THE TRUMP GLOBAL DANGER - THE MOVE TO REMOVE THE SEDITIOUS TRAITOR AND DICTATOR IN THE MAKING DONALD TRUMP

 

Dem Rep. Clark: ‘Trump Needs to Be Removed’ — Impeachment Articles Could Be Brought ‘as Early as Mid-Next Week’

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TRENT BAKER

8 Jan 20216,966

1:52

Friday, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) called on President Donald Trump to be “removed from office” over the riots at the U.S. Capitol this week.

Clark said on CNN’s “New Day” if Vice President Mike Pence is not going to invoke the 25th Amendment, as has been reported, then Congress will move forward with impeachment. She expects the articles of impeachment to be brought against Trump “as early as mid-next week” as President-elect Joe Biden is set to take be inaugurated in less than two weeks.

“Donald Trump needs to be removed from office, and we are going to proceed with every tool that we have to make sure that that happens to protect our democracy. If the reports are correct and Mike Pence is not going to uphold his oath of office and remove the president and help protect our democracy, then we will move forward with impeachment to do just that,” Clark threatened.

“[W]e know that we have limited time, but that every day that Donald Trump is President of the United States is a day of grave danger,” she added. “So, we can use procedural tools to get articles of impeachment to the floor for a House vote quickly. We have already had Chairman Jerry Nadler, chair of the Judiciary Committee, say that he will use those tools to bring the articles as fast as possible.”

“When is that?” host John Berman asked.

“Well, that will be, you know, as early as mid-next week,” Clark replied. “We do have a process we have to go through, but let’s be clear what’s at stake here. We have a president who incited a seditious mob to storm the Capitol. We now have five deaths from that. And the harm to our democracy is really unfathomable.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

Graham: Those in Charge of Protecting Capitol ‘Failed’ and Allowed ‘Terrorists’ to Take Over

IAN HANCHETT

7 Jan 20211,296

1:19

During a press conference on Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that those charged with defending the U.S. Capitol “failed in their duties” by allowing “domestic terrorists” to take over the Capitol.

Graham said, “The first thing that stands out to me is how embarrassed and disgusted I am that the United States Capitol could be taken over by domestic terrorists while we’re in session, transferring power from one president to the other, that a band of people, who are terrorists, not patriots, literally occupied the floor of the House, drove the Senate out of its chamber. And the question for the country is how could that happen 20 years after 9/11?”

He continued, “Sen. Schumer has called for the Sgt. at Arms of the Senate to resign. I echo that. Anyone in charge of defending the Capitol failed in their duties. If they would have been in the military, they would have been relieved of their commands and most likely court-martialed. So, the first thing that has to happen is to hold those accountable for failing to defend the nation’s Capitol while the Congress was in session.”

Graham also called for a joint task force to be created to identify the perpetrators of the riot.

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

Sasse Won’t Rule Out Impeachment, 25th Amendment for Trump — ‘I Will Definitely Consider’

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TRENT BAKER

8 Jan 2021815

3:28

During a Friday appearance on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) would not rule out invoking the 25th Amendment or impeaching President Donald Trump over the riots at the U.S. Capitol this week.

Sasse said Trump “incited” the mob at his rally by telling them to “go wild.” He told host Hugh Hewitt that Trump is “addicted” to division and lies.

“[T]he people’s Capitol, which is obviously the greatest symbol around the world of freedom and liberty and self-government, there’s polling all over the world that the dome of the Capitol is literally the most identifiable symbol of freedom, and it was ransacked by a mob that was incited by the President of the United States,” Sasse stated. “While blood was actually being shed in the Capitol, and I was in the Senate chamber, and the Secret Service was trying to rush the vice president to safety, at those exact moments, the President is rage tweeting against the Vice President. Why? Because Mike, because Vice President Pence had the audacity to fulfill his oath of office to the Constitution. It’s a big deal. Lies have consequences.”

“The president had a rally hours before this happened where he is telling them to go to the Capitol and to go wild,” he added. “This is a part of a pattern. The guy is addicted to division. This is a deep brokenness in his soul. You and I have talked about it multiple times. Donald Trump is a guy who hurts. And I hurt for him at an anthropological and a human level, but at a level of his oath of office to the Constitution, the duty of the president of the United States is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And the President is addicted to social media and to television, and to division, and he’s been lying to the American people for eight straight weeks and planned it long before. No matter what was happening in any state, he was going to say the election was being stolen, and the people needed to rise up. But Wednesday morning, he said repeatedly to go wild when you get to the Capitol. And they went to the Capitol, and well, let’s be clear, Hugh, there are 30,000 people here. The vast majority of them are honorable, freedom-loving people. The vast majority of them, but not all of them.”

“Should he be impeached and removed?” Hewitt asked.

According to Sasse, “a lot of questions” need to be answered before he is ready to impeach or remove Trump.

“I think that there are a lot of questions that we need to get to the bottom of about why the National Guard was not deployed, why was it delayed,” Sasse replied. “So that’s what I’ve been working on last night and this morning. I want to understand more about why the National Guard wasn’t deployed when there had been clear calls for it, and then why that delay happened. So there are more things that I need to understand before I get to a conclusory judgment about that. But I think that the question of was the President derelict in his duty, that’s not an open question. He was.”

During an interview on CBS’s “This Morning” that same day, Sasse said he would “definitely consider” articles of impeachment.

“If they come together and have a process, I will definitely consider whatever articles they might move, because … I believe the president has disregarded his oath of office,” Sasse told host Gayle King, later wondering if doing so “is the best thing for America in 2022 or 2032.”

Growing questions about police stand-down in January 6 coup attempt

9 hours ago

The day after President Donald Trump mounted a fascist insurrection at the US Capitol in an attempt to subvert the Constitution and install himself as dictator, more details are emerging regarding the coconspirators within the police, military and far-right who took part in the insurrection.

Despite weeks of advance notice that thousands of people would be descending on DC and Congress on the orders of Trump, Capitol police made little effort to prevent their entry. Video has already emerged of police opening gates to protesters, while another shows an officer taking a selfie with the rioters. In the most incriminating video yet, an officer is seen goading rioters toward the Capitol building.

In an interview on CNN, one protester characterized the police as “very cool” and polite, telling the rioters to “have a good night” after storming the Capitol. “You can see that some of them are on our side,” he said.

US Capitol Police at The Supreme Court (Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons)

Politico reported that a current Metro DC officer in a public Facebook post claimed that off-duty police officers and military members were among the rioters and that they used their badges and ID cards to help compromise security. “If these people can storm the Capitol building with no regard to punishment, you have to wonder how much they abuse their powers when they put on their uniforms,” the cop wrote.

In an interview in New York magazine, 49-year-old Trump supporter Darinna Thompson from Pennsylvania noted the congenial attitude police took towards fascist insurrectionists inside the Capitol, telling her interviewer, “... you should go in there, it’s beautiful. I thanked them for their hospitality; most of them are on our side, the Capitol Police.”

A reporter for the New York Times who was inside the Capitol at the time it was breached questioned a cop as to why the police weren’t attempting to expel the protesters. The officer replied, “We’ve just got to let them do their thing now.”

The Capitol Police force is under the control of the Congress. After the events of September 11, 2001, the size of the police force was more than doubled, from 800 to about 2,000 officers, or roughly four cops for every one member of Congress. The department's annual budget is about $460 million. However, last month Congress appropriated an additional $51 million to the department, bringing the budget above half a billion dollars.

On Thursday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to resign. This followed the Wednesday evening resignation of House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving. Current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also requested the resignation of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, which he gave Thursday.

By Thursday evening, a union of Capitol Police officers issued a public statement demanding Sund’s resignation as well, which Sund agreed he would do, after initially refusing, effective January 16.

