Lack of time may be the only thing that saves President Trump from becoming the first U.S. president to be impeached a second time, Hill sources tell me.
House Democrats have a caucus call at noon to discuss that very topic.
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) told Kasie Hunt on MSNBC's "Way Too Early'": "I think that Democrats are going to move forward with another impeachment because they do believe that he must be held accountable."
Dingell said it's not a done decision, partly because time is short: "I think that that is the direction that we are headed."
Republicans are openly abandoning Trump. Top officials are resigning. Talk is rising of a second impeachment, or removal from office via the 25th Amendment.
Trump's national security team has begun operating as if he weren’t the president, but rather a guy in the White House who needs to be carefully managed, Jonathan Swan reports.
So 61 days after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Trump was spooked into the concession he never wanted to give:
"A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20," he said on a video last night, reading from a teleprompter. "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation."
Here's what implosion looks like:
Two of Trump's Cabinet secretaries — Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — resigned in one day.
Both Speaker Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer called for Vice President Pence and members of Trump's Cabinet to remove him via the 25th Amendment.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr said Trump's conduct the day of the riot "was a betrayal of his office and supporters."
Retired four-star Gen.John Kelly, Trump's former White House chief of staff, told CNN's Jake Tapper that Trump is "a laughingstock now." Tapper asked: "If you were in the Cabinet right now, would you vote to remove him from office?" Kelly hesitated a split-second, then said: "Yes, I would."
The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, run by Trump's former confidant Rupert Murdoch, calls today for Trump to resign to avoid a second impeachment: "[I]t would give Mr. Trump agency, a la Richard Nixon, over his own fate."
The bottom line: A senior administration official tells me Trump finally conceded because he has "no friends left. He could feel it all slipping away." Read more at Axios
The Justice Department did not rule out pursuing charges against Trump for his possible role in inciting the mob. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said. Read more at New York Times
Trump has suggested to aides that he wants to pardon himself in the final days of his presidency. No president has pardoned himself before, and legal scholars are divided about whether the courts would recognize it. Read more at New York Times
Digital security experts are now raising alarm over the breach, saying it could create potential national security and intelligence risks. Rioters broke into congressional offices, ransacked papers and in at least one case, reportedly stole a laptop. Nearly 6,200 National Guard members are being mobilized from several states and the District of Columbia to provide security to Washington following the deadly events. Read more at CNN
Federal authorities expect to charge dozens. D.C. police reported more than 80 arrests and investigators vowed to find and punish others, scouring hotels to find rioters photographed at the Capitol. Read more at Wall Street Journal
The US reported more than 4,000 Covid-19 deaths in a single day for the first time yesterday, as more grim stats pile up. In Los Angeles County, the number of people dying of Covid-19 in a day is now equivalent to the number of homicide deaths the city sees in an entire year. China has locked down Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people near Beijing, to contain the country's worst flare-up in months. In Japan, Tokyo and three neighboring prefectures went into a state of emergency today. Here’s a little bit of good news: A new study offers early evidence that Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine might be effective against the two new coronavirus variants, first identified in South Africa and the United Kingdom, that are now cropping up across the globe. Read more at CNN
Americans, who are used to feeling like winners, now look around and see a country that can't secure its own seat of government... struggles to distribute a vaccine... was cyber-looted by Russia... was half a year late with a stimulus plan both sides wanted... and can't even orchestrate a peaceful transition of power.
Why it matters: The democracy that President-elect Biden will take over is tattered, archaic, precarious, Felix Salmon writes.
The consent of the governed lies at the heart of American democracy. But Biden will lack that fundamental authority:
40% of Americans and 80% of Trump voters say they believe Biden is not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election — the greatest proportion of holdouts in the history of American polling.
Presidential democracies (think France and Brazil) are prone to crisis at the best of times. None has lasted nearly as long as America's.
It was fragile and old even before Trump was elected, burdened with an anachronistic Electoral College, a dangerously long transition between election and inauguration, and a deeply gerrymandered quilt of state and federal constituencies.
