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All 10 Living Former Defense Secretaries: Involving the Military in Election Disputes Would Cross Into Dangerous Territory |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=57790"><span class="small">Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Monday, 04 January 2021 09:28 |
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Excerpt: "As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party."
Secretary of defense Leon Panetta under Barack Obama speaks to U.S. troops. (photo: Staff Sgt. Marc I. Lane/US Navy)
All 10 Living Former Defense Secretaries: Involving the Military in Election Disputes Would Cross Into Dangerous Territory
By Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld, The Washington Post
04 January 21
 s former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.
American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.
Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.
As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.
Transitions, which all of us have experienced, are a crucial part of the successful transfer of power. They often occur at times of international uncertainty about U.S. national security policy and posture. They can be a moment when the nation is vulnerable to actions by adversaries seeking to take advantage of the situation.
Given these factors, particularly at a time when U.S. forces are engaged in active operations around the world, it is all the more imperative that the transition at the Defense Department be carried out fully, cooperatively and transparently. Acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates — political appointees, officers and civil servants — are each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.
We call upon them, in the strongest terms, to do as so many generations of Americans have done before them. This final action is in keeping with the highest traditions and professionalism of the U.S. armed forces, and the history of democratic transition in our great country.
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Trump's Call With Georgia's Secretary of State Is a Subversion of Democracy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55629"><span class="small">Cameron Peters, Vox</span></a>
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Monday, 04 January 2021 09:26 |
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Peters writes: "President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to 'find' almost 12,000 nonexistent votes during a Saturday phone call."
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference in Atlanta. (photo: John Bazemore/AP)
Trump's Call With Georgia's Secretary of State Is a Subversion of Democracy
By Cameron Peters, Vox
04 January 21
Trump told the Georgia official: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
 resident Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” almost 12,000 nonexistent votes during a Saturday phone call, according to a report by Amy Gardner of the Washington Post. Inventing those votes would change the outcome of the election in that state, tipping its electoral votes to Trump over President-elect Joe Biden.
Over the course of a more than hour-long phone call, a recording of which was obtained by the Post, Trump raised a series of baseless, debunked conspiracy theories — and variously cajoled and threatened Raffensperger to find some way to award him the victory in Georgia, a state Trump lost by 11,779 votes.
“All I want to do is this,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Ryan Germany, the general counsel to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, was also on the call, according to the Post, as were White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell.
Trump had earlier acknowledged the call in a tweet, but framed it very differently, claiming the men spoke about allegations of election fraud, which Raffensperger has disproven several times. Sunday’s Washington Post story reveals what was discussed in far more detail.
“I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”
Audio from the full 62-minute call was published by the Post Sunday, including an exchange where Trump threatens Raffensperger and Germany with imminent legal consequences should they fail to overturn the already certified results.
“That’s a criminal offense,” Trump tells Raffensperger and Germany on the call, apparently in reference to Raffensperger not reporting made-up instances of election fraud. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.”
Trump also raised a number of conspiracy theories resembling those promoted by onetime Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who was cut loose by the Trump campaign’s legal team as her election fraud allegations became increasingly outlandish.
Powell, who has pushed a series of election lawsuits with scant — and sometimes purely fictitious — evidence of fraud. She has also repeatedly falsely asserted that voting machines designed by Dominion Voting Systems helped to steal the 2020 election from Trump.
In reality, President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and with a popular vote margin of more than 7 million votes. Recounts in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin — both won by Biden — have turned up no evidence of large-scale fraud or irregularities that could have affected the results of the election.
In all 50 states and Washington, DC, the election results have been carefully reviewed by state officials and certified as accurate. And Dominion’s machines have been found to have operated correctly.
Nonetheless, Trump aired a version of the Dominion conspiracy during his Saturday call.
“Now, do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?” Trump asked Germany on the call. “Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”
As Germany affirmed on the call, none of Trump’s allegations are true.
Despite the Trump legal team’s move to disavow Powell, Trump has reportedly remained enamored with her theories. According to a New York Times report from December, he briefly considered naming Powell as special counsel to investigate his baseless claims of voter fraud, though he was ultimately talked down by aides.
And as recently as Sunday, he retweeted a message from Powell alleging — again, without even a shred of evidence — “massive fraud.”
According to the Washington Post, Trump’s remarks on the call Saturday raise the possibility of additional legal problems for a president already facing quite a few potential criminal investigations upon leaving office. The report noted, however, that there is no clear-cut offense revealed on the call and that any possible charges would ultimately be “subject to prosecutorial discretion.”
