Fascism

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The U.S. Army is ready to move Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his family to a secure location on a military base if they are found to be in danger due to his testimony in the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. Vindman reportedly requested a security assessment to analyze his and his family’s physical and online security, which was completed in recent weeks, according to the Journal.  The Journal reported that Army security officials have been tracking Vindman and his family at all times to ensure there are not imminent threats against them. “The Army will make sure he’s safe, and the Army is actively supporting any safety needs as deemed necessary,” an official told the Journal.

US Army prepared to move Vindman to secure location: report | TheHill

• Apart from creating an alternate reality and designating the press as the enemy of the people, the witness intimidation, implicit threats to witnesses, threats of civil war, outing of whistleblowers, things are descending into outright fascism
  

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Trump's lawless thuggery is corrupting justice in America
Robert Reich from The Guardian

Intimidating whistleblowers, politicizing law enforcement, protecting rogue military officers and criminal sheriffs – the pattern is depressingly clear
Sun 5 Jan 2020 06.00 GMTLast modified on Sun 5 Jan 2020 12.00 GMT

As the Senate moves to an impeachment trial and America slouches into this election year, the rule of law is center stage.

Yet Donald Trump is substituting lawless thuggery for impartial justice.

The biggest immediate news is the president’s killing of Qassem Suleimani. The act brings America to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval, in direct violation of Congress’s war-making authority under the constitution.

But other presidents have disregarded Congress’s war-making power, too. What makes Trump unique is the overall pattern. Almost wherever you look, he has shown utter disdain for law. Consider Trump’s outing of the person who blew the whistle on his phone call to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – tweeting just after Christmas a link to a Washington Examiner article headlined with the presumed whistleblower’s name, then retweeting a supporter who named the presumed whistleblower.

Even before outing the whistleblower, Trump had whipped his followers into a lather by calling the whistleblower a “spy”, guilty of “treason”.

The outing not only imperils the whistleblower’s safety. It violates the purpose of the Whistleblower Act, which is to protect people who alert authorities that government officials are violating the law.

It’s on this deeper level that Trump’s lawlessness is most corrosive. From now on, anyone aware of illegality on the part of a government official, including a president, will think twice before sounding the alarm.

Trump’s intrusion into the navy’s prosecution of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher on war crimes has the same corrosive effect.

Trump not only stopped the navy from possibly giving Gallagher a less-than-honorable discharge. Trump also upended the military code of justice, designed for the military to handle legal violations in its ranks, including war crimes.

Gallagher’s Navy Seal accusers were themselves whistleblowers who broke the Seal’s code of silence in order to stop a rogue chief. Now they face recrimination from within the ranks. From now on, any soldier who witnesses a superior officer committing possible war crimes will be more reluctant to report them.

Similarly, Trump’s ongoing intrusions into the justice department (DoJ) and the FBI aren’t just efforts to derail investigations of his wrongdoing. They’re attacks on the system of impartial justice itself.

Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, is supposed to be responsible to the American people. Instead he’s become Trump’s advocate. Barr even advised the White House not to turn over the whistleblower complaint to Congress.

After misleading the public on the contents of Robert Mueller’s report, Barr bowed to Trump’s demand that the department look into the origin of the FBI investigation that had led to the Mueller report.

And now, after the DoJ’s own inspector general has found that the FBI had plenty of evidence to start its Russia inquiry – more than 100 contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian agents during the 2016 campaign – Barr refuses to be bound by the findings, and has appointed a prosecutor to launch yet another inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.

The deeper systemic corrosion: from now on, attorneys general won’t be presumed to be administering impartial justice, and the findings of special counsels and inspectors general will have less finality and legitimacy.

Barr is part of Trump’s private goon squad, along with Rudy Giuliani, chief enabler Mick Mulvaney and Trump’s resident white supremacist, Stephen Miller.

Giuliani is using the authority of the presidency to mount a rogue foreign policy designed to keep Trump in power. It’s double lawlessness: Giuliani is bending the law and he’s accountable to no one.

Miller, meanwhile, is waging Trump’s ongoing war against people legally seeking asylum in the United States – featuring family separations, caged children and inhumane detention.

Miller even got Trump to pardon Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who was ordered by a federal judge to stop detaining people solely on suspicion of their immigration status. Arpaio disregarded the order, which is why he was convicted of criminal contempt of court.

From now on, rogue sheriffs will be less constrained.

