Many of the opponents of the January 6 commission cited the other ongoing criminal investigations as a reason why a congressional investigation was not needed. The argument went that the DOJ and law enforcement agencies were already doing much of the work that a commission would do and that Congress would needlessly politicize the investigations into the Capitol insurrection. Yesterday, however, a piece of information dropped that shows why the criminal investigations were insufficient for the events of January 6.

Yesterday, House investigators released notes made by Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue during a December 27, 2020 phone call with President Trump and Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who became head of the DOJ after the resignation of Bill Barr. The notes provide a smoking gun that President Trump pressured the DOJ, not to investigate possible fraud in the election, but to simply agree without evidence that the election was corrupt. (A PDF of the nine pages of handwritten notes can be viewed here.)

Donoghue’s notes record the president instructing the DOJ to “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Taken in total, the handwritten scrawl memorializes a conversation in which the president launched into a diatribe of conspiracy theories about the state with close electoral outcomes and reamed out the DOJ for not providing the same take on the investigation as conspiracy websites.

“You guys are not following the internet the way I do,” Donoghue’s notes quote the president.

To their credit, Rosen and Donoghue pushed back, telling the president, “We are doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false [emphasis in the original].”

The pair went on to correct Trump on the counting error rate in Michigan (0.0063 percent rather than 68 percent) and that there were no suitcases of ballots in Georgia, among other items.

Trump responded by saying, “We have to tell the people that this was a corrupt, illegal election.”

He also added an implicit threat, saying, “People tell me Jeff Clark is great and I should put him in.”

Jeffrey Clark was an assistant attorney general at the time. It was reported in January that Trump had met with Clark, who was more sympathetic to the president’s efforts to paint the election as corrupt and overturn the results, to discuss possibly replacing AAG Rosen.

The phone call ended with President Trump praising Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) for “getting to the bottom of things” and reiterating many of the same conspiracy theories that Rosen and Donoghue had just refuted.

“The people who [are] saying the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt,” Trump said.

I’ve had many Trump supporters tell me that Donald Trump was not trying to overturn the election and that January 6 was not about overthrowing the constitutional order. Donoghue’s notes are compelling evidence to the contrary and it is entirely possible that will be corroborated with recordings.

The notes paint a picture of a president who was out of control and basing his information on unverified internet allegations rather than the facts gathered by the DOJ. If you followed the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency closely, this picture is not surprising. It’s nothing new and it might never have come to light without the congressional inquiry.

What is new and disturbing is the lengths that Trump was willing to go to pressure Justice Department officials to join in his paranoid delusions. While it’s likely that this sort of thing happened at other times during the Trump Administration, the stone walls erected by Sessions, Barr, McConnell, and others meant that there was little hard evidence to show the inner workings of the Trump White House. We had anecdotal evidence of Trump’s interference with the DOJ Russia investigation and holding the Ukraine aid package hostage, but because DOJ and White House agencies were in the hands of Trump’s allies, written evidence was hard to come by as congressional subpoenas were ignored.

That is changing now. The Biden Administration has little interest in helping to cover up Donald Trump’s abuses of power (and potential crimes). The Biden White House is unlikely to exert executive privilege over matters like Trump’s attempts to throw out election results and the DOJ has already cleared the way for former Trump officials to testify about January 6. Even Trump’s tax returns, which are required by law to be released to Congress and were the subject of two Supreme Court cases, are finally being given up by the IRS. The stone walls are falling.

And this is appropriate. Executive privilege was not intended to help protect government officials who try to steal elections or incite insurrections. People who broke the law should pay the consequences even if they are government officials. Especially if they are government officials.

As to politicizing the investigation, it would be difficult for Democrats to make the investigation more political than Republicans have already done. It is understandable why Republicans didn’t want the January 6 commission. The skeletons from the Trump Administration’s closets are embarrassing and possibly incriminating. This is especially true since the party is still fixated on Donald Trump as its messiah and very few sitting Republicans have not been tainted by the former president.

But I’ll say it again: Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And hiding Republican corruption from the light of day may be a good short-term course for the GOP, but it isn’t good for the country in the long term.

