Dunning-Kruger In Action

One of my regular points here has been that it's less productive to try to explain Biden's behavior by saying he has a medical condition, which nobody other than a medical professional who's examined him can say, than it is to refer to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. A clear example of how this works is in Joe's heated exchange with Fox's Peter Doocy in New Mexico this past Wednesday, August 9.

Doocy is providing some funny backstory to the exchange, as well as reporting on the White House’s response to his question.

Doocy said Biden was waving him over to talk, so he tried to climb over a barrier where the press was being held when he was stopped by a White House aide. The aide was trying to stop him, saying Biden didn’t have time to talk. Doocy joked, cautioning the public not to ever jump over a barrier to do what he did in the face of the Secret Service.

Elsewhwere, Doocy stressed that Biden had specifically invited him to cross the security barrier:

I had a chance at the president’s invitation – he waved us on over – to ask him.

According to The Hill,

Doocy, who returned to Fox’s airwaves this week after a stint on paternity leave, has gotten under the president’s skin with his line of questioning on multiple occasions.

The Independent link above repeats the point that Doocy is the one reporter whose questions Joe most resents:

Early last year, a hot microphone captured the president referring to Doocy as “a stupid son of a b****” following a question posed by the reporter about inflation.

But Biden repeatedly seeks out Doocy specifically to set up the same sort of exchanges in which Joe comes off second best. The puzzling thing is why this pattern exists -- the White House staff is clearly aware of it and tries to prevent new instances.

Such was the case on Wednesday, when during the now-infamous clip of Biden losing it with Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, a handler stepped in moments after Doocy began asking the Devon Archer speakerphone question — and proceeded to promptly take control of the situation… and Joe Biden.

Fox reporter Peter Doocy shouted a question to the president during the event in New Mexico. When the president could not hear him, he asked him to get closer. Doocy jumped over the barriers to speak with the president. It is hard to hear the conversation, but it was an… pic.twitter.com/dgRxxmTqam

— Emel Akan (@mlakan) August 9, 2023

The Red State writer comments,

I mean seriously – this woman absolutely means business.

The problem is that Joe himself works against his staff, as he did in New Mexico. I think the reason is clear: he simply thinks he's smarter than Doocy, whom he sees as the most capable of his opponents in the press, so he deliberately seeks Doocy out to prove it. And in his mind, he does in fact think he's proven it, every time, which is why he keeps doing it. Cut to the Dunning-Kruger effect:

John Cleese, the British comedian, once summed up the idea of the Dunning–Kruger effect as, “If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.”

One problem Joe has is that not only does he think he's smarter than Peter Doocy, and not only does he believe he proves it every time he engages Doocy, but he also clearly thinks he's smarter than the White House staff who keep trying to prevent him from doing it.

Pelosi Steps Out

It turns out that while I quoted Speaker Emerita Pelosi's apocalyptic remarks on Trump yesterday, they were from a piece in New York Magazine, How Nancy Pelosi’s Long Game Led to Trump’s Indictment, and I actually missed much more important content that bears on what I've been writing about for the past several days.

(While various accounts of her retirement have referred to her as "emeritus", a term I've been using, it turns out from the piece that she is actually styled "Speaker Emerita", though I would think the politically correct usage would be "Emeritx".)

In the interview at the link, Pelosi takes credit for Trump's indictment, and indeed by implication almost everything that's happened since January 6 -- although she avoids taking credit for the Capitol incursion itself.

It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the select committee she fashioned that finally appears to have spurred a reluctant Justice Department to action, setting in motion a more intense phase of criminal scrutiny focused on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The resulting indictment closely tracks the select committee’s work and findings, presenting a factual narrative that traces — almost identically — the evidence presented by the committee of a sophisticated, multipronged effort by Trump to remain in power that culminated in the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

What's been puzzling me is how little has been said of Trump's actual plan, or maybe more accurately, the plan of some of his congressional supporters.

Long before January 6 itself, Pelosi had been preparing for Trump to try to disrupt the transfer of power. “During the election, I thought, ‘He’s going to try to pull a stunt and we have to try to have as many states in the Democratic column as possible,’” she told me, contemplating the possibility that Biden’s victory might not be certified and that the House would have to move to an obscure procedure in which each state’s congressional delegation would cast a single vote to determine the next president.

