Independent News
GOP Sen. Loeffler weighs subverting democracy in craven effort to win Senate runoff
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Georgia GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler locked herself into an impossible political position Wednesday when she signaled she hadn’t ruled out objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to officially tally the votes from the Electoral College.
“I haven’t looked at it,” Loeffler told reporters Wednesday, according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Greg Bluestein. “January 6 is a long way out and there’s a lot to play out between now and then,” she added, while also refusing to acknowledge that President-elect Joe Biden won the race.
Loeffler may have simply been bluffing in a nod to tantalizing Donald Trump’s rabid base, but walking back that potentiality will be next to impossible without thoroughly galvanizing the right wingers against her.
Loeffler’s Democratic challenger, Rev. Raphael Warnock, was quick to respond, tweeting, “Say it with me @KLoeffler: @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris won the election. It’s disrespectful to Georgia voters to say anything else.”
Warnock’s retort was also targeted at motivating the Democratic base to action on Jan. 5 over Loeffler and her GOP counterpart Sen. David Perdue’s continued refusal to recognize the rightful winners of the state’s presidential contest: Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who will become the first woman and person of color to serve as the nation’s second in command.
Loeffler’s gambit comes just one day after GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell finally conceded Biden had emerged victorious. McConnell’s acknowledgement came after Senate Republicans had underwritten Trump’s all-out assault on U.S. election for more than five weeks, but it still drew a rebuke from Trump in the wee hours of Wednesday morning claiming he won the election “by a lot.”
“Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!” Trump added.
Following McConnell’s concession to Biden Tuesday, the GOP Senate leadership team had explicitly implored members of their caucus not to contest the election results during congressional certification on Jan. 6—a doomed bid that would require at least one GOP senator to join forces with a Republican representative from the lower chamber. Loeffler clearly decided Trump’s tweet had left her little choice but to continue spinelessly paying lip service to his fascist fantasies and those of his supporters.
It’s not much a surprise, frankly. Loeffler—who has repeatedly leveraged her Senate post to profit off the nation’s pandemic crisis—is nothing if not an opportunist.
The only real surprise these days is when Republican lawmakers take a stand in favor of our democracy instead of attacking it. But doing that involves the type of integrity that virtually ensures someone will also have to renounce their membership in the Republican party. Loeffler’s only saving grace is that congressional certification takes place one day after the Jan. 5 runoff. By then, she’ll have dropped Trump’s voters like a hot potato to get back to placing more impeccably timed stock trades for profit.
Former head of cybersecurity gives stunning and moving statement about protecting our democracy
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Christopher Krebs is the former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He was appointed by Trump. Then, couple of weeks after the 2020 election, Trump fired him, after Krebs told the world that Donald Trump was just lying about election fraud. Krebs has subsequently had to, like many other American officials both conservative and liberal, deal with the threats to his life and his family’s welfare that are stewed by the continuing attempts by Trump and others to overthrow America’s democracy.
Today, Krebs is in front of Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s newest b.s. tribunal circus, supposedly looking at the irregularities of the 2020 election. The entire project is one that hopes to endear those angry Trump cult members to the Republican Party that is trying to drop him while also figuring out ways to undermine the Biden administration and our democracy. It’s real dirty stuff. Johnson and other Republicans are trying to thread a strange needle with Krebs, a Trump appointee who is not a bleeding heart liberal by any means. They want to both say that they respect him and believe he did a great job in securing our elections while also pretending he didn’t secure our elections. Republicans have tried to stay away from talking to or directing their questions directly to Krebs since he is the only person with actual intimate knowledge and expertise in the field.
Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada reserved the final two minutes of her time to allow Krebs a chance to speak to anything he felt was missed during this hearing. Krebs did not waste a word.
CHRISTOPHER KREBS: Thank you for that courtesy. Look, I could not be more proud of my team at CISA for the work they did. Not just protecting the 2020 election but in getting through the last nine months of all the stresses that COVID placed on the work force, and come into work each day. Whether they’re sitting at home, out in the field, or the limited folks that came into the office. That’s point one. Point two was I firmly believe that this Protect 20 effort, working with our partners in the federal government, whether it was in the intelligence community or the department of defense, was the single best representation of a unified government effort. Everybody got it. There were no turf wars. There was no parochialism. Everybody was on the same page. So we were defending democracy.
