StealVille
From Amy Gardener et al., writing in the Washington Post yesterday:
A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Washington Post shows.
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the campaign’s election operations director for Georgia, the day before the 16 Republicans gathered at the Georgia Capitol to sign certificates declaring themselves duly elected. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
The Dec. 13, 2020, email went on to instruct the electors to tell security guards at the building that they had an appointment with one of two state senators. “Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media,” Sinners continued in bold.
The admonishments suggest that those who carried out the fake elector planwere concerned that, had the gathering become public before Republicans could follow through on casting their votes, the effort could have been disrupted...
Remember, this all happened after Mr. Trump attempted to bully the Georgia Secretary of State to find him the 11,000, plus votes to beat Joe Biden in that wee bit of Electoral College real estate.
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It also occurred after Mr. Biden's win in Georgia had been formally certified by the state, re-certified after a recount, and re-re-certified by the courts.
So, what was the plan of Trump State Machinery, writ large?
To have Mike Pence nullify the legitimate elector slates from swing states won by Biden and install the fake slates ready to flip/steal the Electoral College for Trump on January 6th, 2021.
Imagine that.
Imagine that.
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The former Trump State quisling quoted in the piece above has since gone to work for the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia...
If you want to listen to a great podcast on how and why regular folks were bamboozled and/or bludgeoned by the Trump State Machinery on January 6th, 2021 itself, the eight part podcast 'It Will Be Wild' by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz (formerly of WNYC) is really good...
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3 comments:
Pence was having none of it. After four years of obsequiousness he had finally had enough. So says Michael Wolff in his book “Landslide - The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” published last year. He details the January 04th meeting involving Eastman referenced in the CNN article linked above.
“The president had returned the night before from Dalton, Georgia, making a last and begrudging appeal in the Senate runoff election in another rambling speech otherwise focused on election grievances and an effort to put more public pressure on Pence.
The vice president had also been in Georgia stumping for the Senate candidates. On the way back, from their separate planes, they had arranged to get together in the White House that evening. Giuliani wanted to have the vice president sit down with John Eastman, the constitutional scholar he was most relying on to make the case for the vice president’s wide powers. Marc Short [Pence’s Chief of Staff] would have liked to avoid this meeting. He was adamant that there was no discretion on the vice president’s part; in the vice president’s mind, there was no debate or ambiguity here; and confidant they had expressed this to the president in every possible way. But trying not to say no to the president, Short agreed they’d come in for a last discussion, with the stipulation that Giuliani, who Short was convinced was wholly without sense or reason, the lead clown in the clown car, not be there.
Short and the vice president arrived with their own attorney, Greg Jacob, a Federalist Society conservative-in-good-standing lawyer who viewed the president and his lawyer’s position as insupportable and fallacious, if not ludicrous.
It was the vice president himself who led the pushback…
…A frustrated, resolute, and, to a degree that he would never show, increasingly angry Mike Pence made the two obvious points…
…It was a curiously novel moment in the Trump presidency: the Vice President standing up for himself. Trump aides, marvelling at the development, analyzed that, in Pence’s mind, all of Trump’s acting out and offending behaviour over four years was on Trump himself - a cover that worked for many Republicans. But taking this action now in the Electoral College count would be on Pence, and he would go down ignominiously in history for it. He had finally, and belatedly, drawn his line in the sand.”
It seems that while it remains to be seen if any of this will have legal repercussions for Trump and/or Giuliani, Mr. Pence needn’t lose any sleep in that regard.
Absolutely Lew--
And Pence knew it was coming, so much so that he and his assembled a triumvirate of conservative Federalist judges to both provide 'advice' and to get out in front of the thing that Mr. Trump was still pushing, on Twitter, as the Jan 6th insurrection was happening.
I'd be willing to take short odds on a bet that the Jan 6th hearing tomorrow will present evidence that the coup plotters had an advance plan to remove Pence from the Capitol if and when he did not do their bidding.
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Most people have a line they will not cross and Pence had reached that line. I think as history rolls on, the one who will be remembered is Pence who did the right thing.
they have names for people who have no line they won't cross to get what they want and that is not a good thing for our democracy or the americans, If we critizise Russian/Putin and China/Xi, we ought to be careful because we now know how close the "defenders" of democracy came to loosing theirs.
Oh, I am looking forward to the hearings, ought to be the best thing on t.v. tomorrow evening. I'm buying cheezies also for the occassion
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