Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

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.

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.

‘Kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell gets schooled after claiming ‘hundreds’ of Jan. 6 attackers are in jail

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Sidney Powell revealed Sunday that she will be joining the legal team helping “hundreds” of Jan. 6 attackers who are currently in prison and asked for money to support them.

The problem, however, is that there aren’t “hundreds” of people in jail for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Far from it, in fact. BuzzFeed justice reporter Zoe Tillman explained, there are just 66 in custody, with a few waiting for a detention hearing. A whopping 478 were allowed to go home awaiting trial.

It’s unclear the degree to which Jan. 6 attackers are willing to accept Powell’s help as she failed to win so many lawsuits around the 2020 election for former President Donald Trump. She and ally Lin Wood are both facing sanctions in Michigan for what some said was a reckless filing filled with inaccuracies. Continue reading.

Trump whines for over 100 minutes at Arizona grievance festival — here are the 7 most absurd moments

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Donald Trump spoke for over 100 minutes during a long-winded speech at a “Rally to Protect Our Elections” in Phoenix.

Much of Trump’s speech was focused on repeating his debunked lies that he won the 2020 presidential election, when in reality he was defeated by Joe Biden.

But he also found time to bash much of America while praising the local extremists behind Arizona’s audit of the vote in Maricopa County and listing his many perceived grievances. Continue reading.

Trump says his only regret as President was not deploying military to attack BLM protestors

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Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, one-term Republican president who lost the popular vote twice and the Electoral College once says he has but a single regret for his time as Commander in Chief: not deploying the U.S. Military to attack Black Lives Matter protestors during the summer of 2020 – an act that at the very least would have been met with massive resistance nationwide and some say would have violated the Constitution.

In a lengthy excerpt published at Vanity Fair from their new book, “I Alone Can Fix It,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker focus on their hours-long interview with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, just 70 days after Joe Biden was sworn in as president.

“I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me,” Trump told the two Washington Post reporters.”I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.” Continue reading.

Trump says Gen. Mark Milley should be ‘court-martialed’ if he thought the former president potentially sought a coup

Former President Donald Trump on Friday said that General Mark Milley should be “court-martialed and tried” if he believed that the former president sought to carry out a coup, referencing an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Trump has pushed back against the excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” which said that Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed the possibility of a coup with friends, legislators, and colleagues.

“The writings within these third-rate books are Fake News, and ‘General’ Milley (who [former Defense Secretary James] Mattis wanted to send to Europe in order to get rid of him), if he said what was reported, perhaps should be impeached, or court-martialed and tried,” the former president said in a statement. “He tries to be a tough guy, which he is not, but he choked beyond belief as soon as a microphone was stuffed in front of his face or, at the mere sight of the Fake News Media.”

Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power

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In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship. Continue reading.

How Trumpism has become outright ‘fascism’

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Although conservative journalist David Frum has been a blistering critic of Donald Trump, he has been reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe the former president. The words “fascist” and ‘fascism,” Frum has stressed in the past, should never be used casually simply to attack policies one does not like. But in an article published by The Atlantic on July 13, the Never Trump conservative lays out some disturbing reasons why Trumpism does, in fact, fit the definition of fascism.

“Through the Trump years, it seemed sensible to eschew comparisons to the worst passages of history,” Frum explains. “I repeated over and over again a warning against too-easy use of the F-word, fascism: ‘There are a lot of stops on the train line to bad before you get to Hitler Station.'”

Frum continues, “Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving.” Continue reading.

Trump Justice Dept. effort to learn source of leaks for Post stories came in Barr’s final days as AG, court documents show

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Newly unsealed court documents show the Trump Justice Department sought a court order for the communications records of three Washington Post reporters in the final days of William P. Barr’s tenure as attorney general in 2020, as prosecutors sought to identify sources for three articles written in 2017.

The papers also reveal the service provider that was the recipient of the secret court order: Proofpoint Corporation, a firm that supplies data security services. Using Proofpoint as a means of trying to get the reporters’ email records suggests prosecutors were thinking creatively about where they might be able to find reporters’ data, beyond just standard email providers like Google or Microsoft. Representatives for Proofpoint did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In addition, the documents indicate the extent to which federal investigators strongly suspected the disclosures of classified information were coming from Congress. Continue reading.