Here Are Some Of The 9,572,802 Ways Trump Tried To Steal The Election

These filthy sumbitches were throwing it all against the wall.

How many ways did Trump try to steal the election? ALLLLLL the ways. Literally every day we are bombarded with stories of new schemes to hold on to power after being definitively booted out by the American people. If we covered them all, we'd write about nothing else. So, to spare you all having to look at his demented orange face all day, let's round up the morning's outrage in one post.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ...

Another wackass memo? And this one involves the NSA? What could possibly go wrong!

The Washington Post has a long article about the descent into conspiracy theory madness that took hold of the GOP after the election. In this latest episode, failed Republican congressional candidate Michael Del Rosso, who gadded around DC for the past decade spouting rightwing security theories and describes himself as a former Trump surrogate, was flogging a memo that proposed using “NSA unprocessed raw signals data” to prove "foreign involvement in both the violent 'Color Revolution' the U.S. is presently undergoing and specifically the 2020 Election fraud and their involvement in altering the vote counts in the 2020 election ."

The memo proposed that Defense Secretary Christopher Miller deputize Del Rosso, along with an Army lawyer named Frank Colon and fired NSC staffer Richard Higgins, to trawl through NSA intercepts looking for evidence of foreign interference. To be clear, there is zero evidence of foreign interference, despite the memo's vague reference to "expert DOD opinion" that the author's "work product" established "sufficient predicate to form search inquiries against NSA unprocessed raw signals data under the existing authorities of NSPM.-13." That last bit is a reference to a classified 2018 memo authorizing the Pentagon to engage in offensive cyber attacks, and was also referenced in a different memo urging Trump to seize the voting machines for a recount.

It's totally illegal for the US government to target communications of US persons without a court order. But this author, whoever he or she is, wasn't super concerned about legality.

"If evidence of foreign interference is found the team would generate a classified DOD legal finding to support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies (which should still be pursued in parallel)," they wrote, adding later, "To treat this solely as a legal issue is to ensure that the USG's response is under-scoped and inadequate."

Colon, who is currently a government employee, insists he had nothing to do with this insanity. Del Rosso and Higgins aren't commenting, but North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer says he got a copy of the memo from Del Rosso after attending a January 4 meeting at the Willard Hotel to hear Mike Lindell scream nonsense about Chinese vote hacking. Mississippi Senator Cynthia Lummis also attended the meeting, as well as Senator Ron Johnson, who says he got a copy of the memo, but won't say from whom.

“We were hoping that the senators would give it 10 more days to give it back to the states,” Lindell told the Post . “We were in an anomaly in history. We still are.”

If there's a silver lining here, it's that the blatantly ludicrous and illegal shit these weirdos were proposing seems to have put off their intended audience of senators, rather than ginning up support for delaying the election certification on January 6.

"Honestly, I was not impressed by these people,” Cramer said, describing their fraud fugues as a “lot of theories but not a lot of evidence.”

Ultimately Lummis, Johnson, and Cramer all voted to certify the election, only objecting to Pennsylvania's use of mail in ballots. Of course it took an armed insurrection to scare them straight, so ... maybe less than full credit on this one.

ANOTHER 'nother memo! This one's about those weirdo cosplay electors.

Have none of these dipshits heard of the Stringer Bell rule?

The New York Times   story involves Trumpland's efforts to circumvent the Electoral Count Act's requirement that electors be certified by December 14, effectively giving themselves until January 6 to figure out another way to un-elect Joe Biden.

Under the law , "The electors of President and Vice President of each State shall meet and give their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December next following their appointment at such place in each State as the legislature of such State shall direct." But a lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro (clear we're living in a broken simulation) cooked up a ridiculous memo for James Troupis, the lawyer running Trump's recount effort in Wisconsin, suggesting that they could just ignore that deadline and behave as if January 6 were the real date. Also they should swear in some fake electors, to have them ready to go in case their ratfucking efforts worked.

"Prudence dictates that the ten electors pledged to Trump and Pence meet and cast their votes on December 14 (unless by then the race has been conceded). It is highly uncertain, given the language in Art. II requiring that all electors throughout the United States vote on the same day, whether Congress could validly count electoral votes cast on a later date," Chesebro wrote on November 18. "It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count, and no certificate of election has been issued in favor of Trump and Pence. However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action."

Well, the DOJ will be the judge of whether it was "a reasonable course of action" to have a bunch of unelected doofuses swear themselves in as "electors" and submit a fraudulent electoral certification to the National Archives. But whether it was legal or not, the involvement of the Trump campaign and Rudy Giuliani in organizing these fake electors, with the express purpose of pointing to them as a pretext to reject the legitimate electors, is pretty damning.

But wait, there's more! Because Chesebro drafted a second memo on December 9 outlining in specific detail how best to draft a fake election certificate in each of the contested states. TL, DR? Just make it look like the real one, but don't include a certificate of ascertainment signed by the governor. Easy peasy!

You get a pardon! And you get a pardon! Everybody gets a PARDON!

Okay, this one isn't strictly an election story, but we simply cannot end this post without drawing your attention to these gonzo quotes from Politico of Trump calling up all his advisors and asking how he could pardon the January 6 insurrectionists.

“Do you think I should pardon them? Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think I have the power to do it?” he asked one of them.

“Is it everybody that had a Trump sign or everybody who walked into the Capitol?” he wondered to another, strategizing how best to thwart efforts to make his supporters testify about the riot.

In the end, it was too hard to figure out whom to pardon, so Trump never did it. But just last weekend he talked about doing just that, and clearly he's not kidding.

In summary and in conclusion, there's a whole lotta shit here, and it all stinks.

[ WaPo / NYT / Politico ]

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