In her remarks Thursday, Pelosi stated that “there was a failure of leadership at the top of the Capitol Police. And I think Mr. Sund, he hasn’t even called us... so I had made him aware that I would be saying that we’re calling for his resignation now.”

In the aftermath of the coup, police uncovered two pipe bombs as well as materials to make “several” Molotov cocktails.

In an extraordinary Thursday morning press conference featuring DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, Metro Police Chief Robert Contee and Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, McCarthy claimed that they didn’t “anticipate” the crowd would be that large, and that “no intelligence” suggested that a breach of the Capitol was possible.

This is nonsense. Not only had similar attempts to attack state legislatures been mounted in states leading up to and after the election, including the foiled assassination plot of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, insurrectionists had been planning their assault in plain sight for weeks.

An article by ProPublica reports that leaders of the Stop the Steal movement advised visitors to the website WildProtest.com (which has since been taken offline) on December 23, “we came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th.” Photos taken the day of the rally show Trump supporters carrying walkie-talkies with branded shirts that read, “MAGA Civil War,” complete with a date of January 6, 2021.

Joining Trump supporters in breaching the Capitol were an assortment of prominent fascists, white supremacists and Nazi filth. Tim Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska,” streamed himself inside a senate office shouting “America First.” According to Business Insider, Gionet attempted to call Trump from inside the Capitol.

Neo-Nazi Matthew W. Heimbach, the “outreach director” for the National Socialist Movement, was also photographed inside the Capitol. Meanwhile, members of the New England-based neo-Nazi group known as NSC 131 were also spotted outside the Capitol. As of this writing, none of them has been arrested or charged.

Pete Harding, formerly of the New York Watchmen, a far-right militia, also hosted an online stream from the Capitol grounds in which he threatened “leftist terrorist communists.” Harding alleged he saw Alex Jones of InfoWars marching to the Capitol as well.

Frequent guest of Jones and head of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, said that he and members of his group were on the Capitol grounds, but never entered the building. “We were in the streets and we were talking to the cops, telling them they should stand down and refuse to follow orders of the illegitimate legislators,” Rhodes told the Times.

Meanwhile, at least six Republican legislators have been confirmed to have marched on the Capitol.

West Virginia Delegate Derrick Evans posted a video of himself entering the building before later deleting it. Tennessee lawmaker Terry Lynn Weaver told the Tennessean that she was "in the thick of it," and later tweeted a photo from the base of the Capitol.

State Senator Amanda Chase, who last month called on Trump to declare martial law in order to stay in power, denied that "rioters" stormed the Capitol, claiming in a Facebook post that it was "Patriots who love their country and do not want to see our great republic turn into a socialist country." She added, "I was there with the people; I know. Don't believe the fake media narrative."

The Hill reported that Michigan state representative Matt Maddock and Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano also took part in the march on the Capitol. Missouri State Representative Justin Hill skipped his swearing-in ceremony to be in DC, where he marched among fascists and neo-Nazis, but allegedly did not enter, according to comments he made to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In her opening remarks, Mayor Bowser emphasized that an “investigation” was needed to determine “why the federal law enforcement response was much stronger at the protests over the summer than during yesterday’s attack on Congress.” Bowser called upon the Joint Terrorism Task Force to “investigate, arrest, and prosecute any individual who entered the Capitol, destroyed property, or incited the acts of domestic terrorism observed yesterday.”

Bowser was unable to answer why it appeared that police let people in and proceeded to take selfies with them, remarking that “we not only need people, we need effective people.”

It has not gone unnoticed by millions of people that the police response to the pro-Trump insurrectionists stood in stark contrast to the treatment victims of police violence and their families have faced throughout the summer and fall protests. Whereas thousands of peaceful multiracial protesters against police violence in DC on June 1 were met with military helicopters, National Guard soldiers, police on horseback and copious amounts of tear gas, flash bangs and less lethal ammunition, the few hundred police stationed outside the Capitol on Wednesday to greet the fascist mob appeared to be armed only with batons and soft language.

The breach of the Capitol, one of the most secure buildings on the planet, was the result of coordination between fascist insurrectionists, the White House and police forces, which allowed them to pass through, virtually unmolested, save for the killing of Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.

Babbitt, who is quickly turning into a martyr of the far-right, was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she was attempting to climb through a broken window to get deeper into the Capitol. On her Twitter account, Babbitt expressed fervent support for Trump, retweeting several of his claims regarding election fraud as well as tweets from Trump’s inner circle of conspirators, namely attorneys L. Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and retired General Michael Flynn.

Three other deaths among the protesters were reported as “medical emergencies.” Chief Contee identified them as Kevin Greeson, 55, of Alabama; Benjamin Phillips, 50, of Pennsylvania; and 34-year-old Georgia resident Rosanne Boyland. One Capitol Police officer is on life support after being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher.

Despite the insurrection being televised and live streamed around the world, on Thursday morning, DC police announced they had made only 68 arrests, a majority of which were for curfew and unlawful entry violations, with many of the arrested already released from jail.

For a full, public investigation of Trump’s January 6 coup!

9 hours ago

Even before the dust has settled from the events of January 6, while bullet holes and smashed windows and doors are visible throughout the US Capitol, the American political establishment is working to cover up the political responsibility for the fascist attempted coup against Congress.

This was not an isolated or accidental event in which right-wing protesters acted spontaneously. The attack on Congress was a conspiracy directed from the top. It was prepared many weeks in advance by high-level officials from within the state apparatus, the police and the military.

The Socialist Equality Party demands a criminal investigation into the Trump administration and all those who aided and abetted this fascist putsch. The conspirators are still at large, planning their next steps. Trump remains president until January 20, and the danger has not passed!

During the Watergate crisis, Senate hearings, widely publicized and avidly followed on television, were the vehicle for bringing out the truth of President Richard Nixon’s conspiracy against democracy and led ultimately to his forced removal from office. Watergate began with the break-in by a gang of former intelligence agents, ordered by Nixon to burglarize the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

If a “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon termed it, and its cover-up merited months of televised hearings exposing presidential criminality, how much more necessary is it to carry out an open, public, televised, live-streamed investigation into all aspects of the events of January 6, 2021, the first-ever attempt by a president to overthrow the American government and establish a dictatorship.

It is obvious and undeniable that Trump played the role of prime instigator of the violent assault, convening a rally of thousands of supporters outside the White House and directing them to march on the Capitol. “It will be WILD,” Trump tweeted beforehand, later calling the fascist mob “special people.”

Trump’s direct accomplices include Missouri Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Behind them are the senators who joined Hawley and Cruz in objecting to the confirmation of Biden’s electoral victory and the more than 100 Republicans who did the same in the House of Representatives.

At least six Republican state legislators took part in the right-wing demonstrations and riots. West Virginia Delegate Derrick Evans posted a video of himself entering the building but later deleted it.

Plans for an insurrection were no secret. The January 6 date for the joint session is fixed by law, and plans for a physical assault on that day were widely circulated on right-wing social media sites. The rally at the White House and the march down Constitution Avenue were carefully timed so that the fascist thugs would arrive during the first hour of the joint session of Congress to conduct the ceremonial counting of electoral votes. The attackers walked through police “barriers” without the slightest resistance, stormed into the Capitol, and forced an end to the proceedings.

Events could well have taken a much bloodier turn; some of the invaders were armed, and some of those arrested were found in possession of plastic ties for handcuffing potential kidnap victims or hostages among the senators and congressmen.

