Oh, Trump Took Top Secret Documents To Mar-A-Lago? Is There A Phrase For That Do You Suppose?
How about the stuff he flushed?
Golly, who could have predicted this one, except everybody? The Washington Post reports that among the 15 boxes of White House documents the National Archives retrieved from Donald Trump's trash palace, it seems, some of them were clearly marked as "Top Secret." The Post says that, according to "two people familiar with the matter,"
While it was unclear how many classified documents were among those received by the National Archives and Records Administration, some bore markings that the information was extremely sensitive and would be limited to a small group of officials with authority to view such highly classified information[.]
Also too, the people who know what's what said that, as of Thursday afternoon, the FBI had not yet reviewed the classified materials, whatever they are.
It's not clear whether the Justice Department will do a full investigation (honestly, at this point, how could it not?), but at least now the recovered classified documents are "being stored in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as an SCIF, while Justice Department officials debated how to proceed," according to the two people in the know. Thank goodness someone's finally protecting those secrets!
FLUSH: Once Again It Comes Back To Trump And A Goddamn Terlet
We'll just assume that while they were kept at Mar-a-Lago for over a year, the sensitive documents may have just sat in storage. Or Trump might have been looking through them for dirt on his political enemies. Most likely, he just used them to build a little fort to hide in.
Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich insisted everything was on the up and up, because of how normal it is for huge troves of documents, some classified, to be dragged out of the White House and kept for more than a year by former presidents.
It is clear that a normal and routine process is being weaponized by anonymous, politically motivated government sources to peddle Fake News. The only entity with the ability to credibly dispute this false reporting, the National Archives, is providing no comment.
Yes, yes, and Trump would just love to release his tax returns, but he can't because they're being "audited."
While the number and exact nature of the classified stuff isn't clear yet, we do learn a bit more about how that might have happened, perhaps because he never intended to leave the White House at all for the rest of his life:
Officials had to scramble to pack up before Joe Biden took office, and one person familiar with the events surmised that some of the documents from the residence likely made their way into boxes destined for Mar-a-Lago rather than being turned over as they should have been.
Gosh, he was just such a chaotic guy! Guess he really can't be held accountable because paranoia, chaos, and utter indifference to norms and protocols are just how the guy rolls, you can't change him, he's just that way. That extends to Trump's apparently grudging decision to return the documents:
It is not precisely clear who packed up the classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, or how they got there in the first place. Trump was very secretive about the packing of boxes that were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago last month, and did not let other aides — including some of his most senior advisers — look at them, according to people close to him.
Oh, well maybe he wouldn't let aides see the boxes because of his very great concern for the security of that classified information. Golly, you people try to make everything look so bad!
We also find out a bit more about the mechanics of the National Archives' discovery that documents were missing. Mostly, it came down to archivists realizing that things they knew existed simply hadn't been turned over, like that map of Hurricane Dorian's path that Trump drew dicks on to prove he knew which way the wind blows, or the "love letters" sent to him by Kim Jong Un. That led the Archives to contact Trump's people at Mar-a-Lago, to ask them to look under the couch maybe.
DICKS: Who Knew Trump's Mental Breakdown Would Involve Drawing Dicks On Hurricane Maps?
As we noted yesterday, the expert opinion seems to be that it could be very difficult to actually charge Trump with a crime for any of this sloppy handling of classified information, for a bunch of reasons, a point the Post explains again.
Even with documents marked classified found where they don’t belong, prosecutors have a high legal bar to get to criminal charges. Prosecutors would have to prove someone intentionally mishandled the material or was grossly negligent in doing so — which can be a steep hurdle in its own right. And Trump, as president, would have had unfettered latitude to declassify material, potentially raising even bigger challenges to bringing a case against him.
Former federal prosecutor Brandon Van Grack said that some of the laws about classified information require someone to act “without authorization, and potentially the president would be able to argue he gave himself that authorization.”
Thing is, even presidents can't just grab a pile of classified documents, wave their hands, and say "I declare thee no longer secret!" There's supposed to be a formal process, and if stuff found at Mar-a-Lago really had been declassified, it should have had "Declassified" printed at the top. No, not scrawled in Sharpie. Haha, as if "rules" applied to the Great Man!
Also too, even if there's somehow no formal criminal investigation, former prosecutor Van Grack told the Post that the FBI will "want and need to review the information and conduct an investigation to determine what occurred and whether any sources and methods were compromised."
