33 Comments

It seems like journalists put cases together better than the DOJ. If those alternate electors and co-conspirators aren’t charged inside a week, AG Garland should be fired!!!!!!!!

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Read your recommendations on what Biden needs to do to turn things around, but I'd like to know WHY someone from the administration is not seeing what we all can see and are included in your recommendations? Is he being well served by his advisors or not taking their advice? TIA

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It's all set up so that Trump can claim to be elevated by acclamation... Pence was the fall guy if it went south and he knew it.

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Let me make a prediction before Amanda Carpenter beats me to the punch. News today is that a bipartisan momentum is building in Congress to pass desperately needed changes to the Electoral Count Act. The ECA needs to be changed to ensure Trump's plot to steal the 2020 election through Congress' role of counting the votes can't be replicated more successfully in the 2024 election.

Here's the prediction. The effort to change the ECA will be derailed not by Donald Trump (although he will denounce it and his minions will follow suit), but by Democratic progressives in the House who will look around, see bipartisan support for the ECA, and demand that their proposed election reforms (such as ballot drop boxes, more early voting, food and water to voters, more vote by mail, ban on Voter ID, etc.) be included with the ECA reform in order to earn their vote.

Of course, that strategy would be insane and be a gift to Donald Trump. Sort of insane like progressives saying they wouldn't support an infrastructure bill they very much wanted, unless it was passed as a package with the much less popular social spending (Build Back Better) bill. That idiotic strategy ensured Biden wouldn't get credit he richly deserved for pushing the infrastructure bill through Congress.

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Number one: Why did Biden wait until the last f***ing minute to push hard for voting rights act(s)? F*** Build Back Better. Build what? An authoritarian anti-democracy with great infrastructure? The Black voters got Biden elected and he hasn't shown any kind of appreciation other than speeches someone else writes for him to read off the TelePrompter. Well, he's better than trump, ain't he? Yup. But he has been governing, and appointing from the middle of the road as if it were normal times. Now he is turning up the heat. Too late, man.

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Everytime i see the Republicans clutch their pearls with the Jan 6th investigation. I think about Benghazi.... how the Republicans heads would be exploding if the Democrats tied to stage a coup and insurrection.

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Hands down one of your best Morning Shots. Best pulling together of the Trump plan, along with the handiwork of his loyal henchmen, to overturn the election. This is one I'll print out for future reference. Thanks!

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So much wasted ink on this topic when there so many actual stories to write about political malfeasance and incompetence. But then that stuff does not do anything to satiate the emotive needs of the cult of anti-Trump.

It is so hilarious... the absolute lies that the corporate media pushed on a fake Russigate story only to have a Russian national, Igor Danchenko, indicted by John Durham for working with Democrat operatives to help make up the fake story. And Democrat campaign attorney Michael Sussmann gets indicted for lying to the FBI to help get this FISA warrants needed to illegally spy on the Trump campaign. The news headline should have been "Democrats Collude with Russian to Interfere with Election"

All of this political malice by the Obama and Clinton machines makes Nixon's bad deeds silly by comparison.

But sure... let's keep pushing the NEW fake Democrat-ginned and corporate media carried story that Trump and some cast of working class clowns were going to steal the election or take over the government.

Breathless hyperbole is so common from the left and left media, the population of people paying any attention to it is crashing like the Biden economy.

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Did anyone see the clip on Rachel Maddow's show of the fake electors standing at the back door of the Michigan statehouse on the day their election was being certified? They were claiming that THEY were the electors and that they had every right to be allowed into the building. The state Trooper that was manning the door was very polite, but he knew the deal, and did not let them in.

I just couldn't believe, although on some level I could, the deep level of shamelessness and open dishonesty these people exhibited, all in service to Trump....a most horrible person if there ever was one.

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founding

I am an ardent reader of The Bulwark and listen to your podcast.Great piece this morning.Although there is much concern about how DOJ in moving,my take is that they are cautious as not to appear political and are awaiting the select committees report.Its encouraging that they charged the oath keepers with sedition.They are building the case starting from the bottom to the top.It will take time and require patience. *Dave Yell

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"There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect."

The partial list of signatories of the letter that contained this sentence is Exhibit A of the thoroughgoing corruption of the American right.

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Thank you! Great article. It made me subscribe e to Bulwark after a year or two of free content. The question I have is this: if you can see it and understand it and I can see it and understand it, why hasn't the DOJ seen it and understood it? Or the FBI? Or the Domestic Terrorism group (I think we have one)?

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Morning Shots included a discussion of the original Sister Souljah moment this week. I think it worthwhile to place this Clinton campaign act in the context of other acts related to race and crime during that campaign. Clinton famously made a show of returning to Arkansas to execute an African-American prisoner who was so mentally incapacitated he did not eat the dessert from his last meal because he was saving it for later. Clinton also called a press conference days before Super Tuesday at a prison at Stone Mountain, Georgia, the spiritual home of the KKK. The purpose of the press conference seems to have been to produce photos of four white politicians in business suits lording it over black prisoners in prison jumpsuits. The four politicians: Clinton, Democratic Governor of Georgia Zell Miller, Democratic Senator from Georgia Sam Nunn, and the fourth a man whose pre-political career included playing "Cooter" on The Dukes of Hazzard, Cooter being the mechanic on the show who repaired the car named General Lee. Some political operative undoubtedly took perverse pleasure in packing so much dark symbolism into one photo-op.

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Eagerly anticipating the rightwing whataboutism on BLM riots....

This does seem to reinforce that reforming ECA > passing John Lewis Act. And I'm interested in any input on the following:

The John Lewis Bill is essentially a restoration of the Voting Rights Act, and is necessary now because a 5-4 conservative SCOTUS essentially threw out the VRA.

So, if the John Lewis bill passes, why will it not also get thrown out by a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS? What am I missing here?

Also, I read a piece in The Atlantic this morning on Trump's sedition rally in AZ last night, and it seems a good deal of the crowd still is convinced that the election will be overturned and that Biden will get yanked and Trump reinstated as President before election 2024. People are not well in this country.

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really depressing set of responses from Jan 6th Committee witnesses about how none of them have been contacted yet by FBI or DOJ in yesterday's WaPo article : https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-jan-6-investigation-garland/2022/01/15/e55a3ca2-7555-11ec-b202-b9b92330d4fa_story.html

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This was the clearest, most understandable (I'm sure there's a better word out there, but I just woke up!), most revealing explanation of what was planned, and IT SHOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS on every news website and newspaper. The last step, they were clearly planning on holding people hostage and forcing them to vote Trump in. They only failed because they didn't have enough people with real military training and nerve actually in there, as the "tourists" who were idiots got in the way.

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