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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — October 11, 2022

By October 11, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Election Deniers In Arizona And Nevada Have a Good Chance Of Becoming Secretary Of State 

  • CNN (Analysis): These Two Elections Deniers Have A Good Chance Of Winning Jobs Overseeing Elections:  New polling conducted by CNN shows election deniers in Arizona and Nevada running strong in their bids to be the top election officials in their respective states, a concerning development as the country begins to prepare for the next presidential election. In Arizona, Republican Mark Finchem takes 49% among likely voters to 45% for Democrat Adrian Fontes in the secretary of state race. In Nevada’s secretary of state contest, Republican Jim Marchant is at 46% among likely voters, while Democrat Cisco Aguilar takes 43%. Both results are within the margin of error, meaning there is not a clear leader in either race. Finchem and Marchant have made very clear that they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump – despite the fact that no evidence exists to back up that claim.
  • NBC: Nevada Democrats Sound Alarm As Election Denier Leads Secretary Of State Race: Jim Marchant, the election-denying Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, has so far been outspent and out campaigned by his Democratic opponent. But as the first counties in the state begin to mail out ballots to voters, he has consistently polled ahead of Democrat Cisco Aguilar. Democratic groups have rushed in with ad buys and organizing efforts to try to boost Aguilar’s prospects in the key battleground state. But some within the party have sounded the alarm that it’s not enough. “Marchant can’t be trusted, but I just don’t think a lot of people are even paying attention to the race,” said Donna West, a former chair of the Clark County Democratic Party who now volunteers as an organizer for the county party. “We’ve been knocking on doors, and people aren’t aware of the race. They still don’t understand what the secretary of state does.” The comments by West and others interviewed by NBC News underscore the uphill climb faced by Democrats in winning the office in Nevada, and in other purple states. Along with Arizona and Michigan, Nevada is one of several key battlegrounds where an election denier backed by former President Donald Trump is running for secretary of state, a position that in most states oversees elections. Nonpartisan groups monitoring races with election deniers, like States United Action, as well as election experts in academia, warn that any of those candidates winning could contribute to an even more robust effort to overturn the next presidential election.

Why Little Known State Races Could Have Big Consequences For Democracy 

  • New York Times: Why Little-Noticed State Legislative Races Could Be Hugely Consequential: The struggle for the Michigan Senate, as well as clashes for control of several other narrowly divided chambers in battleground states, have taken on outsize importance at a time when state legislatures are ever more powerful. With Congress often deadlocked and conservatives dominating the Supreme Court, state governments increasingly steer the direction of voting laws, abortion access, gun policy, public health, education and other issues dominating the lives of Americans. The Supreme Court could soon add federal elections to that list. The justices are expected to decide whether to grant nearly unfettered authority over such elections to state legislatures — a legal argument known as the independent state legislature theory. If the court does so, many Democrats believe, state legislatures could have a pathway to overrule the popular vote in presidential elections by refusing to certify the results and instead sending their own slates of electors. While that might seem like a doomsday scenario, 44 percent of Republicans in crucial swing-state legislatures used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a New York Times analysis. More like-minded G.O.P. candidates on the ballot could soon join them in office.

Cassidy Hutchison Is Cooperating With The Georgia Election Investigation While Grand Jury Seeks Testimony From Gingrich And Flynn 

  • CNN: Former White House Aide Cooperating With Investigation Of Trump Effort To Overturn Election Results: An Atlanta-area prosecutor investigating Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election has secured cooperation from former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. Hutchinson, whose cooperation has not previously been reported, became a prominent witness during a summer hearing for the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection. The former top aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows could offer Georgia prosecutors insights about what she witnessed in the West Wing, as well as steps her former boss took specifically when it came to Georgia.
  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Trump Probe: Fulton Jurors Seek Testimony From Gingrich, Flynn:  The Fulton County special grand jury investigating potential interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections is seeking testimony from a new batch of former President Donald Trump’s allies, including ex-Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich. In addition to the former House speaker, jurors are requesting testimony from Michael Flynn, Trump’s ex-national security adviser, and former White House counsel Eric Herschmann in mid- and late November. The petitions, technically known as certificates of material witness, were filed Friday and approved by Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney. Once greenlit by a judge in a witness’ home state, they essentially function as subpoenas.