Oh, and then there's this complication thrown on the pile, too: While he was pretending to be president, Trump regularly handled official documents while he was working hard at Mar-a-Lago and definitely not just fucking around on the golf course. That might mean "it could be difficult in some instances to establish the chain of custody of specific classified documents."
The Post says that yeah, normal presidents handle lots of classified information, but then, normal presidents followed protocols for keeping classified documents secure, like locking it in a safe. Trump, not so much. He'd take documents to the residence and he'd just let them pile up, presumably accumulating Big Mac and Diet Coke stains.
One White House staffer said it became a problem that eventually led records staff to search for materials in classified burn bags, which are used to dispose of documents.
Hilariously, another former White House official took the opportunity to say Trump's haphazard treatment of official documents proves that the Great Man was much more on the ball than people might think:
“For all the things written about him that he didn’t read, he often would take things with him to the residence or bring things down with him,” said a second Trump White House official. “But I don’t know that that is out of the ordinary.”
No word in this story, however, about Maggie Haberman's scoop that White House staff periodically had to clear clogs of paper from toilets in the residence. We're fairly sure Barack Obama never flushed foreign matter apart from the occasional illicit cigarette butt, and maybe occasional secret messages he received from the Muslim Conspiracy.
[WaPo / Photo: "Scott," Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Deputy Attorney General's Facebook Posts Too Crazy Even For Virginia Republicans, So Bye!
Virginia has been so busy lately!
One of the top deputies to Virginia's new Republican attorney general had to delete her own job Thursday after the Washington Post started asking questions about Facebook posts in which she had called the January 6 insurrectionists "patriots," and others in which she insisted Donald Trump had for sure won the 2020 election. The former deputy AG, Monique Miles, had at least three different Facebook accounts, some pseudonymous, on which she had
espoused unfounded conspiracy theories about voter fraud and election interference in more than a dozen Facebook comments that spanned months. Four people who interacted with Miles on Facebook confirmed the authenticity of the posts.
Oh, and because we live in a world where reality is too improbable for a "Veep" plotline, Ms. Miles worked as "deputy attorney general for government operations and transactions," a job whose remit included
representing the state in election-related litigation and giving legal advice to the state Department of Elections and its governing body, the state Board of Elections, on various matters.
Honestly, we're wondering whether there might be something more yet to be reported about Miles, because since when is believing in crazy conspiracy theories about the 2020 election disqualifying for a Republican official who oversees elections?
Following the 2020 election, Miles posted several Facebook messages espousing the idea that the election was stolen. In one exchange with a friend, she insisted that China did it, and that "The China interference is real," but her friend would have to wait for evidence because "That is high level national security stuff. They can’t just release this evidence in civil court without following the proper protocol." She went on, in another conversation with the same person, to explain that American media had been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party:
We are at war with the CCP and those that sold our Country out to them [...] Trump is here to take them down. Biden will never step his compromised self into the White House.
When January 6 arrived, Miles, posting as "Monique Miglia," was very excited by the prospect that the brave patriots she was watching on TV would save America from its own voters. (Also, credit where due: Using the Italian word for "miles" is nice and nerdy; too bad she's friggin' nuts.)
News Flash: Patriots have stormed the Capitol. No surprise. The deep state has awoken the sleeping giant. Patriots are not taking this lying down. We are awake, ready and will fight for our rights by any means necessary.
At some point later in the day, however, Miles updated the message, possibly in light of the prevailing bullshit going around rightwing media about the insurrection:
Edit: **antifa dressed as Patriots** have stormed the Capitol. No surprise. Typical antifa and BLM intimidation tactics. However, the deep state has awoken the sleeping giant. Patriots are not taking this lying down. We are awake, ready and will fight for our rights by any means necessary. Patriots are peace loving, Antifa and BLM are not.
Also, Patriots have always wanted to hang Mike Pence Eastasia.
This detail makes us a little sad, though:
The post and the later edited version drew a number of angry comments from Miles’s Facebook friends, according to one screenshot. They included one of Miles’s high school government teachers who wrote, “I failed you.”
It's sad to see people get all caught up in a cult, to be sure.
After the Post contacted the office of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares for comment Thursday morning on screenshots of the Facebook posts, spokesperson Victoria LaCivita — could you ask for a better name for a civil servant? — said in a statement that
This information was unknown to the Office of the Attorney General prior to this morning. [...] Ms. Miles has resigned from her position at the Office of the Attorney General.
La Civita went on to say that Miyares had of course condemned the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and of course he knows Joe Biden won the election.