"You can't lump U.S. democracy in with Canada, Germany, and Japan anymore," Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer tells Axios. "We’re now midway between them and Hungary." Read more at Axios
The Capitol's three top security officials resigned: Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund resigned under pressure from congressional leaders. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asked for and received the resignation of the sergeant at arms of the Senate, Michael Stenger. The House sergeant at arms, Paul Irving, also resigned.
Capitol Police turned down help: Three days before the riot, the Pentagon asked the Capitol Police if it needed National Guard manpower. And as the mob descended, the Justice Department leaders reached out to offer FBI agents. The police turned them down both times, AP reports.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) "said federal defense officials repeatedly turned down the state’s initial offers to send Maryland National Guard ... until he got a call from U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy." — Baltimore Sun
Police said they recovered two pipe bombs, one outside the RNC and one outside the DNC, and a cooler from a vehicle that had a long gun and Molotov cocktail on Capitol grounds, per AP. Read more at Axios
Men wearing camouflage shirts began building a makeshift defensive camp outside the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. They moved barricades and green fencing into a circle, and then pulled helmets from a crate and donned goggles in preparation for a clash that had been brewing for weeks and, arguably, for years on far-right forums devoted to President Trump.
“TheDonald.win, that’s where it’s at,” said one of the men, referring to the website where defiant talk, conspiracy theories and tips on how best to lay siege to Washington have grown since Trump lost the Nov. 3 election.
The comment underscored the potent, interactive role between the online and offline worlds in Wednesday’s breach of the Capitol. Violent talk on far-right forums fomented violent real-world action, which was then captured by smartphones, uploaded and celebrated on the same forums. The boundaries between the digital and analog all but disappeared as rage, provocation and gloating bounced back and forth, again and again.
Facebook bans President Trump indefinitely, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says
TheDonald, as the camouflaged men at the Capitol suggested, offered a particularly vivid view of this combustible dynamic. The forum, banned last year from Reddit for hate speech and violent talk and now turned into a website, had been one of many online staging grounds for Wednesday’s riot, and the success of the takeover of the Capitol spurred celebration and calls for further action, including the execution of leading Democrats. For days before, the forum had featured advice on how best to sneak guns into Washington, despite its strict weapons laws.
By Thursday morning, though, different moods had set in on this and other pro-Trump forums. Anger and gloating were still there, but so was unease at the furious public and political backlash against the events of the day before, which led to dozens of arrests and left one person fatally shot by police and three people dead after medical emergencies. Some posters worried their favorite forums, including TheDonald, would get knocked offline by chastened Internet service providers. There also was a pitched effort to redirect blame against left-wing activists, such as antifa, for somehow dressing up as marauding Trump supporters — a claim that was obviously ridiculous to anyone who watched the events unfold on their televisions, computers or smartphones.
Pro-Trump forums erupt with violent threats ahead of Wednesday’s rally against the 2020 election
On TheDonald, as users argued that the removal of some violent comments suggested the site’s leaders had been “compromised,” one moderator wrote, “What do you want? Us to try to lead a [expletive] revolution … from a forum on the internet, which ends up getting the site shut down in a matter of days and all of us sent to the gulag?”
Many things born on the darkest corners of the Internet found their way to the heart of American democracy on Wednesday. Ludicrous claims among adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory — including that leading Democrats are satanic pedophiles — got shouted by the mobs taking over the Capitol. The emerging garb of the far-right — camouflage, goggles, American flags draped as shawls — leaped directly from the far-right memeworld into the nation’s capital.
Years of social media comments about “lynching” political leaders opposed to Trump, meanwhile, manifested themselves as an actual noose, hanging from a makeshift gallows on the Mall. Someone wrote “BIDEN,” in reference to President-elect Joe Biden, on the wooden structure, with an arrow pointing toward the noose.
It was not clear if TheDonald or any similar pro-Trump forum directly coordinated the takeover of the Capitol, or if posters simply shared general advice, promotion and celebration of the idea of thronging to Washington in support of the president. Much of that was included in a popular thread called “PATRIOTS STORM THE CAPITOL | WATCH PARTY.”
