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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — April 20, 2022

By April 20, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day:   

 

Must Read Stories

The Criminal Conspiracy Is Still Ongoing 

  • New York Times: Fearing a Trump Repeat, Jan. 6 Panel Considers Changes to Insurrection Act: In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some of President Donald J. Trump’s most extreme allies and members of right-wing militia groups urged him to use his power as commander in chief to unleash the military to help keep him in office. Now, as the House committee investigating last year’s riot uncovers new evidence about the lengths to which Mr. Trump was willing to go to cling to power, some lawmakers on the panel have quietly begun discussions about rewriting the Insurrection Act, the 1807 law that gives presidents wide authority to deploy the military within the United States to respond to a rebellion. The discussions are preliminary, and debate over the act has been fraught in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Proponents envision a doomsday scenario in which a rogue future president might try to use the military to stoke — rather than put down — an insurrection, or to abuse protesters. But skeptics worry about depriving a president of the power to quickly deploy armed troops in the event of an uprising, as presidents did during the Civil War and the civil rights era.
  • Five Thirty Eight: More Than 70 Percent Of Trump’s Endorsees Believe The 2020 Election Was Fraudulent: Normally, a one-term presidency would be a sign for a political party to move away, regroup and pivot away from a losing brand. But Donald Trump is not a conventional former president. With the 2022 primary season beginning to pick up in earnest — not counting Texas’s runoff elections, 12 more states will be holding their primaries in May — Trump’s continued influence in the GOP is again being put to the test. It’s tricky for Trump, though, as he must thread the needle of maintaining his hold on the party while at the same associating his name with winning — in other words, not reminding voters of his 2020 election loss. He’s largely done this by backing some candidates who seem sure bets to win their primaries as well as supporting his fiercest allies, those who advocate the Big Lie (the idea that he actually won the 2020 election). […] Support for the Big Lie is particularly prominent in the candidates Trump has endorsed for the House, as we identified that 81 percent (58 out of 72) of the candidates Trump has backed believe in the Big Lie. 

Key Pence Advisor Is Willing To Publicly Testify About The January 6 Plot 

  • CBS News: Retired Conservative Judge Willing To Publicly Testify About Jan. 6 And His Counsel To Pence: J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and leading conservative who advised Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, told CBS News on Tuesday that he is willing to publicly testify about that experience and his alarm over Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  “If invited by the Congress, I would of course be glad to testify,” Luttig said in a statement. Luttig played a pivotal role in helping Pence and his chief counsel in the vice president’s office, Greg Jacob, and outside lawyer Richard Cullen, to forge a legal and constitutional argument for the vice president. Luttig urged Pence and his aides to resist President Donald Trump’s overtures for Pence to take steps to try to delay or even block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

Hometown Paper Urges Senator Lee To Confess His Role The Plot To Overturn The Election

  • Salt Lake Tribune (Editorial): Saturday’s Utah State Republican Convention Would Be A Great Place For Mike Lee To Come Clean, Editorial Board Writes: Confession, it is said, is good for the soul. It should also be good politics. It is past time for Mike Lee to start fessing up to all he knows about the plot to set aside the results of an honest and fair election to keep Donald Trump in power. We know Utah’s senior senator had a much greater role in that plot than he has previously acknowledged, his constituents deserve a much more detailed accounting of what went on and the extent of Lee’s participation in it. Yesterday would be a great time for Lee to come clean. Saturday’s Utah State Republican Convention would be a really good opportunity, too. Utah voters deserve this information as they decide whether to return Lee to the Senate for a third term. And the nation as a whole needs to know every possible detail of the behind-the-scenes efforts to overthrow the election, if only to see to it that it never happens again.

In The States 

Fresh Threats To Voting Rights In Georgia 

  • CNN: Voting Rights Advocates Warn Of Fresh Threats To Ballot Access In Georgia:  Voting rights advocates had warned that controversial elections laws Georgia legislators passed in 2021 would lead to partisan takeovers of local election boards, resulting in a curtailing of Sunday early voting — a popular option among Black churchgoers, a key Democratic constituency. Those fears collided last week in Spalding County — a rural region south of Atlanta — when a newly reconstituted elections board voted 3-2 to eliminate Sunday early voting in the upcoming election. The decision “severely restricts an important voting option for all voters in Spalding County, but especially Black voters who have a historic community tradition called ‘Souls to the Polls’ to mobilize and vote on Sundays,” Aklima Khondoker of the New Georgia Project, an organization that works to expand voting access in Georgia, told CNN.
  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Subtle Change May Have Undermined Georgia Automatic Voter Registration: A dramatic drop in automatic voter registrations in Georgia may be caused by a government website that required potential voters to click a button before they could sign up. That’s not how automatic voter registration is supposed to work. The intent of the program is to register voters at driver’s license offices by default, with an option not to register. The change to automatic registration could explain a sharp decline in the rate of Georgians who opted to register through the Department of Driver Services, from 79% in 2020 to 39% last year, according to government records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The reason for the decrease wasn’t known until pictures of the department’s website surfaced in response to the AJC’s reporting Monday, showing that it had altered its online voter registration form last year.

Headlines

The Ongoing Plot To Undermine Elections
Bloomberg: U.S. Election Officials Face Their Biggest Threat Yet — Jail Time

The January 6 Conspiracy
NBC: Uber driver turns in Jan. 6 rioter who bragged about Capitol attack on dashcam