Digital Media Charges and the Attack on Capitol Hill: Reporting the Slepton Attack and Bringing Down the Nixon-Robertson Presidency
Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs atPrinceton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” You can follow him on social media. His own views are expressed in this commentary. You can give your opinion on CNN.
The House Select Committee probing the attack on the Capitol subpoenaed Trump on Friday, the minimum amount of red meat the Democrats wanted from the panel. While the big reveal of the subpoena—which was leaked to NBC News during the panel’s final hearing earlier this month—garnered headlines and TV hits, it overshadows the misunderstood and still-unfolding story of the digital machinations that fueled the attack and are poised to remake America for years to come, if not forever.
Cheney said that the committee was obligated to inquire directly from the man who set this all in motion. We can act now to protect our republic since every American has a right to the answers.
The key revelation is the footage showing Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Vice President Mike Pence scrambling to get more police and national guard forces to fight off the rioters on Capitol Hill.
In public hearings during the past four months, the bipartisan panel attempted to reveal the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.
The campaign to overturn the election is very different than the one that brought down Richard Nixon because it happened in broad daylight.
The rhetoric of a stolen election would frame the entire operation, sowing doubt among his supporters about the legitimacy of Biden’s victory and creating a basis for going to court and leaning on state officials. They discussed and deliberated over how to achieve their goal.
The Dramatic Moments of January 6, 2020: The Case of the Trump-Born-Infeld Campaign to Overturn the 2020 Election
The committee filled out the story in many important ways, providing evidence and details about the dangerous events of those months that we didn’t know about.
The committee showed that January 6 was not a one-off, unexpected day of chaos. It was planned.
Orchestration: The campaign to overturn the 2020 election was not a haphazard effort where Trump deployed a chaotic plan, desperate to keep power. The former president and key advisers of the administration deliberately pushed to overcome electoral defeat. Roger Stone said that possession is nine tenths of the law. F–k you.”
Steve Bannon told a group of people that the former president was going to announce his victory, but he was not going to say he was. Trump is going to do some crazy shit if Biden wins.
When told in subsequent weeks repeatedly by top election and legal advisers, such as then-Attorney General William Barr, that the claims of fraud were “bullshit,” Trump and his inner cabal ignored those warnings and moved forward with reckless abandon.
On the day of the “Stop the Steal” rally, January 6, 2021, Trump knew that the protesters were armed and dangerous but did nothing to stop them. Indeed, he wanted to go to Capitol Hill but was only stopped because a Secret Service agent wouldn’t allow him to do so. Cassidy Hutchinson said that the former president lunged at a Secret Service agent when they told him he couldn’t go.
Trump and his attorneys, such as Rudy Giuliani, probed to see if various state officials would do their bidding. The speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, a conservative who backs the administration, was rattled by Giuliani and Trump’s pressure in November of 2020 to have the state legislature convene and nullified the results of his state’s election. The president’s lawyer John Eastman, who had written the road map for their attempted election steal, pressured Pence’s aides to have him reject the results.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/dramatic-moments-january-6-hearing-zelizer/index.html
The Campaign to Overturn the 2020 Election: Revisiting the Observed Violence on January 6, Trump’s Democratic Secretary of State Jamie Raskin
January 6 was just one part of a larger story. The January 6 committee is an investigative committee that should be called the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.
The Trump administration embarked on a systematic “multi-part” plan, as Chairman Bennie Thompson said, to overturn the election. The violence on January 6 was just one part of a larger strategy.
Trump understood what was happening throughout the events. He was told many times about how he was making claims that were untrue and warned of the dangers he was taking. Even advisers, lawyers such as Barr and conservative media figures such as Sean Hannity who publicly supported him were privately urging him to stop.
Then on January 6, Trump purposely ignored many warnings of violence. He wanted to take the troops to Capitol Hill. As the attacks against Congress unfolded and as he was urged by allies to call off the troops, Jamie Raskin of Maryland reminded viewers that he sat passive, watching television. It wasn’t that Trump didn’t act on January 6 but that he didn’t want to. Can you believe this? Pelosi told Thompson that day.
