Video shows GOP’s history of using unethical, unscrupulous, treasonous tactics to obtain the Presidency going back to Richard Nixon

 

 

Since Dwight Eisenhower left the presidency in 1961, six different Republicans have occupied the Oval Office.

As explained in the info & videos on this page, every one of them (except for Ford) from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump used unethical, unscrupulous tactics to obtain the presidency.

 

Nixon Prolonged Vietnam War to get elected president which cost thousand of lives

Nixon ran on a platform that opposed the Vietnam war, but to win the election, he needed the war to continue

In 1968, the Paris Peace talks, intended to put an end to the 13-year-long Vietnam War, failed because an aide working for then-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon convinced the South Vietnamese to walk away from the dealings, says a new report by the BBC’s David Taylor. By the late 1960s Americans had been involved in the Vietnam War for nearly a decade, and the ongoing conflict was an incredibly contentious issue, says PBS:

In 1967, with American troop strength in Vietnam reaching 500,000, protest against U.S. participation in the Vietnam War had grown stronger as growing numbers of Americans questioned whether the U.S. war effort could succeed or was morally justifiable. They took their protests to the streets in peace marches, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. Despite the country’s polarization, the balance of American public opinion was beginning to sway toward “de-escalation” of the war.

Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.

President Johnson had at the time a habit of recording all of his phone conversations, and newly released tapes from 1968 detailed that the FBI had “bugged” the telephones of the South Vietnamese ambassador and of Anna Chennault, one of Nixon’s aides. Nixon records show that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he used Anna Chennault as his liaison in Vietnam, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson. This was done to hurt Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and help Nixon.

In the recently released tapes, we can hear Johnson being told about Nixon’s interference by Defence Secretary Clark Clifford. The FBI had bugged the South Vietnamese ambassadors phone. They had Chennault lobbying the ambassador on tape. Johnson was justifiably furious — he ordered Nixon’s campaign be placed under FBI surveillance. Johnson passed along a note to Nixon that he knew about the move. Nixon played like he had no idea why the South backed out, and offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Though the basic story of Nixon’s involvement in stalling the Vietnam peace talks has been around before, the new tapes, says the Atlantic Wire, describe how President Johnson knew all about the on-goings but chose not to bring them to the public’s attention: he thought that his intended successor, Hubert Humphrey, was going to beat Nixon in the upcoming election anyway. And, by revealing that he knew about Nixon’s dealings, he’d also have to admit to having spied on the South Vietnamese ambassador.

Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” “I know,” was Dirksen’s feeble reply.

Eventually, Nixon won by just 1 percent of the popular vote. “Once in office he escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968,” says the BBC.

This treason cost the lives of many service men. To Nixon, getting elected was more important. I’ll never understand why Johnson (who I’m no fan of) didn’t expose Nixon in a national address to the nations as he should of for his treason. Johnson’s failure to expose Nixon cost Hubert Humphrey & Democrats the election and the lives of thousands of our troops.

 

Thom Hartmann talks about how Ronald Reagan stole the 1980 presidential election by secretly arranging for American hostages to remain in Iran until after he was sworn in as president.

 

We Haven’t Had a Legitimate Republican President Since Eisenhower in the 50s, Here’s Why

Thom talks about the past several republican presidents who have all essentially cheated to get into office. Also Thom covers some of the news stories of the day.

 

How Ronald Reagan Used Hostages to Steal 1980 Election

Thom Hartmann exposes how Ronald Reagan used U.S. Embassy Hostages in Iran to Steal 1980 Election and history of GOP Presidents committing treason to take the White House.

 

A video trip down memory lane shows how Trump Republicans of 2020 are as lawless as Nixon Republicans from 1972

 

 

Trump ‘won’ the 2016 election using unscrupulous, underhanded means.

 

When Donald Trump said, “This election is rigged”—he should know. His buddies rigged it.

Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast busted Jeb Bush for stealing the 2000 election by purging Black voters from Florida’s electoral rolls. Now Palast is back to take a deep dive into the Republicans’ dark operation, Crosscheck, the secret purge list that helped steal the 2016 Election.

Republicans used Crosscheck to illegally purge thousands of voters off the voter roles, Trump conspired with the National Enquirer to smear political opponents, and Putin / Russia helped Trump’s campaign. Therefore Trump ‘won’ the 2016 election using unscrupulous, underhanded means.

Crosscheck is controlled by a Trump henchman, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State who claims his computer program has identified 7.2 million people in 29 states who may have voted twice in the same election–a felony crime. The catch? Most of these “suspects” are minorities—in other words, mainly Democratic voters. Yet the lists and the evidence remain “confidential”.

 

Rolling Stone investigative reporter Greg Palast busted Jeb Bush for stealing the 2000 election by purging Black voters from Florida’s electoral rolls. Now Palast is back to take a deep dive into the Republicans’ dark operation, Crosscheck, designed to steal a million votes by November.

Crosscheck is controlled by a Trump henchman, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State who claims his computer program has identified 7.2 million people in 29 states who may have voted twice in the same election–a felony crime. The catch? Most of these “suspects” are minorities—in other words, mainly Democratic voters. Yet the lists and the evidence remain “confidential.”

Palast and his investigative side-kick Badpenny do what it takes to get their hands on the data, analyze it and go find some of these 7.2 million Americans tagged “suspects” and “potential duplicate voters” whose votes are threatened this November.

They hunt down and confront Kobach with the evidence of his “lynching by laptop.” Then they are off to find the billionaires behind this voting scam.

In this interview, Greg talks about his new film, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”. Called “The most important investigative journalist of our time”, Palast has been working for the BBC for 20 years and writes for the Guardian and the Rolling Stone.

 

In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged enough minority voters to swing the election for Donald Trump.

The rigging was a simple process: in 27 Republican-controlled states (including critical swing states) hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people showed up to vote, but were mysteriously blocked from voting for allegedly being registered with the intent to vote in multiple states.

 

The above video recorded on November 26, 2017 with MSNBC Host Joy Reid interviewing Greg Palast is the only interview done about this on any Television Network.

 

Millions of Black, Hispanic & Asians Voters Have Been Purged

Greg Palast, Al Jazeera, BBC News, The Guardian/Billionaires & Ballot Bandits joins Thom Hartmann. Jim Crow-style voter suppression has returned to America. That’s the conclusion of a shocking new report from investigative journalist Greg Palast for Al Jazeera America that takes a deep dive into a controversial program known as Interstate Crosscheck. According to his investigation “election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk.”

 

The massive election-rigging scandal the media ignored

In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged minority votes

Per the above article: The massive election-rigging scandal the media ignored. In 27 states, a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck suppressed and purged minority votes

The election of 2016 may well have been stolen — or to use Donald Trump’s oft-repeated phrase — “rigged,” and nobody in the media seems willing to discuss it.

The rigging was a pretty simple process, in fact: in 27 Republican-controlled states (including critical swing states) hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people showed up to vote, but were mysteriously blocked from voting for allegedly being registered with the intent to vote in multiple states.

Greg Palast, an award-winning investigative journalist, writes a stinging piece in Rolling Stone magazine (August 2016 edition), predicting that the presidential election had already been decided: “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters.” He also wrote and produced a brilliant documentary on this exact subject that was released well before the election, titled The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

He said a program called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck had been quietly put together in Kansas and was being used by Republican secretaries of state in 27 states to suppress and purge African American, Asian and Hispanic votes in what would almost certainly be the swing states of the 2016 election.

Crosscheck was started by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach back in 2007 under the guise of combating so-called voter fraud. In the ultimate thumb in the eye to the American voter, the state where Crosscheck started was the only state to refuse to participate in a New York Times review of voter fraud in the 2016 election, which found that, basically, there wasn’t any fraud at the level of individual voters. Turns out, according to Palast, that a total of 7 million voters—including up to 344,000 in Pennsylvania, 589,000 in North Carolina and up to 449,000 in Michigan (based on available Crosscheck data from 2014)—may have been denied the right to have their votes counted under this little known but enormously potent Crosscheck program.

 

 

2016 Exit Polls vs. Actual Results: Here’s What May Have Happened

The 2016 presidential election polls show that Donald Trump lost in four key swing states. Did Hillary Clinton win the election after all? Here are the facts.

 

Here are examples of Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922

Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824

Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393

“University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer found that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law”. Link to full article below.

That’s way more than enough votes to swing the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

There’s more…

Exit polls in key states, FLORIDA , NORTH CAROLINA and WISCONSIN showed Hillary Clinton the winner.

Using exit poll totals compiled by election researcher Theodore de Macedo Soares, seen in the table below on this page as well as available at this link, compared to an ongoing tally of raw votes totals posted at this link by Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report, here is the discrepancy that has caused the suspicions of what Trump himself would call a “rigged election.”

Note that actual vote totals are compiled as of November 16.

FLORIDA — 29 Electoral Votes

(numbers equal percentage points)

Exit Polls: Clinton 47.7, Trump 46.4 — Clinton wins by 1.3

Actual: Clinton 47.8, Trump 49.0 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain between exit polls and actual results: 2.5

NORTH CAROLINA — 15 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.6, Trump 46.5 — Clinton wins by 2.1

Actual: Clinton 46.1, Trump 49.9 — Trump wins by 3.8

Trump gain: 5.9

WISCONSIN — 10 Electoral Votes

Exit Polls: Clinton 48.2, Trump 44.3 — Clinton wins by 3.9

Actual: Clinton 47.6, Trump 48.8 — Trump wins by 1.2

Trump gain: 5.1

Full story at: heavy.com/news/2016/11/2016-exit-polls-did-hillaty-clinton-win-presidential-election-voter-fraud-donald-trump-lose-rigged/

 

OTHER SOURCES CLAIM THE 2016 ELECTION WAS RIGGED

The League of Women Voters claim “The 2016 Presidential Election WAS Rigged” in their article at lwv.org/press-releases/2016-presidential-election-was-rigged by Voter Suppression.

Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters stated “In Wisconsin, President-elect Trump beat Secretary Clinton by roughly 27,000 votes, however according to federal court, 300,000 registered voters lacked the proper photo ID.

Details regarding 300,000 registered voters lacked photo ID at thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-rights-was-the-most-under-covered-story-of-2016/

“We are not talking about vigilante voter intimidation,” said Carson. “We are talking about official, legal voter suppression by state legislatures and election officials.”

Like the 2000 & 2004 Elections, this matter is not being reported by the mainstream media.

 

The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters

Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Donald Trump’s advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?

Yes, the election was rigged. Here’s the proof.

It starts with this story in Wisconsin.

 

Writer and author Thom Hartman discusses exit polls which showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump in states like Florida. Also discussed is a Voter Suppression tactic Republicans has been using for the last 50 years called “Redshift”.

 

Clint Curtis, a veteran computer programmer, testifies at a U.S. Congressional Hearing about being contacted by a Florida Republican to rig Florida’s elections.

 

In the above video, a computer programmer (Clint Curtis) testified to a congressional committee that in October of 2000, he wrote a program for a prominent Florida Republican (Tom Feeney, who was Speaker of the House, per testimony in the above video) which could flip votes and be undetectable. In September 2006, Feeney was named one of the “20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress”.

This shows Republicans history of efforts to rig / flip elections so it would be undetectable.

 

Note how this machine is rigged for Romney in 2012. It appears when a voting machine is rigged, it’s usually rigged for a Republican. Most companies which makes voting machine are owned by Republican owners.

UPDATE: Jan 24, 2007 Two election workers in the state’s most populous county were convicted of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes.

Jacqueline Maiden, the elections’ coordinator who was the board’s third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee.

Maiden and Dreamer also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty. Both Maiden & Dreamer got 18 months in prison.

 

 

 

The 2000 election was rigged before the first vote was cast.

Videos and information posted on this page shows how the 2000 election was rigged and George W Bush was an illegitimate President.

 

 

Here’s the details…

Jeb Bush was the Republican Governor of the State of Florida and brother of the Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush.

Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was also co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, clearly a conflict of interest in conducting a fair and impartial election.

Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris promised to “Deliver Florida” to George W. Bush as reported in numerous newspaper articles.

 

Secretary of State, Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush had the motive and the means to make sure Florida’s decisive electoral votes were “delivered” to George W. Bush.

They accomplished this by illegally purging thousands of black voters off of the Florida voter rolls, ensuring an unfair advantage to George W. Bush, as shown in the above video.

As shown in the “2000 Election Rigged for Bush” video, ChoicePoint / DBT was given a $4 million no-bid contract under the Jeb Bush administration which wrongly and illegally purged thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls.

 

Jame Lee, Vice President of Choicepoint / DBT testified to a panel called by US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney that the State of Florida Division of Elections stated it only wanted 80% accuracy on the list. In other words, to be identified as a convicted felon, one only need to have a similar name to that as someone listed on a Texas convicted felon’s list. You can view Mr. Lee’s testimony in the above video.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice “Florida registrants were purged from the rolls if 80 percent of the letters of their last names were the same as those of persons with criminal convictions. Those wrongly purged included Reverend Willie D. Whiting Jr., who, under the matching criteria, was considered the same person as Willie J. Whiting. Without specific guidelines for or limitations on the authority of election officials conducting purges, eligible voters are regularly made unnecessarily vulnerable”.

As it turned out, almost everyone on the Florida purged voters list had the right to vote.

 

Antonin Scalia and his Radical Right Wing Republican majority of 5 “Justices” subverted democracy & engaged in partisan politics by stopping the 2000 election vote count. The above video explains the shocking details.

This caused George W. Bush to be installed as President. At the time the votes were stopped by the Supreme Court, there were only 154 votes separating Al Gore from George W. Bush.

With only 154 votes separating Al Gore from George W. Bush, it’s easy to see how purging thousands of black voters being off of the Florida voter rolls rigged the 2000 election and handed it to George W. Bush on a Silver Platter.

If all of the illegally disqualified voters had been allowed to vote and all votes counted, the total votes would have decisively shown Al Gore to be the winner of the State of Florida and therefore the Presidency.

It was Jeb Bush’s illegal voter purge and Republicans who subverted Democracy by not allowing the votes to be counted that caused the installation of George W. Bush and the U.S. to have a Radical Right Wing Republican majority in the Supreme Court.

Let’s not forget that Al Gore received 543,895 more votes than George W. Bush. Al Gore was the majority of American’s choice for president so Democracy was violated.

 

REPUBLICANS DETERMINED TO STOP THE VOTE COUNT, OBSTRUCTED DEMOCRACY

John Bolton vs. Democracy

Im with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count. Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida’s disputed presidential race between George W.

As stated in the above article, John Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state’s electoral votes and the presidency.

 

2000 Election GOP House Thugs “Brooks Brothers Riot” also helped stop the Florida Recount which might have declared Al Gore the winner.

 

In this clip from the 2015 CNN documentary Bush v Gore, John “Mac” Stipanovich admits Republicans were determined to stop the vote count to make sure George W. Bush was installed as President. This proves Republicans only cared about winning and to HELL with Democracy and the will of the American people.

The Theft of an election and installation of an illegitimate president is the one of worst possible crimes which a government could commit against it’s citizens… yet that is what our government perpetrated against the citizens of the United States, and NOTHING has been done about it.

 

According to Lance deHaven-Smith, in his book entitled The Battle for Florida…

“Top Republicans used the powers of their offices to inject partisanship and instill fear down through the ranks of the state bureaucracy. In 1998 political operatives working for the Speaker of the house secretly examined voter registration records to learn the party affiliations of specific state employees and to identify agencies with high concentrations of Democrats.

After it was determined that the most Democratic agency in the state government was the Florida Department of education, the department was restructured and the positions of many of its employees were eliminated. Florida law forbids any consideration of partisan orientations in state hiring, firing, and contracting, but it fails to contemplate the more sinister possibility that highly partisan elected officials might purge the state bureaucracy indirectly by reorganization and privatization.”

According to hermes-press.com, “No sooner had he taken the oath of office than Jeb Bush began ferreting out and replacing Democrats throughout Florida state government, his first purge of Democratic voters.

Jeb and his cohorts let special interests know that they expected political donations of $2 for every $1 donated to Democrats or defaulters would lose access to the governor and the legislative leadership.

 

On Election Day 2000, rich white Republican voters stood in short lines and used up-to-date equipment, including electronic machines that let them correct their ballots.

African-American Voters Blocked from Reaching Polling Places by Police Roadblocks

Things were different in black districts. Some voters were flagged down at roadblocks, where highway patrol officers checked their drivers’ licenses. This was documented in sworn testimony to The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (Click here for more details).

Others waited in long lines for an inadequate number of booths and ancient recording equipment. All too often, innocent citizens whose names appeared on the ex-felons list were informed for the first time that they could not vote when they showed up at the polling place.

Some votes were simply trashed by ballot handlers. In Duval County, 27,000 ballots were discarded, over half of them from black precincts in Jacksonville. No official challenges were filed within the 72-hour time limit, so thousands of mostly Democratic votes were lost. Sixteen-thousand votes for Gore disappeared overnight from the ongoing Volusia County tally and were reinstated only when an election supervisor questioned the subtraction of already registered votes. No voting machine company representative or election official was able to explain what happened.

Greg Palast, an award-winning American reporter based in England, broke the story of the scrub list and documented its sleazy origins in The Observer, London, November 26, 2000. Updates, as well as each edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy have added irrefutable, hard evidence of fraud. (Palast’s most recent estimate of all qualified Florida voters barred from casting a ballot in Election 2000 stands at 90,000.)