The resulting mayhem appeared to proceed without obvious leaders, a common feature of political action developed and coordinated online, said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks political extremism.
“It’s a new age of terrorism that can’t exist without the Internet,” Katz said. “Having said that, the movement has a spiritual leader, which is Trump.”
Advance Democracy, a group headed by former FBI analyst and Senate investigator Daniel J. Jones, who led the review of the CIA’s torture program, also was tracking pro-Trump forums as they built toward Wednesday’s assault.
“In the lead-up to yesterday’s violence, the Capitol rioters needed a place to plan for how the violence would unfold. They found this on unmoderated pro-Trump forums such as TheDonald.win,” Jones said. “There, they posted their plans to take matters into their own hands and literally threatened to kill lawmakers. They encouraged each other to bring illegal weapons. When this came to fruition, the real-life actions provided fodder for those on the forum.”
In the aftermath, pro-Trump forums wavered between glee, deflection and recrimination, shunting blame for the chaos onto a mass of scapegoats. They blamed Vice President Pence, for not subverting the reality of Trump’s loss, and old foes like Democrats, the media and the “deep state.” They also blamed the Capitol Police and other members of law enforcement.
Some pro-Trump posters conjured new conspiracy theories to explain away the damage: “Does anyone else feel like this was all a complete setup?” conservative commentator Evan Kilgore tweeted late Wednesday, in a message that was “liked” more than 114,000 times.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter worked belatedly to tamp down some of the fervor. Facebook indefinitely suspended Trump‘s accounts Thursday, while Twitter blocked him from tweeting for 12 hours. A number of less-moderated alternatives offered refuge for Trump supporters eager to egg the chaos on.
The pro-Trump attorney L. Lin Wood, whose Twitter account was suspended Wednesday after he baselessly accused Pence of being a “child molester,” leaped quickly to the alternative social network Parler, where he urged Trump-supporting “patriots” to keep fighting, saying, “Almighty God is with you. TODAY IS OUR DAY.”
“Get the firing squads ready. Pence goes FIRST.” Wood wrote in a Parler post that has been directed toward user feeds nearly 3 million times.
TheDonald, Wood and Parler did not respond to requests for comment.
Seeing the chaos as a marketing opportunity, extreme right-wing groups used encrypted messaging services to coach their followers on recruitment strategies for winning newly disillusioned Trump supporters to their cause.
One self-identified neo-Nazi account wrote to more than 7,000 followers on Telegram, advising them that many people normally averse to a violent ideology could now be more vulnerable to radicalization.
“It will soon be the time to start individually reaching out to Rightwing types and spreading our ‘There is No Political Solution’ message,” the account said.
Reddit closes long-running forum supporting President Trump after years of policy violations
Another white supremacist “fraternity” discussed the possibility of a White-led uprising after Wednesday’s attempted insurrection. “Your mission is to invite [Trump supporters] into our spaces. Tell them there is a solution to their problem. Invite them to telegram. Seize the opportunity,” the administrator posted. “I’m sure a lot of them lost faith with [Trump] today,” one commenter responded.
On TheDonald, where users had proudly shared their travel itineraries for Wednesday’s demonstrations and planned meetups at hotels and restaurants near the White House, the triumphant mood quickly soured after Pence refused to intervene, with thousands of commenters labeling him a criminal traitor compromised by the “swamp.”
Even as they posted, their real-world compatriots tore through the Capitol building voicing the same anger. “Where's Pence, show yourself!” one rioter said after barging onto the Senate floor.
When Trump tweeted a video asking protesters to return home, a barrage of posts ripped through the forum expressing a mix of disbelief and frustration.
“HE ASKED US TO COME. ‘JAn 6 WILL BE WILD,’ ” wrote the user “RiverFenix” in a post quoting Trump’s tweet from last month. “IM AM SO CONFUSED SOMEONE SHAKE ME AWAKE,” the account added.
