2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[Frelga]

As you said, V, Túrin is the starter. For myself, I vote new thread for future developments. I don't think any of us are going to forget what happened that day.

That's a weak preference and I'm happy with wherever the posts end up.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks, Frelga! I appreciate you weighing in. My OCD attempts to keep everything neat and tidy have largely gone by the wayside in these chaotic times. But its nice to be aspirational.

[Frelga]

I have longed since succumbed to entropy. These days, I value searchable over organized.

[Túrin Turambar]

I don't have a strong preference either way. We covered the storming of the Capitol in this thread so I can see how it makes sense to cover the resulting trial, but I can also see how it would make sense to end the election thread with the inauguration.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I think we should just continue to discuss it here. I can always separate it out later if it seems like the thing to do.

[N.E. Brigand]

While we're deliberating that subject, I'll note somethign about the election and not the insurrection: tonight's reporting from the New York Times that President Trump in late December and early January contemplated firing Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replacing him with a conspiracy-addled attorney named Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who was the acting head of the Dept. of Justice's Civil Division. Clark was proposing a scheme by which the Dept. of Justice would get Georgia to void their election results. This is apparently what Trump had in mind when he said in his infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger that if Raffensberger wouldn't toss out the results as Trump proposed, then Trump had another way to fix the situation, but he didn't "want to get into it" during the call. Rosen wouldn't go along with this scheme, which is why Clark suggested that Trump replace him -- and Clark even told Rosen that Trump was going to remove him. But Clark and Rosen met with Trump together, each explaining their positions, and Rosen won out by informing Trump that every other Dept. of Justice official would resign if Rosen was fired.

Marcy Wheeler repeatedly asked over the past two weeks why we hadn't heard from Jeffrey Rosen or Chris Wray in public about the insurrection. As she notes, this situation may explain Rosen's silence, and it makes you wonder what other nonsense Trump was trying to pull on Wray.

Some are describing this as a narrowly-averted Saturday Night Massacre. Arguably we already had one of those in the Trump administration, when four prosecutors withdrew from Roger Stone's case in response to Barr's people ordering that they recommend a lighter sentence for him. But I also think it shows again that Gerald Ford should never have pardoned Richard Nixon. A lack of accountability there led to the pardons for Iran-Contra, and to most Bush Jr. officials being unpunished, and here we are.

And as George Conway said a few days ago in the Washington Post, Trump's criminality is so enormous and wide-reaching that there ought to be multiple Special Counsels investigating it. How many times should you impeach an ex-president?

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Speaking of the New York Times, one of their prominent conservative columnists, Ross Doutat, wrote a piece in October titled "There Will Be No Trump Coup." Kudos to him for owning up to it two weeks ago: "All I will say for certain, cocking my own head back and forth, is that when I predicted three months ago that there would be no Trump coup, I should have showed more imagination."

[Inanna]

Not sure where to put this: Colbert covers Biden’s first day, and how QAnon et al are struggling now. And how they should become Tolkien nerds instead. Great segment.

https://youtu.be/iB7bwyVVVMs

[elengil]

Not sure where to put this: Colbert covers Biden’s first day, and how QAnon et al are struggling now. And how they should become Tolkien nerds instead. Great segment.

https://youtu.be/iB7bwyVVVMs

Does kinda make you wonder if he was among us in the old days. lol

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That was great. It was fun to be part of the 0.01% of his audience that understood everything that he said.

[N.E. Brigand]

Speaking of the New York Times, one of their prominent conservative columnists, Ross Doutat, wrote a piece in October titled "There Will Be No Trump Coup." Kudos to him for owning up to it two weeks ago: "All I will say for certain, cocking my own head back and forth, is that when I predicted three months ago that there would be no Trump coup, I should have showed more imagination."

We know of at least four ways that Donald Trump attempted to improperly or illegally interfere in the 2020 election:

1. He extorted the government of Ukraine by witholding needed aid in order to pressure that country to launch a sham investigation into his likely opponent.

2. He installed a Postal Service director who seems to have deliberately slowed down mail delivery in order to prevent Democratic votes from arriving in time to be counted.

3. He tried to get the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out that state's certified results, and when that didn't work, he tried to get the Dept. of Justice to force the state to do so.

4. He incited a terrorist attack on Congress and then apparently refused to send aid until it was clear the terrorists had failed in their attack.

Am I missing anything? I will note that these are bare bones summaries of acts that had multiple parts. For instance, the Ukraine scheme included the outster of the U.S. ambassador to that country, Marie Yovanovitch, and quite possibly the physical stalking of her as part of that scheme. I think the plotting around (what is alleged to be) Hunter Biden's laptop also had its origins in the Ukraine scheme.

And then consider that this election skullduggery is just one strand of Trump's criminal enterprise. He did all this in order to remain President, because (1) he was using the Presidency to commit other crimes to enrich himself and (2) he knew that once he was out of office, he would no longer be shielded by Dept. of Justice guidelines against indicting a President.

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Edited to add: That Vanity Fair article I linked to earlier today shed some light on another Trump plot to oust a top official and install a compliant replacement, but it was a a story we'd heard before--well, I was going to say we heard about it a couple weeks ago, but I see that it was just five days ago. Here's the relevant passage, in which the reporter, Adam Ciralsky, describes a conversation he had on January 18 with Kash Patel, who was appointed as Chief of Staff to Acting Defense Director Chris Miller in November:

I asked Patel about an Axios story that broke just before we sat down to talk. It asserted that CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign after learning that Trump planned to install Patel as her deputy. “I’m not going to comment on what the president wanted to do or didn’t want to do, but there’s no conversations of that now or this week or this year,” he replied. But he seemed to be playing coy. The CIA gambit took place last year. In fact, when I had spoken with Cohen about the matter, he had told me, “The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge…. Robert O’Brien, [Trump’s national security adviser], is the one who deep-sixed it.” When I pressed Patel further about these machinations, which had occurred in December, I saw him turn lawyerly: “That stuff is between me and the boss. That’s the only thing I don’t comment on. Ever. It’s executive privilege.”

So as 2020 drew to a close, Donald Trump planned to replace both the Acting Attorney General and the CIA Director. We know why he was plotting the former move. Why was he plotting the latter move?

[N.E. Brigand]

Can President Biden waive executive privilege claimed by ex-President Trump?

[Inanna]

That was great. It was fun to be part of the 0.01% of his audience that understood everything that he said.

Lol, yes!

When he said “and correcting mistakes in it” regarding the Tolkien dictionary, it made me think of you, V.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Can President Biden waive executive privilege claimed by ex-President Trump?

In what regard?

[N.E. Brigand]

Can President Biden waive executive privilege claimed by ex-President Trump?

In what regard?

For starters, I'm thinking of the impeachment trial coming up. Suppose Congressional Democrats want to show the pattern of behavior by Trump concerning election interference that gives context to his actions on January 6. (I think the Article of Impeachment specifically mentions his phone call to Raffesnberger.) So the House impeachment managers ask the Senate to subpoena some Trump officials who plotted with Trump to testify against him. (I'm not actually sure who issues the subpoenas if they're needed in an impeachment trial.) Trump tells the Senate that these conversations are protected by executive privilege. Now the Senate can go to the courts and very likely could win on various grounds, but it might take a year before the case works all the way up to the Supreme Court. (Which would suit Republicans just fine.) My question is: can't Biden just say "No, we're waiving executive privilege in this case"?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It's a good question. My very uncertain answer is probably yes. The purpose of executive privilege is to avoid the impairment of government functions. If the current president says that it doesn't impair government functions, that should be good enough.

However, I would expect that Trump era cronies would still claim executive privilege and refuse to testify or give documents absent a court order (which as you say would take a year or more). I don't think the Biden administration would have any mechanism to force them to do so without going through the court process.

[N.E. Brigand]

Bloomberg reports that the Trump campaign paid about $2.7 million to the groups and individuals who organized the January 6 rally (although it's not clear how much of those payments were specifically for that rally). That's the pre-riot event, mind you (there's nothing to indicate that the Trump campaign funded the attack itself), but it does appear to show how important Trump thought that day's gathering was.

[River]

It's a good question. My very uncertain answer is probably yes. The purpose of executive privilege is to avoid the impairment of government functions. If the current president says that it doesn't impair government functions, that should be good enough.

However, I would expect that Trump era cronies would still claim executive privilege and refuse to testify or give documents absent a court order (which as you say would take a year or more). I don't think the Biden administration would have any mechanism to force them to do so without going through the court process.

Wouldn't executive privilege only apply if they were acting in their capacities as federal employees? And, if so, wouldn't that make any relevant documents federal property?

Just asking. I really have no idea how it works in the White House. In the corporate world I work in, anything I create in my capacity as a company employee is basically company property. Because I'm in R&D, some of it is even considered trade secrets. This has some pretty intense implications if I ever try to run off and start a business based on something I came up with at work. This is also why my uber-boss sometimes drove himself batty trying to answer questions relevant to his current job without betraying trade secrets from his previous job.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Presumably anything an official would be called to testify about would involve something related to his or her official duties. Such as, for instance, Trump trying to get Jeffrey Rosen to overturn the election, and then planning to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, who was reportedly willing to take that action. If either of them were called to testify, they would be testifying about so-called official duties.

[N.E. Brigand]

The New York Times has published the most detailed reporting yet on the fatal shooting of insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol Police lieutentant.

[RoseMorninStar]

The New York Times has published the most detailed reporting yet on the fatal shooting of insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol Police lieutentant.

I read that article. One paragraph stood out,

“She didn’t have any weapons on her, I don’t know why she had to die in the People’s House,” he said, adding, “She was voicing her opinion and she got killed for it.”

I realize this was written by a (likely) distraught husband but she was doing a bit more than 'voicing her opinion'. Given the mob was screaming and breaking doors and busting windows, how was a security officer to know she didn't have a weapon? They didn't look like they only wanted to have a reasonable chat with their local representative.