<Republican Party fundraisers are running into major roadblocks when they approach big-money donors they have counted on in the past because there is little interest in seeing a 2024 GOP ticket headed by Donald Trump again.

According to a report from the New York Times, wealthy conservatives who gave freely in 2016 and 2020 with Trump as the presidential candidate are balking at coughing up any money for his 2024 run that seems "inevitable" based upon polling.

Recently a key GOP donor, Eric Levine, fired off an email to contributors and GOP lawmakers expressing dismay at the prospect of Trump 2024, writing: "I refuse to accept the proposition that Donald Trump is the ‘inevitable’ Republican nominee for President. His nomination would be a disaster for our party and our country.”

According to the Times' Rebecca Davis O’Brien, "Many of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors share that view, and the growing sense of urgency about the state of the G.O.P. presidential primary race," adding, "That has left major Republican donors — whose desires have increasingly diverged from those of conservative voters — grappling with the reality that the tens of millions of dollars they have spent to try to stop the former president, fearing he poses a mortal threat to their party and the country, may already be a sunk cost."

O'Brien wrote that interviews with donors, fundraisers and insiders, "revealed hand-wringing, magical thinking, calls to arms and, for some, fatalism."

According to a Texas-based Republican fund-raiser, who is uncommitted and asked to be kept anonymous, telling donors Trump will be the candidate they'll be saddled with is not going over well.

"Intellectually, their heads explode,” they explained before adding that many of them are also “backing off” donating to Trump's GOP rivals.

Writing, "Large-dollar Republican donors, even those who enthusiastically or reluctantly backed Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, have made no secret of their wish to move on in 2024," O'Brien added, "Some donors expressed incredulity that Mr. Trump would be able to run for president while fighting off the charges. He faces a busy calendar of trials next year that is likely to grow only more complex."

According to wealthy donor Andy Sabin, who is backing the longshot campaign of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), "I don’t see how he’s going to deal with these huge legal problems. I don’t really care about his numbers. I think he’s got enough other stuff going on. All of these trials start — who knows? We are in uncharted territory.”

Jay Zeidman, a fundraiser for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), added, "I believe that Republican primary voters need to understand the opportunity they have to win a very winnable presidential election.”>

<Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) demonstrated a "clearly flagrant misunderstanding of his oath of office" when he attempted to intervene in a state-based prosecution of Donald Trump, according to a fellow lawmaker.

Jordan wrote a letter to Fani Willis, mirroring past actions he has taken in the New York-based prosecution of the former president and prompting a scathing rebuke from the prosecutor in Georgia. The letter also earned Jordan some harsh words from former Robert Mueller investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissman.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), an oversight committee member, appeared on MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian Reports to discuss the situation on Saturday.

"Give us first your reaction to some of these pretty strong words we heard from D.A. Fani Willis about specifically Jim Jordan," said the host.

"My initial reaction of this letter as a woman, as a public servant who is highly competent, educated, understands my oath of office, and who goes on to work on behalf of my people every day, I really took this letter as a check on Jim Jordan, and his clearly flagrant misunderstanding of his oath of office, his misunderstanding of U.S. Constitution and the separation of powers, and also his continued use of his position of power," Stansbury said. "I think that in addition to that, it is a check on all of those individuals that are sitting in positions of power, who continue to abuse, to bully, and to prop up unjust and unconstitutional systems. In this case, to the highest levels of government to prop up the criminal enterprise.">

<At the heart of Donald Trump’s two 2020 election interference indictments was his alleged strategy to replace legitimate electors in seven key battleground states with fake ones who met on a certain date to cast fraudulent votes for the former president.

But some conservatives argue that Democrats deployed a similar tactic in Hawaii during the 1960 election between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger John F. Kennedy - a comparison that holds no water.

Though Kennedy beat Nixon in the 1960 election, Hawaii’s results remained largely uncertain since the initial count found that Nixon beat Kennedy in the state by less than 150 votes - a narrow margin that was originally certified by the Hawaii's Republican lieutenant governor.

A lawsuit was soon filed and a court ordered a recount of votes in the state, which was still taking place on Dec. 19, 1960 - the date set for electors to meet and cast their ballots. On that day, Republican electors sent a certificate to Congress with their three votes for Nixon.

But at the same time, Democrat electors cast their three votes for Kennedy and sent their own documents to Congress. The recount found that Kennedy won Hawaii by 115 votes and a court ordered his win to be certified, according to Joan Meyer, a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine.

But the 1960 case and what happened in the aftermath of 2020 are noticeably different.

“In Trump's case there were no genuine grounds for uncertainty about the outcome of the election, no ongoing recount, and Trump's slates of fake electors were assembled with the intent to sow confusion, buffalo Congress and the Vice President, and stop them from certifying the genuine election results,” said David Alan Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford University.

Here’s a closer look at the two cases.

What are legal experts saying about the two cases? The differences in both cases can be viewed in several ways, including the timing of the recount, the nature of the electors’ meetings and the vice presidents' approval.

Unlike any of the contested states in 2020, the 1960 outcome in Hawaii was genuinely in doubt since the margin of victory was within 100 to 200 votes, according to George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. It was reasonable for both sides to have electors prepared since it was unclear who the “real” electors were, he said.

“The 1960 Hawaii dispute had no chance of overturning the overall election result and was not part of a general scheme to rig or steal the election,” Somin said.

By contrast, the margin in all the disputed states in 2020 were vastly larger, and there was no real chance of those results being overturned, Somin said. Trump allegedly continued his fake elector schemes on false claims that the 2020 election was rigged - which the indictments claim he knowingly spread and officials insisted there was no evidence of.

In Georgia where Biden had won by nearly 12,000 votes, for instance, Trump’s electors still allegedly met even after Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that legally cast ballots were counted three times and votes remain unchanged.

"Trump challenged the Georgia results and failed to get any traction,” Meyer said. “In Hawaii in 1960, a court was overseeing the recount process which resulted in the reversal of the win from Nixon to Kennedy.”

In Hawaii, the two slates of electors met openly and transparently, Meyer said. But Trump and his allies in 2020 allegedly selected a Republican slate secretly in Georgia who met in secret, voted secretly and were told not to mention what they were doing or talk to the media.

“This surreptitious behavior indicates that this was not an honest disagreement or a back up plan to keep options open, it was a plot to substitute legitimate electors with fake ones,” Meyer said.

She added that the certificates that the electors sent to Congress in 1960 were “intended to be a backstop utilized after a court ordered recount declaring the real victor of the presidential election," unlike the certificates allegedly signed in 2020 by the fake electors.

After the recount, the Republican Governor of Hawaii at the time, William Quinn, sent a new certificate to Congress dated Jan. 4, 1961, certifying that the Democratic electors - who had previously cast their votes for Kennedy unofficially - were elected. Nixon, who presided over the congressional session to count the electoral votes on Jan. 6 of that year, accepted the governor's certificate "without the intent of establishing a precedent.".....>

<....“It is hard to convince a jury that there was fraudulent intent by the Democrat electors when it turned out that Kennedy had won and they substituted a correct certificate approved by the Governor of Hawaii,” said Marc Scholl, a former prosecutor in New York now counsel to the firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann & Middlemiss.

In contrast, Trump and his allies allegedly tried to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to use Trump's fake electors and reject the legitimate electoral votes, and Pence had refused.

Fani Willis pushes back against claims that 1960 case is a legal precedent

Along with Trump, Georgia’s Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis also indicted 18 of his allies - from prominent figures like Rudy Giuliani to lesser known individuals - last month for their alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in the state.

Cathleen Latham and David Shafer, both of whom were fake electors, requested in court filings last month that their cases be moved from state court to federal court and cited the 1960 Hawaii case as a "legal precedent."

However, Willis denied Latham's motion in a court filing on Thursday, arguing that claims the Hawaii case is precedent "misses the mark by a wide margin."

"Actions that did not result in prosecution 60 years ago - in a different jurisdiction with different election code and criminal statutes, presided over by different prosecuting agencies, and with differing substantive evidence of criminal intent - provides zero protection" for Latham, Willis wrote.

Willis also argued that when Latham allegedly met with other fake electors, two recounts had already been completed and both reaffirmed Biden's victory, and that her losing effort was never certified by the governor or validated through any other means.

"There is no guiding precedent to be found here," Willis wrote.>

Like it, <fredthebore>? Come back for more, once you return from your latest break!

<Surveying the current landscape where judges and prosecutors -- with the notable exception of Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida -- are being threatened with being investigated simply because they are overseeing a case involving Donald Trump, some legal experts are becoming increasingly alarmed that the U.S. system of justice is being turned upside down.

In interviews with the Washington Post's Jacqueline Alemany, law professors and legal experts who served in the DOJ are pushing back at threats made by high-profile Republicans like House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), calling them out of line.

As Alemany wrote, "Investigate the investigator. That has been the operating thesis of the GOP’s playbook to counter the myriad criminal investigations into Donald Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party," adding, "The strategy has been effective in shaping public opinion of the investigations after years of sustained broadsides against the judicial system by Trump and his top allies."

That led former federal prosecutor Caren Morrison who teaches at Georgia State University College of Law to warn, "Big picture, this does seem incredibly troubling."

Morrison added, "For years I’ve told my students that one principle we can always rely on is the principle of prosecutorial discretion — it is unassailable and that is the essence of their power: They can choose which cases to pursue and which cases not to pursue. … We are kind of at a point where nobody agrees on what the rules are.”

"So far, congressional investigations have been launched against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, special counsel Jack Smith, and most recently, Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis — all of whom have charged Trump with crimes," the Post is reporting.

Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs Robert Raben also called out the unwarranted threats.

“There are important lines of division that should not be penetrated — and we can squabble about where those lines are — but hauling up an investigator while something is pending to influence something to which you are not a party is inappropriate,” he explained.

Stephen Boyd, the former assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legislative Affairs under Donald Trump also questioned the manner in which the congressional investigations are being initiated.

“A professional and correctly conducted Justice Department investigation starts with a fact, and then follows to another fact, and leads to some sort of conclusion," he elaborated. "A Capitol Hill political investigation often starts with a conclusion and then looks for facts to support it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Congress is wrong, but it means they are most interested in the things that prove their point.”>

<Fox News host Dagen McDowell suggested that efforts to power parts of Africa with solar panels were a "racist" recolonization of the continent.

The Associated Press recently reported that African businesses chose to use solar panels over energy created with fossil fuels.

McDowell, however, told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the move to green energy was a racist plot.

"These people are telling sub-Saharan Africa, you have to stay in the dark and not develop your fossil fuels because we say so," she said after President Joe Biden met with global leaders. "This is keeping a billion people in the dark, Senator, because they say so. It's called it's essentially climate colonialism. It's racist."

Johnson responded by insisting that there was no "climate emergency."

"All this climate change alarmism is based on bad science, completely ignoring the impact of clouds to basically be a heat sink," Johnson said. "Again, the climate is always [changing], always will."

"I'm not alarmist, I'm not in denial, but we've spent over five trillion dollars globally on climate change," he added. "We haven't moved the needle, according to climate alarmists. How much more are we going to waste?">

<Former President Donald Trump's legal team may need to come up with a more "creative argument" in defending him as their legal one "ain't working," former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele said on Saturday.

Steele's comments come after Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows was handed a legal loss on Friday after trying to move his case to a federal court instead of a state one.

