You might recall the several times Donald Trump has declared that “innocent” people have no reason or justification to fall back on the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that protects citizens self-incrimination.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we might get the chance to see if Trump really and truly believes it. You see, a judge has ordered the former POTUS, his oldest son Don Jr. and daughter Ivanka to testify — under oath — about their financial dealings that are under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney.
So, Trump will take an oath to tell the truth. If he has nothing to hide from investigators, he’ll talk. Isn’t that right? I don’t that’s going to happen.
His company already is under indictment for assorted felony accusations, such as tax fraud.
The walls appear to be closing in around Trump and his family. His son, Eric, already has hidden behind the Fifth Amendment, invoking it hundreds of times during questioning by prosecutors. Do you wonder what Daddy Trump told Eric after he left the conference room? Might he have called Eric a “loser”?
The smart money, based on what I have heard on the news, suggests that Trump’s lawyers will tell him to “not say a word.” His only option, therefore, is to invoke the Fifth Amendment.
But … hey. C’mon, Donald. An “innocent” man should be able to speak freely. Right?
You may choose to believe or disbelieve what I am about to say; it matters not one bit to me, but I just feel the need to ask: What in the world is happening to the Republican Party.
I do not detest all Republicans. Some of my better friends belong to that political party. FYI, my actual “best friends,” and I don’t count many of them, do not belong to the once-great party. We are friends for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.
I count many Republicans among those with whom I have good relationships. They are healthy. Many of my GOP friends happen to be active politicians. Some of them are conservative pols. Others of them are more moderate. One of them, a Texas state senator from Amarillo, is leaving the Legislature at the end of the year and I consider Kel Seliger’s departure a huge loss for the party.
Which brings me to the point. The departure of so many moderate Republican pols suggests to me that the nut-job, fruitcake, Donald Trump cultists are seizing control of the party that once stood for limited government, fiscal responsibility, equal rights for all Americans has become a cabal of cult followers who adhere to the whims and machinations of an individual. You know about whom I am referring, right?
Moderate GOP pols are fleeing Congress. They are leaving state legislatures. My fear is that they are being replaced in these important offices by goofballs and nut jobs, slobbering QAnon followers and those who adhere to The Big Lie perpetuated by the Liar in Chief.
This is a dark time in American political history.
Whenever I think of organizations prone to be subjected to partisan political pressure, among the last of them I think of is the National Archives, the keeper of all things official that emanate from the federal government.
So … when the National Archives issues a statement that Donald J. Trump broke the law when he hustled classified documents out of the White House and stashed them at his glitzy resort in south Florida, well, that’s a big bit of news.
Furthermore, think of the irony of this revelation. Didn’t the GOP presidential nominee, Trump, accuse Hillary Clinton of similar if not identical crimes while campaigning against her in 2016?
The National Archives has sent the matter to the Department of Justice for review and possible criminal referral.
Hmm. Looks to me like the walls are closing in on the ex-president.
According to The Associated Press:
Federal law bars the removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations, though it is possible that Trump could try to argue that, as president, he was the ultimate declassification authority.
No matter the legal risk, it exposes him to charges of hypocrisy given his relentless attacks during the 2016 presidential campaign on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. The FBI investigated but ultimately did not recommend charges.
Trump’s carelessness about national security matters have become almost legendary during his time as president and as a candidate for the highest office in the land. Recall, for instance, how he revealed some national secrets to Russians government officials visiting him in the Oval Office.
The former Moron in Chief, though, apparently has invited “Lock him up!” chants if what the National Archives alleges proves true. As for the DOJ probe, my gut tells me that the FBI has plenty of grist on which it can chew.
Let’s look ahead — shall we? — to President Biden’s first State of the Union speech. He’ll get to stand before a joint session of Congress and give them, and the nation, a report on the health and well-being of the nation he governs.
It is set for March 1.
These events have become sort of a handicapping exercise. Pundits will be offering views on how many members of Congress stand and applaud at the appropriate times.
Although I intend to watch the president deliver his speech, I am approaching that date with a bit of apprehension. We live in highly contentious times. Republicans seem to detest the Democratic president. Many members of the GOP congressional caucus, for instance, haven’t even accepted the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Many of the nut jobs within the Republican caucus have made speeches endorsing Donald J. Trump’s Big Lie about the vote fraud that did not exist.
How will those idiots react to anything Biden says? How many of them will even attend the SOTU? Might we hear a “You lie!” insult coming from the GOP side the way we did when President Obama delivered an SOTU years ago?
