Impeachment II -- It's On

(Pelosi said,) “In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both,” in the letter to rank-and-file colleagues. “As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”

Pelosi, who was personally targeted by some members of the pro-Trump mob in Wednesday’s insurrection, laid out the Democrats’ strategy for the days ahead.

Katko, R-Camillus, is the first House Republican to acknowledge that he will join at least 218 House Democrats who signed onto an impeachment resolution. A vote is expected Wednesday.

McConnell has made no commitments on voting to convict Trump, and wants to see the article itself before voting.
Several GOP sources said on Tuesday that if McConnell supports conviction, Trump almost certainly will be convicted by 67 senators in the impeachment trial.
"If Mitch is a yes, he's done," said one Senate GOP source who asked not to be named.
Many Republican senators are staying quiet about whether they'll back conviction -- a sign that they, too, could support conviction in an effort to rid Trump from their party.

Tom Rice stunned the South Carolina political universe by voting to impeach President Donald Trump, a move destined to spark outrage in his home district where support for Trump runs high and to the extreme.

In a pivot that came without a hint to his constituents or the media, Rice was one of 10 Republicans who voted in favor the Democratic-led impeachment naming Trump for inciting last week’s riot where supporters stormed the Capitol Building.

Heading into the debate, Rice hoped the Democrats wouldn’t bring articles of impeachment to the floor. While he didn’t exactly agree with every part of their document, he said what happened just a week earlier swayed his mind.
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After the protests, Rice still objected to the election results.
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Just last week, the entire S.C. GOP congressional delegation, except for (Charleston Rep. Nancy) Mace, voted to object to certifying the Electoral College results that secured President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Major law firms have also turned down the former president because of the stigma of the insurrection and out of concern they would lose clients, several lawyers told CNN.

"The big firms have too many clients who would say, 'We're going to take our business away from you.' I don't think Butch Bowers or Debbie Barbier have that concern," said Robert Foster, a partner with Nelson Mullins in Columbia, where Bowers was a former partner.

"I cannot think of a better way to turn the upcoming impeachment trial into a complete circus than to call the QAnon Shaman as a witness on anything."

Harris will defend a former president who regularly appealed to racists and inspired a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob that included a significant contingent of outright white supremacists.

Back in 1989, the South Carolina Supreme Court found that Harris had used racial stereotypes to strike two Black jurors during a DUI trial while he served as an assistant solicitor in South Carolina’s 5th Judicial Circuit Solicitor’s Office.

"House Democrats have sought out new cellphone footage of the Capitol siege as well as updated details about injured police officers as they seek to build an emotionally compelling impeachment case against former president Donald Trump.
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Democrats won't just be prosecuting Trump in hopes of GOP senators voting to convict, but will also be focused on trying the case for voters watching the proceedings on television.

"The effort to present new video evidence and witness testimony appears designed to make Republican senators as uncomfortable as possible. . . The prospect of injured police officers describing the brutality of pro-Trump rioters to Republicans who regularly present themselves as advocates of law enforcement could make for an extraordinary, nationally televised scene. . ."

"The House impeachment managers are determined to present as much evidence as senators allow, to ensure a permanent record of Trump's role in the riots — and to force Republicans to witness the chaos and carnage one more time before they vote against conviction."

Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, who were expected to be two of the lead attorneys, are no longer on the team. A source familiar with the changes said it was a mutual decision for both to leave the legal team. As the lead attorney, Bowers assembled the team.

Josh Howard, a North Carolina attorney who was recently added to the team, has also left, according to another source familiar with the changes. Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris, also from South Carolina, are no longer involved with the case, either.

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

The attorneys had not yet been paid any advance fees and a letter of intent was never signed.

"Caught with Their Hands in the Cookie Jar " | The Democrats stole the election, and it’s critically important we keep saying it. | By Jeremy Carl | January 29, 2021

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... "As commentator Glenn Greenwald recently told Tucker Carlson, 'They’re trying to harness corporate and monopoly power to silence everyone who disagrees with them, the very hallmark, the epitome of the fascism they claim to be fighting, but which in reality they embody.'

The Depressing Truth

"Given our current strategic situation, the fact that this election was rigged is the core message we need to proclaim, and that is—not coincidentally—why it is the one thing social media and the powers that be will not allow us to say. The reign of terror they are unleashing upon the Right is really a demand that we accept their false narrative.

