The central question looming over the 2022 midterm elections is whether the Republican Party is morphing into a fascistic organization that wants to end the messy business of elections, voting, and democracy and create a right-wing autocracy instead. Ever since Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection and followed by Republican efforts to downplay the coup attempt, it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the Republican mainstream and the party’s extremist fringe.

If the Republicans prevail and gain control of Congress, one of the first tests of their true intentions will come when they must decide whether to support continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine in its defense against this year’s brutal Russian invasion.

In a Republican-controlled Congress, votes on aid to Ukraine are likely to reveal a sharp divide between traditional, hawkish Republicans who oppose the Russian invasion and have supported the Biden administration’s military aid to Ukraine, and the new and growing faction of the Christian evangelical movement known as Christian nationalists, many of whom admire Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and want to cut off American support for Ukraine. Votes on Ukraine will serve as a barometer of whether traditional Republicans still have any influence, and whether they have the will to stand up to the rise of extremism within their ranks.

Christian nationalists represent a frightening dynamic within the Republican Party. They are theocrats who don’t believe in the separation of church and state and who argue that the United States was founded as a “Christian” nation and needs to return to those origins. They despise Western secularist culture; fear white demographic decline; and deeply resent feminism, homosexuality, abortion rights, and even individualism, which they see as a modern concept at odds with a more traditional, hierarchal society.

Christian nationalists now dominate the extreme right of the Republican Party, and they have come to believe that Putin is a warrior for Christian fundamentalism and that his invasion of Ukraine is one step in his campaign to crush the global woke left.

The intra-party fight over aid to Ukraine could be the first battle in a long war for control over the Republican Party’s foreign policy.

Christian nationalists see Putin as the leader in a powerful right-wing counterattack against liberal secularism and as a protector of their Christian faith. Putin has encouraged this support from Christian nationalists in the United States and other Western nations by co-opting the Russian Orthodox Church and waging a culture war inside Russia, notably with anti-gay and other supposedly “pro-family” measures.

Now, many in the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party openly want Putin to crush Ukraine’s pro-Western government and win the war. They willingly accept Russian disinformation and often parrot Moscow’s lies about Ukraine.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the loudest voices of Christian nationalism in Congress, and one of the few who doesn’t shy away from the term in public. Earlier this year, she spoke at an event held by a white nationalist group where many in the crowd chanted, “Putin! Putin!”

Last week, Greene told a rally in Iowa that Congress would cut off funding for Ukraine if Republicans gain control. “Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator, tweeted in February that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.”

Zelensky is a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.

— Wendy Rogers (@WendyRogersAZ) February 27, 2022

Throughout this year’s campaign, a number of Republican congressional candidates have expressed opposition to continued military support for Ukraine as a kind of political dog whistle to Christian nationalists, signaling that they are on their side without openly advocating for Putin’s victory in Ukraine.

“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, said earlier this year. (He later dialed that back , saying, “Vladimir Putin is the bad guy in this situation,” while claiming that “we cannot fund a long-term military conflict that I think ultimately has diminishing returns for our own country.”)

Former President Donald Trump now recognizes the growing power of the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party and has been using pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine rhetoric at his rallies and elsewhere. He’s claimed that Putin has been “smart” in his invasion of Ukraine.

“So Putin is now saying it’s independent, a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force,” Trump said .

Along with Trump, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has also been using pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine talking points, providing a platform for Russian disinformation during the U.S. election campaign. A feedback loop has developed between Carlson and Putin: Carlson will parrot Russian propaganda on Fox News, and then government-controlled Russian television will show that Carlson has repeated those lies.

Republican congressional leaders, trying to hold together their fragile coalition of traditional Republicans and Christian evangelicals, have not been forthcoming about why so many of their candidates now oppose aid to Ukraine. They don’t want to talk about the rising power of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party.

Instead, they suggest that the opposition to continued aid for Ukraine stems from growing American isolationism, budgetary constraints, and the possibility of a recession next year.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has argued that aid to Ukraine will be slashed in a Republican-controlled House because the government can’t afford to spend billions of dollars on it when there are so many economic problems at home. He said in a recent interview that “I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check. And then there’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically. Not doing the border and people begin to weigh that.”

Representing the hawkish, traditional wing of the Republican Party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly sought to counter McCarthy’s warning about cutting off aid to Ukraine by insisting that a Republican-controlled Senate would actually demand even more military support for Ukraine than the Biden administration has provided. He said a Republican Senate would seek to ensure the “timely delivery of needed weapons and greater allied assistance to Ukraine.”

The debate over Ukraine between McCarthy and McConnell will likely lead to a series of bitter fights in the House and Senate, with the White House caught between them.

