IECVCT January 6, 2021

[Edgy MD]

Rep. Cheney closed with the new Steve Bannon audio, in which Bannon states that the president would declare victory no matter what the outcome. And it would be "wild."

[kcmets]

Good play by play, there's no way I could have sat though all that.
It will be properly regurgitated the next three days on the news.

[Lefty Specialist]

This video is simultaneously embarrassing and horrifying.

[Fman99]

What an awful shitty mess.

[Centerfield]

He orchestrated an attack on the Capitol. That's treason. If he's not prosecuted, this whole idea of justice is a fraud.

[Centerfield]

I mean, an officer died. I don't understand why everyone, all the attackers, Trump, Guiliani, MTG, why are they not being charged with felony murder?

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

That was compelling and sad.

And Cheney just setting the rest of the Rs on fire as it unfolds. It was well executed too.

It's all leading up to something. But the feds have start at the bottom and work their way up, like a drug ring, right?. They're still working through the dumasses on the floor still.

[MFS62]

He orchestrated an attack on the Capitol. That's treason. If he's not prosecuted, this whole idea of justice is a fraud.

Planning And conspiracy would be hard to prove.
But Accessory to Second Degree Murder (people died) before and after the fact might not be a stretch.

Later

[kcmets]

The man was unfit for office for most of his tenure.

Nobody did anything.

[whippoorwill]

Worse, he’d be re-elected in the blink of an eye

[kcmets]

Prolly

[Edgy MD]

Well, somebody did something. He was impeached twice. I'm certainly not conceding the 2024 election.

In further IECVCT news, Steve Bannon, who promised a fiery defense that would embarrass the state, presented no evidence and no witnesses in his defense, and was convicted after a few hours of deliberation in a two-day trial.

Won't be sentenced until October 21, unfortunately. Our slog of a process is a real good incentive for rich guys to do bad things and then run out the clock if they get in trouble.

[MFS62]

I heard that metadata has been recovered from ten Secret Service telephones from calls placed on or around the day of the riot.
My understanding of metadata is it is the header info that identifies the recipients and senders, if not the content of the calls/messages.
If so, those agents should be identified and subpoenaed to testify about the contents.
Later

[kcmets]

The texts are somewhere. To me, Secret Service agents don't stand around
texting Prez security stuff. They have mics and earbuds when they are working.
I think they don't want to have the texts go public because they don't want their
wives to know what the texts contain lolol...

[MFS62]

No, but there may be messages to "stand down" or about the incident in the car or how Pence's Secret Service guys texted their families when they felt they might not make it. Things that supported testimony we have heard.
Later

[kcmets]

Sounds reasonable. I still don't believe the texts are completely gone.
If I texted you two years ago I was going to commit murder and then I was
on trial that text would certainly be 'findable' regardless if we deleted them
two years ago.

[Ceetar]

Sounds reasonable. I still don't believe the texts are completely gone.
If I texted you two years ago I was going to commit murder and then I was
on trial that text would certainly be 'findable' regardless if we deleted them
two years ago.

Right. They're available to the government but not to you, because we live in a police state. I tried to get my call history for about 18 months prior once from Verizon, was denied.

[MFS62]

I agree with you, Kase. Copies of texts are sent to "the cloud". So even if the phones themselves were to be destroyed, the backup is still there - unless they were intentionally deleted.
Standard IT protocol says everything must be backed up when you are upgrading equipment. It is absurd to believe a security conscious organization wouldn't have standard procedures in place to do that.
And the committee sent a letter to the Secret service prior to the upgrade telling them NOT to destroy the messages. Strangely, the spokesperson for the agency says they can't find the letter.
This smells suspiciously like a cover-up.

Later

[batmagadanleadoff]

Sounds reasonable. I still don't believe the texts are completely gone.
If I texted you two years ago I was going to commit murder and then I was
on trial that text would certainly be 'findable' regardless if we deleted them
two years ago.

Right. They're available to the government but not to you, because we live in a police state. I tried to get my call history for about 18 months prior once from Verizon, was denied.

I know what you mean. That's an outrage and it's total bullshit. I once tried to get some old emails of mine that were lost but only a few months before I sought them. I couldn't. I tried practically everything short of starting some legal procedure. The short answer was that the email provider told me that the emails were gone. Forever. What a fucking crock of shit. There's no doubt that if I was some murder suspect in a Federal crime and the FBI needed those emails to make their case, they'd have those emails within 25 minutes of requesting them.

