I watched the select committee's first public hearing last night on YouTube, so when Nielsen reported 20 million people watched it, they weren't counting me... nor the people who watched replays today. But even at 20 million, is more than double the number of people who, on average, viewed Señor Trumpanzee's second impeachment trial. MAGAs who never venture away from Fox were too busy learning about Nancy Pelosi's husband's traffic ticket or whatever the latest nonsense is about Hunter Biden's mistress and his storied relationship with NRA whore Ron Johnson (R-WI).
Apparently Trump was one of the 20 million + viewers. He was carrying on about it at that social media scam thing he has. But what about other MAGA politicians? My bet is that they were. But I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the Clarence and Ginni Thomas home to have heard their reactions. This morning, the Washington Post's Emma Brown did some more coup-related reporting on DC's most dangerous MAGA couple.
The crux was that Ginni, a radical right lobbyist and activist was working even harder than anyone knew on Trump's coup. She pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona-- 27 more than previously known-- to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and 'choose' presidential electors.
Brown reported that ole Ginny "sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time.
The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to 'stand strong in the face of political and media pressure' and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was 'yours and yours alone' [which is a lie]. They had 'power to fight back against fraud' and 'ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen, the email said."
Among the lawmakers who received the email was then-Rep. Anthony Kern, a Stop the Steal supporter who lost his reelection bid in November 2020 and then joined U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and others as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, a last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Kern was photographed outside the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building, according to local media reports. [Kern is a notorious liar.]
Kern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. He is seeking his party’s nomination for a seat in the Arizona state Senate and has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said. It linked to a video of a man urging swing-state lawmakers to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”
...[T]he revelation that Ginni Thomas was directly involved in pressing them to override the popular vote-- an act that would have been without precedent in the modern era-- intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 presidential election and attempts to subvert it. Ginni Thomas’s status as a leading conservative political activist has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices.
...“That conflict of interest just screams at you,” said Adam B. Schiff (D-CA), who serves on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, on MSNBC in response to The Post’s May report revealing the emails to Bolick and Bowers.
Schiff pointed to Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse when Trump went to the Supreme Court to try to block the House committee from getting access to his White House records. The high court declined to block the release of those documents. Thomas, siding with Trump, was the only justice to dissent.
“Here you have the wife of a Supreme Court justice,” Schiff said, trying to “get Arizona to improperly cast aside the votes of millions. And also, to add to it, her husband on the Supreme Court, writing a dissent in a case arguing against providing records to Congress that might have revealed some of these same e-mails.”
...On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) and Gov. Doug Ducey (R).
Trump electors met in Arizona that day and signed a document declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified Electors.” One of them was Kern, the outgoing state representative.
Kern was among more than a dozen lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress that same day calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”
The lawmakers’ letter was an exhibit in Kern and Gohmert’s lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that Pence had the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” in deciding which electoral votes to count for a given state. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene after the case was dismissed in lower courts. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, the court declined in an unsigned order.
Fraudulent electors in Arizona (including state Rep. Jake Hoffman, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona Republican Party), Wisconsin (including Robert Spindell, a member of the Wisconsin Election Commission), Georgia (including state Sen. Burt Jones, David Shafer, the chariot the Georgia Republican Party, and state GOP treasurer Joe Brannan), Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada (including Michael McDonald, chair of teh state Republican Party) and Pennsylvania (including former Congressman Lou Barletta) may well wind up being prosecuted in cases that could easily reach reach the Supreme Court. Did Hoffman and others illegally pretend to be electors because they were told to by Justice Thomas' wife? There is no way to force him to recuse himself other than impeachment.