I will approach this upcoming event with bit of trepidation. I hope Congress — men and women on both sides of the great divide — will treat President Biden with all due respect. Frankly, given the madness that seems to permeate the thick skulls of many within the GOP caucus, I do have some doubt over the kind of reception the president is going to receive.
Please, GOP members, prove my concerns to be without merit.
As one American patriot who believes in civil disobedience, I feel the need to set the record straight on why the 1/6 riot and all those incidents of violence aboard commercial aircraft are so damn disturbing.
There is not a single, solitary aspect of either event that one can describe as “civil disobedience.” The Republican National Committee recently issued a statement calling the 1/6 insurrection an expression of “legitimate political discourse.” I have participated in many such actual events that featured “legitimate political discourse.” None of them bore a shred of resemblance to the violence that erupted on Capitol Hill that day.
And yet, that nonsense came from RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, who sought to tamp down the description of the event. She and other Republicans are uncomfortable with calling it an insurrection. However, to my eyes that is precisely what it was; the rioters sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. If that isn’t an insurrection, then the term has no meaning whatsoever.
Indeed, the Justice Department has indicted the ring leaders of the riot on a charge of “conspiracy to commit sedition,” which bears no significant difference to the insurrection term that others are throwing around.
The Justice Department has received a request from aviation regulators to allow a permanent ban on air passengers who attack flight crews or fellow passengers while their aircraft is in flight. DOJ should follow the recommendation and allow the permanent ban on those who are accused of such hideous mayhem at 30,000 feet above the Earth’s surface.
A group of eight GOP U.S. senators doesn’t want those miscreants banned. They contend the idiots are expressing legitimate concerns about mask mandates on commercial aircraft. Bullsh**! They are putting others in potentially mortal danger by engaging in fistfights with flight attendants or, in at least one case, by trying to open one of the fuselage doors as the aircraft is at cruising altitude.
Count me as one American who believes the Federal Aviation Administration should push hard for federal legislation that would ban unruly passengers from all domestic commercial air travel.
The FAA has referred 80 cases to the FBI and has asked Congress for legislative remedies to deter future passengers from disrupting flights and putting all their fellow passengers in potential dire peril while on board commercial aircraft.
The 80 cases represent all incidents that have occurred in 2022, which just arrived about six weeks ago. The rate of these incidents is alarming in the extreme.
What has caused the surge in these cases? Hmm. Let’s think about this. Oh, mask mandates have been the cause for more than two-thirds of the incidents. Airlines order passengers to mask up; some passengers are resisting; fights break out on aircraft in mid-air. One flight attendant suffered severe facial injuries after being punched by a passenger.
Here, though, is where this story gets bizarre. Eight Republican U.S. senators have objected to any federal legislation. They have signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking him to forgo the criminal referral. They contend foolishly that any federal ban would infringe on Americans’ right to protest mask mandates. How absurd and stupid can these senators get?
I happen to believe in civil disobedience. However, there can be no way in this world you can consider a physical attack on another human being to be “civil.” These attacks, which have spiraled since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, put hundreds of innocent bystanders in potentially mortal danger. If someone, then, is accused and convicted of attacking a flight attendant or of trying to open an airplane door in mid-flight — which did occur in one incident — then by all means they should be banned from traveling via commercial airlines … for the rest of their life!
This form of mayhem has to stop. Thus, the FAA is correct to seek ways to deter future incidents from erupting at 30,000 feet.
Liz Cheney has become the living, breathing face and voice of what is wrong with today’s Republican Party, and I want to salute her for the stance she has taken in the ongoing search for a cure to the assault we have witnessed on our democratic process.
Liz Cheney is as conservative a Republican as one can find in the U.S. Congress. She represents a sparsely populated state in the Mountain West, Wyoming, and has voted consistently conservative during the years she has served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
She is no Republican In Name Only. Far from it. She is the antithesis of what I consider to be the current RINOs who populate the once-great political party. She is the real deal.
Her “crime” in the eyes of the Donald Trump cultists is that she has called out the former president for the acts of disloyalty he has displayed. He has violated the oath he took when he became president in 2017. Liz Cheney now serves on the House select committee that seeks to find the truth behind the cause and effect of the 1/6 insurrection that Trump incited with that speech on The Ellipse.
That is a non-starter for the cultists, but for demonstrating that she is loyal to the oath that Trump has betrayed she now has become persona non grata within her party. The Wyoming GOP has censured her. The Republican National Committee has scolded her publicly, along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican serving on the House 1/6 committee.
