2020 Election: Predictions, Results and Reactions

[N.E. Brigand]

Tony Ornato testified yesterday to the January 6th Committee for more than five hours. There was reporting last summer, supposedly from Secret Service sources, that Ornato, if recalled for further testimony (he had already testified twice to the Committee by that point and said nothing at all on this subject), would contradict the testimony of White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. As you'll recall, Hutchinson testified that Ornato told her on January 6, 2021 that President Trump, in an effort to get the Secret Service to drive him to the Capitol, had lunged for the steering wheel of the car that was taking him back to the White House.

According to the new reporting, Ornato now testified that he does not recall his conversation with Hutchinson.

The new reporting does not say what Ornato testified about the incident in the presidential limousine, and we don't know if what he described to Hutchinson that day was accurate. But obviously she was telling the truth about that conversation, and those leaks last summer were lies meant to protect Donald Trump.

My guess is that Ornato managed to protect himself. And hey, if I'm wrong and it turns out Hutchinson was lying and is charged with perjury, I'll acknowledge that!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

Here is a good pre-verdict analysis by Roger Parloff at Lawfare on Monday of the challenge the prosecutors faced in the Oath Keepers trial. Parloff thought that a complicated split verdict was likely. He was right about that. The verdict form shows that the jurors found that Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs conspired to "oppose by force the authority" of the U.S. government but not "to use force to prevent, hinder, or delay" any specific law. Although both men also were convicted (along with the other three defendants) of actually obstructing Congress, the jury apparently didn't believe that they set out specifically to do that, and in convicting Rhodes and Kelly of seditious conspiracy, the jury may have been more swayed by their actions after January 6th.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

After, and before.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Frelga]

Seems like it's the punishment for the people who will try to register with them, not those two individuals.

[Sunsilver]

Well, Wohl has expressed his regret and shame for what he did. He MAY mean it and not just be trying to score points with the judge. Or maybe I'm just totally naïve...

[N.E. Brigand]

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic with some interesting thoughts about the Oath Keepers:

I am struck not by the grandiosity of the militias, but by their smallness. Stewart Rhodes is a disbarred lawyer who managed to shoot himself in the eye. Kelly Meggs, the leader of the state Oath Keeper chapter who was also found guilty of seditious conspiracy, was a Florida car dealer, a detail so perfectly clichéd that Hollywood would never have dared script it. (And despite being a man of a certain generous girth myself, I will note that the cosplaying amateurs who seemed to adore these organizations were not exactly trim and fit soldiers, which is why they were often dubbed the “Gravy Seals” and “Meal Team Six” by internet wags.) And yet, for these small, unhappy men, we had to suffer the first failed peaceful transfer of power in American history? ...

They arrogated to themselves the duty to interpret the Constitution in any way that would dissolve their sense of emptiness, douse their own insecurities, and make their lives more interesting.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While it is clear to me how the sanctions are being allocated, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit is Alan Dershowitz, who has really fallen far.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While the big news yesterday was the 11th Circuit ruling smacking down Judge Cannon, this might end up being a bigger deal.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Wow, the very next day.


I think Philbin was spotted there today too.

[N.E. Brigand]

Wow, the very next day.


I think Philbin was spotted there today too.

Kyle Cheney of Politico says it appears that two different grand juries heard testimony today, one from Philbin and one from Cipollone.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Apparently, three new grand juries were opened the day that Smith was appointed as Special Council, presumably two for the 1/6 investigation (for some unknown reason) and one for the document investigation. It's not entirely clear which ones Philbin and Cipollone were testifying before; they both potentially have information relevant to both investigations.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

As noted in this forum's thread about Elon Musk's purchase six weeks ago of Twitter, yesterday the contrarian independent journalist Matt Taibbi, having per his own admission agreed to certain undisclosed conditions with Musk, shared the contents of emails and other communication to, from, and between Twitter personnel from two years ago concerning "Hunter Biden's laptop."

As you may recall, in October 2020, the New York Post published claims that Hunter Biden brought a laptop computer to a repair shop in 2019 and (possibly in a drugged out haze) forgot about it, and that the store's owner upon examination discovered a lot of personally and professionally embarrassing material on the laptop, allegedly including details implicating Hunter's father, presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden, in corruption scandals linked to Ukraine and/or China. The provenance of the material from the laptop seemed so sketchy -- the shop owner is legally blind and thus couldn't identify the man who dropped off the computer; the original laptop was by then in the hands of the FBI and no one knew whether the copies of its hard drive then circulating had been tampered with; and Rudy Giuliani, by then known to be working with Russian-linked misinformation agents from Ukraine, had been pushing the material to media outlets for months -- that even Fox News had been unwilling to publish it, although once the Post wrote an article about it, they were happy to do stories about the story.

