Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder

Because make no mistake: Donald J. Trump’s assault on democracy was all-out and multi-pronged, and is being sustained even today. Consider his actions just here in Georgia:

Trump tried to strong-arm Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,800 votes, even hinting at criminal prosecution if Georgia’s top elections official refused. Trump pressured the U.S. attorney for north Georgia, B.J. Pak, to “find” evidence of fraud when none existed, then fired him for failing to uncover what did not exist. Trump tried and failed to intimidate Gov. Brian Kemp, House Speaker David Ralston and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan into calling an illegal special session of the state Legislature to overturn the legitimate decision of Georgia voters.He tried and succeeded in intimidating U.S. Sen. David Perdue and U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler into backing his coup attempt on the campaign trail and in Congress. He sent a team of legal hacks, led by Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, south to Georgia to tell us blatant lies, to feed us what we know now and knew then to be bluster and bullcrap, including attacking public servants who were simply doing their job honestly and competently.He and others engineered creation of a slate of “false electors” to substitute for the real thing, the legitimate thing, the constitutional thing, with the intent to use that false slate to subvert the voters’ intent.He and his team abused our state courts, filing nonsensical cases void of evidence, logic or legal basis, searching vainly for a judge who would collude with him.He encouraged allies deep in the U.S. Department of Justice to claim, falsely, that they had “identified serious concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” in Georgia and elsewhere, and to claim that “a special session (to overturn the election outcome) is warranted and in the national interest.”

The goal in all of that was the same, to rob the people of Georgia and by extension all of America of the right to choose their own leaders.

And in response we’re supposed to do … nothing?

As the federal indictment makes clear, Trump had been told repeatedly by multiple experts and investigators within his own administration and campaign that there was no evidence whatsoever of campaign fraud. He did not care. To the contrary, Trump and his confederates continued to poke and probe at every possible pressure point, looking for a weakness, either in the system or in individual character, that would allow him to steal an election that he had clearly lost.

So now, finally, the season for accountability has arrived.

We should not fear the reaction of those who might be angered by these indictments and prosecutions. We should instead fear the response if indictments and prosecutions had not been pursued, if this concerted, unfounded and cynical assault on democracy had gone unpunished. A democracy that lacks the will to defend itself, to stand up for itself using the law, logic and truth, will not long survive. Those with other, more dangerous forms of government in mind will take note.

It also cannot be that those with legal degrees, official campaign expense accounts, access to network camera time and official government titles, up to and including president of the United States, are somehow immune from prosecution, while those poor suckers whom they provoked into violent insurrection are sent to prison.

We are often warned these days that to employ the powers of law enforcement against such elites is to “weaponize” those powers, and if so I’m fine with it. When democracy comes under attack from within, as it most surely has, then those powers ought to be and need to be wielded as weapons, not for political advantage but as a matter of a democratic republic’s self-preservation.

That is in part why those powers exist, and it is time they were put to the use for which they were designed, which is justice.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

What follows in the video is a compilation of interactions between Joe Biden and various young people, attempting to make the case that the 80-year-old president sexually abuses young children.

This is what the modern Republican Party has become; this is what it is trying to make America become. Greene, like her spirit animal Donald Trump, appeals to the worst of us, and the worst of us respond.

I want to focus on one particular interaction in Greene’s video compilation, a conversation between Biden and a 13-year-old boy whom Biden embraces and asks for his telephone number. It is indeed a creepy moment, not because of the intimacy between Biden and the boy but because of the exceedingly perverted way in which Greene depicts it. In her grimy paws, something beautiful becomes something sickening.

In a longer video from which Greene steals the scene, the boy’s father introduces him to Biden at a campaign event in New Hampshire.

“We’re here because he stutters,” the father explains. “He wanted to hear you speak.”

Biden, of course, overcame a serious stuttering problem as a child. And his empathy with the kid is immediate.

“Ah man, I tell you what,” Biden says as he embraces the boy. “Don’t let it define you. You are smart as hell, you really are. You can do this. Can I get a phone number for you and I can tell you what I used to do, and how I would do it?”

Biden tells the boy that he still works with 25 other stutterers, trying to help them overcome their shared handicap, and he offers his personal help and encouragement.

“It takes a lot of practice, but I promise you. I promise you can do it. And don’t let it define you. You’re handsome, you’re smart. You’re a good guy, I really mean it.” And indeed, Biden did really mean it. He followed up with the promise, coaching the boy by phone and in person in tactics to overcome stuttering.

It takes a vile human being, without heart or any vestige of morality, to try to turn something humane and touching into something so ugly as pedophilia. It would be cruel coming from an anonymous internet troll, but it did not. It came from a member of Congress from right here in Georgia, a person who has become one of the most powerful people in her party.

That’s the part that bothers me most. American politics has always been a rough sport; we’ve always had grifters and charlatans in the game, and neither party has held a monopoly on the sort. Greene is nothing new.

But what’s new is the response. For a long, long time — so long that we had maybe fooled ourselves into thinking it would always be that way — people of both parties who thought of themselves as decent and intelligent have rejected her type, have pushed them back into the shadows and the fringes where they belong, nursing their sour resentments until their souls curdled. There were boundaries and limits, and prices to be paid for crossing those boundaries.

Now, too many of the “decent and intelligent” have chosen to fall silent, and the boundaries are ignored. The worst among us are rising, and they will continue to do so until they are stopped or they take us into very dark places. Because as Greene, Trump and others have shown us, they themselves have no boundaries, no limits on how vile they can be, and too many others have shown themselves willing to follow their example.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

Greene is more an exemplar of that rule than an exception to it.

Nonetheless, in their wisdom, the voters in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District have elected Greene as their U.S. representative, and it’s probably necessary to point out that they’ve now done it twice. They made that choice in 2020 – in both a contested primary and a general election — then last fall they confirmed it, rejecting a qualified, competent challenger by almost a two-to-one margin.

Very well. More than 775,000 people live in the 14th District, and if they have concluded that Greene is the best person to represent that district’s interests and values, if they think she’s the best and brightest they have to offer the country, then they have the right to make that choice. As just one of 435 members of Congress, what harm could she do, right?

But here’s where Greene does begin to get interesting, not in her own right but in what her existence and prominence tells us about our political culture. In her brief time in the public eye, Greene has uttered a long string of absurdities that rank among the dumbest things ever said by an elected official in our nation’s history, from alleging that Jews used space lasers to start California forest fires so they could buy the land cheaply to her most recent campaign calling for a “national divorce,” with red states separating from blue states.

Such a divorce, she claims, is “a necessary reality because of our irreconcilable differences,” and those who disagree must be “totally disconnected from real Americans and how they think & feel.” She then reeled off a long list of steps that such a divorce would enable, including the observation that blue states would be free to eliminate the national anthem and pledge of allegiance while red states could “require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance.”

That would be the pledge that speaks of “one nation … indivisible.”

Because of such stupidity – not despite it, but actually because of it – Greene has been elevated by the Republican Party to prominent positions in the hierarchy of the party and in Congress. She now serves on the House Oversight Committee, one of the more visible platforms the party can offer, and also on the Committee on Homeland Security, where no doubt she can be most effective in her campaign to protect us from Jewish space lasers. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has gone so far as to pledge his eternal devotion to Greene, telling friends “I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her,” and Greene herself seems to be positioning herself as a running mate to Donald Trump if he wins the Republican nomination, and even if he doesn’t.

Greene’s growing prominence is further proof that the Republican Party has forfeited the ability to defend itself against stupidity. It has become a party in which even its nominally brightest and best-educated, those with advanced degrees from the nation’s most prestigious universities, must feign a level of ignorance that would get you flunked from a ninth-grade civics class. In this case, almost no one in the GOP has dared to challenge the insanity of Greene’s proposal, because confronting insanity in that party has become the pathway to irrelevance. Bad ideas that are not confronted and challenged become stronger; silence is taken as acquiescence, which in fact it is.

We also see evidence of that weakness in the recent release of internal emails from Fox News that were written during the GOP’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Those emails, made public through a defamation lawsuit, make it clear that Fox personalities such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham knew full well that Trump’s fraud claims were not merely false but ludicrous on their face.

“Sidney Powell is a bit nuts,” Ingraham said in an email to her colleagues. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson said in another, calling the allegations “absurd.” Another Fox executive referred to Rudy Giuliani as “unhinged … has been for a while. I think booze has got him.”

Even Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, after watching Giuliani on a Fox show, sent an internal email describing the former mayor’s allegations as “really crazy stuff.”

Yet they did not dare to tell the truth – they did not dare to confront the stupidity, because for too long they had promoted the stupidity and encouraged the stupidity and profited from the stupidity. They admitted to each other in those emails that telling their viewers the truth – that Joe Biden won, and there was no evidence of voter fraud — would destroy the Fox News business model that was making them all rich. Out of “respect” for their audience, they told each other, they had to play along.

I’m sorry. You don’t “respect” your audience when you tell them things that you know aren’t true just so you can keep milking them for ratings and ad dollars. That’s like saying a con artist “respects” his victim. Those emails reveal the Fox stars as venal as Greene is stupid, which is about the worst thing you could say about people on both sides of that equation.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

Georgia, more than any other place in the country, was where it all went bad for Trump, and he knows it.

