Biden's inauguration can't come soon enough. In yet another act of sheer desperation after losing one court case after another, Trump's so-called "lawyer" and national embarrassment, Rudy Giuliani, reportedly called the (illegally) Acting Deputy Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Ken "Cooch" Cuccinelli (who, as readers here may recall, ignored a ruling by a federal court that he did not meet the qualifications under the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, but hey, in the age of Trump, laws are for suckers, so he decided to hang around regardless of how the court ruled) and asked him about seizing voting machines:
Rudy Giuliani called Ken Cuccinelli, second in command at the Department of Homeland Security, on Thursday night and asked him whether DHS could seize voting machines, a source familiar with the call confirmed to Axios.
The state of play: Cuccinelli responded that DHS does not have that authority, the source said.
Why it matters: The call, first reported by the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, is another manifestation of President Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to contest an election that was called for President-elect Joe Biden six weeks ago.
On Friday night, as first reported by The New York Times, Trump discussed commandeering voting machines and appointing conspiracy-minded election lawyer Sidney Powell as special counsel to inspect the machines.
- Axios reported Saturday afternoon that senior Trump administration officials are increasingly alarmed at what Trump might do to unleash the power of government to try to overturn the clear result of the election.
So Trump's other national embarrassment Sidney Powell is now some sort of expert on computer hardware and software and capable of inspecting voting machines. Trump is pushing for this as well. We'll see whether his new acting Attorney General, Jeffery Rosen, is willing to rubber stamp this nonsense or not.
In a functioning democracy, all of these grifters and gaslighters would be drummed out of polite society and never allowed to pollute our airways or political discourse in America ever again. Sadly, we're looking more like Nazi Germany in the run-up to Hitler these days, with the dangerous propaganda from the right allowed to flow unchecked on television, on the radio and online.