You see the pattern: whistleblowers intimidated, the justice department politicized, findings of special counsels and inspectors general distorted or ignored, foreign policy made by a private citizen unaccountable to anybody, rogue military officers and rogue sheriffs pardoned.

Each instance is disturbing on its own. Viewed as a whole, Trump’s lawlessness is systematically corrupting justice in the US.

Impartial justice is the keystone of a democracy. Even if the Senate fails to remove Trump for impeachable offenses, American voters must do so next November.

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In a Sunday morning tweet, President Donald Trump said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff would have to pay a “price” for his leading role in the impeachment trial. “Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” the president wrote. “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

And Trump has sent a number of threatening tweets before, accusing Schiff of treason, attacking the whistleblower as a “disgrace to our country,” and calling for that person’s identity to be revealed (anonymity is granted by law to government whistleblowers). He has also attacked those who gave information to the whistleblower, referring to them as “spies,” and seemed to suggest the US should once again begin to execute spies, or those branded as such...

But as State of the Union host Jake Tapper noted in response, “People who are supporters of the president have heard his rhetoric and then actually tried to bomb and kill politicians and the media.” And this is true, as Vox’s Sean Collins noted after Trump began to threaten the whistleblower with investigations:

Democrat and frequent Trump foil Rep. Ilhan Omar has spoken of a number of deaths threats she has received, for instance, and Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison for mailing pipe bombs to some of Trump’s critics.

Trump says Schiff has “not yet paid the price” for his impeachment role - Vox

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Online threats which intimidate people into standing down as MPs are “the path to authoritarianism [and] fascism”, Hillary Clinton has said. Speaking to an audience in London, Clinton said she took “very seriously” the fact that significant numbers of female MPs had opted not to run again for parliament in the coming election, in many cases citing online intimidation and threats against their safety.

Hillary Clinton warns of path to 'fascism' after MPs stand down | US news | The Guardian

• While this is about the UK, mob threats are also happening in the US and some of these threats are instigated at the top.
  

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The Trump White House is out with a first official response to the Senate’s refusal to remove Donald Trump from office. It is mostly the usual claims of “witch hunt” and “full validation” and “exoneration” and a burping out of Trump’s supposed “victories” and accomplishments. It refers to Sen. Mitt Romney only as “one failed Republican presidential candidate.” But this section is the most noteworthy: Rep. Adam Schiff lied to Congress and the American people with a totally made up statement about the president’s phone call. Will there be no retribution? Is that a threat? How could it not be considered one?

White House responds to acquittal by floating vengeance threat at Adam Schiff – Alternet.org

The White House is weighing a plan to dismiss Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, Bloomberg News reported Thursday night. Vindman catapulted into the national spotlight last year when he offered damning, firsthand testimony of President Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into delivering politically motivated investigations against his rivals. Sources told Bloomberg that some NSC officials might be removed because they’re seen as having been disloyal to the president.

Trump is reportedly considering dismissing impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as part of a broad effort to clean house after being acquitted

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon announced Thursday that the U.S. Treasury Department has turned over materials to Senate Republicans to aid in their efforts to investigate Hunter Biden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. This assistance in the investigation contrasts with the administration’s efforts to hinder investigations launched by the Democratic committee chairs in the House of Representatives.

Trump’s Treasury Department is now helping a Hunter Biden probe — while furiously protecting the president – Alternet.org

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Donald Trump was in particularly odious form over the weekend. His primary non-appearance appearance was on Saturday night, when he spoke at a secret no-phones, no-reporters fundraising event for the Florida Republican Party. But he didn’t just speak: The Miami Herald reports that Trump also took the opportunity to fete two of the military war criminals he recently pardoned, bringing the two out onstage with him.

Trump brings pardoned US war criminals onstage at Florida Republican fundraiser – Alternet.org

• War criminals as hero's, used in a fund raiser..
  

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Yet another controversy involving President Donald Trump and his allies came about this week when Facebook removed some campaign ads that used an infamous symbol from the 1930s: a red inverted triangle, which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime used to identify political prisoners ranging from communists and liberals to members of opposition parties. Trump’s campaign has, in essence, responded that it didn’t use that symbol to promote Nazi ideology, but to smear Antifa. Nonetheless, Trump’s critics have asserted that using that symbol in the first place was clueless and ignorant. And according to Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, a leaked internal document from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security makes Trump and his allies look even worse in this controversy.

