Will the Real Dirtbag Please Stand Up

J’accuse, Cruz

Facebook meme. Ted Cruz seemed genuinely crazy on the subject of the subpoenaed phone records. "Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Well, no, Senator, but I'd point out that the special counsel's mandate was "to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification ofthe Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021," and I don't recall any Democrats or Independents doing any of that.

Like everybody else, I enjoyed the humiliation of Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing intended to destroy former special counsel Jack Smith, in which Schmitt had been entrusted with the matador’s sword and cape—hard evidence, they thought, that Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in Atlanta on the very day (February 3 2024) after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis acknowledged her affair with the prosecutor in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump over his attempts to steal the Georgia vote in the 2020 election, like why would anybody ever go to Atlanta unless to do something conspiratorial with Willis involving Smith’s own prosecution, although it’s hard to imagine what that something could have been (it’s one of those Glenn Beck theories of guilt by proximity, based on Schmitt’s staff pasting photos of Smith on the same posterboard with on his big visual aid poster), which Smith would undoubtedly lie about, exposing himself to a perjury charge—

Except, as Senator Klobuchar figured out with her prosecutorial skills, the game Smith had actually attended was women’s basketball in Baltimore, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes (whose stunning point guard Caitlin Clark scored 38 points); he even turns up in the audience in a photo from the game.

My parents were from Minnesota and my dad taught us not only the Sky-U-Mah football fight song (”Minnesota, hats off to thee”) but also “I don’t give a damn for the whole state of Iowa, I’m from the Gopher State,” so I appreciated Klobuchar’s sharp-eyed awareness of the Lady Hawkeyes, which is what I expect from a midwestern senator. If there’s anything shocking about the story, it’s that the committee chairman, 93-year-old Chuckles Grassley, a wild booster of local sports and fervent advocate of Caitlin Clark even after her move to Indiana, didn’t put a stop to Schmitt’s stupidity, because he should have known in a bipartisan way. Schmitt is a real dirtbag, to use the language he wanted to apply to Smith, and Grassley’s one too.

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But speaking of perjury traps, Senator Cruz, please tell us, under oath, what you and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani talked about when he called you sometime in the early evening of January 6, 2021?

In fact I’m interested in pretty much everything you did that day, from when Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (saluted by Hawley with a raised fist as he arrived at the building for the Joint Session to certify the presidential election around 12:30) began breaching the Capitol, through Trump’s 2:24 tweet

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

and the subsequent surge of hundreds more rioters into the building, some of them chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and the adjournment of the session, the evacuation of Pence and family, and the scene after you senators evacuated, described in your 2022 memoir, Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System, as reported in the Dallas News:

Many senators were scared and angry, he recalls, venting their rage at Cruz and others who had objected to certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

And it wasn’t just Democrats who were upset.

“Mitt Romney turned to me and the other objectors and said with a snarl, ‘This is what you’ve gotten us!’ “ Cruz writes.

What did you think he meant by that, Senator Cruz? You must have had some idea, since you put it in your book. Why was he angry at you? What did he think you had done? Had you done it? Did he misjudge your intentions?

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And then you and your “coalition” fled from your bad-tempered colleagues (this time quoting from Newsweek) for a little private talk:

In his book Cruz continued: “While we waited for the Capitol to be secured, I assembled our coalition in a back room (really, a supply closet with stacked chairs) to discuss what we should do next.

“Several members of the group argued that in the face of the riot, we should suspend our objections and vote to certify the election. I understood the sentiment. But I vehemently disagreed with it. I urged my colleagues that the course of action we were advocating was the right and principled one.”

What course of action? You mean the action you took that night, voting that night not to certify the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania with Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Kennedy, Marshall, and Tuberville, minus Kennedy but plus Lummis and Scott for Pennsylvania?

Upholding what principle? You couldn’t have believed those elections had really been stolen, after 19 failed lawsuits in the two states, in which the Trumpy plaintiffs had been unable to bring forward any of the supporting evidence they claimed on TV to have, and the Four Seasons Landscaping press conference. I mean, what did you really say?

Because to tell the truth, Senator, I think you’re kind of a dirtbag. I think what you were doing was working on direct orders from Giuliani in furtherance of the fake elector scheme, which was supposed to go operational on January 6, to make sure the election wasn’t certified.

You’re the one who issued the statement on January 2 calling for a delay in the certification for an “emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states” using the 1876 election as a “precedent”:

The most direct precedent on this question arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race. Specifically, the elections in three states-Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina-were alleged to have been conducted illegally.

In 1877, Congress did not ignore those allegations, nor did the media simply dismiss those raising them as radicals trying to undermine democracy. Instead, Congress appointed an Electoral Commission-consisting of five Senators, five House Members, and five Supreme Court Justices-to consider and resolve the disputed returns.

Which is a false account of the situation in 1877; it wasn’t somebody’s allegation of illegal conduct in the election, it was the fact that in those three states plus Oregon there were two competing slates of electors and Congress had no way of deciding which were legitimate—the very situation that the Trump conspirators were trying to create with the fake elector slates, only it wasn’t ready yet (most of the fake slates had been mailed to Congress and the National Archive, but another signatory of the statement, Senator Ron Johnson, was supposed to serve as courier for Wisconsin and Michigan).

While the “disputes” of 2021 were the self-evidently false allegations of election fraud spread by Giuliani and his confederates like Lindell and Flynn, all clearly without merit, as decisively shown by a complete recount in Georgia, a recount of Milwaukee and Dane Counties in Wisconsin, and state and federal courts in those states plus Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona; not to mention the Supreme Court, which repeatedly refused to intervene in spite of its 6-3 pro-Republican majority (including three Trump appointees). In reality the “disputes” weren’t even part of the case you were planning to make on January 6—you would be trying to pass off the fake electors.

You were the Senate leader of the movement to delay certification, as shown by your authorship of that statement and your running the storage closet meeting in the Capitol on January 6. You were the recruiter, I suspect, of the eleven signatories, including the four freshmen (Lummis, Marshall, Tuberville, and Hagerty), who hadn’t even been sworn in yet at the time they signed. You and Hawley were the likeliest GOP presidential candidates in 2024, so you both had an incentive to enlist in the cause as a way to get Trump’s endorsement, even if you knew it was stupid and hopeless.

You were the last senator Giuliani spoke to that evening in the flurry of calls following Giuliani’s 12-minute conversation with Trump starting 5:07, after calls to Blackburn, Lee, Hagerty, Rep. Jordan (two calls), Graham, and Hawley (also two calls to Sullivan of Alaska, I don’t know where they fit in). We don’t know exactly what he said, except for a message intended for Tuberville but left mistakenly on Lee’s phone:

The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous States and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow. So if you could object to every State and, along with a congressman, get a hearing for every State, I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote.

(Lee sent a text to national security adviser Robert O’Brien: “You can’t make this up. I just got this voice message [from] Rudy Giuliani, who apparently thought he was calling Senator Tuberville.” “You’ve got to listen to that message. Rudy is walking malpractice.”)

That’s what I’d like you to testify about, your steering of the January 6 chaos into the fog of the fake electors plot, which I think is as criminal as Eastman (indicted in Georgia and Arizona, disbarred in California) and Chesebro (indicted and pleaded guilty in Georgia, disbarred in New York). You dirtbag.