JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE PARTY OF QANON

One of the GOP's witnesses in the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings is a lawyer with a QAnon-adjacent organization that's under criminal investigation:

A top official from the controversial anti-child trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad will testify on the Republican panel at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearing Thursday....

The official set to testify, Alessandra Serano, is the Chief Legal Officer for Operation Underground Railroad (OUR). The announcement from the Senate Judiciary Committee came after a heated day of questioning on Tuesday in which Republican senator Josh Hawley misleadingly accused Jackson of levying light punishments in child sex abuse cases....

OUR has a long history of controversies. Utah's Attorney's Office of Davis County is currently investigating OUR for a number of potential offenses, including misuse of funds, operators possibly being intoxicated on missions and whether its members have "engaged in sexual acts with human trafficking victims," according to a Vice News report published in June 2021, citing a source with knowledge of the investigation.

The organization was founded in Utah in 2013 by Tim Ballard, a former officer for the United States' Department of Homeland Security who in 2019 was appointed by former President Donald Trump to a White House advisory council to end human trafficking....

Individuals with connections to the group have ... had links to QAnon....

At a "Health and Freedom" conference in June 2021, actor Jim Caviezel shared QAnon conspiracies while promoting a biopic where he played OUR founder Ballard as a hero rescuing children around the world, Vice reported. Caviezel publicly claimed that traffickers were harvesting the chemical adrenochrome from children, a common myth in the conspiracy movement.

Caviezel had attended the conference, which featured speakers like the conspiracy theorist and QAnon influencer Lin Wood, to promote the movie....

Although OUR denied having any affiliation with QAnon or other conspiracy theory groups in a statement to Vice, Ballard told The New York Times in August 2020 that some internet conspiracy theories about child trafficking "have allowed people to open their eyes."

This happens on the same day that The Washington Post published a story by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa quoting text messages from Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in which she urged him to redouble efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Not only is Ginni Thomas clearly a zealot -- "“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice," she wrote in one text -- but she also shares QAnon theories with Meadows:

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

During that period, supporters of the QAnon extremist ideology embraced a false theory that Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots so he could track potential fraud. “Watch the water” was a refrain in QAnon circles at the time.

In the Nov. 5 message to Meadows, Thomas went on to quote a passage that had circulated on right-wing websites: “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

... The next day, Nov. 6, Thomas sent a follow-up to Meadows: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.”

GQP? It's an appropriate name for this party.

The bit about watermarked ballots came from a video that Woodward and Costa apparently haven't watched:

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

... The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

It's no longer at YouTube, but I think the video at this Rumble link is the same one. It's dated November 5, 2020, and it concerns the (totally implausible) alleged scheme to watermark ballots using blockchain technology. It appears under the title "2020 Election Sting Operation Donald Trump BlockChain Security Steve Pieczenik Interview."

Woodward and Costa tell us:

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The post is batshit crazy. This is just part of it:

Unless we catch a break, people like this will running the entire federal government by 2025.