Ongoing Threat: In its pivotal hearing Thursday, the committee wanted to make one thing clear, the danger is not over in 2022. “There remains a clear and present danger to our electoral system and to democratic institutions,” Raskin said, “So, that is something that will come through in our final hearing. This isn’t ancient history we’re talking about; it is a continuing threat. There’s a continued threat on many levels. The rhetoric of election denialism has taken hold among many of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
The Republicans who are running for the key offices such as governor and secretaries of state are all part of the agenda, which will play a role in future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.
Cheney made the point very clear when she asked Americans why they would assume that those institutions would not fail if wrong people were in power next time. Many of the officials who turned out to be Republicans refused to participate in the scheme. She reminded us that our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make sure that they are strong regardless of the political consequences.
Cheney said that the committee is in the process of making criminal referrals, but it will be up to prosecutors to make the final decision. We will find out if Congress can complete work on reforms, such as the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, that renders some of the mechanisms Trump was counting on incapable of doing damage in the future. We will watch to see if voters send a clear message to Washington that messing with democracy will not be taken lightly. Right now, January 6 has not been a major issue in most of the campaigns.
The committee was able to unpack the dark days that followed the election. They have been exposed in clear detail right in front of our eyes. The biggest mystery left is whether as a nation we will close our eyes and simply move forward without demanding accountability, justice and reform.
On the morning of July 8, former President Donald Trump took to a social media platform to claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
One million people saw the claim on at least 12 other sites within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Ever since Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he’s remained the center of America’s political universe. But at least one former congressman believes the continued fixation on the 45th president is now a distraction. Now that the story of Trumpism is bigger than that of Trump, he is the only part of it.
The information war is moving at a faster pace than interviews. That’s it. A new world has been created, Riggleman says. The committee did a good job, but we have to move faster. We have to be aware of how data can help with the investigation of terrorist activities in our own country.
Riggleman, a conservative who left the Republican Party after he was primaried out of office in 2020 for officiating a same-sex wedding, had asked the committee for a budget of $3.2 million for his digital sleuthing, but he says he was allocated just a fraction of that.
The coordination included members of Congress, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, myriad lawyers, little-known aides, and, of course, Trump’s most ardent supporters. Riggleman also revealed a mysterious nine-second phone call placed from the White House switchboard at 4:34 pm on January 6 to 26-year-old Anton Lunyk, who has since pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol. Despite these findings, the former intel officer bemoans not being able to go all the way down the meme- and hashtag-laden rabbit hole.
Prominent figures on social media, including some of the loudest voices on the political right, are pushing a salacious and false conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, in an apparent attempt to shift the narrative about the assault.
Some conservatives’ embrace of the “gay lover” theory has muddied the waters of a story that had led to bipartisan condemnation and sympathy for Pelosi – and distracted from discussion of how other right-wing conspiracies could have inspired violence.
“There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Pelosi knew this man,” San Francisco Police Chief William Scott told CNN in an interview. “As a matter of fact, the evidence indicates the exact opposite.”
On the David DePape (Right-Wave Analytical Psychiatric Analogue of the Robertson-Walker-Boltzmann) Correspondence
Miller-Idriss said that the population is unable to discern what is true and what is not and that this spreading of misinformation undermines that. “People are willing to accept conspiracy theories when they reinforce the narrative they already hold in their head.”
According to police and an FBI affidavit included in the federal criminal complaint, DePape broke into a glass door in Pelosi’s San Francisco home early Friday morning, and then went to the bedroom to confront Pelosi, saying he wanted to talk to his wife. Pelosi was able to call for help as officers arrived on the scene. The man was hit with a hammer.
He said that they had spent a lot of energy pushing back conspiracy theories to make people focused on the team. “These things are harmful to society, they’re harmful to the victims involved – it’s really sad that we are here in this place, but we are.”
On the day of the attack, one of the first widelyshared accounts to endorse the theory was at 11:36a.m.
