In the fall and winter of 2020, former President Trump’s top lieutenants were in touch with reality: the election had not been stolen. Their guy lost.
Continue reading “Trumpworld Lied To Your Face About The Election”Join Us At Noon For A Discussion Of Last Night’s Hearing
Jan. 6 Panel Is Drawing A Straight Line From Trump To The Proud Boys And Oath Keepers
The Jan. 6 Committee kicked off a string of hearings Thursday night with an intense focus on the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two right-wing extremist groups that the committee appears prepared to tie to the official Trump effort to overturn the election.
Continue reading “Jan. 6 Panel Is Drawing A Straight Line From Trump To The Proud Boys And Oath Keepers”Trump Tries Mid-Meltdown To Discredit Ivanka For Admitting She Knew Daddy Lost The Election
Sorry Ivanka, even you aren’t safe from your dad’s well-established pattern of publicly throwing people under the bus.
Continue reading “Trump Tries Mid-Meltdown To Discredit Ivanka For Admitting She Knew Daddy Lost The Election”Paladino: Hey, I’m Just Repeating Stuff I Heard Without Doing Any Critical Thinking!
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Who Among Us
House candidate Carl Paladino (R-NY) had quite a bit of explaining to do this week after it was discovered that he’d posted a conspiracy theory about the Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings on Facebook, and that he once described Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as “inspirational” and “kind of leader we need today.” But in Paladino’s defense, he did those things because he was just passing along things other people were saying and didn’t think super hard about the things he was passing along.
- Paladino said on Thursday that the “context” of his Hitler shout-out was “in regards to something I heard on the radio from someone else and was repeating.” The candidate called it “a serious mistake,” and then accused the media of making an “implication that I support Hitler.”
- As for the Facebook post, Paladino claimed on Wednesday that while he didn’t write it himself, he did “carelessly republish it without clearly reading it.” The candidate only owned up to publishing the post at all after media outlets found out that he hadn’t just put it on Facebook; he emailed it out, too. Before that, Paladino had insisted that he wasn’t the one who’d posted it on his page because he didn’t know how to use Facebook.
- This whole thing’s put House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who had endorsed Paladino, in an awkward spot. On Thursday, her spokesperson had to clarify that the congresswoman wasn’t pro-Hitler and in fact “has one of the strongest records in the US Congress condemning anti-Semitism.” No word yet on whether Stefanik’s sticking to her endorsement, but her spokesperson shared Paladino’s statement with the media.
Catching Up On Jan. 6 Panel’s First Public Hearing
The House Jan. 6 Committee held its first public hearing on Thursday night. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it (or if you tried watching it on Fox News and uh, still didn’t get to watch it), we’ve got you.
- Read our liveblog here.
- The five main points on what the committee aimed to present in the hearing:
- Putting Trump at the center of it all
- Getting Trumpworld to turn against itself
- Tying the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers
- It was a broad, sweeping conspiracy
- Trump knew he lost, and still lied
- Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) signaled that the panel is well aware that Jan. 6 wasn’t just a one-off explosion of random violence, and they laid out how Trump had paved the way for the attack even months beforehand:
- Trump knew the Big Lie was a lie
- Trump perpetuated the Big Lie
- Trump tried to use the executive branch to overturn the election
- Trump’s call to come to DC on Jan. 6
- Trump watched the Capitol attack and did nothing
Michigan GOP Gubernatorial Candidates Dropping Like Flies
Ryan Kelley, the far-right Michigan gubernatorial candidate who moved to the front of the pack after half the pack got scrubbed out by the petition forgery scandal, was arrested by the FBI on Thursday for allegedly participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
- Five candidates, including the original frontrunners, had already been axed by the forgery scheme. Four of them failed to sue their way back onto the ballot, and the fifth guy didn’t bother fighting and just dropped out.
- Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who’s running for reelection, probably isn’t mad about seeing her potential GOP rivals disappear like America’s Next Top Model contestants.
How The Uvalde Police Failed
The New York Times obtained documents and video that further exposed the police’s astonishingly sluggish response to the Uvalde elementary school shooting and how Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief, seemingly prioritized the safety of his officers during the attack.
