Quote:GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde (Ga.) defended his description of rioters walking through the Capitol on Jan. 6 appearing to look like a “normal tourist visit” during a committee meeting on Tuesday. The heated exchange occurred hours after four police officers appeared before the select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, offering harrowing testimony that recounted scenes of chaos, violence and destruction from the insurrection.

• Tourist visit, that's clearly not how is colleague Mel Brooks experienced it:
  

Quote:Then, to prove his point about preparation, he revealed a new detail to me: that because of a tip he’d received about potential violence, he’d been wearing body armor at the very same Ellipse speech in which he encouraged rally attendees to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” “I was warned on Monday that there might be risks associated with the next few days,” he said. “And as a consequence of those warnings, I did not go to my condo. Instead, I slept on the floor of my office. And when I gave my speech at the Ellipse, I was wearing body armor. “That’s why I was wearing that nice little windbreaker,” he told me with a grin. “To cover up the body armor.” He didn’t say who warned him, or what the “risk” was that he’d been warned about.

Quote:Former President Donald Trump is said to have called former U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen nearly every day as he fought to overturn the presidential election at the end of 2020. According to The Washington Post, Trump made the repeated calls in an effort to raise awareness about his so-called claims of widespread voter fraud. Despite Trump's countless calls, Rosen testified back in May that he did not deliver on many of the requests Trump supporters demanded.

"During my tenure, no special prosecutors were appointed, whether for election fraud or otherwise; no public statements were made questioning the election; no letters were sent to State officials seeking to overturn the election results; [and] no DOJ court actions or filings were submitted seeking to overturn election results," Rosen testified.

Trump reportedly placed the calls from the end of 2020 through early 2021 at a time when the former president and his supporters were pressuring Republican officials to overturn the election. At the time, Trump's legal team had filed lawsuits in several states as they promoted misinformation campaigns. In addition to the legal obstacles, they attempted to create, they also made the presidential transition far more difficult for President Joe Biden's incoming administration..

Quote:Then-President Donald Trump pressured top Justice Department officials to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, the House Oversight and Reform Committee said Friday. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump said during a Dec. 27 call with then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other DOJ officials. Trump also suggested that he was considering replacing the agency’s leadership, according to the handwritten notes taken by Richard Donoghue, then-acting deputy attorney general, who was on the call.

Quote:Trump was quick to allege during that December 27 phone conversation that results from the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, constituted “corrupted elections.” “We are doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Donoghue said, stating that the DOJ had carried out “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” and found that the election was sound. Trump retaliated by asking about ballot fraud in Fulton County and other areas, and when reassured that there was no proof of illicit activity, he asked Donoghue to verify signatures on ballots in Fulton County in person. Trump also claimed that the error rate of ballot counting was 68 percent in the state of Michigan while the department found that it was only 0.0063 percent.

“We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal corrupt election,” Trump said, according to Donoghue’s transcription. Rosen eventually stepped in to explain the reality of the situation as well as the DOJ’s limitations, asking Trump to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way.” But this was not what Trump wanted to hear. “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in,” said Trump, mentioning Republican then-chief of the Justice Department’s civil division. “People want me to replace DOJ leadership,” a less-than-subtle threat to Donoghue’s and Rosen’s jobs in favor of Clark who had also pushed Justice Department officials to intervene in election results. “You should have the leadership you want,” Donoghue responded. Although it was common knowledge that Trump was calling the election results fraudulent everywhere from press conferences to Twitter, Donoghue’s notes documenting the phone call are important because of the severity of Trump’s requests.

• More on the phone call between Trump and DoJ Rosen and Donoghue, threatening their jobs if they didn't comply calling the elections fraudulent on no evidence. 
  

Quote:About 47 percent of Republicans believe that a time will come when “patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands,” according to a George Washington University poll on Americans’ faith in election systems and democratic values.  The GW Politics Poll, conducted among more than 1,700 registered voters from June 4 to June 23 and released this week, found that support for principles like free and fair elections, free speech and peaceful protest were nearly unanimous among Democratic and Republican voters. Approximately 55 percent of GOP respondents, however, said they support the potential use of force to preserve the “traditional American way of life,” compared to just 15 percent of Democrats.  Only 9 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands." Additionally, Republicans were significantly less likely to have a strong amount of faith in local and state elections.

• There is an audience for the coup plotters..
  

Quote:The Republicans’ journey into a universe of alternate facts became virtually complete last week after House Republican leadership, days after the harrowing testimony of police officers deployed to tackle the rioters shocked Congress once more, spun a new lie about the deadly attack. No longer satisfied to simply pardon Trump for inciting his supporters to unlawfully stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, the No 3 House Republican, Elise Stefanik, blamed Pelosi – a target of the mob – for the violence on 6 January. “The American people deserve to know the truth: that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility, as speaker of the House, for the tragedy that occurred on January 6,” Stefanik said falsely from the steps of the Capitol. Pelosi is not responsible for security – a duty that lies with US Capitol police – but the baseless claim promulgated by Stefanik amounted to the party leadership’s latest disinformation campaign they hope will give them political cover as the 2022 midterm elections near...