It was Georgia where the mythology of Trump first gave way to the reality of Trump, where his excesses finally had electoral consequences, where a few of his fellow Republicans showed the guts to stand up to him, where those same few Republicans proved it was possible to survive his anger and spite, and where voters first showed a willingness to punish the feckless cowardice of candidates who groveled too openly at Trump’s feet.

It hasn’t come easy. That must be part of the story too, because important things rarely are. Trump maintains a considerable fan base in the state, and as investigations continue, we’re learning the extraordinary, anti-constitutional lengths that Republican state legislators and members of Congress were willing to go to defy the votes of Georgia citizens and keep Trump in power. Those efforts failed, and overall these past two years have been Georgia’s finest moment, when the motto on its flag – “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation” – proved more than words.

The defiance began, of course, in November of 2020, when Trump lost the state by 11,780 votes. He had clearly taken Georgia for granted, and the shame and humiliation of defeat in a previously deep-red state rattled him, shaking him to the point that he lost whatever small sense of proportion he once possessed.

“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” he ranted in his now infamous post-election phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

In re-reading that conversation, I count almost two dozen times that Trump insisted there was no way, simply no way he could have lost Georgia:“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We won the state and we won it very substantially and easily. I think I probably did win it by half a million.”

“We won the election,” he insisted at another point. “As the governors of major states and the surrounding states said, there is no way you lost Georgia. As the Georgia politicians say, there is no way you lost Georgia. Nobody … everyone knows I won it by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

“Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong,” responded Raffensperger, ever the engineer.

A few days later, in a runoff on Jan. 5, 2021, Georgia voters who hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 20 years elected two of them in a single day, again as a rebuke to Trump. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ran good, smart campaigns, but it was Trump who gave them their narrow margins of victory, who sabotaged the two Republican incumbents by demanding that they support his effort to overturn the election.

David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler certainly did as Trump ordered – anything to please the boss — but Georgia voters just weren’t having it. In 2022, voters in states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada also rejected candidates who echoed Trump’s “Stop the Steal” nonsense, but it happened here first, when it mattered most.

His thirst for vengeance unsatiated, Trump then tried to make examples of Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, who had committed the unpardonable sin of placing loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Trump. He hand-selected submissive primary challengers to those who had dared defy him, believing that his grip on Georgia Republican voters was still strong, that they would show him the blind loyalty that Kemp and Raffensperger would not.

Instead those GOP voters — with strategic assistance from more than a few Democrats – reaffirmed their commitment to a government of laws, not of men, in the process shattering Trump’s aura of invincibility. Raffensperger won his GOP primary by 19 points; Kemp won by 52 points. Last week, Georgia did it once again, rejecting Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, as not just inadequate but insulting.

Georgia’s role in protecting American democracy may have yet another important chapter. We don’t know what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will decide once all the evidence has been gathered and assessed, but Georgia may also become the first place in which Trump is held legally and criminally accountable for his actions.

That would put a pretty little bow on the thing.

So, in conclusion …

Merry Christmas, America, and you’re welcome.

Love,
Georgia

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

According to Fuentes, American Jews are disrespectful ingrates who need to show more humility toward Christian Americans who have so far allowed them to be in this country. He admits that anti-Semitism has a history of erupting quickly into something ugly and violent – he’s actually happy about it, calling it the “silver lining” of anti-Semitism – but also argues that “there’s a reason for that, and the reason is them, OK?”

In other words, it’s the Jews’ fault.

“When it comes to the Jews, every society where the sh– has gone down with these people, it always goes from zero to 60,” Fuentes says. “It never starts with ‘they’re burning all the Talmuds in Paris,’ OK? It never starts that way. But frequently, it seems to end that way, and it gets there very rapidly.”

Fuentes says such things not in horror, but with the anticipation of a child awaiting Christmas. And just as Jews are responsible for causing anti-Semitism, in his mind they are responsible for stopping it too.

The Jews, he says, “had better start being nice to people like us. Because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier for them and a lot worse for them than anything that’s being said” on his show. And by being “nice,” he means among other things that Jews should stop talking about the Holocaust.

“I’ve heard enough about this Holocaust, I’ve heard enough about it. I don’t want to hear one more time about it. …. You want to hear about a Holocaust, how about Jesus Christ being crucified? That was a real Holocaust.”