As I've outlined here, the specific plan was to use the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, which reads in part:

The person having the greatest number of [electoral] votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote. . .

That procedure, outlined in the Constitution, is hardly "obscure". What is possibly more obscure is the means by which a majority of the electoral votes can be challenged, which is outlined in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that provides for objections to the electoral count on the day of certification. The best account I've seen of what appears to have happened on January 6 is at the Wikipedia link:

Following on attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election leading up to congressional certification, Representative Paul Gosar and Senator Ted Cruz filed an objection to the certification of the electoral votes of Arizona. The two houses withdrew and debated the objection, but were evacuated during an attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters. After the crowd was expelled and the Capitol secured, the question was taken up again and the Senate rejected it 6–93 and the House rejected it 121–303. Representative Scott Perry and Senator Josh Hawley later filed an objection to the electoral votes of Pennsylvania with the result that the objection was rejected 7–92 in the Senate and 138–282 in the House.

It is probably correct to say that it wasn't in Trump's interest for supporters to storm the Capitol, but it's also clear that neither house of congress was willing to support any electoral challenge under the 1887 act. The best that can be said is that Trump's congressional supporters had an extreme uphill battle, and they certainly didn't have their ducks in a row going into the process. In addition, it doesn't seem that much effort was made to bring Vice President Pence on board, and his subsequent remarks suggest he never had a clear idea of what was intended.

However, every indication is that the attempt to throw the election into the House was based on the US Constitution and existing law, but as such, it failed under existing procedure. There were no tanks in the streets, it was never any sort of unlawful insurrection or coup attempt.

Speaker Pelosi at the time apparently did have a much clearer idea of what some of the Republicans intended than most of the Republicans themselves. On the other hand, especially given the way the New York Magazine piece praises her savvy, she likely also knew perfectly well what the outcome would be of any debate in the House or Senate following such a challenge, namely, that it would fail massively. So what was her object? The New York Magazine link says,

Republicans in Congress . . . could have exiled Trump from political life and perhaps spared him more intense legal scrutiny if they had voted to convict him in the impeachment trial over his role in the siege of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In other words, her object was to drive a stake through Trump's heart. Her continuing problem is that this hasn't happened, and the point of the story seems to be that she's acutely aware of it -- and a major cause, in her pretty clearly expressed view, has been the dithering of Biden and his appointees over doing what must be done:

Meanwhile, there were questions about what the Justice Department was doing to address the potential criminal culpability of Trump and those in his orbit. The committee’s members and staff were uncovering — and presenting to the public — damaging evidence that they had obtained from Trump administration officials, but the DOJ was not pursuing those same threads — despite public frustration among some observers — seemingly content with focusing on the people who had stormed the Capitol or who played a role in organizing the violence that day.

In effect, Pelosi in this interview is saying she engineered Trump's impeachments and laid out a strategy for ending Trump's career after January 6, but Biden and Garland have waited too long to make their move and botched the job. There may be some truth to this, and it probably unintentionally shows what she thinks of Biden, but it also underestimates Trump. Still, it sets up a narrative by which the Democrat establishment can back off a 2024 debacle by blaming Biden, and that might be the real takeaway from the New York Magazine piece: Pelosi senses a disaster on the horizon and is going to blame Biden.

Götterdämmerung Redux!

Back in 2021, I was intrigued by what I called the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, which they implemented following their narrow congressional victories in 2020, along with the hinky Biden electoral victory for the presidency. I called it that, because it reminded me of the lighthearted comment some people made over the Mayan calendar prediction that the world would end on December 21, 2012, that if thry knew it would end on a date certain, they'd run up their credit cards over the prior month knowing they'd never have to pay them back. At the time, I noted

[Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

Something like what I predicted seems to be taking place now. Speaker Pelosi, having retired (at least as Speaker, but she kept her seat) following a narrow loss of her House majority in 2022, is invoking, of all things, the end of the world as we know it:

When asked about the possibility of another Trump presidency, Pelosi commanded the reporter “Don’t even think of that.”

“Don’t think of the world being on fire,” she continued, adding “It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

“If he were to be president, it would be a criminal enterprise in the White House,” she added, without a hint of irony.

However, as I've noted, Speaker Emeritus Pelosi has close family and political connections with California Gov Gavin Newsom, who appears to be making contingency plans to run for president should Joe Biden ultimately decide not to run, and as I've said, Ms Pelosi continues to be a major figure in the Democrat party, and Newsom would not be doing this without her tacit endorsement. But the inescapable fact is that the Democrats ran up the credit card balances expecting the world to end, it didn't, and now they have to figure out how to pay the bills.

The Speaker Emeritus's hysteria comes at a time when the incumbent party ought to be expressing quiet confidence about the next election, which is over a year away. But indications are that the effort to defeat Trump by piling on indictments is backfiring:

World's least surprising news: 'The public's attention to former President Trump's legal drama has declined with each subsequent indictment.' From @axios https://t.co/Fi0xANKUU9

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 8, 2023

This brings me to an estimate I've made that the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party. Paul Gottfried at American Grestness had a similar take last month:

If the DNC, Democratic congressmen and the MSM were eager to dump Biden, they would have done so by now. . . . If Biden suddenly fell behind in hypothetical races against Republican presidential contenders, then the powerbrokers might decide to pursue a different course. But this has not yet happened.

. . . Joe does have an advantage over other Democratic contenders, and that advantage is precisely his cognitively weakened, morally compromised state. Like John Fetterman, Biden is ridiculously easy for the Left to manipulate. He can also be easily blackmailed. Enough of the public already knows that Biden runs a crime family, and if he falls out of line, the media and his more immediate handlers may stop hiding this fact. Despite his cognitive limits, Joe is sufficiently sentient to understand his own vulnerability. He will therefore continue obeying his political masters, who have stood behind him while keeping his enemies in check.

Nevertheless, it's been leaked that Obama is worried, and Speaker Emeritus Pelosi is now contemplating the end of the world. Trump, meanwhile, is using the indictments and the media coverage to suck out all the air in the room from the other Republican candidates, and in fact he's using the attention he gets from rallies and social media posts to troll Biden, Pelosi, the judges, and the prosecutors, which so far appears to be working well for him, notwithstanding the likes of Jonathan Turley are clutching their pearls at the spectacle.

But if the public is beginning to see the indictments as a joke, the only effective response is to treat them as precisely that. And now his attorneys are joining the fun:

Washington, D.C., District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan requested the federal prosecutors and the Trump team to agree on a day this week, but Trump's leading attorneys, John Lauro and Todd Blanche, cannot appear on Trump's behalf before early next week, Smith's filing Tuesday showed.

Smith told Chutkan that his team is ready for a hearing Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday , but was told by Trump's team that Lauro and Blanche are unavailable together before Monday or Tuesday of next week.

. . . Prosecutors with Smith's team quickly countered with their own filing, accusing Trump of objecting to their proposal because he wants to be able to use the government's evidence to "try the case in the media rather than in the courtroom."

Whatever the prosecutors and the judge try to do, Trump and his attorneys will do everything they can to make monkeys out of them, because they have nothing to lose. This is the William Kunstler-Chicago Seven defense to a political trial; it worked then, and it will work now.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, the House Republicans are seizing the opportunity to challenge the received narrative over the 2020 election. We can only wait and see how this plays out, but so far, I think my Götterdämmerung model is proving itself.

Yes, They're Going To Relitigate The 2020 Election

On Sunday, I noted the phenomenon we've seen since Trump's arrival as a political contender whereby received opinion has promoted a series of quasi-verities that go unquestioned, at least for a period of years, and anyone who doubts them is called a conspiracy theorist. Then something happens, and the quasi-verity collapses and turns out to have been a hoax. One that has continuing prestige, at least so far, is the idea that Trump is delusional or in denial that he lost the 2020 election, which was, as it's sometimes put, stolen fair and square.

But the history we've seen of such quasi-verities makes me skeptical. One of the shorter-lived examples promoted by received opinion was the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was just Russian disinformation. Recent testimony from FBI whistleblowers has established that

The FBI “verified” the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in November 2019 and a federal computer expert assessed “it was not manipulated in any way,” IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told Congress in explosive testimony released Thursday.

. . . “In October 2019, the FBI became aware that a repair shop had a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and that the laptop might contain evidence of a crime. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID,” [whistleblower] Shapley said.

. . . Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until well after Biden won the 2020 election, with the Washington Post and New York Times saying only in March 2022 that they had confirmed the authenticity of files.

This was actually a pretty short life for that particular quasi-verity. However, it's generally acknowledged that had the FBI acknowledged its authenticity, it would have been a bigger issue in the election and could conceivably have affected the outcome.

When President Donald Trump raised Hunter Biden’s laptop during the final 2020 presidential debate, Joe Biden dismissed it as a “Russian plant,” citing “five former heads of the CIA” who say it’s “a bunch of garbage.”

We now know this was patently untrue. The laptop was authentic. But at the time, almost no one in the news media questioned Biden’s false assertion. To the contrary, CNN questioned whether Trump had “spread Russian disinformation” during the debate by raising the laptop.

Twitter suppressed the New York Post story that broke the news of the laptop’s existence, preventing users from sharing the story or even sending it by direct message (a tool usually used to stop the dissemination of child pornography). Worse, the company suspended the New York Post’s Twitter account, as well as other accounts that shared the story.

By last June, we learned that Secretary Blinken was at least involved in coordinating a letter from 51 former spy-agency leaders that claimed The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop could be Russian disinformation.

Blinken’s October 2020 outreach to former CIA acting director Michael Morell was credited by Morell with inspiring the letter, though Morell says Blinken, then a Biden campaign aide, didn’t specifically ask him to write it.

But Jordan and Turner revealed that other letter-signers described Blinken as asking for the letter in their own depositions by the committees.

We've become generally aware over the past year that there was a coordinated effort to discredit the Hunter laptop story, but yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan added important detail:

Jordan published documents showing the FBI's comments on the Hunter Biden story when it first broke and how FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan testified about his meetings with Facebook representatives.

Chan and Foreign Influence Task Force Section Chief Laura Dehmlow met with Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop. Dehmlow met with both Twitter and Facebook that day.

At this time, the FBI had the laptop in its possession and knew that it was real, Jordan said.

Documents published by Jordan show that when a Twitter representative asked whether the story was real, an FBI agent said "yes," but an FBI lawyer jumped in, cutting him off with, "No further comment."

Dehmlow then said the FBI held emergency deliberations on how to respond to the question going forward. When the Facebook meeting was held later in the day, the FBI simply said, "No comment," when asked whether the Hunter Biden story was factual.

Twitter and Facebook then censored the story.

In December of last year, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who worked on the agency's Foreign Influence Task Force, testified in a lawsuit that he met weekly with Twitter and Facebook to "warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election". Although this testimony about the existence of these meetings was known at the time, Chairman Jordan's new allegation is that Chan purjured himself in this testimony.

In a sworn deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, FBI special agent Elvis Chan, who is the main conduit between the bureau and big tech companies, claimed that apart from one instance, he was not aware of any meetings between Facebook and the FBI regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In the same deposition, he also claimed that he had “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s investigation regarding the troubled Biden son’s laptop.

The Facebook files reveal both claims to be false. An internal Facebook communication reveals that Chan had more than one meeting with Facebook regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In addition,

When Facebook initially asked the FBI if the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, Laura Dehmlow, currently Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, said “no comment.” At that point, the FBI was fully aware that the laptop was real, according to Rep. Jordan.

What I find most intriguing about this latest data point is that it reveals an effort within the FBI under Director Wray, a Trump appointee working within his administration, to influlence social media with false information that would aid the Biden campaign. In tandem with the letter from 51 former intelligence officers discrediting the laptop story, it strongly suggests a coordinated effort within the organs of state security to influence the election in Biden's favor. That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

Did anyone suggest to Director Wray that he should so this, especially in coordination with members of the intelligence community? If so, who? The FBI was fully aware that the laptop was authentic. Why did Wray allow the agency to promote this false information? What was Biden's role, or he role of close campaign advisors working on his behalf, in influencing these activities?

And this brings us to a bigger question, what is Biden's role in influencing the current prosecutions of Trump?

[A] story from the New York Times published in April 2022 is gaining new attention, especially after Smith indicted Trump for speech surrounding the events of January 6, 2021 last week.

"The attorney general’s deliberative approach has come to frustrate Democratic allies of the White House and, at times, President Biden himself. As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments. And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6," the paper reported.

. . . More than a year later and at the beginning of the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Justice has fulfilled President Joe Biden's demands Trump be indicted over January 6.

My sense is that the House Republicans have Director Wray in their immediate crosshairs, and that will be a conduit to get Attorney General Garland. An inevitable result of these efforts, fed by material that will inevitably emerge from discovery following Trump's third indictment, will be a re-litigation of the 2020 election and the question of how justified Trump was in believing it was "rigged" or "stolen". This willl also come out in the continuing Republican primary process: given the positions of anti-Trump candidates like Pence and Christie that Trump is delusional, this will be up for real debate.

I had originally expected that the August congressional recess would be a vacation with little news, but it looks like the Republicans have a sense of urgency, and this won't be the case.

Back To 1876 And Mike Pence

Over the weekend, since the third Trump indictment, I've begun to see renewed references to the 1876 election, the Compromise of 1877, and the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Trump's strategy, given assertions that the 2020 vote counts in several states were irregular, was to throw the election into the House of Representatives per the Twelfth Amendment of the US Constitution, as intepreted by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. This post at the National Constitutional Center from December 15, 2020, anticipates and explains this strategy:

Federal law requires the states to deliver certified electoral college results to the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, and other parties by December 23. Then a joint meeting of Congress is required by the 12th Amendment to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the presidential election. The session on January 6, 2021 starts at 1 p.m.

Objections at that meeting about electors will be settled using a process established by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The law has its origins in the contested presidential election of 1876 between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. Several states during the 1876 election sent rival electoral ballots to be considered by Congress, which lacked a procedure to decide among contested slates of electors. The short-term solution was a special 15-person commission (including five House Representatives, five Senators, and five Supreme Court justices) to decide the election, which went to Hayes. In the end, the participating Supreme Court justices cast the deciding votes, after the House and Senate members voted on party lines.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887 and several federal statutes address questions about contested electors that land in Congress. The Congressional Research Service’s current interpretation of the Electoral Count Act explains its understanding of the process when it comes to objections to electoral votes.

“Objections to individual state returns must be made in writing by at least one Member each of the Senate and House of Representatives. If an objection meets these requirements, the joint session recesses and the two houses separate and debate the question in their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours,” the CRS said. “The two houses then vote separately to accept or reject the objection. They then reassemble in joint session, and announce the results of their respective votes. An objection to a state’s electoral vote must be approved by both houses in order for any contested votes to be excluded.”

As Trump's lawyer Christina Bobb explained in yesterday's post, Trump's congressional allies began the process by having one senator and one congressman object to the Arizona electors, Pence in his role as President of the Senate recessed the joint session, and the process of debate began. This was interrupted by the incursion of a crowd of demonstrators into the Capitol, which in effect stopped the process. As Ms Bobb pointed out, this was contrary to the interests of Trump and his allies, and the actual origins of the incursion are still unclear.

While there are questions about the vice president's role in such proceedings, the Electoral Count Act does provide that the vice president in his role as President of the Senate presides over them. Vice President Pence appears to have vacillated over his precise powers on January 6.

[Trump's] Attorney John Lauro said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s defense team believes Mr. Pence’s court testimony could be crucial in exonerating the former president of any wrongdoing in the so-called Jan. 6 case.

. . . “The reason why Vice President Pence will be so important to the defense is . . . number one, he agrees that John Eastman, who gave legal advice to President Trump, was an esteemed legal scholar,” Mr. Lauro told the outlet. “Number two, he agrees that there were election irregularities, fraud, unlawful actions at the state level. All of that will eviscerate any allegation of criminal intent on the part of President Trump,” he added.

Mr. Lauro added that Mr. Pence believed doubts around the 2020 election were legitimate enough to warrant debate during the proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, when lawmakers assembled Capitol Hill to certify the Electoral College vote.

Ahead of Jan. 6, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff said that the former vice president welcomed an effort by some lawmakers to raise objections on Jan. 6.

. . . Mr. Lauro added that there was a “constitutional disagreement” between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence around whether the vice president at the time had the legal authority to reject questionable electoral votes and kick the issue back to the states for further debate or audit.

The attorney said that, at the end of the day, what Mr. Trump wanted from Mr. Pence to do on Jan. 6 was not to overturn the results of the election but stop the counting of electoral votes to allow further debate at the state level.

“The ultimate ask of Vice President Pence was to pause the counts and allow the states to weigh in,” Mr. Lauro said.

We must assume that Pence agreed sufficiently with Trump's interpretation of his role that he did in fact recognize the objections of one senator and one congressman and begin the process of debate in the individual houses, but that process was interrupted and never resumed. The link above continues,

In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Pence insisted that Mr. Trump’s team had asked him outright to overturn the results of the election.

“They were asking me to overturn the election. I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence told the outlet.

There seems, though, to be a general understanding that while interpretations of the Electoral Count Act may differ, Pence had already followed provisions of the act by placing the January 6 joint session in recess for separate debate on the Arizona objections. This debate never concluded, and apparently the joint session never resumed to hear subsequent objections on January 6 after the incursion. At no point in the process does there appear to have been any real opportuinity for Pence to "overturn the election". On the other hand, he never had an opportunity to continue to preside under the provisions of the act to hear further objections to other states' electors.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the various pressures Pence has faced since January 6, 2021 have left him confused over even his generally acknowledged role as president of the joint session that day. That he's now a candidate for the Republican nomination against Trump gives him some incentive to claim Trump wanted him to "overturn the election", but voters so far are rejecting this.

Former Vice President Pence on Friday faced heckling from supporters of former President Donald Trump outside a campaign stop in Londonderry, N.H.

“Why did you sell out the people?” one heckler can be heard saying in a video taken outside of the event and shared across social media.

Pence's current claim, from the link farther above, is “From sometime in the middle of December, the president began to be told that I had some authority to reject or return votes back to the states. I had no such authority. No vice president in American history had ever asserted that authority and no one ever should.”

But as far as I can tell, he was asked only preside over the joint session of congress specified in the Electoral Count Act and recess the session for debate once the specified objections were received. But no ther vice president had been called upon to do this, ever, since the need to invoke the act had never some up since 1887, even though this was completely legal, and it was what Pence did in fact do before the demonstators broke into the Capitol. For whatever reason, the separate debates over the Arizona electors were never concluded, and the joint session never resumed to hear addional objections to other states' electors. It almost sounds as though Pence was complicit in this and simply stopped the process specified in the Electoral Count Act, possibly because even though it was constitutional, he was prevailed upon to stop it due to the potential outcome.

What last weeK's indictment has done has been simply to reopen the 2020 election and raise both old and new questions about the events of January 6, which simply increases the chance that the existing accepted narratives will collapse. It was an unwise move by the deep state to do this. On the other hand, Mike Pence's reputation will now be irredeemably destroyed.

Trump Indictment III Means Relitigating The 2020 Election

One pattern that's kept reemerging in the Trump story since 2016 has been a constant stream of narratives that have been sold as verities, yet they've wound up collapsing into hoaxes years later. The first was the 2016 "pee tape" story that alleged Trump conspired with Russia to interfere in that year's election. This wasn't effectively refuted until the Muller Report in 2019. However, the Wikipedia summary at the link raises what may become a prophetic issue:

The investigation intentionally took an approach that could not result in a judgment that Trump committed a crime. This decision was based on an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution, and Mueller's belief that it would be unfair to accuse the president of a crime even without charging him because he would have no opportunity to clear his name in court[.]

So the problem with the overall "pee tape" narrative was that it gave Trump no opportunity to disprove it, or at minimum to establish that it couldn't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in court.

The second hoax was the 2019 first impeachment of Donald Trump, which was based on putative efforts by Trump to use Ukraine President Zelensky to provide damaging information about Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign. As it happened, the accusations have turned out to be a mirror image of the much better-established threat by Biden himself to withhold aid to Ukraine if a prosecutor who was threatening the Biden-supported Burisma company wasn't removed, a factor that's reemerged four years later.