Some congressional Republicans privately acknowledge the fallacious logic of blaming Pelosi for the Capitol attack, but not the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, her then opposite number in the Senate. But in a sign of the ambition and self-preservation guiding Republican revisionism over the Capitol attack, they also suggest that they are willing for McCarthy to indulge Trump’s claims should it help Republicans capture the House.

Quote:Late last month, 27 Republican members of the Georgia state Senate sent an ominous letter to the state elections board, touting a misleading claim about the 2020 election popularized by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A few days later, several Republican members of the state House sent a similar letter seeking a “performance review” of election officials in the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta.

In a post-Trump GOP, it might seem unremarkable that elected officials are spouting off about some lie or half-truth broadcast by conservative media. But these letters set in motion a chain of events that could end in mass disenfranchisement of voters in the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta for the 2022 statewide and midterm elections.
In March, Georgia Republicans passed SB 202, a sweeping new election law that erects obstacles between Georgia voters and their right to cast a ballot. While some are relatively minor or even popular, the most ominous provisions of this new law allow the state election board, which is dominated by Republicans, to seize control of county election boards. Those boards can disqualify voters, move polling precincts, and potentially even refuse to certify an election count..

• Slow-motion coup attempt already ongoing
  

Quote:Dubin, when asked by Bash what the most shocking part of Rosen’s testimony was, pointed to Trump’s direct involvement in the campaign to pressure officials to overturn the election results. “Just how directly personally involved the president was, the pressure he was putting on Jeffrey Rosen. It was real, very real, and it was very specific,” Durbin said. “The former president is not subtle when he wants something, and I think it's a good thing for America that we had a person like Rosen in that position who stood, withstood the pressure,” Durbin said. "To think that Bill Barr left, resigned after he had announced he didn't see irregularities in the election, and then his replacement was under extraordinary pressure from the president the United States, even to the point where they were talking about replacing him… that pressure was on,” Durbin said at a separate point in the interview. Durbin, when pressed by Bash, refused to offer additional details on the specific pressure Trump placed on Rosen. He did, however, reveal that Trump asked his then-acting attorney general “to do certain things related to states' election returns,” which he refused to do.

• The coup almost succeeded, bar from a few brave people that withstood the pressure
  
• Next time around, it will be far easier to replace these people, due to the flurry of new state legislations introduced.
  

Quote:Jeffrey Clark, originally an environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice, ended up at the center of former President Donald Trump's attempts to use the agency to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In a letter from December published by ABC this week, Clark had sought to use the power of the Justice Department to intervene in Georgia's election. His colleagues at the Justice Department, which had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, ultimately refused. Clark was nominated by Trump in 2017 to serve as the Assistant Attorney General of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. But in September 2020, Trump made Clark the Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department's civil division.

After Trump lost the election to President Joe Biden and proceeded to spread unsubstantiated claims about fraud, Clark emerged as an ally in that endeavor, even after his own agency broke from the president. Attorney General Bill Barr, previously a staunch defender of Trump, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud that would have impacted the results of the election. When Barr resigned in mid-December, Jeffrey Rosen took over as acting attorney general. But The New York Times reported that Trump and Clark were quietly working together to try and oust Rosen in order to replace him with Clark, charges Clark denied. The Times reported the plan was for Clark to pressure Georgia officials on the state's election results. The letter Clark wrote in December that was released this week appears to show him doing exactly that.

Quote:Clark also told colleagues he was in touch with sources who knew more, including someone Justice officials later determined was Rep. Scott Perry, a Trump ally from Pennsylvania who helped Clark get in touch with the former President. Justice Department rules limit contact between department officials and the White House, and Clark's contacts with Trump came as a shock to his superiors. Justice Department officials are also prohibited from discussing investigations with people outside of the department. Clark's December 28 email, obtained by the House Oversight Committee, was sent to Rosen and Donoghue and described how Clark wanted US intelligence information from the Director of National Intelligence so he could assess whether Chinese-made digital thermometers could connect with voting machines. "I would like to have your authorization to get a classified briefing tomorrow from ODNI led by DNI Radcliffe on foreign election interference issues," Clark began his email, "hackers have evidence (in the public domain) that a Dominion machine accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China. ODNI may have additional classified evidence."

• Digital thermometers, lol
  
• Clark in contact with Trump, against DoJ rules
  
• Clark's letter pressuring Georgia was ultimately refused by his boss Rosen
  

Quote:A former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Ga. is revealing the real reason why he abruptly quit amid the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Byung J. Pak on Wednesday, August 11, said he decided to turn in his resignation after learning of former President Donald Trump's intent to fire him, according to the New York Times. Pak reportedly became a target of Trump's ire after he refused to go along with the former president's claims of widespread voter fraud. At the time, Trump was obsessed with overturning the election results in several battleground states. His legal team's main defense was that the election was ripe with fraud. Those claims were made despite them having no substantial evidence of fraud. After hearing whispers about Trump's intent to fire him, Pak opted to take himself out of the equation before that came to fruition, the publication reports. The latest reports also include details about the timeline of events that led up to Pak's departure..

• Pressuring honest people out, next time around who will remain to resist?
  
• And new state laws make firing a lot easier in many states.
  
• Then there is the mob, threatening violence..