Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Three key texts show Mark Meadows knowingly participated in Trump's conspiracy to steal the election



Newly revealed text messages show Mark Meadows stood by at least three times as Donald Trump spread what he knew to be lies about the 2020 election.

The texts reveal at least three episodes where the former White House chief of staff knowingly kept silent or helped the former president attempt to overturn his election loss, and there may be even more evidence of wrongdoing that hasn't been turned over to congressional investigators, according to The Bulwark columnist Will Saletan.

"We’ve known for a long time, based on audits, investigations, and court reviews, that Donald Trump’s allegations about massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election are false," Saletan wrote. "We also know, based on firsthand accounts from Trump’s former aides, attorneys, and political allies, that Trump’s advisers repeatedly told him the allegations were false. That leaves two possibilities: Either Trump is lying, or he’s trying to overthrow the government based on an impenetrable delusion. Take your pick."

Thousands of texts Meadows exchanged with Trump's allies and children suggest that he knew early on the fraud allegations were false, because campaign spokesman Jason Miller described claims about ballot-box stuffing in Philadelphia as wildly implausible in a Nov. 6, 2020, text to the chief of staff, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

"Meadows, Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and others knew from Miller’s text message that these assertions were mathematically absurd," Saletain wrote. "But as the president smeared the city and the election, they said nothing."

A contact in Florida asked Meadows on Nov. 20, 2020, about fraud claims involving Dominion Voting Systems, and he said he was "not that confident" about the allegations and made the same point the following day to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

"Trump’s advisers knew that the allegations were unsubstantiated and that [campaign attorney Sidney] Powell, when asked for substantiation, had refused to supply it," Saletan wrote. "Nevertheless, Trump continued to smear Dominion on Twitter, suggesting that it had 'shifted' enough votes to swing the election. In a Fox News interview, the president said of Dominion’s vote-counting technology: 'These machines are controlling our country. So it was a rigged election.'"

"Meadows knew these smears were baseless," Saletan added. "But he said nothing."

Kushner alerted Meadows on Dec. 4, 2020, to a fact check of Trump claims about ballot fraud in Atlanta, which the former president continued to allege at a rally the following day, in a Dec. 22 White House speech and a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger -- who he begged to "find" exactly enough votes to overturn his loss there.

"Meadows wasn’t a bystander to this phone call," Saletan wrote "He orchestrated and supervised it. When Raffensperger explained to Trump that the suitcase story was false — that the video Trump had seen was 'sliced and diced,' that the unedited video discredited Trump’s story, and that a Georgia state audit had 'proved conclusively' there was no triple-counting of ballots, as Trump had alleged — Meadows stepped in not to correct Trump, but to twist Raffensperger’s arm."

The former chief of staff pressed Raffensperger to investigate claims they both knew to be false “in the spirit of cooperation and compromise,” and Saletan said the texts tell a damning tale about Meadows and other Trump advisers.

"As President Trump told the public one fake story after another about election fraud — stories that eventually led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, in an attempt to block the democratic transfer of power — the president’s advisers knew, and privately admitted to one another, that his stories weren’t true," he wrote.


The Most Damning Part of the Meadows Texts
He knew the president was lying. And he kept helping to spread the lies anyway.



We've known for a long time, based on audits, investigations, and court reviews, that Donald Trump’s allegations about massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election are false. We also know, based on firsthand accounts from Trump’s former aides, attorneys, and political allies, that Trump’s advisers repeatedly told him the allegations were false. That leaves two possibilities: Either Trump is lying, or he’s trying to overthrow the government based on an impenetrable delusion. Take your pick.

Now we’re compiling similar evidence against Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff during the election. He, too, knew Trump’s accusations were false. And instead of telling the truth, Meadows helped spread the lies.

The latest evidence comes from a batch of more than 2,000 text messages, revealed by CNN that were sent to or from Meadows between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021. Three of the exchanges are particularly instructive: one in early November of that year, another in late November, and a third in early December.

On November 6, 2020, Jason Miller, Trump’s campaign spokesman, sent a group text to Meadows and a few other people in Trump’s inner circle, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Miller’s text explained why the Trump team’s accusations of ballot-box stuffing in Philadelphia were wildly implausible, based on trend data and statewide data:

In 2016, POTUS received 15.5% of the vote in Philadelphia County. Today he is currently at 18.3%. So he increased from his performance in 2016. In 2016, Philadelphia County made up 11.3% of the total vote in the state. As it currently stands, Philadelphia County only makes up 10.2% of the statewide vote tally. So POTUS performed better in a smaller share. Sen. Santorum was just making this point on CNN – cuts hard against the urban vote stealing narrative.

