In the Spirit of Jefferson Davis (part twelve)

 

 

Part twelve.

 

January 7^th was the dawn of a new era in the USA, though as I write this, what that actually means is uncertain. 

It had been at least fifty years since the November Elections had been marred by such violence, longer still since the Capital had been stormed by armed Terrorists, when on March 1st, 1954, in a now forgotten event, four Puerto Rican Nationalists, after taking position in the Gallery of the House Chamber, opened fire on the Representatives below. Remarkably, no one was killed.

 

On the first day after the attempted Coup, the much-criticized Capitol Police Chief Sunds, and Sergeants at Arms Irving and Stenger resigned, the latter two after Senate Majority Leader McConnell publicly demanded it.

 

Controversially, and with uncertain effectuality, privately-owned Social Media platforms took steps inhibit the organizing Terrorists and their mayhem. They didn’t all happen this one day of course, but the most notable censoring of all, happen this date. Soon to be ex-President Donald Trump, because of his long history of violating Twitter’s community standards, and specifically because of his contribution to the carnage the day before, saw his personal Twitter permanently banned. Quickly, other Social Media platforms would take similar actions. These are his last two tweets ever:

 

9:46 a.m. “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"

 

10:44 a.m. “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

 

The White House has telephone records documented by the phone company like every other customer in the USA, but the White House also has call logs and a personal dairy of the President maintained by another person. Trump made/received far more phone calls during this crisis than he made texts, tweets, emails, etc. Most were with persons inside and outside of Congress who were allied with him in the Stop the Steal/Big Lie campaign (including former Strategist Bannon, still under Federal indictment at the time). Though the existence of these calls can be demonstrated, the contents of the vast majority are unknown, and they don’t appear in the log or diary. It would also eventually be exposed that Secret Service Agents deleted a huge number of texts that had been sent before, during, and after the crisis.

 

For a short time, a large number of Republicans privately condemned Trump. Though Trump only had less than two weeks left in Office, House Minority Leader McCarthy toyed with evoking the 25^th Amendment to remove him faster.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell said, “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is.” But almost none of this translated into public statements, and when an opportunity for action presented itself, precious few stood up.

 

On January 8^th, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley spoke on the phone (the first of two such calls) with his Chinese counterpart General Li Zuocheng. Milley felt he needed to reassure that the USA was not on the verge of a Civil War, "we are 100 percent steady.” Further, he assured Li that the Trump would not, in another desperate attempt to hold onto power, launch a nuclear first strike against China. Milley expressed to Journalists that a preemptive strike from the USA on China was a legitimate concern from the Chinese point-of-view, so those concerns needed to be addressed. He also personally reviewed the safeguards our system has from a President who goes “rogue.” For this, Trump and other RWNs accused him of Treason, but the Pentagon confirmed he was merely doing his job.

 

Either the during the week of January 9^th, or the 16^th, Capitol Police Union Chair Gus Papathanasiou and several other Senior Officers met with Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman (she was elevated to the post when Sund resigned) and Assistant Chief Chad Thomas. Pittman was challenged about why she, and the other Chiefs, weren’t on the radio on the 6^th, but she dodged the question. These meetings generally ran about an hour, but after only thirty-minutes, Pittman got up to leave for another engagement. The enraged Union then asked Thomas the same question, and again, he dodged.

 

 

It was only later, through news reports, that most Capitol Police officers learned that the Chiefs did, in fact, have Intelligence Warnings of possible severe violence. Before Congress, Pittman admitted that the department failed to adequately act on this, but she never apologized to her rank-and-file. The Union then voted a declaration of “No confidence” against her by a 92% margin. She was replaced in the Chief’s role by another, and resigned. Thomas similarly lost his Command Rank and resigned.

 

 

January 10^th, RWN Social Media site Parler, which had proved essential to the organizing of the increasingly violent Trump rallies and specifically permitted Terrorists to plot their 1/6 mayhem, is finally de-platformed. But it wasn’t going to remain that way forever.

 

January 13^th, the Georgia General Assembly convened their new session, finding themselves under enormous pressure from pro-Trump voters. Several Republican Senators, including some that didn’t buy into the Big Lie, informed Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who presided over the Senate and was also Republican, that they had to pass new, and more restrictive Election laws, to quell the popular anger. Duncan responded, “I get it that you think you’re responding to what you think is the will of your constituents, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be honest with them. When someone says the Earth is flat, you’ve got to vehemently disagree with them because you know it’s not flat.”

 

The Republican Party in Georgia was in trouble, and the most serious problems were not Trump-related; this made it tempting for all Republicans, even those that showed courage against Trump November 3^rd through January 6^th, to join forces with the Trumpsters now that the Nation crisis was (in their minds) over. Georgia’s Republicans were, to a large degree, victims of their own, and the State’s, success.

 

Georgia was formerly a Jim Crow State and until 2013 under direct Federal oversight regarding any changes in its Election laws because of ugly history of racist voter restrictions. After 2013, the Republican-led State Government had supported some progressive Election reforms that were both noble and effective, dramatically increasing voter registration and Election Day participation. Also, though the 2020 CV19 Pandemic was devastating to its economy, Georgia had enjoyed years of growth prior to that, and with that economic growth, came a population growth. The problem though, for the Republicans, is that the population growth mostly favored the Democratic party.

 

Above, I blamed revulsion of Trump’s antics for the Republicans losing their two seats in the US Senate, that is surely true, but the nobility of the Republican-supported voting reforms and the in-flux of out-of-State Democrats, played a role too. The Republicans were on the defensive, desperate to retain control of the State Government, and get those two US Senate seats back in one in 2022, the other in 2024. I’ll return to this, because the situation in Georgia would just get worse.

 

 

January 14^th, only six days after the Insurrection, the brand-new County Recorder for Maricopa, Arizona, Stephen Richer, visited the State Capitol, in Phoenix, which was part of Maricopa. He was to meet with Senate President Karen Fan, he expected the meeting to be “a one-on-one, get-to-know-you” affair.

 

Boy, was he wrong.

 

He was directed to a conference room for a sand-bag meeting with Fann and five other members of the State Senate’s Republican leadership. The Legislators immediately began lecturing Richer about voter fraud.

 

Trump had been popular in Arizona, but after days of counting, he was narrowly defeated by Biden. That defeat rested entirely on Biden leading in Maricopa, but then, that County was the most populous (60% of total population) and most Democratic-leaning part in the State.

 

After the initial count was completed, there had been a hand-recount of a sampling of ballots that confirmed the accuracy of the first. Lawsuits were filed of course, but they were rejected by both State and Federal Judges; one that has special baring here was a Senate bid to obtain ballot images and tabulating machines from Maricopa; in this case it was thrown out, not because of lack-of-evidence of fraud, per se, but because it was improperly filed, a technical error driven by Republican incompatence, panic, or both, because by then it was already past Safe Harbor Day, December 8^th.

 

The Trumpsters wanted a second chance at it (was it the “second”? or was it the third, fourth, or fifth?). Richer, though he wasn’t in charge at the time of the Election, insisted the process on November 3^rd and in the days that followed had been sound. It just so happened that the count the Senators were complaining about was the one that brought him, a Republican, into office, a come-from-behind victory over Democratic Incumbent. He’d been trailing on Election Night, but after days of counting his win was confirmed. That was co-current with Trump tweeting “STOP THE COUNT.”

 

 

State Senator Vince Leach, cited an already debunked claim that “kinematic artifacts” — essentially, folds in paper ballots — could prove whether they were fraudulent. This required the Senate to demand a new top-to-bottom review of the election.

 

Richer didn’t like being lectured. He thought they were treating him as if he were a “petulant child.” He also remembers that no one mentioned the violence in Washington DC less than a week before.

 

Still, the Senators got the recount they wanted, starting a wave of hyper-partisan recounts in other States that continued long-after Biden took the Oath of Office. Less than a week from this date.

 

With historic speed, the House moved to Impeach Trump before he was legally obligated to step down. There were witnesses called and evidence presented, but the most powerful arguments came from a string of videos the Democrats played, displaying the violence of the Insurrection (much of it documented by the Terrorists themselves and up-loaded onto Social Media) and intercut with Trump’s own statements of encouragement to the Traitors.

 

January 18^th, the House convicted Trump of Incitement of Insurrection, making him the first POTUS to be impeached twice. Ten Republican Representatives voted with the Democrats; that the most pro-Impeachment votes ever from members of a President's own party. For the impeachment to stick, there needed to be a second trail in the Senate, that was impossible to accomplice before Trump would be obligated to step down in two days.

 

Hours later, Trump posted a video, “I want to be very clear. I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week. Violence and vandalism have absolutely no place in our country, and no place in our movement … “those who engaged in the attacks last week will be brought to justice.” This was his first explicit and unqualified condemnation of the violence. As we’ll see, he wouldn’t hold to these sentiments.

 

The video was posted on White House’s official Twitter account. Trump’s personal account was permanently suspended by the company about ten days prior because of his incitement of the violence, and he took some time during the address to complain about, “the unprecedented assault on free speech we have seen in recent days. These are tense and difficult times. The efforts to censor, cancel and blacklist our fellow citizens are wrong. What is needed now is for us to listen to one another, not to silence one another.”

 

He also took no responsibility for what happened, “No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence. No true supporter of mine could ever disrespect law enforcement or our great American flag. No true supporter of mine could ever threaten or harass their fellow Americans”

 

January 19^th, the Democrats had secured razor-thin majorities in both Houses of Congress. Trump would be stepping down the next day, and he was aware that the Congressional investigations into his Treason wouldn’t end when he left. He appealed to SCOTUS to block release of documents related 1/6. All but one Justice rejected that request, the outlier being Clarence Thomas. This was in the midst of increasing evidence of Thomas’ wife, Virginia, was deeply immersed with the Big Lie, followed QAnon, and supported those who engaged in the attempted Coup. This led to calls for Thomas to resign, and a serious push to make SCOTUS answerable to the same ethics rules that every other Judge in the USA had to answer to (in any other Court except SCOTUS, Thomas would’ve been required to recuse himself from that case, and numerous others, or face disciplinary charges)

 

 

January 20^th, Washington D.C. was prepared for another Insurrection when Biden took the Oath of Office, but the pro-Trump crowds were much smaller and less criminal. True to his promised, Trump did not attend. There was no ceremony attached to his departure from the White House, it may have been the first time in USA history that there was not.

 

 

January 29^th, Trump was out-of-office for less than ten days, and already campaigning for an assumed run for re-election, or maybe re-instatement, in 2024. By that time, over 760 of his Traitorous minions had been criminally charged. At a rally in Texas, the last Confederate State to surrender at the end of the Civil War, Trump said he was inclined to pardon them if he were reelected in four years’ time. He would make that promise again two years later. Federal Representative Adam Schiff, who would later serve on the House 1/6 Committee, would later state that Trump's offer of pardons suggested he "condoned" the violence. Federal Representative Pete Aguilar, who would also serve on the same Committee, called Trump's offer a form of “witness tampering.”