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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — July 19, 2022

By July 19, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

What To Watch For Today:  

Primary voters head to the polls in Maryland until 8:00 PM.  Opening arguments are set to begin in Steve Bannon’s criminal contempt trial.  

Must Read Stories

The January 6 Committee Isn’t Finished Yet 

  • Politico: ‘Sprint Through The Finish’: Why The Jan. 6 Committee Isn’t Nearly Done: The Jan. 6 select committee once envisioned a single month packed with hearings. Then a fire hose of evidence came its way — and now its members have no interest in shutting or even slowing the spigot. As its summer hearings show some signs of chipping at Donald Trump’s electoral appeal, select panel members describe Thursday’s hearing as only the last in a series. Committee members, aides and allies are emboldened by the public reaction to the information they’re unearthing about the former president’s actions and say their full sprint will continue, even past November. The only hard deadline, they say, is Jan. 3, 2023, when Republicans likely take over the House.
  • Bloomberg: Jan. 6 Panel Extends Inquiry Because Information Keeps Coming: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, which had planned to finish its inquiry by September, will instead keep operating beyond that because more information keeps coming in, the panel’s chairman said Monday night. The chairman, Representative  Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, also said that what had been anticipated to be a final report in September on the committee’s findings will now be a “scaled-back” interim report. He did not predict a date as to when the final report would be completed. Thompson told reporters that “we’re also going to have to do some additional public facing,” though he stopped short of saying whether that meant more hearings, or exactly how many. “We’re just getting a significant amount of information we didn’t have access to,” Thompson said. “And so because of that, obviously, we can’t meet what we felt was an optimistic timeline.”
  • Axios: Jan. 6 Committee Report Will Be Major Publishing Event: We don’t yet know when the House Jan. 6 committee will issue its report. But when it does, it’ll get the treatment seen in the past for the Watergate and 9/11 reports. Twelve Books, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, will announce Tuesday that it plans to publish “The January 6 Report” in partnership with the New York Times. The edition will include “exclusive reporting, eyewitness accounts and analysis … from New York Times reporters who’ve covered the story from the beginning.” Because the report is in the public domain, expect versions from multiple publishers.

Former Trump National Security Official And White House Aide Will Testify On Thursday Night 

  • CNN: Former Trump National Security Council Official Expected To Testify At Thursday’s January 6 Hearing: Matthew Pottinger, who served on former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council before resigning in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, will testify publicly at Thursday’s prime-time hearing held by the House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans. Pottinger is slated to appear alongside former Trump White House aide Sarah Matthews. CNN previously reported that Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary in the Trump White House until resigning shortly after January 6, 2021, was expected to testify publicly. When she resigned, Matthews said she was honored to serve in Trump’s administration but “was deeply disturbed by what I saw.” She said at the time, “Our nation needs a peaceful transfer of power.” Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, stepped down in response to Trump’s reaction to his supporters breaching the US Capitol, a person close to Pottinger confirmed to CNN at the time of his resignation. 

Congressman Jody Hice Subpoenaed In Fulton County Investigation 

  • New York Times: Georgia Congressman Subpoenaed in Trump Inquiry: Representative Jody Hice revealed on Monday that he had been subpoenaed in an ongoing criminal investigation by prosecutors in Georgia into election interference by Donald J. Trump and his allies. It is unclear what kind of information prosecutors are seeking, but Mr. Hice, a Republican, has been one of the most conspicuous proponents of false claims that Mr. Trump was the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Hice, whose district is east of Atlanta, is seeking to challenge the subpoena in federal court, arguing in a new legal filing that his status as a congressman gives him special protections from state proceedings. He has been a stalwart ally of Mr. Trump and led a January 2021 challenge in the House of Representatives to the certification of Georgia’s electors. Earlier this year, he lost a Trump-backed primary challenge to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has had a fractious relationship with the former president.

Support Grows For Efforts To Reform The Electoral Count Act  Before The Next Election 

  • Washington Post (Greg Sargent): A Clever Plan To Foil A 2024 Coup Attempt Quietly Advances: It may seem improbable, given adamant Republican opposition to legislation protecting voting rights, but a bipartisan group of senators is close to agreement on a separate, crucial way to protect our democracy: reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887. That arcane law governs how Congress counts presidential electors. If senators resolve last-minute differences, a stolen 2024 election might become substantially less likely. A serious threat to our democracy is this scenario: A state legislature appoints a slate of presidential electors in defiance of the state’s popular vote, and one chamber of Congress, controlled by the same party, counts those electors. Under current law, those electors would stand, potentially tipping a close election. But now, these senators appear to be homing in on solutions to that problem. If they succeed, it would constitute a substantial accomplishment, thanks in part to the House Jan. 6 committee’s focus on President Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow U.S. democracy.
  • Wall Street Journal (Jimmy Carter and James Baker III): Reform the Electoral Count Act: We stand on opposite sides of the partisan divide, but we believe it is better to search for solutions together than to remain divided. This is particularly true of a vexing problem that could wreak havoc during the 2024 presidential election: the inadequacy of the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The act is an antiquated, muddled and potentially unconstitutional law that allows uncertainty during a critical step in the peaceful transfer of power. […] The need to reform the Electoral Count Act is too great for our elected leaders to get bogged down in the zero-sum game of politics that characterizes Washington today. There will be a time and place to debate important proposals addressing voter access and turnout, ballot security and other election-related issues. But such competing efforts should not be included in current talks about reforming the Electoral Count Act. Doing so would be a recipe for gridlock and failure. Reforming the Electoral Count Act would help our nation avoid a repeat of the disaster that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.

How Stop The Steal Captured The American Right And Remains A Major Threat To Future Elections 

  • New York Times: How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right: Gone, for now, are the big rallies, with their open calls for violence and ostentatious displays of military-style kit, and many of those who organized them. Gone, too, are most of the election audits and other inquiries into the results convened by Republican-controlled state legislatures and local governments, investigations that failed to produce evidence of meaningful fraud. What is left in their place is an insistence — a belief, a lie or an act of motivated reasoning, depending on whom you’re talking to — that the election was stolen, which has fed a new wave of post-Trump activism on the right. In 17 of the 27 states holding elections this year for secretary of state — the top elections officer in 24 states — at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization. In four of the eight Republican primaries held so far, that candidate has won. Scores of groups have organized at the state and local levels to conduct partisan audits of the 2020 election results, support officials and candidates who would do the same and run or volunteer for local positions that operate or monitor elections: the thousands of obscure pressure points in a system that most Republicans profess to believe was turned against them in 2020. Providing the oxygen for these efforts, and often working to connect them, are a cohort of national right-wing media figures and activists, many of them tied to the postelection efforts to stop the transfer of power. It could properly be said to constitute a movement, but one that no longer gathers under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” preferring the good-government language of “election integrity” — though the movement has next to nothing in common with earlier efforts to shore up genuine vulnerabilities in the American election system. It is in essence a new iteration of Stop the Steal, one whose attentions have shifted from the last election to the next one, and the one beyond that.

In The States 

ARIZONA: January 6 Committee Witness Rusty Bowers Needs A “Miracle” To Survive His Primary 

  • NBC: Rusty Bowers Was A Star Jan. 6 Committee Witness. He Says It’ll Take ‘a Miracle’ To Win His Next Election: Curtis Ruhl doesn’t care much for politicians. He doesn’t consider himself to be a Republican or a Democrat and is not planning to vote in Arizona’s high-stakes primary next month. But if he did vote in the Aug. 2 contest, it would be for Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House speaker now fighting for his political life after his emotional testimony to Congress about the intense pressure he withstood from then-President Donald Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 election in his state. […] Bowers himself has no illusion about the task ahead of him — one in which he needs to have voters like Ruhl, part of Arizona’s large, independent voting bloc, choose to cast a Republican ballot on his behalf. “It’s so hostile,” Bowers told NBC News in a phone interview, noting the overwhelming pro-Trump preference of his state Senate district, Arizona’s 10th, east of Phoenix. “If I pull this off, it’s going to be a miracle.” Still, roughly a dozen voters, strategists and insiders who spoke with NBC News felt he had a better chance of defeating his opponent, former state Sen. David Farnsworth, than Bowers himself predicted.
  • Insider: Jan. 6 Committee Witness Rusty Bowers Backs Away From Supporting Trump In 2024, Says He’s Engaged In ‘Tyrannical’ Behavior: Russell “Rusty” Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, is still doing damage control after telling the Associated Press he’d vote for former President Donald Trump again despite testifying to the House January 6 committee that Trump illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 election. Bowers brought up the issue, which he called “the magic question,” during an interview with Insider on Friday that focused largely on his contentious primary race for a state Senate seat in his hometown of Mesa. “Any intimation that I have some overriding, some powerful support for Mr. Trump just would be false,” Bowers said. “I’m looking for a good candidate. And I hope we can certainly provide one, otherwise it’s just going to be a hard thing.” Bowers also said he believes Trump has behaved like a tyrant. “I think much of what he has done has been tyrannical, especially of late,” Bowers told Insider. “I think that there are elements of tyranny that anybody can practice on any given day, and I feel like I’ve seen a lot of it, a lot of bullying and name calling.”

NEVADA: Joey Gilbert Sues To Overturn Gubernatorial Primary He Lost By More Than 25,000 Votes 

  • Nevada Independent: Gilbert Files Election Contest Lawsuit After GOP Governor Primary Loss: Attorney Joey Gilbert has filed an election contest lawsuit after initial results, and then a subsequent recount made at his request, showed he lost the Republican governor primary by about 26,000 votes to Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo. Robert Beadles, a cryptocurrency millionaire and activist who funded the recount, wrote on his website that the lawsuit was filed Friday in Carson City District Court and will prove that “Joey Gilbert rightfully won the primary with 100% certainty. “It’s simple; we prove with mathematical certainty Joey Gilbert is the winner of the primary gubernatorial race and that he had over 55,000 votes taken from him,” Beadles wrote. “It’s a slam dunk case. We’ll post the suit, the exhibits, opinions, etc., as soon as the State publishes them.”

PENNSYLVANIA:  Ultra MAGA Doug Mastriano Holds His Own In Polling, Attempts To Hide His Extremist Past 

  • Politico: MAGA Longshot Is Becoming A Contender In Pennsylvania, Thanks To Democrats’ Election Headwinds: In the immediate aftermath of Pennsylvania’s messy gubernatorial primary — which included an ill-fated, last-minute attempt by the GOP establishment to stop Mastriano — many Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania thought the race was all but over. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee, is a first-class fundraiser with a record of winning tough statewide races. He emerged unscathed from the Democratic primary after clearing the field. Mastriano, on the other hand, has a shoestring campaign, regularly antagonizes members of his own party, and is known for his far-right views on hot-button issues. He chartered buses to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, where he appears to have been part of a crowd that crossed barricades. He believes in no exceptions for an abortion ban. He has said that the state legislature has the power to appoint presidential electors, and as governor, he would have the power to “decertify” election machines. When Mastriano pulled out a win in the primary, many national Republicans kept their distance and, privately, assumed Shapiro would waltz to the governor’s mansion. But as the political environment has worsened for Democrats across the country, the gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected. Polls show Mastriano behind Shapiro by only three to four percentage points, which is within the margin of error. Though many still have doubts about Mastriano’s ability to run a successful campaign, that has made Pennsylvania Republicans more optimistic — and served as a wake-up call for Democrats, particularly in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer: Doug Mastriano Is Deleting His Videos From Facebook As He Runs For Pa. Governor: In early April, Doug Mastriano was recording a Facebook Live video on his phone after a legislative session in Harrisburg when he segued into his thoughts on global warming. The state senator from south-central Pennsylvania, who would become the Republican nominee for governor the following month, told his supporters he wanted to pull the state out of a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, calling it “nonsense” that human activity could significantly alter the earth’s climate. […] The video has since disappeared from Mastriano’s Facebook campaign page. In the last three months alone, more than a dozen other videos have also been deleted. The removed videos include freewheeling discussions in which Mastriano predicts that this November’s election will be marred by Democratic voter fraud; accuses Republicans who don’t support him of looking down on veterans; and calls the fight against abortion “the most important issue of our lifetime.” This has become somewhat of a pattern for Mastriano, 58, a retired Army colonel who bills himself as a plainspoken populist. He communicates directly with voters online, yet sometimes covers his tracks.

