The FBI Has Established a “Payback Squad” to Target Trump Foes — Report

Composed of agents who are deeply loyal to Trump

By Chris Walker

This article was originally published by Truthout

The FBI has reportedly established a team of agents, informally known as a “payback squad,” that is tasked with pursuing investigations (and eventually charges) against individuals perceived to be the political enemies of President Donald Trump. 

NOTUS reported on the details of the so-called payback squad, citing four individuals with knowledge of its existence, including two current government officials, a former official, and another person with an understanding of how it operates. 

According to the report, the agents who are part of the squad are deeply loyal, as they “know what they’re signing up for,” the publication stated. 

The payback squad was formed about a year ago. The squad was assembled to pursue Trump’s political foes, similar to the way the FBI has targeted former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted last month over accusations that he had made a threat to the president’s life.

Comey — who was fired by Trump in 2017 in what was widely perceived as political retribution — faces criminal charges based on his posting a supposedly “threatening” picture of seashells on social media last year. The shells were arranged in the numbers “86” and “47.”

86 is a commonly used restaurant term that means to “throw out” or “get rid of,” while 47 refers to Trump, the 47th U.S. president. Trump has claimed the number is used to express a desire to see another person killed.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Comey “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States,” even though Comey immediately removed the post when people made that inference, and issued a public apology, too.

A senior FBI official denied that the group uses the “payback squad” name, but confirmed that an advisory team for FBI Director Kash Patel was formed last year to target and discredit federal officials who took part in investigations against Trump.

8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

How Trump plans to win by cheating

By ProPublica

When Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely.

If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.

At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers.

As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Here are some of the key things you should know about the Trump administration’s efforts to, as the president said, “take over” the midterms. Read the full investigation here.

1. In 2020, institutional guardrails helped to prevent Trump from overturning the election.

Following his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump pushed for federal officials to uncover proof that he had, in fact, beaten Joe Biden at the polls. Election cybersecurity experts with the Department of Homeland Security relayed to Attorney General William Barr that the election fraud claims that they looked into were false. Barr then told the president what he didn’t want to hear: The election had not been hacked.

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Despite the violent uprising at the Capitol on that day, the election results held firm.

2. Less than 18 months into his second term, Trump has dismantled many of those same guardrails.

Since the start of his second term, Trump and his appointees have made significant changes at federal agencies tasked with helping to safeguard elections. In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, the Department of Justice and other agencies have left, been fired or been reassigned, ProPublica found.

In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of those people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election-denial movement.

Racist Trump Denounced for Sharing Vile Video Depicting Obamas as Monkeys

Trump is truly FUBAR

Brad Reed

A screenshot of the video Trump shared

Donald Trump, a documented racist, drew swift condemnation on Friday night after he posted a video on his Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.

As reported by The Guardian, the racist depiction of the Obamas was part of a longer video that featured “false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election” from Trump.

The outrage over the post was immediate, even as Trump’s racism is well known and documented over many years.

“The most foundational racist idea is likening Black people to apes,” said Howard University historian Ibram X. Kendi in a social media post. “Since humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor, racist ideas cast white people as the most evolved people and the furthest away on the evolutionary scale from apes. Racist ideas cast Black people as the least evolved people and the closest on the evolutionary scale to apes. Almost all racist ideas build on this foundational one expressed by Trump.”

We MUST take away grandpa's car keys

Yet another loony Trump Truth Social post. From last night.

OK, this one falls apart starting with the fact that Barack Obama was NOT President in 2020 - Donald Trump was.

Trump offers another proof that he is demented

So what's wrong with this Trump claim?

1. Trump was still President on January 6, 2021. He seems to have forgotten this.

2. Trump appointee Jeffrey Rosen was serving as Trump's acting Attorney General.

3. Trump appointee Christopher Wray was serving as Director of the FBI.

4. Joe Biden was not inaugurated until January 20, three weeks after January 6.

5. Joe Biden had no control over the FBI or Justice Department until January 20.

6. Donald Trump directed his crowd to march on the Capitol and specifically to confront Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump wants to eliminate mail-in voting even though that's how HE votes

Flurry of false claims and advice from his master Vlad trigger King Donald's rant on voting

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

Guaranteed: Trump's got a vanity plate

In his latest full-frontal assault on democratic access and voting rights, Donald Trump August 18 said he will lead an effort to ban both mail-in ballots and voting machines for next year's mid-term elections—a vow met with immediate rebuke from progressive critics.