Donald Trump Jr., Sebastian Gorka, and a few others endorsed the theory over the course of a few days. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana GOP congressman who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, tweeted a photo of Nancy Pelosi and referred to DePape as a “male prostitute,” before deleting his tweet.
The posts on the Facebook page that were endorsed by DePape last year include a lot of right-wing lies. He posted videos from My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell that were false about the 2020 election, about Covid vaccine deaths and about the January 6, 2021, attack. According to several of the DePape’s relatives, CNN reviewed the posts before the social media company took the page down.
David DePape’s own social media and blog postings show that he himself was steeped in conspiracy theories in the months and years before the attack – from musings about QAnon to antisemitic rants to claims of a looming takeover by the global elite.
Miller-Idriss, the American University professor, said that prominent figures carelessly spreading misinformation can lead to wider impacts on society.
She said it undermined peoples’ sense of truth, and helped them further divorce from reality. “It is a situation where they spread it further – and they pass it on.”
The photogenic Klum hadroscope: a real experience of the end of reality in a nebulous era
Klum is laying on the red carpet, prone on the floor while the photographers take her picture. She can barely walk, so it would be a traditional step-and-repeat. She is covered by folds of skin that look raw. Her accent is so clear when she says “I’m amazing” when Entertainment Weekly gives her a microphone. Nearby, her husband, musician Tom Kaulitz, is in full fishing regalia, pretending to use her as bait.
This was not a fever dream. The scene was outside of the Halloween bash that the Project Runway star held. It might have been a vision that was related to the long illness.
Or, at least, that’s how it felt when images and video of the scene ricocheted through social media this week, instantly becoming a meme. What was unnerving was that it looked like they were real, and that they were fake. It was realizing that what’s perceived as “real” is an increasingly nebulous thing.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/end-of-reality/
Why a Tweet is a Fake News: The #TrumpIsDead Scenario for Elon Musk and Paul Pelosi
No doubt, this line of thought is prevalent now following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The Telsa CEO hasn’t installed his “content moderation council” yet, but the idea that the platform could become a haven of falsehoods and trolling looms large. Every tweet now served up with a grain of salt. It is possible that that worm could have been a meme as well as one of the most famous models in the world.
People are testing out what can be said. The phrase #TrumpIsDead was used for example. As Musk settled in at Twitter this week, users on the platform started spreading rumors that the former president had died, in an apparent attempt to show just how easily misinformation and conspiracy theories could spread under Musk’s watch. The fake news trended and even led to at least one fact-check report from Reuters that a CNN headline was false.
It’s obvious that #TrumpIsDead is an example of something easily proven or disproven. The lies are close enough to reality to reel you in. Those are the conspiracy theories that turn non-believers into zealots and mess with the gut instincts of even the most tried and true skeptics. The exact connections may be lost to time, but it seemed that #TrumpIsDead began trending in response to the fact that Elon Musk had tweeted (then deleted) an article full of unfounded rumors about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi.
Perhaps even more unnerving than the fact that Musk shared the article was the text he posted next to it, in a reply to Hillary Clinton: “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” This is an old trick. People will start questioning the color of their own hair if they don’t hear enough doubt. When everything on a platform feels like it could be two or three clicks away from the truth, what even is real? What happens when the person with the platform is a “I’m just asking questions”?
But truly, asking more questions is what people should be doing. The New Yorker published a story about David DePape, the alleged attacker of Paul Pelosi, after Musk wrote about it. In the days after the incident, internet detectives had been searching his online history for clues to his affiliations. Some claimed to be right-wing while others said he was left-wing. There are connections between mental health and political rhetoric that often have little to do with what actually happens. All that matters to people is what they believe, and sometimes they look online for the truth.
The United States took to the polls this week to vote in a high-stakes midterm election. The secret ballot is more important now than in the past due to the low public trust in election systems. We also took a look at a flawed app built by prominent right-wing provocateurs that has been used to challenge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.