What did Meadows and others in the Trump campaign do with this information? Apparently, nothing. On November 7, the day after Miller sent his text, Trump announced a press conference in Philadelphia. At the press conference, Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, accused the city’s Democrats of rigging the election. “It took a couple of days” after the election “to produce enough ballots” to put Joe Biden ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, Giuliani told reporters. “Could some of those ballots have been manufactured in advance by the Democrat machine of Philadelphia? Wouldn’t be the first time they did it.”

Trump followed the press conference with multiple tweets and a White House speech in which he alleged fraud, corruption, ballot stuffing, and “illegal activity” in Philadelphia. In a Fox News interview, the president argued that Democratic “cheating” in Philadelphia had changed the statewide vote count by a whopping 5 percent. (With nearly 7 million ballots cast in Pennsylvania, 5 percent would have been more than 340,000 ballots worth of “cheating.”)

Meadows, Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and others knew from Miller’s text message that these assertions were mathematically absurd. But as the president smeared the city and the election, they said nothing.

On
November 20, 2020, two weeks after Miller sent that text, Meadows got another message, this time from a contact in Florida. The message asked about allegations that Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, had committed fraud against Trump in computing the results. In response, Meadows admitted he was “not that confident” in the allegations. On November 22, when Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, asked Meadows why Trump’s legal team was distancing itself from attorney Sidney Powell—who had been promoting the allegations against Dominion—Meadows wrote back: “She doesn’t have anything or at least she won’t share it if she does.”

So Trump’s advisers knew that the allegations were unsubstantiated and that Powell, when asked for substantiation, had refused to supply it. Nevertheless, Trump continued to smear Dominion on Twitter, suggesting that it had “shifted” enough votes to swing the election. In a Fox News interview, the president said of Dominion’s vote-counting technology: “These machines are controlling our country. So it was a rigged election.”

Meadows knew these smears were baseless. But he said nothing.

On December 4, 2020, Meadows got another text message. This one came from Kushner, and it alerted Meadows to an article that fact-checked a false story Trump was telling about Georgia. Trump’s story was that election workers in Atlanta had been caught on video using a suitcase full of ballots to inflate Biden’s vote tally and steal the election. The fact check explained that the video had been misrepresented and that the story was false.

The next day, December 5, Trump went to Georgia and accused Democrats of rigging the state’s vote count. He focused on the suitcase story, accused the poll workers of a “crime,” and said they had manufactured enough votes to swing the state. He repeated the debunked story again in a December 22 speech at the White House and then again in a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021. In the phone call, Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to award the state to Trump.

Meadows wasn’t a bystander to this phone call. He orchestrated and supervised it. When Raffensperger explained to Trump that the suitcase story was false—that the video Trump had seen was “sliced and diced,” that the unedited video discredited Trump’s story, and that a Georgia state audit had “proved conclusively” there was no triple-counting of ballots, as Trump had alleged—Meadows stepped in not to correct Trump, but to twist Raffensperger’s arm. Meadows urged the secretary of state, “in the spirit of cooperation and compromise,” to “look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious.”

That's three episodes in which Meadows, knowing that Trump was spreading falsehoods about the election—as confirmed by Meadows’ own text messages—either kept silent or collaborated in the deception. Meadows has withheld other text messages from congressional investigators, so we have no idea how many other incriminating records he’s hiding.

But we know enough to say this: As President Trump told the public one fake story after another about election fraud—stories that eventually led to a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, in an attempt to block the democratic transfer of power—the president’s advisers knew, and privately admitted to one another, that his stories weren’t true.

https://www.thebulwark.com/the-most-damning-part-of-the-meadows-texts/

[Rick Plant]

Trump administration's $700 million loan to Kansas trucking company under fire in Congress

WASHINGTON — Federal officials Wednesday were asked to investigate whether an Overland Park, Kansas, trucking company broke federal law when securing a $700 million loan through a federal pandemic aid program — a sum that accounted for 95% of the money allocated to the program.

South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn — who heads a U.S. House of Representatives Committee tasked with investigating waste, fraud and abuse in federal pandemic relief programs — sent a letter to the Treasury Department’s inspector general asking it to investigate whether Yellow Corp., formerly known as YRC, made false claims and statements about its company when requesting the loan from the government, in potential violation of the Federal False Claims Act.

