Fireworks next month? TRUMP'S KILLER TOMATOES DEPOSITION

 FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE FAST FORWARD:

Fireworks next month? The Jan. 6 Select Committee investigating the events surrounding the insurrection at the Capitol will start holding hearings in June, and committee members are trying to get the public ginned up ahead of time by promising some startling revelations.

I'm not sure how they can top what they've released so far. It appears that the committee has uncovered a pretty widespread conspiracy, spearheaded by Trump, to undermine democracy by pursuing several lines of attack to overturn the election and keep Trump in power.

1. Influence public opinion: First, Trump tried to snooker his followers for months before the 2020 election, claiming hundreds of times that if he lost, it would mean the election was rigged. He said it so many times that virtually all of his supporters actually believed him. And still do!

2. Flood the zone with lawsuits: After he actually did lose to Joe Biden, his clown car of attorneys filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts in states that Trump lost. They lost 61 of those suits.

The only one they won was in Pennsylvania, where a judge agreed with the Trump campaign that the votes of a handful of voters shouldn't be counted because they missed the three-day deadline for providing proper ID after the election. The ruling affected few votes and did not change the outcome: Biden won Pennsylvania by 81,660 votes.

The Supreme Court rejected two of Trump's lawsuits as well.

3. Create fake electors: In several pivotal states that Trump lost, local Republicans, with the help of Trump aides, set up slates of fake electors and illegally sent those names to Congress in hopes that VP Mike Pence would throw out the legitimate electors and substitute the Trump fakers.

4. Enlist the help of House Republicans: Trump's lackeys in the House objected to the Electoral College votes in six pivotal battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Their objections came to naught.

5. Try to corrupt VP Mike Pence: Trump's controversial lawyer John Eastman set out a detailed plan of how Pence could subvert the Constitution. It said that Pence should throw out the electoral college votes of six states that had the illegitimate second slate of fake electors. That would make the vote 232-222 in favor of Trump.

Pence would then announce that since neither candidate reached the 270 threshold, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. With Republicans controlling 26 state delegations, they'd declare Trump the president.

When Pence refused to go along, Trump viciously turned on him, attacking him as a wimp and a p----, and criticizing him again at the rally he held Jan. 6 at which he urged the crowd to march down to the Capitol. Once there, the Trumpers erected a scaffolding with a noose, then stormed the Capitol looking for the VP while chanting, "Hang Mike Pence."

6. Pressure legislators and election officials to throw the election to Trump: Trump lobbied lots of state officials to take illegal actions to keep him in power. The most egregious, of course, was his attempt to intimidate the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, telling him to "find" enough votes to change the outcome of the election in that state and threatening him with criminal action if he didn't.

7. Invoke martial law and seize the presidency. This was advocated by several people, including Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

State representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also favored that route, sending a text message to chief of staff Mark Meadows 11 days after the insurrection that Trump should "call for Marshall law." Yes, she wrote Marshall instead of martial.

What she didn't realize is that it would have been quashed by Nancy Pelosi's Gazpacho Police.

At any rate, the televised hearings should be very interesting. The ultimate report of the committee could contain criminal referrals to the Justice Department -- including for Mr. Tomato Head. (See the next item.)
 

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'They were going to do fruit:' On this lovely Friday afternoon, I thought you'd enjoy reading the transcript of Trump's Killer Tomatoes deposition.

As you know, Trump loves to tell his supporters and security guards at his rallies to beat up any anti-Trump protesters in the crowd, and he always says he'll pay the thugs' legal fees if they get arrested for their assaults.

(BTW, he never has paid someone's legal fees, which isn't a surprise, given his track record of promising to pay and then not. He has stiffed thousands of small businesses and individuals in his private business. And when they sue to try to get their money, he ties them up in court for years, often financially overpowering the much smaller companies, forcing them to drain their bank accounts, or to settle for far less than their contract called for, or to file for bankruptcy, or to just go out of business. But I digress.)

He was giving the deposition because a group of protesters have sued him, claiming that Trump's then-bodyguard Keith Schiller and other security guards hit and shoved them during a protest they attended to object to what they said was Trump's hateful rhetoric about Latinos.

Their attorneys are trying to show that Trump regularly encourages violence against opponents. So they asked Trump about his remarks to supporters at a rally in Iowa in 2016 when he told them that his security people had told him that someone in the crowd may have tomatoes and exhorted the crowd to "knock the crap out of them."

This questioning is by Benjamin N. Dictor, an attorney for the protesters. He first showed the video of Trump's remarks.

Q. Mr. President, do you recall making that statement?
A. Yes.

Q. Okay. And you said that "if you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you." That was your statement?
A. Oh, yeah. It was very dangerous.

Q. What was very dangerous?
A. We were threatened.

Q. With what?
A. They were going to throw fruit. We were threatened, we had a threat.

Q. How did you become aware that there was a threat that people were going to throw fruit?
A. We were told. I thought Secret Service was involved in that, actually. But we were told. And you get hit with fruit, it's -- no, it's very violent stuff. We were on alert for that.

Q. A tomato is a fruit after all, I guess.
A. It's worse than tomato, it's other things also. But tomato, when they start doing that stuff, it's very dangerous. There was an alert out that day.

Q. Who were you speaking to when you said --
A. The audience.

Q. So you were speaking to the audience when you said if they saw someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you?
A. That was to the audience. It was said sort of in jest. But maybe, you know, a little truth to it. It's very dangerous stuff. You can get killed with those things.

Q. So were you trying to incentivize people to engage in violence?
A. No, I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit. And some fruit is a lot worse than -- tomatoes are bad, by the way. But it's very dangerous. No, I wanted them to watch. They were on alert. I remember that specific event because everybody was on alert. They were going to hit -- they were going to hit hard.

Q. Do you have any knowledge as to whether or not anybody was found to have tomatoes in their possession on that date?
A. I don't know. But it didn't happen. It worked out that nothing happened. It was -- the speech was good and there was no event -- there was no -- nothing happened.

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(NOTE: In this next section, Trump apparently realizes that describing a tomato as a fatal projectile sounds silly, so he suddenly introduces something not mentioned by his security team that actually would hurt if you got bonked on the head with it: a pineapple. There's no indication that anyone in Iowa went to the supermarket, stocked up on pineapples, and then carried them into that Trump rally without any of the security guards who were manning the metal detectors at the entrance saying, um, pineapples? But I digress.)

Q. Is it your expectation that if your security guards see someone about to throw a tomato that they should knock the crap out of them?
A. Well, a tomato, a pineapple, a lot of other things they throw. Yeah, if the security saw that, I would say you have to -- and it's not just me, it's other people in the audience get badly hurt. Yeah, I think that they have to be aggressive in stopping that from happening. Because if that happens, you can be killed if that happens.

(NOTE: And here come the bananas ... )

Q. And getting aggressive includes the use of physical force?
A. To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that, yeah, it's dangerous stuff.
 

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