As CNN reporter Ryan Struyk pointed out on Twitter Sunday, US law makes it a crime to “‘knowingly and willfully ... attempt to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process’ by ‘the procurement ... of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false.’”
Trump may also have landed himself in legal peril at the state level. According to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, “conspiracy to commit election fraud” and “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” are both crimes in Georgia, and some legal experts believe Trump’s comments Saturday violated state law.
Other reporters, such as Business Insider’s Grace Panetta, have pointed out that Trump’s comments are strikingly similar to those he was impeached over in late 2019, after his pressure campaign against the president of Ukraine seeking to extort an investigation into Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, came to light.
In a statement Sunday, a Biden adviser condemned Trump’s election pressure campaign.
“We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,” former Obama White House counsel and current Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer said.
Saturday’s call isn’t the first time Trump has tried to subvert democracy
Though Sunday’s Washington Post scoop provides arguably the starkest example of Trump’s long-running attempts to subvert democracy in order to remain in power — not to mention a more than passing resemblance to President Richard Nixon’s presidency-ending tapes — it is by no means the only time Trump has mounted an effort of this sort since losing reelection.
In at least three other battleground states that he lost to Biden — Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — Trump has directly reached out to lawmakers and other officials to urge them to help him overturn the election results in their states, potentially awarding him an unelected second term in office.
In Pennsylvania, one Republican lawmaker — state Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward — told the New York Times that she chose not to push back on Trump’s baseless fraud accusations.
“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said in December, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”
But Trump’s antidemocratic efforts have been most acute in Georgia — possibly because the state remains in the news this month, more than 60 days after the presidential election, in the run-up to two crucial Senate runoffs this Tuesday that will decide partisan control of the chamber.
In his call Saturday, Trump suggested that this was the case to Raffensperger.
“You have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump said on the call. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president.”
Georgia voters set a record for early-voting turnout ahead of Tuesday’s runoffs, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with more than 3 million votes cast ahead of Election Day on January 5. But as Vox’s Aaron Rupar has written, there are some indications Trump’s efforts to spread doubt about the security of the election may have depressed Republican participation so far.
And Republicans are likely to need every vote to ensure victories in both races. Polling suggests that both races are more or less a toss-up: According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock lead incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler by around 2 percentage points each.
Trump will be back in Georgia on Monday for a final preelection rally, though if his last Georgia rally is any indication, he will likely stray to other topics, such as his grievances against Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
“You would be respected, really respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call Saturday. “You have a big election coming up on Tuesday.”
To date, Raffensperger has resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, and Sunday, responded to Trump’s characterization of the call by tweeting, “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”
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Trump and UFOs: The Greatest Hits |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49824"><span class="small">Matt Stieb, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 January 2021 14:28 |
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Stieb writes: "Though Trump is hardly a true believer and didn't live up to the expectations that he'd blurt out everything the government knows on the subject (he often seemed more bored than excited by the whole thing), he did crack open the door on certain secrets."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
Trump and UFOs: The Greatest Hits
By Matt Stieb, New York Magazine
03 January 21
s part of his anti-malarkey platform, Joe Biden has promised a return to presidential norms — a net positive for many Americans who don’t want their president to issue war threats on Twitter and dog whistle to white supremacists. But for those whose policy priorities are focused on the great beyond, a return to business as usual may not be such a welcome prospect: At least during the Trump years, one could expect the occasional comment from the president on UFOs.
In part because Trump (coincidentally) presided over a halcyon age of UFO developments, and in part because he’s prone to saying whatever’s on his mind, aliens had a good four years in the news cycle. Though Trump is hardly a true believer and didn’t live up to the expectations that he’d blurt out everything the government knows on the subject (he often seemed more bored than excited by the whole thing), he did crack open the door on certain secrets. Below is a chronology of Trump’s most notable UFO moments.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she will “circle back” on Trump’s UFO beliefs.
In December 2017, the New York Times reported on the existence of a $22 million Pentagon program that investigated unidentified aerial phenomena from 2007 until 2012, one of the biggest breaks ever in the pursuit to get the federal government to acknowledge purported UFO programs. Days later, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders could neither confirm nor deny if Trump cared about the development. “Somehow that question hasn’t come up in our back-and-forth over the last couple days. But I will check into that and be happy to circle back.” It made sense that aliens hadn’t come up in conversation, as it was a busy month for Trump, who was encouraging the good people of Alabama to vote for a credibly accused child predator.
Trump says “we’re watching” the skies for aliens.
In 2019, senators were reportedly “coming out of the woodwork” to be briefed on extraterrestrial developments after the Times reported in June of that year that Navy pilots were seeing unidentified aircraft off the eastern seaboard on an almost-daily basis in 2014 and 2015.