The GOP Is Embracing Its Most Extreme Anti-Democratic Fringe 

  • Associated Press: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Rises From Gop Fringe To Front: Marjorie Taylor Greene took her seat directly behind Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy, a proximity to power for the firebrand congresswoman that did not go unnoticed, as he unveiled the House GOP’s midterm election agenda in Pennsylvania. Days later, she appeared on stage warming up the crowd for Donald Trump, when the former president rallied voters in Michigan to cast ballots for Republicans, including for control of Congress. Once shunned as a political pariah for her extremist rhetoric, the Georgia congresswoman who spent her first term in the House stripped of institutional power by Democrats is being celebrated by Republicans and welcomed into the GOP fold. If Republicans win the House majority in the November election, Greene is poised to become an influential player shaping the GOP agenda, an agitator with clout. “No. 1, we need to impeach Joe Biden. No. 2, We need to impeach Secretary Mayorkas. And No. 3, we should impeach Merrick Garland,” Greene told The Associated Press outside the U.S. Capitol. Alejandro Mayorkas is the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and Garland the attorney general. Scolding the media for having been “wrong about me” from the start, she said those who know better “take me very seriously.”
  • The Atlantic: Trumpism Has Found Its Leading Lady: The way [Kari] Lake has imitated Trump’s rhetoric is obvious, but as I’ve followed her in the months since, something else has become clear: She is much better at this than Trump’s other emulators. That makes sense, given her first career in front of the camera, cultivating trust among thousands of Maricopa County viewers. But this is more than imitation: Lake has made MAGA her own. She’s agile as a politician in a way that other high-profile Trump-endorsed candidates, like scandal-plagued Herschel Walker and crudités-eating Mehmet Oz, are not. Lake is more likable than Senate hopefuls like Blake Masters or J. D. Vance. And she bats at the press with a vivacity unmatched by anyone but the big man himself. Lake is in a neck-and-neck race in Arizona, but she arguably has a better chance than any other famous Trump endorsee this cycle. Her Democratic opponent, the current Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, is a remarkably dull candidate who has refused to debate Lake, calling her a “conspiracy theorist.” That refusal might be a gift: This week, Lake will get a 30-minute solo interview on the local PBS affiliate. If Lake wins in November, the stakes are clear: Her administration will oversee elections in a swing state that will help decide the next president of the United States. All “Stop the Steal” candidates pose a threat to American democracy, but Lake’s race “is a category on its own,” Tim Miller, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, told me. “On a scale of one to 10, this is a 13-level threat.”
  • Associated Press: Michigan GOP Statewide Candidates Stick To Far-Right Message: With voting underway in Michigan’s general election, the Republican nominee for secretary of state stepped on stage as a warm-up act for former President Donald Trump and hit hard on the main theme of her campaign. Kristina Karamo repeated unfounded assertions about the 2020 presidential election that have been repeatedly debunked. She told the crowd at the recent rally at Macomb Community College that “authoritarians” are giving millions to her Democratic opponent — Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — in an attempt to “corrupt battleground state election systems so they can control America.” “If you look at history, it shows you what tyrants do,” said Karamo, a former community college professor. “History is telling us, history is screaming to us, that if we don’t step up and fight now, we will lose the greatest country in human history.” It was an address designed to rev up the crowd of devoted Trump followers, some of whom have latched onto the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory. While Karamo’s speech drew cheers, relying on a general election strategy that appeals to the most far-right voters is a gamble for Michigan Republicans. Candidates who have to play to their party’s base during primaries or nominating conventions often shift toward the center, aiming to attract more voters for the general election. But that hasn’t happened this year for the Republicans seeking Michigan’s top three statewide offices — governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

Oath Keepers Urged Trump To Invoke The Insurrection Act And Warned Of A “Bloody” War Prior To The January 6 Attack On The Capitol

  • New York Times: Oath Keepers Leader Urged Trump to Invoke the Insurrection Act: In December 2020, hours after the Electoral College cast its votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, posted a letter on his website urging President Donald J. Trump to undertake a series of unprecedented — and possibly illegal — moves to stay in office. Telling Mr. Trump the country was at war with “Communist China” and a secret army of “willing American agents,” Mr. Rhodes beseeched the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give Mr. Trump the power to call up the National Guard and militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him. The open letter, which was shown on Friday to the jury at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates on seditious conspiracy charges, demanded that Mr. Trump take more wild steps to maintain his grip on power. Mr. Rhodes instructed the president to seize data from digital voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged; declassify a trove of the nation’s secrets; and then perform a WikiLeaks-style “data dump,” exposing a supposed cabal of corrupt judges, law enforcement officers and state election officials. All of this was followed by a threat of violence against Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, his vice president-elect. “If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Mr. Rhodes told Mr. Trump, “We the People will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”