Liz Cheney has earned this salute only because she is doing the job she swore an oath to do faithfully. In normal times, this loyalty to her oath wouldn’t be such a big deal. These are not normal times. Liz Cheney is performing an act of political courage.
As I watch the congressional probe into 1/6 trudge along — hopefully to a constructive conclusion — and then listen to the focus of that probe, the 45th POTUS, I have come to an inescapable finding.
It is that I will go to my grave wondering how in the name of political wisdom did Donald J. Trump ever get elected president of the United States in first place. And how in the name of all that is sane and rational did this guy ever avoid getting tossed out of office on his oversized backside after the House of Reps impeached him twice?
He preaches The Big Lie about the 2020 election. His cult followers cheer him on. Trump teases them with hints about possibly running again in 2024 in an astonishing bid to get elected a second time to an office he had no business at all ever occupying even one time.
I read this idiot’s comments, given that I prefer to read them than listen to the sound of his voice. I then wonder: What the hell is this guy saying?
The list of treachery, transgressions and outright treason are too numerous to check off here. You know what they are, what they entail, and you know of the damage they have done individually and collectively to our cherished system of representative democracy.
Trump’s election in 2016 is a case study of a politician benefiting from astonishing luck. The popular phrase du jour of that election cycle was that Trump managed to draw “an inside straight,” while winning the Electoral College and losing the actual vote by 3 million ballots to Hillary Rodham Clinton. I have read many accounts over the years since that fluke victory that Trump never believed he would win. When he did win, he was caught flat-footed, with no clue on how to form a government, let alone actually know how to govern.
Four years later, he got drummed out of office by a seasoned politician. He never accepted Joe Biden’s victory and skulked out of Washington the day before President Biden’s inaugural.
The 1/6 committee continues to gather information and sworn testimony from those who witnessed the disgraced ex-POTUS on the day of the traitorous riot on 1/6. We’re getting bits of info here and there about revelations on fake electors seeking to overturn the legitimate election results; about Trump sitting in the White House residence cheering on the rioting traitors; about the ex-POTUS considering blanket pardons for all the scoundrels who pooped on Capitol floors while shouting out their desire to find and “hang” VP Mike Pence.
There is much more to chronicle. I’ll leave it to you to piece together all that you have seen and heard from this moron.
I always have expected us to elect the best among us to public office. To think that one of the very worst among us managed to blunder and bumble his way into the White House simply defies my ability to explain it.
I understand fully that many millions of Americans are fixated at this moment on the Super Bowl; indeed, I am watching it myself.
Allow me this momentary diversion back into what is transpiring in Washington, D.C. That would be the congressional probe into 1/6, the riot that sought to disrupt the counting of electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election.
You know what happened on 1/6. The mob of traitors stormed the Capitol Building and pooped on the center of our democracy. They sought to murder the vice president of the U.S., Mike Pence, and the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
I am ready for the probe to end. I know the House committee chaired by Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has more work to complete. I hope it can continue at the pace it has been working so far. It needs to finish this probe well before the midterm election. I believe it will.
I also believe the committee is going to produce some constructive recommendations on how to prevent such an insurrection from occurring ever again. I will wait with bated breath to see what the panel suggests.
Moreover, I also want Donald Trump to be held accountable for inciting the riot. I know he did; you know he did; Trump knows he did.
One final thought: I don’t give a damn about whatever political implications this probe will have on the midterm election or on the 2024 presidential election.
I want the probe to conclude, and I am waiting to see who pays for the damage done to our democratic process.
Carl Bernstein knows an existential threat to American democracy when he sees it, given that he had a front-row seat at one of the worst threats ever imagined, the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.
However, he said that the Donald Trump unraveling is worse than Watergate because this crisis lacks something that Watergate contained: heroes among Republicans who told the president, Richard Nixon, that he couldn’t survive an impeachment and a Senate trial. Thus, Nixon quit the office and headed off into the sunset of oblivion.
Donald Trump isn’t facing that kind of threat from within his party, the same party of Richard Nixon.
Bernstein and his Washington Post colleague Robert Woodward covered the Watergate scandal as it unfolded in late 1972, into 1973 and ended with President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Bernstein and Woodward became journalism legends and their work stands forever as the definition of investigative reporting.
I have to agree with Bernstein, that Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law, on our democratic process, on the nation’s cherished electoral system presents a greater threat to the nation than a “third-rate burglary” that devolved into a coverup and an abuse of presidential power that drove a president from the pinnacle of power.
We need answers to the 1/6 insurrection and we need to take measures to prevent a tragic recurrence.
