"Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) is leading an effort with nearly three dozen House GOP lawmakers, urging President Trump to name a special counsel to investigate election fraud. The lawmakers noted they believe the Justice Department isn’t taking the allegations seriously." OAN
————–
IMO this should be done. A Special Counsel should be named to make it as difficult as possible for the Harris/Biden Administration to cancel all investigation of the obvious fraud at both the wholesale and retail levels (Dershowitz reference). If this is not done, consolidation of power on the Left will lead to a sham republic. IMO this Special Counsel should be appointed from outside the government. If Barr has to be fired to accomplish a direct appointment by the president, so be it. pl
Totally agree. As a parting shot it would help keep the Democrats from savoring their “victory”.
I believe that President Trump has all the powers that the Attorney General has so there’s no need to fire Barr in order for the President to appoint a Special Counsel. He should also appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s Chinese connections and dealings. I heard Rudy Guiliani say this morning that given Biden’s history he couldn’t pass a background check for even the lowliest of government jobs requiring a check.
BillWade, Free State of Florida
ITA – and not a second to waste doing this. No civilized country outside the US now uses “electronic voting” due to its obvious corruptions.
At this stage of the game you have to wonder whether there would be any point. How likely is it that whoever was appointed is not already compromised? Trump’s picks for other posts don’t inspire confidence here. Even if someone were appointed and attempted to investigate, I’m sure they would be leaned on not to look too closely and whatever conclusions they came to would never see the light of day if they were unfavourable to the usual suspects. We have already seen there is no lengths these people won’t go to.
Trump had an opportunity over the last 4 years to at least try to clean up the swamp and he squandered it trying to play nice with them. But then maybe if he had really tried, he would just have been impeached, with the Republicans going along with it. That’s the thing about checks and balances. They only work under the assumption that the majority of the players are honest and there are one or two bad apples. But if the majority are corrupt or compromised, the checks and balances serve to entrench the corruption and make it impossible for anyone to clean it up.
irf520 wrote:
“At this stage of the game you have to wonder whether there would be any point. How likely is it that whoever was appointed is not already compromised? Trump’s picks for other posts don’t inspire confidence here.”
I’ve read this type of comment repeatedly, implying that Trump’s “picks” have been ineffectual (to say the least). But have they actually been Trump’s picks? In the case of AG Barr, it’s obvious now he was selected by the establishment to protect the establishment.
I completely agree with the colonel.
The optics of a defeated outgoing President appointing a Special Counsel to investigate the electoral victory of his victorious successor at the ballot box and in the Electoral College, over the objections of his attorney General, do not look particularly palatable and doubly so if the President had to fire the Attorney General to make the appointment. The ensuing firestorm would make Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox look like a brush fire.
If the outgoing President were to make such an appointment, one can be assured that Joe Biden’s first executive on January 21,2021 would be the firing of the putative Special Counsel, and he would be generally applauded for doing so.
Even if Biden didn’t move quickly, there is the question of who should be appointed (and Trump is not particularly good at hiring good lawyers), funding (is Pelosi going to be particularly keen on appropriating the funds?) and staffing up with supporting (and supportive) attorneys, paralegals and FBI agents (you can be sure that Chris Wray will not be too enthusiastic about helping out).
That said, there is one Special Counsel that needs to be appointed and that is a Special Counsel to investigate the Hunter Biden affair[s} which reached all the way to the “Big Guy”, according to Tony Bobulinski. Joe Biden appears to have been the electoral beneficiary of a massive cover-up of “Biden-gate” with the black-out of the New York Daily News story by Big tech, the almost-total suppression of the Hunter laptop and the Tony Bobulinski revelations by the MSM and the coordinated fabrications of the former IC biggies, like Clapper, Brennan and Morrell, who very publicly dismissed the New York Post Story and Bobulinski revelations as the product of Russian disinformation and artful lies embedded in a KGB-engineered fake lap-top.
The 2020 election, with its cover-up and potential denouement, is beginning to look more and more like the 1972 election where the cover-up led to the resignation of a President who just 20 months prior had been elected in one of the biggest landslides in American history. This is the investigation we need NOW to save our Republic.
Alexandria
IMO the presidential election was stolen and Biden is a crook, has always been a nasty. That being said if you want a special prosecutor for l’affaire Hunter, have at it.
Alexandria,
Hunter the bag man for crooked Joe? What did Obama know and when did he know it? The same should be asked about his and Brennan and Clapper’s involvement in The Steal.
Given that Hunter’s troubles were non-news but a month ago and now are big-news the vision in my head is Hillary sneaking up on China Joe’s back with a rather large dagger. Good luck Joe!
