Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the march on Charlottesville, VA by neo-Nazis who turned violent, injured more than 50 people and killed a young woman. The police there failed to utilize proper crowd control as some were sympathetic to the neo-Nazis. City leaders promised to institute reforms within that department but their efforts failed, undercut by the same racists within the police force.
People who experienced that provided an oral history to commemorate the anniversary.
Within the past week:
Imagine what they can do to ordinary Americans but cannot do to a former President who openly flaunts all laws and standards of a civil society.
The former president said about the neo-Nazis and the local residents who protested their appearance “There’s very fine people on both sides.”
Because of Trump’s lies and rhetoric, Ricky Shiffer died yesterday, trying to kill FBI agents and incite a civil war. Shiffer was seen in a video of a Washington DC rally the night before the insurrection.
Because she believed Trump’s lies about the election being stolen, 14 year Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt is dead.
Because Trump incited an insurrection and ignored pleas to send reinforcements, more than 140 police officers were injured, 4 committed suicide shortly after, more than $1.5 million in damage was done to the Capitol building and the lives of the Vice President and Speaker of the House were threatened.
At least 889 of his supporters have been arrested due to their actions that day. More arrests are expected. 347 of them have pleaded guilty so far. Because they believed his lies and believed he wanted them to do that.
This Virginia cop just got 7+ years for his actions before, during and after January 6th, tied for the longest sentence so far. Trump helped convince him to break the law.
Since J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972 while working as the FBI Director, major reforms were done to rid the agency of the corruption he engaged in and encouraged. The FBI’s efforts have tracked down the 889 arrested in the January 6 attack.
But today, Trump is leading an attack on the FBI. Because its director, who Trump appointed, brought evidence to a federal judge, who Trump appointed, laying out the case that a Trump insider had defined areas in Mar-A-Lago where sensitive national security documents were still being illegally stashed despite an effort begun last year by the FBI to retrieve all such documents in negotiations with Trump’s lawyers.
The plainsclothes FBI team notified Trump’s attorneys of their pending arrival about 45 minutes before they got there. Trump and others watched the search that followed on Mar-A-Lago security cameras.
Rather than release a copy of the search warrant - which he is legally entitled to do - Trump characterized this as a ‘raid’ to provoke fear in his followers and used it to raise funds.
And who made the removal of classified documents such a serious crime? That also would be Donald Trump. The old adage of ‘hoisted on his own petard’ clearly applies here. The FBI director, the judge, the law being enforced all came from Trump.
Imagine what they can do to ordinary Americans but cannot do to a former President who openly flaunts all laws and standards of a civil society.
It’s been reported that the January 6 congressional committee is gathering evidence that Trump may have violated 5 federal laws.
His response is standard boilerplate stuff: when attacked, don’t defend. Go on the offensive.
Stephen Miller, a bureaucrat Trump hired, is characterizing the FBI’s investigation as an effort caused by other lowly bureaucrats (the people hired to collect the records of presidents and other elected officials required by US law). Miller is well known for his connections to hate groups and eugenicist groups that believe non-white people are genetically inferior to whites, going back to his college days. He’s pals with the racist neo-Nazi Richard Spencer who was supposed to be the featured speaker at the Charlottesville march and rally. He’s considered to be the author of the Trump child separation policy for immigrants crossing the border, which failed to track the families properly so more than 500 kids remain separated from their parents.
Miller has started an organization called America First Legal that has just launched a political investigation of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice, in response to the FBI’s document retrieval.
Via NBC News:
Stephen Miller, a former senior White House adviser to Trump who still speaks regularly to the former president, said while he was not addressing any specifics regarding the filing or declassification of documents, suggestions that the former president broke the law represent a “completely backwards upside-down nonsensical understanding of our Constitution” because it essentially makes a president subservient to unelected “preening insufferable bureaucrats” in the branch of government the president controls.
The federal government is composed of millions of Americans hired to provide services to American citizens and to ensure laws and regulations are followed. This apparently makes them ‘preening insufferable’ people to people who don’t respect or abide by laws. The constant attacks on normal Americans hired to be public servants, suggesting they’re engaged in a massive conspiracy against any president is not only coo-coo; it’s unforgivable.
In the deposition Trump was legally required to take part in, in NY this week, he took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 440 times. You know who has never done that once? Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, AOC, just to name a few.
Imagine what they can do to ordinary Americans but cannot do to a former President who openly flaunts all laws and standards of a civil society.
From the unsealed warrant, this is what he’s being investigated for:
Detail of what it means here. Trump claims it was all stuff he declassified. There are some things - like nuclear arms - that no president can declassify, so we’ll still have to wait a bit to know what the material seized covers.
Imagine what they can do to ordinary Americans who violate the Espionage Act like the FBI believes the former president did.
Good news?
Amid Senator Rick Scott’s effort to make Social Security & Medicare subject to a yearly vote in a badly polarized Congress (they’ve been trying to kill Social Security since FDR created it 85 years ago) comes this welcome news from the Wall Street Journal:
Social Security recipients are on track to receive the highest cost-of-living increase in more than four decades next year.
Though the exact percentage won’t be known for a couple of months, it’s expected to be about a 9.6% increase. Only the 1980 and 1981 increases were larger than that.
It’s not going to help the service workers and farmworkers who worked at or near a minimum wage that wasn’t increased since 2009 because Congressional Republicans blocked the raise. The people who kept the US economy afloat throughout the worst of the covid pandemic.
It won’t lower the record profits raked in this year by corporations like Big Oil or the financial and property development giants that gave us the Housing Bubble collapse and the inflation that has raged in the first half of this year.
But it will help seniors, the group hardest hit by the pandemic, that absorbed more than 90% of the fatalities or lost friends in the same age group.
Instead of a video today, I’m providing some satirical mirth from multiple meme creators that I hope you’ll enjoy. I believe them all to be in the public domain.
