This is nothing new and is obvious to you and I. The real question is, why can't everyone see this? Why on Earth would people elect a mentally unstable potus? The obvious answer is that nearly half the population is also mentally unstable. Exhibit A: ET Forums. Exhibit B: Trump's vote count.
There is a special kind of crazy going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Some White House advisers fear Trump's final days https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/21/politics/trump-white-house-sidney-powell/index.html President Donald Trump has turned to a fringe group of advisers peddling increasingly dubious tactics to overturn the results of the election, creating a dire situation that multiple senior officials and people close to the President say has led to new levels of uncertainty at how Trump will resist the coming end to his tenure. "No one is sure where this is heading," one official said on Monday. "He's still the President for another month." Conspiracist lawyer Sidney Powell, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon, hawkish trade adviser Peter Navarro and the eccentric founder of the retail website Overstock have all recently found themselves in the Oval Office or on the telephone advising Trump on new last-ditch efforts to reverse his loss. That's in addition to Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has been feeding the President's conspiracy theories for weeks and who, along with Powell, was seen again at the White House on Monday. In the process, Trump has mostly shunned those working inside the government, leading to growing fears of how he may lash out in the four weeks he has remaining in the White House -- or at how he may resist leaving the building come Inauguration Day. Through it all, Trump has mostly abandoned the day-to-day running of government. At a Cabinet meeting last week, he spent much of the time complaining about his suspicions of voter fraud, according to a person familiar with the matter, leaving some attendees puzzled at the point of the gathering. Indeed, Trump has spent his days singularly focused on the election results. "We won this election in a landslide," Trump claimed falsely during a Monday call to the activist Charlie Kirk, who broadcast the conversation using a microphone so attendees at a gathering of young conservatives in West Palm Beach, Florida, could all hear. "The problem is we need a party that's going to fight and we have some great congressmen and women that are doing it and we have others, some great fighters," Trump went on. "But we won this in a landslide, they know it, and we need backing from, like, the Justice Department, and other people finally have to step up." Sources close to the President describe particular worry among his advisers over what Powell -- who only three weeks ago was unceremoniously dumped from his official legal team -- may convince him to do in the coming days. Trump's idea, which he floated in a heated Friday meeting at the White House, is for Powell to essentially embed as a special counsel inside the White House Counsel's Office, a proposal the counsel's office has not looked kindly at. "There's high levels of concern with anything involving Sidney Powell," one source close to the President said. "The lawyers are very worried." Trump's annual holiday trip to his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he will be surrounded by sycophants and devotees encouraging him to fight on, will likely only add grist to his election fraud fantasies, the official said. The trip to Florida is set to begin later this week, though Trump's unpredictability has led some advisers to wonder whether it will remain on the schedule. If he does go, officials say it's likely he will take meetings, in person and via phone, that his official advisers aren't aware of. "It's scary," said another administration official, who added that Trump appears "obsessed" with far-flung scenarios to overturn the election results that are seemingly untenable, both feasibly and politically. One of those includes an effort led by Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama to challenge President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory when Congress meets to formally ratify it on January 6. Trump met with Brooks and a number of other conservative House lawmakers at the White House on Monday for a discussion focused on the President's baseless claims and conspiracy theories that the election was stolen from him, participants said. The lawmakers emerged confident that there was a contingent of House and Senate Republicans who would join the effort and prompt a marathon debate on the floor on January 6 that would spill into the next day. "I believe we have multiple senators and the question is not if but how many," Brooks said, something that would defy the wishes of Senate Republican leaders, who are eager to move on and are urging senators not to participate since doing so could force them to cast a politically toxic vote against Trump. In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, though few believe Trump will actually follow through. How such an episode might unfold isn't clear, and federal law enforcement agencies have been loath to discuss the possibility. Heated Oval Office meeting After news emerged of a heated Oval Office meeting Friday pitting Powell and Flynn against White House officials, including chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Powell was seen exiting the executive mansion again on Sunday. She was also seen at the White House on Monday, though it wasn't clear with whom she was planning to meet. She has been promoting an executive order allowing the federal government to seize voting machines in order to inspect them for fraud, a proposition that administration officials including acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf have warned is outside their authority. Powell attended Friday's meeting alongside Flynn, her client who Trump pardoned last month after he had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Flynn had suggested in a television interview last week that Trump could use the military to rerun the election in certain states, an idea that again arose during Friday's meeting. They were joined by Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, who tweeted afterward that he was disappointed in how Trump is being served by his White House team. "President Trump is being terribly served by his advisers. They want him to lose and are lying to him. He is surrounding by mendacious mediocrities," Byrne wrote, adding later: "For the first time in my life I feel sorry for Donald Trump. He is standing up to his waist in snakes. Trust Rudy and Sidney only." Byrne, who resigned from Overstock in 2019 after his comments about the "deep state" triggered a steep decline in the company's stock price, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. He has previously admitted in a series of interviews that he had an intimate relationship with accused Russian agent Maria Butina, which lasted from 2015 to 2018, and ultimately assisted law enforcement in their investigation of her. More recently, he has emerged as a proponent of the debunked election fraud claims heralded by the President and Powell. He said last month he'd "funded a team of hackers and cyber-sleuths, other people with odd skills" to look into the claims. Friday's meeting was a highly charged example of a recurring phenomenon: Trump's outside advisers raising their voices in anger at White House aides, accusing them of disloyalty and weakness, while Trump looks on. Bannon's advice Meanwhile, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said Sunday night that he has also advised Trump to appoint special counsels to investigate allegations of election fraud and to investigate matters relating to Biden's son, Hunter. "As I strongly recommended to the President, we need a special counsel named immediately -- a special prosecutor just on election fraud and voter fraud, they're two different things -- election fraud and voter fraud -- you need to do that immediately," Bannon said during a livestream with conservative pastors on Sunday night. "In addition, he must announce a special prosecutor, name a special prosecutor to look at the Biden hard drive." Bannon's comments suggest that the former White House chief strategist is once again advising the President, even as he is under federal indictment and could be under consideration for a presidential pardon. On the livestream, Bannon also said he does not believe Trump will attend Biden's inauguration and that Trump "will never concede." "He is not going to back down. He will never concede. And I will tell you in the small chance we don't win this, he will never sit on that stage and participate in that inauguration, as he should not. This is an illegal effort that's going on," Bannon said. A day later, Bannon spoke on his own program, "War Room," with Navarro, the trade adviser who officials say Trump is consulting frequently on his election fraud claims. Navarro said he'd been personally phoning lawmakers in six states where Trump and his team still hope to overturn the results. "There are a lot of traditional Republicans who don't want to get on the Trump train. I can't explain what's going on in these state legislators except to say they don't embrace economic nationalism and they've turned their back on the President," Navarro said. On Monday, the split between the President's official set of advisers and the informal group currently in his ear exploded into clear view. Speaking during a news conference at the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr roundly pushed back against the President's calls in recent days for a special counsel on voting or his supporters' requests to consider seizing voting machines. Both are ideas floated by Powell and others who have spoken to the President in recent days. "I see no basis for seizure of machines by the federal government," Barr said at his news conference. If he thought there was a need for a special counsel on voting fraud, Barr said, he would have already appointed one. "There is fraud, unfortunately, in most elections. I think we're too tolerant of it," he said. But in this election, Barr said, he stands by the finding that there was no systemic or broad-based fraud, a finding the President refuses to admit.
And it's not only Trump who lost his grip: House Republicans meet with Trump to discuss overturning election results https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/21/trump-house-overturn-election-449787 Trump loyalists are planning a last stand Jan. 6. Rep. Jody Hice tweeted after the meeting: "The courts refuse to hear the President's legal case. We're going to make sure the People can!” President Donald Trump huddled with a group of congressional Republicans at the White House on Monday, where they strategized over a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results next month, according to several members who attended the meeting. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) — who is spearheading the long-shot push to overturn the election results in Congress — organized the trio of White House meetings, which lasted over three hours and included roughly a dozen lawmakers. The group also met with Vice President Mike Pence, who will be presiding over the joint session of Congress when lawmakers officially certify the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, as well as members of Trump’s legal team. “It was a back-and-forth concerning the planning and strategy for January the 6th,” Brooks said in a phone interview. Hice tweeted. “I will lead an objection to Georgia's electors on Jan 6. The courts refuse to hear the President's legal case. We're going to make sure the People can!” But even if a senator joins the House GOP’s attempt to throw out the election results — which is required in order to force a deliberation and vote on the matter — the effort is almost certain to fail. The House is led by Democrats, while there’s not a huge appetite for the effort in the Senate GOP. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even warned Senate Republicans last week not to get involved. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has dodged questions about the improbable effort. Still, the whole episode could turn messy — and become one last Trump loyalty test. Brooks, who said there are plans to challenge the results in six states, said total debate time could clock in at around 18 hours. That means the vote-counting process could bleed into the wee hours of Jan. 7. During Monday’s meeting at the White House — where lawmakers noshed on a mid-afternoon snack of meatballs and pigs in a blanket — Trump talked with members for over an hour about how Jan. 6 will play out. They discussed logistics, such as what the objection language for each state would look like and how the floor proceedings will work. The group of conservatives is still debating whether to keep the objection language short or detail claims of widespread voter fraud, which they have not proved and which have repeatedly been rejected in court. And while only one senator and representative can be the chief sponsor of each objection, scores of other lawmakers will likely be listed as cosponsors since there are so many members eager to be involved in the effort. Meanwhile, the goal of meeting with Pence was to make sure they are all on the same page, since the vice president will be presiding over the proceedings and will have to rule on various objections and procedural issues. Lawmakers were “trying to make sure that we understand what his view of the procedural requirements are, so we can comply with them,” Brooks said. “Pence will have a tremendous amount of discretion, though I think the rulings he will make will be pretty cut and dry.” “It’s still somewhat fluid, since this does not happen very often,” Brooks added.
Exclusive: Donald Trump's Martial-Law Talk Has Military on Red Alert https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-donald-trumps-martial-law-talk-has-military-red-alert-1557056 Pentagon and Washington-area military leaders are on red alert, wary of what President Donald Trump might do in his remaining days in office. Though far-fetched, ranking officers have discussed what they would do if the president declared martial law. And military commands responsible for Washington DC are engaged in secret contingency planning in case the armed forces are called upon to maintain or restore civil order during the inauguration and transition period. According to one officer who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity, the planning is being kept out of sight of the White House and Trump loyalists in the Pentagon for fear that it would be shut down. "I've been associated with the military for over 40 years and I've never seen the discussions that are being had right now, the need for such discussions," says a retired flag officer, currently a defense contractor who has mentored and advised his service's senior leaders. He was granted anonymity in order to speak without fear of reprisal. A half-dozen officers in similar positions agree that while there is zero chance that the uniformed leadership would involve itself in any scheme to create an election-related reversal, they worry that the military could get sucked into a crisis of Trump's making, particularly if the president tries to rally private militias and pro-Trump paramilitaries in an effort to disrupt the transition and bring violence to the capital. "Right now, because of coronavirus," one retired judge advocate general says, "the president actually has unprecedented emergency powers, ones that might convince him—particularly if he listens to certain of his supporters—that he has unlimited powers and is above the law." "But martial law," says the lawyer, "is the wrong paradigm to think about the dangers ahead." Though such a presidential proclamation could flow from his order as commander-in-chief, an essential missing ingredient is the martial side: the involvement and connivance of some cabal of officers who would support the president's illegal move. Such a group doesn't exist, he and other experts agree, but there could still be room for mischief, confusion, and even use of military force. It would just not be in the way Trump might intend, particularly if he continues his quest to destabilize the democratic process. "There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election," Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff General James McConville said in a joint statement last Friday. Yet while the Pentagon officially responded to Newsweek's queries with various quotes from defense leaders that the military has no role to play in the outcome of the election, it declined to address post-election crises or the discussions of martial law, referring questions to the White House. The White House then declined to comment. Similarly, officers who were willing to speak about the subject insisted on anonymity, fearful that use of their names might provoke the ire of the president. They feared that publicly stated opposition to the president's scheme to undermine the election—whether that is to proclaim martial law, to seize voting machines, or even to halt Congress from ratifying state elector's results on January 6—could actually embolden Donald Trump to act. "At this point there's no telling what the president might do in the next month," says a former Northern Command (NORTHCOM) commander, one who has been intimately involved in the development of domestic civil planning. "Though I'm confident that the uniformed military leadership has their heads screwed on right, the craziness is unprecedented and the possibilities are endless." The retired flag officer also requested anonymity because he is actively advising senior officers and is not authorized to speak on the record. In some ways the military has already gotten dragged into the issue. Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, President Trump's first national security advisor and a recently pardoned felon, publicly broached the subject of martial law on the conservative channel Newsmax last week, saying that the president should use the military to seize voting boxes and "rerun" the election in certain states. "He could take military capabilities and he could ... basically rerun an election," Flynn said. "The president has to plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is.'' Flynn's suggestion has been openly condemned by numerous retired officers. Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said on MSNBC that Flynn was a "disgrace to his uniform." After his television remarks, Flynn was invited to the Oval Office over the weekend, according to The New York Times and CNN, where he repeated his proposal. Since then, top aides have shot down the president's musings, and military sources point out that none of these discussions have included the Pentagon, and no one in the military supports any use of the armed forces to keep Donald Trump in office. But officials willing to speak about the martial law discussions, and to speculate about the president's state of mind, are quick to point out that in March the president said he had "the right to do a lot of things that people don't even know about." That statement came a day before the president declared a COVID-19 national emergency on March 13, a state that continues to this day as specified in three laws—the Public Health Service Act, the Stafford Act, and the National Emergencies Act. The Public Health Service Act is a 1944 statute that affords the president broad powers to mandate and enforce a nationwide quarantine. The Stafford Act, created mostly for natural disasters, allows the president to move to alleviate a local civil emergency without a request from a governor (that is, when he certifies that the primary responsibility for whatever the emergency is rests with the federal government). There is no aspect of either of these first two statutes that involves the military in any way. The National Emergencies Act, on the other hand, could be more problematic if Trump chose to invoke it. It generally gives the president nearly unlimited discretion in defining the conditions of a national emergency. President George W. Bush declared a national emergency under this act after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. President Barack Obama declared a national emergency with regard to cybersecurity on April 1, 2015, a declaration still in effect. In both the Bush and Obama declarations, the presidents specified what authorities they were granting to government agencies and departments, mostly to redirect funds (and since then, a February 15, 2019 declaration of national emergency has been used by President Trump to divert defense construction dollars to pay for the southern border wall). Though the National Emergencies Act does not itself provide specific powers—it merely allows the president to implement other statutes—experts worry that Trump and his loyalist supporters might imagine that the Act allows him to invoke extraordinary powers when in fact there is no precedent behind such a move. And though President Trump himself tweeted "Martial law = Fake News" the day of the New York Times report, officials who have served in the Trump White House say that his reference to "things that people don't even know about" portends true dangers, as the president indeed does have secret powers and has been fascinated with their existence. Military officers and National Security Council officials with direct knowledge of the early coronavirus deliberations at the White House say Trump was briefed by his national security team on a broad range of extraordinary powers available to him, including secret military plans to suppress civil disturbances in the "National Capital Region" and extraordinary powers contained in Top Secret continuity of government plans, both first revealed in Newsweek. "The president is not a lawyer and he doesn't pay attention to details, but he is also fascinated with the secret levers of the presidency that are available to him," says a former national security council staffer who spoke off the record because he is not authorized to discuss the highly classified plans. Contained in the various packages briefed in the Oval Office during the early months of COVID-19, he says, were discussions of so-called Presidential Emergency Action Documents. PEADs originated during the darkest days of the Cold War and are proclamations, executive orders, presidential messages and draft legislation ready for submission to Congress, prepared and approved by the White House, the Justice Department, and Congressional lawyers. A separate presidentially-activated code word exists to implement each of some five dozen PEADs—the documents already dispersed amongst various departments and government agencies. Those codes are contained in the same satchel—the so-called "football"—that holds the president's nuclear authenticators and is carried by military aides who are always with the president. In other words, such orders for extraordinary powers have been regularly briefed to President Trump and are only an arm's length away. Officials caution that none of the PEADs are applicable to any election scenario. But the little-known directives were reviewed to update them for coronavirus, to take into consideration the possibility of a countrywide breakdown in conditions other than war. During that review, some 60 documents circulated in a very small government circle of lawyers and emergency specialists: some of the PEADs themselves, some national security-related interagency agreements, some lower-level "major emergency actions," emergency action "packages" and draft presidential proclamations. One of the PEADs—they are organized into seven broad lettered categories, each on a different topic—addresses martial law. That document, according to a former Justice Department lawyer who was involved in an Obama administration review of the entire sheaf of PEADs, is probably the only explicit government statement setting out a domestic application of such a presidential proclamation. The PEAD, sometimes referred to as Directive 20, confers upon the Secretary of Defense powers to maintain public order, ensure public safety, and enforce federal, state, and local laws. It also directs the Secretary to form an interim government. The former Justice official cautions, though, that Directive 20 assumes that the United States has been subjected to armed attack and is suffering millions of deaths, that Washington has been destroyed, and that state and local governments are paralyzed, with essential services disrupted. "Of course Directive 20 can't be implemented, both because the conditions aren't present and the military wouldn't go along," the former official says. More applicable to the current situation, he says, is the PEAD that allows for "proclaiming the existence of an unlimited national emergency." Executive orders, he says, already exist that define a "national security emergency" as including military attack, natural disaster, a technological calamity, and "other emergencies" that threaten the national security of the United States. "The entire apparatus is both meticulous and highly ambiguous," the official says. He declined to speak on the record because the subject matter—PEADs and emergency powers—is so highly classified. Martial law, according to Black's Law Dictionary, "exists when military authorities carry on government or exercise various degrees of control over civilians or civilian authorities in domestic territory." According to longstanding federal rules, the condition of "public necessity" mirrors that of Directive 20: that is, that there be extraordinary conditions necessitating military involvement, and that the duration of martial and its purpose be clearly stated. Military lawyers say that threats to public safety and order have to exist beyond the capacity of the federal government or state and local government to resolve. But they point out that in Portland, Oregon, and other cities across America, the Department of Homeland Security has already declared that the local governments have lost control, necessitating federal intervention, even without the state's permission. That precedent could embolden the White House to believe it has the right to act. So it's also conceivable that in the District of Columbia a commander could independently invoke martial law to restore order were there a complete breakdown. All the sources Newsweek spoke to, from the Pentagon military leadership down to the Joint Task Force already activated for coronavirus and used to suppress the George Floyd riots, agree that such a declaration is unlikely—that is, unless there is an armed rebellion undertaken on behalf of Donald Trump. To guide the Pentagon's preparation of civil disturbance contingency plans, the Department of Justice prepared a legal analysis of peacetime martial law that further questions its relevance in the presidential transition. The classified memorandum, reviewed by Newsweek, calls use of the term "martial law" improper in cases of law enforcement, concluding that there is neither a Constitutional nor statutory definition that applies. The military might be used to perform judicial functions, the memo says, but the substitution of the military for civilian control is lawful only when unrecognized enemy governments—something like the Confederate States, for example, or a deposed and defeated government on foreign territory—no longer exists. Still, the tangle of contingency plans, continuity of government procedures, secret presidential directives and even unknown powers, experts say, is now partially responsible for the current state of affairs and form a real basis for any anxiety that Donald Trump could do anything to cause even more chaos in the coming weeks. "The greatest danger is that the very existence of these layers of secret directives might convey the impression of powers and authorities that don't really exist in peacetime," the former Justice Department lawyer says. In years of writing on this subject, I have never heard so many officers—active and retired—willing to talk openly about the need for professional military officers to review their sacred obligations to refuse to follow unlawful orders and to think through their roles and duties given the Donald Trump wild card, even though he is still president. "You've got to recognize an illegal order when it comes your way," says another retired flag officer, saying he has been involved in unprecedented internal discussions going on right now about this subject. The officer, who declined to speak on the record, says that though lawful and unlawful orders are a part of officer training from the beginning, "the principles of loyalty to the Constitution hammered home from the start of every career, ... we've never had the real thing, never someone who occupied the White House who conducted themselves anything like President Trump."