The best course for the country is to expose the Trumpian abuses of power and just how close we came to having a president use the government to try to steal an election. In all likelihood, government intervention to overturn the election results would have precipitated widespread violence or possibly a civil war. People like Rosen, Donoghue, and even Bill Barr who held the line against Trump’s demands deserve credit, but those who were willing to toss out the will of the people because they didn’t like the result should be exposed and face consequences for their actions.

And that’s where the January 6 commission comes in. These unethical actions might not fit the criminal code. For example, we know that Donald Trump, Mo Brooks, and others encouraged the crowd to March on the Capitol to disrupt the Electoral College proceedings and persuade Vice President Pence to “send it back,” something he had no authority to do. These exhortations may not reach the legal bar of incitement, but they were clearly wrong and clearly contributed directly to insurrection.

It may be that the January 6 commission unearths enough evidence to charge some members of the Trump Administration and/or Congress with criminal acts in connection with the events of January 6. The congressional investigation will pursue threads and uncover evidence that would not be applicable to criminal investigations of individual rioters or accessible to law enforcement. Evidence like the notes of Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.

But even if their actions are not prosecutable or don’t reach the level of criminal conduct, Americans deserve to know what was going on behind closed doors in the White House and halls of government last winter. We deserve to know who risked their career to hold the line against Trump and defend the Constitution. We need to know who was ready to toss out the Constitution and pledge loyalty to Donald Trump.

Donoghue’s notes won’t be the last bomb to drop on the Trump Administration and Republicans. The damage that the investigation will do to the Republican Party makes it easy to understand why Republicans wanted to cover up Trump’s activities and pretend the attack on the Capitol was no big deal.

But as each successive revelation about Donald Trump’s attempted coup hits the presses, it will be increasingly obvious why the congressional investigation was vital. It won’t be easy to hear, especially if you’re a Republican, but it will be information that we as a country need to hear.

Erick Erickson recently pointed out that January 6 was not the first time that the Capitol had been under attack. One of the incidents that he cited was the 1983 bombing of the Capitol by a communist group. Personally, I don’t think that comparing the MAGA insurrection to a communist bombing is as mitigating as Erickson and others seem to think it is. This is in no small part due to the fact that no sitting president has even instigated an attack on the Capitol in order to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. This was a very big deal and unprecedented in our history.

And with all due respect to Erick Erickson and others who deny that January 6 was an insurrection, the January 6 events meet the definition of the word “insurrection” as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government” with the synonyms “revolt,” “uprising,” and “rebellion.” What part of that does not sound like January 6?

Follow David Thornton on Twitter (@captainkudzu) and Facebook

The First TV contributor network is a place for vibrant thought and ideas. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The First or The First TV. We want to foster dialogue, create conversation, and debate ideas. See something you like or don’t like? Reach out to the author or to us at [email protected]. 

Steve had a great point this morning. He and his family have all had COVID-19 and he and his wife are both vaccinated. There really is no good reason for the two of them to have to wear masks as they go about their business in Atlanta. Their odds of getting infected with COVID again or spreading the virus to anyone else are extremely low. So why are the Bermans being subjected to a universal mask mandate once again?

The answer is that we have no good way to determine who has survived COVID and/or been vaccinated and who is simply running around without a mask despite being unvaccinated. The key to getting things back to normal in a world of the Delta variant is going to be telling the difference between the people who are doing the right thing with respect to vaccinations and the people who would be hiding a zombie bite if this were a zombie apocalypse movie. I know people who are unvaccinated but who are running around like they are invincible and I’m sure you do too. Maybe you are one.

Like everything else related to this pandemic, the phrase “vaccine passport” has taken on political implications. In the past, most of us haven’t had a problem with the use of vaccination records for school, work, travel, or military service, but now, thanks to conspiracy theories and the sinister rebranding of vaccination records as “passports,” it’s suddenly an issue of personal rights. This is wrong on two counts.

