Even as Joe Biden and Democrats strive to keep America afloat, the truth-bringing to the dumb-ass ‘coup’ attempt by the T-Rump at the end of his term in office appears to be hitting too close to home — if you can’t lie your way out of shit, then just ignore the law.

As Congressional Republicans attempt to bullshit beyond the debt ceiling fiasco, T-Rump’s boys will apparently disregard legal subpoenas:

Again democrats bring a stuff animal to a knife fight. I hope democrats will pursue all legal remedies to get These trumpists to comply. https://t.co/xW4wt2prId

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) October 6, 2021

Details via the Guardian this morning:

The former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other top aides subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack are expected to defy orders for documents and testimony related to 6 January, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The move to defy the subpoenas would mark the first major investigative hurdle faced by the select committee and threatens to touch off an extended legal battle as the former president pushes some of his most senior aides to undercut the inquiry.

All four Trump aides targeted by the select committee — Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel — are expected to resist the orders because Trump is preparing to direct them to do so, the source said.

The select committee had issued the subpoenas under the threat of criminal prosecution in the event of non-compliance, warning that the penalty for defying a congressional subpoena would be far graver under the Biden administration than during the Trump presidency.

But increasingly concerned with the far-reaching nature of the 6 January investigation, Trump and his legal team, led by the ex-Trump campaign lawyer Justin Clark the former deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin, are moving to instruct the attorneys for the subpoenaed aides to defy the orders.
…
The move means that House select committee investigators now face the key decision over how to enforce the orders — and whether they make a criminal referral to the justice department after the Thursday deadline for documents or next week’s crunch date for testimony.

The House select committee chairman, Bennie Thompson, told reporters recently that he was prepared to pursue criminal referrals to witnesses who defied subpoenas and subpoena deadlines, as the panel escalates the pace of the evidence-gathering part of its investigation.

“We’ll do whatever the law allows us to do,” Thompson said last Friday on the subject of prosecuting recalcitrant witnesses.
“For those who don’t agree to come in voluntarily, we’ll do criminal referrals.”

Shitty outlook. T-Rump tried this shit while in office to some success, but how it will play now is a twisted view of how much muck America is rolling around in right now. Despite the best intentions and circumstances that’s what we doodoo.
Former White House Russia expert, Fiona Hill, says the US is “in a cold civil war.”

And Norman Ornstein, a noted conservative political analyst, sees the situation as maybe even worse — if that’s possible.
In an interview at Salon, published this morning, Ornstein outlined the ominous, tattered scenario:

“I believe that it is more broken than anything else. There are several layers of problems here.

“One layer is that the Republican Party has really descended into the abyss. It’s not a party anymore. It’s a cult, a full-blown cult. We could call it a cult of personality, but it was really a cult before Donald Trump came along. He’s just the leader right now. We see this, for example, with the fact that literally only two Republican members of Congress were willing to stand up to a violent insurrection and a complete collapse of norms — and that is in the House and Senate combined.

“Mitch McConnell is saying that if the Republicans recapture the majority in the Senate, he won’t vote to seat any Supreme Court nominee from Joe Biden. There is also the COVID response by Republican governors and other elected officials.

“This problem is going to get worse before it gets better at the level of elected officials. Every serious candidate that Republicans have for president is going to be saying, “I’m just like Donald Trump, except I’m tougher, meaner and stronger.” Anybody who is even to the slightest side toward sanity is going nowhere in today’s Republican Party. That is a big problem at the level of elites and across the federal, state and local levels.

“There is also the problem that begins with the leadership of Trump and extends down through Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham and many others, including social media more generally. That’s the problem of disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“There is a major cultural gap that is not going away anytime soon. For example, 30% of the Republicans basically say that violence is appropriate if people are supposedly trying to “destroy your way of life.” In this case, “destroying your way of life” means basically doing anything that does not protect white people first.

“Then you’ve got the fact that there’s not just voter suppression, but that direct attempts to overturn the results of lawful and fair elections are running rampant.

“We are also seeing a Supreme Court that will basically provide no boundaries. There is the farce of having the most extreme partisan justices saying, “Well, it’s ridiculous to think that decisions are made on the basis of personal views or partisanship.” These Supreme Court justices are not only partisans, they are liars.

“We can mitigate some of these problems with election and voting reform. We can also reform the laws that enabled Donald Trump to use executive power in misguided ways. But ultimately, I would say the system is broken.”

Shit-on-a-stick, that’s not good.

Once again, here we are…

(Image out front by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).