The company called the claims “unsubstantiated” and “demonstrably false.”

Clyburn’s letter comes on the heels of a report by the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis that found the administration of former President Donald Trump ignored the advice of Defense Department experts by granting the company a loan through a program to help firms considered critical to the country’s national security continue to operate through the pandemic.

The committee’s report highlights another example of the company making use of its connections to the Trump White House.

The former president picked the company’s Chief Executive Darren Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force and he tapped former CEO William Zollers to the Postal Service Board of Governors in 2020. The company also has received $600 million in funding from private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which had close ties to the Trump administration and the Trump family.

But a lawyer representing the company downplayed ties to the former administration. He noted the trucking company was working with the Biden administration to resolve the nation’s supply chain shortages.

Attorney Marc Kasowitz said the company voluntarily cooperated with the committee, providing documents that show how the loan was used. He said the loan enjoyed bipartisan support and helped save 30,000 jobs during the height of the pandemic.

“In truth and fact, and as this Committee now indisputably knows, Yellow’s eligibility for and use of its CARES Act funds is, was, and continues to be appropriate in every respect,” he wrote to the committee Tuesday.

The loan to YRC was authorized through the federal CARES Act, which pumped $2.2 trillion into the U.S. economy in the heart of the pandemic, allocating money to small businesses, local and state governments and direct payments into many people’s bank accounts.

But while the money helped prop up the economy in a time of unprecedented economic crisis, it has also proven ripe for abuse. Congress is currently attempting to crack down on rampant fraud and abuse, from local governments misspending federal money to people who misrepresented themselves to access federal funds.

Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids, whose district includes Overland Park.

Moran specifically asked the administration to help firms like YRC, which he described as “hugely important to the economy.” In May 2020 testimony on coronavirus relief, he noted that the company employed nearly 30,000 people.

“It is a company that in the absence of assistance, the jeopardy of its employees are significant. I think there’s a lot of companies out there like that. I think there’s a number of other companies in Kansas like that. And I want to make certain we are doing the things that are necessary to prepare to be of assistance to them.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin assured Moran at the time that he would look specifically at YRC and similar firms.

Former Sen. Pat Roberts, who represented the state at the time, told The Kansas City Star on Wednesday that he believed the whole Kansas delegation supported the loan, but he couldn’t recall the details.

Formerly called YRC, the company last year changed its name to Yellow Corp., a nod to its roots as Yellow Transit, which was founded in Oklahoma City in 1924. Aside from Yellow-branded trucks, the company also operates subsidiaries YRC Freight, Holland, New Penn, Reddaway and HNRY Logistics.

For years, YRC operated out of a 10-story tower on Roe Avenue in Overland Park. But earlier this year, the company moved its headquarters to downtown Nashville. The company committed to maintaining a sizable local workforce and signed a 15-year lease on new offices at the former Sprint Campus in south Overland Park, according to the Kansas City Business Journal.

The CARES Act established a fund called the National Security Loan Program intended to make sure that companies that provided services related to the country’s national security were able to offset their losses from disruptions to the economy during the pandemic.

Yellow, which delivers freight for Defense Department operations, was one of 11 companies that received money through the program. The other 10 companies combined received $35.9 million in loans, just 5% of the total money the Treasury Department approved through the loan program.

The subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis launched the investigation into Yellow in June 2021, a little under a year after the federal government approved the company’s loan.

"Today’s Select Subcommittee staff report reveals yet another example of the Trump Administration disregarding their obligation to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Clyburn said in a press release. “Political appointees risked hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds against the recommendations of career DOD officials and in clear disregard of provisions of the CARES Act intended to protect national security and American taxpayers.”

The report shows that the company’s lobbyists were able to secure access to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, and that Meadows personally advocated for the loan to the Treasury Department, which was in charge of approving the loan. The committee also found that Trump had spoken directly with a union leader who was coordinating with the company to get federal assistance.

The loan was approved over objections by Defense Department officials. While Yellow claimed that it was responsible for 68% of the Defense Department’s “less-than-truckload” shipping, analysts for the Department of Defense found that it only accounted for 34% of the LTL shipping and that the burden could be handled by other companies. Yellow specializes in moving smaller loads of materials that don’t take up an entire tractor trailer.