The last thing I’ll say is that the real heroes here are the state and local election workers across the country. The hundreds of thousands of election workers that risked their lives. And that’s not a joke, right? There is a global pandemic. There is COVID spreading across the country. They went to work so that you and I could go vote and cast our decision here—contribute to this process. They had to deal with incredible adversity. Then, at the end of it, risking their lives, they get death threats for doing their jobs. For standing up. Speaking truth to power. Putting country over party. That’s got to end.
We’re going to have to move past this somehow. I’ve said before that democracy, yeah, we survived this, I think. It was strong enough to survive, but democracy in general is fragile. It requires commitment and follow-through on both sides. If a party fails to participate in the process and instead undermines the process, we risk losing that democracy. We have to come back together as a country.
Krebs impromptu speech shows a passion for democracy that the entire Republican Party seems to have lost the thread of a long, long time ago—if they ever had it to begin with.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago neighbors remind their city that Trump is absolutely not allowed to live there
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The theory goes that Donald Trump, once he has gotten another month of pathetic narcissistic whining out of his system, will in January permanently move to Mar-a-Lago to spend time with—well, not with his family, but at least with an ever-present rotation of paying admirers. It’ll be his own little theme park—a one-figure wax museum with himself as the feature attraction.
If this sounds like hell on Earth to you, rest assured that Trump’s wealthy Palm Beach neighbors share your opinion. They don’t like the idea of living next to Nazi Disneyland and are once again demanding that the city force Trump to keep his past promises (ha) that the property will not be used as a residence. The Washington Post reports that Mar-a-Lago’s neighbors delivered a new letter to the city reminding them of such, which may once again put the city on the spot when it comes to enforcing their agreements with Trump or once again caving in.
This is all in dispute because of the arrangements Donald Trump set up when he turned the mansion into a private rich-person club. At the time, Trump assured the city of a great many things, including that the compound would not be used as full-time residence by him or by anyone else. Trump went on to of course break every one of the past agreements whenever he had a desire to do so, because that is literally how he does “real estate” deals: He lies, daring the other party to spend the enormous amounts of cash required to enforce their contract.
One of the latest Mar-a-Lago breaches was the installation of a private helipad, which Trump claimed was now a Secret Service necessity but which his team promised would for sure be removed again when the Secret Service didn’t need it. Photographs soon after its construction proved that Trump’s family was using it for their own purposes, and the odds that Trump will agree to not do that when he is no longer in office are approximately zero. Get used to helicopters, Mar-a-Lago neighbors.
And, in fact, Trump has already been claiming that Mar-a-Lago is his permanent residence. He did so when he voted in these last elections, asserting in his voter registration forms that he lived at the Mar-a-Lago address, not the White House, in order to vote absentee in the state. This is the sort of fraud that (not white) Americans can face heavy prison time for attempting, but if you are a rich and powerful ultraturd, nobody bats an eye.
Now Palm Beach is in a familiar position: fight Trump in court, for years, at great expense, or simply allow him to break the agreement forbidding him from using the property both as for-profit club and private home and admit once again they got played. It’s almost certain that they will. The possibly most appropriate compromise, in which Trump agrees to turn the property back into a private residence and end its use as a business, will never happen because Trump very, very, very much needs every dime he can squeeze out of his devotees. He has very big loans coming due soon, and few ways of making anything close to the amount of money needed to avoid bankruptcy.
Especially if bank fraud charges make him an even more toxic figure in the non-crooked segments of the finance world.
So this will be fun to watch, in a glad-we’re-not-them way. Will Trump’s wealthy neighbors succeed in getting the worst person in America to not move in next to them? Will Trump really decamp to Mar-a-Lago at all, when Trump Tower offers so much more privacy and freer access to Russian organized cri—I mean, to the other Trump Tower residents?
Will Trump instead decide that he has a new, irresistible desire to live in some nation that has no extradition agreements with the United States?
I’m still betting on the last one; the man has now gotten used to being able to break laws with reckless abandon while relying on a staff of government officials to shield him from the results. He’s not going to be able to stop, which means he’s going to have to go shopping for a city and nation that lets its oligarchs violate laws with even less oversight than Palm Beach, Florida, and the United States can be bothered to provide. Somewhere in the Middle East, probably. No helipad rules at all in some of those places.
Ron DeSantis gave Trump a last-minute boost by covering up Florida COVID-19 deaths before election
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From the start of the pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been committed to the idea of mushroom management — he’s kept Florida citizens in the dark and fed them bullshit. In April, Florida began hiding the list of deaths from county medical examiners, which had always been public before that point. In May, DeSantis fired data scientist Rebekah Jones after she refused to stop posting data that was both accurate and public. Jones created her own dashboard in June, in hopes of giving Florida residents a more accurate view of what was going on. However, since then the state has been making it harder to get basic information on topics like hospitalization rates, and persecuting Jones—ending with a raid on her home in which weapons were pointed at her children. In the wake of that raid, a Republican official resigned his position, saying he no longer wished to serve Florida’s current government in any capacity.
But even if Jones’ computers were carried away in this politically motivated raid, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel couldn’t help but notice another … oddity in Florida’s COVID-19 data. This particular strangeness was a sudden and unexplained gap in reporting of deaths related to COVID-19, one that began just days before the election.
The gap was actually noticed first by University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi. On his personal website, Salemi posted the data, but drew no immediate conclusion, saying that he needed “to understand this process more.”
But what the Sun-Sentinel shows is that Florida announced that it was making a change in how it was handling “backlogged deaths” on Oct. 24, just 10 days before the election. These are deaths that had been recorded on previous dates, but not yet reported on the state’s official site. According to the state, it wanted to make sure that deaths logged to COVID-19 really were directly attributable to the disease, and couldn’t be assigned to some other cause. Florida officials didn’t resume reporting these deaths until Nov. 17, and when they did numbers were surprisingly down, even though case counts and hospitalizations were up. In addition, it seems that there was a very abrupt change that came a few days before these announcements.
So what were Florida voters seeing when they looked at COVID-19 deaths in the days leading up to the election? That things were great. On Oct. 7, there had been 119 deaths reported in a day. But after Oct. 20, the number of deaths reported in a day never reached double-digits until well after the election.
Here’s another astounding coincidence that was picked up by WTSP back in November: Starting on Oct. 22, just as the reported deaths from COVID-19 made this unexplained drop, DeSantis went dark on COVID-19 statements. Even though case counts were rising in the state all through this period, and COVID-19 was dominating the conversation in other states, DeSantis didn’t make a statement about the state of the pandemic. For two weeks, DeSantis had no briefings or news conferences about the pandemic, despite multiple requests for an update from both local officials and news organizations.
It seems that DeSantis contrived to make sure that when people went to the polls across his state, COVID-19 wasn’t on their minds. And if it was, they could be expected to be comforted by how the state was seeing a plummeting death toll even as the numbers were soaring across the nation. In short—Florida voters were sent a false message that the pandemic was under control in their state, and that the “open everything” policies advocated by DeSantis and Donald Trump had been successful.
Chad Wolf finalizes anti-asylum policy in final weeks of job he’s been unlawfully occupying
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it will deport some asylum-seekers seeking protection at the southern border to El Salvador under a kind of policy that legislators have previously said “violates the law and endangers their lives.” BuzzFeed News reports that plan was initially announced last year, with talks going into March but sounding like the effort had been stalled.
That was good news for asylum-seekers. Advocacy group Human Rights First said earlier this year that at least 138 people were killed after being deported from the U.S. to El Salvador. The fact is that these so-called safe third country agreements forcing people seeking asylum to another nation are dangerous. But now with just over 30 days left of this wretched administration, DHS said the policy with El Salvador has been finalized.
The Trump administration had already been sending some asylum-seekers to Guatemala under the policy with the claim that vulnerable families can just apply for protection there. That, of course, has been a lie: Guatemala itself produces thousands of asylum-seekers a year. And yet, U.S. officials have gone forward with these agreements knowing full well that they’re deporting vulnerable people, including children, back to danger.