Gosh, what about the optics of the outgoing Obama administration plotting to take down Flynn and Trump.
Bad manners for sure, because a lot of this anti-Trump plotting sure looked like the work of the sore losers still occupying the WH until the 11th hour when the infamous Susan Rice CYA memo was typed and filed. And the last Samatha Power FISA unmasking request was unmasked for purposes still unknown.
Ah, yes, the bad optics of it all. Bummer. Bad optics is seeing the thoroughly discredited and rejected Obama team warming up in the dug out.
Bad optics is Trump leaving office and NOT appointing a special counsel to investigate both election fraud and Hunter Biden incestuous influence peddling. Two transgressions we never want to see in this country again.
@Alexandria | 12 December 2020 at 06:45 PM
Alexandria et al
SWMBO says do both otherwise we end up with KH when he resigns or is impeached.
@akaPatience: If they weren’t Trump’s picks, then what was Trump doing there? If he can’t pick his own cabinet, he was just wasting his and everyone else’s time. Yes, they have to be approved by the senate. What happens if the president and the senate can’t agree?
As for the remarks about optics, I think it’s all a bit late to worry about optics. The dems just stole the election right in front of everyone’s faces. They aren’t worrying about optics. They essentially just stole it and then turned round and said, “What are you going to do about it?”
Col., OT, perhaps impertinent, but inspired by the Wisdom of SWMBO–
I’m just a few years younger than you. I carry a few excess pounds but retain the immune system of my Italian peasant ancestors. Not a chance in the world that I will allow myself to be injected with an “emergency authorized” vaccine.
If I may ask: Will you?
nb. Not entirely off-topic, since the rigged election relied on Covid hysteria propagated by media and the same usual suspects as should be the subject of Special Counsel.
In other words, the Covid pandemic should be investigated. More urgently: distribution of vaccine should be HALTED before anyone is (potentially} harmed.
Artemesia
I had a talk with my immigrant Chinese doctor about this. That was two days ago. He was still working out how this would be funded but he said to me that we (his family and mine) would wait just a bit to see how bad the reactions are.
My memory of the very early days of Trump WH staffing was having to run interference past the Democrats standard and vicous politics o personal destruction out to destroy anyone who even thought about particpating in the Trump administration, the renegade GOP establishment undermining him at every turn denying him any establishment help or advice, and the normal learning curve of someone 100% outside of the political establishment who was bound to stumble and falter before hitting his stride.
Democrats declared it was treason for anyone to aid and abet the “enemy” even though Trump did try to reach out – remember his very early High Tech guru meeting? The liberal media never let up, the deep state leaked and sabotaged as a fifth column from within.
The most remarkable thing about Trump is what in fact he did accomplish anyway, despite the constant opposition, churning and revolving door of staff appointments.
#45 presidency remains a story of amazing accomplishments. Thank you President Trump. I did not think you had this in you. But you did. Sitting in Dr Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in NYC, taking early lessons from his Power of Positive Thinking and practicing The Method held you in good course.
(See PBS Peter Graves Biography on the early Donald Trump -from the Marla Maple days – what you saw then is what you also got in 2026 – youtube)
The man is transparent and consistent. No one can complain they were duped or he is a false charade. He is what he says and he delivered. How refreshing.
Colonel and Others,
Please excuse my “politeness” in using the phrase “bad optics” to describe a proposed potential action by a defeated outgoing President to appoint a “Special Prosecutor” to investigate the election of his victorious successor when such an action, to be blunt, would be politically stupid, subversive of our Constitutional order and futile, as such action would be immediately reversed in the first minutes of the incoming administration. If we are talking about “savor[ing]”, it would only give the Ds an opportunity to “savor” another victory.
The President has only himself to blame for the legal setbacks suffered by his ineffective lawyers who have never been able to produce sufficient evidence to convince even his judicial appointees that substantial electoral fraud took place during the 2020 balloting. Constitutional challenges to gubernatorial changes to balloting procedures for usurping legislative authority should have been mounted immediately after they were announced, not at the 13th hour after the ballots had been counted. In 2000, Jim Baker organized a team that included four lawyers who now sit on the Supreme Court. The failing, flailing Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (as much as I admire her advocacy for General Flynn), by contrast, have not cut any mustard with their post-hoc and sometimes bizarre arguments. IMHO, the President should cease and desist now from taking actions which detract from the R effort to save the Senate seats in Georgia which, if lost, will immediately begin the de-Republicanization (used Constitutionally) of our American system of government.