Aside from the debate surrounding the company’s purported importance to national security, critics questioned why the government was bailing out a company that was struggling financially even before the pandemic. In 2019, YRC lost more than $100 million.

Defense officials also argued Yellow should not be considered critical to national security because it had been sued by the Justice Department, which alleged the company had overcharged the Defense Department for seven years and made false statements to the government to cover up its misconduct. The Justice Department called the company’s actions “fraudulent and illegal.”

Though the company admitted no wrongdoing, YRC agreed to pay $6.85 million to resolve those allegations in a settlement announced last month.

Despite the objections by Defense Department experts, top officials at the Treasury Department and Defense Department got involved and ultimately approved a loan. They also approved terms that would allow the company to use more than half of its loan — $400 million — to replenish its aging fleet of trucks.

The CARES Act specified that money from the loan program should only be used to offset losses, putting the terms of the loan in contradiction of Congress’ intended purpose of the loan program.

Yellow Chief Financial Officer Jamie Pierson emailed the company’s creditors touting the fact the company would be able to use the loan money to replenish its fleet, saying, “While we had our hand in the cookie jar, we thought we would try to get a little ‘catch up’ capex (capital expenditures) while we were at it,” according to emails obtained by the committee.

Between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the end of 2021, the company said it spent nearly $600 million on new tractors, trailers, technology and other assets. According to the report, the company only spent $145.4 million on capital expenses in 2018 and $143.2 million in 2020.

Company representatives said all expenditures were negotiated with and approved by the Treasury.

The committee also found that the federal government authorized the loan at a lower interest rate than it received from creditors prior to the pandemic.

“The loan terms agreed to by the Trump Administration were impermissibly generous even under Yellow’s own legal counsel’s interpretation of the applicable CARES Act requirements,” the report said.

A lawyer representing the firm noted that the company posted collateral to obtain the loan and gave the government a nearly 30% stake in Yellow stock. That’s now worth nearly $70 million. Yellow also says it has already paid more than $25 million in interest to the government.

Meanwhile, Yellow has increased its pay for the CEO, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. The CEO made $4 million in 2018 and $12.3 million in 2021, while other top officers have left and new officers have been brought in at higher salaries.

Last year, the Congressional Oversight Commission noted that the company spent $570,000 on lobbying efforts in 2020 before receiving the loan. That compared to no lobbying expenditures in 2019, $80,000 in 2018 and $75,000 in 2017.

“The Commission makes note of the correlation between lobbying the government and Yellow’s ability to secure a $700 million loan. The Treasury confirmed that several Senators and members of Congress sent letters to Treasury urging them to underwrite Yellow’s loans.”

U.S. Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., one of three people on that commission, characterized the loan as a “mistake.”

“Based on the oversight work conducted by the Commission,” he said last year, “there is no evidence to support Yellow being critical to national security which means these loans should never have been executed.”

© The Kansas City Star

[Rick Plant]

Stunning texts blow the lid off of Trump's Big Lie



There was much that was compelling about Monday's CNN dump of another couple thousand coup-related Mark Meadows texts into the public domain. We learned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., can't spell and that former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry apparently signs his text messages with his name and phone number. But while the linguistic faux pas of people conspiring to overthrow democracy are entertaining, I must confess that what I found most riveting and illuminating was the way the texts pulled back the curtain on how Republicans generate their lies.

Meadows' texts offer a glimpse into the apparently routine Republican brainstorming sessions about which false narratives they knowingly plan to inject into the conspiracy theory dissemination machine anchored by Fox News and social media. We see this in the flurry of texts that were spread around on January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump's co-conspirators began to realize that the violence of the insurrection was hurting their efforts at justifying the coup. Trump aide Jason Miller texted Trump's social media manager and Meadows his ideas for "tweets from POTUS." They included a conspiracy theory blaming the violence on "ANTIFA or other crazed leftists" and falsely accusing the media of "trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions." As the CNN reporters wrote, "Trump's allies in Congress appeared to get the message." In real-time, you can see them workshopping the details of this conspiracy theory, inventing details like how "Antifa dressed in red Trump shirts."

Republicans may not be able to spell good, but holy crap, they are masters at generating disinformation, often on the fly, that will go viral among their followers. Of course, they are aided heavily by having a follower base that doesn't care what is true or what is false. The average Republican voter now happily parrots obvious lies, glad to be of service to the larger fascist cause.