In general, the media smelled a rat, a group of former U.S. intelligence officials wrote an open letter indicating that the timing and nature of the material had all the earmarks of a Russian propaganda campaign, and everyone remembered what Russia had done to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, so this time, journalists for the most part refused to take the bait. U.S. social media companies were also mindful of how a foreign power had misused their platforms four years earlier, and Twitter executives took the very cautious but also extraordinary step, as part of their commitment to fighting election misinformation, of blocking posts that pushed the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Subsequent media investigations of what are said to be copies of the laptop's hard drive have found that some or much of its contents do appear to be legitimate, with different independent researchers hired by different outlets coming to different conclusions about whether there were signs of tampering. But even if one were to set aside the legitimate basic questions that remain -- e.g., did Hunter Biden actually take it to the store, or was it stolen by someone else, as happened with Ashley Biden's diary, and delivered to someone who would be unable to recognize the provider? -- and treat all of the laptop's contents as genuine, the only potentially serious allegations pertain to possible influence peddling by Hunter Biden that don't appear to implicate his father. An investigation into Hunter Biden was opened in Delaware by the U.S. Attorney for that state during Donald Trump's presidency, and as president, Joe Biden, in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety, left that U.S. Attorney in place (along with Special Counsel John Durham, who was investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, with almost nothing to show for it), even though presidents customarily replace all of their predecessor's U.S. Attorneys. It's been reported for months that charges against Hunter Biden may be forthcoming. But in right-wing circles, there seems to be a recognition that this is at most a Roger Clinton-type story, and the laptop-derived material that circulates most among Republicans is video of Hunter in various states of debauch, using hard drugs, naked, and cavorting with alleged prostitutes.

Still, it has become an article of faith on the right that if Twitter and the mainstream media have treated the laptop like any other story and not "censored" it, then Donald Trump would have won the election. Elon Musk appears to believe at least that Twitter's executives, in the course of trying to prevent election interference, themselves were interfering in the election, and so he provided these internal emails to Matt Taibbi to examine and share. Taibbi did so in a Twitter thread last night -- after a last-minute delay of more than an hour for "fact-checking," and the results were underwhelming. Both the Biden campaign and the Trump administration at various points in 2020 did contact Twitter asking for certain tweets to be removed, as did many others on both sides. Taibbi is at pains to note that because Twitter's staff were mostly liberal, they thus had more such requests from contacts on the left, but nothing he posted indicates anything untoward, and if anything, the most troubling point would be those requests from the Trump White House: that comes closer to a First Amendment violation than any inquiry from the Biden campaign, which was a private firm. But we don't know the specifics of what the Trump administration asked, and I do think there could be legitimate reasons for the government to ask a media company or social media company not to publish certain content.

Now, Musk and his supporters have suggested that -- apart from blocking/deleting spam, pornography, or tweets that violate the law -- Twitter should not moderate content at all. But in light of the fact that Musk himself just two days ago suspended the account of Kanye West for sharing antisemitic material -- just a month after Musk had welcomed West back to the platform following the rapper's previous suspension for doing the same thing-- I think those arguments fall flat: what West shared was not illegal or porn or spam; it was just abhorrent. Furthermore, as noted in the discussion of Twitter here, the tweets that the Biden campaign asked Twitter to remove appear to have been naked images of Hunter Biden that did violate Twitter's policies (and possibly laws concerning the dissemination of '"revenge porn").

Beyond all that, what the newly published emails reveal -- and it should be noted that Taibbi, doing a poor job of editing his source materials, appears to have violated Twitter's current policy about not publicly sharing others' email addresses without their consent -- is Twitter employees thoughtfully struggling with the ramifications of their anti-disinformation policies when confronted with material that was potentially newsworthy but also potentially propaganda. They may have made the wrong decisions, but there's nothing to indicate any sort of deliberate effort to help Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump, responding on his own social media platform this morning to yesterday's news, claims that it shows "massive and widespread fraud and deception" and calls for either a "new election" or a declaration that he was in fact the winner in 2020. He adds that the U.S. founding fathers would agree with him that in light of these circumstances, there should be a "termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

My takeaway: Donald Trump wants to overturn the Second Amendment!

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Edited to add this funny tweet:

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump just shared a further message reading just: "Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented cure!"

It is possible, as Marcy Wheeler suggested earlier today, that what's really driving Trump's heated calls today to throw out the U.S. Constitution is not last night's "news" about Twitter and Hunter Biden but the implications of former White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Pat Philbin having testified yesterday, presumably about what Trump said and did before, during, and after the events of January 6th.

Edit: That said, some on the right are certainly taking the story about Twitter as their cue to call for violence. A former Minnesota political candidate who unsuccessfully vied to be the Republican nominee challenging Rep. Ilhan Omar this year responded on Twitter to Taibbi's publication by saying it showed that Democrats had to be defeated by "bullets" rather than "ballots". After she was criticized for that comment, the Republican former candidate, Shukri Abdirahman, said "It's no secret that our Founders would've taken up arms and put to use the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment to take out this tyrannical government."

(People who claim that the 2nd Amendment was intended to allow the populace to overthrow the U.S. government if necessary never reckon with the fact that President George Washington led an army to western Massachusetts to put down a rebellion of farmers who refused to pay their taxes.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Even some Republicans are condemning Trump for his call to suspend the constitution. But I thought the best comments came from the man who in January 2025 will become the first-ever African-American Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (you heard here first!), Hakeem Jeffries.

Trump rebuked for call to suspend Constitution over election

[RoseMorninStar]

Every MAGA/Trump endorsed representative should be asked to respond to Trump's comment. No wishy-washy responses allowed. Either they stand with our constitution or they don't. Members are asked to take an oath, ' to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic" and they should mean it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

As Heather Cox Richardson says about this, Wow!


and

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And this: