a week. The link below is from November 30:
Former Trump advisor Stephen Miller testifies in court (turnto23.com)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@UncleEbeneezer: I see reports like this and wonder how many reporters there are whose full-time job is just to hang around the many courthouses where grand juries are investigating TFG and see who goes in and out and for how many hours.
Burnspbesq
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Several.
Ken
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The job is made easier because so many of them are wearing tracking devices on their ankles.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: Dave Matthews was a big local hero but I was never that much into his music. But I think I understood why he caught on. People crave something new, and Matthews and his band were a refreshing break from the guitar-dominated music they’d been hearing for years.
Matthews lives in the Seattle area now, but he traveled to Georgia last week and appeared with Senator Warnock at a rally in Cobb County, just outside of Atlanta on November 28.
Matthews is very much a contrasting figure to fellow South African immigrant Elon Musk. But he likes to keep a low profile and does not make much of the contrast, at least not publically. I think his family was Quaker, and they moved to Virginia when he was a child.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: I think I’ve shared the story here about my ex’s cousin, who was such a big Dave Matthews fan that she wrote him a long letter talking about what his music meant to her – which so impressed him that he actually called her up! She was in the middle of trying to wrestle groceries in from the car when she heard him on the answering machine – luckily, she managed to get to the phone in time to actually talk to him.
I was never a big fan of his music but I became a big fan of *his*, personally, after that.
Gwangung
@Geminid: I think funk and disco still holds up. Can’t really dump on folks like Earth, Wind and Fire, Tower of Power and Stevie Wonder. In fact, almost all of the Black acts hold up very well.
Hm. Wonder what that means….
MisterDancer
I worked closely with a DMB mega-fan (mumble) years ago, in sysadmin work. And yeah, he was one of the best “dudebros” I’ve ever associated with, in or our of the office. He educated me on DMB stuff a bit, and I can’t help but think he looked to Mr. Matthews as sort of a role model.
UncleEbeneezer
@Geminid: That’s cool. I was a big DMB fan back in college. I was just starting to get into jam-bands, for the “jamming”/improv aspects (long before I discovered jazz) but most of the bands in the scene had terrible vocals and weak drums. Dave Matthews was the first band in that realm that had “a drummers’ drummer” with serious funk feel and virtuoso chops, and strong vocals (though I totally get why some people HATE Dave’s voice and his quirky lyrics). Also, the airwaves at the time were heavy on acoustic/rock bands like Soul Asylum, Hootie & The Blowfish, The Samples etc. that all had that Earthy/Crunchy, Beach/Mountain-Stoner vibe but didn’t really rock. DMB had a similar sound but could absolutely kill it, live. All that said, I haven’t listened to anything beyond their first three albums (and even rarely those) in years. I always heard that Dave was a good guy. That’s great that he was stumping for Warnock :)
UncleEbeneezer
@Gwangung: To be fair Tower of Power is/was predominantly white (and very much what I call “white funk”: very busy, linear grooves and not much Second Line/New Orleans influence)
For funky/white artists: I would argue that the Bee Gee’s still hold up pretty well and had some incredibly funky non-disco tunes like Boogie Child and that Little Feat was one of the funkiest bands of it’s time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I really like Grey Street, and if I’m in the right mood and it comes on the radio I’ll turn up Ants Marching (I think that’s the one? there’s another up tempo one I hate). Still and all, glad Dave Matthews is on our side and crossed the country to try to help
Also like his duet with Emmylou, My Antonia, which I was hoping when I saw the title was about the Willa Cather character, but I like it anyway