The former White House chief of staff is facing two criminal counts, accused of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, along with Trump and 17 other associates of the former president. All 19 defendants from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' indictment have pleaded not guilty to their various charges. Meadows took the stand in Georgia last week to argue that his case should be tried in federal court, given that his actions tied to the indictment fell under his responsibilities as chief of staff.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones wrote in his 49-page filing order on Friday, however, that Meadows' actions fell outside the requirements of a White House chief of staff.

While speaking with MSNBC host Ali Velshi on Saturday, Steele said Trump's attorneys now need to come up with an alternative argument to get away from state court.

"Well, it smells political because it is political and the judge knew it and the judge was very cautious about that," Steele said of Friday's ruling. "He understands the political environment his court is operating in. He understands the political players in front of him as defendants, and so he wanted to be methodical. He wanted to be clear in his approach to this, so that yes, there will be some political backlash as there always is."

Steele continued: "But at least you can look at his effort to give Mark Meadows every deference, every opportunity to lay out and make the claim that he was acting as an official of the federal government of the United States when he was on those phone calls. It was very clear he was not, so the judge did it right. Mark Meadows, recognizing the peril he is in, was trying to get it to a more favorable venue for him, getting it out of Washington, D.C. The judge would have none of it. I think that to your point, Ali, is something that the other lawyers representing other defendants now, including Donald Trump, are looking at it and going, 'Well we've got to come up with a more creative argument because the legal one ain't working.'"

When asked if Trump's legal team should re-evaluate their strategy after Meadows' ruling, Emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School Alan Dershowitz told Newsweek on Saturday that Meadows' lawyers "should appeal."

Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance also said on MSNBC about the ruling on Friday, "Trying to help your boss steal an election is not part of the chief of staff's official duties in serving the presidency. Sounds like the work of the campaign at best, a criminal conspiracy at worst, and the judge says it will stay in the courts in Georgia for a decision.">

<According to former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, expect more indictments coming from special counsel Jack Smith against allies of Donald Trump, likely to be filed in Washington, D.C.

Speaking with MSNBC host Katie Phang about the three dozen unindicted co-conspirators listed in Friday's Georgia grand jury report, Kirschner noted that they may have not been part of the 19-defendant RICO indictment -- which included the former president -- already in progress, but they could see themselves hauled into court at a later date.

That, in turn, led him to suggest he expects Jack Smith to make a third indictment filing.

"Here's the outlier, Katie," the former prosecutor explained. "These people, who were named for indictment, but we haven't seen them show up in an indictment yet, they could be indicted in the future"

"Think about the Jack Smith's [sic] indictment that was handed down in Washington, D.C.," he stated. "There are six pretty important, unnamed, but pretty well-identified co-conspirators in that case. And I have every expectation that we will see a second wave of indictments in Washington, D.C. of those, thus far, unindicted co-conspirators."

"So it could be that [Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis is not yet done indicting people in Georgia," he added.>

<The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.

Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.

In the early legal skirmishing over this agenda, opponents including the federal Justice Department have won a surprising number of decisions, mostly in federal courts, blocking states from implementing the new laws.

But eventually most of these issues are likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court’s six-member Republican-appointed majority has generally ruled in ways that favor the conservative social-policy priorities reflected in the red-state actions. That inclination was most dramatically demonstrated in last year’s Dobbs decision, when the Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

In the coming years, the Court will face a series of decisions on the new red-state agenda that may determine whether the U.S. maintains a strong baseline of civil rights available in all states or reverts back toward a pre-1960s world where people’s rights varied much more depending on where they lived.

“The idea of the Bill of Rights was that we would have a floor of civil rights and civil liberties that the states could not go below,” David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “But for that floor to be meaningful, it has to be enforced by the Supreme Court ultimately.

“In our history, the courts have sometimes done that courageously and bravely, and other times they have fallen down on the job,” Cole continued. “And when they have fallen down on the job, you get a two-tier system in this country.”

Since President Joe Biden’s election, the 22 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature have moved with remarkable speed to create a two-tier system on issues including abortion, classroom censorship, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. “The fact that all of this is happening on so many different fronts simultaneously is unprecedented,” Donald Kettl, a former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.

This broad red-state push to retrench rights, as I’ve written, is reversing the general trend since the 1960s of nationalizing more rights, a process often called “the rights revolution.”

Civil-rights advocates have limited options for reversing this tide of red-state legislation. So long as the Senate filibuster exists, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing national legislation to override the red-state actions on issues such as abortion and voting rights, even if the party regains unified control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.

In some states, opponents can try to rescind these measures directly through ballot initiatives, like the Ohio referendum that, if passed in November, would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. But not all states permit such referendums, and even in those that do, ballot measures to reverse many of the key red-state restrictions would face an uncertain fate given the underlying conservative lean of their electorates.....>

<....Opponents are challenging some of the new statutes in state courts. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion, has cases pending in six states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida, arguing that abortion restrictions adopted since the Dobbs decision violate provisions in those states’ constitutions. But recent rulings by state supreme courts—in South Carolina, upholding the state’s six-week abortion ban, and in Texas, dismissing an injunction against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—show the limitations of relying on red-state courts to undo the work of red-state political leaders.

“Sometimes the state courts provide a sympathetic venue,” Cole said. “But oftentimes in the red states, precisely because the courts have been appointed by red-state governors and legislatures, they are not especially open to challenges to their legislature’s laws.”

That leaves federal courts as the principal arena for those hoping to overturn the restrictive red-state laws.

These federal cases raise a range of legal arguments. Mostly they revolve around the claim that the state laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech in the First Amendment and the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As courts consider these claims, the key early federal rulings have covered cases involving a variety of issues.

Freedom of speech: In a striking victory for critics, a federal district judge in Florida issued two decisions blocking enforcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how private employers and college and university professors talk about racial inequity. In one ruling, Judge Mark Walker called the law “positively dystopian.” He wrote: “The powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has denied DeSantis’s request to lift Walker’s injunction against the law while the case proceeds.

Federal courts have also blocked enforcement of the Florida law DeSantis signed increasing the penalties for public protest. But another federal judge has twice dismissed a case attempting to block DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms. (Opponents of the law are appealing that decision.)

Litigation against the multiple red-state measures making it easier for critics to ban books in school libraries has not advanced as far. But in May, PEN America, a free-speech group, together with Penguin Random House and several authors filed a suit against Florida’s Escambia County school district over the removal of titles about people of color and LGBTQ people that could become the bellwether case.

Abortion: Though the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision preempted any frontal federal legal challenge to the state laws restricting or banning the procedure, abortion-rights supporters continue to fight elements of the new statutes.

In late July, a federal district judge blocked guidance from Raúl Labrador, the Republican attorney general of Idaho, a state that has banned abortion, warning doctors that they could be prosecuted for helping patients travel out of state to obtain the procedure. A separate federal lawsuit filed in July is challenging Idaho’s law imposing criminal penalties on adults who transport a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. The Justice Department won an injunction last year preventing Idaho from enforcing another portion of its abortion ban on the grounds that it violates federal law requiring treatment of people needing emergency care in hospitals.

“Dobbs overturned 50 years of precedent and got rid of the fundamental liberty right to abortion, but it definitely didn’t answer every question,” Amy Myrick, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “And federal courts are now being faced with a public-health crisis of enormous magnitude, so at some point they will have to decide whether a ban becomes irrational if it forces patients to get sick or even die based on what a state says.”

<.....Voting: As with abortion, critics have found a legal basis to challenge only provisions at the periphery of the voting restrictions approved in most red states since 2021. Last month, the Justice Department won a federal court ruling blocking a measure that Texas had passed making it easier for officials to reject absentee ballots. In July, a federal-district-court judge upheld key components of Georgia’s 2021 law making voting more difficult, but did partially overturn that law’s most controversial element: a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.

LGBTQ rights: Federal litigation has probably progressed most against the intertwined red-state moves to impose new restrictions on transgender people. The Biden Justice Department has joined cases seeking to overturn the red-state actions on each of the major issues.

Two federal appellate courts have blocked policies requiring transgender students to use the bathroom (or locker room) of their gender assigned at birth, while the Eleventh Circuit late last year upheld such a law in Florida. Two federal circuit courts have also blocked the enforcement of laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender girls from participating on female sports teams in high school, though a lower federal court has subsequently upheld the West Virginia law.

Of all the issues affecting transgender people, litigation against the statutes passed in 22 Republican-controlled states barring gender-affirming care for minor children, even with their parents’ approval, may reach the Supreme Court first. In a flurry of decisions made mostly this summer, multiple federal district courts have issued injunctions blocking the implementation of such laws in several states. One federal appellate court has upheld such an injunction, but two others recently overturned lower-court rulings and allowed Tennessee and Alabama to put their laws into effect. (After those decisions, a federal district court last week also allowed Georgia to enforce its ban.) Such a split among circuit courts could encourage the Supreme Court to step in, as do the momentous and timely stakes for families facing choices about medical care. “For families who have adolescents who need this care, some of whom have been receiving this care, it’s a matter of family urgency,” Jennifer Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me.

Although liberal groups and the Biden administration have been heartened by many of these early rulings, they recognize that the most significant legal fights are all rolling toward the same foreboding terminus: the Supreme Court.

Over recent years, the Court has restricted the ability of blue states to impinge on rights that conservatives prize while mostly allowing red states to constrain rights that liberals prioritize. The Court has displayed the former instinct in its rulings striking down gun-control laws in blue jurisdictions, allowing religious-freedom exemptions to state civil-rights statutes, and barring public universities from using affirmative action. Conversely, the Court has loosened restrictions on red states with the Dobbs decision and the 2013 Shelby County ruling effectively revoking the Justice Department’s authority to preemptively block changes in state voting laws.

Those who see this past as prologue believe that the current Supreme Court majority may provide the red states great leeway to establish a legal regime that defines rights much more narrowly than in the rest of the country. At various points in American history, the Supreme Court has certainly done that before, most notoriously in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, when the justices approved the system of “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation across the South that persisted for nearly the next 70 years.

But several legal experts I spoke with said it was premature to assume that these recent rulings ensure that the Supreme Court will reflexively uphold the contemporary wave of red-state measures. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, told me that the Court’s decisions in recent years have advanced “what’s been the conservative Republican agenda for decades: Overrule Roe v. Wade; eliminate affirmative action; protect gun rights.” It’s less clear, Chemerinsky believes, what the Court will do with this “new conservative agenda” rising from the red states. Although the six Republican-appointed justices are clearly sympathetic to conservative goals, he said, “some of what the [states] are doing is so radical, I don’t know that the Supreme Court will go along.”....>

<.....The ACLU’s Cole notes that the Court appeared to move more cautiously in the term that ended in June than it did in the 2021–22 session, which concluded with the cannon shot overruling Roe. With a few prominent exceptions headlined by the decision banning affirmative action in higher education, “civil rights and civil liberties did pretty well in the Supreme Court this term,” Cole maintained. “Much is still to be determined, but I think this term showed us that you can’t just assume that this Court is going to impose right-wing results regardless of precedent.”

Conservatives remain confident that this Supreme Court majority will not reject many of these new red-state laws. They see an early signal of how some of these fights may play out in the August decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Alabama to enforce its law banning gender-affirming care for minors.

Written by Barbara Lagoa, who was appointed by Donald Trump, that ruling specifically cited the Supreme Court’s logic in the Dobbs case to argue that Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors would likely survive legal scrutiny. In Dobbs, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass the right to abortion because there was no evidence that such a right was “deeply rooted” in American history. Likewise, Lagoa wrote of gender-affirming care that “the use of these medications in general—let alone for children—almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition.”

Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, predicted that such logic would ultimately persuade the conservative Supreme Court majority. “What we are seeing now is the use of the Dobbs framework in actual action,” she told me. “I think the Supreme Court quite frankly is going to be very wary of expanding Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence to rubber-stamp an experimental new treatment, especially when minor children are involved.”

The one point both sides can agree on is that the Supreme Court’s rulings on the red-state measures will represent a crossroads for the country. One path preserves the broadly consistent floor of civil rights across state lines that Americans have known since the 1960s; the other leads to a widening divergence reminiscent of earlier periods of intense separation among the states.

Kettl believes that if the Supreme Court doesn’t constrain the red states, they almost certainly will push much further in undoing the rights revolution. “We haven’t seen what the boundary of that effort will be yet,” he told me, pointing to the ordinances some Texas localities have passed attempting to bar women from driving through them to obtain an abortion out of state.

If the Supreme Court allows the red states a largely free hand to continue devising their own system of civil rights and liberties, Chemerinsky said, it will present Americans with a “profound” question:

“Will the country accept being two different countries with regard to so many of these important things, as it did with regard to other important things such as slavery and civil rights?” he said. “Or will there be a point that people will say, ‘What divides us as a country is much greater than what unites us.’ And will we start hearing the first serious calls to rethink the United States?”>

<The phrase “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” often mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, has been used by countless Americans since 1800. Calls to protect the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution remain urgently relevant in 2023, when extremists have taken control of the Republican Party — via attempts to overthrow the results of a free and fair election, suppress the votes of qualified American citizens, incite violence against political opponents and spread conspiracy theories and lies.

More than a few Republican politicians, judges and voters, however, continue to oppose departures from democratic values. Along with the Republicans who denounced claims of election fraud and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, they deserve a shout-out.

In May, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature created a Prosecuting Attorneys Statewide Qualifications Commission (PASQC). The bill authorized a five-member panel to remove district attorneys who committed misconduct, failed to carry out their duties, or were convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude. When he signed the legislation, Gov. Brian Kemp predicted it would hold prosecutors accountable for giving “dangerous criminals a get-out-of-jail free card.”

In testimony before Georgia’s Senate Judiciary Committee, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis maintained that “it is dangerous to undo the voters, because you don’t like someone, and you don’t like their policies.” Willis emphasized that prosecutors always consider resources and community standards, among other factors, before deciding to indict. Adultery, she pointed out, remained illegal in Georgia, but adulterers were virtually never prosecuted.

Willis also confronted the elephant in the room. “I take my oath seriously,” Willis emphasized. “I look at each and every case.”

“Well, that’s not what we’re reading in the papers that you’re prosecuting,” State Sen. Bill Cowsert exclaimed.

State Sen. Clint Dixon subsequently acknowledged that the pending indictment of former President Trump was “one of the reasons” Republicans established the PASQC. State Sen. Colton Moore called on the governor to call a special session of the legislature to defund Willis’s office and impeach her.

Noting that he had rejected a special session to overturn the results of the 2020 election “because such an action would have been unconstitutional,” Kemp then asserted, “I have not seen any evidence that DA Willis’ actions or lack thereof warrant action by the prosecuting attorney oversight commission. As long as I’m governor, we are going to follow the law and the Constitution — regardless of who it helps politically.”

“Over the years,” Kemp added, “some inside and outside this building may have forgotten that. But I assure you I have not.”

A special session is not going to happen. But when the PASQC opens for business on Oct. 1, the commissioners may or may not heed Kemp’s admonitions.

In GOP-controlled Ohio, the legislature’s ban on virtually all special elections held in August took effect in April 2023. On May 10, however, Republican lawmakers scheduled a vote in August raising the threshold to amend the state constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent, and requiring petitions of support from at least 5 percent of voters in all 88 counties, instead of 44 of them. The referendum, Secretary of State Frank LaRosa initially claimed, was designed to diminish the influence of out-of-state special interests. The real reason, LaRosa subsequently acknowledged, was “100 percent about” defeating what he deemed a “radical pro-abortion” constitutional amendment in November....>

<.....In August, citizens of Ohio, which supported Donald Trump by an 8 percent margin in 2020, turned out in huge numbers to defeat the measure, 57-43. “No” votes came from Republican strongholds as well as from Democrats and Independents.

An attempt to subvert the will of the majority was thwarted. At least for now.

In January 2022, three federal district court judges, two of whom were appointed by President Trump, threw out congressional redistricting maps drawn by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature. The plan, they declared, violated the Voting Rights Act by giving Blacks less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice.

After postponing a decision until after the 2022 election was held, the Supreme Court agreed that Blacks, who comprise about 27 percent of the state’s population, should have more than one congressional district in which they constitute a majority. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals in a 5-4 vote.

When the Alabama lawmakers submitted a “new” plan, Judge Terry Moore, one of the Trump appointees, wondered if they had “deliberately disregarded” the court’s instructions. On September 5, the three district court judges declared they were “deeply troubled” that the legislature “did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy” and threw out the map.

The case, which may well return to the Supreme Court, is likely to set a precedent imperiling the GOP’s slim majority in the House of Representatives. As one Republican National Committee member put it, Louisiana is “next in line” and likely to be hit “right between the eyes.”

Racial gerrymandering has been declared unconstitutional. At least for now.

And in August, the Maricopa County, Arizona GOP proposed opting out of the state’s 2024 government-run presidential primary, and paying for, staffing and conducting a one-day contest, limited to paper ballots, counted by hand, “in solidarity with President Donald J. Trump, who was persecuted, arrested and indicted for taking the same position.”

The chair of the state’s Republican Party rejected the proposal as too expensive, too difficult to administer and likely to disenfranchise some of the 1.4 million eligible voters.

As he left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the delegates had created. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” These days, keeping it requires, at least as much as it did in 1787, eternal vigilance; civic and civil engagement from Democrats, Independents, and Republicans; and a respect for democratic ideas, ideals and institutions that, alas, seems to be in short supply.>

<One of the excuses Republicans have been spinning about the fake electors' plot in states like Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, is that they were simply copying a tactic used by Hawaii during the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. According to legal experts, however, it doesn't hold up, USA Today explained Sunday.

In the case of Hawaii, the election was 150 votes apart, with Nixon ahead. As those who recall Florida in 2000, elections that close in most states trigger an automatic recount, not to mention lawsuits. In the case of Donald Trump in 2020, those lawsuits had already unfolded and they lost them.

“In Trump's case there were no genuine grounds for uncertainty about the outcome of the election, no ongoing recount, and Trump's slates of fake electors were assembled with the intent to sow confusion, buffalo Congress and the Vice President, and stop them from certifying the genuine election results,” Stanford Law School Professor David Alan Sklansky told USA Today.

It made sense in the Hawaii case to have electors prepared since it wasn't clear who the actual electors were. In 2020, it was known. The elections were finalized. The counts were over. The lawsuits had concluded or were dismissed. Trump lost.

“The 1960 Hawaii dispute had no chance of overturning the overall election result and was not part of a general scheme to rig or steal the election,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.

At the same time, there were no states where the election was so close that it was just 150 votes apart. In Georgia, for example, there were nearly 12,000 more votes for Biden.

Even after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that the vote counting was over and Trump lost, the fake electors still met, fraudulently signed the letter, and sent it to Washington arguing it should be counted.

Joan Meyer, a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine, also explained that in the 1960 case, the court was still overseeing the recount process, and it did result in flipping the state. In Trump's case, there was no court-monitored recount and the election was already finalized and called.

In Hawaii, the electors of both sides met publicly and with the understanding that one side would not be used after the recount. Trump's Georgia people met secretly and were specifically told not to talk about what they were doing.

“This surreptitious behavior indicates that this was not an honest disagreement or a backup plan to keep options open, it was a plot to substitute legitimate electors with fake ones,” Meyer said.

Meyer also explained that the election certifications in 1960 were “intended to be a backstop, utilized after a court-ordered recount declaring the real victor of the presidential election."

In 2020, however, the fake electors weren't involved in any lawsuits nor were they being observed by the courts. Another thing happened for Hawaii in 1960, their Republican governor sent the new certificate to Congress, USA Today cited. Georgia had no support from their governor or the secretary of state.

“It is hard to convince a jury that there was fraudulent intent by the Democrat electors when it turned out that Kennedy had won and they substituted a correct certificate approved by the Governor of Hawaii,” former prosecutor Marc Scholl told USA Today.>

<With budget negotiations heating up and the far-right Republican Party House members clamoring for impeachment hearings on President Joe Biden, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is entering the most fraught period of his already tenuous speakership.

Now, according to a new report from Politico, the threat to his leadership is coming from GOP moderates who are furious with the California Republican letting the likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) set the agenda and dictate policy.

As Politico is reporting, "interviews with more than two dozen GOP members and aides reveal that it would take only a few rogue lawmakers hell-bent on his downfall to risk McCarthy’s fate in an entirely new way, sending their party spiraling into a new period of chaos."

"More centrist Republicans, too, are increasingly fed up with McCarthy’s efforts to placate the far right. They want him to stop giving ground to lawmakers they see as holding the party hostage to unrealistic demands," the report adds.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) is quite vocal about the direction of the party is going.

“There’s at least 180 of us that will vote for the speaker 15 more times if we’ve got to. So we just can’t be held hostage to a threat …We’re talking about a small minority who want to control the conference," he warned.

The report notes that the biggest battle with be over the budget and a possible shutdown.

Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH) is worried about a potential shutdown going into an election year.

"A shutdown is not good for us if we want to show that given the opportunity of taking back the Senate and the presidency, that we’re going to lead," he told Politico in an interview.>

<The divide between candidates favored by the Republican establishment and those favored by former President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) base continues to grow as the MAGA faithful go after wealthy Republican candidates with the ability to self-fund their campaigns.

This clash threatens to further tear at the fabric of the GOP's identity going into the 2024 election season.

On one side, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has "placed an emphasis" on recruiting candidates who can finance their races, as reported by Politico in March. In 2020, then-NRSC Executive Director Kevin McLaughlin said his party could mitigate its underperformance among small-dollar donors by "recruiting strong candidates who can both self-fund and win general elections."

But former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a Trump ally and potential GOP candidate for the 2024 Senate race in Wisconsin, blasted this strategy in an April episode of his podcast, elaborating further on the issue in a statement to Newsweek.

"My initial reaction to that statement is that it is tone deaf," Clarke said. "The Republican Party has an image problem. The Democrats have painted them as the Party of the rich and a good old boy club of white males. Say what you want but there is some truth to that visually."

"The GOP needs a face lift," he added, "and that won't happen when GOP Party officials make statements to that effect that basically eliminates minority and women candidates."

This strategy follows the NRSC's underperformance during the 2022 election cycle when Trump-endorsed candidates lost in three critical swing states. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who Trump has called a "pawn for the Democrats" and Clarke has said is "full of s***," attributed the defeats to "candidate quality" problems." The NRSC declined to comment for this piece.

In response, the NRSC has successfully recruited two candidates who are wealthy enough to potentially fund their own campaigns. Governor Jim Justice, a coal magnate, will look to flip the West Virginia seat held by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, and Tim Sheehy, an aerospace company founder, will challenge Montana's Democratic Senator Jon Tester. In Wisconsin, Eric Hovde, a real estate executive, is weighing a bid to challenge Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin. Hovde could face Clarke in a primary.

"This approach excludes me," Clarke told Newsweek. "I am not filthy rich, although I have significant support from grass roots voters. Even if that is not their intention, and I don't think it is, it is a bad look. It is time to prune away the dead wood of the Republican establishment and make way for the growth of a new Republican Party."

Clarke, who originally ran for sheriff as a Democrat and held the position from 2002 to 2017, became a conservative commentor and vocal supporter of Trump over the course of the latter's presidency. Trump considered Clarke for a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security.

As the appointment faced delays, Clarke ultimately chose to rescind his acceptance of the offer, with an adviser of his saying the former sheriff wanted to be in a position where he could "promote the president's agenda in a more aggressive role." Clarke has gone on to defend attendees of January 6 and has promoted Trump's claims of a stolen election. A national GOP strategist voiced serious concerns about a Clarke primary victory.

"National Republicans believe David Clarke would be a disastrous candidate who would completely take Wisconsin off the 2024 map not just at the Senate level, but the presidential as well," the strategist, who provided the comment on the condition of anonymity, told Newsweek.

The former sheriff is not the only candidate with MAGA credibility to take shots at an NRSC-recruited candidates finances. Republican Congressman Alex Mooney, who's running for the West Virginia Senate seat, has called Justice the "king of scandals" due to reports of the mounting debt, unpaid fines, and other financial troubles the governor's businesses have faced.

Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale, who received Trump's endorsement for a failed 2018 Senate bid and is weighing a second bid in 2024, called Sheehy a protector of the "DC cartel," linking him to McConnell and "the party bosses."

Jörg Spenkuch, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who specializes in political economics, said the tension playing out between these MAGA-aligned candidates and their wealthy counterparts represents the broader struggle playing out in the Republican party between its traditional donor class and the populist base that has grown in influence alongside the emergence of Trump....>

<.....While populist candidates like Clarke, who boycott corporations they deem liberal and scrutinize the influence of corporate lobbyists, may have messages that appeal to a grassroots base, these messages do not always fare well with businesses and wealthy individuals that Republicans have traditionally relied upon. As Democrats have outraised Republicans in small-dollar donations over the past two election cycles, Spenkuch said the party faces difficult decisions.

"If I were a Republican strategist, I would think long and hard—'Can I perhaps win over a different segment of donors if I stay populist, or do I need to dial back the populism a little bit to get back into the good graces of the traditional donor class?'" Spenkuch told Newsweek. "I don't really know the answer to that, and I'm not sure anyone really does."

Spenkuch added that the recruitment of wealthy candidate appears to be the GOP's answer to falling behind in the small-donor race. However, he warns that Republicans should be "very cautious" about this strategy because he said it's not clear whether wealthy candidates resonate with the GOP base. Spenkuch points to celebrity physician Mehmet Oz's failed Senate bid in Pennsylvania as a recent example of the strategy failing.

When it comes to the balance between popular ideas and money, Alvin Tillery Jr., a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, said he sees ideas as the bigger factor shaping GOP success in upcoming elections.

Tillery dismissed Clarke's notion that the GOP's emphasis on recruiting candidates who can self-fund as a reason why the party may struggle to recruit women and minority candidates. Instead, he said that struggle is because many of their ideas are unpopular with those groups.

While conservative causes, like Trump's legal defense fund, have garnered small-dollar donations from the party's base, Tillery believes Republicans have struggled to best Democrats in the small-dollar fundraising race because their ideas are less popular to a wider share of the American electorate. He pointed to Trump, the first reported billionaire president, as an example, with Trump being someone whose ideas became the focus of his 2020 campaign loss as opposed to his wealth.

"The worship of wealth, I think, is pretty ubiquitous in the American system, so I don't think the 'little guys versus the billionaire self-funders' is going to be the wedge issue in the Republican primary," Tillery told Newsweek.

"As the Republicans continue to stay with radically unpopular ideas, like anti-wokeness and opposing women's reproductive rights," he added, "I think the ability to find candidates that can pay for themselves is going to help be an equalizer for them.">

<There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

As the possibility of this traitorous plan becomes increasingly visible, the GOP, after a frantic two weeks of not knowing what to say or do, has finally settled on a response to Trump’s theft of classified information: “Hillary did the same thing, and she didn’t go to jail!”

(For the record, Hillary did nothing whatsoever even remotely close to Trump’s theft of classified materials. Among the 50,000+ personal emails on her server, Republicans found three that had markings indicating they were at one time classified, none had to do with espionage or compromised national security in any way, and all three were clearly there because she had replied to somebody using the wrong account in error. But we can expect this to be the distraction line coming from Trump and the GOP.)

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

While, at this moment, most of the evidence is circumstantial, collectively it paints a damning picture for which it’s hard to find any other possible explanation.

This article’s opening sentence describes the worst-case scenario that the media seems to be going out of its way not to even get close to mentioning. Again, this is, at this moment, still speculation, in large part because the alleged conspirators have been so successful at destroying much of the evidence that might have implicated (or cleared) them.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops hadpreviously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

The prospect that violence was heading toward the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t a secret to anybody with a Twitter or Facebook account: the nation was awash with threats and planning for violence, much of it in the open.

This apparently so alarmed Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy that, on January 4th, he reached out to his boss, Trump’s recently-appointed Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, to get permission to send the National Guard to the Capitol building on January 6th to prevent the violence they were seeing being planned all over social media....>

<.....Acting Defense Secretary Miller, in the effective role of commander of our entire military just one step below Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

・Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.

・Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.

・Not to employ any riot control agents.

・Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.

・Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.

・Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.

・Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.

・Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

If this isn’t bad enough, on January 6th itself — as armed traitors were attacking police and searching to “hang Mike Pence” — Chris Miller oversaw a mid-afternoon, mid-riot conference call in which Army Secretary McCarthy was again asking for authority to immediately bring in the National Guard.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has beenreported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widelyreported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, "absolute and unmitigated liars" for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

Last year, wediscovered that the phones and text messages of most of the group, including Chris Miller, Walter Piatt, Kash Patel and Ryan McCarthy, were all wiped of all conversations they had on January 6th.

