Independent News
FBI sends flawed email in response to media inquiry about the status of Leonard Peltier’s clemency
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In a strange turn of events, when HuffPost recently asked for the status of an inmate’s petition for clemency, instead of receiving a response from the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney, the FBI sent an email.
But as the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. The inmate in question is Leonard Peltier, a Native American rights activist who supporters say has been wrongfully imprisoned for the past 46 years. Now 77 years old, he has been locked up since 1975, making him the longest-serving political prisoner in U.S. history.
HuffPost reports that in late March they emailed the Office of the Pardon Attorney to check on the status of Peltier’s review process, filed by his attorney in July. They received an email response from the FBI office.
Peltier was convicted for the deaths of two FBI agents who died during a 1975 shoot-out on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Peltier has denied being involved in the shooting.
RELATED STORY: ‘He doesn’t deserve this,’ activist says after learning Leonard Peltier has COVID-19
The FBI’s email to HuffPost:
“The FBI remains resolute against the commutation of Leonard Peltier’s sentence for murdering FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. We must never forget or put aside that Peltier intentionally and mercilessly murdered these two young men and has never expressed remorse for his ruthless actions.
“Peltier’s conviction, rightly and fairly obtained, still stands, and has withstood numerous appeals to multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. No amount of prison time changes the facts surrounding Coler and Williams’ deaths and commuting Peltier’s sentence now would only serve to diminish the brutality of his crime and the suffering of their surviving families and the FBI family.”
Justin Mazzola, deputy director for research at Amnesty International USA, told HuffPost the email from the FBI is not only outdated but also factually incorrect.
“Forty-five years later, this statement does not even come close to aligning with what we now know about the environment and events leading up to and on Pine Ridge that fateful day, let alone all of the information we now know about the trial and case against Leonard Peltier,” Mazzola said.
“It denies the FBI’s own role in using perjured testimony to secure his extradition from Canada, the suppression of potentially exonerating evidence by the [Department of Justice] attorneys in his case. … Even the prosecutors subsequently admitted that they have no idea who shot the agents at point-blank range,” Mazzola adds.
In 2020, Peltier’s attorney Kevin Sharp told the Tennessee Lookout that what happened to Peltier equals a “mountain of constitutional violations.” He added that the government eventually dropped the murder conviction because, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it turned out the FBI had withheld “damning exculpatory evidence” showing that the gun used to shoot the two agents did not belong to Peltier. Additionally, according to Sharp, several witnesses recanted their testimonies, saying, “We were threatened by the FBI. So we said we saw things that we did not see.”
And it seems it has been the fear of the FBI that has kept Peltier behind bars for so long. Sharp says at one point former President Clinton was considering Peltier’s case, but did nothing. Hope sprung again during former President Obama’s terms in office, but again, nothing was done.
In an early February White House press briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether President Biden knew about or had been briefed on Peltier’s case. Psaki said at the time she had no idea whether or not the president had been spoken to or about his case.
International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (ILPDC) co-director Carol Gokee told Daily Kos in February that she was worried about Peltier after learning he’d tested positive for COVID-19.
“Leonard has been begging and pleading for years and nothing has been accomplished,” Gokee told Daily Kos. “He just keeps saying, ‘Get me home so I don’t die here.’”
ILPDC has been demanding that Peltier either be released or placed in a more adequate facility.
“If Leonard Peltier dies in prison, God help us,” Gokee said at a recent press conference. “Because America is watching. Joe Biden, this is up to you,” she added.
Peltier’s last chance for clemency is from Biden. Dozens of people have signed petitions in support of his release. With Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, leading the Interior Department, there’s a sliver of hope to save Peltier from dying in prison.
Gokee told Daily Kos that after a press conference ILPDC gave, “Joe Biden decided to ask Senator Jon Ossoff to lead up the judiciary committee with Dick Durbin on prison conditions, misconduct and Covid. We have been giving them all kinds of information. Let’s see if they do a good job with this. “
Ginni Thomas' texts to Meadows reveal connection to another highly placed conspiracy theorist
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Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was truly part of a web of efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Among her dozens of text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, CNN reports, was one passing along thoughts from her friend Connie Hair. But Hair wasn’t just a personal friend. She was also chief of staff to Rep. Louie Gohmert—and Gohmert joined or supported two lawsuits seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election loss. Those lawsuits went to the Supreme Court, though the court didn’t take up either of them.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas have long made a mockery of the weak Supreme Court ethics rules allowing justices to decide, on their own, when to recuse themselves from cases in which they have conflicts of interest. Ginni is a far-right activist who has worked with groups actively advocating for specific outcomes in major Supreme Court cases, cases that Clarence never recuses himself from. It’s not just a matter of Ginni’s stated opinions, it’s also often a matter of her professional interests. But Team Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election have brought the corruption of the Thomases’ inside-outside act into renewed attention, because it’s noteworthy when a Supreme Court justice’s wife texts a White House chief of staff: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for [Trump’s] back,” and later the Supreme Court justice in question is the only member of the court dissenting on allowing Trump’s documents relating to Jan. 6 to be handed over to investigators.