First, as I described a while back, the Supreme Court has upheld mandatory vaccinations and recent lower court rulings have affirmed the authority of organizations to require vaccines. It would be legal to mandate the vaccine and it is legal to limit the public actions of those who refuse to be vaccinated.

Second, at this point, you do have a right not to get a COVID vaccine, but you don’t have the right to escape the consequences of refusing to be vaccinated. There’s nothing new about this. Even before the pandemic, if you didn’t get your shots, you couldn’t enroll in school, travel to certain destinations, or hold certain jobs. Decisions have consequences.

This is not new. If you look closely at the picture that accompanies this article, you’ll see that it is a polio vaccination certificate from 1963 rather than a 2021 COVID vaccination card. Polio vaccines were mandated in the 1950s and you would have had to show a card like this to enroll in school.

All this matters because it is the unvaccinated who are driving the current stage of the pandemic. Statistics show that the most serious COVID cases and deaths in the US are now almost exclusively among the unvaccinated.

Even though the vaccines are less effective at preventing infection by the Delta variant than they were against previous strains, they still help to reduce the chance of infection as well as to help prevent a serious illness in the case of a breakthrough infection. Further, vaccines seem to greatly reduce the chances of spreading the disease to others in a breakthrough infection, although this seems to be lessened in the case of Delta as well.

The bottom line is that it is the unvaccinated who are most vulnerable to all of the variants of COVID-19. They also seem to be the ones doing the most to spread it.

This has taken on a new personal importance to me. If you follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t, why not?), you may already know that my wife tested positive for COVID yesterday. This is despite the fact that our entire family is fully vaccinated.

As with many of the COVID infections, my wife’s case seems to have begun at church. We went to church after it reopened last summer but then went back to virtual church as the virus surged over the winter. We started back a second time after being vaccinated last spring.

On Wednesday, we got an email from our church saying that someone who was at the service on Sunday had tested positive. Citing privacy concerns, the email didn’t say who the person was so we didn’t know if we were in close contact or not. Later that night, my wife started developing allergy-like symptoms like sneezing. Since we had planned to visit our parents this weekend, she decided to get tested. Yesterday, she got a positive result. The nurse at the clinic said that my wife was the first person that she had seen who had tested positive after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. (That may be a result of the smaller number of J&J jabs rather than its efficacy. Who knows?)

So far, her case is mild. That’s good news as far as COVID is concerned, but still, nothing that you’d really want to endure if you didn’t have to. The rest of the family is still free of any symptoms and we are once again all quarantined at home. Due to my flying schedule, it is possible that I’m a couple of days behind the rest of the family on the exposure timeline.

Even though we’ve had one breakthrough infection in the family, I’m glad that we are a fully vaccinated family. I can be more confident in my wife’s recovery since she is vaccinated. I can hope that the rest of the family will not get infected since we are all fully vaccinated and my wife may not be as contagious as she would otherwise. All in all, there really is no downside to being vaccinated even though our family beat the odds with a breakthrough infection.

Public policy right now is about balance. We have to balance nudging the unvaccinated to take their shots with rewarding those who have been responsible. We have to balance promises made in the past with mitigating an even more deadly new variant. We have to balance privacy rights with the need to slow the spread once again.

The best way to do that is to allow government and private organizations to require proof of vaccinations for employees and customers. This idea is based on the conservative notion that actions (or inactions) have consequences. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, you don’t have to, but you also don’t get to go to concerts this summer or football games this fall. You might also have to find a job or school that matches your beliefs about vaccines.

This is not a new idea and it is not unconstitutional. It is an idea whose time has come once again.

Just don’t call them “vaccine passports.”

Follow David Thornton on Twitter (@captainkudzu) and Facebook

The First TV contributor network is a place for vibrant thought and ideas. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The First or The First TV. We want to foster dialogue, create conversation, and debate ideas. See something you like or don’t like? Reach out to the author or to us at [email protected]. 

Joe Biden baffled countless Americans Friday when launched into 40-second rant about forest fires, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Montana, and more.

