Skip to main content
Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — July 7, 2022

By July 7, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Reaches Agreement For Testimony From Former White House Counsel Pat Cippollone 

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Secures Deal to Hear Testimony From Cipollone: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel to President Donald J. Trump who repeatedly fought Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has reached a deal to be interviewed by Friday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The agreement was a breakthrough for the panel, which has pressed for weeks for Mr. Cipollone to cooperate — and issued a subpoena to him last week — believing he could provide crucial testimony. Mr. Cipollone was a witness to pivotal moments in Mr. Trump’s push to invalidate the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud. He was also in the West Wing on Jan. 6, 2021, as Mr. Trump reacted to the violence at the Capitol, when his supporters attacked the building in his name.

Lindsey Graham Will Resist Subpoena In Fulton County Grand Jury Investigation 

  • The Hill: Graham Plans To Challenge Subpoena: ‘This Is All Politics’: Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C) legal team on Wednesday said he will challenge the subpoena from Fulton County, Ga., investigators probing former President Trump’s interference in the 2020 election in the county, calling the investigation “all politics” and a “fishing expedition.” Attorneys Bart Daniel and Matt Austin said in a statement their client was “neither a subject nor target of the investigation, simply a witness” and said they expect to “prevail” in the legal challenge. “Fulton County is engaged in a fishing expedition and working in concert with the January 6 Committee in Washington,” the attorneys said of the House panel investigating the rioting at the U.S. Capitol last year. “Any information from an interview or deposition with Senator Graham would immediately be shared with the January 6 Committee.”

New Initiatives Launch Aimed At Shoring Up Democracy In The US 

  • Politico: Elections Expert Launches ‘Safeguarding Democracy’ Project: A leading elections expert is launching a project at UCLA School of Law to promote democratic norms and “free and fair” elections in the U.S. Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA’s law school and one of the most prominent election law commentators in the country, is launching the “Safeguarding Democracy Project” on Thursday. The project, which was shared first with POLITICO, was launched in part as a response to efforts to undermine confidence in U.S. elections by former President Donald Trump and his allies, including calls to “decertify” the 2020 election. The project will be advised by a number of well-known attorneys, legal experts and activists. The advisory board includes former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, who testified last month before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection; Janai S. Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; and Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook who is now the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, among others.
  • Axios: A Supper Club With Democracy On The Menu: A new, nonpartisan group is organizing dinners around the country for friends and neighbors to gather around a pledge to protect American democracy. Driving the news: Democracydinners.org launched over the July 4 holiday weekend. The partnership with Vote.org aims to allow guests to check their voter registration status or register to vote in real time. Why it matters: It’s part of a growing movement to counter voter apathy, conspiracy theories and lies around voter fraud, as well as some states’ efforts to make it more difficult to vote in the wake of the 2020 election.

In The States 

ARIZONA: Trump-Endorsed Senate Candidate Blake Masters Wrote Approvingly Of Nazis And Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories 

  • New York Times: The Strident Writings of a Young Blake Masters Dog His Senate Run: Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, has been dogged by a trail of youthful writings in which he lamented the entry of the United States into the First and Second World Wars, approvingly quoted a Nazi war criminal and pushed an isolationism that extended beyond even Mr. Trump’s. In the most recent examples, unearthed and provided to The New York Times by opponents of Mr. Masters, he took to the chat room of CrossFit, his workout of choice, as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 to espouse views that might not sit well with the Republican electorate of 2022. As he had in other forums, Mr. Masters wrote on the CrossFit chat room that he opposed American involvement in both world wars — although World War II, he conceded, “is harder to argue because of the hot button issue of the Holocaust (nevermind that our friend Stalin murdered over twice as many as Hitler … why do we gloss over that in schools?).” He did not address Pearl Harbor or say whether he thought the United States should have ignored it. Also on the CrossFit chat room, Mr. Masters, then 20, argued that Iraq and Al Qaeda did not “constitute substantial threats to Americans.”

MICHIGAN: Election Conspiracy Theories Dominate Another Michigan Gubernatorial Debate 

  • NBC: Michigan GOP Candidates For Governor Pledge Loyalty To Trump In Primary Debate: The four leading contenders in Michigan’s GOP primary for governor professed loyalty to former President Donald Trump at a debate Wednesday night while promoting debunked conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “President Trump is still my president,” chiropractor Garrett Soldano responded when candidates were asked if they supported Trump even after recent congressional hearings revealed more about his actions before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Commentator Tudor Dixon described how she amplified Trump’s accomplishments through conservative media. “We have this focus on all the negative and we have this focus on Jan. 6, where there were peaceful protesters and then some who disrupted the process,” she said in remarks about the deadly riot at the Capitol. Businessman Kevin Rinke fondly recalled Trump’s social media habits. “I would take mean tweets today for a safer America,” he said. And Ryan Kelley — a real estate broker who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and has surged to the top of polls since his arrest last month on misdemeanor charges related to the riot — drew a dubious parallel between Trump’s defeat and the cost of gas. “Jan. 6, 2021, back when gas was under $2 a gallon,” Kelley said, leaning into a tidbit that fact-checkers have found was false. “Those were good times.”

PENNSYLVANIA:  Republicans Endorse Josh Shapiro, Warn Of Dangers Of A Mastriano Governorship 

  • NBC: ‘Uphill Slog’ For The GOP As Republicans Start Fleeing Mastriano For Shapiro In Pa: When Doug Mastriano bested Pennsylvania’s GOP establishment to win the nomination for governor, top Republicans feared he was too extreme to win independent and mainstream party support in the general election. Now those predictions are starting to look prescient. On Wednesday, nine former and current Republican officials publicly endorsed Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Other Republicans told NBC News they’ll just abstain from voting in the governor’s race — warning signs for Mastriano that he’s struggling to broaden his support in one of the country’s tightest swing states. Mastriano, a state senator, has been slow to reach out for the support of his former primary rivals. He refuses to talk to most of the local or national media, limiting himself to conservative media outlets, where he talks about abortion restrictions and unfounded election fraud claims. “Most Republicans recognize this is an uphill slog,” said Phil English, a Republican former member of Congress who hasn’t publicly endorsed a candidate in the governor’s race. “Republicans are looking to Mastriano to appeal outside his base and show an awareness of what a Republican candidate for governor needs to win. But he doesn’t enjoy any of the traditional base-broadening qualities for successful statewide campaigns.”

What Experts Are Saying

Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Former President Donald Trump is eyeing a return in 2024. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — militias the Committee has highlighted for their roles as ring leaders for the violence that day — did not see their strength ebb after January 6. On the contrary, violence, first used as a political tool and now partially mainstreamed, has spread. The events on January 6 are not past. They are prelude.” Just Security 

Neal Katyal, former US acting solicitor general, (MSNBC video): “‘There are two buckets of people in this investigation. One are the extremists who…attacked the Capitol…the other are the higher up people, Trump, people around him…the question is what is the glue between these two different groups?’ – @neal_katyal w/ @NicolleDWallace” MSNBC’s Deadline WH Tweet 

Matthew Seligman, election law scholar, re: independent state legislature theory: “‘One nightmare scenario is that a Republican state legislature, potentially with a Trumpist governor, passes a law saying the state legislature itself is the final canvassing board for the state,” Matthew Seligman, an election law scholar, told me. ‘Under the theory, state courts and state constitutions would place no constraints on such a radically anti-democratic partisan putsch,’ Seligman continued.” Greg Sargent’s WaPo column: Why the Trumpist threat in 2024 just got more dangerous

Norm Eisen, Brookings Institution senior fellow, (CNN video): “Lindsey Graham does not have a legitimate basis to resist the DA’s subpoena. A federal senator contacting a state official to selectively disqualify ballots is a political act, not an official one[.] I explained @CNN @CNNnewsroom w/ @AlisynCamerota @aronberg.” Tweet 

Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, re: Republican Senator Lindsey Graham reaching out to Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada election officials: “This outreach had nothing to do with the Senate Judiciary Committee; Graham was plainly working for Trump’s campaign. Further undercutting this argument is that it is not the Senate Judiciary Committee that oversees elections; it is the Senate Rules Committee.” Letters from an American  

Harry Litman, former US attorney: “Giuliani portrayed as ringleader of overall effort in the papers filed by DA Willis to secure his testimony along w/ 6 members of Trump inner circle.And unlike federal system, targets can be forced to testify in GA.” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

New York Times: Internal Inconsistencies

New York Times: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Forbes: Alex Holder’s Trump Documentary Will Show Never-Before-Seen Jan. 6 Footage Sunday—Ahead Of Next Hearing

Politico: Where Jan. 6 prosecutions stand, 18 months after the attack

Other Trump Investigations 

New York Times: Comey and McCabe, Who Infuriated Trump, Both Faced Intensive I.R.S. Audits

Politico: Judge holds Cushman & Wakefield in contempt, orders fines in Trump probe

Opinion

Politico (Ankush Khardori): Bombshell Jan. 6 Testimony Could Hurt a Justice Department Prosecution

Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin): The Georgia investigation remains Trump’s biggest problem yet

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Why the Trumpist threat in 2024 just got more dangerous

Washington Post (Lizette Alvarez): Democratic alarms sound over DeSantis’s new elections overseer

Political Violence

Daily Beast: ‘Satanic’ Georgia Tablets Despised by Conspiracy Theorists Bombed

NPR: The Highland Park suspect breaks the mold on violent extremists

In The States 

Detroit Free Press: Trump-endorsed John Gibbs falsely states Peter Meijer voted to create Jan. 6 committee

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A third Dane County judge orders Michael Gableman to stop deleting records related to 2020 election review

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Group of Pa. Republicans bucking party to endorse Democrat Josh Shapiro for governor