"Who's With Me"
There's no doubt that Donald Trump desperately wanted to overturn the 2020 election results. He failed because no one would help him.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
First, a quick reminder that tomorrow I’ll be Zoomcasting at 12:30 PM tomorrow. Anthony Fisher, a columnist for Business Insider and a previous Zoomcast participant, will be joining me. We’ll be discussing our recent columns on post-COVID optimism and his latest on how the pandemic is changing the way parents think about work. Anthony is one of the sharpest writers I know, and I’m thrilled to have him on again. Now on to the news.
“Overturn the Election”
Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report titled “Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election,” which is one helluva title and completely accurate.
Indeed, the report captures Trump using these exact words. According to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Trump opened a January 3 meeting with his White House counsel and DOJ officials by stating, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”
The language is telling — and in particular, the use of the word “overturn.” It’s an explicit statement that Trump knew he lost the election and wants the Department of Justice to step in “overturn” the results and ensure that he remains in office. Of course, one has to be careful drawing too direct of a conclusion from Trump’s words since it’s his propensity to be inexact in his use of language (understatement of the century right there). But Rosen’s testimony offers a clear indication that despite his raging about a stolen election, Trump knew that he’d lost, and he wanted the Department of Justice to keep him in office. I would imagine that the Senate report only enhances Trump’s legal jeopardy. Indeed, I struggle to see how the former president can avoid criminal indictment in light of these statements procured under oath. Rosen’s testimony is confirmation that Trump unlawfully tried to overturn the election results. There’s no real doubt about this anymore.
All Alone
Not surprisingly, the other key takeaway from the report is that the president is a raving lunatic and a true authoritarian. None of this is a surprise. For nine months now we’ve been bombarded with stories about the president’s explicit and corrupt efforts to remain in power. However, as I’ve written before, the other takeaway is that his efforts failed because virtually no one was willing to go along with him. There was one quisling in the Department of Justice — Jeffrey Clark, the then-Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Division. Clark openly tried to collaborate with Trump in using the power of the Department to cast doubt on the election returns. Yet, he had no allies. No one at DOJ — Rosen and the other leaders of the Department told Trump they would resign en masse — and no one at the White House. Indeed, Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Deputy White House Counsel Pat Philbin informed the president of their intention to resign if he went through with efforts to use the Department to cast doubt on the Georgia election returns.
Perhaps even more striking was the behavior of Attorney General Bill Barr. In early October, the Department announced “an exception to the general non-interference with elections policy.” According to the report, DOJ “instructed U.S. Attorneys’ Offices that they could publicly announce election fraud investigations prior to Election Day.” Barr’s directive upended longstanding DOJ policy to avoid discussing criminal investigations right before elections for fear of prejudicing the electorate against a candidate (I’m looking at you, Jim Comey). In addition, “two days after then-candidate Joe Biden was declared the Electoral College winner, Barr issued a memorandum authorizing and encouraging overt, pre-certification ‘election irregularity inquiries.’ Barr’s November 9, 2020 memorandum directly contradicted DOJ’s longstanding policy against overtly investigating election fraud allegations before the election results are certified.”
Barr took both steps on behalf of the president and in furtherance of Trump’s false claims about election fraud, which of course, pre-dated Election Day. Yet, though Barr was willing to get the ball rolling on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, he refused to go all the way. As the report notes, on December 1, “'Barr conceded that DOJ had found no evidence of widespread election fraud. He stated that DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been working to follow up on specific information they had received, but that ‘to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.’” Two weeks later, he submitted his resignation and left office on December 23.
Barr does not get a medal for this. His behavior is deplorable, but it is telling that even a figure as corrupt and as consistently solicitous of the president’s authoritarian tendencies as Barr had a limit to how far he was willing to go. It’s one thing to talk about electoral fraud — as Barr did. It’s another to lay the groundwork for a potential investigation. But it’s something altogether to subvert democracy when evidence of fraud simply doesn’t exist. There were steps Barr could have taken to further Trump’s coup attempts. He didn’t take them.
None of this means that things will play out differently in 2024 if we are faced with a Trump-led effort to overturn an election result. But we should still take solace from the fact that in 2020, when push came to shove, virtually no one was willing to help the president’s corrupt efforts. Ultimately, Trump’s plot to overturn the election failed because he couldn’t find any co-conspirators to go along with him. This latest report from the Senate offers yet further confirmation.
What’s Going On?
A federal judge in Texas granted a Justice Department request to block implementation of the state’s odious abortion law. In an unusually sharp rebuke of Texas lawmakers, Judge Robert Pitman wrote, “From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their own lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.
Even more striking was Pitman’s direct rebuke of the Supreme Court, which last month punted on staying the law, in effect, overturning the right to an abortion in the state of Texas. According to Pittman’s opinion, “That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.” Ouch.
Ever since GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to make a deal on extending the debt ceiling to December, the pundit world has been furiously debating whether or not McConnel caved. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall is convinced that McConnell’s actions represent an “abject fold.”
But I’m with Ed Kilgore here.
“First and foremost, he (McConnell) gets what he wanted most from the whole debt-limit fight: all 50 Democratic senators voting for a specific-dollar debt-limit increase with a lot of zeroes on it. The actual number of zeroes is irrelevant for purposes of 2022 attack ads, which can simply charge vulnerable Democrats with voting to “add hundreds of billions ($480 billion to be exact) to the national debt.”
In addition to gaining some attack-ad fodder, McConnell gets to replay the whole demagogic exercise whenever the new debt limit is breached, most likely in December. It adds another bargaining chip to the one he already holds in being able to threaten a government shutdown when the stopgap spending bill runs out, also in December. And in the meantime, he can quietly tell his friends on Wall Street that he did them the inestimable favor of heading off a financial calamity. If he also did indeed reduce the already low odds of Senate Democrats blowing up the filibuster, that’s an added bonus.”
Rather than have the debt limit issue go away, Democrats will be forced to deal with it again in 3 months. Since that debate will likely come after Democrats pass their trillion-dollar budget package, it will be even easier for Republicans to make the argument that the debt limit increase is a result of the Democrat’s profligate spending — even though this is entirely inaccurate. Democrats could have done away with this issue once and for all, ideally by suspending the filibuster or more directly playing chicken with Republicans until they gave in. Refusing to budge would have put pressure on McConnell and the two Democrats (Manchin and Sinema) blocking filibuster reform. If Marshall is right that McConnell caved because Democrats were playing hardball, why let him slip out of the trap? Wouldn’t the better play have been to tighten the vise?
Instead, Schumer and the Democrats have kicked the can down the road. Marshall is not wrong that temporarily dispensing with the debt limit allows Democrats to focus their energies on the budget package. But the next debt limit fight is coming, and all McConnell has done is strategically retreat so he can fight another day. I struggle to see how that’s a win.
Musical Interlude
For today’s musical interlude, I’m going back to the Grateful Dead and taking the lazy path of recommending today’s Dead of the Day — October 7, 1977, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In my defense, any ‘77 Dead is worth a listen, and the versions of “Terrapin Station” and “Wharf Rat” are simply gorgeous. There’s a near ethereal quality to so much of the band’s live output in ‘77 with the band firing on all cylinders and the music taking on a near transcendent groove. Sorry if that’s a bit too hippy-ish for you but give it a listen and tell me I’m wrong!