Play Card Game – Enabled

It only takes one honest lawyer.

Mr. Cipollone was a witness to some of the most significant moments in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines, meddling in the Justice Department and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud.

“That’s a terrible idea for the country,” he said of suggestions that the Trump administration seize voting machines, adding, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.”

Mr. Cipollone was also in direct contact with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol and told the House committee he believed more should have been done to call off the mob.

“I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response, statement, public statement, that people need to leave the Capitol now,” Mr. Cipollone testified.

Learn More

Alt-right radio host Jesse Kelly, adoring Trump booster, and frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time Fox News show, agreed with a Twitter user's suggestion that “Weimar problems eventually lead to Weimar solutions." Kelly's tweet? America “needs a dictator.” Learn More

After Joe Biden won the state of Arizona, Hoffman, an Arizona state representative, declared himself a state elector and attempted to submit false documents to the National Archive asserting that Arizona had been won by Republican candidate Donald Trump. Learn More

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, former QAnon follower, conservative activist, wife of conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, urging him to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory,
Pressed lawmakers in Arizona and a second battleground state, Wisconsin, to overturn state electoral votes for Biden,
attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. on Jan. 6, and
wrote to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) denigrating the House select committee’s investigation of the attack on the Capitol.

Learn More

Rubio dismisses Trump’s NATO comments: ‘Zero concern’

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) attempted to defend Trump’s comments at a rally on Saturday, where the former president said he warned a foreign leader that if that country didn’t contribute enough to the alliance, then Russia can “do whatever the hell they want."

Learn More

If there is a madness, slight or otherwise, in Kennedy’s bid, it is not confined to his hubris. He is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism. There are many. To prepare for the conversation, I listened to some of Kennedy’s podcast sessions with the likes of Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan. I watched his marathon announcement speech and tuned in to all the hosannas he was getting from a peculiar amen corner that includes Steve Bannon, Jack Dorsey, and Tucker Carlson. In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy accuses Fauci, who was then the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, of helping to carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” (The book has blurbs from Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, and Oliver Stone.) https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-alternative-facts-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr Learn More

Meadows was told of intelligence ahead of Jan. 6 that the day could get very violent. He shared that with Trump. But Meadows rarely had any reaction or seemed surprised at all and was equally unperturbed by the violence on the day of the insurrection, according to Hutchinson. -- Meadows also participated, by phone — though he wanted to go in person — for a briefing with Roger Stone and retired Gen. Michael Flynn in the "War Room" they had set up on Jan. 5 in the Willard Hotel. Stone and Flynn were intimately involved in the "Stop the Steal" movement. There are pictures of Stone with white supremacist militia functioning as his bodyguards on Jan. 6. Stone: “F*ck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” Learn More

"John. C. Eastman, a key legal architect of the effort to keep Mr. Trump in power using bogus slates of Trump electors in swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/14/us/politics/trump-georgia-indictment-key-players. John Eastman drafted the memo laying out a plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to buck his ceremonial duty to certify the election results. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/trump-indictment-sidesteps-details-unearthed-jan-6-panel/

The convergence of someone who took part in the legal attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power with those who were central to bringing the force of a crowd to bear as Congress was certifying the election results was a powerful reminder of how many mysteries remain where Jan. 6 is concerned. But Mr. Chesebro hinted at those connections in an email exchange with John Eastman . . . . In late December 2020, the two lawyers discussed how to get a case before the Supreme Court. Mr. Chesebro told Mr. Eastman as they discussed filing a legal action that in terms of the highest court, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/kenneth-chesebro-jan-6-trump

Learn More

Noem, a presidential aspirant, clinging closely to the Trump playbook, was adamant that widespread fraud existed in the 2020 election, despite the lack of concrete evidence. After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Noem tried to deflect blame from the president, blaming the Capitol insurrection on lack of civics education while making no mention of President Donald Trump’s role in the attack that sent Congress into hiding. Learn More

Learn More