Joe Biden is now POTUS

darth frosty

Dark Lord of the Sith
BGOL Investor
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Keepthapeace

well-known lurker
BGOL Investor
This is an incredible fucking story. What pieces of shit Trump and all his lackeys are. In short, A DOJ lawyer approached Trump with a plan to overthrow Georgia's election. The lawyer went back to his own boss, the Attorney General, and told him that Trump was replacing him, the AG, with him but he can stay around as his underling. The AG went to see Trump and Trump's lawyer had to talk him out of it.

Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General
Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist, and had the men make their cases to him.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.

Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers. “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”

Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.

Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”

The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen.
When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.


Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.

(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)

Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy to the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.

They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.

Bruh, got damn white folks privilege bruh. :smh:This gotta make the top 2 white privilege savage moves in history next to Trump being elected. Imagine you able to walk into your job and up to your boss who helped train you, but you just at a regular employee level, and this ain't no normal boss position, this is the boss position that got more power than the POTUS regarding fast powerful state result legal authority moves, and you say I am replacing you... the got damn smirk that was on his face walking in to tell his boss I'm sure would have put Martin Shkreli to shame as he walked in like pimp and walked out like George Jefferson. And that same Jeffrey Clark mthafker will get book deals, another big law firm job and of course a Fox gig out of that. Just Wow.
 

Nzinga

Lover of Africa
BGOL Investor
Lawyers representing the Capitol insurrectionists are building a damning case against Trump
ssheth@businessinsider.com (Sonam Sheth) 8 hrs ago

Lawyers representing the Capitol insurrectionists are building a damning case against Trump
sing on Trump.
  • They're blaming him for inciting the deadly siege with his spread of disinformation about the election.
  • The allegations bolster House Democrats' impeachment case against Trump and expose him to more legal risk.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
The rioters were adamant when they stormed the US Capitol: Joe Biden and the Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Congress wasn't doing anything to stop it, so it was up to patriotic Americans like themselves to save the country.

Now many of the insurrectionists, facing a multitude of federal charges and lacking the protection of a presidential pardon, are changing their tune and laying the blame for their actions squarely at the former president's feet. It's an inconvenient development for Trump, who is not only staring down a looming Senate impeachment trial but also may face criminal liability for his actions.
"Let's roll the tape," said Al Watkins, the defense attorney representing one of the defendants, Jacob Chansley. Chansley is more widely known as the "QAnon Shaman" and made headlines for roaming the halls of Congress while wearing a fur hat, carrying a spear, and covered in face paint. He was later arrested and charged with multiple felony counts, including unlawfully entering the Capitol and engaging in disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
"Let's roll the months of lies and misrepresentations and horrific innuendo and hyperbolic speech by our president designed to inflame, enrage, motivate," Watkins told KSDK, a local NBC affiliate in Missouri.

Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the Justice Department, didn't mince words when addressing the allegation.
"This goes directly to Trump's impeachment trial" and any criminal case he could face, Cramer said. "His words and actions for months directly led to an armed and deadly insurrection at the Capitol. He can't argue that nobody took him seriously or that his words didn't provoke violence."
A lawyer representing Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Watkins also alluded to Trump's repeated assertion at a rally preceding the siege that he would join his supporters as they marched to the Capitol that day (which he didn't do).
"What's really curious is the reality that our president, as a matter of public record, invited these individuals, as president, to walk down to the Capitol with him," Watkins told KSDK, adding that his client "regrets very very much having not just been duped by the president, but ... allowed that duping to put him in a position to make decisions he should not have made."
"You'll never take back our country with weakness," Trump told his fanatics at the January 6 rally, which took place as Congress was convening to finalize Biden's victory. "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We're going to have to fight much harder. After this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down - we're going to walk down."
At the end of the 70-minute speech that was riddled with grievances and falsehoods about the election, Trump said: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
And then he unleashed the mob.