The third quasi-verity involving Trump has been the January 6, 2021 demonstration and alleged incursion at the Capitol. This was the cause of Trump's second impeachment, just before he was to leave office in any case. Wikipedia summarizes the narrative:

The House of Representatives of the 117th U.S. Congress adopted one article of impeachment against Trump of "incitement of insurrection", stating that he had incited the January 6 attack of the U.S. Capitol. These events were preceded by attempts by Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election, as well as his pushing of voter fraud conspiracy theories on his social media channels before, during, and after the election.

Last week's third indictment essentially rehearses the charges in the second impeachment and maintains the quasi-verity:

The indictment charges Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction; and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.

So in effect, it opens the door to giving Trump the chance to make his full case in an official venue, even if the trial's outcome is potentially rigged against him. This is because he can bring in evidence via discovery, which appears to be what his lawyers have in mind. Via Red State:

Critical to the left’s J6 narrative is that the angry mob that showed up at the Capitol was working in Trump’s interests. Yet, the protesters began crashing the barriers on the Capitol grounds just as Trump’s congressional allies challenged former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electors from Arizona.

Trump ally Rep. Paul Gosar (R.-Ariz.) objected to Arizona’s Biden slate, and it was seconded by Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Texas), which triggered an adjournment of the joint session of Congress called to adjudicate the presidential elector slates sent to Congress by the state legislatures.

If one congressman and one senator challenge a state’s electors, the two chambers meet separately for a maximum of two hours of debate, followed by a vote. If both chambers vote to reject a state’s electors, they are taken off the board. They are not awarded to another candidate.

If Trump allies successfully challenged Arizona’s 11 electors, plus Georgia’s 16 and Wisconsin’s 10, Biden’s total would drop from 306 to 269—although any greater combination that took any candidate below 270 would do.

When no candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, the presidential election goes to the House of Representatives. In the House, each state’s delegation votes, and because Republicans had majorities in more House delegations than the Democrats, Trump would have been expected to win his second term.

While the House and Senate debated Arizona, the protesters crashed the gates, leading to both chambers going into a recess. When Congress reconvened, the Trump allies lost support, and objections to the Biden electors became politically untenable.

In effect, the crashing of the Capitol gates disrupted the plan developed by Trump’s congressional allies—it was not in any way part of a plan for Trump to subvert the Constitution or seize power.

The J6 protesters blocked Trump’s challenges, ensuring he would have to relinquish power on January 20, 2021.

Trump's Lawyer Christina Bobb makes the point, which is echoed by Alan Dershowitz, that Trump's January 6 plan was simply to exercise his constitutional right to petition Congress for redress of grievances, which was interrupted by the January 6 Capitol incursion, whose origins have always been suspicious. At the link above,

Bobb said 20 months after J6; there are still questions.

“OK, who started it? Did you start it, FBI? Did you start it, Department of Justice? Did you start it, Capitol Police? Because somebody moved to the barricades,” she said. “We gotta get all of that information.”

This in turn has caused Smith's prosecution team to do all it can to prevent material Trump's defense obtains through discovery from being made public. Late Friday evening, it filed for a protective order:

In the filing, prosecutors urged U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue an order prohibiting any findings related to the case be kept from public view.

“Such a restriction is particularly important in this case because the defendant has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him,” Senior Assistant Special Counsels Molly Gaston and Thomas Windom wrote in the filing. “And in recent days, regarding this case, the defendant has issued multiple posts—either specifically or by implication—including the following, which the defendant posted just hours ago.”

The filing does not specifically request a gag order against Trump, which would bar him from discussing the case altogether outside the courtroom or with the media. However, prosecutors noted they are set to share a “substantial” amount of evidence to Trump’s team, which they are trying to keep out of public view while criminal proceedings play out.

Their problem is that they're dealing with Donald Trump. In the filing, they demonstrate a rudimentary insight into how Trump is going to operate -- he's going to use the media against itself. Their need to cover Trump is irresistible, because his style is outlandish -- but that in turn means it's going to be much harder to sustain a mediating narrative that maintains the quasi-verities. And apparently the prosecutors understand this perfectly well.

So they'll need to keep Trump's mouth shut, which will be almost impossible, and in the process, he'll have the opportunity to relitigate not just January 6, but the 2020 election, likely with evidence the prosecutors will be forced to provide while doing their best to keep it from being public.

This whole idea of basically reopening the unsuccessful second impeachment is turning out to be reckless and hamartic.

What's Up In Ukraine?

The YouTube video above is from the Hindustan Times, one of the few media outlets that's essentially repeating a New York Times story that's behind a paywall. The Gateway Pundit has an excerpt:

“Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether.

[…] Now the Western-trained Ukrainian brigades are trying to turn things around, U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire. A troop surge is underway in the country’s south, with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mostly small-scale attacks to punch through Russian lines.”

“Ukraine’s decision to change tactics is a clear signal that NATO’s hopes for large advances made by Ukrainian formations armed with new weapons, new training and an injection of artillery ammunition have failed to materialize, at least for now.”

I went to https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/ and found no mention of the New York Times piece, but that page is heavily pro-Ukraine and pro-Western involvement. The neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, possibly responding indirectly to the Times story, would only say "Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder stated that Ukraine independently decides when and where to employ its significant combat capabilities."

The most objective analysis I've seen of the Russo-Ukraine War's progress continues to be the YouTube presentations of Col Markus Reisner of the Austrian military academy. The date of this presentation is January 13 of this year, but it was released only a day or two ago. What's significant is that so little has changed over the past seven months. My German is pretty good, but Col Reisner's English is far better than my German, so I'm grateful that he releases his presentations in an English-language version:

At 12:35, he cites estimates as of early 2023 from Ukrainian, US, and Estonian/NATO sources on the progress of the war and concludes that major additional resources from both sides will be needed to bring about a clear outcome, but so far, both sides have already expended major resources with neither gaining a clear advantage. The result has been World War I-style artillery standoffs, something nobody expected before the war.

At about 16:00, he asks a more significant set of questions, which is why the US and the West have been so slow to deliver weapons that would tip the balance. Although the US has delivered HIMARS, they haven't been in quantities that would prove significant, while F-16 fighters, while they were finally approved, will not arrive for effective use this year. Promised deliveries of modern armored vehicles from the West are in quantities far below what Ukraine has said they need.

What we've begun to see in recent days has been a shift in strategy by Ukraine, as the Times story implies, to emphasize the use of drone attacks, including a second attack on the Kerch bridge on July 17, and now a drone attack on the Olenengorsky Gornyak, a landing ship that had reportedly been used to ferry vehicles across the Kerch Strait to bypass the new damage to the bridge. My impression is that with the ground war largely stalemated, Ukraine is shifting to a strategy that can produce visible victories after many monhs when its propaganda war has also been stalled.

There are also new reports this morning of other explosions near the Kerch Bridge, which whether successful or not, are also aimed at giving an impression of progress in the war, something that's been missing so far all this year.

What I find intriguing, though, is that as a practical matter, as Col Reisner has pointed out, US support for Ukraine hasn't been at a level that would allow significant progress in the counteroffensive by the end of this year, something that it's been generally recognized that Ukraine needs to show if in fact it wants to regain all the occupied territories that are its stated objective in the war. At the same time, there's been no change in the stated US objective, most recently outlined by Sec Blinken in London on June 21:

As President Biden has said since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.

But in that case, why is it taking so long? Delays in approving Abrams tanks and F-16 fighters have resulted in equivalent delays in deliveries and training, to the point that they probably can't be used this year. So we're back to my favorite question, what problem are we trying to solve? It's been generally understood that Ukraine needs to have the war wrapped up before the 2024 election, when Republicans, especially if Trump is the nominee, will make it an issue.

At this point, that's unlikely to happen. Do Joe Biden and Sec Blinken have a Plan B? The big focus in recent weeks has been on Hunter and Trump's indictments, but it's hard not to think Ukraine will return as an issue at some point, except Biden and Blinken will have had no progress to report when it does.

And this could easily lead to more people asking the questions I began to notice last Monday that were raised by Seymour Hersh and Holman Jenkins: what's led to this policy of fruitless stalemate? Is it a bug or a feature? Who benefits? Why, after all, does the answer to so many questions that shouldn't involve it at all turn out to be Ukraine?