President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I saw two threads regarding 1/6 over the weekend, and taken together they are pretty damning. One is in regard to Trump's meetings with Kash Patel, Chris Miller, and John Radcliffe, his last minute replacements as SecDef and Director of ONI on Dec. 12, when he left the Army-Navy game at halftime to hold meetings at the WH. The other one, which I had never heard of and found rather astonishing, refers to a David Ignatius column on 12/26, where he refers to information he had gotten from senior Republican officials who feared that Trump would use foreign or domestic turmoil as an excuse to cling to power.

These are both pretty remarkable threads, well worth a look, as they pull together a number of puzzle pieces together which, taken with revelations from the 1/6 committee, are pretty damning. That Ignatius column, in particular, is remarkably accurate in describing the events of 1/6 two weeks before it happened, based on what he was hearing from former Trump insiders who feared that he was organizing a coup, as indeed he was.





The Ignatius references are here, in a thread that goes back to April of 2021.. I can't believe that this column has not been more referenced than it has been, as it is outright prescient.







The full Ignatius column is here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...idens-win-is-certified-us-remains-vulnerable/

Quoting for those outside the paywall:

Until Biden’s win is certified, the U.S. remains vulnerable

"Not to be alarmist, but we should recognize that the United States will be in the danger zone until the formal certification of Joe Biden’s election victory on Jan. 6, because potential domestic and foreign turmoil could give President Trump an excuse to cling to power.

This threat, while unlikely to materialize, is concerning senior officials, including Republicans who have supported Trump in the past but believe he is now threatening to overstep the constitutional limits on his power. They described a multifaceted campaign by die-hard Trump supporters to use disruptions at home and perhaps threats abroad to advance his interests.


The big showdown is the Jan. 6 gathering of both houses of Congress to formally count the electoral college vote taken on Dec. 14, which Biden won 306 to 232. The certification should be a pro forma event, but a desperate Trump is demanding that House and Senate Republicans challenge the count and block this final, binding affirmation of Biden’s victory before Inauguration Day.

Trump’s last-ditch campaign will almost certainly fail in Congress. The greater danger is on the streets, where pro-Trump forces are already threatening chaos. A pro-Trump group called “Women for America First” has requested a permit for a Jan. 6 rally in Washington, and Trump is already beating the drum: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Government officials fear that if violence spreads, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. Then Trump might use “military capabilities” to rerun the Nov. 3 election in swing states, as suggested by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Trump “could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election,” Flynn told Newsmax in a Dec. 17 interview.

The Pentagon would be the locus of any such action, and some unusual recent moves suggest pro-Trump officials might be mobilizing to secure levers of power. Kash Patel, chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller, returned home “abruptly” from an Asia trip in early December, according to Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin. Patel didn’t explain, but in mid-December Trump discussed with colleagues the possibility that Patel might replace Christopher A. Wray as FBI director, one official said. Wray remains in his job.

Another strange Pentagon machination was the proposal Miller floated in mid-December to separate the code-breaking National Security Agency from U.S. Cyber Command, which are both currently headed by Gen. Paul Nakasone. That proposal collapsed because of bipartisan congressional opposition.

But why did Trump loyalists suggest the NSA-Cyber Command split in the first place? Some officials speculate that the White House may have planned to install a new NSA chief, perhaps Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the young conservative recently installed to oversee Pentagon intelligence activities.

With firm control of the NSA and the FBI, the Trump team might then disclose highly sensitive information about the origins of the 2016 Trump Russia investigation. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tried to release this sensitive intelligence before the election, despite protests from intelligence chiefs that it would severely damage U.S. national security. Trump retreated under pressure from then-Attorney General William P. Barr, among others.

Trump’s final weeks in office will also be a tinder box because of the danger of turmoil abroad. Iranian-backed militias fired more than 20 rockets last Sunday at the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, with around nine hitting the compound but inflicting no American casualties. The United States sent intense, high-level messages to Tehran, public and private, warning against any further provocation. The toughest was a Dec. 23 tweet from Trump warning: “If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over.” State Department and Pentagon officials say Trump’s retaliatory threat is real.

Another potential flash point is just a week away. Jan. 3 marks the first anniversary of the U.S. targeted killing of Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iraq militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Any new violence could ignite a quick cycle of escalation that could bring direct conflict between the United States and Iran during Trump’s final weeks in office.

The heroes in preserving the United States’ hopes of a stable democratic transition, perhaps ironically, have been some courageous, principled Republicans: judges in state and federal courts, including Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump; secretaries of state and other election monitors; a disappointingly small handful of GOP senators and members of Congress, and even a few members of Trump’s inner circle like White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who is said to have resisted some of Trump’s disruptive plans. They have all stood up in different ways for the rule of law.

Trump won’t succeed in subverting the Constitution, but he can do enormous damage over the next weeks. Before Jan. 6, a delegation of senior Republicans should visit him at the White House and insist, emphatically: Biden has won. This must stop."

 

Holy Donald lost to Biden
Yeah, he tried to set him straight
Looked him in the eye,
"Are you gonna pack the court?"

Holy Donald in his palace
Had for dinner a golden calf
Went to get the Ten Commandments
Yeah, he's just gonna break 'em in half!

All you MAGAs hide your faces,
All you people in the street,
All you sittin' in high places,
The rain's gonna fall on you

No one ever spoke to Eric,
They all laughed at him instead
Tweetin' in the dark,
Tweetin' all by himself

Only Putin saw it comin',
Forty days and forty nights,
Took some sons and daughters with him,
Yeah, they were economically anxious whites!

All you MAGAs hide your faces,
All you people in the street,
All you sittin' in high places,
The rain's gonna fall on you

Holy Donald, what's the matter?
Where have all your children gone?
Livin' apart
Livin' off by themselves,
No more documents to hide anymore!

 

GOP Complains That Biden Administration Won’t Negotiate With Terrorists On Debt Limit

 

“When President Biden says he’s just going to refuse to negotiate with Republicans on any concessions, I don’t think that’s right either,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) in an interview with ABC This Week on Sunday.

“I want our side to negotiate with the Democrats in good faith,” he said later in the interview. “But President Biden has to also negotiate. He can’t say he refuses to negotiate.”

So when MAGA refuses, it's "fulfilling a promise" and "fighting," but when anyone else does it, it's just wrong?

GTFOH. There is no negotiating with terrorists. Period.

 

NOTHING has been verified about "George Santos." It must be presumed he was not the person who was awarded the GED; it must also presumed that whatever "classwork" was done for the GED was all faked too.

The Democrats should not accept ANYTHING about this Russian plant as true. It's all bullshit. Every word. Run him out of congress. Bring criminal charges and drag his ass to jail.

Dig deep enough and "Santos" or "Devolder" or whatever the fuck his name is supposed to be, will quickly become more of a liability than he's worth for Uncle Vlad. At that point Whatshisface will probably fall out a window.

 

"Mar-a-Lago this year requested to fill a record 91 positions with foreign workers for this coming year, up from 80 in 2019, according to CareerSource, the county's nonprofit job placement agency.......This year, as in years past, Trump is requesting permission to hire seasonal foreign workers for these properties, too: 14 for Trump International and 10 for Trump National."


Foreign temp workers at Mar-a-Lago raise another security concern

 

The thing is before Biden became the guy who saved us from a second Trump term he was generally regarded as a genial doofus
That’s what his document problem seems like more than Trump, who has fought the Feds all the way

 

Good thread on the Mountaintop speech.

 

The safest place in which George Fuckface could be ensconced is the United States House of Representatives.
Hey, hey, listen. Forget about it, kid. They are ghosts.