IMHO, the President has only himself to blame for losing the 2020 election due to a succession of self-inflicted miscues which began on Day 1 of his administration. Let me count the ways:
1. When campaigning in 2016, he promised his non-Goldman Sachs supporters (i.e., the “deplorables”) that infrastructure and a wall to be paid by Mexico would be among the major priorities during his first two years; instead he came out of the chute with a tax-cut for the wealthy and a phony “repeal and replace” assault on the Affordable Care Act which led to the R loss of the House when it became clear to voters in November 2018 that the Rs and the President had nothing to offer as a replacement. Thus, he repeated the same mistake that Clinton and Obama made in 1993 and 2009 and suffered the same fate that they suffered in 1994 and 2008 when they lost the House. In this case, President Trump’s mistake was near fatal as he gave his bitter enemy, Nancy Pelosi, the whip hand in which to drive the Country to impeachment. We are still waiting for a “replacement” and a completed “Wall”.
2. He failed to purge the bureaucracy of Obama administration holdovers on January 21, 2017, unlike Dick Cheney who threw all the Clintonians out of government on January 21, 2001, thus, leaving people in place like Sally Yates and the Vindman brothers who never missed an opportunity to knife President Trump in the back.
3. He failed at the outset to investigate the case against General Flynn (engineered by Strzok, Comey and David Ignatius) who was his only close advisor with previous governmental experience and left the General twisting in the wind.
4. He bungled the firing of Jim Comey after getting Rod Rosenthal to sign onto a memo citing Comey’s botched and procedurally defective Clinton email investigation as the reason, then publicly boasted of having done so with the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador and, for a self-inflicted coup de grace, told Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of Russia fatally undermining the laboriously constructed Justice Department rationale. The Comey firing and the President’s ineptitude led directly to the appointment of a Special Prosecutor.
5. Moving ahead three years, after narrowly escaping the Mueller noose, the President immediately bungled the effort to get the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden corruption story out to the public, thus putting the noose back around his neck, by seeking in a conversation with the Ukrainian President, with his many enemies listening in, to get the Ukrainians to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Biden-Burisma connection. Surely, there was a competent way to get the story out without igniting an impeachment controversy. He could have taken a seminar with Dick Cheney to figure out how this is done, all the while keeping his fingerprints off the weapon.
6. Another egregious self-inflicted and, perhaps, fatal wound: He gives Bob Woodward (a mortal enemy) the right to conduct a taped-interview during which he admits to Woodward, among other things, that he had been briefed at the outset about the lethality of COVID19, which gave the lie to his previous pronouncements that the virus was little more than another version of the flu. The election of 2020 was in many respects a referendum on President Trump’s handling of the Corona Virus. Had he leveled with the American people, under-promised and over-delivered, instead of over-promising and under-delivering by election day, he would most likely be taking the oath of office for a second term. BTW, Pfizer had all the information that it needed to announce prior to the last weekend in October that its vaccine was 90+ % effective, but, instead, Pfizer stopped trials the Friday before the election and did not make its announcement until after the election. It’s amazing that the President’s people did not have their fingers on the pulse of what was happening at Pfizer. One more fatal error.
7. On Attorney General Barr, the AG saved Trump’s bacon and what was left of our Republic when he put a harness on Bob Mueller, took control of the Mueller Report, ordered up the Horwitz investigation (disagreeing with Horwitz’s conclusion that there was no impropriety at the outset), put his own gloss on the Mueller Report before its dissemination, appointed a Special Counsel to investigate the origins of the Russia Investigation. If he can’t find the demonstrable, provable evidence of ballot fraud sufficient to overturn the election and is hesitant to undertake a Constitutionally dubious and futile action, I am satisfied with the AG’s conclusions.
All
“Alexandria” is a Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law School grad who was a senior person in Clinton’s USAID, very senior.
Artemesia,
We should really be commending the Chinese for a well played round of unrestriced warfare as laid out by a couple of CCP colonels two decades ago. The current attact, inresponse to Trump’s America first actions: Unleash a variant of what amounts to a flu virus along with planting it in multiple countries with infected agents masquerading as tourists, unleash a massive amount of propaganda, coerce all your compromised political assets to do what they wanted to do anyway (to get Trump), give the actual original genetic samples so the West can develop a ‘vaccine’. Then reap the rewards as your opponents destroy their own economies, disrupt their social structures and further discredit their governments and other institutions.