“After Facebook removed the ads amid an outcry,” Sargent explains, “the Trump campaign continued to defend use of the image — which was used by Nazis to identify political prisoners — by claiming it’s a ‘common Antifa symbol.’ The suggestion, of course, is that the image is justified by the idea that it’s associated with Antifa, so it’s merely a warning of a continuing menace to the country. ‘STOP ANTIFA,’ the ads say, warning of ‘dangerous MOBS of far-left groups’ that are ‘DESTROYING our cities.’”

Sargent adds, “Meanwhile, Trump and his top officials have continued to blame unrest and violence at protests on Antifa, to cast the violence more broadly as primarily left-wing in orientation. But the DHS document I obtained undercuts this series of claims.” The leaked DHS document, according to Sargent, shows that Antifa has not been a major source of violence at the recent “Justice for George Floyd” protests that have been taking place all over the United States.

“The document — which is an assessment of ongoing ‘protest-related’ threats to law enforcement dated June 17 — makes no mention at all of Antifa in its cataloging of those threats,” Sargent notes. “The DHS document states that ‘anarchist and anti-government extremists pose the most significant threat of targeted low-level, protest-related assaults against law enforcement.’ It bases this assessment on ‘the observed ideologies of recent attackers and the body of reporting of tactics noted by violent opportunists used over the last two weeks.’ Thus, as of this week, ‘anarchist and anti-government extremists’ pose the most serious ongoing threat, according to Trump’s own Homeland Security Department.”

Although Trump and his allies have been smearing Antifa in order to terrorize the president’s base of older white male voters, their assertions have demonstrated that they don’t know much about Antifa (which stands for “anti-fascist”). First, Antifa is a movement, not an organization. Second, Trumpistas tend to lump Antifa and Black Bloc anarchists together even though they’re separate movements. 

The Trump campaign’s Nazi symbol scandal just got a whole lot worse – Alternet.org

• But it's all a coincidence, right? Restarting one's campaign on Juneteenth in Tulsa, Nazi symbols, creating phantom enemies, etc.
  

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Discussing the recent police killing of a self-described anti-fascist suspected of fatally shooting a far-right activist in Portland, Oregon, President Donald Trump openly endorsed extrajudicial executions in a Fox News interview Saturday, declaring that “there has to be retribution.” “I put out, ‘When are you going to go get him?’ And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him,” the president told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, referring to Michael Forest Reinoehl. “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something—that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

‘There has to be retribution’: Trump openly endorses extrajudicial killings of suspects by law enforcement – Alternet.org

Roger Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Russia investigation was commuted by Donald Trump, has said Trump should seize total power and jail prominent figures including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg if he loses to Joe Biden in November. Trump uses Fox News interview to accuse Biden of taking drugs Read more The long-time Republican dirty trickster, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, offered the startling advice on Thursday, in a call to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars online show.

Roger Stone to Donald Trump: bring in martial law if you lose election | US news | The Guardian

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A top Trump administration health official has accused career government scientists of plotting against Donald Trump, as he encouraged the president’s supporters to arm themselves for the upcoming November election. Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo said without evidence that health experts with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were harbouring a “resistance unit” to the president during a Facebook Live on Sunday, The New York Times reported. In his Facebook Live, Mr Caputo claimed career scientists of "haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump,” according to The New York Times...

Mr Caupto also claimed during his Facebook Live that Mr Trump would win the presidential election in November but that Democratic candidate Joe Biden would be unlikely to concede.

"When Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

Top Trump health official accuses government scientists of “sedition” against the president | The Independent

Sooo:

• Trump people don't like the Covid figures and want th CDC, the FDA, the scientists to pretend that the pandemic isn't all that bad
  
• There is plenty of evidence of this meddling in these institutions and bend them to Trump's political will (as he has done with a raft of other institutions)
  
• The scientist who don't cooperate are accused of "sedition"
  
• Trump supporters are urged to arm themselves..
  

And all this as it is chrystal clear how badly Trump mismanaged the pandemic, 4% of the world's population, 22% of the deaths, and counting..

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MSNBC said President Trump is endangering journalists and undermining freedoms after he told a crowd at a rally that it was a “beautiful sight” when one of the network's anchors, Ali Velshi, was shot with a rubber bullet during a protest over the death of George Floyd.

MSNBC: Trump endangering journalists, undermining freedoms with comments about Velshi | TheHill