This is an important question, and one that needs to be taken seriously.
The GOP has broken a "123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session.”
If you didn’t see it, watch @SenWhitehouse’s confirmation presentation.
Whitehouse lays out the way that coordinated groups use millions in dark money to bring cases to specific jurisdictions, then pay others to file amicus briefs, gaming the entire judicial process.
Funders of these dark money groups want to roll back all of the laws and policies that have been enacted since the Great Depression.
These obviously are not popular ideas, and they know that they cannot pass them in the legislature.
/5
The GOP has re-envisioned our system of government. They no longer see the legislative branch as conducive to their agenda.
They now use the Senate as a backstop, to prevent opponents from checking them, and as a tool to attack their opponents (e.g. Benghazi investigations).
/6
And while they use the Senate as a means to attack opposition to their agenda, they use the federal bench and dark money networks as their new, replacement legislative branch.
It is a way to maintain power, despite being voted out of power. In a sense, it is a judicial coup.
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Netanyahu quietly took a trip with the head of Mossad for a “clandestine” meeting with MBS, at the same time that Mike Pompeo was there meeting with him.
h/t @FauxbotSupreme
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people began discovering documentation of the secretive outflows of money from the USSR.
An even bigger dark money channel was the use of “Friendly Firms” - groups that other companies had to pay, in order to do business in the USSR.
/1
One of those firms, it was discovered, was Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press - a large publishing company that was used to sell the Soviets’ science books to the West.
Maxwell was found dead just days before this list was published.
-from Putin’s People, by Catherine Belton
As it turns out, the communist party was selling goods and materials to foreign companies at incredibly low, fixed internal Soviet prices.
The companies would reap huge profits, and then use that money to finance active measures campaigns to destabilize other nations.
Considering that Trump recently started installing loyally subversive operatives like Kash Patel, is anyone else getting a weird Manning/Assange type vibe from the release of this story, or is it just me?
It’s entirely possible that these court cases are a delaying tactic, to give Trump a reason not to allow Biden to be recognized as POTUS-Elect - and therefore not allow him to receive briefings.
While Trump installs loyalists to find and destroy evidence, and cover up crimes.
It sounds like @AshaRangappa_ had this same thought, although for slightly different reasons - what she outlines here buttresses this theory in a way that, IMO, compliments my reasoning as well.
Notice that another key placement that occurred today, in addition to Kash Patel, was Ezra Cohen Watnick, appointed to Acting Undersecretary of Defense, over **Intelligence** and Security.
h/t @arapaho415
Similar to Patel, this guy has things he needs to cover up.