[guest post by Dana]

Damning:

The Democratic-led House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has voted to hold Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, sending to the full House a referral for the former Trump White House chief of staff to face a criminal charge.

The Monday night vote was months in the making. Meadows had initially cooperated with the panel and turned over thousands of emails and text messages, but he reversed course last week, saying a day before he was due to appear for a deposition that he would no longer be cooperating with the probe.

Ahead of the vote, the panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read a litany of text messages she said Meadows received during the Jan. 6 siege, urging him to get then-President Donald Trump to tell his supporters to leave the Capitol.

We now know with certainty that the White House knew what was happening outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. It was so bad that even Donald Trump Jr. repeatedly begged Meadows to get his father to make a statement from the Oval Office to stop the violence and tell his supporters to go home. Despite his son, Republican leaders, and even Fox News personalities pleading with Meadows to get the president to act during the harrowing 187 minutes as the Capitol was attacked, Trump refused.

Here is Cheney making her statement:

Full @RepLizCheney statement on holding Mark Meadows in contempt, including texts from Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and others:

"These text messages leave no doubt…multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately. They texted Mr. Meadows." pic.twitter.com/KxrVMS4CTZ

— CSPAN (@cspan) December 14, 2021

Unfortunately, Trumpers will not be swayed in the least by the revealed text messages nor impacted by then-President Trump’s decision to not immediately address the mob from the Oval Office and send them home. Instead of looking at the texts with any objectivity, or grasping how Trump not only encouraged the mob to go to the Capitol and then refused to make an effort to stop them, they will attack Cheney because she continues to dishonor their hero. To them, she represents all the evils of the pre-Trump Republican Party. They see her as the enemy, despite her solid conservative voting record and unwavering protection of the Constitution. Think about that: Republicans today hate a true conservative who has the voting record to back up her claims all because she is willing to risk even losing her political career to hold accountable a corrupt president who betrayed his country. Once upon a time, she would have been the ideal Republican.

This sums up the absolutely damning views held by any number of Republican lawmakers about the events of Jan. 6:

A GOP lawmaker texted Meadows on Jan. 7. The lawmaker wrote: “Yesterday was a terrible day. We tried everything we could in our objection to the 6 states. I’m sorry nothing worked,” per Jan. 6 committee. They don’t say who it was

It’s nothing less than stunning and dangerous that this individual is a sitting member of Congress. Yet certainly they are not alone in their misguided disappointment and regret. Given that, it is far past time for those still sane members who have kept their heads down and mouths shut for fear of retribution from their Trump-loyal colleagues to speak up with unrelenting force and push back against this rot coming from within their own party. Sadly, and in yet one more example of how deep the rot goes, when you consider which lawmaker may have made the above comment, it’s far more than just one name that comes to mind.

–Dana

Donald Trump is good at something Brett Kimberlin was always good at. Here’s how it works: you take something you are doing to others, and accuse the others of doing it to you. Robert Stacy McCain always called this the “accuse the accusers” strategy.

So when he mounts an effort to convince the public that the media is trying to hoax you about his connections to Russia, you can be sure that effort is itself a hoax.

Jonathan Rauch sets the stage this way:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell said, “needs a constant struggle.” Among Donald Trump’s many impressive talents is his gift for obscuring, occluding, and even inverting what is in front of America’s nose.

Most notably, he has convinced tens of millions of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election—which is pretty amazing, when you think about it. In close second place, though, is that he and his supporters have won the Russia narrative. They have convinced millions of people, including many in non-MAGA circles, that Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russians in the 2016 presidential campaign; that in fact, if anyone colluded, it was Christopher Steele, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the FBI—against Trump.

Rauch details the evidence:

The brazenness and success of this counternarrative are remarkable, because what is there in front of our nose, in plain view, is an undeniable and undenied stack of evidence that the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence viewed the 2016 presidential race as a collaborative venture. The facts are these (all according to undisputed reports by special counsel Robert Mueller, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, and many news outlets):

• The Trump campaign eagerly and knowingly accepted overtures from the Russian government to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

• Trump publicly asked the Russians to illegally steal and dump Clinton documents, and Russian intelligence promptly did exactly that.

• The campaign and its associates had at least 100 contacts and probably more with assorted Russians, including (according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s account) ones with ties to organized crime and Russian intelligence.

• Trump’s campaign manager provided internal campaign materials to a business associate characterized by the Senate report and the U.S. Treasury Department as a Russian intelligence operative.

• The campaign team, including Trump, was well aware of potential plans by Russia’s Wikileaks partner to dump stolen documents, kept close tabs on it, and tried to schedule and exploit that possibility.

• Trump and his fixer Michael Cohen lied point-blank about Trump’s ongoing business dealings with the Russians.

• Meanwhile, at no point did Trump and his people report Russia’s activities to U.S. law enforcement; instead, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the campaign was “elated” by what it regarded as a “gift” from Wikileaks.

That the Trump campaign did all of those things and more is not seriously disputed.

Btw, if you want to yammer about the dossier, Rauch addresses that too.

It’s old news. But it’s worth repeating. Because, as Rauch notes, Trump is big on repetition. Trump will repeat his lies until he dies. The repetition is a big part of the way he gets chump suckas, like the people who use the phrase “Russia hoax,” to buy in to the con.