Trump Can’t Escape Jan. 6th
Jack Smith and Liz Cheney remind Republicans just what sort of person they put at the top of their 2024 ticket.
Liz Cheney is stumping with Kamala Harris today in Ripon, Wisconsin—the birthplace of the Republican party. Meanwhile, Jack Smith’s factual case against Trump is unsealed, the longshoremen’s strike is costing you money, and time is running out to find survivors of Hurricane Helene. Thirty two days until election day. Happy Thursday.
Jack Smith’s Brief Puts Jan. 6th Back in the Headlines. Good.
by A.B. Stoddard
YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, the sun peeked out from behind the dim gray clouds for a few minutes just as the news broke that Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a new 165-page brief from Special Counsel Jack Smith. Because of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity for official acts, Smith has had to slightly retool his election-subversion case against Donald Trump, and this brief walks through the facts of his case against Trump in great detail. Smith writes that after Trump lost in 2020, the former president “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” and that he did so as a candidate and not as president—and so the case against him should proceed.
It was the first time we’d seen the sun in D.C. in nearly two weeks. Sunlight. Transparency. Truth. It felt like a good omen.
Those optimistic feelings continue this morning. Today, former Rep. Liz Cheney, who served as the vice chairwoman of the House January 6th Committee, will campaign with Vice President Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin. Cheney announced weeks ago she would be voting for Harris, and she later said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would as well. Ripon is the birthplace of the GOP; gatherings in a one-room schoolhouse there led to the formation of the Republican party in 1854.
It’s a fitting place for Harris to make a direct appeal to Republican and independent voters, and both she and Cheney will speak to the danger of re-electing Trump.
Smith’s brief reveals new evidence and information about the lead-up to January 6th. Even before the election, the special counsel argues, Trump had planned to “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.” The filing recounts conversations Trump had with allies right after Election Day—many of them with then–Vice President Mike Pence—during which he was informed “he would likely lose” and that his fraud claims “were false.”
Those scheming to steal the election for Trump “changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day” and “made up figures from whole cloth,” Smith’s filing alleges. Trump was overheard telling family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,” according to the filing.
Trump spoke with Steve Bannon on January 5, 2021, less than two hours before Bannon said on his podcast that “all hell is going to break loose” the following day at the Capitol.
When Trump was informed that Pence had been evacuated from the Capitol, aides hoped Trump would “take action to ensure Pence’s safety.” Trump’s response to the news was, “So what?”
On the site today, Bulwark contributor Kim Wehle explains how Smith’s revised indictment presents evidence of “private” actions by Trump, who was committing these crimes in a private capacity as a candidate and well outside the zone of protection for a president’s “official acts” established by the high court’s broad immunity decision.
As Wehle writes, Smith alleges Trump engaged in three conspiracies, and they “all hinge on showing that Trump knew there was no outcome-determinative voter fraud in the election, but that he continued knowingly to make false claims in furtherance of his criminal schemes to illegally thwart the peaceful transfer of power.”
Smith’s filing is “loaded with evidence to prove the prosecution’s case,” Wehle writes. All of this evidence should have been public months ago. But Trump appealed and received multiple delays, and he seemed to have hit the corruption jackpot with SCOTUS’s immunity ruling. The former president said in an interview with News Nation last night that Smith’s filing should never have been made public and that “they rigged the election”—the 2024 election, he means. So expect to hear that a lot if he loses November 5.
Trump’s rageposts from last night sound like he knows this actually matters—the usual lunacy frosted with extra desperation:
It’s the panic of a man who recognizes that the most important argument against him is back in the headlines, with new ghastly detail, as the campaign enters its final month.
Trump had gotten lucky, as he often does; his two-month coup attempt that culminated on January 6th had seemed to disappear into the political mist. There is always too much Trump, so we are propelled by the latest outrage to leave the rest behind us.
And Harris makes scant mention of Trump’s attempt to steal the last election as she focuses on policy issues that voters prioritize. And often those who should be talking about January 6th for Harris, keeping it front and center, are not. It wasn’t just whitewashed and memory-holed by Republicans trying to get re-elected. Even those opposed to Trump frequently omit the fact that a president of the United States sought to retain power illegally after losing an election by trying to overturn the results and then inciting a deadly insurrection.
Take former-Gov. John Kasich, for example. Last night he tweeted that he would not be voting for Trump:
Kasich wants hope. That sounds nice. But if Trump is rewarded with a second term after trying to overthrow our government less than four years ago, there is nothing he won’t do in pursuit of his corrupt aims—for power, retribution, and money.
Yes, Trump is divisive and animated solely by his own grievances, but that is not why Harris must defeat him. Trump wants to destroy the system that reins him in. You can count on it. He isn’t a toxic whiner; he is a threat to our democracy.
This is the only reason any voter needs—including Republicans—to vote for Harris. And that needs to remain in the campaign spotlight until the last votes are cast.
We know we can count on Cheney, but others must treat this with the same urgency.
