At last!

December 13, 2022

          At last! The DOJ appears to be investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. You will recall that Trump’s attempt to overturn the Georgia election was recorded on audio tape! (“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”) And yet, for two years after the audio of that crime was released, there was no evidence that the DOJ was investigating Trump’s attempted interference in Georgia. But only three weeks after Jack Smith was appointed as special counsel, Smith sent a subpoena to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking for all communications with Trump and a dozen campaign officials and lawyers (including Sydney Powell and Cleta Mitchell). See Axios, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger subpoenaed in DOJ’s Trump investigation.

          The documents subpoenaed by Jack Smith are the type that prosecutors seek at the beginning of an investigation. The subpoena demands that Raffensperger turn over

any and all communications in any form to, from, or involving Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (hereinafter, “the Trump Campaign”), Donald J. Trump, or any employee or agent of, or attorney for, the Trump Campaign or any records or documents that record, summarize, transcribe, annotate, or reflect any such communications.

          Even though the subpoena suggests that Smith is starting from scratch on the Georgia investigation, every indication is that he will move with the urgency demanded of the situation. And, as noted above, Trump’s criminal efforts in Georgia are recorded on audiotape, so Smith should be able to move quickly to indict Trump on that charge.

          Trump’s interference in Georgia is one of the two crimes that seem easiest to prosecute. (I don’t mean to suggest by making that comparative statement that prosecution of any crime against Trump will be “easy” in an absolute sense.) The other crime is Trump’s theft and retention of national defense secrets. As Philip Rottner explains in The Bulwark, that crime is ripe for indictment. See The Bulwark, It’s Time to Indict Donald Trump.

          As with everything Rotner writes, his analysis is detailed and careful. If you are interested in the best argument for indicting Trump for the theft of defense secrets now, I recommend Rotner’s article. But I especially recommend his unassailable conclusion:

 So, at long last, it is time to indict Donald Trump.

If it were you, you’d already be in jail.

          Good point, and well said! I suspect that Jack Smith feels the same way.

Talking Points Memo releases Mark Meadows’s texts surrounding January 6th.

          One of my favorite sources, Talking Points Memo, has released a trove of texts to and from Mark Meadows surrounding January 6th. TPM has featured four articles on this topic today, but a good place to start is here: Mark Meadows Exchanged Texts With 34 Members Of Congress About Plans To Overturn The 2020 Election.

          It will take some time to understand the full import of the texts, but they are already reverberating through Washington—and beyond. Several Republican members of Congress advocated overturning the election. But the most notable advocate for that insurrectionist view was Jim Jordan, who urged that VP Mike Pence reject electors certified by the states. Jordan repeated baseless allegations of fraud and concluded, “an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally enacted statute, is no elector at all.” GOP Representative Ralph Norman called for the imposition of martial law. (There is much more to discuss in future editions of the newsletter.)

          Jim Jordan is likely to be the chair of the House Judiciary Committee commencing on January 3, 2023. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less serve as a chair of a House Committee. The same logic applies to Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and two dozen other House Republicans. Read on!

Kevin McCarthy will appoint supporters of the January 6th insurrection to House committees.

          Over the weekend, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared at a “young Republicans” meeting and announced that if she and Steve Bannon were in charge of the January 6th insurrection, “We would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed.” Greene claims she was being humorous. There is nothing funny about the violence and death that occurred despite the absence of firearms on January 6th.

          Kevin McCarthy has promised to restore the insurrectionist-admirer Greene to her committee assignments—if he becomes Speaker. But as Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Tulis argue in The Bulwark, someone who supports insurrectionists should not be Speaker:

The new Speaker—the first post-January 6th Speaker—should not be an election denier. The new Speaker should not be any of the 147 representatives and senators who went along with the mob and voted to reject the electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. The constitutional officer second in line to the presidency should not be someone who tried to overturn the last election for the presidency.

          McCarthy was among the 147 Republicans who opposed counting the electoral ballots of Arizona’s duly selected electors. Moreover, after voting to overturn the election, McCarthy has consistently denied he did so—despite a congressional record that reflects his vote against counting the Arizona electoral votes. See Talking Points Memo, McCarthy Falsely Denies Voting To Overturn Election Results.

          So, there you have it: An election denying Speaker who will elevate a member who fantasizes about an even more violent, armed insurrection on January 6th.

Musk: From bad to worse.

          As legendary news anchorman Ron Burgandy once said, “Boy, that escalated quickly.” After Musk attacked Dr. Fauci and LGBTQ people on Saturday, the Twitter Trust and Safety Council scheduled a meeting for Monday evening to “discuss recent developments” at Twitter. The Trust and Safety Council is designed to minimize and ban abusive tweets of the type being sent by Musk—including the tweet attacking Dr. Fauci and LGBTQ people.