”Earlier this year, the Biden–Sanders task force, organized after the president-elect won the Democratic nomination, recommended an end to the agreements signed with the Central American countries,” BuzzFeed News reported. “Biden has said he wants to convene leaders in the region to discuss larger, structural issues regarding migration to the US border.” That’s the kind of direction we should be going in, but instead the outgoing administration has actively put up fights that only worsen conditions for these families.
“It’s hard to see the point of this particular bit of theater from both the outgoing Trump admin & the Bukele govt,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer. “Biden has said he’d abandon these agreements once in office. I asked a former DHS official what the play cld be. Official replied, ‘Chad Wolf just wants to travel?’”
That’s not a stretch in the least—the unlawfully appointed acting secretary loves his taxpayer-funded cosplay and travel, with a giant bill to prove it. Now he’s added a trip to Central America just days after holding an unmasked DHS holiday party. But as we’ve also noted before, the outgoing administration is intentionally creating a mountain of cruelty and policy for the president-elect to have to clean up, including another rule gutting asylum that’s set to go into effect just nine days before his inauguration.
“If enacted, this rule will send countless migrants to certain harm or death,” National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “The asylum regulations put forth by the Trump administration violate our obligations under U.S. and international law. Amongst a barrage of hostile policies and regulations, these rules are the most comprehensive assault on the right to asylum yet seen.”
NIJC has called on Biden to reverse the policy, which he can do. The same for the rest of the outgoing administration’s anti-immigrant and anti-asylum policies. But that doesn’t stop the human costs of this rule until that happens, or the human costs of the dozens of other rule changes the administration is trying to push through at the last minute.
Peters rips into Senate hearing aimed at undermining U.S. democracy
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Sen. Ron Johnson, fresh off his unexpected admission that Joe Biden won the election and is president-elect, went ahead with his previously planned hearing on supposed election irregularities. At the outset, Johnson claimed it was important because so many people don’t believe the election results are legitimate—as if he hadn’t played an active role in undermining confidence in the results.
Sen. Gary Peters, the top Democrat on the committee and a senator representing Michigan, one of the states whose results have come under specific attack, wasn’t having it. He opened with a strong condemnation of the entire hearing.
“The president and many of his supporters are, unfortunately, continuing their efforts to undermine the will of the people, disenfranchise voters, and sow the seeds of mistrust and discontent to further their partisan desire for power. Whether intended or not, this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies and it’s a destructive exercise that has no place in the U.S. Senate,” Peters said, highlighting Biden’s 306 electoral votes, his historic popular vote total, and the growing, if reluctant, recognition among Republican lawmakers that Biden did win.
Yet still the hearing is happening. “And despite the title of today’s hearing, there were no widespread election irregularities that affected the final outcome. These claims are false. And giving them more oxygen is a grave threat to the future of our democracy. Now, I understand the chairman’s desire to ensure our elections run smoothly, and I agree that we need to restore faith and trust in our election process. But I’m concerned that today’s hearing will do more harm than good by confusing a few anecdotes about human error with the insidious claims the president has aired,” Peters said. “Mistakes do happen in elections, but there is a difference between a clerk making an error that gets caught and corrected during routine audits, and calling the entire election fraudulent or stolen when there is no evidence just because you do not like the outcome. Amplifying these obviously false narratives about fraud or irregularities corrodes public trust, it threatens national security, and it weakens our democracy and our standing around the world.”
Peters issued a strong warning: “Democracy and a free society are not guaranteed. We have seen democracies around the world crumble because of similar words and actions.”
Johnson, doing his part to keep undermining the legitimacy of the election he now admits has a clear winner, responded by insisting that this was “legitimate congressional oversight.” Oversight he’s never been interested in conducting into Russian election interference, or voter suppression. But now that Donald Trump lost in a landslide? It’s time to make a big fuss. Good for Peters for setting the tone at the outset.
Detroit wants Krakenpot attorney Sidney Powell to pay for undermining democracy
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The City of Detroit wants attorney Sidney Powell to pay—literally—for her reality-adjacent dog and pony legal challenge to Michigan’s election results.
