The Dictatorship
Bill Cassidy held Trump accountable. Voters responded by humiliating him.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy was one of the few Republicans who tried to hold Donald Trump accountable after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Voters in his home state rewarded him for that Saturday with an overwhelming defeat.
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen,” Cassidy said as applause from supporters overtook him in a speech after his loss. “You don’t manufacture some excuse. You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege, and that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Back in February of 2021, Cassidy was one of just seven GOP senators to side against the then former president in the impeachment trial over an incitement of insurrection charge that drove Republicans apart. At that point, weeks removed from winning his seat once again, it seemed possible that by the time Cassidy was up for re-election, if he decided to run at all, Trump would no longer dominate Republican politics as he faced severe backlash over the tumultuous end to his presidency, and his false claims of voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election that spurred a mob of his supporters to storm Capitol Hill.
“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” Cassidy said in explaining his vote. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”
Most of Cassidy’s Republican colleagues went a different direction, and gave Trump a free pass. In doing so, they provided him with a path back to power that he seized upon almost immediately. Cassidy suffered the consequence of his choice Saturday night in a reliably Republican state.
“Louisiana was not pleased with that vote. They took that as a sign that he had turned his back on the Louisiana voters,” GOP Rep. Julia Letlow told reporters before saying that Trump, who endorsed her to replace Cassidy, is “the best president of my lifetime.”
More than five years removed from a second impeachment trial and acquittal, Trump’s influence over the Republican party is as fierce as ever, a march out of the political wilderness that saw him take back the White House and win every presidential battleground in the 2024 election. Republicans in Congress uneasy with him after Jan. 6 have by and large gathered behind him. Almost all of those who felt differently have either lost office or found themselves largely excommunicated from the party.
Facing voters in an election for the first time since his vote, Cassidy contended the kind of storm that made the unlikely already seem impossible.
Since his last win, Republicans overhauled the state’s wonky style of elections, meaning that Cassidy needed to win over the kind of GOP voters who are the backbone of Trump’s base of support if he wanted to continue on in Washington. His third place finish in the GOP primary this weekend showed how tall an order that was.
Trump publicly coaxed Letlow to enter the race, endorsing her before she even officially announcedgiving Cassidy a stark challenge. The state’s GOP governor also backed Letlow, making a bleak campaign for Cassidy even lonelier.
Cassidy adjusted his tune as the president returned to power. In a telling moment early during Trump’s second term last year, Cassidy, a physician, ended up supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the administration’s leader for health and human services despite clear public concerns about the Trump pick’s anti-vaccine record.
The only Republicans still in Congress today who defied Trump on impeachment have all been saved by unique circumstances, benefiting from different state election practices or representing seats that they alone, as relative moderates, may be able to hold. The rest have either skipped running again or been rejected by voters.
That track record underlines a trend that’s been borne out by Trump’s second term in the White House. Republicans have seen firsthand what happens to those who challenge or defy the president. And even amid a presidency relying heavy on the kind of executive authority that is typically anathema to the GOP, accountability has been few and far between.
Federal campaign finance records show that more than $17 million in outside spending went towards trying to influence Saturday’s primary in Louisiana, with a large amount of that opposing Letlow. That money couldn’t even help get Cassidy to a one-on-one primary runoff. Instead he watched his fellow Republicans side with Letlow and state treasurer John Fleming, both of whom made it to that next stage. Fleming, a former member of Congress who served in Trump’s first administration, loaned his campaign more than $10 million as he tried to prove to voters that he was the real Trump acolyte instead of Letlow.
Fleming’s campaign emphasized his allegiance to Trump in the aftermath of Jan. 6 when the president’s political future seemed so tenuous, claiming on its website that “John stood by President Trump until the end of his first term, and was the last staffer to leave the White House on January 20, 2021.” His campaign even touted that Fleming “was MAGA long before MAGA was cool.”
It’s rare for this kind of loss to happen to a senator, any senator, in recent years. One has to go all the way back to 2012 when Richard Lugar lost a Republican primary in Indiana, to find an incumbent who lost a primary battle after having been elected to the statewide seat before.
When Cassidy took the stage Saturday amid defeat, he gave the kind of speech that was humble, self-effacing, but still with enough implicit sharp elbows towards the president to try and acknowledge why the Louisiana senator had just been rejected by voters. He made appeals to character, integrity and the values of leadership, stressed the lofty ideals that are supposed to tie the nation together — the same kind of tone Trump’s opponents struck back in the 2016 Republican primary, as they dropped out, one by one, and brought the country, and the party, to where it is today.
Cassidy’s loss comes just a few weeks after Trump got revenge on some of the Indiana GOP state senators who had defied him late last year and voted down a plan to dismantle the state’s two Democratic congressional districts.
All of that underlines that Trump’s control over Republicans may be sacrosanct still, even if his ability to sway the kind of general election voters his party needs this fall to keep control of Congress may be more fragile and tenuous.
For now though, Trump has called on Republicans to oust those he’s deemed not fit to be a part of his party time and again.
They’re still more than willing, in most cases, to oblige him.
Trump celebrated Cassidy’s defeat, saying in a social media post overnight that the senator “voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane!”
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend,” Trump said.
Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
The Dictatorship
Maricopa County official fears Stephen Miller’s group has taken over election office
Even the Republican county attorney in Arizona’s most populous locality is sounding the alarm on potential election meddling by MAGA world.
That’s the crux of a court filing submitted by Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell this week. For those unaware, Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager. Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.
Two years later, Mitchell successfully ran for Maricopa County attorney, and she endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024 — in other words, she is not an opponent of the MAGA movement. So it’s noteworthy that she and her legal team are accusing America First Legal, the right-wing activist group founded by White House adviser Stephen Miller, of effectively taking control of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which helps administer elections.
The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona. And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and “take over the voting” in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.
According to The Arizona Republic:
In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken “an unprecedented power grab.”
“The Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview,’” Mitchell’s lawyers wrote.
America First Legal is advising Heap’s office as he battles the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in an attempt to claim official powers for himself. As Democracy Docket reportedthe dispute at one point allegedly involved Heap seizing election equipment and provisional ballot envelopes while votes were being cast in a local election in March, causing county supervisors to warn about “grave chain-of-custody concerns.”
The Arizona Republic said Mitchell listed several examples of America First Legal wielding unauthorized power in Heap’s office amid the dispute with the board:
Mitchell’s request, handled by the law firm of Snell and Wilmer, identified six examples of what she contends involves America First Legal going beyond Blaney’s intended role for them: litigating the power-sharing agreement with the board.
Now, Mitchell argues, America First Legal has claimed authority over all matters relating to early voting, told election officials to disregard directives from or seek advice from Mitchell’s office, threatened prosecution over drop boxes and sent a warning letter signaling new litigation against the board.
Let’s not downplay the crisis playing out here. The GOP-controlled Board of Supervisors and the Republican county attorney overseeing the largest county in Arizona, where the majority of the state’s voters live, are calling out the pro-MAGA county recorder, who stands accused of allowing a right-wing activist group, founded by a White House official, to have unchecked power over electoral processes. (Heap’s office did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.)
The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
A federal judge in Washington has denied a bid Wednesday brought by a watchdog group to immediately block the Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” fund, for now choosing to trust the department’s assertions that it is not moving forward with the fund.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled immediately, denying Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have blocked the Department of Justice from taking steps to create the fund.
Throughout the 30-minute hearing, the DOJ reiterated that the administration was not moving forward with the nearly $1.8 billion fund, which seeks to compensate individuals who allege they have been politically targeted or victimized by the DOJ.
Andrew Block, the only lawyer present for the government, repeatedly cited Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s June 2 congressional testimonyin which he said the administration was “not moving forward” with plans to create the fund.
Leon indicated he agreed with the DOJ’s position that the case appeared to be moot, saying he was not persuaded there was an issue for the court to decide regarding the creation of the fund. He issued a stern warning to the DOJ, saying, “Don’t play possum with this court!” — meaning he does not want to be deceived.
The plaintiffs argued Blanche’s testimony did not amount to an official cancellation. Nikhel Sus, CREW’s attorney, said Blanche “refused to memorialize that rescission,” or in other words, put it in writing. Sus said that was “highly unusual.” Leon responded, “This whole case is highly unusual to say the least.”
Leon asked the government twice why they would not just rescind the order that established the fund. Block responded, “I don’t know,” and pointed again to Blanche’s public statements about the fund’s future.
Both Leon and Sus raised the issue of Trump’s continued public defense of the fund. “It can still be an important issue and also not moving forward,” Block said. “That isn’t a direction to move forward with the fund.”
Although Leon rejected CREW’s bid for an immediate block, he indicated he is still considering its request for a longer-term block against the fund.
A block order from a separate federal judge in Virginia remains in effect until at least Friday.
Fallon Gallagher is a legal affairs reporter for MS NOW.
The Dictatorship
‘Incredibly dangerous’: Capitol officer badly beaten by Jan. 6 rioters says Trump pardons absolved them
When FBI agents confronted Daniel Rodriguez about using a stun gun on a Washington police officer during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he wept, seeming to express remorse.
“I’m sorry,” he said through tears in a recorded interview after he was arrested in March 2021. “He’s a human being with children, and he’s not a bad guy. He sounds like he’s just doing his job and he’s — I’m an asshole.”
Two years later, as he was being led away after a judge sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison, Rodriguez raised his fist and screamed, “Trump won!”
Rodriguez is now a free man. The hefty prison sentences imposed on him and four other people convicted of assaulting police officer Michael Fanone — who was dragged into the crowd and severely beaten — were all wiped away in one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president in January 2025: He pardoned almost 1,600 people charged or convicted for their involvement in the riot.
