9/11 cases: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed speaks in court, lectures judge
In a surprise move on Wednesday, accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed urged the military judge presiding over his case at Guantánamo not to be swayed by broad claims of US national security invoked by prosecutors, nor by sympathy for the nearly 3,000 victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks…
Georgia's lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan says he received disturbing threats from fellow Republicans for refusing to endorse Donald Trump's election lies.
The twice-impeached one-term president pressured Georgia's GOP governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn his loss in that typically Republican state, and Duncan told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he paid a personal price for refusing to go along with the scheme.
"Look, i've got three kids -- three boys [ages] 19, 15, 10, I'm married to my high school sweetheart," Duncan said. "These have been some very interesting times for us. I'm proud to have them on my team, they've been very supportive. But when you receive death threats from hundreds of Republicans from around the country, that's a problem, when you're only sitting there telling the truth."
However, the lieutenant governor remains hopeful the Republican Party will turn away from its cult-like devoting to the former president.
"There's a better day ahead," Duncan said. "I'm proud to go to work on behalf of my family and 11 million Georgians, but this is bigger than Georgia. It's time to create a movement, a movement that is worthy to ask for millions and tens of millions of people to vote for."
05 18 2021 07 14 40 www.youtube.com
Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg on Tuesday stomped all over Trump supporters' "audit" of ballots in Arizona, and predicted that whatever "findings" the audit presented would be totally lacking in credibility.
While appearing on CNN, Ginsberg said that the audit was a major black eye for the Arizona GOP and could depress turnout for the party in future elections.
"The audit itself and the way it's been run has been really sloppy, unprofessional, and ultimately... its credibility is going to be really challenged," he said. "Now that we're getting in to the deep details of what this audit is, and it's clear from the charges made by the Cyber Ninjas that they just don't understand what they're doing."
He went on to say that even some Trump diehards may be starting to realize that the audit's frantic search for traces of bamboo in ballots to supposedly prove nefarious Chinese influence was damaging their credibility with the public.
He then predicted that the Arizona GOP's decision to allow the audit to take place would come back to haunt the party.
"Just look at the political peril this has now put Arizona Republicans in," he said. "You've got Republicans fighting with each other. There's a significant segment of the Republican base that doesn't believe that elections are valid. If people don't believe elections are valid, they are unlikely to participate."
Watch the video below.
GOP election lawyer stomps all over Trump fans' ballot audit www.youtube.com
The United States came perilously close to a second civil war over Donald Trump's election loss, but that threat hasn't evaporated.
The former president's supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to overturn Joe Biden's election win in favor of authoritarianism, which columnist Damon Linker argues in The Week would have kicked off a civil war -- which now remains a volatile risk after future elections.
"The chilling events of Jan. 6 were made possible by profoundly deep differences between Democrats and Republicans — not over policy or morals, but over reality itself," Linker wrote. "That was Trump's decisive contribution to our civic breakdown. On top of the substantive partisan disagreements that have piled up over the decades, Trump built on and radicalized the polemical style of right-wing media, combining it with the lies and intentional distortions of a well-practiced conman who considers it unacceptable ever to concede a loss."
Trump then exploited the long-standing right-wing paranoia about voter fraud to spin a conspiracy theory that denied anything short of victory, and in just six months the twice-impeached one-term president has thoroughly corrupted the Republican Party's commitment to democracy.
"A significant chunk of the American electorate now resides in an alternative universe of facts about the nation's elections while continuing to share the same political space with the rest of the country," Linker wrote.
Future elections will now likely depend on which party controls Congress and governments in the states with the closest margins, which could throw the process into partisan chaos.
"That's the direction in which we seem to be headed," Linker wrote. "Not toward the imposition of dictatorial rule, but toward something like its opposite — a cascading breakdown of authority as the country and its citizens, already residing in wholly different realities, break apart into rival camps and find themselves incapable of reaching even the most minimal agreement required for functional and stable government and the maintenance of rudimentary public order."
"When a nation gets to that point, it has already slipped beyond the bounds of normal politics into the twilight world of outright dysfunction and the settling of disputes by violence instead of ballots," he added.
Copyright © 2021 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
Don't Sit on the Sidelines of History. Join Raw Story Investigates and Go Ad-Free. Support Honest Journalism.
Subscribe Annually
$95 / year — Just $7.91/month
Subscribe Monthly
$1 trial
I want to Support More
$14.99 per month