          Apparently, Musk was feeling anxious about the Trust and Safety Council meeting scheduled for Monday evening, so he did what any ego-maniacal billionaire would do—he dissolved the Council twenty minutes before the meeting. See HuffPo, Elon Musk’s Twitter Dissolves Trust And Safety Council.

          In other words, the remaining guardrails are off at Twitter. Musk has made a grievous mistake. Two weeks ago, the EU threatened to ban Twitter if Musk did not improve Twitter’s controls over content, including hate speech and disinformation. See Financial Times, EU warns Musk that Twitter faces ban over content moderation.

          In the meantime, Musk has responded to backlash against his tweet attacking Dr. Fauci and LGBTQ people by tweeting, in part,

Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.

          Hmm. So, Musk can’t stand the thought of conforming his speech to evolving social norms? Are his tender sensibilities offended by the fact that it is no longer socially acceptable to refer to Black Americans as “*******” or gay men as “*******” or Jewish people as “*****” or Italians as “*****” or Irish people as “*****” or Asian people as “******”?

It is no sacrifice on Musk’s part to recognize the dignity of LGBTQ people by calling them by their chosen pronouns, just as it is no sacrifice on Musk’s part to refrain from using racial slurs and bigoted terms to refer to his fellow Americans.

          Readers have asked in emails and Comments what we can do. I believe that users should not flee Twitter, which would abandon a digital town square to extremists and hate speech. But we can tell advertisers of our displeasure that they are subsidizing hate speech. I can’t find an organized effort to identify and boycott those advertisers. If you know of such an effort, please email me or post it in the Comments section. (To save effort and avoid missteps, here is a list of advertisers that have reportedly suspended advertising on Twitter: In less than a month, Elon Musk has driven away half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers | Media Matters for America.)

Our debt of gratitude to the Ukrainian people.

          Tim Snyder is familiar to many readers as the author of On Tyranny. Snyder is also a professor of European history at Yale and a writer on Substack. He recently posted a moving essay on the debt of gratitude that America (and the world) owes to the Ukrainian people. See Gratitude to Ukraine - by Timothy Snyder (substack.com). His essay begins,

Americans (and many others) owe Ukrainians a huge debt of gratitude for their resistance to Russian aggression.  For some mixture of reasons, we have difficulty acknowledging this.  To do so, we have to find the words.  Seven that might help are: security, freedom, democracy, courage, pluralism, perseverance, and generosity.

          Professor Snyder’s essay is moving and filled with deep insight into the ways in which the courage of the Ukrainian people in resisting Russia has reshaped our world. Check it out.

          Separately, a reader mentioned in the Comments section a few weeks ago that Professor Snyder’s semester-long class about Ukraine taught to first-year Yale students is available (for free) on YouTube. I have started listening and can report that every lecture is filled with interesting insights that will unsettle your beliefs about European history—in a good way! Here is an interesting fact: Both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin are named after the same person, known either as Vladimir the Great or Volodymyr the Great. Whatever his name, Volodymyr converted to Christianity (for political reasons) in 988, and effectively founded the proto-nation precursor to Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. It’s a bit more complicated than my summary suggests, but if you are interested, the first lecture is here: Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine.

Concluding Thoughts.

          In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote the following sentence: Democrats face a tough Senate map in 2024. A reader (Mike S.) responded with the following Comment:

I want to push back on your reprise of what is rapidly becoming the universal mantra of conventional wisdom—the 2024 Senate map is an impending Democratic disaster. . . . When are we going to learn? Believing the worst can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

          I thanked the reader for the correction and promised to never make that mistake again! As soon as I made my vow, I ran across a story that proves the reader’s point. See Politico, Why one rising GOP senator is tapping out for a governor’s race instead. As explained in the story, GOP Senator Mike Braun will not run for re-election in a seat that flipped from blue to red in 2018. In other words, Republicans now have one seat they have to worry about retaining that they previously assumed was "safe.” And Politico notes that GOP Senator Kennedy of Louisiana is considering vacating his seat to run for governor of his state in 2023.

          While it is too earlier to make any predictions, the “Senate map” in 2024 is wide open and Democrats just got a lucky break in Indiana. So, everyone, please make a vow with me now: “I will not fall victim to the narrative that the Senate map favors Republicans in 2024.” As Yogi Berra should have said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

          If we learned anything from the midterms, it is that we cannot surrender to defeatism or media-driven narratives. We control our fate—so long as we do not cede control to others who seek to distract and demoralize us with disinformation and doubt.

          Stay strong! Talk to you tomorrow!