Details of how close the House and Senate came to disaster were revealed by Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan, a vocal opponent of Trump, who told a press conference Thursday that he had spoken to the Senate and House leadership when they were huddled together in a basement of the Capitol building:

“I was actually on the phone with [Democratic House] Leader [Steny] Hoyer, who was pleading with us to send the [National] Guard. He was yelling across the room to Schumer, and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.’”

Hogan explained to Hoyer and Schumer that the Pentagon had denied Hogan’s request to deploy his state National Guard to Washington D.C. The head of the Maryland guard “kept running it up the flagpole, and we don’t have authorization,” Hogan told the congressional leaders.

Some two hours later, Hogan said he received a call “out of the blue, not from the secretary of defense, not through what would be normal channels,” but from Ryan McCarthy, the Secretary of the Army, who granted the deployment request. Separate reports indicated that the military only agreed to deploy the guard after speaking to Vice President Mike Pence, not to Trump, the ostensible commander-in-chief.

Top Republicans echoed the lies from Trump of massive vote fraud and ballot stuffing, which were developed as the political cover for the raid on the Capital. The staged objections to Electoral College votes from battleground states were designed to provide legitimacy to violently suppress the congressional certification of the election result.

In addition to the direct collaborators with the coup attempt, the top leaders of the congressional Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, played a critical role in enabling Trump’s unprecedented refusal to concede the outcome of the election, which was clear within a few days after the November 3 vote, after ballot counting was completed. They vouched for the legitimacy of his claims of election fraud.

Other questions are raised about the extent of support for the coup within sections of the military, intelligence and state apparatus.

First, the Capitol police clearly allowed the fascist mobs to invade the grounds, posed for friendly photographs with the insurrectionists, and removed barriers to facilitate the fascists’ entry.

Second, as indicated by Governor Hogan’s statements, the Pentagon initially declined a request to send National Guard troops to the Capitol. (In the District of Columbia, which is federal and not state territory, these troops are directed by the Secretary of the Army). Only after former CIA agent and Pentagon official Elissa Slotkin, now a Democratic congresswoman, contacted General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by cellphone, did the Pentagon shift into action and deploy 1,100 soldiers.

Third, those who stormed the Capitol included elements drawn from the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, and supporters of the fascistic QAnon conspiracy theory. These groups—whom Trump ordered to “stand back and stand by” before the election—have direct representatives in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly elected congresswoman from Georgia, a QAnon supporter, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a “gun rights” activist who sought to carry firearms in the Capitol.

In her press conference Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for “accountability” for the Republicans in Congress who promoted the conspiracy theories that inspired the attack, declaring that they had “abdicated their oath of office” and were “enabling the president.” The reality is that charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government could and should be brought against a majority of the Republican members of Congress. They should be investigated, charged and expelled.

Both Pelosi and Biden, at separate news conferences Thursday, sought to divert attention from the broader political significance of the attempted coup, attributing it solely to Trump’s personal role in inciting the violence. Both Democratic leaders described Trump as a tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as though the threat to American democracy came from Moscow rather than from homegrown fascists.

This is a crude effort to divert popular anger towards an external enemy, although Russia has nothing to do with the events of January 6. It continues the orientation of the Democratic Party since Trump first took office, which has been to divert all opposition in a right-wing direction based on foreign policy differences, particularly in relation to Syria and Russia.

Working people should demand full, public congressional hearings conducted on national television to expose every aspect of Trump’s coup attempt. These should begin immediately and should include interrogation of the soon-to-be ex-president and all his top aides, as well as leading Republican instigators of the coup in Congress.

But the Democratic Party, both in Congress and in the incoming Biden administration, is adamantly opposed to any serious and detailed investigation of the events of January 6, one that would alert the American people to the mounting dangers of fascist conspiracies in the United States.

These conspiracies are ongoing. They are aimed at the forcible suppression of opposition by the working class to social inequality and the ruling class’s homicidal “herd immunity” policy. The defense of democratic rights in the United States demands the mobilization of the working class, politically organized and armed with a socialist perspective.