Remember the day after the 2020 election when Rudy Giuliani held that loony press conference in front of a landscaping company in Philadelphia with the porn shop across the street? Standing behind Rudy that day (see pic above) was his chief go-fer, Bernie Kerik, who had spent four years as a tenant at the Cumberland Federal Prison Camp for eight felonies related to tax fraud and false statements on applications for loans.
Kerik knew a little bit about crime because he was previously Commissioner of the NYPD, an appointment courtesy of his asshole buddy, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And don’t think that Trump wasn’t grateful for Kerik’s work on his campaign, because he granted Bernie a full and complete pardon two days before we got rid of that phony blonde, his fat ass and his good-for-nothing son-in-law as well.
Kerik’s payback from Trump was partially a favor owed Rudy but was also recognition of the time and effort spent by Kerik to help fashion and promote the idea of election ‘fraud.’ Kerik participated in that effort as a volunteer leader of the team that conducted the so-called ‘research’ into the national vote-stealing conspiracy. As he told the 1/6 Select Committee, he had a lot of experience conducting criminal investigations - his testimony was released Tuesday night.
You can download all the testimony right here.
Did I read all 227 pages of Kerik’s testimony last night? Does a bear sh*t in the woods? Is New York a city? No – it’s a jungle!
In fact, Kerik didn’t conduct any investigations into the so-called ‘conspiracy’ to steal the election from Trump. His job was to collect affidavits from various locations where voting fraud allegedly occurred and file this so-called ‘evidence’ in a database which could then be accessed by GOP plaintiffs who were challenging election results in court.
Kerik made no attempt to verify or validate any of the eyewitness accounts which individuals aligned with the GOP claimed was what they heard or what they saw. In fact, his attorney admitted [p. 133] that everything that Kerik knew about the election amounted at best to ‘probable cause.’
Probable cause? What’s probable cause? It’s not evidence, or at least it’s not evidence that can be cited as a fact. The word ‘probable’ comes right out from the way President Eisenhower used to answer questions at his press conferences: ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that.’
Kerik told the 1/6 Select Committee that Trump appointed Giuliani to head up the whole legal effort to challenge the Presidential results on November 11th. But Giuliani had been ranting about election ‘fraud’ from at least the day after the election when he held that crazy press conference in Philadelphia, and Trump had been ranting about votes being ‘stolen’ for at least several months.
In fact, Trump was charging that the election was going to be hijacked beginning in April, seven months before the vote. And this strategy was adopted and promoted because deaths from Covid-19 were beginning to occur and would not only hit 5,000 by May 1st, but the numbers were soon going to get much worse.
So, Kerik had his work cut out for him, which is why he ran up more than $60,000 in travel expenses by the time he appeared before the 1/6 Select Committee, expenditures that still hadn’t been reimbursed.
With all due respect to the work of the 1/6 Select Committee, even with the referral of criminal charges against Trump to the DOJ, what Kerik’s testimony tells me is that the Committee was barking up the wrong tree.
This Committee, whose membership included a former prosecutor (Schiff), and a Professor of Constitutional Law (Raskin) should have wanted to figure out how Trump developed the election ‘fraud’ narrative because, after all, just about every one of those schmucks who rioted at the Capitol on 1/6 stated they were angry at how the election was ‘stolen’ from them.
We still don’t know exactly how Trump decided to run his re-election campaign based on a total and complete lie about all those votes and ballots which were allegedly counted multiple times or were thrown away.
What we do know from eight hours of sworn testimony by a Federal jailbird named Bernard Kerik is that Trump had plenty of help to undertake and promote his election ‘fraud’ strategy thanks to two guys from New York who didn’t even get paid for what they did.