The intra-party fight over aid to Ukraine could be the first battle in a long war for control over the Republican Party’s foreign policy. It could also help determine whether anything will stop the Republican Party’s descent into fascism.

It is clear which side Moscow is supporting. In a recent tweet , Julia Davis, who runs the Russian Media Monitor, linked to a video of Russian state television explaining why “they’re rooting for MAGA Republicans in the midterms.”

The post Midterms Will Determine Republicans’ Stance on Ukraine — and America appeared first on The Intercept .

For three years, John Durham has essentially been the Justice Department’s Special Counsel in Charge of Owning the Libs.

His long-running inquiry into the government’s performance during the Trump-Russia investigation has often seemed designed to get shoutouts from Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson and to go viral on right-wing social media.

John Durham has used the criminal justice system to try to score political points. What he has not done is search for the truth.

Durham has developed and launched just two prosecutions in connection with his probe of the Justice Department and FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia case. Remarkably, neither targeted officials from the Justice Department or the FBI. He still lost both cases.

It is rare for a federal prosecutor to go 0-2, but Durham never really seemed to care about making his cases stick. He targeted people outside the government to stage trials that seemed designed to help prove his pro-Trump bona fides. He chose targets affiliated with what Trump and his supporters have claimed were the evil forces behind the Mueller investigation: the Hillary Clinton campaign and the so-called Steele dossier. Durham prosecuted a lawyer associated with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and a Russian-born informant for Christopher Steele, the retired British intelligence officer who authored the dossier.

In the process, Durham tried to treat a federal courtroom like a cable news studio , where he could verbally attack the Justice Department and the FBI without actually prosecuting any government officials.

During his most recent case, he harshly criticized two FBI officials on the stand — both his own witnesses and ostensibly friendly to the prosecution. Durham called them to testify and then turned on them, to the detriment of his own case.

Durham is a Trump administration holdover, a federal prosecutor appointed in 2019 by former Attorney General William Barr to investigate how the Trump-Russia inquiry originated and was conducted. Barr appointed Durham to satisfy the former president, who has constantly complained that he was the victim of a witch hunt by the so-called deep state. In 2020, Barr gave Durham special counsel status, meaning the Biden administration couldn’t fire him.

Durham’s investigation has now lasted about twice as long as the original Trump-Russia inquiry conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller. Like Trump and many pro-Trump pundits, Durham has focused mainly on the Steele dossier, an inflammatory collection of unsubstantiated tips and leads about possible ties between Trump and Russia that was written in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and Durham have tried to shift public attention to the Steele dossier because it was a mess.

But that is a red herring. The Steele dossier was not behind the FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia investigation, nor was it the basis for any allegations included in Mueller’s final report.

While he was collecting information about Trump and Russia, Steele worked with Fusion GPS, a Washington-based private investigation firm, which in turn had been hired by a law firm working with Clinton’s presidential campaign. Steele also had a long-standing relationship with the FBI; years earlier, he had given the bureau information during its criminal investigation of FIFA, the world soccer organization.

Steele shared the information he was collecting on Trump and Russia with both Fusion GPS and the FBI. But Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a 2019 report that the FBI officials involved in the decision to open the original Trump-Russia investigation “did not become aware of Steele’s election reporting until weeks later and we therefore determined that Steele’s reports played no role” in the decision to launch the investigation. The inspector general also found no evidence of political bias in the way in which the FBI conducted the Trump-Russia investigation.

In May 2016, an Australian diplomat met in London with George Papadopoulos, a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign; Papadopoulos told him that the Russians had derogatory information on Clinton, including thousands of emails from Clinton and the Democrats. After the emails were published by WikiLeaks and the press, Australian officials told their U.S. counterparts what Papadopoulos had said to the diplomat. That — along with the prior discovery by U.S. intelligence that Russia was seeking to interfere in the campaign — prompted the FBI to open its Trump-Russia investigation in July 2016.

Nevertheless, by focusing on the flawed dossier, Trump and Durham hoped to muddy the waters and discredit the Justice Department’s probe.

There are several facts that have made it easier for Trump and Durham to conflate the Steele dossier and the Trump-Russia investigation. The FBI used information from Steele in its October 2016 application to a court to obtain a secret warrant to wiretap Carter Page, a Trump adviser. (That was discovered by Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, not Durham.)

In addition, FBI Director James Comey privately briefed Trump on the salacious Steele dossier after the election, angering Trump and offering a compelling lure to the U.S. press. BuzzFeed News published the dossier in January 2017. Such intense focus on the dossier aided Trump and his supporters in their efforts to link Steele’s work with the Mueller investigation.

In his first prosecution, Durham charged Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who was working for Clinton’s presidential campaign, with lying to the FBI when he shared leads with the bureau about Trump and Russia in September 2016. The lie, according to Durham, involved Sussman telling the FBI that he had come on his own. Durham argued that by concealing his ties to the Clinton campaign, Sussmann was hiding a political agenda.

But a jury acquitted Sussmann, unanimously, and seemed to agree that Durham had badly overreached by bringing the case in the first place.

Durham’s second prosecution targeted Igor Danchenko, a researcher on Russian issues who was a key source for the Steele dossier, and who had also been an informant for the FBI. Durham also charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about whether he had talked to a Democratic lobbyist and the former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. But Durham’s case was undercut when two FBI officials called to testify; both said that Danchenko had been a valuable informant. A jury acquitted Danchenko last week. Again, the jury seemed to agree that Durham had overreached.

Durham’s only other accomplishment in three years came in 2020, when he cut a plea deal with an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith , who acknowledged that he had altered an email used in an application to surveil Carter Page. But Horowitz, the inspector general, had discovered that problem when he conducted his own investigation, and he made the criminal referral.

With no further prosecutions lined up, Durham’s courtroom antics are likely over. But his final report will doubtless offer Trump loyalists plenty of red meat.

Considering that it has taken Durham three years to lose two cases, however, it is not clear how long he will take to write and publish his final report. He may want to wait until Donald Trump is back in the White House.

The post John Durham Was Trump’s Answer to Robert Mueller. His Investigation Went Nowhere. appeared first on The Intercept .

Weeks like last week explain why Donald Trump is so eager to regain power. He wants to avoid accountability for his dangerous actions, which still threaten to turn America into a right-wing autocracy.

Last week was a particularly trying one for Trump. He faced a blizzard of bad news, on multiple fronts, underscoring his exposure now that he is just a regular citizen and not president.

The highlight came on Thursday, when the House January 6 committee held its last public hearing before the midterm elections in November. Committee members made the case that Trump himself brought on the January 6 insurrection aimed at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. The committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., called Trump the “central player” of January 6.

During the hearing, the committee revealed evidence that Trump incited the insurrection, even though he had privately acknowledged that he knew he’d lost. The committee aired testimony from a former Trump White House aide who recalled going into the Oval Office a week after the November, 2020 election, and finding Trump watching television. “ Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy? ” Trump asked the aide, referring to Biden.

The panel voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to testify. But that was just the beginning of Trump’s very bad week.

While the House hearing was underway on Thursday, the Supreme Court, which Trump had packed with three ultraconservative justices, and which he might thus have expected to be sympathetic to his cause, ruled against him. The court rejected a key Trump appeal of a lower-court ruling, part of his broader legal strategy to stop the Justice Department and the FBI from using the classified documents found during a court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago home in August. Trump wants the government to be forced to return the documents to him, which he apparently thinks would stop the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation in connection with the documents; the Supreme Court’s terse order effectively rejected that notion.

The ruling followed press reports Wednesday that a Trump employee has told the FBI that, as government officials sought to retrieve thousands of documents that Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump personally ordered the employee to move the boxes containing the documents to his residence. Security camera footage of the employee moving the boxes appears to corroborate his story. Such testimony could be damning evidence in an obstruction of justice case against Trump.

Other legal problems for Trump surfaced elsewhere last week. Marc Short, the chief of staff for former Vice President Mike Pence, testified Thursday before a federal grand jury in Washington in connection with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump had sought to block Short’s testimony, invoking executive privilege, but a judge rejected that claim . The ruling could ultimately make it easier for federal prosecutors to get other former top Trump administration officials to testify before the grand jury.

The former president’s legal problems continued in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge on Thursday to prevent Trump’s company from selling or moving assets without court approval. James wants to stop Trump from trying to shield his money from the possible penalties he may face as a result of the lawsuit she filed in September against Trump, three of his children, and their family business. In that suit, James accused them of engaging in a prolonged fraud by falsifying the value of company assets. Her office has also referred the evidence gathered in her civil lawsuit to federal prosecutors for a criminal investigation.

Finally, in yet another courtroom back in Washington, Trump’s long-standing efforts to discredit the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin took another damaging hit this week. While Trump was still president, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr appointed John Durham as special prosecutor to investigate the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. The appointment was Barr’s gift to Trump; Durham’s mission was to search for wrongdoing in the way the investigation was opened and conducted.

But while Durham has stayed on as a special prosecutor long after the end of the Trump administration, his attempts to prove that the Trump-Russia case was a politicized bad faith effort to undermine Trump have largely failed. He has had only two cases that have led to charges, and the first one fell apart in May, when Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI for sharing a tip about Trump and Russia.

This week, his last remaining case, against FBI informant Igor Danchenko, has taken a series of damaging hits. Durham charged Danchenko with lying to the FBI about issues related to the Trump-Russia investigation, particularly the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of rumors and tips about possible ties between Trump and Russia compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Danchenko was a source for Steele, while also serving as an FBI informant.

But the FBI agents who Durham brought in to testify have undermined Durham’s case and defended Danchenko. They have said that he was a valuable informant, and one testified that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. On Friday, the judge in the case dismissed one of the charges brought against Danchenko, damaging Durham’s prosecution even further.

A few more weeks like this one might bankrupt Trump or land him in prison — or he might just officially announce that he’s running for president in 2024.

The post Trump’s Bad Week May Hasten His Ruin — or Simply Stoke His Hubris appeared first on The Intercept .

Al Capone’s murderous gangsterism in Chicago in the 1920s wasn’t stopped by investigating the killings he ordered or the river of rum he sold during Prohibition, but by a patient federal investigation into his failure to pay income taxes on all of his illicit gains.

Donald Trump has yet to face criminal charges for his efforts to incite a violent coup against the United States government. But Monday’s unprecedented FBI search of Trump’s Florida home appears to be part of a criminal investigation into his removal — a better word might be theft — of classified documents after he left the White House.

So instead of being charged as a violent insurrectionist bent on destroying American democracy, Donald Trump may go to jail for a much more mundane reason: He pissed off the nerds at theNational Archives, the legal custodians of the missing documents, who then tipped off the Justice Department.

The FBI search really is evidence of a leak investigation — perhaps the biggest in history. But in legal terms, the case doesn’t appear that different from the many leak investigations that Trump’s own Justice Department aggressively prosecuted throughout his time in office. In fact, Trump put enormous pressure on the Justice Department to pursue leaks of classified information while he was president, usually related to negative disclosures in the press about him . Many of the people charged in cases involving leaks of classified information during the Trump administration came in connection to disclosures in the press about Trump or Russia, or both. The Intercept reported last year that the Trump administration had referred a record of at least 334 leaks of classified information to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

In many cases involving leaks to the press, the Justice Department has wielded a century-old draconian law — the Espionage Act — that can potentially put away the leaker for decades. The government often uses the Espionage Act as a threat to intimidate leakers into pleading to lesser charges ; the leakers often end up pleading to some charges related to the mishandling of classified information. The New York Times observed Tuesday that one of the laws that would come with lesser charges than the Espionage Act and which would seem to fit Trump’s case is Section 2071 of Title 18 in the U.S. code; under that law, an official who has custodial responsibility for the documents who then “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” the records could face up to three years in prison and could be barred from running for federal office again.

Prosecuting under that statute would not seem to require the government to prove that Trump gave documents to foreign spies, the media, or other unauthorized people.

The FBI search, authorized by a search warrant approved by a federal judge, caught Washington by surprise, but it did not come completely out of the blue. A quiet battle between the National Archives, the Justice Department, and Trump has been underway over the issue since last year.

After Trump left office, the National Archives discovered that there were lots of records, documents, and other materials missing from the White House — and began to search for them. They found that Trump had at least 15 boxes of materials that he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and officials from the archives began to fight with Trump to get them back. When he finally returned the 15 boxes in January 2022, archives officials discovered that they included classified documents, and referred the matter to the Justice Department. The Justice Department opened a grand jury investigation, and a small group of federal agents went to Mar-a-Lago in the spring to look for classified documents. Obviously, Monday’s raid reveals that the Justice Department and the FBI believed that Trump had not been cooperative in their investigation, and that he still had more classified documents hidden away at his home, in violation of federal law.

While it is possible that the FBI search will not lead to criminal charges against Trump, it is really hard to see how U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department would have approved the historic step of an FBI search of a former president’s home without much higher stakes than just a bureaucratic attempt to retrieve missing presidential records. It also seems difficult to believe that the Justice Department would conduct such a politically radioactive search if officials were only considering some slap on the wrist in the case, like the light punishments applied in the past to former CIA Director John Deutch and former national security adviser Sandy Berger.

Clearly, a big question at the heart of the case is what was Trump planning to do with so many highly classified documents after leaving office. When it comes to Trump, it’s hard to go wrong thinking the worst. Clearly, they were documents he thought would somehow benefit him in the future — perhaps in another presidential campaign, in his own private dealings, or even with foreign leaders. It is not too much of a stretch to think that the Espionage Act might apply.

It is also difficult not to see that the case is drenched in irony. As a presidential candidate, Trump constantly attacked Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, supposedly putting classified information at risk. It turns out that the “Lock her up” chant may have used the wrong gender.

The post Could Trump Go Down Like Al Capone? appeared first on The Intercept .

Donald Trump is a murderous cult leader who incited the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping that his supporters would kill his own vice president, Mike Pence, and as many members of Congress as possible so that he could become a dictator.

That was the inescapable conclusion from Thursday night’s chilling prime-time, nationally televised hearing of the House January 6 committee. The committee combined a wide range of evidence and testimony to reveal a timeline of the insurrection, showing how Trump eagerly sent his mob to the Capitol and then refused for hours to call them off when they broke into the building. Instead, he wanted to join and lead them.

On January 6, Trump was not much different from Jim Jones at Jonestown, as he urged his rabid followers to kill American democracy.

Trump controlled the insurrection, and he could easily have stopped his cult members from attacking the Capitol, the hearing revealed. But he didn’t want to stop them. For months, he had tried everything to overturn the 2020 election and failed, so now he was willing to try assassination.

Some of the most damning evidence presented during the hearing was audio of insurrectionist leaders and video from inside the Capitol, showing how the rioters were keyed into every Trump tweet in real time and were eager to do his bidding. The evidence showed that the insurrectionists believed — indeed, knew — that they were following Trump’s orders.

As soon as the insurrection began, Trump’s family members and White House aides, along with leading members of Congress, tried to get him to call off the mob — because they all knew that it was his mob and that he could call them off if he chose to do so. That fact alone is damning evidence that should be used to prove his leadership of the insurrection in a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

But Trump refused to listen to any of them. “The mob was accomplishing [Trump’s] purpose,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, said during Thursday’s hearing.

In fact, Trump did not lift a finger to try to stop the insurrection during its most critical hours, the committee revealed. He didn’t call anyone in the government — not at the Pentagon, or the Justice Department, or the Department of Homeland Security — for help gaining control over the violent crisis at the Capitol. Testimony by former Trump aides and others, including Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed that Trump did nothing except call Republican senators to try to get them to refuse to certify the election. “You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?” Milley told the committee in disbelief.

It was finally Pence, not Trump, who ordered the military to send the National Guard to the Capitol, Milley said in audio of his testimony played during Thursday night’s hearing.

Pence’s role as the presiding officer during the congressional certification of the election on January 6 made him a target for Trump and the mob, and his Secret Service detail feared for their own lives, the committee revealed. An unidentified White House aide who was listening to radio traffic from the Secret Service told the committee that agents were calling their families to say goodbye. Trump showed no remorse for the danger in which he had put his own vice president, telling a White House staffer later that day that Pence had let him down by refusing to block the congressional certification.

It was hours after the insurrection began — and only after it was clearly starting to lose momentum — that Trump grudgingly made a half-hearted statement urging his supporters to go home.

The next day, the president showed no remorse. The committee played previously unseen video outtakes from the public statement he made on January 7, showing that he refused to say that the election was over and struggled about whether to say his followers had done anything wrong.

There was just one light moment in the hearing about the darkest day in modern American history: The committee showed video footage of Sen. Josh Hawley running for his life through the halls of Congress just after he was photographed outside the Capitol raising his fist in support of the mob.

The post The Cult of Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept .

At the end of Tuesday’s hearing of the House January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney revealed yet one more bombshell from a congressional investigation that has been full of them.

Former President Donald Trump, Cheney said, called a witness who is planning to testify at a future House hearing, in an apparent attempt to influence their upcoming testimony. Cheney did not identify the witness but said that the committee was alerted about the call by the witness’s lawyer. Trump called the witness in the last few days — after the committee’s previous hearing, in which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered explosive testimony about Trump’s volatile behavior on January 6. The committee has referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation into possible witness tampering by Trump.

The January 6 committee’s investigation into the insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election has turned into perhaps the best congressional inquiry since the Church Committee’s legendary investigation of the intelligence community in the 1970s. The House committee has patiently and meticulously laid out the evidence of Trump’s illegal efforts to overturn the election and incite a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, making it clear, once and for all, that he was the puppet master behind the surging mob seeking to prevent the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

In fact, the allegation of witness tampering by Trump is just the latest in a series of possible criminal acts disclosed by the committee. In seven hearings so far, the committee has portrayed the former president’s behavior as far worse than was previously known. The House committee has uncovered much more than the media ever expected and has provided mountains of evidence that should be used by the Justice Department to intensify its criminal investigation of Trump and his cronies.

During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee showed that Trump carefully planned to incite the mob to march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Congress was meeting to certify the election results. In fact, the leaders of the rally held outside the White House on January 6 knew in advance that Trump was planning to urge the crowd to go to the Capitol. “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol,” said Kylie Jane Kremer, a rally organizer, in a January 4, 2021, text message shown by the committee.