"I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election," Trump wrote in a social media post infested with lies and falsehoods.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Trump falsely claimed that no other country in the world uses mail-in voting—a blatant lie, according to International IDEA, which monitors democratic trends worldwide, at least 34 nations allow for in-country postal voting of some kind. The group notes that over 100 countries allow out-of-country postal voting for citizens living or stationed overseas during an election.

Trump has repeated his false claim—over and over again—that he won the 2020 election, which he actually lost, in part due to fraud related to mail-in ballots, though the lie has been debunked ad nauseam. 

He also fails to note that mail-in ballots were very much in use nationwide in 2024, with an estimated 30% of voters casting a mail-in ballot as opposed to in-person during the election in which Trump returned to the White House and Republicans took back the US Senate and retained the US House of Representatives.

Rhode Island has the right to remain silent

Secretary of State Gregg Amore hasn’t answered DOJ voter record request

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

Silence can speak louder than words.

Just ask Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore, who as of Friday afternoon had yet to respond to a U.S. Department of Justice request for information about registered voters. 

Rhode Island is among a growing number of mostly Democratic states facing federal probes into voter rolls, ranging from basic lists of registrants to massive documentation requests including ballots cast and voting equipment used in the 2024 election.

The July 8 email Amore’s office received from Scott Laragy, principal deputy director in the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, is far less expansive and detailed than requests made to other states.

Laragy asked Amore for a phone meeting to discuss a “potential information-sharing agreement,” that would give the DOJ information on state registered voters who lack eligibility, have falsified documents or “may otherwise have engaged in unlawful conduct relevant to the election process.” 

Eight days later, Amore had not responded to Laragy — Amore’s office was still reviewing the request, Faith Chybowski, a spokesperson for Amore, confirmed in an email. Chybowski was unsure when, or if, Amore plans to answer the DOJ.

But the Democrat and former high school history teacher is not keeping mum on his feelings about the probe.

“This is a highly unusual request as the States are Constitutionally empowered to manage all aspects of elections that are not otherwise mandated by federal law,” Amore said in an emailed statement. “It appears this is a continued attempt to promote the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and to undermine confidence in our elections—pretty consistent playbook from the Trump people.”

John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, backed Amore’s approach.

“It’s right for Secretary Amore to be both cautious and skeptical of the request given the history of this administration’s propagation of lies about voter fraud,” Marion said in an interview.

Charlestown Democrat Jennifer Douglas pays fine and turns in late reports to settle three-year-old case.

Unlike her opponent Elaine Morgan, Jennifer admits ‘I was wrong.’ 

By Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current

Editor's note: I supported Jennifer in each of her efforts
to topple MAGA Sen. Elaine Morgan. I am still certain Jennifer
would have been a far better Senator for Charlestown. - Will Collette

Three years, $2,000 in civil and criminal fines, and a trio of misdemeanor charges later, a former state Senate candidate finally turned in her overdue campaign finance reports, the Rhode Island Board of Elections announced Wednesday.

The resolution comes after Jennifer Douglas, a Charlestown Democrat, provided the state elections panel with seven missing campaign finance reports spanning 2021 to 2022. Douglas turned in the paperwork on Friday, May 9, a day after entering a no contest plea in Rhode Island District Court on three criminal misdemeanor charges of violating campaign finance laws, according to public court records.

Douglas in an interview Thursday said she failed to keep up with the paperwork due to a loss in her personal life.

“I went through a very difficult time and was only concentrating on my kids and myself,” Douglas said. “Things just got away from me.”

She emphasized that failure to file reports was different from misuse of campaign funds. 

“My campaign finances are to the penny right now,” Douglas said. “It wasn’t like I stole campaign funds, it was simply bad accounting, and a failure to do my due diligence.”