ICE, whose plainclothes agents were sent by Trump to Portland to beat up andkidnap protesters off the street and used, essentially, as his private militia was also instructed by the Trump Administration to wipe all their phones after January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

Similarly, if Trump was planning to install himself in power in a way that echoed and aligned him with Putin, he’d need the active help and support of his palace guard, the Secret Service.

Here, again, we discover that the evidence is not only missing but that Trump appointees — still in government — knew about it for over a year and concealed that information from the January 6th Committee, Congress, and the media.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning.

Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

And lest you think that even Trump wouldn’t be so audacious as to solicit help from a foreign government to hold power, please remember that he was impeached for exactly that: his attempted extortion of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to smear Joe Biden.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense....>

<.....First, throughout 2020 and in January of 2021, Trump removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of Top Secret (and above) documents that, according to multiple news reports, contained information that could reveal the identities and locations of America’s spies and agents.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi government.

AsThe Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018:

“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.”

The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to ­people familiar with their ­reactions.

“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history....>

<.....The Washington Post, just yesterday, reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could damage our national security, intentionally leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations:

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

The Mueller Report identifies ten specific instances of Trump trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who would could [sic] possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific obstruction of justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.

“Viewing the acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance. For example, the President’s direction to McGahn to have the Special Counsel removed was followed almost immediately by his direction to Lewandowski to tell the Attorney General to limit the scope of the Russia investigation to prospective election-interference only—a temporal connection that suggests that both acts were taken with a related purpose with respect to the investigation.”

There are, after all, credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin....>

<.....As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned the spy was so great that, at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may have helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine, we pulled the spy out of Russia in 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is also fluent in English and German) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large room in which they met.

Things were picking up in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

・On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White Housetold Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

・The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

・Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban a bounty to kill American service members in Afghanistan (and 4 had died as a result), Trump refused to demand the practice stop, a possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.

As The New York Times noted at the time:

“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence... But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”

Instead of stopping Putin, Trump shut down every US airbase in Afghanistan except one (there were about a dozen),crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract US assets from the country in an orderly fashion.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a visit to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump made “promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

Along his journey toward converting America into a full-blown oligarchy (as I detail inThe Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class), Trump has picked up quite a few democracy-skeptical allies.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paulmade a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. Perhaps he had ambitious plans for a role in the Trump administration after the planned end of American democracy?....>

<.....With that backstory, consider more contemporary events to see if they fit together.

In January of last year Trump stole and moved to Florida information that, multiple sources assert, would reveal the identities of many of our spies, as well as our nuclear plans and capabilities.

Three months later, in March of 2021, Jared Kushner filed papers showing that his brand new investment company —against the advice of the Saudi government but at MBS’s order — had received over $2 billion from the Kingdom.

It’s still unknown if or how much money the Kingdom gave to Trump himself, presumably through the dark offshore accounts common among billionaires like Trump.

This was not the first time Kushner had apparently altered US foreign policy or shared valuable US secrets with Middle East players in exchange for large quantities of cash that flowed directly to him or other members of the Trump family.

As investigative reporter Vicky Ward notes in the most recent post on Vicky Ward Investigates on Substack:

Kushner was struggling with the “ticking time bomb of a $1.8 billion mortgage on 666 Fifth Avenue that would come due in February of 2019—a debt no domestic buyer was interested in. Not even the Chinese or Qataris wanted it. … Kushner desperately needed a bail-out for his troubled building…and the clock was ticking.

“Then, in the spring of 2018, two things happened within weeks. First, the U.S. withdrew their support of the blockade of Qatar, leading the Saudis and Emiratis to lift it.

“Then, Brookfield, a Canadian real estate investment trust whose largest outside shareholder is the Qatari government, bailed out the Kushners in a deal that has real estate moguls rolling their eyes to this day: A 99-year lease paid upfront on a building that was bleeding money.”

Which brings us back, again, to last year, just after Trump’s failed January 6th attempt to overthrow the US government....>

<....About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. As The Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?

・That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News” showcased in Hungary?

・That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May, voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?

・That, as soon as he was sworn in for a second term, he’d invoke his October 21, 2020 Executive Order 13957 that would instantly fire 50,000 senior Civil Service employees encompassing the management of every federal agency including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, and allow Trump to replace all of them with nakedly political loyalist appointees?

・That as soon as that transformation of America and our alliances was complete, Trump would use a national state of emergency to suppress dissent and seize control of voting systems across the nation to insure he and the Republicans loyal to him would continue in power for the long run?

・And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

After all, it’s not like we’ve never had a coup attempt before in this country: wealthy industrialists tried to kidnap or kill President Franklin Roosevelt 91 years ago and turn America into an Italian/German-style fascist state “friendly to capitalism.” Not a single one of those conspirators were ever arrested or tried; why not try again?

While, as noted, some of this is just speculation right now, every day we get more information that seems to validate it. After all, if you’re going to try to overthrow your nation’s government and anoint yourself dictator for life, wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to guarantee your success? Why just do half-measures?

The only “innocent” explanation I can come up with for Trump stealing spy-level documents and squirreling them away in Florida:

“Trump is simply mentally ill with a condition common among billionaires: hoarding syndrome. If he hadn’t been born rich, he’d be living in an apartment filled with newspapers and old tin cans from floor to ceiling; instead, he hoards money and anything else he thinks has value that gets close enough to grab.

“This is ‘normal’ among kleptocrats like Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier: they think that they are the state, so everything the state owns is their property. Supporting this premise are over 3,000 former contractors and employees (including attorneys) who’ve sued Trump because he’s refused to pay them over the years.”

Even if that’s the extent of it — which I believe is extremely unlikely — we appear to have dodged a huge bullet here.

Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let go?

Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

But even the possibility — that the question can be credibly raised given the evidence laid out here (which only scratches the surface) — should give every American pause.