Trump’s Palace Guard

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Secret Service prevarication about purged data suggests rebuttable presumption of complicity in a conspiracy to kidnap Pence on Jan. 6 before he could certify Biden’s election.

Sure seems like Pence thought so when he refused to let Secret Service take him away from the Capitol, saying to his lead agent, “I’m not getting in the car. I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car”.

Meanwhile… Bannon lawyer’s opening statement yesterday really stupid, said Steve was confused about dates for complying with congressional subpoena. Using your client’s state of mind as a defense means you have to put him on the stand to prove it. Prosecutors would love to cross examine that crap. As my moot court professor said about openings: “Never write the jury a check you can’t cash”

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48 thoughts on “Trump’s Palace Guard”

  2. huffpo reports colbert’s take on bannon trial:

    Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday that longtime Donald Trump insider Steve Bannon is facing an uphill battle in his contempt of Congress trial, with many of his key defenses already unraveling.
    For example, Bannon claimed executive privilege prevented him from testifying. But, as Colbert pointed out, a Trump attorney told the FBI in June that the former president never invoked executive privilege for Bannon.
    “I mean, wow. He really hung Bannon out to dry,” the “Late Show” host said. “Which isn’t easy, because Bannon excretes a thick layer of sebum.”
    Colbert also spotted some leaked audio from before the 2020 election in which Bannon essentially revealed much of the playbook Trump would follow after losing.

    Stephen celebrates his dog Benny’s third birthday, peeks across the pond at the sweltering heat in Europe, and takes a look at what Steve Bannon may say about the former president when he testifies before the Jan. 6th Committee.

  3. The Guardian

    One in five adults in the United States, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some circumstances, a new mega-survey has found.
    A team of medical and public health scientists at the University of California, Davis enlisted the opinions of almost 9,000 people across the country to explore how far willingness to engage in political violence now goes.[…]
    A hard-core rump of the US population, the survey recorded – amounting to 3% or by extrapolation 7 million people – believe that political violence is usually or always justified. Almost one in four of the respondents – equivalent to more than 60 million Americans – could conceive of violence being justified “to preserve an American way of life based on western European traditions”.
    Most alarmingly, 7.1% said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal. The UC Davis team points out that, extrapolated to US society at large, that is the equivalent of 18 million Americans.
    [continues]

  4. I’m thinking that the UCD study underestimates the number of folks who agree with the use of violence to achieve political results – unless Dumbass has lost 1/3 of his support in the GQP.

  6. “conspiracy to kidnap Pence”  ???

    craig, they’ll deny a “kidnapping” charge and swear under oath they were just doing their required duty to whisk away a protected subject from an obvious threat (i.e. people rampaging thru capitol on the way to hang pence). 

     

    charge to be successful would need hard evidence of an order/plan/discussion given to or made by them which specifically refers to obstructing the veep’s responsibilities in re the electoral vote that day.

  7. wonder if the memo will stall or speed up doj activity

    july 18 – Rachel Maddow shares a newly obtained May 25, 2022 memorandum from Attorney General Merrick Garland to Department of Justice employees about “policies with respect to political activities” that doubles down on Bill Barr’s policy against investigating candidates without approval.

  8. answering rachel’s question at the end of above:

    DoJ Jan. 6 Investigation into Trump to Continue If He Runs in 2024 – Rolling Stone

    The Justice Department will continue investigating Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack even if he runs for reelection, a department official said Tuesday.
    “We’re going to continue to do our job, to follow the facts wherever they go, no matter where they lead, no matter to what level,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, according to a Bloomberg report. “We’re going to continue to investigate what was fundamentally an attack on our democracy.”

  9. Since there is no proof it will just have to go into the Everybody Knows file. Because they DID destroy evidence. Evidence pertaining to two specific days.  

  11. Everybody knows that they’d rather take the heat of destroying the evidence than take the heat of what the evidence is.  That destroyed evidence must be a humdinger of a lollapalooza
    This is Yuge.  
     

  12. There is a saying “nothing is deleted on the Internet”.  Those text messages, encrypted most likely using the same encryption scheme used for all special use cell phones, are somewhere.  They move from server to server on the path from one cell phone to another.  As this is smelling like the Secret Service is deeply involved in something dirty I am sure someone is enlisting people in the other intelligence community agencies to find a scrubber program to hide their trail.  Hopefully there is someone in DOJ doing the same but looking for the deleted messages.  These will be encrypted when found, unless a phone or two is not cleaned and has some of the missing text messages.  It will be a chore though considering how much lead the possible bad guys have.

  13. I keep getting flashbacks of the Hillary campaign when the Bernie Bros (12% of who refused to vote for her) and all the media were screaming “But her EMAILS”.  Note, she never so much as clipped one and all official ones were copied to the archives.  Instead, the nation got the horror of Trump and potential destruction of Democracy.  