Monday's cache of texts was quickly followed by a Tuesday report from ProPublica and Frontline that, once again using a massive cache of once-secret documents, illustrated how much Trump's co-conspirators knowingly fabricated evidence and used false testimony to create the illusion of a "basis for Trump's claims that the election had been rigged."

What truly fascinates me is how these documents illustrate how the right-wing disinformation machine works.

That these folks were just making it all up as they went along isn't even particularly subtle. Over and over, Trump's lawyers like Sidney Powell or Big Lie proponents like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell would claim they had some proof of voter fraud which they would hand to low-level staffers or private investigators. And every time, those folks would warn them that the evidence they claimed to have was fraudulent. Inevitably, however, Trump's cronies would ignore those warnings and use the lies anyway either as propaganda or in court filings.

It's tempting to shrug off these revelations. Politically plugged-in progressives have long assumed that all these folks are knowingly lying. The lies are so silly and often so self-contradictory — and the people disseminating so obviously evil — that these texts just feel like confirming what we already knew. But this hard evidence matters.

There's still a mushy middle of voters who aren't yet convinced that Republicans are such cynical liars, and instead want to believe they're just a little deluded by partisan fervor. The potential legal ramifications could help convince them.

As has been widely reported, the likeliest defense is "we didn't know any better," if Trump and his co-conspirators were ever tried for their various crimes committed during the coup. The argument would be that they "sincerely" believed that the election was stolen and their efforts were an attempt to rectify this supposed great wrong. But the massive trove of documents showing they knew full well there was no voter fraud and certainly no stolen election cuts against this defense. It also takes away any excuse for the Department of Justice to keep avoiding criminal charges against the coup's leaders, including Trump.

But what truly fascinates me is how these documents illustrate how the right-wing disinformation machine works.

Being wrong never bothers them, because they think concepts like "true" and "false" have no value at all.

What is clear from reading these texts and other documents is that the Big Lie is not really abut persuading anyone that the election was stolen. It's more about creating so much noise that the truth never has a chance. It's about creating a permission structure that allows Trump, his allies, and — crucially — his followers to say whatever they need to in a moment to justify their desire to overthrow democracy. Truth doesn't matter to them. Making sense doesn't matter to them. It's about setting the concept of rational, evidence-based discourse on fire, thereby eliminating the main obstacle to their raw exercise of power.

It's telling how right-wingers will ping pong from one conspiracy theory to another, depending entirely on whether it's useful in the moment, and indifferent to whether or not it flatly contradicts the lie they were claiming to believe five minutes ago. After all, new lies can always be made up on the spot! As ProPublica's reporters write, when one of Trump's team's conspiracy theories "was debunked, they'd move on to the next alternative and then the next." Being wrong never bothers them, because they think concepts like "true" and "false" have no value at all.

We see how this works with the January 6 conspiracy theories. While the riot was happening, and it looked like it would make Republicans look bad, Miller threw out the "blame antifa" lie and the minions got to work on it. It was, indeed, trendy for a time for Trump followers to parrot that lie. In the weeks after the Capitol insurrection, about half of Republican voters were espousing some version of the "antifa did it, the MAGAs were peaceful" conspiracy theory. As the months wore on and it became clear, however, that Trump was proud of inciting the riot and wanted to take credit for it, the narrative shifted. Instead of "antifa did it," it became "the insurrectionists are heroes." Republicans who held to the old violence-in-bad line, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, were put on blast by the talking heads at Fox News until they gave in and acceded to the new violence-is-justified narrative. Sure enough, the Republican base got the message. Now the majority of them have stopped saying that the rioters were "antifa" and instead are calling them "patriots."

Republicans collectively understand that empirical truth can be destroyed as long as they stick together

This shift matters, because it reinforces what I've been arguing for months now about the Big Lie: Republican voters don't actually "believe" it. Instead, like their leaders, the Republican base simply doesn't care what's true and, frankly, finds truth to be an annoying obstacle on their way to power. So they're happy to do their part to lay waste to the idea that truth has any value at all.

Republicans collectively understand that empirical truth can be destroyed as long as they stick together, especially in a media environment where reporters are frequently allergic to calling lies out as lies. With nothing to lose from lying and everything to gain, MAGA world, from their top dog Trump to every ordinary person spewing nonsense on Facebook, is fully committed to the destruction-of-truth project. If Miller says "antifa did it," then they will all pretend to believe that. When the narrative changes to "MAGA did it, but it was justified," they will happily shift, without giving a fig that the new lie contradicts the last one. Truth simply doesn't matter to Trump and his followers. All that matters is power, and they will say or do whatever it takes to get it.

© 2022 Salon.com, LLC

[Rick Plant]

This little-known GOP congressman shared 'utterly bonkers' conspiracies with Trump's top staffer: columnist



Outside of Pennsylvania, five-term Republican Rep. Scott Perry doesn't have much in the way of name recognition. But now, in the wake of testimony from a former Trump White House aide, the House Select Committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection is paying attention to Perry and his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Last December, Perry refused to voluntarily testify before the committee, calling it "illegitimate." As MSNBC reports now, the congressman may be facing a subpoena to compel his testimony.

Perry, chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, endorsed a plan “to direct thousands of angry marchers” to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. According to The New York Times, Perry participated in a planning call including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and other Freedom Caucus members. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, said no one on the call spoke out against the idea.

Hutchinson also said Perry was present when lawyers warned that a fake-electors scheme was not “legally sound,” though many Republicans proceeded with the scheme anyway.

Perry cast a wide net with his "stolen election" conspiracy theories. MSNBC columnist Steve Benen reports: "Five days after the election was called for Joe Biden, Perry sent a message to Meadows that read, 'From an Intel friend: DNI needs to task NSA to immediately seize and begin looking for international comms related to Dominion.' Perry appeared to encourage the then-White House chief of staff to get the Director of National Intelligence to order the National Security Agency to investigate debunked claims that Dominion voting machines were hacked by China."

The Pennsylvania congressman also claimed that America's British allies were behind a secret plot to manipulate U.S. voting machines and that Gina Haspel, the Trump-appointed director of the CIA, was helping to cover it up. About a month later, according to a CNN report, he sent Meadows a YouTube link detailing another conspiracy theory: that votes were changed by Italian satellites."

"For those familiar with Perry’s record, this may not come as a surprise: The congressman has spent years promoting weird conspiracy theories with little connection to reality," Benen concluded. "But the ideas the Pennsylvania Republican shared with Meadows appear to be utterly bonkers.

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/conspiracy-theories-gops-scott-perry-went-amazingly-far-rcna26218

[Rick Plant]

Trump is a 'a crybaby loser' — and any Republican with presidential ambitions must say so: former GOP lawmaker



On Wednesday, writing for The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich reported that former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-VA) is urging her fellow Republicans to call out former President Donald Trump as a "loser" — which she sees as a necessary step for the party to move beyond him.

“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” Comstock told Leibovich. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”

As Leibovich noted, this attack is essential to defang the former President's false narrative that continues to drive his sway over the GOP.

"This is a devastating point of attack against Trump. He knows it, too, which is why he has taken such pains to loser-proof himself and scrub his MAGA universe of any doubt that he was in fact reelected 'in a landslide,'" he wrote. "Don’t let him get away with that, the cabinet of critics urged. Abandon all deference, and don’t forget to troll the troller."

MSNBC's Donny Deutsch has previously noted that GOP power brokers already understand this — and it comes down to putting that message in the base of the party.

You can read more here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/04/gop-strategy-against-trump-2024-election/629687/

[Rick Plant]

Nolan Finley: The empire strikes back: Wealthy GOP donors move to avert Trump takeover

The Republican old guard is finally mounting a counter offensive to bring the Michigan party back to its traditional conservative roots and head off an attempt by former President Donald Trump to tilt Michigan's presidential nominating process in his favor.

A number of Michigan’s largest and most loyal GOP donors, known as the Michigan Opportunity Alliance (MOA), are pooling their money to support candidates who stand for good government and fiscal conservatism.

Many of the candidates they're backing are incumbents who face challenges in the August primary from candidates endorsed by Trump.

The alliance includes roughly 50 of the state’s wealthiest individuals and is led by former state party Chair Bobby Schostak and west Michigan businessman Doug DeVos. They wouldn't discuss their activities publicly.

But those familiar with what the alliance is doing say it's a return to a pre-Trump initiative to elect competent politicians more interested in problem solving than politics.

"It's more of a confederation than an organized group," says Greg McNeilly, chief operating officer of the Windquest Group, the Grand Rapids investment company owned by Dick and Betsy DeVos.

"They've been together since 2014 and engage politically when they see a need. They've been quiet the last two election cycles, but are active this year on behalf of candidates they believe will move the state forward."