The committee also showed that Trump decided to incite the insurrection after all of his other illicit efforts to overturn the election had failed. Tuesday’s hearing focused in part on a bizarre meeting at the White House on December 18, 2020, in which Trump surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, including attorney Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, to discuss seizing voting machines. Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House lawyer, testified about how he fought the crazed ideas coming from the people whispering to Trump in his final days in the White House. Right after the marathon meeting ended in the middle of the night, Trump began to incite an insurrection. At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, he wrote a tweet urging his supporters to come to Washington. “Be there, will be wild.”

Tuesday’s astonishing hearing added to the portrait of an unhinged Trump that was sketched by Hutchinson in her June 28 hearing. Hutchinson, a key aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, disclosed that Trump knew that some in the crowd on January 6 were armed and still urged them to go to the Capitol. She also revealed that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol to lead the crowd and that he tried to grab the steering wheel from a Secret Service agent when his detail refused to take him there.

The hearings of the January 6 committee, including Hutchinson’s testimony, have been must-see television, depicting Trump as a psychopath and a criminal who sought to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship.

The post Donald Trump Is Even More Unhinged Than We Thought appeared first on The Intercept .

For more than 100 years, the Espionage Act, one of the worst laws in American history, has stayed on the books, impervious to reform.

A relic of World War I, when the government sought to stifle anti-war dissent, the law is so vague and yet so draconian that it has become a handy weapon for federal prosecutors to use against a wide array of targets — often individuals considered politically dangerous by mainstream America. For generations, it was used against American communists ; in the 21st century, the Espionage Act has been repeatedly employed against whistleblowers who disclose embarrassing government secrets to the press. The Biden administration is now fighting to extradite Julian Assange , the WikiLeaks founder, so he can be tried under the Espionage Act, among other charges.

It’s easy to see why prosecutors love this antiquated law. Unlike other measures that might be used to prevent the disclosure of classified information, the Espionage Act carries extraordinarily heavy penalties, including life in prison. Prosecutors use the Espionage Act like a cudgel, convincing whistleblowers to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like mishandling classified information, to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. That way, prosecutors get quick convictions without going to trial.

Because prosecutors find the Espionage Act such a useful tool, it is probably not going away anytime soon. It is an abuse of the legal system, but the Justice Department has no incentive to stop using it.

The occasional efforts by members of Congress to reform the Espionage Act have never gotten very far. In recent years, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has tried , and failed, to change it; now Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is trying again. In an amendment to the massive 2022-23 Pentagon spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, Tlaib would, among other things, allow whistleblowers charged in leak cases to defend themselves by arguing that their disclosures to the media were in the public interest.

One of the worst things about the current law is that there is no way for whistleblowers to argue in court that they had a valid, even laudable reason to reveal government secrets. They are not allowed to explain that what they did was designed to help the American people know the truth about the government’s actions. A so-called public interest defense would be thrown out of court.

That gap in the law led to hypocrisy and tragedy in the case of Reality Winner . The former National Security Agency contractor was arrested in 2017 for anonymously leaking to a news outlet an NSA document showing that Russian intelligence tried to hack into U.S. state-level voting systems during the 2016 election. But while Winner was in jail awaiting trial, the Senate intelligence committee issued a report revealing that federal officials did not adequately warn state officials of the threat to their voting systems from the Russian hackers. Instead, the Senate report found that state officials only found out about the hacking threat from the press . That meant that The Intercept, which published the document along with a story about its significance, provided a critical public service. But even as the Senate implicitly lauded Winner’s actions, she wasn’t allowed to make the same argument in her own defense . Winner eventually pleaded guilty to avoid a longer prison term. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund, of which I am the director, supported Winner’s legal defense. Like The Intercept, the fund is part of First Look Institute .)

Like previous efforts to reform the Espionage Act, Tlaib’s amendment is likely to be rejected, perhaps in the next few days, as the House Rules Committee considers hundreds of amendments to the Pentagon budget bill. (Since the Pentagon budget must pass every year, it gets decked out like a Christmas tree with measures totally unrelated to Pentagon spending. This year, it has become an especially attractive platform for conservative culture warriors. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and close ally of Donald Trump, has submitted an amendment that would express the sense of Congress “that combating extremism in the military should not be a top priority for the Department of Defense.”)

The Espionage Act will likely continue to withstand reform because few in Congress want to be labelled soft on national security. Like others who go against conventional wisdom, whistleblowers have very few allies.

The post Rashida Tlaib Is Trying to Fix the Espionage Act, but Whistleblowers Are Probably Out of Luck appeared first on The Intercept .