The city has prepared a motion to fine Powell and her team over her so-called “Kraken” lawsuit for “frivolously undermining ‘People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.'” The motion also seeks disciplinary action that could include banning the lawyers from practicing law in the Eastern District of Michigan—which might be just fine by Powell’s team since they thought they were in Minnesota anyway.
“It’s time for this nonsense to end,” Detroit’s lawyer David Fink told the Law & Crime site in an interview. “The lawyers filing these frivolous cases that undermine democracy must pay a price.”
The city is seeking what are known as Rule 11 sanctions, which can be sought against an opposing counsel for frivolously filing claims with improper aims and virtually zero chance of succeeding due to lack of evidence or a legitimate grievance.
That would seem appropriate here, particularly for Powell’s suits since they have been flatly dismissed in several states by federal judges who often include scathing rebukes of Powell’s intent. That was certainly true in Michigan. In fact, forget trying to defend claims made by Team Kraken and Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a court of law. They have indeed been so outlandish that they were indefensible even in the friendly setting of Fox News studios.
Detroit’s motion has not been filed yet, according to Law & Crime. Once it is, the “Kraken” team will have 21 days to fix the problem and/or withdraw the litigation.
Detroit’s attorneys had hinted at taking this type of action in a filing in November. It certainly wouldn’t be surprising to see other jurisdictions employ it if Trump’s litigation efforts continue, which seems entirely possible.
When Powell was asked about the sanctions effort, she signaled confidence that she was really on the right track now: “We are clearly over the target.”
Hoo boy.
Mike Pompeo can cry if he wants to: Only a few people showed up to his big holiday party
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One of the drawbacks to being a miserably craven, scruples-free, power-hungry bully is that people tend to only want to be around you for a handful of reasons. These people—one could call them hangers-on, or sycophants, or minions—will put up with you because you either have real power or they perceive that you have power. The difference in results is miniscule. People like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and virtually everyone in the Trump White House, fit this personality description. Whether those folks listen to a Mike Pompeo because they are afraid of him or because they too are miserably craven and believe Pompeo to be the best route towards their own selfish goals doesn’t change the equation.
On Tuesday, Pompeo and his wife were set to host an ill-advised hundreds of persons holiday party—indoors. According to The Washington Post, of the “more than 900 guests invited,” only a few dozen people RSVP’d to the event “and even fewer showed up.” Normally these kinds of fancy events pull in a few hundred people, but Pompeo had two things going against him: there’s a goddamn out of control pandemic going on in the United States that has claimed over 300,000 American lives; and Mike Pompeo, like the rest of the Trump White House, is no longer a perennial dictator.
But there’s a cherry on top of this cake.
It turns out that even while most people were losing their RSVPs in their bathroom wastepaper basket, Pompeo himself was getting ready to cancel his appearance at this frivolous and dangerous event. Why? Let’s hear from a White House spokesperson: “Secretary Pompeo has been identified as having come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID. For reasons of privacy we can’t identify that individual. The Secretary has been tested and is negative. In accordance with CDC guidelines, he will be in quarantine. He is being closely monitored by the Department’s medical team.”
This comes just a few days after it was announced that Trump legal team stu-perstar Jenna Ellis had tested positive for COVID-19 after attending one of the holiday parties held by the White House on Friday. To be clear, the event was still attended by a few dozen people and while it isn’t clear who those people were, there is a very good chance many of them were State Department employees and possibly their families under pressure from their bosses. The exact number is not known, but a considerable number of people were likely obligated to work the event—champagne and table settings don’t pour and set themselves.
Pompeo’s ugly displays of vanity continue to be a danger to the public at large. This was not Pompeo’s first attempt to force people to make bad health decisions in the name of a holiday party. Last Tuesday, Pompeo’s State Department hosted a 200-person party. It’s important to remember that these are the last big luxury fancy parties that people like Mike Pompeo get to bill to the American taxpayer before these people crawl into whatever lobbying firm or other private interest they plan on taking a paycheck from once they leave office.
How’s that “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” been going, Mike?
Congressional leaders close in on COVID-19 stimulus deal, but can they get it over the finish line?
