Trump's Frivolitron
The frivolity is starting early for the 2024 election.
This is the top story on Washington Post on July 10th.
GOP jump-starts 2024 election challenges with Trump-inspired lawsuits
What are we looking at here?
Frivolous claims being laundered through the courts.
Election integrity being called into doubt without evidence.
Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee replaces broad election support with lawfare.
This is a de facto admission the Republican party is dead. They haven’t legitimately won the presidency since 1988 and now they’re basically ceding the House and Senate in favor of the RNC’s money being used pursuing this strategy. Recall that the antidote to civil war is doubling down on democratic participation, per Barbara F. Walter in How Civil Wars Start. The GOP fully intend to escalate the insurrection that began on January 6th, 2021.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is the beginning of exploring Republican “lawfare” - the frivolous use of our legal system to launder conspiracy theories into our collective reality, or to intimidate those speaking out against Leonard Leo’s Catholic Integralism replacing our democracy. If you’re not watching closely, and doing so long term, this might be just a skim for you.
Consequences 2020 Style
One of the most heartening things in this area is The 65 Project, which self describes as:
A bipartisan effort to deter future abuse of the legal system by lawyers seeking to overturn legitimate elections. We will hold such lawyers accountable for past abuses and will work to revitalize the state bar disciplinary process so that lawyers, including public officials, who lie about election results and who fuel insurrection will face professional consequences.
Getting badly behaved lawyers consequences is well nigh impossible in this country. The only thing that typically endangers them are problems in fiduciary responsibility, which is why The 65 Projects results are so impressive. I graphed their accountability efforts and looking at the whole thing is illegible even on a large 4k display - you have to zoom in and scroll around to see it all.
Fourteen of the 65 targets are state attorneys general.
And six of those are also members of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Recall that RAGA was the entity behind the Ellipsis rally that led to the January 6th Capitol Siege.
Six of the seven states involved in the fake electors plot have a total of thirty one attorneys facing ethics complaints. Only New Mexico is not represented here.
Piling On:
One of those thirty one attorneys is in more trouble than they would have been, thanks to a Disinfodrome find. I can’t say precisely which one because there’s a story brewing and I don’t want to mess my chance at another citation.
I know something else about the RAGA crew that’s never been brought to light, that isn’t a story just yet, and there’s a complex leak evaluation angle to it. I think what’s happening here is that there will be a sort of descriptive statistics piece, and then a much deeper treatment of what the leak reveals.
Conclusion:
The real meaning of MAGA appears to be “Making Attorneys Get Attorneys”. The consequences for January 6th have been largely limited to the groundlings involved in the attack, while seemingly letting the organizers go free. Maybe there are a pile of sealed indictments that will drop the day after the post-election misbehavior begins in earnest, but The 65 Project went right to work and they are having some success.
I will note that I found half a dozen mistakes in the main graph, places where these lawyers were listed due to appearing in articles, and then listed again with middle initial due to The 65 Project filings. I used Maltego’s merge function to clean up the duplicates. This is normal maintenance when you’re using Maltego for note taking on a complex problem.
A final observation: there are 295 attorneys among the 3,775 people listed in the MAGA Meltdown graph. There are 143 links in the graph that contain the word “counsel” - there has been some benefit in paying attention to which attorneys are representing people when there is overlap. We’ll dig deeper into this in a future article.