In 1982, an extremist group calling itself the Army of God kidnapped Dr. Hector Zevallos and his wife. Zevallos was an abortion provider in Edwardsville, Illinois, and his abduction signaled the rise of a new generation of white nationalist extremist groups, many of which made opposition to abortion their top priority.

Zevallos and his wife were eventually released, but the rightist Supreme Court succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade last month thanks in part to decades of unrelenting violence by the Army of God and other anti-abortion extremists — violence that set the stage for the rise of the white nationalist domestic terror groups that threaten American democracy today. The Army of God was an early precursor to today’s pro-Trump paramilitary organizations.

Over the past four decades, the right-wing campaign against Roe v. Wade has been the most violent protest movement in modern American history. Despite recent complaints by conservatives about acts of violence associated with the George Floyd protests in 2020, no other recent social protest movement comes close to anti-abortion activists’ long record of violence.

Between 1977 and 2021, anti-abortion extremists committed at least 42 clinic bombings, 196 clinic arsons, and 11 murders of doctors and clinic staffers, according to data compiled by the National Abortion Federation.

The political side of the anti-abortion movement has only occasionally and very reluctantly condemned the violence, and instead has taken advantage of the intense media attention that clinic bombings and the murders of doctors have generated for their cause. Anti-abortion leaders have long considered terrorism a useful political tool, keeping up the pressure against legalized abortion while also attracting zealous new recruits. In the process, anti-abortion extremists have helped build a foundation for the pro-Trump extremist groups that are proliferating today.

To skirt the law, anti-abortion extremists have tended to form groups without much structure, making it more difficult for them to be sued by reproductive rights groups or investigated by law enforcement. The Army of God, for example, had such an amorphous framework that abortion rights activists and federal officials found it difficult to determine whether the organization really existed or not, despite investigations by a Justice Department anti-abortion violence task force and the FBI in the 1990s.

After Don Benny Anderson and two other men who had called themselves the Army of God were charged in the Zevallos kidnapping and sent to prison, the group’s name was widely used by other extremists throughout the anti-abortion underground. Yet the Army of God seemed to be nothing more than a nom de guerre, a name invoked by extremists who did not want to claim personal responsibility for major acts of violence. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, received a threatening letter from the Army of God in 1984; as a result, security guards were assigned to protect him whenever he appeared in public.

But while the group lacked any apparent organization, there were real people committing real acts of violence in its name. And there were anti-abortion activists who worked hard to expand the Army of God’s reach. In fact, the group’s most potent weapon became a document known as the “ Army of God Manual ,” an anonymously written how-to guide to anti-abortion violence that circulated widely in the extremist underground. In the days before the internet, the manual was printed out and secretly distributed by hand or mail.

The Justice Department struggled to uncover the truth about the Army of God. In 1994, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, investigating anti-abortion violence issued a subpoena to John Burt, a longtime extremist. When officials learned that Burt had a copy of the “Army of God Manual,” they flew back to his home with him to get it. The manual explained that the group’s soldiers did not usually communicate with each other or meet. “That is why the Feds will never stop this Army,” the manual states. “Never.”

Another extremist anti-abortion group that was fluid and shifting was the Lambs of Christ, founded by Norman Weslin, a former Green Beret who became a Catholic priest and was arrested at least 80 times for leading clinic blockades. James Kopp, who murdered the abortion provider Dr. Bernard Slepian in 1998 in Amherst, New York, was affiliated with the Lambs of Christ, but federal investigators were unable to connect any anti-abortion organization to Kopp’s killing of Slepian. Kopp fled to France, and a couple who were anti-abortion activists pleaded guilty to conspiring to help him avoid capture; he was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. Kopp’s nickname in the anti-abortion movement was “Atomic Dog,” a name mentioned in the Army of God manual.

The intentionally loose and informal organizational structure used by anti-abortion extremists has been adopted by pro-Trump white nationalist extremists as well.

The intentionally loose and informal organizational structure used by anti-abortion extremists has been adopted by pro-Trump white nationalist extremists as well. For example, extremist leader Thomas Rousseau was involved with a group called Vanguard America at the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. James Fields, who marched with Vanguard America at the rally, was arrested for driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding many others. Vanguard America’s connection to Fields was devastating, despite the group’s denials that he was really a member.

With Vanguard America mired in controversy, Rousseau simply quit the group and created a new, nearly identical one, now known as Patriot Front. Last month, 31 members of Patriot Front, including Rousseau, were arrested when police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stopped a U-Haul truck full of Patriot Front members , all dressed alike and wearing masks to hide their identities. They were on their way to start a riot at a Pride event in downtown Coeur d’Alene, police said. On July 2, about 100 masked members of Patriot Front marched through Boston , carrying metal shields and a banner saying “Reclaim America.” The group was accused of assaulting a Black man during their march.