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Congressional negotiators are reportedly close to a deal on COVID-19 stimulus, a mere seven months after the House passed the HEROES Act. The December deal will likely come in at around a third of the size of the HEROES Act and take effect after the long months of Senate Republican inaction have pushed up to 8 million people into poverty.
The details reportedly include direct payments to individuals of around $600, far less than the already inadequate $1,200 included in the March CARES Act, along with extended unemployment benefits—months after the $600 per week expanded aid expired. An earlier version of a proposed deal added $300 per week for 16 weeks.
The deal also reportedly includes extra money for the Paycheck Protection Program, despite its many failures. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Vaccine distribution, education, and health care are likely also on the list.
Democrats and Republicans are each giving up a priority, the media tells us. For Democrats, that’s the state and local aid needed to prevent millions of job losses. For Republicans, it’s a liability shield for corporations that risked the health and safety of workers and customers during the pandemic. These two things are not alike.
They are also not alike in that Democrats have already given up—or watched Republicans snatch—many other priorities. Priorities like the last four and a half months of expanded unemployment. Like the funding schools needed to safely reopen at the beginning of the school year. Like $300 more a week in expanded unemployment benefits. Like at least another $600 per person in direct payments.
We also have to watch the media recycle bullshit like: “The direct checks will likely be far less than $1,200 per person—likely around $600—in order to keep the cost of the bill in check.” As we know—and as Politico’s Jake Sherman and Burgess Everett damn well also know—Republicans do not care about the cost of a bill when it benefits rich people. “Keeping the cost of the bill in check” is a priority now only because the money in question would go to the people in the middle and below, not those at the very top. It’s on the media to call that out, and it’s not hard to do. There’s a perfect case study in the 2017 Republican tax law.
Added unemployment benefits of $300 a week for an additional 16 weeks, with $600 per person, is pitifully inadequate. Without aid to state and local governments, the economy is in serious danger. This is not going to be enough. But as Republicans know, and are exploiting, Democrats don’t want people to continue suffering and will do what it takes to alleviate that suffering, even if it’s not nearly enough.
Trump demanding that Barr’s replacement appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden
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When Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter held the official post of nothing at all. When Joe Biden becomes president next month, Hunter will take on the role of doing just what he was doing when Biden was not president. Unlike Ivanka Trump or Jared Kushner, Hunter is not about to get a taxpayer paycheck as a very special adviser. Unlike Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Lara Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Hunter Biden is not on the payroll with either Biden’s campaign or the party.
So, naturally, the Associated Press is reporting that Donald Trump wants the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. Why is Trump doing this? Because he wants to leave behind as much ongoing damage as possible to hamper Biden’s work over the next four years. Why now? Because Bill Barr is helpfully stepping aside so that Trump can get his own personal Christmas gift from incoming acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Trump’s push to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden makes no sense. Even should Biden’s sole surviving son turn out to have problems with his taxes, that issue is already under investigation with absolutely zero indication that it has any ties to any action by his father or any government official. Hunter Biden’s taxes are under examination. Period. Just as Donald Trump’s taxes are also under examination. Source have said that Hunter is not the target of a criminal investigation, and he has publicly admitted that his tax returns are being reviewed. There is not even an indication of a connection to his father.
Trump doesn’t want a special counsel because he believes that Hunter Biden did something wrong. He wants it because, as he tweeted himself, he wants to see that Biden’s term is “plagued by scandal.” And considering that post-Trump, the media will likely return to their standard of declaring scandals based on suit color or type of sandwich condiment, he may even get his wish.
Trump isn’t stopping with just one special counsel. He wants another to investigate his claims of election fraud—the same claims that have been rejected in court 60 times. Trump knows this counsel wouldn’t be doing anything that would actually affect the election outcome in 2020. He’s planting bombs that he hopes will cause enough damage to give him an edge in 2024.
If Trump can’t get Rosen to misuse his very temporary office for blatantly political purposes, Trump has a plan for that as well: just keep replacing the AG until he finds someone who will give him everything he wants. Trump is even looking into whether he can just skip the entire farce that this is something originating in the Justice Department and simply appoint a special counsel himself.
The answer to that question is: Of course he can. It may not be legal, but considering that a majority of House Republicans just signed on to an attempt to overthrow the election, what has legal got to do with any of this?