While some posters expressed continued allegiance to the president, many others responded with cynicism. “Let’s move on to someone that will actually fight and isn’t afraid of scrutiny,” one user commented. “He led us to slaughter,” said another.
Still, a contingent of Trump supporters and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory voiced the belief that the siege was all part of a plan to keep Trump in power — and that more tumult would come in the days ahead.
“Sleep well tonight patriots. … You are going to love how this movie ends,” wrote “StormIsUponUs,” a QAnon-espousing account with more than 450,000 followers on Parler. “'Nothing can stop what’s coming’ wasn’t just a catch-phrase.” Read at Washington Post
Lives Lived: Neil Sheehan, who in 1971 obtained the Pentagon Papers, telling the secret government history of the Vietnam War, has died at 84. Sheehan, who covered the war for The Times, never explained how he got the documents — until a few years ago, when he agreed to an interview on the condition that it not be published until his death. Read more at New York Times
$195 billion — Elon Musk’s estimated net worth on Thursday. The Tesla CEO surpassed Amazon chief Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person, with his net worth jumping from $30 billion a year ago largely due to the electric-vehicle maker’s meteoric rise in value. Read more at Wall Street Journal
‘Numb and nearly broken’
In the four months between Franklin Roosevelt’s election and his 1933 inauguration, much of the world descended into chaos.
Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, and the Reichstag — the Parliament building — burned. Japan quit the League of Nations. In the U.S., hundreds of banks shut down. Lynchings surged in the South. “The country, numb and nearly broken, anxiously awaited deliverance,” as David Kennedy wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the era.
Today, the length of time between a presidential election and inauguration is about six weeks shorter than it was in 1933, and neither the U.S. nor the world is in as dire a situation as it was then. But the current situation is still pretty dire.
The worst pandemic in a century is becoming more severe, with a contagious new coronavirus variant spreading and thousands of Americans dying every day. The mass vaccination program is behind schedule. Almost 10 million fewer Americans have jobs than did a year ago. The U.S. president, with the backing of dozens of members of Congress, has tried to overturn an election result and remain in power. Hundreds of his supporters overwhelmed police officers and stormed the Capitol, one of the few times in history that an U.S. government building has been violently attacked.
All the while, the country lacks a president who has both the power and willingness to reduce the death, illness and mayhem.
Instead, President-elect Joe Biden is left to rue that President Trump is denying the new government access to important national security information — and to plead with Trump to renounce the violence. Trump, for his part, appears disengaged from the worsening coronavirus crisis.
Most other longtime democracies have much shorter lags between an election and the transfer of power. In Britain, a new government usually takes office the next day. In Canada, France, India and Japan, it happens within a few weeks.
By The New York Times
The authors of the U.S. Constitution created the delay to give a new government time to travel to the nation’s capital during winter, an issue that obviously no longer applies. And the country has already shortened the time period once, through the 20th Amendment. It was ratified in early 1933, during the chaotic months when Roosevelt was waiting to take office, but not soon enough to shorten his transition.
Many legal scholars say there is little justification for today’s two-and-a-half-month wait. Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas has called it the Constitution’s “most mischievous” feature.
“There is something profoundly troubling,” Levinson wrote in an academic journal in 1995, “in allowing repudiated presidents to continue to exercise the prerogatives of what is usually called ‘the most powerful political office in the world.’” Read more at New York Times
With the elections over and President Trump in his final days in office, tech companies feel they have more latitude to take tougher action, sources tell Axios' Ashley Gold and Sara Fischer.
The firms also have an eye on Washington's looming power shift. Democrats who have long been concerned about the proliferation of misinformation and extremism on social media will soon be in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress.
A slew of platforms, including companies that have shown restraint over the past four years, finally pulled the plug on Trump after Wednesday's riot:
Facebook and Instagram banned him from posting for at least the next two weeks. Michelle Obama and high-ranking Hill Democrats said Facebook should boot him permanently.
Twitter froze Trump out of his account, before reinstating him yesterday once certain tweets were deleted.