She added, “I was wrong. It played out the way it should have.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jennifer's opponent in her three election runs was Charlestown embarrassment incumbent Sen. Elaine Morgan. Morgan was also busted for campaign finance violations. In her case, Morgan was charged with illegally diverting money from her campaign account to finance personal spending sprees.  The Boston Globe flagged these items in the Board of Elections audit of Morgan's spending:

· In January and February 2020, Morgan spent $1,227 from her campaign account for personal use, including a $500 cash withdrawal; $584 in expenses for food, beverages, and meals; and $142 in miscellaneous expenses.

· In April 2020, she used her campaign account to pay for $73 in groceries from Aldi.

· In April 2021, she used her campaign account to pay $320 at a Chelo’s restaurant.

· In February 2022, she used her campaign account to pay $108 for “grooming expense” at V Nails and Spa By Han.

· In February 2022, she used her campaign account to pay $875 to Patriot Coins.

Never happened

The Astonishing MAGAverse

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

Yeah, straight-talking guy

Hard evidence Trump is a traitor

New Motion Presents Most Detailed Case Yet Against Trump for Insurrection Crimes

Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams

Jack Smith, the special counsel probing former U.S. President Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential contest, on Wednesday presented a massive trove of fresh evidence supporting his election interference case against the 2024 Republican nominee.

Smith's sprawling and highly anticipated 165-page motion—which was partly unsealed Wednesday by presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—states that Trump "asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so."

Trump—who in August 2023 was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights—contends that his actions were taken in his official capacity as president and not as a private individual.

In July, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing justices—including three Trump appointees—ruled that the ex-president is entitled to "absolute immunity" for "official acts" taken while he was in office, raising questions about the future of this case. According to Smith's motion:

Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as president, had no official role.

In Trump v. United States... the Supreme Court held that presidents are immune from prosecution for certain official conduct—including the defendant's use of the Justice Department in furtherance of his scheme, as was alleged in the original indictment—and remanded to this court to determine whether the remaining allegations against the defendant are immunized.

The answer to that question is no. This motion provides a comprehensive account of the defendant's private criminal conduct; sets forth the legal framework created by Trump for resolving immunity claims; applies that framework to establish that none of the defendant's charged conduct is immunized because it either was unofficial or any presumptive immunity is rebutted; and requests the relief the government seeks, which is, at bottom, this: that the court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.

Smith's filing details what Trump told various people in his inner circle, including then-Vice President Mike Pence, his now-disgraced and twice-disbarred lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and leading White House and Republican Party figures—some of whose names remain undisclosed.

The motion also highlights Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Trump is still pushing his "Big Lie" that Democrats stole the 2020 election; his running mate, U.S. Sen. J D Vance (R-Ohio), on Tuesday refused to acknowledge that Trump lost to Biden when he was asked about the election during a vice presidential debate against Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

"Upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location, [PERSON 15] rushed to the dining room to inform [Trump] in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence's safety," the filing states. "Instead, after [P15] delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, 'So what?'"

Smith argued that deceit was central to Trump's efforts, specifically, "the defendant's and co-conspirators' knowingly false claims of election fraud," which they used to purvey the Big Lie.

The motion states:

When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the "targeted states"). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to obstruct Congress' certification of the election by using the defendant's fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification.

Putin's creature

JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism

Fascism and Christian Nationalism now define the GOP

Karyn Amira, College of Charleston

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and
vice presidential candidate JD Vance at a campaign rally in
Michigan on July 20, 2024. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Since Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, it’s been widely noted that Vance once described Trump as “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin.” However, the day after Vance won his own Senate race in 2022, he reportedly made it known that he would support Trump for president in 2024.

Given this dramatic change, what does Vance’s selection mean for the Republican Party and conservatism, the political philosophy that the GOP once claimed to embrace?

I am a political scientist whose research and political analysis focuses on the relationship between Trump, the Republican Party and conservatism. Everyday citizens define conservatism in different ways, but at its root it is a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties.

Since 2015, Trump has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, moving it further away from its professed conservative ideology. The choice of Vance as Trump’s running mate – and the competition that preceded it – are the latest steps in this process.