Clearly, such a man should not be dining with a former American president. Trump has tried to claim that he did not know who Fuentes was, that he was an uninvited guest whom West had brought along. That isn’t much of an excuse, given that West, also known as Ye, is himself an avid and by now well-known anti-Semite with whom presidents should not dine.

Furthermore, and most telling, if Trump finds such ideologies repulsive and hateful, all he has to do is say so. He has not shown himself a shy man; when he disagrees with people he doesn’t hesitate to put them on blast. Yet in this case he has remained silent. At minimum, he acts afraid of offending and alienating Jew haters, because he wants their continued support.

Others in the Republican Party and conservative movement also seek that support. And it’s not just Trump of course. Earlier this year, Georgia’s own Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at a political convention that was organized and hosted by Fuentes, who introduced her to the crowd by lauding the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

She got a huge applause. Like Trump, Greene brushed aside criticism of her appearance with Fuentes by claiming not to know about his ideology, as if she makes a habit of accepting speaking invitations to unfamiliar groups.

And of course, Greene has her own well-documented history of anti-Semitism. In 2018, for example, she “speculated” that the wildfires then ravaging California had been started with space-based lasers deployed by the Rothschilds banking family as part of a plot to destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of real estate so they could buy it more cheaply. Wacko, but that’s what she said. As recently as June of this year, Greene announced that she had hired another far-right figure with a long history of anti-Semitism, Milo Yiannopoulos, as an unpaid intern in her congressional office.

As it turns out, Yiannopoulos plays a bit role in this latest controversy involving Trump. During the Mar-a-Lago dinner, West told Trump that he too was contemplating a run for president in 2024, a discovery that Trump did not take well and led to some friction. Afterward, West’s spokesman and campaign manager attacked Trump, accusing him of “continuing to suck the boots of the Jewish powers-that-be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country and see us all as disposable cattle according to their ‘holy’ book.

“We’re done putting Jewish interests first,” the spokesman said. “It’s time we put Jesus Christ first again in this country. Nothing and no one is going to get in our way to make that happen.”

That spokesman was Greene’s former intern, Yiannopoulus. That’s the type of person with whom Greene chooses to surround herself.

In a healthy political climate, continued association with vicious anti-Semites would get a person “canceled,” to borrow a term. In Greene’s case, her presence in Congress is a humiliation and embarrassment for Georgia, but it doesn’t seem likely to change. Despite her behavior, or more likely because of it, she is highly popular in her district, defeating a qualified, well-funded opponent by more than 30 points.

And even after her appearance with Fuentes, Georgia Republicans have rushed to bask in her popularity. Herschel Walker, for example, campaigned alongside Greene in late October, an association that he needed far more than she did.

Fuentes is right: Historically, anti-Semitism goes from zero to 60 very quickly. And while I can’t see the speedometer from where I’m sitting, we’re a long way from zero, going faster in a bad direction than I ever would have thought possible, and we’re picking up speed.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

In a recent campaign video, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican from Georgia, likened Democrats to destructive feral hogs allowed to range free and destroy the American countryside.

But Marjorie had a solution:

As the camera followed her, she grabbed a rifle and climbed aboard a waiting helicopter, where she tracked down and shot a fleeing hog. In the next scene, quite pleased with herself, Greene posed next to her dead prey and invited supporters to enter a free drawing, with the winner accompanying her on her next hog-killing expedition.

In a healthy political climate, members of both parties would unite to condemn such a message. But that is not the climate in which we live. To the contrary, lest anyone have moral qualms about the message of such a video, Greene offered an answer for that too. At a Trump rally in Michigan this month, she told the crowd that “we are all targets now though, for daring to push back against the regime…. I am not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.”

So … kill or be killed.

It would be nice to be able to dismiss that talk as the rantings of a loon, which on one level it is. But the rantings are being delivered by a loon invited to speak at a series of rallies by the former president of the United States, a man who remains the favorite for becoming the GOP presidential nominee in 2024, which implies a high level of support for such sentiments.

And instead of shunning Greene and condemning her remarks, other top Republicans are embracing her, happy to bask in her malevolent glow. JD Vance, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Ohio, has appeared alongside Greene at campaign events, as have Doug Mastriano, the extremist GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, and many others. Far from a pariah, she’s the GOP’s new “it girl,” the one everybody wants to be seen with.

In fact, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has made it clear that if Republicans gain control of the House and make him speaker, he would reward Greene with a much more prominent role in party leadership

“I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, (McCarthy) is going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway,” Greene predicted in an interview with a writer for the New York Times. “And if he doesn’t, they’re going to be very unhappy about it. I think that’s the best way to read that. And that’s not in any way a threat at all. I just think that’s reality.”

Greene is not particularly bright – anyone who believes that forest fires are caused by space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds falls a few pennies short of a nickel. But what she knows she knows. She knows her party’s base and its obsessions, because they are her obsessions; she knows her party’s leadership. She knows that leadership is terrified of its base, and she knows that because she is the embodiment of that base, the leaders are by extension terrified of her. These days, nobody in the Republican tribe is voted off the island because you’re a racist or insurrectionist or because you espouse violence. But you dare to publicly condemn those things, you’ll be sent to sit with Liz Cheney.

Greene also knows, probably through instinct, that if you say crazy things with certainty and conviction, it is the certainty and conviction that people will find impressive, that will mark you as a leader to be followed. For example, in recent months Greene and others in her party have taken to calling the Biden administration “the regime,” as she does in the comments quoted above. Why? Because a regime is illegitimate; a regime is imposed on a people through force, rather than emanating from that people. You don’t remove a regime through elections, because elections are not how the regime gained power in the first place. Calling it a regime is a subtle justification for using violence in its overthrow.

It’s important to acknowledge that no political party or movement is immune to the lure of violence. It is not an inherently Republican thing or a Democratic thing; it is a human thing. Part of the responsibility of leadership is to recognize that frailty in ourselves and others and try to tamp it down rather than provoke it. But at this moment in American history, members of only one party are featuring assault weapons prominently in their campaign ads and even family Christmas cards. Only one party is tolerating and even promoting the likes of Greene, with none daring to condemn her message.

It should not be difficult to state that the outcome of elections should be honored, and that violence is never the solution. If those things can no longer be said, if we no longer have broad acceptance of those two bottom-line propositions, if stating and defending them makes you anathema to a large chunk of America, then we no longer have a democracy or even a country.

What you first act out through make-believe you can later make reality. That final step, that step from play-acting to acting, is much less daunting once you’ve had sufficient rehearsal, which is what we’re witnessing.

In his 1951 book “The True Believer,” American philosopher Eric Hoffer explores the phenomenon of mass movements and extremists. To the fanatic, Hoffer writes, “chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end.”

Greene is such a fanatic, as are many others in the rising New Right who are riding racism and hatred and fear, who hint openly at the necessity for violence if the change they seek cannot be produced through the ballot box. Speaking personally, I am not ready to see this world with all its shortcomings come to a sudden end. But such fires, once ignited, can be difficult to suppress.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

I don’t think Georgia is prepared for what’s coming its way.

I don’t know how it could be, not with the most important and controversial trial in American history looming in its not-too-distant future.

Now, maybe that trial will never happen. After months of investigative work into an alleged criminal conspiracy to interfere with and overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, the special grand jury convened by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis could decide that no indictments are warranted.

After all, we don’t know what if anything the investigation is finding, because there have been few leaks of consequence. The grand jury process is supposed to be secret, and Willis and her team have been far more professional, diligent and disciplined about honoring secrecy requirements than a certain ex-president has been.

That high degree of professionalism and discipline tells us that Willis is taking this very seriously, as she must. And I find it hard to believe that someone who has run such a tight ship is still stringing out a probe that hasn’t found much. Donald Trump’s prospects of escaping unscathed would be far better with an investigation that was loose and sloppy, which so far this shows no sign of being.

To the contrary, through court filings, subpoenas and witness statements to the media, we know that the investigation has been broad and wide-ranging. “False electors” who proclaimed themselves the true voice of Georgia voters, and who sent false documents to Congress to that effect, have been warned they might be targets for prosecution. Rudy Giuliani, who told a string of huge whoppers to the Georgia Legislature to try to get it to hand Georgia’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, is also a potential target. Subpoenas have been issued to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, to Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, to Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, as well as many others.

Willis and her team are also exploring the illegal breach of voting machines in Coffee County by Trump advocates, a crime that Georgia’s Republican leadership has been notably slow to address, as well as an apparent attempt to intimidate Fulton County poll workers who were falsely accused of rigging the election outcome.

Again, this is not the behavior of an investigative team that is coming up empty. It looks instead like the careful, confident work of a team that is quietly disassembling a conspiracy network, figuring out how this effort is related to that effort, who gave the orders, who drew up the strategy, who should be held responsible.

And while we have no insight into the operations of the special grand jury, congressional investigations into Trump’s effort to remain in office despite losing the election have been far more public. Extremely damning emails, messages and witness testimony from Trump officials, including requests for pardons from conspiracy participants, have no doubt contributed immensely to Willis’ effort to weave all of this into a narrative that she can take to a jury, a narrative that places Trump at the center of it all. It would be an injustice to prosecute and potentially convict those at lower rungs of an alleged conspiracy to overthrow American democracy while allowing the man who would have benefitted most from it, who inspired it and who even reveled in it, to go scot-free.

That said, though, we should acknowledge that it would be a monumental decision to bring charges against Trump. It would create enormous security concerns, with Trump already hinting darkly that violence might be a justifiable response. The global media spotlight would be harsh and blinding, because nothing like it has ever happened in American history. It would be a storm like we have never witnessed, and we would be the center of it.

However, the events that have brought us to this point have also been unprecedented: Never before have we witnessed a serious, multi-pronged attempt to halt the peaceful transfer of presidential power; never before have we seen an attempt to silence the voice of American voters. The Fulton grand jurors have seen and heard things that we have not, and if they recommend to Willis that charges are necessary, then they can’t be blamed for the resulting chaos. The responsibility would belong to those who set all this in motion from Nov. 3, 2020 through Jan. 6, 2021.

They made the mess; this would be the cleanup.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

For two hours Tuesday, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson calmly, matter-of-factly testified to the commission of high crimes by the former president and by many of those around him.

She told her fellow Americans that Trump had been informed on the morning of Jan. 6 that the mob assembled by his command had armed itself with “knives, guns in the form of pistols and rifles, bear spray, body armor, spears, and flagpoles.” She spoke of efforts within the Trump White House to remove violent language from the president’s speech that day, to prevent incitement, and she told us that Trump had refused to change that language.

“I – – I don’t effing care that they have weapons,” she quoted Trump as saying about the mob. “They’re not here to hurt me.”

She talked of Trump planning to lead the armed mob to the Capitol, even after repeated, almost desperate warnings from Trump’s own White House counsel that “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.” And according to Hutchinson, only the stubborn refusal of the Secret Service to participate in that part of the plot prevented Trump from taking part.

She recalled the strange indifference from Trump and her boss, chief of staff Mark Meadows, to news that the Capitol was being assaulted. And she talked about the planning that had preceded Jan. 6, including what to do after the Capitol had been taken.

“You know, I — I know that there were discussions about him having another speech outside of the Capitol before going in,” Hutchinson told the January 6 special committee. “I know that there was a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point.”

Imagine, for a moment, that scenario. The mob has taken the Capitol; Congress has fled. And into the abandoned House chamber marches a triumphant Trump, ready to begin his second, maybe never-ending term.

In one of many other chilling moments, Hutchinson also describes a conversation she witnessed between Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cippolone after they and Trump had learned that the crowd was calling for Vice President Mike Pence to be hung:

“I remember Pat saying something to the effect of, ‘Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be f’ing hung,’” Hutchinson recalled. “And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard (Trump), Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’”

He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they were doing anything wrong.

As some have pointed out, it’s true that neither the committee nor the American people are hearing much from the other side, so to speak, from those who might defend Trump’s actions or contradict the storylines laid out so emphatically by the committee. But why is that?

Most of those who might conceivably offer such testimony – everyone from Republican congressmen to former generals to Trump’s White House counsel to the spouse of a Supreme Court justice — are fighting subpoenas, taking the Fifth or simply refusing to testify. And if they don’t want to tell their story to the committee, under oath, every reporter and TV outlet in the world would love to give them an opportunity to do so without such an oath. Apparently, they’re afraid that revealing what they did, what they witnessed and what they heard wouldn’t be all that helpful to Trump or to their own situation.

I think they’re probably right.

In fact, the same instincts of self-preservation that drove these people to stay silent or play along while Trump tried to end American democracy are still telling them, even after all this, that cowardice remains the best course. They are victims of their character.

As Hutchinson made clear, many of the now-silent had sought pardons for their actions from Trump, another indication that the stories they might tell aren’t exactly exonerative. Trump did not grant those pardons, probably because doing so would have been an admission of his own criminal behavior, and as always the only hide he was interested in protecting was his own.

However, as stunning as Hutchinson’s testimony was, it suggested that even more serious revelations are yet to come. Throughout her appearance, she referred to secret meetings to which she had not been invited, and ominous hints and clues that she did not fully understand at the time.

“I recall hearing the word Oath Keeper and hearing the word Proud Boys closer to the planning of the Jan. 6 rally, when (Rudy) Giuliani would be around,” she said at one point. At another, she recalled Trump issuing an order for Meadows “to speak with Roger Stone and General (Mike) Flynn on Jan. 5.” She mentioned the existence of a “war room” at a Washington hotel where Stone, Giuliani, Flynn, John Eastman and other plotters were meeting the night of the 5th, and she pleaded with her boss not to attend.

“I wasn’t sure everything that was going on at the Willard Hotel, although I knew enough about what Mr. Giuliani and his associates were pushing during this period. I didn’t think that it was something appropriate for the White House chief of staff to attend or to consider involvement in, and made that clear to Mr. Meadows.”

Meadows heeded that advice, according to Hutchinson. Instead of attending that meeting in person, he participated by telephone, and I think he’s going to very much regret doing even that much.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

We can’t know what’s happening inside the secret, special-purpose grand jury convened at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta. We can’t hear the sworn testimony being given about Donald Trump’s multiple efforts to overturn the 2020 elections here in Georgia; we can’t read the documents being subpoenaed; we can’t know what revelations the investigation might be uncovering.

But up in Washington, D.C., a much more public process is playing out, much of it focused on the same set of facts, narratives and players that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is exploring here in Atlanta. And from that, we’re learning a lot.

For example, one of the core issues confronting Willis in her decision whether to prosecute Trump is the question of Trump’s intent. If the former president truly believed that he had carried Georgia and was simply trying to get an accurate vote count, then he committed no crime. But if he did know that he had lost the election but was trying to overturn it anyway, then this was indeed a coup attempt and prosecution is not only possible but necessary.

In a televised hearing by a U.S. House select committee this week, we got a pretty definitive answer to that particular question:

1. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr testified via video that he had told Trump repeatedly and emphatically, in language too graphic to print here, that there was no evidence of significant vote fraud in Georgia or anywhere else. Barr’s replacement as attorney general later told Trump the same thing.
2. Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, testified that he too told Trump that they had lost fair and square.
3. Matt Oczkowski, the Trump campaign’s top data analyst, reaffirmed to Trump that he had lost fairly.
4. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, also told him he had lost.
5. Trump’s appointee as head of U.S. cybersecurity, Chris Krebs, investigated voting-machine fraud charges and announced on Twitter that “in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” Trump can’t claim he didn’t know about that tweet, because he fired Krebs the same day, also via Twitter, citing the tweet as the reason.
6. A similar fate befell BJay Pak, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for northern Georgia. In testimony made public by the House committee this week, Pak said he had reported to his Justice Department superiors that he could find no evidence of election fraud in Georgia. For that, Trump demanded his resignation.
7. And of course, in their now-infamous phone call with Trump, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his staff also patiently walked through all the detailed evidence proving that there was no evidence of voting or election fraud.

So yes, Trump knew that he had lost. Trump knew because many well-informed, credible fellow Republicans – many of them his own appointees – had dared to tell him so on repeated occasions, citing actual evidence and data. The House committee has made that clear.

Thanks to the House committee, we may also get an early window into Raffensperger’s secret grand-jury testimony about Trump’s demand that Raffensperger “find” the 11,800 votes that Trump needed to carry Georgia.

For the moment, we don’t know if Raffensperger told the grand jury that he felt pressured by Trump to take improper or illegal actions to void the election results. We don’t know how Raffensperger interpreted Trump’s suggestion that Raffensperger might be criminally prosecuted if he did not reverse the outcome of the election, or whether he saw it as an effort to intimidate him.

But we do know that Raffensperger was also subpoenaed by and has testified to the House committee. According to the committee schedule, we will hear at least portions of his testimony in a public hearing next week.

Yet another Georgia angle that Willis will find interesting comes from a document recently made public by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s an unsent letter, drafted by Trump co-conspirators and circulated within the U.S. Department of Justice and elsewhere by Trump sympathizers in December of 2020. The draft is addressed to Gov. Brian Kemp, House Speaker David Ralston and Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, and it’s titled “Georgia Proof of Concept.”

The proposed letter falsely states that the Department of Justice had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election” in Georgia. “In light of these developments,” the draft letter states, “the Department recommends that the Georgia General Assembly should convene in special session” to reallocate Georgia’s electoral votes from Joe Biden to Trump.

By that point, Kemp had already rebuffed Trump’s demands for a special session, but Trump would not be dissuaded. The letter insisted that “the Georgia General Assembly has implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session … regardless of any purported limit imposed by the state constitution or state statute requiring the Governor’s approval.”

In other words, the Georgia General Assembly should not feel itself bound by either Georgia law or the Georgia Constitution. That’s remarkable.

As the House select committee has documented, Trump was deeply involved in pressing the DOJ to send that false letter to Georgia imploring state officials to break their own laws. At one critical point, after acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen said he would never issue such a letter, Trump even threatened to fire Rosen and replace him with someone more willing to carry out his illegal orders.