"And here’s an uglier and more depressing truth we need to embrace: They rigged the election in front of our very eyes because we weren’t smart enough, tough enough, and most importantly, not powerful enough to stop them. That’s something we desperately need to fix before 2024, and election integrity efforts led by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—not coincidentally three of the top targets of the left-wing mob—are a vital part of that effort.

"To be clear, there are some important ways in which I differ from Trump and some of his supporters on the nature of the election-rigging that took place. While I have not reviewed every detail of each claim, reports that I have examined of hacked Dominion machines, mass-switched votes, or other overt fraud at the level to have changed the election results ranges from the somewhat unlikely to the outlandish. President Trump did not help his own case by amplifying some of the more implausible of these theories. But direct fraud is mostly for amateurs. The Democrats were pros, stacking the deck so heavily in advance that they could be virtually certain the cards would play out in their favor.

"In this context, it is important to note the closeness of the race: just 44,000 votes in three states, a total of 0.013 percent of the total votes cast nationwide, would have needed to be switched from Biden to Trump to have handed President Trump a victory. In a free and fair U.S. election, Donald Trump would have certainly been reelected, and probably reelected easily." ...

Schoen represented Trump ally Roger Stone when he appealed his conviction for lying to Congress and witness tampering in connection to the probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election. Stone later received a pardon from Trump. He also discussed taking over as counsel for financier Jeffrey Epstein just days before the convicted sex offender was found dead in his New York jail cell.

Castor gained notoriety for his decision in 2005 not to charge Bill Cosby with sexual misconduct after allegations from a Temple University employee surfaced. Cosby was convicted 13 years later of drugging and raping his accuser.

"The first would be someone who could testify that Donald Trump actually told them to go break into the Capitol or was part of that planning," he said. "And number two, if I had a witness who was with Donald Trump on the afternoon of January 6th, who actually had his state of mind, saw his reactions to the rioting, knows what he did when the request for additional aid came in and he delayed it a great deal, I think those would be the witnesses that I would want."

Senate leaders are closing in on an agreement that would give each side up to 16 hours to present their cases and the potential for a debate and voting on calling witnesses. . .

Ethan Nordean, a 30-year-old bodybuilder known in right-wing circles by his alias, Rufio Panman, faces four federal criminal counts in the District of Columbia, including obstructing an official proceeding, aiding and abetting injury to government property, disorderly conduct and knowingly and violently entering a restricted building, according to a criminal complaint.

Nordean faces more than 30 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
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Charging documents identify Nordean as the self-described “Sergeant of Arms” of the Seattle chapter of the Proud Boys, a group that often wears yellow and black clothing, prohibits women from joining its ranks and is known in the Northwest for street brawls and violent clashes with antifascist activists.
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One video taken by Eddie Block, a Proud Boys livestreamer, featured Nordean at various times speaking through a bullhorn and leading a large group to the Capitol, just before the mob broke through a police line and breached the building.
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. . .Nordean also wrote a post under his alias on Parler, the social-media platform widely used by Trump supporters and right-leaning groups, that indicated “he and other Proud Boys members were planning in advance to organize a group that would attempt to overwhelm police barricades and enter the United States Capitol building.”
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(The) family said: “We have tried for a long while to get our son off the path which led to his arrest today — to no avail. Ethan will be held accountable for his actions.”

One side holds up a mirror to America in 2021. The other, not so much.

The nine Democratic prosecutors at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial are made up of men and women young and old with multiple racial and religious identities. But each day in the Senate chamber they are trying to persuade a caucus of 50 Republicans still dominated by ageing white men...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY., said on the Senate floor that former President Donald Trump is "practically and morally responsible" for the insurrection on Jan. 6.

McConnell said Trump's supporters were “assaulting the Capitol in his name” and "carried his banners” while “screaming their loyalties to him.”

“It was obvious,” McConnell said of where the rioters' loyalties laid. He explained the riot was unsurprising given the lies Trump had fed to his supporters about the election being stolen.

" Tucker: This video shatters the left’s narrative about January 6" | Fox News | 10.4M subscribers

Tucker Carlson Unbound: Setting Fire to the Uniparty | COMMENTARY | By Frank Miele | March 13, 2023

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Tucker Carlson’s decision last week to air previously unseen video of the Jan. 6, 2021, confrontation between protesters and Capitol Police put his own career at risk and has made him the subject of bipartisan scorn. Some even speculate that he was silently punished by his bosses at Fox News, but Carlson doesn’t seem worried about being fired, and the condemnation he has received from both the majority leader and minority leader of the Senate has only emboldened him.

