  Friday, December 16, 2022

TODD ZWILLICH

Deputy DC Bureau Chief, VICE News

Washington, D.C. Bureau
@toddzwillich

New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax at the Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for a Re-Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City, January 31, 2021. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

One night on the ȕber East Side

On Monday the January 6 committee will finally release its report on Donald Trump's attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss and mount a coup on the United States government. It will be an urgent document, warning Americans that their democracy didn't just survive a direct assault, but that it remains under critical threat.

How can this be? The coup plot failed, and Trump left office. Republicans' attempt to install loyalists in state offices to steal elections in the midterms withered. Trump is dining with anti-semitic losers, languishing in the polls, and clowning himself with cheap grifts when he's supposed mounting his presidential comeback. Prosecutors are circling, and Trump could soon be charged with real crimes.

You might think that democracy is safe while its enemies languish in public rejection and subpoenas. But this week, just a few blocks from Trump Tower on New York's Upper East Side, a group of Republicans gathered for an elegant evening of dinner, toasts, and fascism.

This was the gala of the New York Young Republican Club, a group whose mainstream name obscures the guest list: White supremacists, coup plotters, and white nationlist propagandists relishing their rise. They included inmate-number-yet-to-be-assigned Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump, Jr.

"We want total war," said NYYRC president Gavin Wax, who told the crowd they must be prepared to do battle with liberals everywhere, including "in the streets." GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene boasted that had she and Steve Bannon planned the insurrection, "we would have won."

"Not to mention, it would've been armed," Greene reportedly said to applause. (Afterward, Greene told her critics to get over it, she was just joking.)

Back in the spring, CNN published some of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows coup-adjacent texts with media personalities and lawmakers. Greene had sent one of the more notable messages, telling Meadows that GOP lawmakers were urging Trump to institute "Marshall law" to keep power. What lawmakers was Greene talking about?

According to a detailed report on Meadows texts published by Talking Points Memo, at least one of them was GOP Rep. Ralph Norman. On Jan. 17, 2021, just days before Joe Biden's inauguration, Norman texted Meadows to urge Trump to put the military into the streets and to stay in power by force.

"Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!" Norman wrote, mirroring Greene's celebrated spelling.

In all, the texts show various levels of cheerleading, crackpottery, magical thinking, and authoritarian planning on the part of nearly three dozen GOP lawmakers in Meadows' contacts. The vast majority of them—Norman, Greene, Rep. Scott Perry (who I'm betting you'll be reading a lot about in Monday's report)—are all returning to Congress, ready to take power in January and wielding muscular influence over GOP leaders. Those leaders have already promised to do all they can to distort and erase the truth of Jan. 6 from the national memory.

And while Trump looks weakened and diminished, sinking in the polls and fearing arrest, his main rival is achieving GOP clout not by rejecting Trumpism, but by representing a smarter, craftier and less offensive version of it.

I'll be off next week, so I'll have to read the Jan. 6 report on a beach. You should read it! If it's TL; DR, VICE News will have plenty of coverage of the critical parts. But don't let anyone tell you the report is only the record of a democratic crisis averted. It's actually a tip sheet of the authoritarians who say they're just getting started.

Happy Holidays! Why not stuff those stockings…er, email boxes…with Breaking the Vote!

Prosecutor Jack Smith at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers court in The Hague, on November 10, 2020. (Photo by Peter DeJong/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

Counter Factual

Given how openly Republican elected officials advertise their love for coups, it's hard to imagine a project more urgent than making it harder to consummate them. There's reason to be hopeful that Congress will pass some reforms before it adjourns for the year that make a Jan. 6-style, John Eastman bespoke overthrow a lot less likely.

There's already bipartisan support for refining the arcane Electoral Count Act, the very same one Trump's allies tried to exploit when they objected to the count and tried to get Mike Pence to throw the 2020 election into chaos. Now it looks like ECA reform could piggy back on the last big Capitol Hill deal likely to get done this year. The bill on the table makes it crystal clear that the veep's role is purely ceremonial when Congress gathers to count those electoral votes. It would raise the bar for lawmakers to object to a state's electors, and require Congress to only recognize a state's electoral slate if it's certified by the governor.

There are still plenty of vulnerabilities in the states, especially if the Supreme Court embraces fringe "the independent state legislature" theory and gives partisan state reps unilateral control over elections. But getting ECA reform passed before Republicans take over the House with a pro-coup mission of discrediting any accountability for Jan. 6 would be a good step.

T.W.I.S.™ Notes

Christmas is coming early for This Week in Subpoenas! The January 6 committee is expected to meet on Monday to release its report, and also to vote on just who's going to get referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution. But look out for the committee calling for other accountability too, like professional sanctions against attorneys and ethics charges against lawmakers who played an active role in the plot.