What the House committee is exposing, what Willis may be finding, is a pattern in which Trump repeatedly tries to recruit people into his conspiracy. When Trump was told by Raffensperger that there was no legal way to change the vote outcome, Trump insisted that he do it anyway. When Mike Pence told Trump that there was no legal or constitutional way to alter the electoral-vote count, Trump pressured him intensely, publicly and privately, to do it anyway. When Kemp told Trump that there was no legal way to call the state Legislature into special session, Kemp was told to do it anyway. When DOJ lawyers said they had no valid grounds to send that “proof of concept” letter to Georgia or other states, Trump said do it anyway.

Do it anyway, regardless of the facts or the law. Folks, that’s criminal.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

NOW WATCH: Peter Navarro tells judge he wants to postpone trial because he’ll be on his book tour

Peter Navarro tells judge he wants to postpone trial because he’ll be on his book tourwww.youtube.com

For almost five decades, Roe v. Wade has been established American law, guaranteeing the constitutional right of choice to all Americans. Even those Supreme Court justices now ready to toss that precedent aside have previously testified under oath during their Senate confirmation hearings that they believed Roe is established law that ought to be respected.

They lied.

They lied to the Senate, and they lied to us. The fact that most Americans on both sides of the abortion question understood them to be lies at the time they were told does not alter their character as lies. And those lies have been accompanied by multitudes of other lies, as lies tend to be.

For example, we have been told for most of the decades since Roe that the pro-life movement was not seeking an absolute ban on abortion, that of course reasonable exemptions would be allowed in cases of rape, incest, life of the mother or health of the mother. Of course it would not apply to ectopic pregnancies, or to pregnancies in which fetal defects would make it impossible for the baby to survive. To impose a ban in those situations would be barbaric.

Likewise, we have been reassured that a reversal of Roe would not mean a national ban on abortion, but would merely return the decision-making powers to the 50 states, which would each craft its own approach to the issue. We have also been told earnestly that post-Roe, no one would be seeking to prosecute those who sought abortions, out of sympathy for women placed in such a difficult situation.

But now, on the precipice of that change, all such reassurances are being abandoned. Congressional Republicans are preparing legislation to ban abortion nationwide. Laws already on the books in various states in anticipation of Roe’s reversal would outlaw not just abortion but the crossing of state lines to seek an abortion. Think of them as fugitive abortion laws. Bills are also moving in state legislatures to treat abortion as homicide, with pregnant women, doctors, nurses and administrators as murderers or accomplices.

And those three exceptions? Republicans who today dare to support allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest or life of the mother risk excommunication from their party, in yet another example of the party’s increasing radicalism. The only acceptable position now is to insist that human life begins at conception, and all else flows from that.

If human life begins at conception then any attempt to end that life must be treated as murder. If human life begins at conception then it doesn’t matter how that conception occurred – rape, incest — it doesn’t matter. A woman who was given no choice about whether to have sex is also given no choice whether to carry to term and give birth if that rape results in pregnancy.

“Oh, don’t worry,” we are told. “Rape rarely results in pregnancy,” which is false. But if those instances truly are rare, then surely we can allow an exception in those cases?

No, we cannot. If human life begins at conception then all abortion is murder. If human life begins at conception then of course it is criminal to cross state lines to end that life. If human life begins at conception, if embryos are full-blown U.S. citizens, then of course the U.S. government must intervene; it cannot allow pre-born Americans to die in one state but live in another.

In a leaked draft opinion, written with the apparent support of four of his nine colleagues on the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito dismisses the idea that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, and with it the idea that some decisions are too intimate and personal to be decided by the heavy hand of government. As Alito notes, the words “privacy” and “abortion” are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, therefore leading him to conclude that we have no right to such things.

He also waves away the Ninth Amendment, which the Founders included in anticipation of just such an argument. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” it states. Alito writes that the amendment does not apply, because the right to abortion “is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.”

But if there is no right to privacy in the Constitution, if it is not among those rights “retained by the people” even if it is not explicitly mentioned, then the door is reopened to challenge other rights granted as part of the right to privacy: the right to obtain contraceptives, the right of gay Americans to live as straight Americans live, the right to marry. Because after all, “gay” and “contraceptive” also do not appear in the Constitution.

Instead, Alito writes, “it is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

If that draft opinion holds, as it probably will, the state legislators that you elect, the members of Congress and the attorneys general and governors that you elect, will now decide whether and how the rights that we have enjoyed for half a century will continue to exist.

The Constitution, as construed by this court, will no longer protect us. Our only remaining protection is through the ballot box, and if we don’t make our voices heard loudly and clearly there, then we can expect even worse rulings in the years ahead. Vote wisely or accept the consequences.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.