One woman who was arrested and charged after she was accused of participating in the riot told a reporter that she and her friends traveled to Washington, DC, from Texas specifically because the president "asked us to go."
"He said, 'Be there,'" Jenna Ryan told a local news outlet in Texas. "So I went and I answered the call of my president."
Days after the failed coup, the House of Representatives charged Trump with "incitement of insurrection." The single article of impeachment accused Trump of having "repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State of Federal officials."
It also accused him of having "willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged - and foreseeably resulted in - lawless action at the Capitol."
© Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images Trump supporters occupy the Capitol and the inauguration stands on January 6. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
Lori Ulrich, the defense attorney representing 22-year-old Riley Williams, struck a similar chord in a court appearance Thursday.
Williams was arrested and charged with entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, theft of government property, and obstruction. She has also been accused of helping steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office during the siege, and a person who claimed to be her former romantic partner told the FBI she "intended to send the computer device to a friend in Russia, who then planned to sell the device to SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service," court filings said.
At Thursday's federal court hearing, Ulrich acknowledged that Williams had participated in the insurrection but said, "It is regrettable that Ms. Williams took the president's bait and went inside the Capitol." She added that the charges against her client were "overstated."
Enrique Latoison, a lawyer representing another man charged in connection with the siege, told The New York Times his client wouldn't have been at the Capitol at all if not for the president's words.
The Justice Department's statement of facts accompanying its criminal complaint against Latoison's client Robert Sanford also indicated that he believed he was acting on the president's orders. In addition to participating in the siege itself, Sanford is accused of "hurling" a fire extinguisher at a group of police officers and injuring three of them.
"The group had gone to the White House and listened to President Donald J. Trump's speech and then had followed the President's instructions and

The multitude of court filings stemming from the insurrection and recent allegations from the defendants' lawyers will likely play a pivotal role in Trump's upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate. The House will transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate on Monday, and according to the Constitution, the upper chamber must begin its impeachment trial by 1 p.m. the day after the article is submitted.
But for Trump, an impeachment trial is the least of his worries. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate - 51 votes, including that of the vice president - and it's highly unlikely that enough Republicans will break ranks to reach the two-thirds majority that's required to convict and remove a president from office and bar him from ever holding public office again.
Trump's bigger concern may lie in whether he'll face criminal prosecution over his actions.
"The fact that the rioters are saying all they did was follow the urging of POTUS goes to whether or not Trump's words incited a riot," Cramer said, though he added the defense likely wouldn't help the rioters in their cases. "Hard for him to argue that nobody would listen to his words and riot."
Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney in Washington, DC, said earlier this month that federal prosecutors weren't ruling out anything or anyone as they investigated the deadly riot - and that includes the now former president.
When asked if prosecutors would examine statements Trump made at the rally before the siege, Sherwin replied, "Yes, we are looking at all actors here, not only the people that went into the building, but ... were there others that maybe assisted or facilitated or played some ancillary role in this."
Read the original article on Business Insider
life on easy mode
 

moufasa

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Bruh, got damn white folks privilege bruh. :smh:This gotta make the top 2 white privilege savage moves in history next to Trump being elected. Imagine you able to walk into your job and up to your boss who helped train you, but you just at a regular employee level, and this ain't no normal boss position, this is the boss position that got more power than the POTUS regarding fast powerful state result legal authority moves, and you say I am replacing you... the got damn smirk that was on his face walking in to tell his boss I'm sure would have put Martin Shkreli to shame as he walked in like pimp and walked out like George Jefferson. And that same Jeffrey Clark mthafker will get book deals, another big law firm job and of course a Fox gig out of that. Just Wow.

I believe Barr resigned because Trump kept asking him to overturn the election
 

mangobob79

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
Well either they're going to flip on Biden or contiue to hammer the Tea Party/Trumpers in congress.
Wilson & crew said they still got heat for the traitors! thats their next move ! any corp doing business with any of them gets exposed, !
 
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