Between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott letting the state power grid collapse while he’s busing migrants to D.C. to get himself on Fox News, Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis, and Donald Trump bragging to Sean Hannity about how well he knows Vladimir Putin, there’s no end to the fuckery.
But the focus on The New Abnormal this week is on Donald Trump Jr., as CNN reporter Zachary Cohen breaks down his reporting on the namesake’s post-election text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows scheming on how to steal the election: “We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021.”
That, Cohen tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, “shows that even in those earliest days, while the election votes were still being counted, there were high-level people, very close to the former president, including his chief of staff and his namesake oldest son, talking through the details about what would happen over the next two months in the lead up to Jan. 6, as far as the strategy to overturn the election. It really puts an important timestamp on when this strategy was being drawn up—even as the votes were still being counted.”
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“What’s interesting about Donald Trump Junior’s text messages,” Cohen explains, is that they refer to multiple paths that we control. “There was an eye to Jan. 6 as sort of the backup plan where Junior alludes to a scenario where the House of Representatives can essentially vote to install Donald Trump as president, rather than Joe Biden. So Junior’s lawyer told us, ‘Look, this was given the date that this was sent.’ And, uh, he was, looks like he was forwarding along someone else’s ideas, but we’ve also learned about a text that came immediately before that from Donald Trump, Jr. that says, Look, this is what we need to do. Please read it, please get it to everyone. We need to do it because I’m not sure we’re doing it. So he is clearly putting a stamp of approval on” things.
Plus University of California Law professor Rick Hasen, the co-director of the university’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center and the author of Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It, explains how “if we had the same polarized politics of today, but the technology of the 1950s, we likely wouldn’t have had Jan. 6 and the insurrection and millions of people believing the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.”
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