This article first appeared in Michelangelo Signorile’s Substack newsletter. To see the article in its original location or to subscribe, click here.

A rush of federal executions during the transition — of mostly Black men — unparalleled by any president in 131 years

While much of the country was swept up in the horrors of the escalating coronavirus pandemic, or focused on the unprecedented assault on the election by Donald Trump and his GOP enablers, the U.S. government has been carrying out more executions than at any time since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1988.

Last night 40-year old Brandon Bernard was executed after the Supreme Court refused to halt his death by lethal injection. He’d been convicted of being an accomplice to a crime in Texas at age 18. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonja Sotomayor writing in her opinion:

Today, the Court allows the Federal Government to execute Brandon Bernard, despite Bernard’s troubling allegations that the Government secured his death sentence by withholding exculpatory evidence and knowingly eliciting false testimony against him.

Jessica Schulberg at HuffPost covered the story and the aftermath:

Bernard, who is Black, was sentenced to death by a nearly all-white jury in 2000 for his role in a botched car-jacking that ended in the killing of married couple Todd and Stacie Bagley. Bernard was not present when his friends abducted the Bagleys and he was not the one to shoot them dead. Christopher Vialva, the man who shot the Bagleys in the head, was executed in September. Prosecutors claimed Bernard was the one who set the car on fire with the Bagleys inside, although the government’s cooperating witness admitted at trial that he didn’t actually see who lit fire to the car.

At 18 years old, Bernard was just barely legally eligible for the death penalty. The teens who participated in the crime and were under 18 received more lenient sentences, even those who were more culpable than Bernard in the Bagleys’ deaths. Two have completed their 20-year sentences; a third is serving a 35-year sentence.

In 2018 Bernard’s lawyers found evidence that was covered up by government prosecutors and would have helped his case, as Justice Sotomayor noted. A majority of the jurors who sentenced him have now said it would have changed their minds. But Bernard was turned away by courts from presenting that evidence before being put to death.

The Justice Department, with Trump’s urging, had scheduled 13 executions beginning in July, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Since the federal death penalty’s reinstatement in 1988, there had only been three federal executions, all under George W. Bush’s administration — one of them Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. There had been no federal executions since 2003.

Bernard is one of five men — four of them Black — to be scheduled to be executed by the federal government since Trump lost the election. With the scheduled execution of Alfred Bourgeois today, Trump will have executed more people in a year than any president in 131 years. No president in more than a century has carried out executions after losing an election and during the lame duck period, traditionally a time when most major actions are put off until the next administration.

To read the remainder of this article, visit Michelangelo Signorile’s Substack newsletter.

Image: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead via Flickr

The two Georgia GOP incumbent Senators facing a tough January 5 runoff election, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are getting help today from several low-level Republicans as part of the right wing Club for Growth’s “Save America Bus Tour.”

Former President Barack Obama and President-elect Joe Biden will both soon be traveling to Georgia to help get out the vote for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who are in the January runoff elections against Perdue and Loeffler.

And while President Donald Trump campaigned for the two Georgia incumbents last week, as expected his rally was mostly a grievance session that focused little on motivating Georgia Republicans to vote.

The stakes could not be higher. If Ossoff and Warnock win, the U.S. Senate will effectively be split 50-50, allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to provide any tie-breaking votes, giving Democrats control of the Senate. And given Democrats already control the House, President Joe Biden would be free to unleash a progressive agenda while reversing as much of the Trump destruction as possible.

That’s why it’s comical that campaigning today for Senators Perdue and Loeffler are not GOP bigwigs, but castaways like former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whose popularity has dropped so far she’s rarely invited onto national television anymore.

Here’s Palin on today’s bus tour, attacking Democrats and calling for a “restoration” of America, despite Republicans having controlled the White House and the Senate for the past four years.

Sarah Palin: "This fundamental transformation of America that they have promised to do — no, we don't need a fundamental transformation, we need that fundamental restoration!" pic.twitter.com/3wGDxIPt2u

— The Recount (@therecount) December 11, 2020

CNN Politics’ DJ Judd is on the road covering today’s “Save America” tour. He’s posted some photos. Despite the Club for Growth claiming it will spend $10 million to help elect the two Republicans, it does not appear there’s much of a turnout.

Kicking off remarks, Marjorie Taylor Greene claims, “I know we’re upset about the election, I know we’re upset about the election for President Trump. We all know that Joe Biden did not win Georgia, we all know that Georgia re-elected President Trump.”https://t.co/Kc6gCsaKUB

— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) December 11, 2020

Also on today’s guest list is Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, accused of being a racist and a liar. She’s perhaps best known as a promoter the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.

Congressman Louie Gohmert, apparently fresh from his coronavirus recovery and a very public lost tooth mid-speech yesterday, is also on the bus tour.

Here he is praising Greene:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) misspeaks while praising Congresswoman-elect/QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene: "She is a huge, wonderful — she's not huge, but she's a great addition." pic.twitter.com/TZWL5h2d3v

— The Recount (@therecount) December 11, 2020

Joining them is former executive director of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, who was the target of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) enforcement action in the 1990’s, and later linked to the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal.

Rounding out today’s campaigning for Perdue and Loeffler is U.S, Rep. Jim Jordan, who still faces multiple allegations about his alleged role in the Ohio State sexual abuse claims against the team’s physician, Richard Strauss.

Good morning from the Club for Growth “Save America” Bus Tour kickoff— Sarah Palin, Senator Steve Daines, and Rep. Jim Jordan are scheduled to speak here at the Cobb County GOP headquarters in Marietta, GA. Also here: Rep. Louie Gohmert, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. pic.twitter.com/RuAazrWvHD

— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) December 11, 2020

Discussing a report in the New York Times that the office of Manhattan District attorney Cyrus Vance has intensified their investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank, CNN’s John Harwood speculated the president might see some jail time.

According to NYT report, “Employees of Deutsche Bank and Aon, two corporate giants, could be important witnesses. As two of Mr. Trump’s oldest allies — and some of the only mainstream companies willing to do regular business with him — they might offer investigators a rich vein of information about the Trump Organization.”

Adding that to the president’s other legal woes that can come into play once he leaves office after January 20th, the CNN White House correspondent admitted that details about what is being discussed are sketchy, but what is known to date indicates investigators have a good idea what they’re looking for due to previous conversations with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

“We don’t know a lot of detail about this, but we’ve gotten outlines of what it may be about from Michael Cohen in his public testimony,” Harwood told host John Berman, “in which he has said before Congress that President Trump had a pattern of lying about the value of his assets, inflating them, in order to either get good publicity or impress lenders, but lying on the downside, deflating them for the purpose of avoiding taxes and this appears to be what Cy Vance is investigating.”

“Cy Vance, remember, a state and local prosecution is beyond the reach of a presidential pardon, so even if the president decides that he is going to pardon himself before leaving office, which is a legally dubious step, never been tried, he could not pardon himself from a state charge,” Harwood added. “This is in addition to the civil investigation that’s underway by the New York Attorney General Letitia James. All of this — again, we do know not if Cy Vance is ultimately going to bring charges — but I think this is one reason why all the talk about Trump potentially running in 2024 has gotten a little ahead of itself.”

“Set aside that he is an overweight 74-year-old man,” he added. “There is also a chance that he could be facing criminal prosecution after he leaves office and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he could end up in jail.”

Watch below: