Is the J6 Committee just politics?
If the hearings end and Trump is not charged as many others were charged, the J6 Hearings are political.
To not be just a political exercise to win elections Donald Trump needs to be charged as others in the insurrectionist coup who invaded Capital Hill were charged.
TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY DONALD TRUMP MUST BE REMOVED FROM POLITICS.
“Donald Trump is sending the most dangerous signal of his post-presidency, with a promise that if he returns to power he will be prepared to pardon January 6 insurrectionists. His message is a promise of impunity that does not merely propose to let violent political allies and supporters of the former president off the hook for their past lawlessness. It provides none-too-subtle encouragement for the next wave of insurrectionist violence.”
“Freeman told the committee that after being named by Giuliani and Trump, she had to leave her home for two months after the FBI said it was not safe.
“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security all because a group of people starting with number 45″ — a reference to Trump — “and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter,” she said, in taped testimony played by the committee.
Moss, who testified live, explained to the committee that she had worked as an elections official for 10 years, taking satisfaction in helping elderly and disabled people vote. She had learned from her grandmother to treasure the right to vote, particularly since it had been withheld from many Black voters.
“It’s turned my life upside down,” said Moss, adding, “I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all. … I second-guess everything I do. It’s affected my life in a major way — in every way. All because of lies, for me doing my job, the same thing I’ve been doing forever.”
Moss and Freeman filed defamation lawsuits last year against Giuliani, as well as pro-Trump media outlets One America News and the Gateway Pundit. They settled with OAN in May for undisclosed terms. As part of the settlement, OAN aired a segment reporting that Georgia officials had concluded there was “no widespread voter fraud by election workers” at the State Farm Arena and that neither Moss nor Freeman engaged in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”
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Trump’s pressure drew violence, threats to local officials, committee shows
In its fourth public hearing, the committee shared new evidence of Trump’s personal involvement in organizing the false elector strategy
Trump is using the Dictator’s playbook
As he prepares for an expected 2024 presidential bid, Trump is stealing whole sections from the authoritarian playbook of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and other fascists who have used political violence as a tool to create and extend their grip on power…
Scholars who have studied the rise of fascist strongmen have long compared Trump’s words and deeds to those of authoritarians such as Mussolini, who ruled Italy with an iron fist from the mid-1920s to 1943, and who aligned that country with German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Not all of these scholars have gone so far as to label Trump a fascist, arguing for a narrow definition of the term that recognizes the distinct character of one-party states and the fervor for territorial conquest that characterized dictatorships of the 1930s and ’40s. But there are many who see the former president as following “the authoritarian playbook first written by Mussolini,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, has put it.
“Benito Mussolini created the world’s first Fascist dictatorship not just as a counter to the powerful Italian left—that’s a well-known story—but also as a desperate act to avoid prosecution,” explained Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, in 2018. As they were grasping for power, Mussolini and his fascist allies used pardons of supporters to strengthen their position.
When Mussolini served as Italy’s prime minister in the mid-1920s, a leading Socialist member of the Italian Parliament, Giacomo Matteotti, was preparing to reveal evidence of financial impropriety on the part of Mussolini and his fellow fascists. In June of 1924, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by Mussolini’s secret police. It was an international scandal, with Time magazine reporting on protests against “the crime itself and the ruthless methods of suppressing the scandal adopted by Fascismo,” which initially threatened to topple Mussolini from his position as prime minister.
“A special investigation was soon launched to determine Mussolini’s role in the murder. By December 1924, rumors circulated that the Italian leader would be impeached or arrested, while Fascist loyalists floated the idea of pardons,” Ben-Ghiat recalled in her 2018 essay.
To save himself, Mussolini took the plunge into dictatorship, announcing in January 1925 that he and his party were above the law. “If Fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association,” he told Parliament, letting them know that the window to unseat him had closed. Amid the slew of repressive legislation that followed, Mussolini pardoned all political criminals and fired the two magistrates overseeing the investigation, replacing them with loyalists who issued a verdict of involuntary rather than willful murder. He ruled without limits to his power for 18 more years.
Reflecting on Trump’s authoritarian excesses, Ben-Ghiat noted at that time that “some rules of strongman behavior haven’t changed.”
MORE AT:
The Nation
Trump Steals a Strategy From Mussolini’s Playbook
The former president’s promise to pardon January 6 insurrectionists recalls the fascist’s strongman tactics.
By John Nichols February 1, 2022
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