     

  14. Watched a bit of Lawrence O’Donnell last night.  He was on fire concerning the Secret Service.  Said the head of the SS was a trump appointee that was put in that position in trump’s 3rd year.  O’Donnell said his name is James Murray and that he is scheduled to retire at the end of this month and that he’s already been hired as the new CEO of Snapchat.
     
    I don’t want to criticize Biden… but the fact that he kept that man on as Head of the Secret Service is a misstep, IMO.

  15. RR, Murray and Tony Ornato were in cahoots. Trump originally wanted to appoint Ornato, his lead agent, to director of SS, who instead talked prez into naming his buddy Murray, who backed Ornato for the dual SS/WH deputy chief positions he wanted. Both were very involved Jan. 6, and would do anything for Trump. I’m guessing their texts among those purged. 

  16. PatD: “charge to be successful would need hard evidence”

    Agreed, not enough yet to prove, but enough for a theory of the case to pursue, that the purpose for sending the mob was to either scare Pence into submission or force him to leave before certification. Purged texts must show something significant or they wouldn’t hide them.

    If anyone can resurrect the data the NSA could. Hopefully they’ve been contacted for help. 

  17. How DARE you guys accuse US of deliberately deleting text message from 2 specific days which just by total coincidence happened to be the days where we tried to kidnap Pence….oops we tried to PROTECT Pence..  PROTECT!
    That hurts our feelings—BOTH of them. 

    Just because we’re chumpers doesn’t mean we’d lie, cheat, and steal at the drop of a hat; much less attempt a fascist overthrow of the United States.

    Besides……there’s no evidence.

  21. yesterday Igor Novikov (former advisor to zelenskyy) noted on nicole wallace’s show the haunting similarity of what went on in Uvalde and what’s been going on in Ukraine.   both cases well-armed folk (cops in former case and the western world in the latter) reluctant to do what is necessary to stop the mass murder of children.

     

  22. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/20/politics/garrett-ziegler-rant/index.html

    “A former Trump White House aide who met with the January 6 committee earlier this week went on a profane and sexist rant on a livestream after his testimony…”

    “This is a Bolshevistic anti-White campaign. If you can’t see that, your eyes are freaking closed. And so, they see me as a young Christian who they can try to basically scare, right?”

    “In the 27-minute livestream, Ziegler used vulgar and misogynistic language to attack Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin…”

    Christian? Uh, no.

  24. Bolshevistic anti-White campaign
    See “Ruby Ridge” , “Waco” , “OKC”, ……… etc., etc., ……. 
    This fig leaf of “law abiding citizens” keeping assault weapons for home defense is as dead as Barry Goldwater.  
     

  27. Attorney General Merrick Garland on January 6th investigation: “We do not do our investigations in public. This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into…We have to get this right.”
    —Cspan

  28. Alarm as fastest growing US cities risk becoming unlivable from climate crisis

    Some of the cities enjoying population boom are among those gripped by a ferocious heatwave and seeing record temperatures

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/20/us-fastest-growing-cities-risk-becoming-unlivable-climate-crisis

    San Antonio , Phoenix , Ft. Worth ……….. 123 
     
    All are at their limits of water and power as well .
     
    I see a wall building effort from Canada in the near future.
     

  29. A real news story from my google news feed –
    Where to get the best ice cream on Cape Cod
     
    Answer , ask a great white shark.
     

  30. Back to moving to the wrong places.
     
    Arizona just took the top spot as the worst state  to live in.  It’s was a great day for Mississippi  , and West Virginia. 

  32.  

    The climate system,Broecker noted in 1998, is like “an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks” as we pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. On 8 August 1975, Broecker published a paper in Science entitled ‘Climate change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?Mar 26, 2019

  33. Wally  was autistic , much like  Greta .
    He never moved to computers.  A slide rule and a pencil and paper. 
    His is one of the voices  that was ignored . 
     
    Next up –  the Deniers  …………… “We had no idea”. 

  35. I whish I had my talent back , I have great cartoon  in mind .
     
     
    A  little skinny  Greta  tosses a cup of dust into a bloated  Senator  Inhofe’s face, and says …….
     
    ” Here’s your snowball , jack ass.” 

  36. Washington Post Secret Service reporter and author Carol Leonnig on MSNBC: “It is clear to me that senior leadership and a majority of President Trump’s detail were in the tank for him… I have seen several texts, numerous posts on social media by members of the president’s protective detail showing that they were essentially cheering on the insurrectionists.”

  38. Buying and selling the empire.  Makes sense .
    It’s an old movie , too bad they didn’t  knife  him  in a tunnel somewhere , because  he  wouldn’t cough up more salt and silver. 

  40. Just had a flashback to when they used to show those godawful prison shows after hours on msnbc.   

  47. i realize dance/electronica ain’t a trailmix  favorite but that playlist is truly bangin’, still grooves
     
    94 is huge

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