In The States 

ARIZONA: Blake Masters Continues To Elevate False Election Claims  

  • Washington Post (Analysis): Asked To Reject False Election Claims, Blake Masters Elevates Them: If you go to venture capitalist Blake Masters’s Twitter feed, you can still see the ad he posted in November 2021 as he first began his campaign for the Republican nomination for Senate in Arizona. It begins unequivocally, with Masters speaking to the camera: “I think Trump won in 2020.” His flat assertion almost certainly contributed to Donald Trump’s eventual endorsement of Masters, which probably contributed to his primary win. But the sentiment, that Trump won, carries a different tone in the general election — and it came up in the first general election debate including Masters and incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D). “Is Joe Biden the legitimately elected president of the United States?” moderator Ted Simons asked. “Joe Biden is absolutely the president,” Masters replied. “I mean, my gosh, have you seen the gas prices lately?” This pivot — from “was his election legitimate” to “is he president” — is a hoary one and one that didn’t fool Simons. But it was appropriate as an introduction to the subject as Masters then proceeded to try to simultaneously suggest that elections were imperiled by fraud, deny that 2020 was derailed by fraud and elevate a dishonest alternate theory for how the election was stolen from Trump.

NEW HAMPSHIRE:  How New Hampshire Is Trying To Restore Voter Confidence 

  • Washington Post: In Time Of Distrust, How One State Is Trying To Boost Voter Confidence: Since May, the New Hampshire Special Committee on Voter Confidence has traveled the length of the state holding public hearings that are part civics roadshow, part airing of grievances. The committee’s stated goal is to identify the causes of the decline in voter confidence and recommend ways to reverse it. Left unstated is the unprecedented nature of the current moment, where former president Donald Trump and Republican candidates continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election. Embedded in the bipartisan exercise in New Hampshire is a fundamental tension: Can you reassure voters that the electoral process is sound while providing skeptics a forum for their concerns?

What Experts Are Saying

Elaine C. Kamarck, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institute and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management, and Norman Eisen, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institute: “The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed. Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the ‘Big Lie’ a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump…So far, we have been able to identify 345 candidates who will be on the ballot in November who have expressed election denial beliefs—false claims that the presidential election in 2020 was flawed…As one can see, more than half of the election deniers look like they will win their races.” Brookings 

Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University: “We all live in states. And they are diverging more rapidly than we can track, in a manner that exposes Justice Kavanaugh’s happy talk about how this court’s decisions will work in practice as cynical in the extreme. One conclusion is inescapable: The war for democracy in America will be lost—or won—in the states. The reality in the U.S. today is the opposite of what Kavanaugh avowed. Federalism is not the solution to our problems. Federalism is the problem.” The New Republic    

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “‘Election denialism is a form of corruption,’ said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and a historian at New York University. ‘The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity. These politicians are essentially conspiring to make party dogma the idea that it’s possible to reject certified results.’” Daily Kos

Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law, re: Trump’s reported idea to try to cut a deal to exchange materials at Mar-a-Lago for documents from the FBI’s 2016 campaign Russia investigation: “This suggests Trump’s motive for stealing classified documents & hiding them at Mar-a-Lago: They gave him leverage to pressure the govt to try getting his way. Watch him try to use the top secret information he still has hidden away to avoid prosecution!” Tweet 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “While motive is not an element prosecutors have to prove to convict, being able to establish it goes along way to helping a jury understand a crime & deciding to convict. And here, it helps to establish Trump’s knowledge of what was in his possession & his intent to hold onto it.” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Associated Press: Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken Roadshow Recruits ‘Army Of God’ 

Associated Press: Trump speaks via video at rally of global far-right in Spain

Axios: Two Americas Index: Must be fraud

USA Today: Election workers fear trouble, boost security as vengeful threats persist after Trump loss

Votebeat: Federal judge demands True the Vote identify who provided access to poll worker data

Washington Post (Analysis): What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: Judge won’t block Jan. 6 panel subpoena to Arizona GOP chair

New York Times: Stewart Rhodes is Not the Only Oath Keeper on Trial

New York Times: In Trump Case, Texas Creates a Headache for Georgia Prosecutors

Other Trump Investigations 

CNN: Newly released emails debunk Trump and allies’ attempts to blame the GSA for packing boxes that ended up in Mar-a-Lago

NBC: Trump lawyer Christina Bobb speaks to federal investigators in Mar-a-Lago case

New York Times: How Trump Deflected Demands for Documents, Enmeshing Aides

In The States 

Associated Press: Colorado: 30,000 noncitizens got vote registration mailer

Texas Monthly: Texas Election Chief Speaks Out on Conspiracy “Nuts,” Death Threats, and President Biden’s Legitimacy

Rolling Stone: The Retreat of the MAGA General

Washington Post: Arizona GOP raised record money with misleading pitches on election audit