- Arredondo and other officers were in fact made aware that not everyone in the classrooms where the gunman opened fire was dead, the documents reportedly show. Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw had told the media on the day of the shooting on May 27 that officers believed nobody was alive and therefore mistakenly believed they had more time to respond.
- Arredondo finally decided to breach the classroom doors about an hour after the gunman began shooting–but he wanted to find the keys first. He repeatedly kept asking for the keys even after heavily armed officers had arrived with shields, according to the Times.
- Officers reportedly kept their distance from the classroom door in the hallway for more than 40 minutes after the initial shots were fired.
SCOTUS Allows Undated Ballots To Be Counted In Pennsylvania
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that elections officials could count ballots that were signed but didn’t have the date on them.
- The dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
- This would be great news for (now-ex) Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick, who had tried to sue to make this possible, if he hadn’t already conceded the race to rival Dr. Mehmet Oz last week (and Oz still beat him in the hand recount anyway).
Amy Coney Barrett Raked In $425,000 For Book Deal
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett got nearly half a million dollars from her publisher last year as part of a book deal, the Washington Post found.
Zinke Scores A Winke
Trump’s scandal-plagued former Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, is projected to win the GOP House primary for Montana’s First Congressional District.
Betsy DeVos Says She Discussed 25th Amendment With Pence
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who wrote a book after resigning from the Trump administration over Jan. 6, told USA Today that after the Capitol attack, she spoke to then-Vice President Mike Pence about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, to which Pence said no. She also wants you to buy her book.
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What The Jan. 6 Committee Sought To Demonstrate In Its First Primetime Hearing
The Jan. 6 Committee’s primetime Thursday presentation offered a sweeping view of former President Trump’s conspiracy to stay in office.
Continue reading “What The Jan. 6 Committee Sought To Demonstrate In Its First Primetime Hearing”The Jan. 6 Committee Gets It: Trump’s Attack On The 2020 Election Wasn’t About One Day
We’ve been wondering for months whether the Jan. 6 committee will understand the Jan. 6 insurrection as a one-day spasm of violence, or the culmination of months of lies, provocation and planning from Donald Trump and his close associates.
Continue reading “The Jan. 6 Committee Gets It: Trump’s Attack On The 2020 Election Wasn’t About One Day”Jan. 6 Panel Holds Its First Prime-Time Hearing
After several months of work, more than 1,000 interviews and plenty of high-profile legal fights, the Jan. 6 Committee on Thursday began a series of public hearings painting a picture of its discoveries for the public.
Continue reading “Jan. 6 Panel Holds Its First Prime-Time Hearing”A Few Thoughts
I would say the first hearing was pretty powerful. The second half was emotively powerful. But it was the first portion of the hearing which seemed to make some critical connections and add some new facts that I either wasn’t aware of or hadn’t seen connected like that before. There were a lot examples where they hinted at things to come – claiming that the White House was getting lots of intelligence that violence was being planned.
As I mentioned earlier, the part that seemed new to me was seeing so many Trump diehards saying straightforwardly that the whole thing was a lie. That’s not new information. Or not surprising information. But it’s remarkable to see it so clearly. That the whole thing was a lie. A cynical lie. We know that. But this just brings it to the fore in such a graphic way.
The one other point I’ll emphasize again: I didn’t quite grasp how much of this would be wrong-footing the Trump world. You’ve got existing diehards. Not just like Bill Barr who we know has basically washed his hands of Trump. But people who still very much in that world saying yeah that was all crap. That has to sow a lot of dissension in that milieu and put Trump on the warpath against his own loyalists.
Curious to see more.
Flashbacks
As we watch these synchronous videos, I am reminded what I was doing when this was happening. We were actually recording an episode of our podcast. I don’t remember if I had a TV feed on or I was watching posted videos on social media. But I remember watching what seemed like just rowdy protests, people getting rowdy outside the perimeter of the Capitol. There’s nothing unprecedented about that. Protests get rowdy sometimes. But at one point I distinctly remember watching what seemed like breaking through police lines, or perhaps it was simply attacking the police lines.
So as we were talking in the podcast at one point I said something like, it seems to be getting a little out of control. I may go back and pull up that episode to see exactly what I said. I’m probably retrospectively shaping some of what I thought or said. But what I’m confident about is having a moment where I could tell things were escalating beyond any normal kind of protest. We know where it went from there.