“And, I mean, and, the thing, you know, I come from the State of Delaware… We had more acreage burn last year than the state of Delaware and Maryland combined… Combined… For you all out in Montana, that ain’t, I know, but… I want people to get a sense of how massive these fires are, anyway,” said Biden.

Watch the President’s comments above.

A new Monmouth University poll has bad news for Biden.

According to The Daily Caller, “Biden entered office in January with a net approval rating of +24, but now in July sits at just +4, according to the poll. The Monmouth poll is the second to show Biden’s approval rating slipping to an all-time low this week, pairing off with a Rasmussen Reports poll released Wednesday.”

Biden has dropped in popularity every month since taking office in January.

While Joe is tanking in the polls, his policy efforts remain slightly more popular.

“His American Jobs Plan, described in the poll as an infrastructure bill focusing on ‘roads, bridges and trains, internet access, power grid improvements, and clean energy projects,’ sits at a 71% approval rating,” the Caller reports.

Many believe Biden’s poor poll performance has largely to do with Americans’ faith in the economy. According to AP News, “Fewer than half, 45%, judge the economy to be in good shape, while 54% say it’s in poor shape.”

“It was true at the time.”

The President is finding himself in more situations where he has to explain his administration’s flip-flop on vaccines and mask mandates. Fox News’ Peter Doocy pressed Biden about the issue, and it didn’t go so well. 

DOOCY: “You said if you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask.”

BIDEN: “That was true at the time… What happened was the new variant came along. They didn’t get vaccinated… More people were getting sick.”

BIDEN: “Because I thought there were people that were going to understand that getting vaccinated made a dramatic difference and what happened was the new variant came along, they didn’t get vaccinated, it spread more rapidly, and more people were getting sick.”

“That’s the difference,” Biden added before walking away.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed an executive order prohibiting vax and mask requirements from government agencies and municipalities.

“To further ensure that no governmental entity can mandate masks, the following requirement shall continue to apply: No governmental entity, including a county, city, school district, and public health authority, and no governmental official may require an person to wear a face-covering or to mandate that other person wear a covering,” the executive order read. 

According to the New York Post, Abbott defended the order with the following statement: “Today’s executive order will provide clarity and uniformity in the Lone Star State’s continued fight against COVID-19.”

The governor has also signed an order restricting migrant transports in the Lone Star state after news that COVID-positive illegal immigrants were being dumped in a small border community, The Washington Examiner reports.

“The dramatic rise in unlawful border crossings has also led to a dramatic rise in COVID-19 cases among unlawful migrants who have made their way into our state, and we must do more to protect Texans from this virus and reduce the burden on our communities,” Abbott said in a statement.

From BillOReilly.com…

There are so many things going on with the Covid resurgence, it is impossible for Americans to make sense of the problem. With the deconstruction of Dr. Anthony Fauci, there is no longer a trusted medical authority disseminating information to the public.  CNN may still love Fauci, but few others believe him.

So, we are left with a symbolic Tower of Babel, a public discourse that is chaotic and even dangerous.

President Biden is at fault, of course.  He is incapable of leading a divided nation in any direction.  His verbal skills are non-existent (repetition of words cartoonish), and his problem-solving ability mirrors that of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez; approximately zero.

Mr. Biden was extremely fortunate to inherit a miraculous vaccination development from the Trump administration.  At first, the new president and his crew were successful in rolling out the vax nationwide.  If you wanted the protection, it was available free at a pharmacy near you.

The developing problem is not every citizen will take the vax.  Plenty of fear. Also, millions of foreign nationals are flooding across the southern border. Many, if not most, are not vaccinated.

President Biden has no strategy to stop the border madness and little ability to persuade anti-vaxxers.  Therefore, when yet another strain of Covid gathered strength, the federal government had no coherent response.  The result is the foolish and destructive panic we are seeing now.

There are two primary groups that will not cooperate in fighting Covid: skeptics in the conservative arena, and African-Americans.  Surveys say about half of black Americans remain unvaxxed, and resistance in right-wing precincts is hovering around 30 percent.

Both groups have rare common ground: they don’t trust the government.