If these vaccines turn out to have disasterous side effects that only further damages the credibility of Western institutions. Should Biden get inaugurated they blame Trump, if Trump is still in office they blame Trump. Either way a win for the CCP because the last thing the left wants to come out is how compromised they are both with the communist government in China but a failing ideology of their own.
[Unrestricted Warfare, by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999)]
https://www.oodaloop.com/documents/unrestricted.pdf
Alexandria
I do not think the COVID economic disaster can be blamed on him. What you face now is infinitely worse than the political blunders that can be blamed on him.
@alexandria… i don’t think covid can be blamed on china either… blaming others for your own misdeeds never got anywhere anyway…
Colonel,
Agree with your first comment. The only countries that have dealt effectively with the Corona Virus are islands (NZ, Australia, Singapore) or those that are east-Asian/culturally authoritarian (China, S. Korea, Japan) or some combination of the two (Singapore and both Koreas, each a virtual island). The “little Nordics” (Denmark and Norway) have also done remarkably well in responding to the virus,probably because of size and cultural uniformity. The U.S. with its porous borders, exposure to globalization and sprawling federal system was always going to be more at risk, no matter who occupied the Oval Office.
The President’s problem was political in that he minimized the risk of our exposure to COVID19, knowing of its lethality, and was greatly wounded politically after being outed by Bob Woodward. He paid the price on November 3rd.
I also agree with your second comment. We are now going through a “Third Reconstruction” both in the states of the Old Confederacy and in the rest of the country where the fall of “Stonewall” will be the least of the casualties.
In closing, let me add my voice to those who urge you to soldier on with Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Alexandria
The rape of VMI has just begun.
james
What are our “misdeeds” about COVID? Developing vaccines at Warp Speed? Don’t be an ass.
@ pat
it seems to me that the usa largely hasn’t taken the issue of covid seriously… it’s highly contagious.. while it might not take out many people – 306,000 so far… there will be people who will say the numbers are a fabrication.. there will be people who will say ‘our civil liberties’ are being infringed upon and there will be people who don’t give a rats ass if the people more vulnerable get it as so long as they don’t get it – all is well.. then there are the many people in the usa who do not have the money to get proper medical attention if they were to need it..
the usa is a place of 2 types of economically positioned people – those who can afford to wait it out and those who can’t…or – those who have and those who don’t.. either you believe the numbers are a pile of b.s. or you can see that the way the usa has handled covid has been very unsuccessful relative to other countries…
the economy is considered the most important thing by some and they consider it more important then the health and welfare of it’s people.. i think usa falls into this and i think it’s a big part of the problem for the usa too.. but remember – i am a leftist, lol…
Alexandria,
“he had been briefed at the outset about the lethality of COVID19, ”
you mean he was lied to by multiple people as to the lethatlity of what is ever more apparent to be something similar to a virulent strain of influenza that is lethal almost entirely to people over 70 or in bad health to begin with.
Fred, I agree with you that it is highly improbable that people under the age of 70 or, particularly under the age of 50, and those without co-morbids will be struck down by the COVID; but, in this case we are dealing with political truth, not statistical truth, and political truth still reigned supreme as of November 3rd. Trump’s problem is that he still believed the “political truth” at the time he blabbed to Woodward and was caught out when outed by Woodward.
As an aside, I do not believe he was deliberately lied to by the epidemiologists who seem to be unable to balance the risk of death against the damage to the economy by imposing total lock-downs for, perhaps, professional theological reasons.
Trump did understand the lethality of “covid” – it has 99.99% recovery rate. And only marginally goes up after age 70-80 – when life starts shortening regardless of what you call it.
And now the overall morbidity data, as analyzed by Johns Hopkins researcher, found all-cause deaths for 2020 from CDC were pretty much the same – just more deaths got labeled “covid”, while other more typical causes of death including regular flu went down. She found no “excessive” deaths in 2020 to date.
Not sure why anyone is still pushing this high covid “lethality” chestnut. But covid-covid-covid did buy Biden cover and will continue to buy Biden cover, so we will now be stuck with the charade should Biden ultimately suceed.
Also explains why Democrat covid partner in crime Calif Gov Newsom is doubling down on this latest super-lockdown, since Biden requires a virtual Inauguration and not a full frontal public exposure. (Save that one for his dog)
The last thing Democrats need right now is a vaccine, a mitgation treatment, or any exposure of “high lethality” data to the contrary of the covid agenda that has worked so well for them so far. Covid, covid, covid. .
Deap – exactly so.
I did feel at the start he should have cleaned house in a big way. But how? It would have needed a revolution. Because he wasn’t faced with just a few bad apples. It’s turned out that the whole damned barrel was rotten.