It will probably take years to fully understand the importance of Carlson’s challenge of the “official Washington” narrative of Jan. 6 as a “deadly insurrection,” but Carlson wasted no time last Monday in laying out the framework of his complete rejection of the “accepted truth” pushed by the Biden Department of Justice, the House Select Committee on January 6, and the mainstream media.

Only a tiny fraction of the thousands of hours of surveillance video released to Carlson by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was shown last week on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” but you only need a small pin to burst a large balloon, and by the time the week was over, all the president’s men couldn’t put the Humpty-Dumpty story of a “Trump-surrection” back together again.

“The images you will see were recorded 26 months ago today on January 6, 2021,” Carlson began. “Until now, politicians have kept this tape hidden from the public. There is no legitimate justification for that and there never has been.”

The powers that be would have you believe that Carlson had jeopardized national security by playing the tapes – probably 30 minutes out of the 41,000 hours. Now, it is true the tapes provided some interesting counterbalance to the non-stop harassment of Trump supporters that has taken place for the past two years, but if truth be told, the evidence on the tapes was much less significant than the reaction to them. What you really want to know now is, if 30 minutes of video has the Uniparty crowd so scared, what else are they hiding?

I think much more than the video, the Censorship-Industrial Complex (as journalist Matt Taibbi has accurately tabbed it) wants to shut down any information or even belief that goes counter to the official narrative, and that’s where Carlson got so deep under their skin that they were willing to rip themselves to shreds in an effort to get at him.

Everything Carlson said about Jan. 6 for three days last week was a threat to their power, and he knew it.

“The protesters were angry. They believed the election they had just voted in was unfairly conducted. They were right. In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy.”

He didn’t go beyond that in explaining the illegitimacy of the election, but he didn’t have to. The “it is clear” speaks volumes to those who haven’t bought into the official narrative that the 2020 election was “the most secure” in the nation’s history. Yeah, it was secure if you don’t believe the Supreme Courts of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that election law was violated en masse in those states. It was secure if you don’t have any concern about billionaire Mark Zuckerberg spending hundreds of millions of dollars to gain access to voter rolls and ensure that likely Biden voters were goosed to get their butts out of the chair and their ballots in the drop boxes. It was secure if you don’t care about Twitter and Facebook colluding with the federal government to make sure that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was falsely painted as Russian disinformation in the weeks leading up to the election.

Wikipedia | "Death of Brian Sicknick"
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Brian Sicknick, a United States Capitol Police (USCP) officer, died on January 7, 2021, after having two strokes one day after he responded to an attack on the U.S. Capitol. The District of Columbia chief medical examiner found that Sicknick had died from stroke, classifying his death as natural and additionally commented that "all that transpired played a role in his condition." His cremated remains were laid in honor in the Capitol Rotunda on February 2, 2021, before they were buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Multiple media outlets reported Sicknick's death was due to injuries he sustained, but months later the Washington D.C. medical examiner reported there were no injuries to Sicknick. Within a day after his death, the U.S. Capitol Police and the U.S. Justice Department each said that his death was due to injuries from the riot. Meanwhile media, citing two anonymous law enforcement officials, incorrectly reported for weeks that Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest. (emphasis added)

"In October of 2014, I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum when I received an invitation from some guy named Jeff Bezos from a company called Amazon. I had never heard of either, so I replied that I was going to be busy (even though I wasn’t!)

"I was also invited to speak at several conferences, including Women in the World hosted by Tina Brown, the founding editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. At Women in the World, I was scheduled to speak right before Hillary Rodham Clinton—a name I was familiar with from news coverage in South Korea when she was secretary of state. Other speakers there included Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, the actress Meryl Streep, and other political figures like Samantha Power, then America’s ambassador to the United Nations.

"This conference was a watershed moment for me and my understanding of the world. Until that point, I thought that the international community had neglected to do anything for the North Korean people because they didn’t know what was going on there. After all, only about two hundred North Korean defectors have made it to America legally in the past seventy-plus years, and no one inside North Korea can communicate with the outside world.

"After accepting the invitation to speak at the conference, I resolved to share with the esteemed audience what was actually going on in North Korea, so that Americans and Europeans with real money, power, and influence would feel inspired and empowered to do something. At the very least, I was sure that they would help spread the word about the modern-day holocaust taking place in North Korea, about the fact that it is being aided and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party, and that tens and even hundreds of thousands of mostly female North Korean defectors are being sold, raped, and otherwise harmed in China.

"In a word, that isn’t what happened. ...