News With Views By Steven Yates
They’ve done it!
On Monday, December 19, the January 6 (Un)Select Committee recommended that not two, not three, but four criminal referrals against former president Donald Trump be sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The charges referred to the DOJ are immersed — totally — in official narratives about Election 2020 and its aftermath, leading up to what happened on January 6, 2021. No early-morning vote spikes (a statistically impossible all-at-once deluge of hundreds of votes for Biden being recorded all at once) scrubbed from the Internet within days, no electronically altered votes, no illegal ballot harvesting, no dead people voting (well, in Georgia, two), nothing. All memory-holed.
Aggregating that early evidence would have been crucial! This needed to be done in a couple of days if not hours! Without it, there is indeed no hard evidence of fraud! I have no idea if it was attempted or not. (How I wish I’d thought to take screenshots!) Patrick Byrne’s book is very suggestive of what happened, and his apparent invisibility to the Committee might well be significant. He had Trump’s ear. But Trump listened to Rudy Giuliani, not Byrne, and the effort to rescue his presidency went down in flames.
Not that this matters now. Powerful people wanted Trump gone. They got what they wanted. There is no reversing this. Ever. Period.
The Committee’s Executive Summary begins:
In the Committee’s hearings, we presented evidence of what ultimately became a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. That evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.
What follows is an account of how Trump was urged by those around him to concede the election. He refused. By the time the Electoral College had met, however (December 14), the evidence was gone. Possibly a computer engineer could have retrieved the images I saw; I don’t know. Since they only came from one location in one state, they would not have been sufficient. The point is, it was too late.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, moreover, but as far as I can tell, an eleventh-hour refusal by Mike Pence to count electoral votes from certain states on January 6 would indeed have been illegal. A vice president simply doesn’t have the Constitutionally-grounded authority to make that kind of unilateral call. I’d concluded that long before reading the Committee’s report. Would any of us have wanted Al Gore to have it back in 2001? Or Kamala Harris to have it in 2025?!
The confrontation, however, came to a head anyway.
Here is a summation of the Committee’s accusations:
- Obstruction of an official proceeding of the U.S. Congress: because Trump urged Pence (on the advice of one John Eastman) to refuse to certify the election; and is accused of then sending his supporters to the Capitol to disrupt the electoral vote count.
- Conspiracy to defraud the United States: because he and others told and retold what Democrats and corporate media have labeled “the Big Lie” and tried to have state officials, e.g., in Georgia, “find” him votes; this includes that idea that Pence could act unilaterally in the way described above. The accusation goes beyond just this. The Committee contends that this was premeditated: that Trump thought through the idea of stealing an election in advance of the election itself.
- Conspiracy to make a false statement: because among other things Trump called for separate slates of electors in states Biden “won” to replace the official ones.
- “Inciting” or “assisting,” or giving “aid and comfort” to an insurrection — because, so the charge goes, Trump watched events that afternoon unfold on television and did nothing to try and stop the violence. This allegation would enable the DOJ to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent Trump from ever holding office again, his announcement of his candidacy for the GOP nomination for 2024 last month notwithstanding…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… – News With Views
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