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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — May 18, 2022

By May 18, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Election Deniers Thrive In GOP Primaries 

  • Washington Post: Victories By Mastriano, Budd Show Potency Of Trump’s False Stolen Election Claims In GOP: Republican candidates who sought to overturn the 2020 election won statewide primaries in Pennsylvania and North Carolina on Tuesday, reflecting the lingering influence in the GOP of former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the vote was rigged against him. In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Trump-endorsed candidate who led an effort to overturn the election in his state and attended the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a pro-Trump mob attacked U.S. Capitol, won the Republican nomination for governor. He will face state Attorney General Josh Shapiro in November — a showdown Democrats were eager to embrace. Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), who was backed by Trump and among the 139 House members who supported at least one objection to certifying the election, will be the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina. He will face former state Supreme Court chief justice Cheri Beasley, who made history as the first Black woman nominated for the Senate in the state.
  • New York Times: Election Deniers Thrive Even as Trumpism Drifts: 5 Primary Takeaways:  The Republican candidates who did best on Tuesday were the ones who have most aggressively cast doubt on the 2020 election results and have campaigned on restricting voting further and overhauling how elections are run. […] The success of the election deniers comes after a year and a half in which Mr. Trump has continued to fixate on his 2020 loss and, in some places, has called on Republican state legislators to try to decertify their states’ results — something that has no basis in law.

President Biden Issues Stark Warning In Buffalo About Danger To Democracy 

  • Politico: Biden’s Stark Warning In Buffalo:  President Joe Biden arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., today with consolations for a community reeling from this weekend’s mass shooting — and stark warnings for the country. “The American experiment, the democracy, is in a danger like it hasn’t been in my lifetime,” he said this afternoon. “It’s in a danger this hour. Hate and fear are being given too much oxygen by those who pretend to love America, but who don’t understand America.” Invoking scripture and paying homage to the individual victims, Biden played a familiar role of comforter in chief, having met with victims’ families and local leaders/law enforcement before his remarks. Harkening back to his campaign rhetoric about the soul of the country, he also delivered a “message from deep in our nation’s soul: In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word.”
  • Associated Press: Republican Senate Candidates Promote ‘Replacement’ Theory:  Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America.

Coup Plotters Met With Senior Trump Officials At The State Department On January 6 

  • Washington Post: Senior Trump Official At State Met With Election Denial Activists Jan. 6:  On Jan. 6, 2021, around the time that thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department met with two activists who had been key to spreading the false narrative that the presidential election had been stolen. The meeting came as Trump’s allies were pressing theories that election machines had been hacked by foreign powers and were angling for Trump to employ the vast powers of the national security establishment to seize voting machines or even rerun the election. Robert A. Destro, a law professor at Catholic University of America then serving as an assistant secretary of state, confirmed to The Washington Post he met with the two men — Colorado podcaster Joe Oltmann and Michigan lawyer Matthew DePerno — in the midst of the tumultuous day. The two men have previously claimed to have huddled on Jan. 6 with State Department leaders, who Oltmann has said were sympathetic to the claims that a “coup” was underway to steal the presidency from Trump. They have not identified with whom they met. Destro’s acknowledgment is the first independent confirmation that they successfully gained the high-level audience. It is unclear whether the meeting led to any action.

Department Of Justice Requests Transcripts From January 6 Committee For Use In Potential Criminal Prosecutions 

  • New York Times: Justice Dept. Is Said to Request Transcripts From Jan. 6 Committee: The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack for transcripts of interviews it is conducting behind closed doors, including some with associates of former President Donald J. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The move is further evidence of the wide-ranging nature of the department’s criminal inquiry into the events leading up to the assault on the Capitol and the role played by Mr. Trump and his allies as they sought to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2020 election. The House committee, which has no power to pursue criminal charges, has interviewed more than 1,000 people so far, and the transcripts could be used by the Justice Department as evidence in potential criminal cases, to pursue new leads or as a baseline for new interviews conducted by federal law enforcement officials.

In The States 

Lawsuit Filed Against Fake Electors In Wisconsin 

  • NBC: Lawsuit Filed Over Trump Slates Of Electors In States Biden Won:  Two members of the electoral college from Wisconsin filed a lawsuit Tuesday against 10 Republicans who claimed they were the duly elected presidential electors from the state in 2020, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote there. It appeared to be the first legal action against Republicans in the battleground states where supporters of former President Donald Trump sent in what they claimed were electoral votes for him, despite Biden’s statewide electoral victories. Trump urged Vice President Mike Pence to honor the Republican slates on Jan. 6 when Congress met to count the electoral votes, but Pence declined to do so.  The lawsuit, filed in state court in Wisconsin, argues that even though the Republicans were unsuccessful in having their alternate slate of electoral votes counted, “they caused significant harm simply by trying, and there is every reason to believe that they will try again if given the opportunity.”

What Experts Are Saying

Kathleen Belew, incoming associate professor of history at Northwestern University, in NYT: The Long Game of White-Power Activists Isn’t Just About Violence: “It’s not immediately obvious how the ‘great replacement’ theory, often framed as anti-immigrant doctrine meant to preserve predominantly white societies, is connected to the shooting of Black customers and employees at a grocery store in Buffalo last weekend. Those at the store, who lived over 100 miles away from the man accused in the killings, were simply going about their lives (picking up groceries, buying a birthday cake, taking their children for ice cream). But the explanation for both the choice of targets and the brutality of an attack that killed 10 people can be found in the history of the theory. In the American context, it has in its cross-hairs a host of future targets, among them democracy itself.” New York Times Op-Ed 

Elie Honig, former Assistant U.S. Attorney with the Southern District of New York, re: Justice Dept. Request of Transcripts from 1/6 House Committee: “Finally, this underscores the importance of the Committee’s work an upcoming hearings. All their evidence is or will be very much in play for prosecutors. It’s not about any formal criminal “referral” from the a committee – it’s all about the evidence. (End /8)” Twitter 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, re: Trump State Dept. Senior Official Reportedly Meeting with Election Denial Activists on January 6: “We will continue to find out that the coup attempt involved Trump officials in multiple areas of govt. Coup planners must get elite buy-in so the coup will be accepted once it happens. 1/3 of #Strongmen is about coups. Never thought that knowledge would be relevant for the US.” Twitter 

Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” in Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Column: Trump Has Uncorked a ‘Toxic Blend of Extremist Orientations’ describing “religious nationalism”: “a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the ‘right’ religion in recovering that lost greatness. This mind-set always involves a narrative of unjust persecution at the hands of alien or ‘un-American’ groups.” New York Times 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Axios: DHS preparing for violence following abortion ruling

NPR: A pro-Trump film suggests its data are so accurate, it solved a murder. That’s false

January 6 

Daily Beast: GOP Rep. Pushes Bizarre Bill to ‘Expunge’ Trump’s Jan. 6 Impeachment

Politico: Jan. 6 panel unlikely to call Trump to testify, chair says

Politico: Judge mulls prospect of collision between Jan. 6 committee report and Oath Keepers trial

Washington Post: Inside the Jan. 6 committee, key questions remain as hearings loom

Opinion 

Newsweek (Christie Todd Whitman): Promoters of the Big Lie Want to Run Our Elections. We Must Stop Them

In The States 

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Georgia investigation dispels allegations highlighted in ‘2000 Mules’

KQED:  Plot to Blow Up Democratic Headquarters Exposed California Extremists Hiding in Plain Sight

Washington Post: Florida bans protests outside homes