Keep the leaks coming: The case against Donald Trump is being built up by Republicans' big mouths

Keep the leaks coming: The case against Donald Trump is being built up by Republicans' big mouths
There can be no more doubt in anyone's mind who is paying attention that a coup was plotted and nearly successful

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
PUBLISHED APRIL 27, 2022 9:56AM


(Salon) Ive lost count of how many books have been published at this point about Donald Trump's final days, but I'm glad that the staggered release of them has helped to keep the event fresh in people's minds as each one offers up something that we didn't know before. With the January 6th Committee selectively leaking information and the prospect of public hearings at some point in the near future, it's still possible that the whole thing won't be completely swept under the rug before the election in the fall.

A few days ago, Politico's Kyle Cheney posted a useful overview of just some of what we have learned so far. We know that Trump went to great lengths in the days and weeks after the election to bully, coerce, strong arm and intimidate local and state officials in all the battleground states to illegally overturn the election results. He pushed the Department of Justice to declare the election results were tainted and only moved on when it became clear that they would all resign in protest if he installed a willing toady who would carry it out. And his legal team of fringe weirdos led by Rudy Giuliani descended upon courthouses in the targeted states with wild accusations of voter fraud that were all denied, many of them by judges Trump himself appointed.

Throughout this period, various conspiracy nuts, hucksters, crackpots and grifters were running in and out of the White House with ludicrous schemes, pushing conspiracy theories. On Tuesday, CNN published texts from one of them, an obscure congressman from Pennsylvania named Scott Perry, a former Army General like fellow weirdo Michael Flynn who was heavily involved in all aspects of the attempted coup. Among Perry's texts were messages to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows accusing CIA director Gina Haspel of being in cahoots with "the Brits" to manipulate the voting machines and telling him the "DNI needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at CIA - and their National Endowment for Democracy. " (How many of these kooky Generals are there?)

When none of Giuliani's legal claims came to fruition, Trump enlisted the help of a legal quack named John Eastman who devised a plan to have Republican-run states send alternate slates of electors and then have Vice President Mike Pence throw out the electoral votes from those states to dishonestly invoke the "contingent election process" which would result in Trump being elected because there are currently more GOP state delegations than Democratic ones.

And that's just for starters. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/04/27/keep-the-leaks-coming-the-case-against-donald-is-being-built-up-by-republicans-big-mouths/