- Oh Brad, I'm Mad

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has another grand jury subpoena to add to his collection. The man who taped Donald Trump demanding he find him 11,780 votes got served by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who's running the coup investigation for the DOJ now.

- A Jack of All Raids

There's more evidence Smith is charging hard in his criminal investigation of the coup attempt. This week Smith added local election officials from Nevada, New Mexico and Pennsylvania to his growing list of subpoenas. Smith wants the officials to hand over any and all communications they had with a long list of Trump fake elector schemers, including Rudy Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman.

It's clear that Smith means business, both in the coup investigation and in the probe into classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Former prosecutors tell VICE's Greg Walters that Smith could charge Trump soon after the New Year.

- Perry Feral

Judging from the texts we know about from Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Scott Perry, it's not surprise the feds want to see the rest of them. Perry, of course, helped organize the effort to turn the DOJ into a disinformation hub for the coup. Later he was so convinced his actions were good and true that, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, he asked for a presidential pardon. Perry denies it. The feds seized Perry's phone back in August, and now they've been fighting in court to get access to his texts.

Militias' Irony

The second batch of Oath Keepers to go on trial for seditious conspiracy is underway in Washington. Jurors heard opening statements this week at the trial of four Oath Keepers who were charged along with Steward Rhodes, who was convicted of sedition and other crimes a couple weeks ago. Joseph Hackett, Robert Minuta, David Moerschel and Edward Vallejo are all charged with multiple felonies in the same alleged plot, but the judge divided the group into two separate conspiracy trials.

Meanwhile, jury selection starts next week in the federal trial of Proud Boys, including former leader Enrique Tarrio. A judge ruled this week that prosecutors will get to tell the jury about the Proud Boys' role in violent street fights after the "Million MAGA March" in December, 2020. The actual trial has been pushed to the first week of January.

Don't miss Tess Owen's VICE News deep dive on how the Proud Boys keep morphing in their role as the GOP's culture war henchmen.

Off to Jail

In other violent militia news, three convicted members of the "Wolverine Watchmen" plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were sentenced Thursday. Joe Morrison, Pete Musico and Paul Bellar were all convicted of aiding the conspiracy. They got 12, 10, and seven years, respectively.

Lake Woebegotten

Arizona GOP governor candidate Kari Lake's legal challenge to her midterm loss got off to a reliably chaotic start this week. A preliminary hearing was delayed when unnamed parties publicized the court's attorney call-in line, which promptly got jammed with 700 outside spectators. The parties who leaked the number included Lake, who tweeted it.

Lake alleges that the election should be invalidated and overturned in her favor because problems at some Maricopa County polling places disenfranchised her voters. Motions to dismiss the case should be heard Monday. In the meantime, Lake's been doing the most important part: appearing regularly on right-wing propaganda shows hosted by (soon-to-be-jailed) Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk and others, proclaiming that the election was stolen.

As for Mark Finchem's bid to overturn his losing campaign for Arizona secretary of state…it's going about as well as you might expect.

"Need to end this call. I don't think this will be productive much longer." — Texts from Georgia deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the infamous call where Donald Trump asked Georgia officials to find him 11,780 votes.

Elon Musk during a T-Mobile and SpaceX joint event on August 25, 2022 in Boca Chica Beach, Texas. (Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)

QElon — World's not-richest person Elon Musk has been delighting online authoritarians in his chaotic quest to re-establish Twitter as a friendly place for propaganda, hate speech and election lies. He's also showing a steep learning curve for right-wing trolling and conspiracy theories masquerading as empowerment, as modeled by pioneer Donald Trump. Check out David Gilbert's VICE piece on Musk's embrace and promotion of QAnon, and how online conspiracy communities lit up with joy at this new tactic.

Rampant voter fraud unlike we've ever seen — A Walker County, Georgia man was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison for filling out another resident's absentee ballot and faking a signature. William Chase, 62, was convicted last month and given the surprisingly long sentence. He has a long rap sheet of multiple felony convictions for fraud, forgery and theft.

American sad-ass — Russian troll farms are always looking for creative ways to infiltrate U.S. elections and drive divisions in political culture. Who knew that our best disinformation vectors are also some of our worst musicians? This report explains that despite their heavy traffic in right-wing echo chambers, fake Kid Rocks (you heard me) don't really fool a lot of people on the broader internet. Except Don Jr.

Rudolph the reind'in — Rudy Giuliani's 2020 stolen election lies have him on the verge of getting disbarred for professional misconduct in the District of Columbia.