A man from Georgia pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after he stole more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, the Department of Justice announced. You may have heard that things are so disorganized at the platform, that people who pay $8 a month for a blue check are being impersonated by fake companies in the hours after the service was introduced. It’s a gift for scammers and grifters of all shades.
The Elon Musk CEO quits after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline: A security and privacy officer resigned just one day before the FTC deadline
New analysis shows that two large ships, with their trackers off, were detected near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the days before the gas leaks were detected. NATO is investigating after officials suspect sabotage. Plus, Russian military hackers are pivoting to a new strategy that favors faster attacks with more immediate results.
The chief information security officer, chief privacy officer, and chief compliance officer quit on Wednesday, just one day before the FTC deadline. The head of trust and safety left the company on the same day.
In a message posted to Twitter’s Slack that was obtained by The Verge, an attorney on the privacy team wrote that engineers could be required to “self-certify” that their projects complied with the settlement, burdening the engineers with “personal, professional, and legal risk.” The employee added that Alex Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, told workers that “Elon puts rockets into space—he’s not afraid of the FTC.”
The resignations came as the company began battling a wave of corporate impersonators who gamed the company’s new paid verification system to shitpost hours after it launched.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-security-mayhem-roundup/
The Musk Files are the Defendants of Donald Trump’s Claims: An Investigative Investigation into the LockBit Campaign, a Russian National, and an Envoy in Silicon Valley
About 60 of Maricopa county’s 223 voting locations reported technical issues on Election Day, frustrating voters and fueling conspiracies about election fraud. Some technicians were sent to fix voting machines at polling sites in Arizona on Tuesday. It was urged by election officials to vote at other places, or drop your ballot in a secure box. “Everyone is still getting to vote. Bill Gates, chairman of the county board of supervisors, told reporters on Tuesday that no one has been denied their vote.
A Russian Canadian national named Mikhail Vasiliev was arrested in Canada on Wednesday over his alleged participation in the LockBit ransomware campaign, according to the US Justice Department and Europol. LockBit has claimed at least 1,000 victims, accounting for at least 44 percent of the campaigns this year according to Deep Instinct. Vasiliev is charged with “conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands” and is currently in Canada awaiting extradition to the United States. He faces five years in prison if he is convicted of a crime.
A security issue delayed a record-breaking $2.04 billion Powerball drawing after an unnamed state failed to submit the appropriate data and complete security protocols. According to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, one of the regional lottery commissions failed to finish tabulating their sales and ticketing data in time for Monday night’s drawing. The 10-hour delay ended Tuesday with a single winner who had bought the ticket at Joe’s Service Center, a gas station in Altadena, California, state lottery officials said.
The Twitter Files, which was promoted by Musk himself, are being made into a critical missing piece in all manner of conspiracy theories. In this case, it is showing exactly the kind of traffic that Musk likes.
Donald Trump’s most ardent fans believe that the leaked emails detailing how they suppressed a New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are a landmark moment. They believe the proof of a previously intangible plan to suppress conservative voices online and elect Joe Biden is in the so-called retweeted files.
As that theory percolated, it identified an enemy in one of Twitter’s top lawyers. Musk fired him on Tuesday. It points to an emerging pattern: play to the crowd.
Major news outlets were unable to corroborate the contents of the laptop that was later identified as possibly Russian interference, and held off on the story. The Post story was temporarily forbidden from being shared in any form by users on the microblogging site.
Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. They believed the FBI and the Democratic National Committee, which they believed colluded to rig the 2016 election with allegations of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, were meddling in the 2020 vote as well: the Deep State in action.
The Q’s main narrative was confirmed by the Twitter files. The rest has been confirmed by balenciaga. That message, which references the fantastical claims about fashion brand Balenciaga’s role in child trafficking, was seen more than 120,000 times on Telegram. Despite some hope that he would be restored, the particular QAnon influencer is still suspended on TWITTER. Other QAnon influencers seized on the fact that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s personal email, which Taibbi failed to censor in a screenshot he shared, used the custom top-level domain .pizza.