[Ceetar]

nah, wouldn't be 25 minutes. I suspect they're super-compressed and in storage somewhere. Same with the call logs. Those used tobe freely available for YEARS on the website, but to decrease server costs, companies are offloading data and taking it offline and such. They'd have to wake up the Sysadmin and have him find the password to the server room, and spin up the thing...

so maybe half a day. ;-)

[metsmarathon]

my experience in government tells me that it is entirely believable that the texts were lost due to a software update, and that the responsibility to backup said texts fell on the individual agents.

[Edgy MD]

The problems are that (1) we're talking about disappeared texts from a period where great effort was taken on multiple fronts to obscure the president's activities and who was enabling him in those activities, and (2) there has been a shifting explanation of why they have gone missing.

Beyond that, we're seeing continuing disgrace and failure over several administrations now by an agency that had been utterly defined by its well oiled competence. It's part of the origin story of the agency that, following the McKinley assassination, the mission of protecting the head of state and highest elected leaders was given to the Secret Service, even though they were part of the Treasury Department, because Congress had no faith in any other agency that they had in the Secret Service.

So, a shitshow of records keeping at exactly the point when the nation most desperately needs their records not only strains credulity, but if its true, is just as distressing.

I mean, is knowing the agents tasked with the agency's most important assignments were grossly incompetent at our hour of greatest need really that much more comforting than knowing they were grossly corrupt and politically aligned with a seditious president?

Either way, I hope the Department of Homeland Security joins with the 1/6 Committee.

[metsmarathon]

oh, no, it's terribly damnable. but also wholly believable. we don't usually pay for the best IT solutions, but (often) the cheapest, without fully appreciating the ramifications of these decisions.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

The problems are that (1) we're talking about disappeared texts from a period where great effort was taken on multiple fronts to obscure the president's activities and who was enabling him in those activities, and (2) there has been a shifting explanation of why they have gone missing.

Beyond that, we're seeing continuing disgrace and failure over several administrations now by an agency that had been utterly defined by its well oiled competence. It's part of the origin story of the agency that, following the McKinley assassination, the mission of protecting the head of state and highest elected leaders was given to the Secret Service, even though they were part of the Treasury Department, because Congress had no faith in any other agency that they had in the Secret Service.

So, a shitshow of records keeping at exactly the point when the nation most desperately needs their records not only strains credulity, but if its true, is just as distressing.

I mean, is knowing the agents tasked with the agency's most important assignments were grossly incompetent at our hour of greatest need really that much more comforting than knowing they were grossly corrupt and politically aligned with a seditious president?

Either way, I hope the Department of Homeland Security joins with the 1/6 Committee.

I don't know half the stuff you just demonstrated you knew about the secret service.

The only thing I or probably most people DO know know what the Secret Service even does or is supposed to do-- it's that when an assassin has somehow concealed a deadly weapon in the cover of a crowd, and as he draws that weapon, and trains it on the president while he's doing presidential things like smiling and waving, or delivering an important speech so he's utterly defenseless, in the instant before the trigger is pulled, that assassin is spotted by a well-trained and dedicated agent of the US Secret Service, who realizes in that instant he won't have time to draw his own weapon faster, so he does the only thing he can do instead, and takes a flying leap "into the line of fire" knowing that he may not survive.

Trusted to Trump, that that idea wouldn't be somehow exploited is almost more likely than a successful presidential assassination. First name "Secret" Last name "Service"

I do know one other thing about Secret Service that's interesting to me, and also involves where the line gets drawn.

I knew a guy from way back, who became a secret service agent during the Clinton admin. But because it "secret" I also knew that whatever he did, was not supposed to be clear to us "regular people," or something you'd necessarily ask about, like if you had happened to see him on the street, because "secret" and he was acquaintance and a good guy back then, also an athlete and a musician of some skill, but we hadn't stayed in touch

So I don;t really understand what he did. I do know though he did time in federal prison, and that it related to something he did, that might have been interpreted as "protecting the president" but actually wasn't that even if it looked like it (the details are unclear, I wanna say I came across it because it came out in scandal of some kind but I don't recall which one or when).

Anyway I saw him for the first time in 30+years a few years back so I knew he was no longer a prisoner. But because "secret" I never pumped for more details in his reply to our re-encounter "Hey man! How you been?"

[Edgy MD]

Always a tough question to ask, even without the Secret Service angle.

　　"Hey man! How you been?"

　　"I've been incarcerated, Lloyd!!"