The corrupt media adds to the danger by irresponsible analysis, especially on television.  The liberal networks refuse to criticize African-Americans, and the conservative outlets downplay resistance on the right.  Once again, these corporate media companies and their mouthpieces are in business solely to make money. 

They could not care less whether someone dies from Covid.

In the end, President Biden will pay a big price for his poor leadership regarding the virus.  His latest attempt to bribe people to get vaxxed using taxpayer money is insulting.  Voters will remember how weak and befuddled Biden is on a very personal issue.  Most Americans don’t want to wear masks and are horrified their children may again be forced to wear them in school.

There is always a tipping point in any presidential term.  For LBJ it was Vietnam. Nixon Watergate.  Carter gas lines.

If Joe Biden can regain leadership credibility after the Covid redux, I will be surprised.  He, Vice-President Harris, and Dr. Fauci can wear all the masks they want – but most folks see right through them.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed-in Thursday on the CDC’s new guidelines regarding face masks; saying it’s important that all Americans be “free to choose how they govern their affairs.”

“I think it’s very important that we say unequivocally: no to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions, and no mandates…Americans should be free to choose how they govern their affairs…not consigned to live in a Faucian dystopia,” said DeSantis.

Watch the Governor’s comments above.

While Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has reinstated a mask mandate, and communities around America are doing the same, I am not going to wear one. As Erick Erickson wrote yesterday, “like hell will I wear a mask.” I earned the right to say that.

For months during the heat of the pandemic in 2020, I masked practically everywhere. The only place I didn’t wear a mask was at home or in my private office at work. I masked at Walmart, Publix, Kroger—and did my one-person shopping expeditions like a Bushido warrior on a family honor mission, alone and fully equipped for battle. My family huddled at home, and we even did a round of the “bleach the groceries” game.

Despite all my countermeasures and care, I got COVID-19 in October. I think I picked it up at Sam’s Club, while I touched a shirt in a pile of shirts, and likely failed to properly and immediately apply hand sanitizer soon enough. Either that, or Sam’s Club was such a saturated viral playground that they should have encased it in a sarcophagus with an exclusion zone around it like Chernobyl.

I got COVID-19 and it sucked. My wife and kids got it. My oldest kid didn’t immediately get it, and in a Kafaesque twist of absurdity, uninfected he would have needed to quarantine 28 days to go back to school, but only 10 days once he tested positive. So we stopped quarantining him to get him back to school faster.

I still experience some “long COVID” effects. Allergies hit me harder. I sometimes get a wave of fatigue in the middle of the day. It took me a month to get my smell and taste back. My average heart rate, which hovers around 55, spiked to over 60 during my bout with the disease. I missed three weeks of work. My sleep has not yet recovered. I’ll say it again, COVID-19 sucks, and I wish it on nobody.

Six months after having COVID-19, my son’s school made him quarantine for a week because someone in his class, with whom he spent maybe 15 minutes during an art class inside the six-foot social distancing bubble, tested positive. We knew who it was because all the parents in our neighborhood talk. The school wouldn’t disclose who it was, and they took on a threat posture when I asked about their contact tracing and decision-making processes. Some kids got quarantined, some did not, and having had COVID-19 was not a defense.

As soon as I could get vaccinated, I made an appointment to get the one-and-done J&J/Janssen shot. I had to travel 90 minutes away to find a health department that had that vaccine—all the J&J in Atlanta metro was gone in days. I took two days off from work; one to get the shot, and one to recover. I needed that second day. The vaccine was like a truck hit me. I could barely lift a glass of water the next day, and was stuck in a recliner for six hours. Then I was better (except for the “long COVID” effects, which seemed to worsen).

Now I am fully vaccinated. My wife is fully vaccinated (two shots of Pfizer). My kids are too young (one just turned 12 this week and will get his shot soon). Why in hell do I need to wear a mask? Who am I protecting from a viral load that I have a—from the science I hear—1 in 10:000 or more chance of carrying? The chance of me being a double-breakthrough case (have any even been reported?), asymptomatic yet shedding viral load, is beyond the risk tables that actuaries use to calculate insurance premiums. It’s asymptotic to zero.

