Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Justice Dept. secretly obtained New York Times reporters’ phone records during Trump administration

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The Justice Department revealed Wednesday that it had, during President Donald Trump’s administration, secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters, marking the third time in recent weeks that federal law enforcement has disclosed using the aggressive and controversial tactic to sift through journalists’ data.

The New York Times reported Wednesday night that the Justice Department had informed the newspaper it had seized the phone records of four of its reporters: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt. The Times reported that the department also disclosed it had secured a court order to take logs, but not contents, of the reporters’ emails but that “no records were obtained.” The records dated from Jan. 14, 2017, to April 30 of that year.

Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, confirmed the seizures in a statement, saying the department “notified four journalists that it obtained their phone toll records and sought to obtain non-content email records from 2017 as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.” Continue reading.

‘Ultimate betrayal of oaths sworn’: Michigan GOP congressman slams ‘treacherous snakes’ who ‘salivate for civil war’

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Rep. Pete Meijer (R-Mich.) is fed up with the pro-Trump conservative Republicans whom he describes as “treacherous snakes.” On Monday, May 31, Meijer, a military veteran, took to Twitter with a post in observance of Memorial Day as he criticized those “salivating for civil war.”

The freshman lawmaker, who is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, acknowledged the work of those who came before him as he noted his “struggle with Memorial Day” as a result of “browing-beating from the holier-than-thous.”

“Memories + knowledge that for too many it’s a reminder of a father, mother, wife, husband, son, daughter gone. Our shared obligation to make this nation worthy of their sacrifice,” Meijer tweeted. Continue reading.

Opinion: A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger

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Democrats can’t say they weren’t warned.

With yet another GOP effort to restrict voting underway in Texas, President Biden is now calling on Congress to act in the face of the Republican “assault on democracy.” Importantly, Biden cast that attack as aimed at “Black and Brown Americans,” meriting federal legislation in response.

That is a welcome escalation. But it remains unclear whether 50 Senate Democrats will ever prove willing to reform or end the filibuster, and more to the point, whether Biden will put real muscle behind that cause. If not, such protections will never, ever pass.

Now, in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself. Continue reading.

Americans demand court-martial for Flynn after call for military coup: ‘Honor veterans — arrest this traitor’

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Lt. Gen Michael Flynn proclaimed that he thinks there should be a military coup to replace President Joe Biden with Donald Trump in the White House. It’s something that sent many to demand he be court-martialed, the legal process of prosecution in the U.S. Military. 

It isn’t unheard of, Jan. 2020, the Navy Appeals Court decided that “a Navy retiree was properly court-martialed and convicted for a crime committed after he had left active duty,” reported the Military Times.

Even the Federalist Society noted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed for some retirees to be court-martialed though they are rare. But in the civil case Larrabee v. Braithwaitethere is a question before the DC Circuit about whether a military member can be court-martialed for a civil crime. For advocating the overthrow of the government, it’s a different issue entirely. Continue reading.

Video reveals Michael Flynn calling for coup like ‘what happened in Myanmar’ to replace Biden with Donald Trump

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Raw Story’s Ray Hartman revealed some of the specifics of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s shocking speech from the QAnon conference in Dallas where he proclaimed that he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, while also claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

But as videos are being revealed, Flynn was also captured calling for a military coup in the United States to install their own leader in Donald Trump

“I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can’t happen here?” someone asked the audience as they cheered. Continue reading.

Republicans Create the Doubts, Then They ‘Investigate’ Them

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Wisconsin Republicans are particularly nihilistic, and they have been ever since the arrival of Scott Walker in the state’s politics.

[State Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials.

“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said…Vos said he is hiring three form er law enforcement officers along with an attorney who will oversee them. As contractors with the Legislature, they will have subpoena power. Anyone they subpoena will be immune from criminal prosecution, he said. 

Wisconsin Republicans are peculiarly nihilistic, and they have been ever since the arrival of Scott Walker in the state’s politics. (Thanks again, Charlie Sykes). Wisconsin cops have a history of being particularly biased and violent. So to oversee the farce, Vos is bringing some of these people out of retirement, handing them subpoena power, and turning them loose to ratfck an election result that most of them likely believe was the product of some sort of magical swindle they learned about 1o minutes ago on the radio. Continue reading.

A whole new level’: Harvard law professor says not even Nixon would have made the legal claims Trump is

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In response to a lawsuit from Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Donald Trump responded that he can’t be sued for anything he did as the president. MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell noted that it sounded a lot like former President Richard Nixon, who said, “when the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

But when Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe reviewed the excuse and explained that not even Nixon would have made the excuses that Donald Trump is. 

In a case involving a civil case against Nixon, the Supreme Court decided that when a president is exercising his/her official duties as president that he/she cannot be liable. It’s hard to claim that Trump’s speech inciting an insurrection because he lost an election is an official duty as president. Continue reading.

Commerce Department security unit evolved into counterintelligence-like operation, Washington Post examination found

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An obscure security unit tasked with protecting the Commerce Department’s officials and facilities has evolved into something more akin to a counterintelligence operation that collected information on hundreds of people inside and outside the department, a Washington Post examination found.

The Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) covertly searched employees’ offices at night, ran broad keyword searches of their emails trying to surface signs of foreign influence and scoured Americans’ social media for critical comments about the census, according to documents and interviews with five former investigators.

In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” records show. Continue reading.

Maricopa County will need new voting machines after GOP’s audit, Arizona secretary of state says

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The machines must be replaced because election officials don’t know what was done to them by the Republican auditors, she said.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections.

In a letter sent to Maricopa County officials and shared with NBC News, Hobbs, a Democrat, cited security concerns about losing the chain of custody over the equipment when it was handed over to the auditors and urged the county to get new machines. If it does not, her office would consider decertifying the equipment involved in the audit, she wrote. That would remove the machines from service.

State Senate Republicans subpoenaed nearly 400 of Maricopa County’s election machines, along with ballots cast by voters in November’s election, to facilitate an unusual audit of the election results. The GOP hired private firms, led by the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, to do the work. Continue reading.

As Trump seizes on Arizona ballot audit, election officials fear partisan vote counts could be the norm in future elections

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More than five months after the 2020 presidential election, and after numerous failed attempts to overturn the results, former president Donald Trump has seized on a new avenue to try to call the outcome into question: a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots cast in Arizona’s largest county.

Several advisers said the former president has become fixated on the unorthodox process underway in Phoenix, where the GOP-led state Senate took ballots and voting equipment from Maricopa County and turned them over to Cyber Ninjas, a private contractor whose chief executive has echoed baseless claims that the election was fraudulent but has now promised a fair review of the November results.

Ensconced at his private club in Florida, Trump asks aides for updates about the process multiple times a day, advisers said, expressing particular interest in the use of UV lights to scrutinize Maricopa’s ballots — a method that has bewildered election experts, who say it could damage the votes. Continue reading.