Collectively, this group and their families have given millions of dollars to Republican causes and many have held leadership positions in the party in the past. They are the power brokers who helped bring former Govs. John Engler and Rick Snyder to office, secured a Republican majority on the Supreme Court in the early 2000s and passed ballot initiatives changing the tax code and limiting the reach of labor unions.

But they've been largely dormant recently as the GOP demanded 100% loyalty to Trump as the price of admission. MOA members once controlled Republican politics in the state, but saw both their influence and interest wane during the Trump years.

When they've given money in recent cycles, it's mostly been to individual candidates, and not to the state party.

"I've been more selective," says David Nicholson of Grosse Pointe, whose family once ranked among the largest Michigan GOP donors. "I'm not giving to the state party. I'm supporting fiscal conservatives and good government candidates on an individual basis."

The alliance mobilized this spring in part to organize and fundraise on behalf of 10 to 15 Republican legislative candidates, many of them incumbents, who are being targeted to further the political ambitions of Matt and Meshawn Maddock.

Meshawn Maddock is the state GOP co-chair and a Trump confidante. Matt Maddock is a state representative from Milford who wants to be the next speaker of the House.

The incumbents on their hit list refused to support Matt Maddock's power grab. So the couple recruited a slate of candidates to challenge them — including the father of their daughter's fiancé — and got Trump to endorse them.

It was a sleazy move, and one that helped lead to the expulsion this week of Matt Maddock from the House GOP caucus. It also broke with the tradition of party officials remaining neutral in partisan primaries. And that was a last straw for the big donors who had done little up to now but shake their heads as the state GOP lost any claim to being a legitimate political party in Michigan.

The donors, mostly from west and southeast Michigan, are said to be giving generously, and all of the contributions will be publicly disclosed. No dark money is involved. It's funding that in the past likely would have gone to the state party to support operations and fund Republican candidates in the general election.

There's another motivation at work as well, and one perhaps even more important than saving rational and competent GOP lawmakers.

The MOA has also told donors it is concerned Trump would like the Michigan GOP to switch from awarding its presidential nominating delegates via an open primary to a closed caucus or convention. That would give party operatives greater control over the process and, if the current leadership make-up holds, assure him Michigan's delegates in 2024.

While those familiar with the MOA insist its mission is not to derail Trump, but rather to uphold conservative values, the alliance represents the first real hope of returning the Michigan Republican Party to the mainstream of American politics.

© The Detroit News

[Rick Plant]

Feds seek $3M from Paul Manafort over failing to disclose offshore accounts

A civil lawsuit signals the Justice Department views penalties as not covered by President Donald Trump's pardon of his former adviser.



The Justice Department is suing Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair, for almost $3 million in penalties related to his alleged failure to file reports disclosing more than 20 bank accounts he controlled in foreign countries, including Cyprus, the United Kingdom and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

According to the civil suit filed in federal court in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday, the Treasury Department assessed the penalties against the longtime lobbyist and political consultant in July 2020, exactly five months before then-President Donald Trump pardoned his former adviser on criminal tax, bank fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice convictions. That case was pursued by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose probe of alleged Russian influence on Trump’s 2016 campaign was the focus of intense and bitter criticism from Trump.

An attorney for Manafort expressed disappointment in the Justice Department’s decision to file the case, which was brought near Manafort’s legal residence in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

“Today’s civil lawsuit seeks a money judgment against Mr. Manafort for simply failing to file a tax form,” the lawyer, Jeffrey Neiman, said in a statement. “Mr. Manafort was aware the Government was going to file the suit because he has tried for months to resolve this civil matter. Nonetheless, the Government insisted on filing this suit simply to embarrass Mr. Manafort.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit.

Manafort told POLITICO earlier this month that he was planning to head back to work soon doing what he called “general business consulting.”

During a 2018 jury trial in Alexandria, Va., on some of the various criminal charges, Manafort was found guilty of failing to file a Foreign Bank Account Report for 2012, but the jury failed to reach a verdict on the same charge for 2013 and 2014. Jurors split 11-1 in favor of convicting Manafort on those counts, according to the verdict sheet and juror interviews.

The Justice Department’s suit signals that federal attorneys have concluded that Trump’s pardon does not cover the 2013 and 2014 charges, as well as the other eight counts the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on.