The Longshoremen’s Strike Is Bad, Actually
by Andrew Egger
The East Coast dockworkers of the International Longshoremen’s Association are striking, and the economy is taking a hit as a result. The overall cost of additional snarls to U.S. supply chains is projected to be substantial: $3.78 billion over the course of the first week, according to an analysis by the Conference Board. The inflationary pressures could be significant.
President Joe Biden won’t knock the union: He’s determined to keep his pro-labor bona fides intact. In a statement, he urged shipping companies to return to the negotiating table: “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well.”
Donald Trump won’t knock the union: He’s making a play for the labor vote, too, and wouldn’t mind another round of price hikes to blame on Biden. “The strike was caused by the massive inflation that was created by the Harris-Biden regime,” he told Fox News Digital. “Everybody understands the dockworkers because they were decimated by this inflation, just like everybody else in our country and beyond.”
But I will knock the union—because they’re a cartel of rent-seeking Luddites attempting to hold the economy hostage a month before a presidential election in an attempt to forbid the nation from improving the efficiency of its shipping operations.
No one can begrudge a union trying to improve its members’ wages: That’s a perennial dispute between labor and management, and it’s true that shipping companies are coming off some fat post-pandemic years. Still, it’s worth noting that we’re not talking about a group just trying to scratch out a living wage here. As they’re currently compensated, senior longshoremen can make more than $200,000 a year while factoring in overtime pay. The shippers of the U.S. Maritime Alliance had offered to bump that compensation up nearly 50 percent in their new contract; the union turned them down.
Why? Partly because the union wants even more money. But they also want suppliers to lock in agreements not to allow any part of the complicated process of loading and unloading container ships to be fully automated. They’re dead serious about this: “Talks between the I.L.A and port operators broke off in June,” the New York Times reports, “after the union said it discovered a gate at a port in Mobile, Alabama that was using technology to check and let in trucks without the involvement of dockworkers.”
A gate that scans in trucks without a six-figure union guy there to supervise it? These greedy corporations will try to get away with anything!
Union resistance to automation is a major part of why U.S. ports are far less efficient than many other major ports around the world. It’s crucial to apply this drag on all U.S. imports and exports in perpetuity, the union insists, because increased automation could mean “more than 2,250 East Coast workers losing their jobs.”
Until their demands are met, ILA negotiators are content to cripple the U.S. economy, no matter how many (less well paid) workers in other industries end up hurt. They’re saying this explicitly, in fact.
“When my men hit the streets from Maine to Texas, every single port, a lockdown,” ILA president Harold Daggett said last month. “First week, be all over the news every night. Second week? Guys who sell cars can’t sell cars because the cars ain’t coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week? Mall starts closing down. They can’t get the goods from China. They can’t sell clothes. They can’t do this. Everything in the United States comes on a ship. They go out of business. Construction workers: They get laid off because the materials aren’t coming in. . . . They lose their jobs.”
“Who’s gonna win here in the long run?” he went on. “You’re better off sitting down, and let’s get a contract, and let’s move on with this world. In today’s world, I’ll cripple you. I’ll cripple you, and you have no idea what that means.”
Quick Hits
Larry Hogan Is Running a West Wing Campaign in an Idiocracy World: Don’t miss Joe Perticone’s interview with Maryland’s popular Republican ex-governor now running for the Senate. Hogan needs Democrats to vote for him—but he has to reach them first.
“I come from what I call the traditional Republican party,” Hogan said in an interview with The Bulwark after his speech. “Maybe I’m not a MAGA Republican, like many people today, but I think there’s, I think there are people on both sides of the aisle that would like to get things done and fix some problems, but they don’t have the courage to speak out quite as much as I do. And rather than just giving up on the party and walking away—which I don’t think is going to fix anything—I’m trying to be one of the few that’s willing to stand up and fight back.”
Will Wisconsin Voters Elect a Jerk for U.S. Senate? Bill Lueders reports: “Trump-backed Eric Hovde is keeping his hopes high and his scruples low in his bid to unseat Tammy Baldwin.”
How Serious Is the Risk of a ‘Wider War’ Breaking Out in the Middle East? And how prepared is the United States? Take a deep dive with Giselle Donnelly.
Cheap Shots
President of the ILA, Harold Daggett is a real piece of work. He owns two, million dollar+ homes, just sold a 75-foot yacht, was prosecuted and acquitted on RICO charges in 2005, and is reputed to work for the Genovese crime family. Oh, and he met with Trump in July:
"We had a wonderful, productive 90-minute meeting where I expressed to President Trump the threat of automation to American workers," Daggett said. "President Trump promised to support the ILA in its opposition to automated terminals in the U.S. Mr. Trump also listened to my concerns about Federal 'Right To Work' laws which undermines unions and their ability to represent and fight for its membership." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/01/harold-daggett-trump-photo-longshoremens-union/75474233007/
Dagget must have left out the part where he guaranteed Trump an October surprise, I mean strike.
I'm furious about a different aspect of the longshoreman strike. Joe Biden is going out of his way to help the union, including not invoking the Taft Hartley Act. Biden's reward? The Union is not endorsing the Democrats. Seriously, F these guys. Good luck with the labor protections another GOP administration will bring.