Attempted Coup At The Trump DOJ? Just How Many Coups Was This Traitor Planning?
Lots.
Last night the New York Times revealed that Trump came very close to deploying the Justice Department to stage an electoral coup on New Year's Eve, and only threats by the entire DOJ leadership to resign en masse put him off it. Which puts us in the very awkward position of thanking our lucky stars for those filthy sumbitches who enabled the corruption of the last four years but, finally, in the end, discovered something they weren't willing to do.
SLOW CLAP.
In a story since confirmed by the Washington Post , the Times's Katie Benner reported that Jeffrey Clark, the (acting) head of the DOJ's Civil Division, schemed to shiv (acting) Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and get himself installed in the top spot. From which perch Clark would then launch a plan to get the electoral votes in Georgia thrown out by announcing a fictional investigation of electoral irregularities in the state.
Bill Barr made clear on December 1 that the Justice Department had found no significant evidence of election fraud, but after he announced his impending resignation on December 14, Trump immediately went to work on his successor, Jeffrey Rosen. But Rosen wasn't playing dice either, refusing pressure from the president to announce investigations, join briefs filed by Rudy Giuliani and the rest of the wackass legal team, and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate all the nonsense fraud claims pumped out by Trump's media allies.
Enter Jeffrey Clark, introduced to the president by "a Pennsylvania politician" (that you Scott Perry ?), who "mentioned to Mr. Rosen and [his deputy Richard] Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet." From which they did not infer that Clark was a faithful reader of Wonkette, particularly as he followed it up by pressuring them to announce investigations of non-existent electoral fraud.
Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden's win there.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark's proposal.
So Clark went around Rosen, hatching the plan to get his former mentor at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis fired. But this so freaked out the rest of the DOJ leadership that they agreed among themselves that they would all quit together if Trump went through with the plan, signaling to the public to pay attention because some majorly hinky shit was going down.
Things came to a head on January 3 in a meeting at the White House where Rosen and Clark each made their case to the president "'Apprentice'-style," and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and top Justice Department officials said DO NOT DO IT. After three hours, Trump was finally convinced to stand down, put off apparently by the prospect of congressional investigations. Just moments later, the Post released audio of his call with Georgia election officials pressuring them to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have."
Clark, a doctrinaire conservative who made his bones getting paid to deny climate change before his appointment to be the DOJ's point man on the environment, defended his conduct.
"I categorically deny that I 'devised a plan ... to oust' Jeff Rosen," he said. "Nor did I formulate recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the Internet."
""My practice is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims," he sniffed. By which we assume he meant ...
Then he insisted that the real villains were those who revealed "privileged" conversations with the president, saying "There was a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president. It is unfortunate that those who were part of a privileged legal conversation would comment in public about such internal deliberations, while also distorting any discussions."
Which raises a serious question.
Does Donald Trump feed the brain worms to his lawyers? Or are lawyers with brain worms drawn to the former president like flies to shit? Because there sure are a lot of attorneys around the president who have lost their damn minds!
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One of the things that continues to fascinate me (if you can't be happy be curious) is that it was in the end the Deep State that brought down Donald Trump. Not the secret cabal of leftists we've all heard so much abject rubbish about, but people who have served in government for a while, and over time began to believe in some of the things they'd had to recite so many times about respecting the Constitution and making impartial decisions. Even Mitch McConnell rose to the occasion just long enough to finally stop the man short of bringing down the government. Popcorn does not do it justice.
I had seen that term ( autogolpe) used to describe the tactics of both Adolf and Saddam, but had a senior memory moment and lost it, until just now, so thanks for bringing it back. I recall once seeing a documentary about how Saddam had brought his armed goons right into Iraq's legislative chamber during a session and commenced to having a series of votes carried out granting him more power with each successive piece of "legislation". After each vote was taken, his henchmen would arrest a couple of legislators who were then immediately escorted out of the room, never to be seen again. This was all captured on video and it is horrifying. The looks of fear on the faces of these people who know what is happening and know what Saddam has planned for them if they don't immediately acquiesce to his demands is something not easily forgotten. This is probably along the lines of what Trump actually wanted to pull off when he said he was going to lead his armed mob to the Capital himself. Exactly how many weapon toting Republican thugs were already in there to do his bidding? But he didn't go. It just didn't pan out the way he, Stephen Miller and Putin wanted it to, and it became a riot instead of the efficiently carried out series of arrests and executions that Saddam Hussein used to acquire absolute power.