On the same day Trump left office in January 2021, a former Mueller deputy, Andrew Weissmann, published a legal commentary on the Just Security website arguing that Trump’s pardon of Manafort was poorly worded and failed to cover the charges he was never convicted on in Virginia. Noting that Manafort was sent home from his seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence after serving just two years, Weissmann argued that the punishment of Manafort was so modest that the Justice Department should consider re-prosecuting him on the 10 mistried charges in Virginia as well as other charges dismissed after he agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team to avoid a second trial in Washington.

“Reimposing appropriate punishment — one imposed by two courts — is thus not only fair in a system wedded to the rule of law, but may increase the chance of finally learning the truth,” Weissmann wrote, indicating that he believed Manafort knew more than he had previously acknowledged about Trump’s connections to Russia. Weissmann noted that Manafort admitted to all the charges against him as part of the plea deal and also agreed to waive any applicable statutes of limitations.

Weissmann declined to comment on the lawsuit filed on Thursday.

Justice Department lawyers seemed to take a broader view of the Trump pardon than Weissmann. About a month later, government attorneys cited the pardon as they told a federal judge that they were dropping efforts to complete forfeitures of three properties owned by Manafort, including his luxurious Long Island estate.

“The department has determined that due to President Trump’s full and unconditional pardon of Paul Manafort, it is necessary to dismiss the criminal forfeiture proceedings involving the four assets which were the subject of the ongoing forfeiture ancillary proceedings,” Justice Department lawyers wrote. The decision cleared the way for a Chicago bank that gave Manafort loans backed by the properties to foreclose and resell them. (The bank said late last year that it expected to turn a multimillion-dollar profit on the Manafort loans after selling off the collateral.)

Although the Justice Department could have tried to prosecute Manafort over the allegedly unfiled financial disclosures, the new court filing may signal that department attorneys concluded that a civil lawsuit was a more appropriate way to seek to further penalize the former Trump campaign official than initiating a new criminal prosecution.

The new suit says Manafort failed to comply with a requirement to report all foreign accounts under one’s control if the total balance in the accounts exceeds $10,000. While the suit contends that Manafort failed to report 22 foreign accounts in 2013, the complaint acknowledges that 19 of those accounts had a “zero balance” by the middle of the following year. Two of the accounts had a balance of less than $200,000 at that time, while one had a balance of about $443,000, the suit alleges.

All of the accounts were in the names of offshore companies that Manafort controlled or had signature authority over with the banks involved, according to the complaint. During the criminal cases several years ago, prosecutors alleged that Manafort used the accounts to park funds he earned from his political consulting work in Ukraine, but transferred some of the money to pay his bills in the U.S. for real estate, landscaping and expensive custom clothing. He also failed to pay taxes on much of the money that remained overseas or the sums he used to pay debts here, prosecutors alleged.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/paul-manafort-trump-lawsuit-00028717

[Rick Plant]

Trump 'doubled down' on backing GOP candidate after learning he was accused of assaulting 8 women



After Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, a businessman endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was accused of sexually assaulting eight women, including a state senator, Republicans throughout the state washed their hands of him, and sitting Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts told him to end his campaign and "get help."

But according to POLITICO on Thursday, Trump himself is still all in on Herbster's candidacy.

"Trump did not withdraw his support for Herbster, or scrap plans to hold a Friday evening rally for the candidate in Nebraska. Instead, he doubled down: The former president relayed word that Herbster wasn’t fighting back hard enough, backing plans for Herbster to hold a press conference aggressively denying the allegations and pushing back at his adversaries," reported Alex Isenstadt.

"Herbster followed suit, blasting the allegations as a 'smear campaign' taken from the same 'playbook' used to target Trump and Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, when they faced accusations of sexual misconduct," Isenstadt continued. "And Herbster ... boasted to reporters that he had brought on a law firm used by Trump to defend himself."

Herbster faces two opponents in the GOP primary for governor: state Sen. Brett Lindstrom, and hog farming executive Jim Pillen. But Trump shows now signs of moving his support to either.

"Trump’s unflinching support of Herbster, who served on a Trump White House agricultural panel and has known the former president since 2005, starkly illustrates the all-encompassing emphasis the former president places on loyalty," noted the report. "When Trump associates have faced allegations of misconduct, the question of what they did has often taken a back seat to how close they’ve been to Trump — who has then offered allies everything from pardons to campaign support in their time of need."

Trump himself has faced numerous allegations of se*ual misconduct, from forcible kissing and touching to rape.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/trumps-risky-primary-play-rallying-for-a-longtime-ally-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-00028611