RELATED STORY: The Supreme Court can’t be untouchable. Congress needs to investigate Thomas
Hair turns up in a Nov. 14, 2020, text from Ginni Thomas to Meadows, reading, “This war is psychological. PSYOP. It’s what I did in the military. They are using every weapon they have to try to make us quit … It is fake, fraud and if people would take a deep breath and look at things through that filter we will see this through and win.”
The text to Meadows mentions Hair in a context suggesting she was the author of those words, and a source told CNN that Thomas had cut and pasted Hair’s comments from other texts. Ginni Thomas does not have a military background, while Hair’s Twitter profile includes “#veteran.”
Publicly, Hair tweeted things like, “Was on a call with the Trump campaign manager and legal folks for a briefing this morning. WE ARE SEEING THIS THROUGH TO THE END OF THE COURT/COUNT BATTLE,” and “Massive amounts of voter fraud in big cities throughout the contested states.”
Hair’s boss, Gohmert, sued Mike Pence in an effort to get him to interfere in the certification of the Electoral College count, and endorsed a Texas lawsuit challenging the votes of four other states.
According to CNN’s source, Hair didn’t know about Gohmert’s involvement in those cases, and Thomas and Hair didn’t discuss them. But Hair has been friends with the Thomases for years, including dinners and a Colbie Caillat concert as well as photos from inside Clarence’s judicial chambers. So what we have is the Supreme Court justice’s wife texting her good friend the congressional chief of staff, then passing along words of wisdom from the latter to the White House chief of staff, while the member of Congress is involved in lawsuits headed to the Supreme Court.
It’s all a little suspicious.
Clarence Thomas should not be allowed to pick and choose which of the legal matters in which his wife is deeply involved he will take as a member of the Supreme Court—particularly as his answer to that question has been “all of them.” A Supreme Court justice whose wife was strategizing with someone actively engaged in a coup attempt, telling them “Do not concede,” and sending along conspiracy theories and advice about which lawyers should lead the effort in the courts should perhaps not be one out of nine votes on which of those efforts will succeed in court. If Thomas won’t start recusing himself where his wife has been actively involved—and he won’t—it’s another strong argument for, at a minimum, imposing a strong set of judicial ethics on the Supreme Court, and beyond that, investigating Thomas and expanding the court so that one corrupt justice will not loom so large.
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Texts between Ginni Thomas, Meadows reveal an extraordinary effort to destroy democracy
Ginni Thomas wanted to overturn the election. About Clarence Thomas’ Jan. 6 documents dissent …
Union posts a rare loss at Starbucks, then roars back with five wins
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Late last week, the union organizing campaign at Starbucks suffered a rare loss—just its second in more than 20 elections—with an election in Springfield, Virginia, that went against unionizing, 10 to 8. That did not signal a reversal of momentum, though: On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in the Richmond, Virginia, area voted to unionize.
The Richmond votes weren’t close, either. The closest was 13-8 in favor of unionizing. One was unanimous, 19-0. In between, they racked up victories at 17-1, 22-3, and 11-2. Across the five stores, that’s 82-14. For context, Virginia is a state where less than 5% of workers are in unions.
RELATED STORY: Starbucks CEO whines that companies are being ‘assaulted … by the threat of unionization’
“It was jump started by the fact that a lot of us were out sick during the beginning of the Omicron surge, so we were really understaffed then,” Iman Djehiche, a worker at one of the stores, told VICE News. “And we realized exactly how strenuous it can be without the support of corporate on our side… our safety was being put second to profit, and we weren’t being treated with any sort of dignity and respect.”
Tim Swicord, an 18-year-old worker at the Springfield Starbucks, told DCist he had expected to win, but, in the wake of the vote, thinks the company’s anti-union campaign intimidated workers while turnover took a toll on support.