What Experts Are Saying

UPDATED: Just Security’s Seventh Edition of The January 6th Hearings: Criminal Evidence Tracker LINK 

UPDATED: Just Security’s Timeline: False Alternate Slate of Electors Scheme, Donald Trump and His Close Associates: Updated to include latest evidence from Select Committee on January 6 hearings. LINK 

CREW Legal Complaint: Secret Service likely broke the law by deleting texts: “The United States Secret Service appears to have violated federal criminal law by destroying text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 after receiving a request for records related to the attack on the Capitol from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, according to a complaint sent today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to the Department of Justice.” Copy of Legal Complaint | More Context 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to impose a 15-year prison sentence in the case of January 6 defendant Guy Reffitt. Reffitt was convicted on five felony counts at trial, including obstruction of Congress’s work to certify the 2020 election, interfering with police, and carrying a firearm to a riot. The allegations against him included threatening to harm his son and daughter when he returned to Texas if they turned him in to the FBI, which his son did. This is the longest sentence DOJ has recommended in a January 6 case, and while the request is not binding on the judge, it’s worth noting because of how DOJ calculated the Sentencing Guidelines, to get to this recommendation. They did it by characterizing Reffitt’s conduct as domestic terrorism. The Guidelines permit the court to sharply increase a defendant’s sentence where it meets the statutory definition of terrorism. But it hasn’t happened so far in a January 6 prosecution. So this is a bit of a watershed moment in the sense that DOJ seems to be drawing a line in the sand. On one side of it, people who overran the Capitol, even some of those who engaged in some forms of violence, aren’t being tagged with the terrorism enhancement. But Reffitt’s conduct, and presumably similar conduct, does qualify for the enhancement. And that could be very instructive if DOJ continues to set its targets higher.” Civil Discourse  

Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College professor of American history: “In fact, the Framers were so leery of state legislatures’ oversight of elections that James Madison insisted on giving Congress the power to overrule them. Since the Civil War, until very recently, the word ‘legislatures’ has been interpreted to mean the state government, so that a state’s legislature cannot, for example, act in ways that the state courts find violate the state constitution. But since the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, in which the Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court to stop a recount of the votes in four Florida counties when Chief Justice William Rehnquist suggested limits to the power of state judges, those interested in reducing the power of the voters in favor of the state legislatures have focused on honing this argument.” Letters from an American 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Buffalo News: Saying Trump ‘lost his mind,’ Jacobs urges GOP to choose another nominee in 2024

New York Times: Bolsonaro Gathers Foreign Diplomats to Cast Doubt on Brazil’s Elections

Salon: Joe Walsh’s MAGA warning: If Trump is indicted, expect “major violence”

Washington Post: Advocates want Cyber Ninjas, which led Ariz. ballot review, barred from federal work

WNYC: Election Officials Are Being Targeted and Harassed

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Politico: Bannon trial set to open Tuesday as jury selection winds down

Washington Post (Analysis): Claims that drop boxes were a vector for rampant election fraud keep crumbling

Other Trump Investigations

New York Times: Word of Trump Media Deal Is Said to Have Leaked Months in Advance

Wall Street Journal: Former GOP Donors Charged in Investment Fraud Scheme Involving Illegal Contributions

Opinion

Bloomberg (Julianna Goldman): Good News for Democrats: Even Republicans Are Tiring of Trump

In The States 

Daily Beast: MAGA-Shilling Kansas Sheriff Volunteered Staff to Transport Ballots: Report

Philadelphia Inquirer: Founder of extremist social-media site working with Doug Mastriano has a message for news media: ‘Repent now’