Miles herself was a bit less diplomatic. She emailed the Post to explain that she had been the victim of a "character assassination to stir up controversy" and also that "some liberals have their daggers out for black conservative females."
You see, it's actually very unfair to call attention to her Facebook posts from that brief period of time before it became absolutely clear that the election was legitimate, yeah, that's the ticket!
"The posts were made at a time when the news was still developing re: the facts around the election, the court cases, the Rally on the Ellipse and what happened at the capitol,” Miles said in the email. “That was before all the audits occurred. These posts have been taken out of context.”
She added: “What we know now about the election today is very different from what we knew on Election Day 2020 or even what we knew on the day that President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. I believe he is our president as he was certified as such.”
Well of course! It's perfectly normal to assume that a shadowy conspiracy and massive fraud were at work in any election, at least until the winner — who you've been insisting is illegitimate — gets sworn in, and then automatically you decide to accept the results.
Say, speaking of context, you know what context we're missing? Neither the Post nor Ms. Miles offered any screenshots of posts in which she said, "Oops, my bad, I was mistaken! There was no fraud, and Joe Biden is, I hate to say it, the actual president. Guess our side will have to work harder next time!"
The story notes that the "comments obtained by The Post are not publicly visible, but Miles said they had not been deleted." So surely if there were posts announcing her change of heart, Miles could call attention to them? The Post also pointed out that the account where the posts had appeared is still up (for now), although she later changed the handle to "Myb Monique."
We didn't find anything especially inflammatory on the page, apart from a fun image she'd posted in June 2021 to explain that she has no idea how vaccines work:
The Post also offers a screenshot of a post from the day of Virginia's general election last November, in which Miles suggests that the election had to be rigged to hurt Republicans:
It's official. Voter suppression appears to be happening in precincts across the Commonwealth as many are reporting that they don't have enough ballots!!!!!! One precinct ran out at 11am and another at 10:15am. What the heck?!!! It is well known that GOP voters tend to vote in person on Election Day, so.....! #shenanigans #PrayHardltWorks
I'm stationed in a registrar's office standing guard. I'm anticipating a long night because of all the xerox ballots and people (GOP and DNC poll watcher pairs) needing to stay and watch the hand count to make sure our election is fair and not stolen.
After all, precincts couldn't simply run out of ballots in a high-turnout election for any other reason than a deliberate plot to suppress GOP votes, that's just logic.
As it turned out, though, that election resulted in the election of Jason Miyares, who selected Miles for her job, so we guess maybe she grudgingly came to accept its legitimacy.
[WaPo]
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TN Judge Sentences Woman To Six Years For Attempting To Register To Vote While Black
No, a different woman.
A judge in Memphis, Tennessee, threw the book at voting rights activist Pamela Moses this week for the crime of illegally trying to register to vote in 2019. Moses was on probation for a 2015 felony conviction, but says she was never told that the conviction took away her right to vote. What's more, Tennessee state officials admit they made a number of mistakes that led to Moses thinking it was actually legal to vote, although that didn't seem to matter to the prosecutor who pursued the stiffest possible sentence, or to Judge Mark Ward, who insisted that Moses had "tricked" the officials into signing documents saying it was OK for her to vote. On Monday, Ward sentenced Moses to six years and a day in state prison.
Moses has said from the start that she made a mistake, but the state has treated her as the most dangerous frauder that ever tried to steal an election, although she never actually completed the registration process in 2019; her application was denied due to the prior conviction. Moses was convicted in November of "making or consenting to false information on an election document."
Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow contrasted the heavy sentence given to Moses with the slaps on the wrist handed to four white men who deliberately voted fraudulently for Donald Trump in the 2020 election:
Three of the fine gentlemen who voted twice got probation, and one served three whole days in jail. Again, they actually voted, knowing full well they were submitting fraudulent ballots. You might recall that one of the dudes, Donald "Kirk" Hartle of Las Vegas, Nevada, voted the absentee ballot of his late wife and then enjoyed wingnut fame for a while when he insisted terrible Democrats had stolen her ballot and frauded with it. Nevada Republicans and rightwing media hyped the story for months, until Hartle was arrested in October 2021 for having been (allegedly!) the actual frauder.
Read More: Vegas Republican Learns Voter Fraud Is Not As Easy As Fox News Promised
Hartle was convicted and sentenced to probation and a $2,000 fine. If he keeps his nose clean on probation for a year, he'll even be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and plead to a misdemeanor charge instead. No judges or Republican officials that we know of have called for Hartle to be sent to prison for years on end to set an example for would-be election thieves.
