About a month ago, I would’ve said there’s no chance Donald Trump will be indicted, and I still think that you’re not gonna see that on a federal level. But Trump may yet see the inside of a prison cell, thanks to the efforts of Fani Willis, the first woman to hold the office of District Attorney in Fulton County, Georgia.

Because of the Georgia Republicans’ zeal to put Democrats like Stacey Abrams behind bars — Democrats who are guilty of registering hundreds of thousands of voters in Georgia — the state created its own racketeering laws, which make it a lot easier to prosecute people than under the federal RICO statute. Specifically, Georgia made interference in the election process count as a “predicate act”, which is a prerequisite for RICO prosecutions.

Ironically, this now leaves Trump open to a racketeering prosecution in Georgia, and a grand jury has been impaneled in Atlanta, which is looking into whether the former president and his cronies interfered with and tried to overturn the legal vote count in Georgia. Beyond the attempt to use a slate of phony electors to overturn Joe Biden’s win, the grand jury may also be investigating Trump’s role in instigating and organizing the violence that took place not only at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but also before the January 6th insurrection at the Georgia State Capitol and Governor’s Mansion.

In the latest Election Crimes Bulletin, first broadcast on Pacifica Radio’s FlashPoints News on July 28, 2022, host Dennis Bernstein and I discuss the political and technical reasons why it’ll be easier to indict Trump for a racketeering crime in Georgia.

To learn more, and for a transcript of this program, visit: https://www.gregpalast.com/why-georgia-da-fani-willis-is-the-biggest-threat-to-donald-trump/

Nullification, as Martin Luther king called it, is a continuing theme in the fight against the right to vote. And it wasn't just the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In 1877 you had a successful overturning, a nullification of the vote, so it can happen again.

In Dinesh D’Souza’s new film #2000Mules — which claims to prove the 2020 election was stolen by an army of mules that stuffed ballot drop-boxes with fraudulent votes — they don’t show the face or give us the name of a single perp. Why not? They even blur the face of a dog that went to a drop-box with one of these so-called mules! Nice of D’Souza to protect the guilty. Unless, of course, they weren’t guilty. Or just guilty of Voting While Black.

#2000Mules: Fact or Fiction? Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

In his film 2000 Mules, Dinesh D’Souza sets out to prove a giant criminal conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The proof? Well, you can see it with your own eyes: There’s a BLACK man and he is dropping off BALLOTS in a ballot drop box. Case closed! You can laugh now. But crying time is coming. I predict that 2000 Mules will create the platform for Trump’s loss of the election in 2024 — and Trump’s inauguration in 2025.

D’Souza’s charge is mind-blowing... In Fulton County (Atlanta), he tells us 92,670 ballots were stuffed illegally into drop boxes. That’s astonishing — because there were only 79,000 ballots cast in drop boxes in Fulton County! And in Detroit, it was worse. “Mules” stuffed 226,590 ballots into Detroit area drop boxes — way more than the total number of all mail-in ballots — about three times the number of ballots in drop boxes.

In this interview, Palast chats with Zach D. Roberts, and breaks down the flawed math and misleading claims featured in 2000 Mules.

Learn more: https://www.gregpalast.com/2000-mules-belly-laughs-belly-aches-from-dsouzas-proof-that-trump-won/

“I don't want anyone censored, whether you're supporting Democrats, Republicans, or whatever. And I don't support any freaking candidate, because they all end up going rotten, I don't care who they are.” — Greg Palast

“It's a victim's parade, send in the clowns, theater of the mass, whitelist for everybody.” — Jack Blood

In this week's episode of The FlashPoints' Election Crimes Bulletin, John C. Bonifaz of Free Speech for People talks to hosts Greg Palast and Dennis J. Bernstein about his group’s lawsuit, which challenges Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s candidacy for re-election under the 14th Amendment’s Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause

More than 50 activists convened on a power plant in West Virginia last weekend, calling for its closure. By the end of the day, 16 people were arrested. The plant the protesters targeted in Grant Town is one where Sen. Joe Manchin makes nearly $500,000 per year selling a dirty coal waste called “gob.” Gob is short for “garbage of bituminous,” which Sen. Manchin sells to the power plant for a tidy profit via Enersystems, the company he founded and that his son now runs.

