Tag Archives: Jeffrey Clark

If Trump Is Elected in 2024

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I expect to have much to say about this as time goes on, especially if, as seems more likely each day, Trump remains on all the state ballots and is not tried and convicted of any of his multitude of felonies before the election. For now, I will just list some of what is being reported as the Trump plan for his second term as President. http://tinyurl.com/4bxpv8mf

Based on reporting by people in a position to know, Trump will:

  1. Create an “enemies list” of people he plans to punish for their opposition to him.
  2. Invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

This effort is being led by Jeffrey Clark, the lawyer who was working with Trump to use the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election by, among other things, pressing state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college. He is one of six unnamed co-conspirators in the federal election interference case and has been charged in Georgia with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement regarding the 2020 election. How Clark retains his license to practice law remains a mystery.

  1. Direct the Justice Department to investigate and punish former officials and allies who were critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.
  2. Order the prosecution of officials at the FBI and Justice Department who resist him.
  3. Appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
  4. “Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.”
  5. “Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation.”
  6. Alumni have also saved lists of … career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.

“… a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff said, “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”

  1. “Trump declared on Truth Social (on Veterans Day weekend, no less) that “the radical left thugs … live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He repeated the invective during an appearance in New Hampshire.” http://tinyurl.com/2brrsar8

As Forbes pointed out, “The former president’s incendiary rhetoric invokes a term frequently used by Nazis to dehumanize Jews, including a 1939 quote attributed to Hitler: ‘This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies.’”

  1. The New York Times reportedthat Trump “is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.” Likewise, The Post reported on “specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”
  2. The Post just days later  reported on Trump’s Univision appearance in which he uttered a bone-chilling threat: “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business,” Trump said. “They’d be out of the election.”
  3. Axios reported that Trump allies “are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potentialfoot soldiers, as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024.” The report added: “Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.”
  4. Trump will terminate aid to Ukraine and try to force that country to yield to Russia’s imperialist demands to take over the country. Trump will likely also eviscerate NATO, leaving its constituent countries vulnerable to Russian attack.

Just this weekend, Trump said “if the threatened country was in arrears on its NATO dues, he and the United States would not provide protection. For emphasis, Trump said that — on the contrary — he would “encourage” the aggressor to do “whatever the hell they want.”http://tinyurl.com/yc6ysv3d

In practice, the MAGA gang’s plans will look to end the independence of the civil service, long a bedrock of the stability and coherence of federal policy across both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Equally problematic is the current challenge to the power/authority of independent federal agencies to interpret federal statutory ambiguities under the doctrine known as Chevron Deference. MAGA Republicans want to end Chevron Deference so that if Congress has been ambiguous in legislation or failed to explain every aspect of what the legislation requires, those ambiguities and failures cannot be cured by the responsible agencies, regardless of the consequences. Given the paralysis of the Congress arising from the MAGA Republicans demand that their views control every legislative outcome, the end of Chevron Deference would be catastrophic for the functioning of the federal government.

The bottom line: the return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024 will lead directly and immediately to the end of democracy as the United States has known it since the Founding. The United States will become a dependency of Russia, a tool of Vladimir Putin whom Trump admires above all other world leaders.

The MAGA Republicans who have convinced themselves Trump cares about them will quickly, but too late, discover, that it was all a ruse.

 

Lost in Space

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I am harping a bit about the failure of the mainstream media to recognize the peril in which the country, and the MSM itself, finds itself. This failure is reflected in numerous ways, the latest being the decision of favorite New York Times to publish on page 21 of Sunday’s edition a story about the astonishing direct efforts by Donald Trump to suborn the Department of Justice to support his unfounded claims that the 2020 election was invalidated by fraud. Not only is Trump guilty of this effort to subvert the election, but compelling evidence has been produced that he had secured the support and active cooperation of Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division. https://nyti.ms/3iy3Gsw

This story is related to the on-going attempts of Trump and his enablers in Congress and the Republican-controlled states to overturn the lawful election of Joe Biden for President. That is the most important story of our time, right up there with the pandemic. If Trump had succeeded (or succeeds in the future), the democratic republic known as the United States of America would be finished. Seriously, is there a more important story than that?