Political columnist George Will describes how Trumpism has steered the Republican Party away from traditional conservative views.

Vance came from a small pool of contenders that included other noteworthy politicians who likewise once vehemently opposed Trump. By examining their trajectories, we can see how the Republican Party has abandoned conservative values to serve a single man.

Absolute immunity

The Republican National Committee requires you to believe in the Big Lie to be a Republican candidate

To get elected, voters must require candidates to believe in democracy

ROBERT REICH in Robertreich.Substack.Com

If there’s one thing that keeps me up at night, it’s my worry that those of us who are dedicated to democracy and therefore committed to playing by the rules are underestimating the willingness of House Republicans to break the rules to elect Trump.

It’s easy to forget that most current Republican members of the House, including Republican Speaker Michael Johnson, refused to certify the outcome of the 2020 election.

In fact, Johnson helped organize 138 Republican House members to dispute that outcome, despite state certifications and the nearly unanimous rulings from state and federal courts that it was an honest election.

If Johnson and his cronies had so few scruples then, why should we assume they’ll have more scruples in the weeks following November’s elections?

The specific scenario I worry about is that in the wake of the elections, the House’s election-denying Republicans retain their majority in the next Congress by denying certification of Democratic candidates who have won by close margins. 

Then, on January 6, 2025, the new Republican House majority refuses to certify Electoral College results from states that went for Biden by close margins — thereby ensuring that no candidate receives an Electoral College majority.

As a result, the decision about who’s to be the next president is made on a state-by-state delegation vote — almost surely delivering it to Trump.

I don’t think this scenario is far-fetched. Good faith can no longer be assumed. Quite the contrary: The current litmus test for Republican lawmakers in the Trump GOP is to say publicly that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Presumably they and Trump will do anything to get the White House back.

So what can we do to prevent it?

Donald Trump’s “Catch and Kill” Colluders at the U.S. Supreme Court

There’s a reason the right-wing justices are eager to support Trump’s senseless arguments on presidential immunity.

MITCHELL ZIMMERMAN in Common Dreams

They fooled me completely.

When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Donald Trump’s presidential immunity defense, I, an experienced lawyer and devout follower of legal developments, believed that the court had only accepted the case in order to buy time for Trump.

I was sure the right-wing justices—having ensured that the election overthrow prosecution would not go to trial until after November—would ultimately reject Trump’s outlandish claim that a president can commit crimes with impunity.

Wrong. At the oral argument of the case, the conservatives quietly embraced the notion that a president could face no criminal penalties even for ordering the assassination of a political rival or directing the military to stage a coup. 

They were unfazed by an argument that our president needed to enjoy the immunity of a king although the Constitution says not one word about immunity. 

And, in a mind-numbing reversal of reality, Justice Alito argued that presidential immunity was required so presidents could “leave office peacefully” and to avoid a cycle of events that “destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.”

Could the right-wing justices have failed to notice that the petitioner in this very case, Donald Trump, did not seek to “go off into peaceful retirement”? That instead he launched a vicious campaign of lies to reverse the election, based on election-fraud allegations found to be groundless in 60 cases?

Could they have forgotten that “the functioning of our country as a democracy” had in fact been “destabilized”—by the petitioner before their court, Donald Trump—when he wrongly persuaded tens of millions of followers that they had been cheated, and when the mob he had summoned to Washington invaded the Capitol to halt the peaceful transfer of power?

GOP 2024 playbook

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE

States that lean Republican report more COVID vaccine-related adverse events

They also had more COVID deaths

Mary Van Beusekom, MS

US states with a 10% increase in Republican voting reported a 5% increase in COVID-19 vaccine–related adverse events (AEs), a 25% increase in severe AEs, and a 21% higher proportion of AEs characterized as severe, with more pronounced associations in older people, a study today in JAMA Network Open concludes.

A University of Pennsylvania–led research team analyzed 620,456 AE reports filed by adult vaccine recipients or their clinicians in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database from 2020 to 2022, and compared them with AEs after influenza vaccination from 2019 to 2022. They examined the AEs against state-level proportions of Republican votes in the 2020 US presidential election.

The five stages of grift