”Our district manager started coming in and we had these scheduled ‘connects,’ which is what corporate called them,” he said. “But they are really the same kind of one-on-ones … except ours were more frequently than not two-on-ones with our store manager and our district manager. They were saying things like, ‘you could lose your ability to transfer stores. You could lose some benefits.’”
He continued, “From what I heard, the things that were being said in these one-on-ones were definitely influencing people’s votes. And at least in my mind, I definitely felt that that two-on-one aspect was very kind of intimidating. And I really think it’s unfair.”
An 18-year-old barista being sat down by a store manager and a district manager, the latter of whom sat around the store when she wasn’t in forced two-on-ones, and told they would lose benefits? Yeah, that seems intimidating, especially coming from a company that has fired a series of union leaders among its workers, most on the flimsiest of pretexts. Meanwhile, founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz made a public speech whining that “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways, by the threat of unionization.” Strong words from a man whose company is out here threatening teenagers as a matter of policy.
The company is also laying the groundwork to refuse to bargain in good faith as workers at the newly unionized stores seek to negotiate first contracts.
”Developing a contract that meets or exceeds what we already offer to our partners is going to be difficult for them to do,” Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, was recently quoted in HuffPost. “These contracts don’t start at the baseline of the benefits that our partners get. That is the full-stop rule. The contract negotiations start at zero.” Borges quickly backtracked after Dave Jamieson’s story was published, because that very explicit threat is actually an illegal one. But it wasn’t an accident—it was in fact similar to what Swicord reported that managers are telling workers in their two-on-one intimidation sessions.
These contract fights will be long and hard and fought store by store, just as the union elections have been. Workers are planning, Jamieson reports, to develop a first contract framework that leaves significant room for workers to bargain based on the specific conditions in their stores.
By the time serious bargaining is going on across many stores, though, many more may have voted to unionize. According to a new Starbucks unionization tracker from Law360, workers at 219 Starbucks have taken steps to organize and votes have been scheduled in 82.
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Two things keep happening at Starbucks: Union wins, and union supporters facing retaliatory firing
Starbucks workers are racking up win after win after win, despite vicious anti-union campaign
Climate change is killing workers, but it doesn't have to be this way
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Way back when I was splitting my working time freelance writing and working live events, I signed on with an audio-visual company that provides services to hotels. It was considered the retirement gig for production folks, as there was no touring involved and very little stress. As a lighting designer, my job consisted of gussying up a ballroom in corporate colors and making sure the lights I used to illuminate a podium made presenters look good. All that gear came from a warehouse, run by a cherished coworker who used to lovingly chide me for wearing ballet flats on show days because they weren’t exactly as safe as steel-toes. He stood up for me when there did come an opportunity to work out of town and I was the only woman on the gig. And he was known for his relentless work ethic, which was just as strong as his belief in the people around him. That relentlessness may have cost him his life.
A lawsuit has been brought on behalf of this friend, who likely succumbed to heatstroke one blazing summer day in the New Orleans metro and ultimately passed away. The company claimed it was heart-related. Rumblings from his friends and colleagues made it clear: It was likely heat-related.
There’s little recourse for workers who die from extreme temperatures, which have been made much worse due to climate change. As Mother Jones notes in a recent report, median penalties for on-the-job deaths stand at just $12,144 for federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) plans. State OSHA plans typically penalize companies with median fines of just $6,899 for worker deaths. For companies like the one I worked at, with revenues in excess of $40 million, a penalty like that certainly wouldn’t inspire a whole lot of change. Not that enforcement has even come close to allowing for such penalties to be incurred in the first place: As the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) notes, underreporting of such tragedies is altogether too common.
Amazon is guilty of underreporting when it comes to COVID-19 cases, as are meatpacking plants and farm operations. The entire state of Texas is guilty of underreporting workplace incidents like injuries, as it’s the only state without universal workers comp, which means companies have even fewer incentives to do the right thing since they’re ostensibly setting their own rules. As workplace tragedies—like the eight lives lost to a tornado at the Mayfield Consumer Products plant in Kentucky—continue to mount, legislation has been introduced to at least address some of the issues. The Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act, named for a worker who died of heatstroke in 2004, was introduced last year to address heat-related deaths in the workplace. And, last week, OSHA finally announced the launching of what it dubs a National Emphasis Program on heat-related hazards.
