Tag: GOP now the fascist party

Officer Michael Fanone received threatening, expletive-laced voicemail as he testified about Jan. 6

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The caller repeated former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the presidential election was stolen.

WASHINGTON — Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury after being violently assaulted Jan. 6, received a threatening, expletive-laced voicemail on his cellphone as he testified Tuesday about his experience during the Capitol riot.

“I could slap you up the side of your head with a backhand and knock you out, you little f—–,” the caller said in his message, which Fanone shared on CNN.

“I wish they would have killed all you scumbags, ’cause you people are scum,” the man, who used homophobic and racist slurs in his message, continued after repeating former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the presidential election was stolen. Continue reading.

Trump urged DOJ officials to call election corrupt ‘and leave the rest to me’

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Former President Trump pressured top Justice Department officials to call the 2020 presidential election results corrupt, according to documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

The documents are notes from former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue that were allegedly taken during a call between Trump, Rosen and Donoghue on December 27.

Donoghue wrote that he told Trump during the call that the DOJ could not change the outcome of the election, with Trump allegedly replying he understood that. Continue reading.

Justice Dept. Warns States on Voting Laws and Election Audits

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The department said that auditors could face criminal or civil penalties if they flouted elections laws.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday sent another warning shot to Republican state legislatures that have initiated private audits of voting tabulations broadly viewed as efforts to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election.

The department warned that auditors could face criminal and civil penalties if they destroy any records related to the election or intimidate voters in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and federal laws prohibiting voter intimidation.

The admonishment came in election-related guidance documentsissued as part of the department’s larger plan to protect access to the polls, announced by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in June. Another document released on Wednesday outlined federal laws on how ballots are cast and said that the department could scrutinize states that revert to prepandemic voting procedures, which may not have allowed as many people to vote early or by mail. Continue reading.

As Trump pushed for probes of 2020 election, he called acting AG Rosen almost daily

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President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue. The people familiar with the conversations spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive legal and political issues that are not yet public.

Rosen told few people about the phone calls, even in his inner circle. But there are notes of some of the calls that were written by a top aide to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, who was present for some of the conversations, these people said. Continue reading.

GOP liaison to Arizona reverses course after vowing to resign

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Twitter recently suspended a number of pro-election-audit accounts — including one that’s been cited as the partisan ballot review’s official page.

The Republican serving as liaison between the Arizona state Senate and the private company conducting a partisan ballot review said Wednesday that he intended to resign, then walked it back.

Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state, said he’d decided to resign when it became clear he would not regain access to the Phoenix fairgrounds where the private company, Cyber Ninjas, continues its examination of millions of ballots cast last November in Maricopa County.

“Right now I’m the liaison in name only,” he told conservative radio host James Harris on Wednesday morning. “I don’t know if that makes me a LINO or what.” Continue reading.

‘An embarrassment and a disgrace’: McConnell faces brutal backlash after saying he didn’t watch 1/6 hearing because he ‘had to work’

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Speaking to a gaggle of reporters this Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked if he watched the House select committee’s first hearing in its investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“Did you watch any of the hearing today?” a reporter asked. 

“No, I didn’t,” McConnell replied. 

“Why not?” the reporter asked. Continue reading.

A GOP Event to Support Accused Insurrectionists Went Off the Rails Pretty Quickly

Far-right members of Congress are rallying against alleged mistreatment of Capitol rioters

A small group of Republican lawmakers held a press conference in support of the January 6 arrestees, but it didn’t even last ten minutes. Instead of being met with supporters, the legislators were chased out of their own presser.

Earlier today, other members of Congress teared up while listening to police officers’ gripping eyewitness testimony on the opening day of Congressional hearings about the January 6 insurrection. However, a small group of their far-right legislative colleagues was on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue speaking out about a rather different cause: The alleged mistreatment of the folks who had stormed the Capitol that day.

Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz—all members of the so-called “Sedition Caucus” of legislators, so named because they all voted against the certification of President Joe Biden‘s presidential victory—gathered reporters outside the Justice Department in what they described as an effort to demand answers from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on the treatment of “January 6th prisoners”. Continue reading.

VIDEO: Flynn Jokes About Assassination While Brandishing Assault Rifle

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Former Trump administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has made more than his fair share of disturbing, jaw-dropping remarks– like telling the former guy he should impose martial law to hold a new election or suggesting a Myanmar-like coup at a QAnon conference in May. But he seemed to reach a new low when he joked about using a newly gifted assault rifle to carry out an assassination in the nation’s capital. 

“We were trying to come up with a rifle that we thought was appropriate for a general, so we went with an old-school Woodland camouflage…one of our top-quality guns,” said Jason Parker, a gun company employee who gifted the weapon to Flynn.

“Maybe I’ll find somebody in Washington, D.C.,” Flynn replied, prompting an uproar of chuckles.  Continue reading.

Donald Trump finally has the obsequious press he always wanted

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It’s an ecosystem in which his false election claims spread unchecked

Fox News didn’t carry Donald Trump’s speech in Arizona this weekend. It’s not hard to figure out why. One could easily have predicted that the former president would say all of the false and potentially lawsuit-spawning things that he ended up saying, and, given that it unfolded on Saturday evening, it’s not as though it was going to yield billions of viewers.

But the speech didn’t need to air on Fox. Before it began, his newly appointed spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, hyped the fact that the speech would instead be carried on the small galaxy of Trump-loyal networks that have emerged in the past few years. For those interested in hearing Trump say the same things he’s been saying for nine months but with a new set of incorrect or misleading details, there was plenty of opportunity to do so.

This is how it works now. Trump has a relatively small footprint in the mainstream media and conversation, including on Fox News. But on the remote media fringes where accuracy dies in obsequiousness, Trump’s message is as loud as it has ever been. Continue reading.

A group of Republican lawmakers now want to openly defend the Capitol rioters

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The U.S. Dept. of Justice arrested and charged over 500 people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, many in a coordinated effort to overturn a free and fair election. DOJ expects to charge about 100 others as well.

“The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol Attack will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence,” the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. wrote in March, when the list of people to be charged was estimated at about 400, The Washington Post reported at the time.

On Tuesday, as the newly-minted U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack launches, holding its first day of events, four far right wing House Republicans – some of whom has been linked to white nationalists – will be holding a different type of event. Continue reading.