“I want them to think whatever they think,” Trump said of the Navy pilots in an interview that month, sounding more like a supportive parent than the commander-in-chief. “I did have one very brief meeting on it,” he added. “But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”
Trump, the first sitting president to admit to a briefing on aliens, did so quite casually, suggesting that either the evidence is sparse or, perhaps, he’s constitutionally incapable of paying attention to something that does not directly involve him. Nevertheless, he did display his showman’s flair in promoting this space race, telling George Stephanopoulos that “we’re watching” for aliens, “and you’ll be the first to know.”
That’s one “hell of a video.”
In April 2020, the Pentagon officially released three infrared videos featuring unidentified flying objects traveling at high speeds and making near-impossible turns. “As I got close to it … it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds,” explained retired U.S. Navy pilot David Fravor, who recorded one of the encounters. “This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way.”
Trump, despite being a big fan of expansive executive power when it benefits him, made it sound like he didn’t have the clearance to learn more about the clips. “I just wonder if it’s real,” he said. “That’s a hell of a video.”
Two months later, he played coy again in an interview with his eldest son on Father’s Day. When Donald Trump Jr. asked his father if he would ever tell the public about an alleged incident at Roswell in 1947, Trump said, “I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting.”
Trump vows to “take a good, strong look” at UFOs.
Days after contracting the coronavirus, Trump said in an interview that he would “take a good, strong look” at a government program on UFOs.
In the interview, which took place on Fox News on October 11, Trump said that he had only heard about the Pentagon’s August announcement of a task force to investigate UFOs “two days ago,” again suggesting his overall lack of interest on the subject — a curious incuriousness, considering that there’d been a classified briefing ahead of that task force detailing “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
A former Israeli space official thinks Trump knows more than he’s letting on.
Granted, Trump is letting on very little.
In an interview in early December, Haim Eshed, the former head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s space directorate, gave a sprawling interview to the nation’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper. Among other claims, he said that aliens “have asked not to publish that they are here [because] humanity is not ready yet.” The respected professor and former general added that he believed Trump knew of their existence and was “on the verge of revealing” the blockbuster details, but was asked not to, so that “mass hysteria would not break out.” Eshed also claimed there “is an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
And officials fear Trump could spill state secrets once he’s out of office.
The president hasn’t been stellar about keeping classified information under wraps, accidentally confirming the open secret that the U.S. has nuclear weapons in Turkey, and informing Bob Woodward that “we have stuff that you haven’t ever seen or heard about” in a conversation about the nuclear stockpile. According to legal and national security officials who spoke with the Washington Post, there’s worry that Trump will be even less careful with his words once he sets off on his next career venture. “A knowledgeable and informed president with Trump’s personality characteristics, including lack of self-discipline, would be a disaster,” Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, told the paper. Goldsmith added that it was luck for the security apparatus that Trump “hasn’t been paying attention.”
And it’s quite possible that Trump won’t ever think about UFOs again, unless the topic slips onscreen during one of his daily binges of television news.
But in the past few decades, several retired military and political figures have come out during their retirements with new information on government research around UFOs, including former CIA directors John Brennan and Roscoe Hillenkoetter, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer. Considering the sense of relaxation Trump clearly feels at Mar-a-Lago — where he has previously discussed matters of national security in the open — it’s not too far-fetched to imagine the ex-president admitting to extraterrestrial life on Earth while enjoying a well-done steak, spilling ketchup and state secrets all over the nice white tablecloth.
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For the GOP, Democracy Is Now Up for Debate. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55629"><span class="small">Cameron Peters, Vox</span></a>
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Sunday, 03 January 2021 14:25 |
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Peters writes: "In the wake of a Saturday announcement by 11 Republican senators that they plan to formally object to the results of the 2020 presidential election, the Senate GOP conference has descended into infighting over whether to get behind efforts to overturn the election."
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., questions Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during a hearing on the "Examination of Loans to Businesses Critical to Maintaining National Security" on Capitol Hill on December 10, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)
For the GOP, Democracy Is Now Up for Debate.
By Cameron Peters, Vox
03 January 21
For the GOP, democracy is now up for debate.
 n the wake of a Saturday announcement by 11 Republican senators that they plan to formally object to the results of the 2020 presidential election, the Senate GOP conference has descended into infighting over whether to get behind efforts to overturn the election.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, and Pat Toomey all came out with strong statements pushing back against the doomed — but alarmingly undemocratic — scheme to reject Biden electors on Saturday.
“The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic,” Romney said in his first public response to the plan Saturday. “The congressional power to reject electors is reserved for the most extreme and unusual circumstances. These are far from it.”
The effort — led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and backed by at least 10 other current and incoming Republican senators, some of whom were elected in the same election they are currently disputing — argues that Congress cannot certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, as it is scheduled to do on January 6, because “allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.” The senators also proposed “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.”
They join Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who was first to announce his plan to object to the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes last week, and has so far led an internecine clash against colleagues like Toomey, who represents Pennsylvania in the Senate.
“Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf,” Hawley said on Twitter last month.
In response to a Toomey statement Saturday pointing out that Hawley and Cruz’s efforts stand in direct opposition to “the right of the people to elect their own leaders,” Hawley released a letter defending his decision and calling for his colleagues to “avoid putting word into each other’s mouths.”
“Instead of debating the issue of election integrity by press release, conference call, or email,” Hawley wrote, “Perhaps we could have a debate on the Senate floor for all of the American people to judge.”
Hawley’s statement — as well as that of Cruz and his allies — leaves out a few salient details, however.
Specifically, the “irregularities” they cite have been litigated at length, in Pennsylvania and every other battleground state in the country. In the two months since Election Day, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have filed, and lost, at least 60 election-related lawsuits at all levels of the state and federal court systems alleging voter fraud and other improprieties, and they have failed to prove their case at every turn.
What’s more, recounts in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin — both won by Biden — have turned up no evidence of large-scale fraud or irregularities that could have affected the results of the election. And in all 50 states and Washington, DC, the election results have been carefully reviewed by state officials and certified as accurate.
All of the senators planning on objecting to certification do little to address where voters’ concerns about election integrity originate. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out on Twitter Saturday, Republican leaders “spent months lying to people, telling them the election was stolen and now turn around and cite the fact that many people believe them as evidence!” The same is true of the unsubstantiated allegations brought by Hawley, Cruz, and the other signatories of Saturday’s statement.
The back-and-forth between Toomey and Hawley highlights exactly how far the GOP has drifted. An ever-growing swath of the Republican Party, led by Hawley, Cruz, and Trump, appears to be perfectly willing to overturn the results of a free and fair election by rejecting Biden electors on January 6 — just as long as it allows their party to hold the White House.
Ultimately, it won’t work. Even were the plan to get universal Republican support — and statements by Murkowski, Romney, and Toomey, among others, demonstrate that it won’t — actually rejecting a state’s slate of electors requires a majority in both chambers of Congress, which the GOP lacks.
As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained in December,
If at least one House member and one senator object to the results in any state, each chamber will hold a vote on the matter. For the objection to succeed, both the House and the Senate must vote in favor of it. Otherwise, it fails. (And since Democrats will control the new House, any objection to Biden’s win will surely fail in that chamber.)
Democrats will also hold 48 seats in the Senate on January 6 — meaning only three Republicans would have to refuse to participate in efforts to overturn the election in order to end any objection. And more than three Republican senators have registered their contempt for Hawley and Cruz’s scheme.
Consequently, the most Hawley and the Cruz coalition can achieve by objecting is a protracted certification process on January 6 ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration.
Many GOP leaders are giving up on democracy
Futile though the GOP plan to hand Trump an unelected second term in office may be, it has found widespread acceptance throughout the party. Beyond the dozen Republican senators who have bought in, a sizable majority of the House GOP conference — as many as 140 members, according to Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert — also plans to participate in the effort.
And top Trump officials such as chief of staff Mark Meadows — a member of Congress until last year — are on board too.
“We’re now at well over 100 House members and a dozen Senators ready to stand up for election integrity and object to certification,” Meadows tweeted Saturday. “It’s time to fight back.”
None of this is new for Trump, of course. Even aside from the steady drumbeat of voter fraud allegations emanating from his Twitter feed since losing reelection, baseless fraud claims have been a favorite tactic of his in the face of defeat. In 2016, after losing the Iowa caucuses to then-presidential candidate Cruz, Trump tweeted “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
From his perch in the White House, though, Trump has a much larger megaphone — and a base that’s more fervent than ever. While senators like Hawley and Cruz prepare to object to certification in Congress on January 6, Trump has been promoting a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC the same day. The event will be just the latest of a series pro-Trump protest since Election Day: The last major Washington protest took place in early December 2020, and resulted in at least four stabbings as violent hate groups like the Proud Boys descended on the city.
For Trump and his allies in Congress, however — some of whom are thought to have their eyes on a 2024 presidential run if Trump cedes the field — that kind of damage appears secondary.
“America is proud of Josh [Hawley] and the many others who are joining him,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “The USA cannot have fraudulent elections!”
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n Saturday, 11 current and incoming Republican senators announced in a 