Trump has used the clemency power like no president in history, freeing fraudsters, drug traffickers and corrupt politicians.
But his pardon of Jan. 6 defendants, more than 170 of whom pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers, stands apart. MS NOW is spotlighting the clemency granted to Jan. 6 defendants as part of a series on Trump’s pardons, “Justice Interrupted.”
“It’s incredibly dangerous,” Fanone told MS NOW in an interview. “You have individuals who were inspired by Donald Trump’s lies to storm and assault the Capitol and try to prevent the certification of a free and fair election. Donald Trump then absolved them of all of their criminal culpability.”
Trump’s first attorney general and his FBI director each told Congress they opposed pardons for people who hurt police officers, but the president did it anyway. Afterward, even some of his biggest backers balked.
“Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer violently, I think, was a mistake, because it seems to suggest that’s an OK thing to do,” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after the pardons in 2025.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said on the Senate floor this past January, “People that harm police officers and destroy federal buildings should go to prison, and it’s a damn shame they’re out.”
Trump has never explained why he freed those rioters who violently assaulted police officers. When correspondent Peter Alexander confronted the president about his pardon of the man who shocked Fanone in the neck, Trump brushed aside the question.
“Among those you pardoned, D.J. Rodriguez,” Alexander said to Trump. “He drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer who was abducted by the mob that day. He later confessed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon?”
Trump replied, “Well, I don’t know. Is it a pardon? Because we’re looking at commutes and we’re looking at pardons.” Told it was a pardon, he responded, “OK, well, we’ll take a look at everything. But I can say this: Murderers today are not even charged.”
But there was nothing, as Trump commented, to “look at.” Pardons are not reversible.
Fanone believes Trump knew exactly what he was doing: rewarding people who committed violence on his behalf.
“I know that he knows that it was violent. I know that he knows that, and I think that that was intentional,” he said.
In addition to Rodriguez, three others who attacked him were spared most or all of their prison terms:
- Albuquerque Cosper Head got 7 1/2 years for dragging Fanone into the mob while yelling, “I got one!”
- Kyle Young was sentenced to seven years, and Lewis Wayne Snoots to six, for helping to restrain Fanone during the attack.
- Thomas Sibick was sentenced to just over four years for assaulting Fanone and stealing his badge and radio.
Liz Oyer, a former Justice Department pardon attorney, said Trump has disregarded the normal tradition of presidential clemency.
“The things that the Justice Department traditionally looks for are acceptance of responsibility, remorse, rehabilitation, a significant track record of good conduct in the community before we would recommend someone for consideration of a presidential pardon,” she said, adding that few, if any, of the Jan. 6 defendants met that qualification.
“This president’s use of the pardon system is really undermining the legitimacy of our justice system,” she said.
In fact, a Lawfare analysis found that at least 97 of the roughly 1,600 people charged in the Capitol attack have been accused of new crimes since Jan. 6, 2021. At least 19 were accused after being pardoned.
One of the first rioters to breach police barricades, Christopher Moynihanpleaded guilty in February in New York to a harassment charge over threats to kill House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Moynihan was later sentenced to three years’ probation.
Zachary Alama man a judge called “one of the most violent and aggressive rioters,” was sentenced in May to seven years in prison after a jury convicted him of committing a home invasion burglary in Virginia.
Andrew Paul Johnsonconvicted of illegally entering the Capitol, was pardoned despite having been accused of molesting children. In May, he was sentenced to life in prison for the sex crimes.
Fanone wasn’t supposed to be at the Capitol that day, but he rushed there when he heard the distress calls.
He was pulled into a crowd of attackers as he was trying to keep them out of the building. He was holding on to his service weapon to keep it from being taken from him. But once he felt the excruciating, debilitating shock from Rodriguez’s weapon, he knew he was in a dire situation; in fact, he thought he might be killed.
“I knew at that point that I was not going to be able to fight my way out of this,” Fanone remembered. “I wasn’t even going to be able to maintain control of my weapon. The only solution here was that people in the crowd helped me, and when I yelled out that I have kids, it worked.”
His doctors say Fanone suffered a heart attack.
Trump supporters have wrongly called Fanone a “crisis actor,” disputing that he really was attacked. Ed Martin, who once represented Jan. 6 defendants and is now the Justice Department’s pardons attorney, called him a “fake cop.”
Fanone says his life, and the lives of his loved ones, has never been the same.
“My mother’s been the target of swatting events eight times. She had a credible bomb threat called into her home,” he said.
“She had an individual pull up to her house in a pickup truck, approach her in her front yard while she was raking leaves, and throw a bag of dog feces at her.”
In an apparent attempt to wipe the charges, convictions or sentences of Jan. 6 offenders from public knowledge, the Justice Department recently took down press releases naming them from its website, calling it “partisan propaganda.”
Anyone who tries to find the official DOJ announcements of the convictions or sentencing of the men who attacked Fanone will see only broken links.
Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.
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