The story was huge in Europe, but the American press ignored it completely. Massive civil rights violations that subverted an election just didn’t resonate with the mainstream press. On January 10, 2001, lawyers acting for the NAACP sued and won their case against ChoicePoint’s DBT, Secretary of State Katherine Harris (who coincidentally was enthusiastically co-chairing the Bush campaign), and Bush loyalist Clay Roberts, Director of the Division of Elections. In July 2002, to atone for its staggering error rate of 95%, DBT agreed to remove innocent voters from the now infamous list of purported ex-felons. (In 2002, the purge list hadn’t been corrected. In 2004, another suspicious list appeared. (end quote from hermes-press)

 

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2000 Election Investigation Recommended that the U.S. Department of Justice should “immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor” (Jeb Bush)

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted an extensive public investigation of allegations of voting irregularities during the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

“There emerges a confluence of circumstances that indicates intimidation and harassment of the Florida voters, and that was set in motion long before the November election,” said Commissioner Victoria Wilson of the US Commission on Civil Rights in their report, “Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election.” Issued June 8, 2001, the report accuses Florida election officials of “gross dereliction” and “injustice.”

To follow is some of the text from the report at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/ch9.htm

“Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election”

“The investigation, utilizing the Commission’s subpoena power, included three days of hearings, more than 30 hours of testimony, 100 witnesses, and a systematic review of more than 118,000 pages of pertinent documents.

Responsibility Without Accountability

Florida’s governor is the state’s chief executive officer who “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Florida’s secretary of state is the chief election officer and oversees the Division of Elections. Each county has an elected supervisor of elections, except one. Together, the secretary of state and the county supervisors of elections preside over Florida’s elections.

Governor John Ellis Bush

When asked about his responsibilities to ensure the election laws of Florida were faithfully executed during the November 2000 election, Governor Bush testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he had no real legal authority over election matters except for certifying the election and serving as a member of the state canvassing board. He indicated that he recused himself from participating on the state canvassing board because his brother was one of the presidential candidates. Governor Bush testified that “governors have the moral authority . . . to make sure that the laws, not only the state laws, but . . . also federal laws are upheld. . . .” When asked what authority and responsibility he had regarding preparation for the 2000 presidential election, Governor Bush testified that he had none and that “the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of elections were responsible for that, and they carried out their duties.”

Under the Florida Constitution, the governor is charged with ensuring that “the laws be faithfully executed,” a responsibility Governor Bush apparently delegated to others with respect to elections. Under Florida election law, the governor is also specifically empowered to “appoint special officers to investigate alleged violations of the election laws . . .” Governor Bush testified that he had not appointed any officers to do any investigation of alleged irregularities surrounding the November 2000 election but would “if there was a reason to do so.” As of the date of this report there is no indication that the governor has exercised this authority by appointing special officers to investigate the widespread allegations of violations of the Florida election law”.

Findings:

Despite the closeness of the election, it was widespread voter disenfranchisement, not the dead-heat contest, that was the extraordinary feature in the Florida election.

Disenfranchisement of Florida voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of African Americans. Statewide, based on county-level statistical estimates, African American voters were nearly 10 times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected in the November 2000 election.

Recommendations:

• The U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate the litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws, practices, and procedures, regarding their contributions, if any, to the extraordinary racial disparity in the rate that votes were rejected, through their actions or failure to act before and during the 2000 presidential election, in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended. Appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws.

• The Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against state election officials who violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, and/or Title IX of the Florida statutes through their actions or failure to act before, during, and after the November 2000 election. Based on the results of the investigation, appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws.

• The U.S. Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division in the Office of the Florida Attorney General should initiate the litigation process against all state election officials who through their actions or failure to act violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, by not obtaining preclearance either from the federal district court of Washington, D.C., or the U.S. attorney general. Based on the results of the investigation, appropriate enforcement action should be initiated to ensure full compliance with the election laws”.

END OF QUOTE:

Note that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recommended that the “U.S. Department of Justice should immediately initiate litigation process against the governor, secretary of state, director of the Division of Elections, specific supervisors of elections, and other state and local officials responsible for the execution of election laws”.

 

 

Bush is guilty of War Crimes by attacking Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with 9/11 or attacking the United States. He caused the deaths of over 4,000 American Troops and over 112,000 Iraqi civilians.

If we had a REAL Democracy, George W. Bush would NOT have been President because Gore received almost 600,000 more votes than Bush.

 

 

The Corruption of the Republican Party

The GOP is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

Per the above article; “Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. Demography can take a long time to change—longer than in progressives’ dreams—but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. They could have tried to expand; instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. This is why, while voter fraud knows no party, only the Republican Party wildly overstates the risk so that it can pass laws (including right now in Wisconsin, with a bill that reduces early voting) to limit the franchise in ways that have a disparate partisan impact. This is why, when some Democrats in the New Jersey legislature proposed to enshrine gerrymandering in the state constitution, other Democrats, in New Jersey and around the country, objected.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come”.

Full article at; theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/

 

 

 

America has Ignored GOP Crimes to Seize the White House Long Enough – It’s Time to Put this One in Prison

It’s now a certainty that the last legitimately elected Republican president who wasn’t a traitor to the United States was Eisenhower. In aggregate, this should be the biggest story in the media…

Per the above article: “It’s now a certainty that the last legitimately elected Republican president who wasn’t a traitor to the United States was Eisenhower. In aggregate, this should be the biggest story in the media.

It’s dizzying: in this one week we learn that there’s a witness to Reagan’s 1980 treason to seize the presidency, and that Donald Trump, who gave the Russians a spy in his first week in office (among other treasons), will be indicted for the crime that helped him avoid losing to Hillary Clinton. This is on top of Nixon’s well-documented treason with Vietnam and Bush’s explicit lies about Iraq.

It’s now a certainty that the last legitimately elected Republican president who wasn’t a traitor to the United States was Dwight D. Eisenhower. In aggregate, this should be the biggest story in the media.

On Saturday, the New York Times published a bombshell report that former Texas Speaker of the House of Representatives and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes has confirmed that he and former Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally told the Iranians in 1980s if they held onto the American hostages until after the election, they’d be rewarded by Reagan with weapons and spare parts.

Also on Saturday, Donald Trump whined on his Nazi-infested social media site that he was going to be arrested this week for paying off Stormy Daniels and thus stealing the 2016 election (with help from Putin).

Republican candidates for president committing treason to get into or stay in the White House has been the norm since 1968: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then (just like Reagan would later do with the Iranians).

The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about his effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up was Ronald Reagan.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This is the story that was finally confirmed just this past weekend with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.

As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation, which Bush did.

The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all:

“THE PARDONS; BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

To get re-elected, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush’s family decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

This week is also the 20th anniversary of Bush lying us into that war, an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.

Which brings us to the first Republican president who may actually be held accountable for the crimes he committed to get into the White House.

In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring him a “Russian asset.”

It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, you’ll remember, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Trump had recently been wounded politically by the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment he’d made on the Access Hollywood videotape, and if the Stormy Daniels affair (just 4 months after Melania had given birth to Barron) had become public Hillary Clinton would have wiped the floor with him.

But he paid Stormy off to keep quiet, a check delivered by Michael Cohen who was then sentenced to three years in prison (and served one) for corruptly violating campaign finance and tax laws with that check to help Trump get into the White House.

Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes, but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college loophole designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.

If the news about Stormy Daniels had gotten out in the weeks before the election, there never would have been a January 6th; 300,000 Americans wouldn’t have died unnecessarily from Covid; Iran would still be in compliance with the nuclear deal; Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine; and our country wouldn’t have given the morbidly rich another $2 trillion in tax cuts while gutting the social safety net.

Thus, New York DA Alvin Bragg is about to prosecute the crime that set the stage for all of Trump’s other crimes in office.

One can only wonder how much better off America would be if six Republican Presidents hadn’t stolen or inherited a stolen White House and used it to put rightwing cranks on the Supreme Court and other federal benches while cutting taxes on the morbidly rich, destroying unions, and offshoring over 16,000 factories and 15 million good-paying union jobs.

Now, finally, there may be an opportunity for some accountability for our most recent criminal Republican president.

The depth and breadth of Trump’s involvement in the January 6th attempt to destroy our form of government and replace it with single-party strongman rule is becoming more and more obvious. As a result, the pressure is building to hold him and many of those in his administration to account.

America has ignored GOP crimes to seize and hold the White House long enough. The immunity Ford gave Nixon has echoed down through the decades, leading to a packed Supreme Court and two unnecessary and illegal wars (not to mention tax cuts for billionaires that have gutted our middle class).

It’s time, at long last, to put this one in prison”.