The protesters, a mix of local and national activists, call themselves West Virginia Rising. One of them was Michael Whitten, a retired miner from Boone County, West Virginia. “When I worked on strip mines, we threw that [gob] away,” Whitten told DeSmogBlog. “We covered it up, it’s like if you had a wood-burning stove at your home and you wanted to put wet wood in it — it’s just not economical.”

He’s right. The West Virginia customers served by the Grant Town Power Plant, run by American Bituminous Power Partners (AMBit), are being charged more because of the gob. In the last six years burning this waste coal has cost the local power utility an additional $117 million. All of this — even though regulators initially fought the plant’s transition to burning gob — was pushed through thanks to Sen. Manchin.

Manchin, who has a blind trust set up for his investments, has continually been a one-man blockade for climate legislation. That came to a head this year when he essentially killed the Build Back Better bill, Biden’s signature climate and social policy legislation, by dropping his (some might argue never serious) support of it.

Full report by Zach D. Roberts: https://www.gregpalast.com/west-virginia-protest-calls-out-manchins-coal-profits/

#JoeManchin #GrantTown #WestVirginia #WVRising #CoalBaronBlockade #StopGOB #WestVirginiaRising #Pollution #Environment

Russia got 45% of its national budget — that’s all its social programs, everything — from oil and gas royalties, and the price of gas hit the floor during COVID. Russia was broke. Russia was bankrupt before Putin’s war in the Ukraine. Thanks to this invasion, the price of oil has completely reversed the bankruptcy of the Russian state, and now they're making money off this war. So, we have to cutoff Putin’s ability to make money off the oil.

Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil on the planet. If you look at OPEC, they put Saudi Arabia as number two. Venezuela's producing very little oil, not even enough for its own needs at this moment, when it was producing 3.2 million barrels of oil a day — 2 million barrels a day for export. If we unleash oil from Venezuela, then Putin's profit from the invasion evaporates.

Putin is earning roughly, by my calculation, a billion dollars a day windfall from the sales of oil and gas, at prices which today hit about $118 a barrel, with natural gas going up an equal amount. So, Venezuela is the way to stop Putin's tanks, it's that simple. Chevron say that within three months they could bring 800,000 barrels of oil a day to the US from Venezuela, all they need is Biden to lift the Trump embargo. That 800,000 barrels a day, by the way, equals the maximum amount of oil that the US gets from Russia.

This deadly embargo of Venezuela was imposed by Donald Trump. Why is Biden continuing with Trump's policies, which right now are enriching Putin, by keeping 2 million barrels of oil a day off the market? Keep in mind, Venezuela has invaded no one, attacked no one, and they’ve got a president that was elected, even if our State Department isn’t exactly a fan of Nicolás Maduro.

And while Biden is celebrating the fact he got Europe to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which wasn’t in operation anyway, they’re still taking 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas a year from Nord Stream 1. That 1.9 trillion cubic feet a year, which Russia provides through Nord Stream 1, can be replaced 100% by Venezuela, which according to the US Energy Information Administration is capable of over 2 trillion cubic feet of gas production a year for export. They could send this as liquid natural gas to Europe, and completely replace what they get from Nord Stream 1. But we're not doing it, and here's why… It’s being blocked by an axis of awful, which includes two powerful Democrats.

One is Bob Menendez, the Senator from New Jersey who's the only sitting senator who's ever had unanimous censure by the Senate Ethics Committee for corruption. And the other is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was deeply involved in an illegal scheme to move Democratic National Committee money to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Meanwhile Charles Koch is refusing to shutter his operations in Russia, and is using his power and influence to stop any oil flowing out of Venezuela. And, by the way, the Kochs also funded the Clinton administration, which helped put Putin in power. Here’s the thing; when you corrode and corrupt democracy, it has consequences.

As long as the tanks roll, Koch Industries will be rolling in it — in this edition of the FlashPoints, Election Crimes Bulletin, Greg Palast explains why.