“Tragically, the three-year average of workplace deaths caused by heat has doubled since the early 1990s. These extreme heat hazards aren’t limited to outdoor occupations, the seasons, or geography. From farmworkers in California to construction workers in Texas and warehouse workers in Pennsylvania, heat illness—exacerbated by our climate’s rising temperatures—presents a growing hazard for millions of workers,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement.
Missing are requirements instead of guidance for natural disasters or grievous workplace incidents, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred 12 years ago today in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest oil spill in American history, it led to the deaths of 11 workers, irrevocably damaged the environment, and has continued to impact the Gulf South today. Damning reports following the incident found that safety regulations were regularly flouted for the sake of expedience. These problems persist to this day. Despite establishing new oversight in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill, journalists found that offshore worker deaths remain underreported.
As the president pushes for bold, sweeping changes to reach net-zero, so too should the Biden administration push for a country in which workplace deaths rarely, if ever, occur. Committing to a greener future means ensuring those who play key roles in reaching that goal are protected from exploitation, paid a livable wage, and protected from entirely preventable disasters. The Department of Labor has indeed issued reports touching on environmental justice but, like its guidance-over-rules approach to handling such matters, it is altogether lacking. The time to act is now, especially given the fact that it takes years for OSHA to fully adopt a regulation. The agency must act before more are senselessly lost for the sake of profit.
Praise and relief: Responses come in after Sen. Mallory McMorrow's powerhouse speech goes viral
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On Tuesday, video of Michigan Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow giving a powerhouse speech on the floor of the state Senate went viral. It was a breath of fresh air to watch a Democratic representative bring the hard-hitting dose of reality our political discourse sorely needs. Sen. McMorrow was responding to a fundraising email Republican sate Sen. Lana Theis had sent out days earlier that name-checked Sen. McMorrow as someone “grooming” children. It was the natural progression of the profound moral perversions that have been powering the conservative bigotry movement over these past many decades.
Sen. McMorrow’s speech was four minutes of calling Theis and other conservatives out for their bigotries as well as the ultimate hypocrisy: their “protection of children” by way of attacking marginalized children. Saying, “I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white, and Christian,” McMorrow repeatedly drove the point home that true “Christian values” are shown with action and service, not “performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people.”
McMorrow’s words have been seen and heard by millions and the reactions to her righteous indignation are coming in from all over.
RELATED STORY: Watch what happens when you pick the wrong Democrat to lie about
Let us first read a brief analysis.
Then let us give the proper congratulations.
Hear, hear.
Fellow Democrats in the Michigan legislature responded as well.
And some perspective on history and how it’s taught or not taught:
And then a visual representation.
Oh, snap!
And then a hometown favorite!
Daily Kos community! Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noticed, as well.
And finally:
If you can, please give a dollar or two to help Democrats hold the House this coming election.
Here’s the whole speech, if you want to experience it all over again.
In now-deleted tweet, Arizona lawmaker boldly lies about 1 billion migrants at border
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There are right-wing politicians using extremist talking points to attack Democrats on immigration and the southern border, and then there’s Debbie Lesko. The Arizona representative lied in a now-deleted tweet on Tuesday that “more than 1,000,000,000 migrants”—that’s billion with a b!—were apprehended by U.S. border officials in a span of six months.
That’s a lot of people—about one in seven of all living human beings, to be more specific, noted The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. “If you have a spare bedroom, you probably would have had a knock at the door from someone from Customs and Border Protection. No wonder she eventually deleted the message.”
RELATED STORY: If it seems like Republicans sound like hate group, it’s because they are sounding like hate group
In her now-deleted tweet, Lesko pointed to a report from The Wall Street Journal that claimed more than 1 million—not billion—arrests by U.S. border officials. But this too needs more explanation: Immigration policy experts have long stressed the Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy “has had the counterproductive effect of significantly increasing the number of arrests at the border.” This is because desperate people unjustly blocked from their asylum rights will again try to seek safety.
”Before the pandemic began, just 7% of people arrested at the border had crossed the border more than once, but by October 2020, 40% of all people arrested had crossed the border multiple times that year,” American Immigration Council said last October. “Throughout Fiscal Year 2021, 1 in 3 people apprehended at the border had already crossed the border at least once that year.”
”Last month, the Border Patrol recorded 209,906 apprehensions, the third-highest since 2000 (we don’t have monthly records from before then),” Senior Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted on Tuesday. “I estimate that 61,000 of them—41%—were repeat apprehensions of someone on their 2nd, 3rd, or higher attempt to cross the border.”
It would seem that one way to respond to this would be to end this disastrous policy. But instead, some squeamish Democrats have actually joined forces with Republicans to defend this white supremacist order when all that’s being asked for is a return to the same exact asylum system we had in place on March 19, 2020, the day before Miller used the novel coronavirus pandemic as his excuse to invoke the policy.
But back to Lesko: She’s usually much better at parroting anti-immigrant talking points, like when congressional Republicans echoed the rhetoric of anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The Tanton network group issued a press release just one day after President Biden’s inauguration that accused him of “inducing an immigration and border crisis.” Just one day after getting sworn in! That Biden sure gets shit done.
“Within days of the release, Republicans began to echo the same language in their messages on social media,” The American Independent’s Oliver Willis reported last year, with Republican legislators including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy mimicking FAIR’s “border crisis” term nearly 40 times altogether through March 2021. Listed alongside Lesko were a number of other notorious anti-immigrant loudmouths, including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn.
Blackburn has used “invasion” terminology to describe immigration at the southern border in Facebook ads several times in 2018, Media Matters reported in 2019. This is the same wording used by the white supremacist terrorist who went to El Paso that year to shoot and kill Mexicans. In Lesko’s state, GOP officials have used the term in asking the state’s governor to invoke war powers against asylum-seekers. Meanwhile, Lesko and Cotton opposed a bipartisan probe of the Jan. 6 insurrection, while Blackburn didn’t vote at all. Let’s also remember how McCarthy tried to sabotage the whole thing. But they continue to push the lie that we should be afraid of asylum-seekers.
RELATED STORIES: Border state advocates say they’re ready to welcome asylum-seekers following Title 42 announcement
GOP officials use white supremacist rhetoric in pushing Arizona governor to attack asylum-seekers
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Video shows police detaining 8-year-old boy over a bag of chips
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Anyone who picks up a cell phone or other recording device and proceeds to capture just how police are using their authority against citizens deserves to be applauded in my book. The same is true for Kenneth Jackson, who KKTV identified as the man who captured Syracuse police officers apprehending an 8-year-old boy on Sunday over the alleged theft of a bag of chips, and then advocated for the child.
The boy sobbed as an officer grabbed him and escorted him to a police vehicle. “He look like a baby to me,” Jackson can be heard telling an officer while asking what he was doing. The officer claimed the child was stealing stuff and proceeded to ask Jackson a hypothetical question about if the child was stealing from his home.
“Nah man, what he steal? A bag of chips? So y’all treat him like a whole cold-blooded f–king killer,” Jackson asked.
RELATED STORY: ‘Everybody sweeps you under the rug, and they move on. We can’t’: Life after 6-year-old is arrested
The officer told Jackson to keep walking, and that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “I know what I just came up and seen,” Jackson said.
When the officer asked him what he saw, he responded:
“I seen y’all snatching him off the bike like he a f–king grown-a– man, and he saying it wasn’t him.”
Warning: This video contains profanity and disturbing footage of a child being detained, which may be triggering for viewers.
Jackson was repeating the words another child on the scene screamed at officers. He went on to offer to pay for the chips the boy was accused of stealing. “Leave him alone. He a kid,” Jackson said.
His video exploded on social media and led the police department to conduct an internal review, KKTV reported. The footage had been viewed more than 5.3 million times on Twitter alone by Wednesday afternoon. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump tweeted about “how traumatizing” the detainment must have been.
“Syracuse (NY) police officers detained an 8-YEAR-OLD for allegedly stealing a bag of Doritos,” Crump said in the tweet. “Rather than talking to him or handling this incident in a different way, officers chose to escalate this incident and detain an obviously terrified young boy!”
The Syracuse Police Department said in a statement released on Twitter Tuesday that it is aware of the video and is reviewing footage from officers’ body cameras. “There is some misinformation involving this case,” the department said. “The juvenile suspected of larceny was not placed in handcuffs. He was placed in the rear of a patrol unit where he was directly brought home. Officers met with the child’s father and no charges were filed.”
Anthony Weah, the boy’s father, told The Post-Standard he was running errands when police called him to report officers were at his home with his three sons, who were accused of stealing chips. Weah said when he returned home, the officers were friendly, didn’t press charges, and returned his son—even the one featured in the viral video—without a mark on him. Weah still said after seeing a video of the encounter that he wants to file a complaint.