TikTok is removing content violations and redirecting hashtags like #stormthecapitol and #patriotparty to its community guidelines. Read more at Axios
Brazil Deaths: South America's largest nation has seen its virus deaths surpass 200,000, pushing the second highest toll in the world higher even as its citizens are again crowding their beaches. Many Brazilians have been straining against quarantine for months, going to bars or small gatherings with friends, though big blowouts had been few and far between since the pandemic began. But while many countries imposed new restrictions to limit the spread of the virus in mid-December, Brazil’s government gave its blessing for holiday fun in the sun. Festivities kicked off after the Southern Hemisphere’s summer started Dec. 21. Mauricio Savarese and Diane Jeantet report from Sao Paulo. Read more at AP
Czech Crematorium Full: The biggest crematorium in the Czech Republic has been overwhelmed by mounting numbers of pandemic victims. With new confirmed infections around record highs, the situation looks set to worsen. Authorities in the northeastern city of Ostrava have been speeding up plans to build a fourth furnace but, in the meantime, have sought help from the government. These days, the crematorium receives more than 100 coffins daily, about double its maximum cremation capacity. Karel Janicek reports. Read more at AP
Indonesian cleric who inspired extremists freed from prison
A firebrand cleric who inspired the Bali bombers and other violent extremists has walked free from an Indonesian prison after completing his sentence for funding the training of Islamic militants. Police said they would continue to monitor the activities of Abu Bakar Bashir, who is now 82 and ailing. Bashir was the spiritual leader of the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah network behind the 2002 bombings on the tourist island of Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists, including 88 Australians. Indonesian authorities struggled to prove his involvement, and Bashir was imprisoned in 2011 for his links to a militant camp. Read more at AP
Seoul court orders Japan to compensate 12 Korean sex slaves
A Seoul court has ordered Japan to financially compensate 12 South Korean women forced to work as sex slaves for Japanese troops during World War II. Japan immediately protested the ruling to South Korea's ambassador to Japan. Tokyo maintains that all wartime compensation issues were resolved under a 1965 treaty that normalized ties. Observers say it is unlikely to pay. The court ruled the Japanese government must give $91,360 each to the women who sued. The verdict will likely rekindle animosities between the countries. Read more at AP
The US military flew two B-52 bombers to the Middle East to demonstrate its "continuing commitment to regional security and deterrence to aggression," the Air Force said. It’s the fourth such show of force in the last two months as tensions over the anniversary of the death of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani blur with tensions leading up to the transfer of presidential power in the US. There is a broad sense of concern that adversaries could take advantage of the domestic turmoil in the US, but so far, there’s no concrete evidence that anything is afoot. Meanwhile, a judge in Baghdad's investigative court has issued an arrest warrant for Trump on his way out of office over the killing of an Iraqi paramilitary leader during the Soleimani assassination last year. Read more at CNN
Boeing has reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department over criminal charges that the company defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration when it first won approval for its blighted 737 Max jet. The settlement includes a $243.6 million criminal fine, compensation payments of $1.77 billion to Boeing's airline customers and $500 million to a fund to compensate relatives of crash victims. The planes were grounded by the FAA in 2019 after two fatal crashes that killed 346 people, and the Justice Department said Boeing wasn't honest about the safety and performance of its jets. The FAA approved the jets to fly passengers again in November, but not before serious changes were made to the flawed safety system that caused the crashes. Read more at CNN
Some political leaders and public health experts are rethinking strict prioritization for coronavirus vaccines, suggesting that it might make more sense to simply try to administer as many doses as possible as quickly as possible, Axios Vitals author Caitlin Owens writes.
Why it matters: Especially while supplies are still limited, there's an inherent tension between trying to focus first on the people most at risk from the virus — including those most likely to spread it — and getting shots into arms at maximum speed.
Nationwide, only about 29% of the doses delivered to the states have been administered, according to Bloomberg's tracker.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar said at a briefing this week: 'It would be much better to move quickly and end up vaccinating some lower-priority people than to let vaccines sit around while states try to micromanage this process." Read more at Axios