The only reason someone like me should mask is to declare some kind of solidarity with those who are mandating masks for people who need to mask. I am supposed to feel like my masking will give them some kind of moral support, some ammunition to use against the hicks and rubes who refuse to take the vaccine. Here’s my answer: No.

The “hicks and rubes” apparently include some 40 percent of New York City Department of Education workers who have not been vaccinated. Why do they still have jobs? My wife’s employer won’t hire teachers who aren’t vaccinated. She had to get her shot to keep her job. Why is NYC not showing solidarity with the government who wants everyone to get a vaccine or at least mask up?

If they won’t get a shot, why should I mask up?

I am a danger to nobody. The risk of me being a danger is basically nil. The only reason someone like me has to mask up is to be a social warrior for masking or getting vaccinated. I might as well stand on a street corner holding a sign “Get Vaxxed!” as wear a mask.

Now that I’ve said all that: if you haven’t earned the right to be me—to be a danger to nobody—and you refuse to take the vaccine, then you don’t have the right to not wear a mask. If you haven’t had COVID-19, and you are unvaccinated, you are a clear and present danger to yourself and those around you. You can very easily get the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that’s floating around like the Sam’s Club where I probably got infected.

The Delta variant is said to be 40 percent more, well, virulent, than the original 2020 version that swept through. If you are unvaccinated and haven’t already had some protection by having COVID-19, you most likely will get it. You will get sick. You might die. COVID-19 sucks, and I wouldn’t wish it on you even if you voted a straight Democratic ticket since Mike Dukakis popped his Greek head out of a tank.

If you choose to be a reckless vector for viral super spread, then that’s your business. God should have mercy on your soul because you are not doing your patriotic, brotherly, or human duty to not be a danger to everyone like you. But it’s a free country, and if you want to be reckless, then you can go out and drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and get behind the wheel, too. The consequences may or may not be deadly, but it’s the same attitude of “it won’t be me” at work.

Sorry, buddy, it will be you. You will probably get COVID-19 and spread it. Then you’ll have to live with the knowledge you did. If someone close to you gets it and dies, it can gnaw at your soul for a very long time. Do I wish this on you? No.

Like war veterans don’t wish war on anyone, including those who haven’t fought one, they also don’t like it when someone wears the medals and decorations they earned without having earned them. I earned the right not to wear a mask. People who’ve endured COVID-19, whether they choose to get vaccinated or not, have much more protection than those who have not been sick and not vaccinated. They have a right to say no to masks if they’re not sick right now.

Those who have been fully vaccinated have a right to say no to masks, otherwise what’s the point of getting vaccinated? If they choose, because of their own risk aversion, or because of standing in solidarity with people who should wear masks, to wear a mask, good for them.

But not me. I earned my right to say no, and I’m saying no.

Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.

The First TV contributor network is a place for vibrant thought and ideas. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The First or The First TV. We want to foster dialogue, create conversation, and debate ideas. See something you like or don’t like? Reach out to the author or to us at [email protected]. 

According to a police memo sent to U.S. Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, his department has new orders when encountering people without a mask – arrest them.

“If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to House office buildings or the House side of the Capitol. “Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for Unlawful Entry,” the memo said.

Congresswoman Kat Cammack tweeted a photo of the memo, blaming Nancy Pelosi and calling it an abuse of power.

In today’s edition of Pelosi’s abuse of power, Capitol Police have been directed to arrest staff and visitors to comply with her mask mandate for vaccinated individuals. 

For Members, they advise not arresting but “reporting Members to SAA for their failure to comply.”

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise has a similar reaction, expressing serious concern about Pelosi’s willingness to arrest vaccinated Americans.

“To be clear: Pelosi is directing police to ARREST vaccinated people who aren’t wearing masks. This isn’t about science—it’s about power and control.”

Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff Drew Hammill denies the Speaker is involved. Hammill tells Fox News: “The Speaker of the House does not control the U.S. Capitol Police. We were unaware of the [mask-related] memo until it was reported in the press.”