“The policeman, they are not children,” he told The Post-Standard. “They are not boys; they’re men.”
Sen. Mike Lee is betraying his country, still hiding what he knows about a violent coup
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There’s a pretty straightforward way to determine which Republican lawmakers were themselves conned by the “election fraud” hoaxes that led directly to an attempted coup, and which were co-conspirators in those efforts. If you’re a Republican aware of information relevant to how Donald Trump and his allies attempted the nullification of Trump’s election loss but you refuse to talk about what you know, you’re a co-conspirator. The cover-up is equivalent to the crime. There’s not any room for ambiguity on this one; hiding evidence is an act to ally with the coup, and an act intended to pave the way for such a thing to happen again.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee communicated with the White House in the run-up to the coup, proposing that “alternative slates of delegates” be sent by the states that would claim to be the real electors, pushing the White House to use the crackpot hoax promoter Sidney Powell to help push the plot, and publicly pushing the notion that there was “fraud” in the United States presidential election despite knowing, we can be sure, that there was not a damn bit of evidence for such a democracy-shaking claim. And now he’s clamming up tight, refusing to answer questions about any of that, and that puts Sen. Mike Lee squarely in the camp of co-conspirator.
He could explain what he knows or he could boost the cover-up, and Mike Lee made his choice many months back.
The Salt Lake Tribune is entirely fed up with their sedition-backing senator at this point, and in a Tuesday editorial demanded Lee “start fessing up to all he knows about the plot to set aside the results of an honest and fair election to keep Donald Trump in power.” He needs to explain his knowledge of those events to “his constituents,” to “the House committee” investigating the coup, and to “history,” says the Tribune.
If the editorial is blistering it is likely because it still seems unimaginable to most Americans that top Republican Party hacks would both support an attempt to nullify a United States election and, after the coup failed, devote themselves to hiding whatever evidence they could hide. But here we are, and Mike Lee is a key witness to an attempted coup that relied on promoting an utterly fraudulent hoax calling the election into question so that Republican lawmakers could simply toss aside whatever state electors needed to be tossed aside in order to declare that Donald Trump “won” regardless of the vote totals.
He is not alone. The Republican lawmakers who have taken direct steps to block America from knowing how the coup attempt was planned and executed include approximately All Of Them, which is how we know we are in a true fascist moment and not just cleaning up the aftermath of one particularly corrupt and hoax-promoting jackass. The party’s attacks on the few Republicans in Congress and in the states who are supporting efforts to expose the details speak for themselves.
And, of course, all of this would become moot if the Republican base, the Republican voters who put Sen. Mike Lee and the others in power and could just as easily throw him back out, thought an attempt to end democracy itself was a scandal that they could not themselves abide. On the contrary, most Republican voters adhere to the Fox News belief that Republican power should take what Republican power can, and if the majority of voters vote against Republican policies then it is the voting that needs to stop, not the policies.
That is why we need to keep our contempt for seditionists front and center, and why it is important to call seditionists like Sen. Mike Lee out for what they are. It would be lovely if so-called political journalism could stomach taking a stand on something as profound as should propaganda be used to erase our democracy, and perhaps they can be eventually humiliated into it, but “political” journalism is where reporters and pundits land when their most central journalistic belief is that they themselves should be on television; crime reporting is needed here, not access-based fluffery. An attempt was made to block the constitutional transfer of power. It began with propaganda, was built into a “march” aimed directly at obstructing the lawful counting of electors, and ended with violence targeting the Congress itself. Mike Lee can f–k himself if he thinks he can stand silently to see how it all shakes out and pretend, even for a moment, at being a patriot.
He is looking to survive after helping to plot a coup, to be sure. But he’s not sorry he participated in it. He could make the case that he was conned by Republican hoax-promoters but could no longer abide those acts when it became clear the hoaxers were lying about their claims, but he’s not saying that either—because admitting the hoax would, of course, enrage all the other Republicans who participated in it. So he clams up, he runs from reporters, and he ignores all those who ask him to explain just what he knows about an attempted erasure of our democracy.
He has no claim to innocence on this one. Mike Lee was a co-conspirator to a coup, and his loyalty to that coup continues.
RELATED STORIES:
Texts show they were all for Trump overturning the election—until a lack of evidence got in the way
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Florida man pleads guilty to sending death threats to Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar
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A Florida man pleaded guilty Tuesday to threatening Rep. Ilhan Omar, more than two years after sending Omar an email threatening to kill her in 2019. Identified as David Hannon, the 67-year-old man pleaded guilty in Tampa federal court to one count of threatening a federal official, the Associated Press reported. According to court records, the charge carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
The threat came in an email with the subject line: “(You’re) dead, you radical Muslim.” Omar, one of only a few Muslim members of Congress, was asked if she was prepared “to die for Islam.” Hannon also referred to her and other congresswomen of color as “radical rats.” But that’s not all, according to a statement released by the Department of Justice: The email even stated Hannon’s intention to shoot Omar in the head.
According to NBC News, the email was sent after Omar and three other Congress members, all women of color known as “the Squad,” held a televised press conference criticizing then-President Donald Trump in connection to racist tweets he posted about their nationalities.
Hannon, upset that Omar criticized Trump for telling her and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib to”go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” tried to take matters into his own hands by sending a threatening email.
“All four of you will die and the American people will cheer! Patriots Against Islam!” his email read.
In a news conference Tuesday, the Justice Department called Hannon’s threat “hate-motivated.”
“No one should fear violence because of who they are or what they believe,” U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Roger Handberg said in a statement. “Unlawful threats against our elected officials are an assault against our democracy, and we will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to seek justice in these cases.”
Born in Somalia, Omar came to the U.S. with her family in the 1990s. Since being elected as one of the first two Muslim women in Congress in 2018, she has consistently faced hate.
Last year during a press conference, Omar read some of the “hundreds” of threats she has received as a result of comments made not only by Trump but by her Republican colleagues in office. As reported by Daily Kos, Omar even held up her phone and played a graphic voicemail in which a person issued a death threat.
The Squad and other Democratic members of Congress are demanding more efforts be taken to protect minority officials who have constantly become the targets of right-wing media and extremists.
A sentencing hearing for Hannon has not been scheduled yet. Of course, Hannon’s attorney, Michael Perry, defended his client and told the Star Tribune that his client “has cooperated with the government. He’s never done anything like that before. He’s a good guy, other than one small infraction.”
No alleged sexual assaulter is too gross for Donald Trump to campaign with
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Eight women. Eight women have accused Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster of sexually assaulting them, according to a story last week by the Nebraska Examiner‘s Aaron Sanderford. One of them is a sitting Republican state senator.
Naturally, Donald Trump jumped at the chance to publicly campaign with the serially accused assaulter at a rally later this month after Donald Trump Jr. campaigned for him last week. Trump, who had already endorsed Herbster last fall, decided to double down.
“BREAKING NEWS: DONALD J. TRUMP WILL BE COMING TO NEBRASKA ON APRIL 29TH!” Herbster tweeted Tuesday, including the screenshot of an April 19 press release from Trump’s Save America PAC.
The announcement came less than a week after the Examiner broke the story detailing the eight accounts of Herbster inappropriately touching and groping women without their consent. Seven of the accounts were anonymous, but Republican State Sen. Julie Slama affirmed on the record that she too had been the unsuspecting target of Herbster’s wandering hands. Another witness saw Herbster reach up Slama’s skirt at a Douglas County Republican Party event in 2019, and tipped off the Examiner about the incident.
Trump’s response to the revelations was clearly, that’s my guy. Perhaps it brings Trump back to his “grab ‘em by the pussy” heyday, because Herbster is definitely a grabber. According the Examiner report, “Each woman said she was grabbed, not inadvertently grazed, by Herbster.” One woman said Herbster had “cornered her in a private setting and forcibly kissed her.”
Herbster is in a virtual three-way tie with two other Republicans to win the primary, according to recent polling. Choo, choo—cue the Trump Train!
The timing couldn’t be more awkward unless your last name is Trump—then it’s perfect. But sitting GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts has backed Slama’s account and called on Herbster to apologize to the women, “seek help,” and end his gubernatorial bid, according to The Washington Post.
Herbster, in true Trump form, has suggested the entire revelation is the result of an elaborate conspiracy to smear him.
Ricketts, who is backing one of Herbster’s rivals, disagreed. “I would say just read the article, because that article is probably one of the most well-researched, corroborated articles I’ve ever seen on this topic,” he offered.
However, when Rickets was asked whether he would give Trump the same advice, he declined, suggesting that Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comments were a “very different thing.” As if well over a dozen women haven’t come forward to say Trump either sexually harassed or assaulted them.