Prosecute Trump if Evidence Warrants
Monday, July 4, 2022
Vol. 11, No. 149
Serious Threat: The Justice Department should not avoid prosecuting former President Donald Trump for his involvement with the January 6th insurrection if the evidence warrants it, Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.
Cheney is one of only two Republicans on the House January 6th Committee, both of whom are pressing hard for the truth.
Cheney told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “I think it’s a much graver constitutional threat if a president can engage in these kinds of activities, and the majority of the president’s party looks away; or we as a country decide we’re not actually going to take our constitutional obligations seriously,” Cheney said. “I think that’s a much, a much more serious threat.”
She said, “I really believe we have to make these decisions, as difficult as it is, apart from politics. We really have to think about these from the perspective of: What does it mean for the country?”
The committee in future sessions will be examining Trump connections to the right wing Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Some reports say the Oath Keepers thought they would be federalized to protect Trump’s hold on the presidency.
Speaking of the insurrection, Graeme Wood writes for The Atlantic, “I hope it does not sound like I am diminishing the gravity of January 6 when I say that it was among the dumbest coup attempts in history—not because it was destined to fail but because of the trivial reason it was destined to fail. That reason is Trump’s incredible laziness and complete aversion to personal risk.” Wood says, “I struggle to think of another putsch that was doomed in quite this way. A whole party prostrated itself before its leader. Lawyers confected idiotic, barely-even-trying justifications. And thousands of people stood ready in the streets to escalate the violence and stop legitimate politics from proceeding. But Trump himself, the one plotter whose vigorous participation was absolutely necessary, seems to have spent most of that day watching TV and ignoring texts.”
Reproduction Rights: The Texas Supreme Court overruled a lower court and allowed a 1925 law banning abortion in that state to take effect Friday night, overturning a lower court ruling that had temporarily blocked it.
The Texas law was written in 1925, long before the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the country. The Supreme Court overturning Roe meant the 1925 law that banned abortions and punished those who performed them with possible imprisonment automatically went back into effect, said Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general.
The War Zone: Explosions rocked the center of the Russian city of Belgorod just north of Ukraine early yesterday, killing four people in the deadliest known incident affecting civilians in Russia since the start of its invasion.
Ukraine has previously hit fuel and military targets in Russia’s border region, but this would appear to be the first time they have attacked a Russian city center. Russia claims to have shot down three out of four Soviet-era missiles fired by Ukraine, missing the fourth that did the damage.
In the east, Russia’s defense minister claims that his forces have seized the city of Lysychansk, strengthening their hold on a province of eastern Ukraine, and control of the entire Donbas region.
A Ukrainian official denied that the city is fully under Russian control.
Target Practice: Protesters hit the streets in Akron, Ohio over the police shooting of a 25 year old man in a traffic stop. Jayland Walker was hit 60 times as he ran away from the police, who later said they thought they saw him reaching to his waist for a weapon.
The cops on June 27th stopped Walker for traffic and equipment violations. At first he led the cops on a car chase then got out and ran.
In narrated body camera video, police said that they heard “a sound consistent with a gunshot.” They said that at the end of it all they found a gun in his car.
The Spin Rack: Pete Arredondo, the chief of the school district police force in Uvalde, Texas, resigned his seat on the City Council amid outrage over the slow police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in May. He did not resign from the police even though he was the officer in charge. — At least six people were killed and eight injured after a chunk of a glacier collapsed in Italy’s Alps yesterday. The ice fall hit a popular summit route. — Some orchestras in the United States have decided not to perform Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” tonight at the finale of their fireworks show because it was written to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s army in 1812.
Ski Therapy: A well-known Vermont ski area is about to change its name now deemed to be offensive.
The mountain got its name back in the late 1930s when it has just known as Hill No. 6 and had only a rope tow. Wallace “Bunny’’ Bertram, a former Dartmouth College ski instructor, according to the resort’s website, “often joked that skiing down the steep pitch of Hill No. 6 would be suicide.” And so the ski area was named “Suicide 6.”
Now in the age of social awareness, the ski area’s managers have decided that the name has to go and they will soon announce a new one. Maybe something like “Sensitivity 6.”
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