March 7, 2022

Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America's slide into Putinism?

Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America’s slide into Putinism?
Political bombshells here at home tie Donald Trump tightly to a criminal conspiracy on January 6. Will the attorney general find the courage to act?
The Philadelphia Inquirer: Can Merrick Garland find his inner Zelensky and stop America’s slide into Putinism? | Will Bunch.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/merrick-garland-indict-trump-january-6-20220306.html

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Indeed, a federal investigation that so far has netted charges against more than 700 smaller fish hasn’t ensnared any swamp creature larger than James or Rhodes, who pleaded not guilty to the same seditious conspiracy charge. The big kahunas — Stone, his pal Michael Flynn, Trump January 6 advisers like Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon, as well as Trump himself — have not been charged (although Bannon faces trial for ignoring the House Committee’s subpoena), and legal watchers have seen scant evidence such a probe is far along.

That, in a nutshell, is the true significance of last week’s legal filing by the House committee. In announcing its strong evidence of Trump’s criminality around January 6, the committee also made it all but inevitable it will eventually send a criminal referral against Trump to Garland at the Justice Department. This will likely come after public hearings, probably this spring, that will lay out the case of the United States vs. Donald J. Trump. The pressure will mount on Garland to do something America has never done — charge a president with a crime.

That’s why what’s happening right now in Ukraine should be a game-changer. We are watching, in real-time, the moral implosion of a powerful, nuclear-armed nation that’s just a few years farther down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism than the United States. Putin’s delusional but deadly invasion of a sovereign democracy has elevated the question: How do you stop a madman? And when? In Sunday’s Washington Post, veteran journalist Dan Balz reports the biggest worry of America’s western allies in working so closely with the Biden administration against Russia is their fear that U.S. voters — or U.S. vote counters — will return Trump to the White House in 2024.

Yet fear has ruled our own response to Trump’s criminality. The latest deer in those headlines has been newly elected Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who stunned his top career staffers by aborting their ongoing criminal investigation into Trump’s role in the dodgy finances of the Trump Organization. It’s totally legit to worry that the milquetoast-y Garland — whose prosecutors have already pulled their Trump-related punches in other matters — is the next frightened deer standing on the roadway between January 6 and real justice.

One of the few positives to emerge from the horrors taking place in Eastern Europe is the reminder for a politics-weary world of what actual courage looks like, in the unexpected persona of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. A former comedian and actor, Zelensky has shown the power of looking directly into a camera and speaking plain truths, about the barbarity of Putin’s invasion and the will of his own people to resist it. It’s something that some of America’s political leaders — but especially Merrick Garland, facing the decision of a lifetime — should watch, and study. That’s because speaking the plain truth about what Donald Trump did, and acting upon that truth, is the only surefire way to prevent an American Putin.

February 25, 2022

"You cannot just go and buy a weapon. It's not like the United States"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/25/ukraine-invasion-russia-news/#link-NEBMMPYONRFF3CKVWJTURS2Z2A

Key update
‘I’m going to fight to my last drop of blood’: Ukrainians return from abroad to join battle

SHEHYNI, Ukraine — Some Ukrainian men living overseas lined up Friday at border crossings to return to Ukraine and do their part to fight Russia’s onslaught. Others, attempting to leave Ukraine, expressed frustration at being blocked amid a national call to arms.

Ukraine’s border guards stopped all male citizens between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country on Friday, as the Defense Ministry called on residents of one district of Kyiv to make molotov cocktails.

Alexander Gorbenko, 54, complained that there was little he could do to protect his homeland from Russian troops as he parted from his wife and 11-year-old daughter at the Medyka-Shehyni border crossing to Poland, unable to cross with them.

“I just have an air rifle, the cash machines don’t work, and there is no organization,” he said. “I cannot prepare. You cannot just go and buy a weapon. It’s not like the United States.”

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February 3, 2022

How Will America Deal with The Next GOP Wannabee Dictator?

How Will America Deal with The Next GOP Wannabee Dictator?
If the DOJ and Congress don't prosecute Trump and change our laws, the next Republican to occupy the White House will probably also try to end our democracy
https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-will-america-deal-with-the-next

“Precedent” sounds boring and wonky. In reality, it’s the way past criminal Republican presidents have taught those who followed them to break the law.

This is the shocking story of how Republican presidents taught each other to break the law, and how — if Trump isn't prosecuted — the next Republican president will try to end democracy in the USA.

Trump has broken multiple past presidential precedents and established entirely new ones that — unless they’re punished and outlawed — provide a template for the next Republican president who wants to turn America into a strongman oligarchy like Hungary or Turkey.

And given the rhetoric coming out of the GOP’s front-runners for 2024, we should be seriously concerned about that as a future

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Since the Nixon precedents were set, criminality and a flagrant disregard for democratic norms have run like an underground river through the GOP, and have now flowed from federal to state Republican politicians as well.

As you’re reading these words, Republicans are preparing to openly steal elections in more than a dozen states and fifty corrupt Republicans in the US Senate just helped them in their effort.

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January 16, 2022

we should be grateful that Democrats elected a lot of smart, fearless women in recent years

JANUARY 6 DECONFLICTION: “THIS IS PART OF A MUCH BIGGER CONSPIRACY”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/01/15/january-6-deconfliction-this-is-part-of-a-much-bigger-conspiracy/

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Consider what happened to lead to this federal criminal referral. After electors sent fake certifications to the National Archives, NARA then sent them to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

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Arizona took immediate action; given Nessel’s comments, Benson appears to have referred the matter to Nessel. Some of these details were made public last March after American Oversight obtained them. But after the January 6 Committee put them all in context and focused renewed attention to how the fake certificates fit into a larger effort, it led Nessel to hold off on pursuing potential 14-year charges against some of the most powerful Republicans in the state, and instead to formally refer the investigation to the Feds, based on the logic that the obviously coordinated effort to forge fake electoral certificates is part of a larger whole.

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Regardless of what Willis decides, she can also refer actions to the Feds because it, like the forged electoral certifications, “is part of a much bigger conspiracy.”

The point is (besides that we should be grateful that Democrats elected a lot of smart, fearless women in recent years) that there are lots of moving parts to this “much bigger conspiracy.” And all those moving parts have, as an option, referring their investigative findings to DOJ to drop it into the “much bigger conspiracy.”

So during the year when DOJ has been laying what Merrick Garland called “the evidentiary foundation for more complex cases,” states and local authorities have been conducting investigations that can be joined to that evidentiary foundation.

These are all parts of a much bigger conspiracy.

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