Funny how the courts are so nice to white guys who deliberately do fraud, but they come down like a million-pound shithammer on Black people who insist they made understandable mistakes.
Ms. Moses, on the other hand, says that after she pleaded guilty to felony charges in 2015, she was never told that she had lost her right to vote under Tennessee law. She told The Guardian's Sam Levine in an interview last year,
They never mentioned anything about voting. They never mentioned anything about not voting, being able to vote … none of that.
To complicate matters further, elections officials should have removed her from the voting rolls when she was convicted, but they failed to, oopsie! Levine explains that
[The] the court never sent election officials in Memphis the documents they needed to do so, according to a letter from an election official I obtained.
In 2019, Moses announced she was running for Memphis mayor, in an admittedly long-shot campaign, but was informed by elections officials she was ineligible because of her conviction, the first time she'd heard of it. Like any good citizen, she tried to get herself legal:
Moses went to court and asked a judge to clarify whether she was still on probation, and the court confirmed that she was. What happened next is at the crux of the case against her.
Moses did not believe the judge had correctly calculated her sentence. So she went to the local probation office and asked an officer to figure it out. An officer filled out and signed a certificate confirming her probation had ended. In Tennessee, people with felony convictions who want to vote need that document from a correction official. Moses submitted it to local election officials along with a voter registration form.
But the day afterwards, an official at the corrections department wrote an email to election officials saying a probation officer had made an “error” on Moses’ certificate. Moses was still serving an active felony sentence, they wrote, and was not eligible to vote. The department offered no explanation for the mistake.
At trial, the prosecution argued that even if elections officials had made mistakes, Moses knew she was ineligible to register because the judge had told her so when she went to court, and therefore everything she did after that was proof that she was out to do fraud of the most nefarious sort. At her sentencing Monday, Judge Ward told her he didn't believe her filthy lies:
It’s that simple. You went down to the probation office, told them you weren’t on probation, tricked them into giving you a form so you could re-register to vote when you had a court order in your hand from the judge presiding over your case.
Levine notes that in fact, it's not all that unusual for people to be confused about the status of their voting rights, according to Campaign Legal Center attorney Blair Bowie, who is part of a lawsuit to fix Tennessee's voting rights restoration process but isn't involved in Moses's criminal case. She noted a study finding that about eight percent of former felons' applications for restoration of voting rights are rejected because the applicants haven't actually completed their probation, but said she'd never heard of anyone being prosecuted after mistakenly submitting an erroneous certificate.
The judge's insistence that Moses deliberately tricked the probation office didn't hold much water with Bowie, who said it "seems absurd to me on its face."
The instructions on the certificate of restoration form are very clear to the probation officer or the clerk. They say you will check these records and you will sign off on this based on what the records say.
They’re saying that she tricked the probation officer into filling out this form for her. That creates a really scary prospect for people who think they’re being wrongly told they’re not eligible.
Moses is likely to appeal, and depending on her behavior, it's possible she could be eligible for release as soon as her May 20 status update hearing, according to her attorney.
But for now, she's gone to prison, and no doubt all the rightwing media that said nothing about frauders deliberately voting for Trump will point to Moses and insist her case proves that elections just can't be trusted. And all voters of color will be assumed to be up to something, because look what that one lady in Tennessee did.
We also have no doubt that even more Republicans, absolutely convinced that Democrats steal all the elections, will be voting multiple times this fall, to even things out. That's only fair, right?
[Guardian / WREG-TV / KLAS-TV]
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Here Are Some Of The 9,572,802 Ways Trump Tried To Steal The Election
These filthy sumbitches were throwing it all against the wall.
How many ways did Trump try to steal the election? ALLLLLL the ways. Literally every day we are bombarded with stories of new schemes to hold on to power after being definitively booted out by the American people. If we covered them all, we'd write about nothing else. So, to spare you all having to look at his demented orange face all day, let's round up the morning's outrage in one post.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ...
Another wackass memo? And this one involves the NSA? What could possibly go wrong!
The Washington Post has a long article about the descent into conspiracy theory madness that took hold of the GOP after the election. In this latest episode, failed Republican congressional candidate Michael Del Rosso, who gadded around DC for the past decade spouting rightwing security theories and describes himself as a former Trump surrogate, was flogging a memo that proposed using “NSA unprocessed raw signals data” to prove "foreign involvement in both the violent 'Color Revolution' the U.S. is presently undergoing and specifically the 2020 Election fraud and their involvement in altering the vote counts in the 2020 election."