As usual, the key players at the Justice Department have gone dark, refusing to comment substantively. But the testimony of Jeffrey Rosen, who was Acting Attorney General at the time, indicates that despite being directed otherwise, Clark continued having private conversations with Trump while Trump was still president. Clark even “drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.” The proposal was rejected but the apparent fact remains that Clark engaged in multiple violations of DOJ policy, and possibly federal law, in working collaboratively with Trump to overturn the election.

Clark has a spectacular resume. https://bit.ly/2VG7yi4 That fact does not mean that he was incapable of the acts to which Rosen, with a similar resume (https://bit.ly/37vlgqu), has testified. The story mentioned almost in passing the suggestion by one of Trump’s lawyers that Trump “might take some undisclosed legal action if congressional investigators sought “privileged information.” That is, of course, a huge issue, but privilege (executive or attorney-client or whatever) cannot be used to coverup conversations about the commission or attempt at commission of a crime.

I well understand that there are many other big stories afoot at the same time. The Times front page this morning covers some of those: the Cuomo scandal, Republicans supporting infrastructure legislation, problems attributable to children being denied in-classroom learning, restaurant struggles in New York City and, of course, the Olympics. But page 21 for the inside story of attempts to defeat the lawful transfer of power?

Meanwhile, my other favorite publication, the Washington Post, has once again elected (it clearly had a choice) to publish an op-ed that undermines the effort to rid the country of COVID-19 through vaccinations and other public health measures. https://wapo.st/3iwpgxx This piece was written by Drew Holden, a public affairs consultant in D.C. and a former Republican congressional staff member. There is no surprise, therefore, that he objects to the recently re-established mask mandate in Washington, including those already vaccinated. Typically, he downplays the significance of the Delta Variant that is sweeping the country and overwhelming medical resources in numerous states. He focused on a “slight uptick in local cases” and “only three deaths from the coronavirus in the past two weeks and with a positive test rate hovering around 1 percent.” Only three dead in two weeks, so who cares?

The author’s data, however, is massively contradicted by the Center for Disease Control’s COVID Data Tracker, https://bit.ly/3Cs8qrt. And, of course, the author dredges up the usual Republican talking points about overbearing government (ignoring, for example, the new Red Hero, the Governor of Florida, who has worked around the clock to defeat public health measures in his state that might help control the virus — #DeathSantis doesn’t hesitate to overrule local officials and to prevent Florida jurisdictions from following CDC guidance). So much for the principle of limited government.

Apparently no fan of logical consistency, Mr. Holden argues that while indoor mask mandates will reduce viral transmission, they will undermine the effort to persuade more people to vaccinate. He argues that more vaccinations are the “best way” to prevent more deaths, a view that most rational humans would accept, but Holden argues that vaccination is the only viable path forward, so the solution is to use the “best message” by repeating over and over again that vaccines are safe and effective.

Mandating masks even for the vaccinated sends a clear (if unintended) message to the contrary: Even when you have the vaccine, you aren’t really safe to yourself or others, even if we just told you the opposite was true. How can those already deservedly distrustful of the medical wisdom of the government overcome their skepticism if the government itself can’t seem to get the story straight?

Wow. If the author were really paying attention, he would understand that no one has claimed that vaccines were 100 percent security against COVID infection. This has been clear since the earliest public disclosures of the vaccines. The author also confuses mask requirements with other forms of incentive to vaccinate.

I could go on and on about this piece, but the real issue I want to raise is: why does the Washington Post continue to give credence and exposure to views like this? Is the Post’s commitment to truth tied to both-sides-ing issues of public health? Does the Post really believe that this type of message is essential to understanding the public health risks of another, and perhaps yet another, surge in COVID cases? If the Post is going to continue both-sides-ing COVID messaging, should it not explain its editorial policy to its readers?  If the issue were whether it is in the national interest to maintain a union of 50 states or whether we’d be better off as a nation by having multiple states secede, would the Post also both-sides that issue? How about smoking? Does the Post intend to publish both-sides commentary on the benefits and detriments of smoking tobacco? Wearing seat belts? How is this different?