Today, anti-abortion extremists and white nationalists are forging alliances, and the dividing lines between them are increasingly blurred.

The anti-abortion and white nationalist camps seemed to merge during the January 6 insurrection. Longtime anti-abortion extremist John Brockhoeft livestreamed himself outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot, claiming he was “ fighting for our beloved President Donald J. Trump .” In 1988, Brockhoeft was arrested outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, after authorities, who had been tipped off by his wife, found explosives in his car. He later admitted to committing a series of arsons and bombings of abortion clinics in Ohio. Brockhoeft served seven years in prison.

Also at the Capitol on January 6 was Jason Storms, now the national director of Operation Save America — the current name for Operation Rescue, once the nation’s largest and most volatile anti-abortion protest organization. He was joined by other members of the group, which reported on its website that Storms and others had “ set up the Lord’s beachhead at this immense gathering. ”

“We went to DC, meeting other OSA brethren there to engage in worship, prayers of repentance, to preach the Word of God, the Gospel, and to explain to the thousands there why our nation is on the precipice of ruin,” the group’s website says.

White nationalist and anti-abortion extremists have bonded over their shared white Christian nationalism and their fears of white demographic decline . The “ great replacement ,” a conspiracy theory claiming that the U.S. government is seeking to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants, has motivated white nationalists to oppose abortion alongside with their opposition to immigration; some white nationalists only want abortion banned for white women.

Patriot Front members attended the January “March for Life” in Washington, which has long been the largest event of the anti-abortion movement, held annually on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. They carried banners that read like something straight out of the Third Reich: “Strong families make strong nations.”

The post Anti-Abortion Zealots Were Precursor to Donald Trump’s Right-Wing Shock Troops appeared first on The Intercept .

With her surprise testimony at Tuesday’s hearing of the House January 6 committee, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson broke open the inside story of the coup plotting that was underway at the White House before and during the insurrection, and in the process suddenly raised Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy.

Above all, Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff, showed that Trump knew that many of his supporters who marched on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were armed and dangerous, and still encouraged them to march on Congress. He even sought to go to the U.S. Capitol himself to lead them in person, and lunged at a Secret Service agent to try to take control of his presidential limousine so he could drive up to Capitol Hill to lead the armed mob.

Hutchinson’s stunning testimony, the most dramatic since the House hearings started, recalls that of Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide during Watergate who revealed to the Senate Watergate Committee that President Richard Nixon had a taping system in place in the Oval Office. Butterfield’s testimony suddenly changed the trajectory of the Watergate scandal and helped lead to Nixon’s 1974 resignation.

The January 6 hearings have disclosed far more than was previously known about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, raising questions about why the Justice Department has not been as aggressive in its own inquiry. The success of the House hearings may finally be forcing the Justice Department to intensify its criminal investigation. Last week, the FBI raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who sought to help Trump pressure state officials not to certify Biden’s win in Georgia; the Justice Department also seized the phone of John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump who wrote memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the presidential election during the congressional certification process.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Hutchinson painted a vivid picture of Trump’s insane behavior as he sought to prevent Joe Biden from assuming office. On the day of the insurrection, Hutchinson testified, Trump tried to force the Secret Service to drive him to the U.S. Capitol to take charge of the insurrection himself. Trump had incited the mob during a speech outside the White House, urging his supporters to go up to the Capitol while Congress was in the process of certifying the election. The crowd then followed his directions and marched to the Capitol.

Immediately after his speech to the crowd outside the White House, he tried to grab the steering wheel of his limousine from the Secret Service agent who was driving.

By that time, Trump was already furious that the Secret Service was refusing to let his heavily armed supporters into the secured area outside the White House. Hutchinson testified that Trump said that “they’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away,” referring to the metal detectors used to check for weapons. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

Beyond January 6, Hutchinson also revealed that Trump was mentally unbalanced throughout the months in which he sought to overturn the election. She said that on December 1, 2020, Trump threw a plate with ketchup on it against a wall in the White House when he found out that Attorney General William Barr had just told the press that there was no significant voter fraud during the presidential election. She added that Trump had thrown objects in the White House before, including inside the Oval Office.

Hutchinson also said that Meadows did almost nothing to try to rein in Trump during the insurrection, and later sought a presidential pardon.

Hutchinson’s testimony came as Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is vice chair of the House committee, said that there is evidence of witness tampering against others speaking to the committee. Several witnesses have received phone calls and messages in which people tried to pressure them before testifying, Cheney said.

The post Hutchinson’s January 6 Testimony Was an Alexander Butterfield Moment appeared first on The Intercept .