The memo proposed that Defense Secretary Christopher Miller deputize Del Rosso, along with an Army lawyer named Frank Colon and fired NSC staffer Richard Higgins, to trawl through NSA intercepts looking for evidence of foreign interference. To be clear, there is zero evidence of foreign interference, despite the memo's vague reference to "expert DOD opinion" that the author's "work product" established "sufficient predicate to form search inquiries against NSA unprocessed raw signals data under the existing authorities of NSPM.-13." That last bit is a reference to a classified 2018 memo authorizing the Pentagon to engage in offensive cyber attacks, and was also referenced in a different memo urging Trump to seize the voting machines for a recount.
It's totally illegal for the US government to target communications of US persons without a court order. But this author, whoever he or she is, wasn't super concerned about legality.
"If evidence of foreign interference is found the team would generate a classified DOD legal finding to support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies (which should still be pursued in parallel)," they wrote, adding later, "To treat this solely as a legal issue is to ensure that the USG's response is under-scoped and inadequate."
Colon, who is currently a government employee, insists he had nothing to do with this insanity. Del Rosso and Higgins aren't commenting, but North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer says he got a copy of the memo from Del Rosso after attending a January 4 meeting at the Willard Hotel to hear Mike Lindell scream nonsense about Chinese vote hacking. Mississippi Senator Cynthia Lummis also attended the meeting, as well as Senator Ron Johnson, who says he got a copy of the memo, but won't say from whom.
“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell told the Post. “We were in an anomaly in history. We still are.”
If there's a silver lining here, it's that the blatantly ludicrous and illegal shit these weirdos were proposing seems to have put off their intended audience of senators, rather than ginning up support for delaying the election certification on January 6.
"Honestly, I was not impressed by these people,” Cramer said, describing their fraud fugues as a “lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”
Ultimately Lummis, Johnson, and Cramer all voted to certify the election, only objecting to Pennsylvania's use of mail in ballots. Of course it took an armed insurrection to scare them straight, so ... maybe less than full credit on this one.
ANOTHER 'nother memo! This one's about those weirdo cosplay electors.
Have none of these dipshits heard of the Stringer Bell rule?
The New York Times story involves Trumpland's efforts to circumvent the Electoral Count Act's requirement that electors be certified by December 14, effectively giving themselves until January 6 to figure out another way to un-elect Joe Biden.
Under the law, "The electors of President and Vice President of each State shall meet and give their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December next following their appointment at such place in each State as the legislature of such State shall direct." But a lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro (clear we're living in a broken simulation) cooked up a ridiculous memo for James Troupis, the lawyer running Trump's recount effort in Wisconsin, suggesting that they could just ignore that deadline and behave as if January 6 were the real date. Also they should swear in some fake electors, to have them ready to go in case their ratfucking efforts worked.
"Prudence dictates that the ten electors pledged to Trump and Pence meet and cast their votes on December 14 (unless by then the race has been conceded). It is highly uncertain, given the language in Art. II requiring that all electors throughout the United States vote on the same day, whether Congress could validly count electoral votes cast on a later date," Chesebro wrote on November 18. "It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence. However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action."
Well, the DOJ will be the judge of whether it was "a reasonable course of action" to have a bunch of unelected doofuses swear themselves in as "electors" and submit a fraudulent electoral certification to the National Archives. But whether it was legal or not, the involvement of the Trump campaign and Rudy Giuliani in organizing these fake electors, with the express purpose of pointing to them as a pretext to reject the legitimate electors, is pretty damning.
But wait, there's more! Because Chesebro drafted a second memo on December 9 outlining in specific detail how best to draft a fake election certificate in each of the contested states. TL, DR? Just make it look like the real one, but don't include a certificate of ascertainment signed by the governor. Easy peasy!
You get a pardon! And you get a pardon! Everybody gets a PARDON!
Okay, this one isn't strictly an election story, but we simply cannot end this post without drawing your attention to these gonzo quotes from Politico of Trump calling up all his advisors and asking how he could pardon the January 6 insurrectionists.
“Do you think I should pardon them? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think I have the power to do it?” he asked one of them.
“Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol?” he wondered to another, strategizing how best to thwart efforts to make his supporters testify about the riot.
In the end, it was too hard to figure out whom to pardon, so Trump never did it. But just last weekend he talked about doing just that, and clearly he's not kidding.
In summary and in conclusion, there's a whole lotta shit here, and it all stinks.
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