Tag: mark meadows

Trump chief of staff Meadows denies two allegations in Georgia indictment as he takes witness stand

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Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows took the witness stand at a hearing on August 28 to deny two of the allegations made against him in a Georgia indictment accusing him of participating in an illegal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.

Meadows, who was charged this month along with former President Donald Trump and 17 other people, is seeking to fight the charges in federal court rather than in state court. As part of that effort, he testified that he never asked White House personnel officer John McEntee to draft a memo to Vice President Mike Pence on how to delay certification of the election.

“When this came out in the indictment, it was the biggest surprise for me,” Mr. Meadows said Monday. He later said, “Me asking Johnny McEntee for this kind of a memo just didn’t happen.”

He also said he did not text the Georgia secretary of state’s office chief investigator, Frances Watson, as the indictment alleged. Rather, he said he believes that text was sent to Jordan Fuchs, the secretary of state’s chief of staff.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who used Georgia’s racketeering law to bring the case, alleges that Trump, Meadows and the others participated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to try to keep the Republican president in power illegally even after his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Willis argues that Meadows’ actions were political in nature and not performed as part of his official duties.

The extraordinary testimony from Trump’s former chief of staff came as two of the former president’s attorneys listened attentively in the courtroom. Monday’s hearing in Georgia involved just one of four criminal cases that Trump is currently facing. In Washington, a judge overseeing a federal case over charges that Trump sought to illegally subvert the results of the 2020 election set a trial date for March 4, 2024, right in the heart of the presidential primary calendar.

Lawyers for Meadows argue that his actions that gave rise to the charges in the indictment “all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as Chief of Staff.” They argue that he did nothing criminal and that the charges against him should be dismissed, and they want U.S. District Judge Steve Jones to move the case to federal court to halt any proceedings against him at the state level.

It was unclear when the judge planned to make his decision.

During Monday’s hearing, Meadows attorney George J. Terwilliger III quickly called his client to the stand and asked him about his duties as Trump’s chief of staff. The lawyer then walked him through the acts alleged in the indictment to ask if he had done those as part of his job. For most of the acts listed, Meadows said he had performed them as part of his official duty.

In the cross-examination, prosecutor Anna Cross ticked through the same acts to ask Meadows what federal policy was being advanced in each of them. He frequently answered that the federal interest was in ensuring accurate and fair elections, but she accused him several times of not answering her question.

Willis’ team argues that the actions in question were meant solely to keep Trump in office. These actions were explicitly political in nature and are illegal under the Hatch Act, which restricts partisan political activity by federal employees, they wrote in a response to Meadows’ notice of removal to federal court. They believe the case should remain in Fulton County Superior Court.

The allegations against Meadows include participating in meetings or communications with state lawmakers along with Trump and others that were meant to advance the alleged illegal scheme to keep Trump in power; traveling to Atlanta’s suburbs where a ballot envelope signature audit was happening; arranging a phone call between Trump and a Georgia secretary of state investigator; and participating in a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during which Trump suggested Raffensperger could help “find 11,780 votes” needed for him to win Georgia.

Cross asked Meadows on Monday why he was present in an Oval Office meeting with Michigan legislators in which, the indictment alleges, Trump made false claims about election fraud in the state. Meadows said he was responsible for managing the president’s time and it was important for someone to keep the meeting moving and wrap it up when it was finished.

Willis’ team subpoenaed several witnesses to appear at Monday’s hearing, including Raffensperger, Watson and two lawyers who did work for Trump in Georgia in the aftermath of the election but who were not named in the indictment. The team has also submitted excerpts of previously taken depositions of several people, including former Meadows assistant Cassidy Hutchinson.

Two of Trump’s attorneys in the Georgia case, Steve Sadow and Jennifer Little, watched the proceedings in the courtroom, as did lawyers for at least one other co-defendant in the case.

Willis’ team argues that Meadows is not entitled to immunity under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which basically says that federal law takes precedence over state law, because his actions were “improper political activity” that weren’t part of his official duties and the evidence shows that he had “personal or criminal motivations for acting.”

In response to Willis’ team’s filing, Meadows’ lawyers said all that is at issue at the moment is whether the case should be moved to federal court and that he has met that “very low threshold.”

Meadows was a federal official and his actions were part of that role, they wrote, noting that the chief of staff has “broad-ranging duties to advise and assist the President.” The merits of his arguments of immunity cannot be used to decide whether the case should be moved to federal court, they argued.

They added that the “Hatch Act is a red herring, particularly at this stage,” and shouldn’t even be discussed until after the case is moved to federal court. “Nonetheless, Mr. Meadows complied with federal law in connection with the charged conduct,” they wrote.

At least four others charged in the indictment are also seeking to move the case to federal court, including U.S. Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. The other three — former Georgia Republican Party chair David Shafer, Georgia state Sen. Shawn Still and Cathy Latham — are among the 16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate declaring falsely that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.

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Trump Did THREE Perfect Calls To Overturn Georgia? Go To Three Prisons!

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s get the ball rolling so Fox News doesn’t have to: These Georgia grand jurors are so woke, they probably got a restful night of sleep last night. They’re so woke they probably didn’t even have to drink coffee today. They’re so woke they probably go on dates with Hunter Biden to Silicon Valley Bank in the morning.

OK cool. The Atlanta Journal Constitution dropped some very cool new reporting and interviews with the grand jurors in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow the free and fair 2020 election in Georgia. If you’re already cringing hearing “Georgia grand jurors talking to media,” worry not. These people are anonymous and it appears they’re being very careful about blabbing any information they shouldn’t.

What they are telling us, though, is fascinating. For instance, Trump made yet another PERFECT CALL trying to overthrow the election. There was the most famous one — the “find me 11,780 votes” one, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. There was the one to Frances Watson, the lead investigator in the secretary of state’s office, when he pressed her to get to the “right’ answer on what happened in Georgia.

BEFORE! If Team Trump Is Sh*tting Itself This Much Over THESE Georgia Grand Jury Excerpts, Imagine What’s Under Seal

And now we have Trump’s third perfect call, which jurors heard, to Georgia Republican House Speaker David Ralston, telling him to convene a special session of the Georgia Legislature to overturn Joe Biden’s win and give it to him. Ralston, as we know, did not do that.

One juror said Ralston proved to be “an amazing politician.”

The speaker “basically cut the president off. He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just basically took the wind out of the sails,” the juror said. “‘Well, thank you,’ you know, is all the president could say.”

We feel like there’s a pattern here.

A juror the AJC talked to spoke of crying in their car at the end of the day, particularly days when they’d hear testimony from people whose lives Donald Trump ruined because he’s a weak sore loser who doesn’t love himself and can’t look his unending failures in the face.

Among the most compelling witnesses, various jurors said, were Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who had received death threats after being singled out by Trump and his then-attorney Rudy Giuliani. Another mentioned Eric Coomer, the onetime executive for Dominion Voting Systems, who left his job after being vilified. Also mentioned was Tricia Raffensperger, the wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who broke down when describing the vitriol and threats leveled at her, one juror said.

“I was pretty emotional throughout the whole thing,” a juror said. “I wouldn’t cry in front of any of the witnesses, but when I would get in my car, I was like, I just left that and I have to just go do my job now?…. I just know things that are hard to know.”

They talked about how they want people to know how serious their deliberations were — especially after the media tour their foreperson took — and the respect for the system and the people who administer it they came away with.

Donald Trump Destroys People’s Lives

GA Grand Jury Foreperson Is Telling Us What We Want To Hear. She Should Stop That.

They talked about understanding the gravity of what they were participating in, as they confronted lockdowns and being protected by SWAT teams and bomb-sniffing dogs. The latter happened the day seditious bastard Michael Flynn showed up and, of course, refused to answer questions.

Speaking of, they talked about the three kinds of witnesses they heard from: those who came freely, those who came under subpoena but answered freely, and those who fought tooth-and-nail and then refused to answer questions, often people who had been in Trump’s inner circle. Those people annoyed the shit out of them, not because of any preconceived notions they had about people taking the Fifth — hearteningly, prosecutors made sure they didn’t have those — but because they knew it was going to take forever and be tedious as fuck.

Of course, jurors report that sometimes when those dicks would refuse to answer questions, prosecutors would helpfully play videos of them talking elsewhere, to fill out the record.

Jurors dropped some details about what some folks did say to them. This quip from Lindsey Graham is getting a lot of play:

“He said that during that time, if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it,” the juror said.

Such a pathetic damned idiot.

One juror talked about how gross it was seeing certain witnesses speak one way to them and then go back out on the campaign trail and say election-denying garbage. But these last quotes are a bit more uplifting:

“I can honestly give a damn of whoever goes to jail, you know, like personally,” one juror said. “I care more about there being more respect in the system for the work that people do to make sure elections are free and fair.”

Said another juror: “I tell my wife if every person in America knew every single word of information we knew, this country would not be divided as it is right now.”

The grand jurors said they understand why the public release of their full final report needs to wait until Willis makes indictment decisions.

“A lot’s gonna come out sooner or later,” one of the jurors said. “And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”

Well, that gives us hope, because unlike that very nice juror who doesn’t care who goes to jail, we are much meaner than that and we would like to see at least 10 people buried underneath Guantanamo over this, starting with Mr. Perfect Calls himself.

Speaking of, let’s see if he’s going berserk or anything.

We’ll mark that one down as a “yes.”

[AJC]

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And once that doesn’t exist, I’m also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@[email protected]) and at Post!

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Trump Lawyers Were Surrounding Cassidy Hutchinson Like The Devil Witches In Rosemary’s Baby

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

On Monday, at the final public hearing of the House January 6 Select Committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren hinted that
some attorney in Trumpland might be in deep shit for urging his client to tell fibs to the committee. Speculation immediately turned to Stefan Passantino, the former Trump White House Ethics (if any!) lawyer whom blockbuster witness Cassidy Hutchinson fired before making her damning public testimony. CNN confirmed Wednesday that Passantino was the attorney in question, by which time his bio had disappeared from the website of his law firm Michael Best. Reached for comment, Passantino told the network that he had resigned “given the distraction of this matter.”

And indeed, the transcript released yesterday of Hutchinson’s testimony about her dealings with Passantino will probably prove to be
quite a distraction for the lawyer, both personally and professionally. Particularly since Hutchinson said that she’s had discussions about this very topic with the nice people at the DOJ.

The passage where Hutchinson described Passantino saying New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman is “friendly to us” made immediate headlines. But most of the 138 pages released yesterday is Hutchinson’s narration of how she wound up in the clutches of a bunch of older Trump attorneys who exploited her inexperience, loyalty, and most of all her financial straits to keep her quiet about what she’d seen.

And it’s filthy.

The story starts off in November of 2021, when it became clear to Hutchinson that she was going to be subpoenaed to testify to the committee. Despite Hutchinson being in her early 20s, Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had relied on her completely, and she’d been in the room when a lot of shit went down. In 2022, she had no money and no job, but she also knew exactly what kind of people she was dealing with, which is why she was desperate to find an attorney who was
not from Trumpland.

“In a lot of scenarios that I have been privy to, once you are looped in, especially financially with them, there sort of is no turning back,” she told the committee.

But by February, after she’d been subpoenaed and with the deadline looming to produce documents and show up to testify, she was desperate. So she had mixed feelings when Eric Herschmann, the former White House attorney who testified memorably about the advice he gave to John Eastman, told her something like “Hey, I’m so sorry that we haven’t taken care of you yet. We didn’t know you didn’t have an attorney yet. Why didn’t you reach out sooner? Well, don’t worry about that now. … I’ll call you in a couple of days to connect you with somebody.”

That somebody turned out to be Stefan Passantino, who’d represented both the Trump campaign and members of the Trump family. And after meeting Passantino, Hutchinson didn’t feel any less conflicted.

“I’m fucked … I am completely indebted to these people,” she told her mother. “And they will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything that they don’t want me to do.”

Weirdly enough, her aunt and uncle, whom she describes as being heavy into QAnon, seemed to understand her predicament and even offered to mortgage their house to help her get independent counsel. But in the end she stayed with the “free” lawyer Trumpworld assigned her.

The deal was hinky from the jump, with Passantino refusing to sign an engagement letter or tell her who was paying his bill, both of which violate legal ethics in most jurisdictions.

“If you want to know at the end, we’ll let you know, but we’re not telling people where funding is coming from right now. Don’t worry, we’re taking care of you,” he assured her.

Passantino also presented it as in
her interests that he share the details of her testimony with his “partners,” by which he meant Herschmann as well as Trump’s lawyers Alex Cannon and Justin Clark. Later that circle expanded to include Meadows’s lawyer George Terwiliger.

When it came to the committee, Passantino seems to have done everything he could to limit Hutchinson’s testimony and make it seem like she knew less than she did. He ordered her not to print out her calendar to refresh her memory, and only let her see the documents she was supposed to testify about five minutes before her appearance. And unlike the other attorneys she interviewed who said they’d need a six-figure retainer to cover the months of deposition preparation, he seems to have been perfectly happy to send her in there and let her play the amnesia patient:

And he said, “If you don’t 100 percent recall something, even if you don’t recall a date or somebody who may or may not have been in the room, that’s an entirely fine answer, and we want you to use that response as much as you deem necessary.” I said, “But, if I do recall something but not every little detail, Stefan, can I still say I don’t recall?”

And he had said, “Yes.” And I said, “But if I do remember things but not every little detail, and I say I don’t recall, wouldn’t I be perjuring myself?”

And he had — Stefan had said something to the effect of, “The committee doesn’t know what you can and can’t recall, so we want to be able to use that as much as we can unless you really, really remember something very clearly. And that’s when you give a short, sweet response. The less you remember the better. I don’t think you should be filling in any calendars or anything.

He also seems to have counseled her that she didn’t have to disclose conversations she’d overheard.

He was like, “Well, if you had just overheard conversations that happened, you don’t need to testify to that.”

“So, if I overheard it from a Member, do I have to?”

And he said, “It’s circumstantial. We can talk about it.”

So I said, “Okay.”

Spoiler Alert: NOT OKAY.

Nor is it okay to advise your client that she doesn’t have to testify as to what she knows because she should never have been in the room in the first place, and “That’s Mark’s problem. Just because you knew what Mark was doing, doesn’t mean you have to answer these questions.”

And it is very much not okay for a lawyer to watch his client give false testimony and do nothing about it.

Hutchinson told Passantino about her conversation with Secret Service agent Tony Ornato, but when she was first questioned about it by the committee, she denied knowing about the incident in the limo when the driver refused to take him to the Capitol on January 6.

Here’s how she describes her conversation with Passantino after that testimony:

I looked at Stefan, and I said, “Stefan, I am fucked.”

And he was like, “Don’t freak out. You’re fine.”

I said. “No, Stefan, I’m fucked. I just lied.”

And he said, “You didn’t lie.”

I said, “No, Stefan. Do you know how many times they just asked me that question? I just lied.”

And he said, “They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”

He’s like, “They’re prodding. They want there to be something. They don’t know that there is something. We’re not going to give them anything because this is not important. You’re doing great. You’re doing fine. You’re doing exactly what you should be doing.”

And in case it wasn’t clear why he was perfectly okay with her lying, Passantino spelled it out.

“It’s not fair that Mark put you in this position,” she quotes him saying. “We just want to focus on protecting the President. We all know you’re loyal. Let’s just get you in and out, and this day will be easy, I promise.”

Hutchinson claims that Herschmann also reached out to her in the period she was being represented by Passantino to say something along the lines of “You were so effective in your role, a lot of times we forgot how young you actually are. It’s not fair that you were exposed to so much at such a young age. Nobody ever thought it was going to get to this point. We just want to focus on taking care of you now.”

Which sounds very nice, except that Passantino was also representing Herschmann in some capacity and seemed very hot to keep Herschmann out of the soup.

And in that same conversation, he said, “So if you have any conversations with any of them, especially Eric Herschmann, we want to really work to protect Eric Herschmann.” And I remember saying sarcastically to him, “Eric can handle himself. Eric has his own resources. Why do I have to protect Eric?” He said, “No, no, no. Like, just to keep everything straight, like, we want to protect Eric with all of this.”

Maybe if you squint at it just right, you can make out a scenario in which these much older, much more powerful people really were trying to take care of this kid. And she absolutely was a kid — FFS, she wasn’t even old enough to rent a car when most of this shit went down. Maybe they really did regret putting her in that position, and weren’t taking advantage of her inability to afford a lawyer to keep her quiet about what she knew. Maybe Passantino, Herschman, Clark, Cannon, Pam Bondi, and Susie Wiles weren’t manipulating her with job offers and promises of financial stability, all of which disappeared when she testified truthfully as to what she knew.

But it seems pretty bloody unlikely.

In the event, they picked the wrong girl. Because there was a reason she was in the room when all that stuff went down, and it was because she was incredibly competent and politically astute. So Hutchinson reached out to Alyssa Farah, a former Trump White House communications official, who helped her establish a back channel to the committee and eventually find new counsel.

But before she broke with Passantino, Hutchinson went through another round of interviews with the committee, during which the lawyer told her explicitly that if she cooperated, even to the point of showing up without being subpoenaed, Trumpland would stop paying her legal bills. He also suggested that she risk going to jail for contempt of Congress, insisting it would be “better” for her if she didn’t testify any further.

At which point, Hutchinson spent an entire weekend in New Jersey reading All the President’s Men over and over, highlighter in hand (because she really is Tracy Flick), and then reached out to a member of Congress she trusted:

But there is a Republican Member of Congress who, for years I’ve been close with and confided in, Republican Member of Congress who is not on the committee.

And I remember calling this Member as I’m reading through this. And this Member had told me — this Member had reminded me that, when I spoke with this Member back in January when I reached out to them about potentially getting money from Trump world to pay for my legal bills, like if that was a bad or a good idea, this Member had told me that, “If you do that, just know that you’re kind of making your bed and you’re getting back in Trump world, Cassidy. That lawyer isn’t just going to be working for you. Like, I just — I want you to be aware of that. I’m not telling you to do it or not to do it, but I just — I want you to know that you can’t take money like that and expect them to just be working for you and your interests.”

So that night I had called this Member, and they essentially said, “Yeah, Cassidy, you need to — you’re the one that has to live with the mirror test for the rest of your life. I know that you feel like that you didn’t handle things right. I know that you’re stressed about this. Are you going to be able to live with yourself if you just move on and kind of forget about this, or do you want to try to do something about it?”

And the rest is history, but one that should not gloss over how extremely filthy and exploitative this was. Let’s cross our fingers that karma’s feeling especially bitchy in 2023.

[Hutchinson September 14 Transcript]

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Rudy Giuliani Not Out Of Order, THESE MARK MEADOWS COUP TEXTS ARE OUT OF ORDER!

Post By Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Try to imagine what Republicans would have done if it emerged that Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff was actually running his re-election campaign. You can’t do it! Your head would explode! Leave aside for the moment that whole fomenting a coup thing. If Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz found out that government employees, whose salaries were paid by American taxpayers, were essentially working full time for the campaign, they’d burn the White House down.

So, before we get into the substance of Mark Meadows’s texts, let’s acknowledge the threshold scandal that he was the one running point to coordinate both the coup rally and the campaign. Which is FUCKING CRAZY!

And speaking of crazy, last night’s Meadows text drop from Talking Points Memo’s Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky focuses on Rudy Giuliani, formerly America’s Mayor, now its Crazy Uncle who leaks hair dye at press conferences while accusing dead South American politicians of hacking the 2020 election. (Another TPM writeup, not to be missed, focuses on all the people on January 6 screaming ANTIFA! after explaining how not ANTIFA the whole thing sure seemed!)

Cast your mind back to that day, if you will. It was November 19, 2020. Rudy, Sidney, and Jenna crowded around the podium at the RNC to explain how Trump was totally gonna win this thing thanks to the Elite Super Friends Task Force of Future Bar Sanctionees.

THIS. ACTUALLY. HAPPENED.

And this.

Rudy Giuliani’s Hair Dye Leaks at One-of-a-Kind Press Conference | NowThis

Every normal American was dead of cringe. But not Ginny Thomas, the red pilled Missus of one Justice Clarence Thomas.

“Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now!!!!????????” she texted her pal Mark Meadows during the event.

“Glad to help??” responded a seemingly confused Meadows, who was apparently watching the Sidney and Rudy Show in abject horror.

“Whoa!! Heroes!!!!” replied the emotional Mrs. T.

No doubt Meadows was pleased to see that his friend had recovered from her wee bout of spleen two weeks earlier when she texted the chief of staff to enquire if the rumors were true that “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

But Rudy continued to be a problem for our man Mark in the White House.

“Frigging Rudy needs to hush…” Rep. Chip Roy groused on November 22, annoyed by Giuliani’s incontinence, both verbal and follicular, adding later that “If we don’t get logic and reason in this before 11/30 – the GOP conference will bolt (all except the most hard core Trump guys.”

Oh, ye of little faith! Those people hid in a bunker from an angry mob sacking the seat of government, and even that didn’t make ’em “bolt.”

Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller also had issues with the president’s lawyer.

“Chief – need your advice here. Rudy sent me this draft GA legislature petition this evening and asked me to put together a release for Sunday morning blast out, but you’ve made clear who is running our GA efforts,” he texted on December 6. “I’m the only one Rudy sent this to besides Jenna and Boris, so it’s not like a bunch of people know about it, but I don’t want to screw up our other efforts. All guidance appreciated, as the legal turf war thing is new to me!”

Presumably the “legal turf war” was between the competent counsel and the Elite Superfriends, who were more of the “wild allegations first, verify never” school of litigation. Meadows promised to run it up the flagpole with Trumpland attorney Cleta Mitchell, which is perhaps outside the normal duties of a public servant, but probably Meadows was too busy texting to notice.

A week later Miller was back, seeking advice about a press release Roodles wanted to put out in which he regurgitated all the loony conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and Antrim County and Dead Hugo Chavez. As it turned out, Miller wanted him to do … not that.

Hi Chief – sorry to be a stalker, but I wanted to make sure you saw the Dominion/Michigan release I emailed to you for review. The Mayor wants to put it out right away, but Eric (rightfully) thinks it doesn’t make any sense. This would be the first time shooting down a Rudy press release request, so I wanted to get your take on this as well. Thank you, Jason

Meadows response is not in the cache of documents provided to the House January 6 Select Committee, so let’s just assume that it’s really fuckin’ bad.

Meanwhile Rudy was trying and failing to get paid.

“Sir, we are airborne on the way to Michigan from Arizona. We’re going to need a hotel for the team and two vehicles to pick us up,” Giuilani’s pal Bernie Kerik texted Meadows on December 1. “Christina Bobb, Who is our coordinator back in DC does not have a credit card or authorization for these logistics. I reached out to Mike Glassner who Apparently is no longer on payroll. Can you I have some money coordinate with Christina to handle? Thank you sir.”

And Kerik wasn’t the only member of Rudy’s entourage with Meadows on speed dial. His girlfriend Maria Ryan also had lots of advice for Trump, which she relayed through his chief of staff. Here she is advising Trump to appoint Ken “No Butt Stuff” Cuccinelli as special counsel to investigate the election hacking

Dear Mark, I hope you are doing well. I am very happy POTUS has such a smart and honest man as you by his side. I strongly believe in a special counsel for election integrity. I strongly believe it CANNOT be Powell who leads it . K. Cuccinelli or someone of equal prominence. Powell can be named lead investigator or given another title. Also the issue with cyber security. Strongly recommend Radcliffe put out a statement that it was foreign interference, likely cast of characters is China, Iran and maybe Russia. ( unfortunately the media is saying definitively it was Russia but my sources say it is just as likely China- Radcliffe could shed light on this) Our President has been tough on all these nations and we will continue to seek to hold them accountable. These opinions expressed are my own. If I can be of help to you or our President please let me know . Dr Maria Ryan

It’s not clear what “sources” the hospital administrator had that gave her special insight on foreign election interference, but it is pretty funny that even she knew Sidney Powell was too crazy eyes to have any public facing role.

And speaking of funny, get a load of Sean Hannity yelling at TPM for breaking the “rules” by asking him for comment on his personal texts with the chief of staff:

“Number one, you’re not allowed to get my number,” Hannity said, adding, “What are your questions?”

When he was informed about the subject of this story, Hannity declared, “You want any interview with me, you have to go through Fox PR.” After assuring Hannity that we would also contact Fox News’ spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, TPM asked him if he thought it was “appropriate” for a member of the political media to do business deals with associates of the former president.

“You think it’s appropriate when you know Fox’s rules to bypass Irena and call me directly?” Hannity asked incredulously, before adding, “You can take your predetermined outcome, which is already written in your head, and write whatever the hell you want. I don’t give a shit. You knew the rules and you didn’t care.”

Hannity subsequently hung up the phone. Briganti did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Whiny snowflakes, the lot of them.

[TPM]

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