And one big attraction of Trump for me was that he wasn’t “revolution”. He was reform. As I saw it then, the “last chance saloon”. The last chance to bring things round before it all collapsed. Which I’d rather not see, for my children’s sake and for the sake of all others.
Now we find out whether that apocalyptic view held in 2016/17 was too extreme. Whether it was or not, I don’t believe the next few years are going to offer much chance of that so needed reform.
james
This epidemic is essentially uncontrollable in the absence of a vaccine. You really don’t know much about the US. If you are poor and you get sick you go to a hospital emergency room where the federal government subsidizes your treatment. It just has not reached populated BC yet. You expect the US to become depopulated? The fatality rate across the US population is .07% You are living in a leftist fantasy.
Fred,
I agree with you that it is highly unlikely for healthy folk under the age of 70, especially those under 50, and the non co-Morbid to become Covid fatalities. What we are dealing with now especially during the third surge is the “political truth” of lethality, not statistical truth, which has created conditions of panic in America which were still in place as of November 3. The President apparently believed the political truth at the time of the Woodward interview and made the unenforced error of confiding in Bob Woodward, giving Woodward the opening to put the “shiv” in his ribs by accusing him of lying to the American people and deliberately minimizing the dangers associated with the virus.
As an aside, I don’t believe the epidemiologists deliberately lied to the President. I think that they believe that the goal of public health policy is to minimize death to the fullest extent possible, that they adhere to this view as a matter of professional theology and are temperamentally incapable of being able to contemplate balancing the loss of lives now against the destruction of the economy and consequent loss of lives/increase of misery in the future as a result of lock-downs.
In the end, the President got the balance mostly right,but was never able to sell his vision to a sufficient number of voters to win re-election.
Alexandria,
The “political truth” is that the entrenched bureaucrats and “career civil servants” wanted Trump removed by any means necessary (along with big tech, the Democratic party and China). See the prior year’s Ukrainian fraud and the slew of credentialed experts and their articulated manipulations before, during and after the impeachment hearings as an example. As icing on the cake review Chief Justice John Roberts refusing to allow a Senator to even mention the name of the “whistle blower”.
@ pat… it seems like some places on the planet have been able to protect their citizens without the need of a vaccine… china and new zealand are a few places that quickly come to mind.. vietnam is another one… why success in these places and not in the usa?
as for the thought that covid only affects people over 70, it seems to affect a number of other people below the age of 70 as well…. we don’t know what the long term implications of this is for those who have caught it.. some people seem to breeze thru it and for some others it is much more problematic… i am not so sure of everything i read and here on the internet…
@pat – thanks for the wider overview of how it works in the usa.. i didn’t know that…
james, how does simply re-labeling the average annual mortality numbers as covid mortality numbers sit with you? CDC numbers did not find any pattern of excessive deaths for 2020 – the Year of Covid”. Why was that?
“Covid” ultimately was a labeling matter (election years can be pesky), rather than any political liability issue. Blaming Trump for “covid” got no traction outside the Beltway, but it did get a lot of friendly media and kept Biden from needing to offer any substance. A very curious election year.
Covid did not beat Trump. Which leaves only Dominion and Democrat vote counters beating Trump. Sorry, but there are not two ways of looking at this.
This quote says it for me: Grrrrrrr.
“……The Trump campaign has alleged in several states that there was enough fraud and other election irregularities, especially with electronic voting machines, to have swayed them for Joe Biden.
But thus far, dozens of court cases have failed largely because judges have refused to believe the people who have signed hundreds of sworn affidavits attesting to fraud they actually witnessed.
These court losses have allowed the president’s detractors to claim – falsely – that ‘no fraud occurred and that his legal team ‘has no evidence’ to ‘prove’ it did…….”
turcopolier, Thank you.
james
Perhaps you should try living in China or Vietnam where the most savage oppression is available for government use in suppressing the people. Newsom and Cuomo can only aspire to such power. New Zealand? Islands. pl
@ pat… no man is an island… we are all in this together…
IT IS MY HOPE THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL APPOINT SYDNEY POWELL SC.
SHE IS A FIGHTER AND SHE HAS THE VOTER FRAUD PROOF, THAT NOW FOX
WILL NOT ALLOW TO BE SHOWN. PLUS, THERE IS ROBERT’S PHONE
CALL INTERCEPTED, TELLING HIS COHART THAT THEY MUST DISALLOW THE
TEXAS APPEAL TO THE COURT RE. THE ELECTION. (ISN’T THAT IMPEACH-
ABLE)? WHAT SAY YOU?