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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — December 12, 2022

By December 12, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

What The January 6 Committee’s Report Will Look Like 

  • Politico: What The Jan. 6 Select Committee’s Final Report Will Look Like: The Jan. 6 select committee’s final report will begin with a voluminous executive summary describing former President Donald Trump’s culpability for his extensive and baseless effort to subvert the 2020 election, according to people briefed on its contents. Drafts of the report, which the people briefed say have been circulating among committee members for weeks, include thousands of footnotes drawn from the panel’s interviews and research over the past 16 months into Trump’s activities in the frenzied final weeks that preceded Jan. 6, 2021 — when a mob of his supporters battered police and stormed the Capitol. The committee members are expected to formally approve the report at a Dec. 21 public meeting of the panel described by Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). Lawmakers will be able to propose final edits before the draft is expected to be sent to the Government Publishing Office for printing later this week. The final report, according to those briefed on it, will have eight chapters that align closely with the evidence the panel unveiled during its public hearings in June and July:  1. Trump’s effort to sow distrust in the results of the election; 2. Trump’s pressure on state governments or legislatures to overturn victories by Joe Biden; 3. Trump campaign efforts to send pro-Trump electors to Washington from states won by Biden; 4. Trump’s push to deploy the Justice Department in service of his election scheme; 5. The pressure campaign by Trump and his lawyers against then-Vice President Mike Pence; 6. Trump’s effort to summon supporters to Washington who later fueled the Jan. 6 mob; 7. The 187 minutes during which Trump refused to tell rioters to leave the Capitol; 8. An analysis of the attack on the Capitol
  • Bloomberg: Jan. 6 Panel Members Say Criminal Referrals Would Be Important Marker: Members of a House panel on Sunday discussed urging criminal prosecutions against aides and allies of former President Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, and adjourned without announcing any decisions. Presentations for referrals were made and other topics were also discussed at the virtual meeting, according to multiple people familiar with the talks. A committee spokesman said Sunday night there would be no immediate formal announcement or description of what was discussed or decided.  A list of investigative targets that could be subjects of referrals — which included former President Donald Trump and four top associates — was assembled by a subcommittee ahead of Sunday’s meeting. With a US Justice Department investigation also under way, criminal referrals by the panel “aren’t necessarily something that is going to wake DOJ up to something they didn’t know before,” Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger said earlier Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “But I do think it will be an important, symbolic thing that the committee can do.”

The 2022 Election Is Over, The Fight To Defend Democracy Is Not 

  • New York Times: The Election Is Over. The Fight Over Voting Rules and Gerrymanders Isn’t: With Raphael Warnock’s victory in the Georgia Senate race on Tuesday, the major midterm elections are over. But the battles over voting rules, restrictions and political boundaries that will help determine who wins the next ones barely paused for ballot-counting before resuming in force. Indeed, the day after Mr. Warnock’s election, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a potentially seismic case brought by Republicans in North Carolina that could give state legislatures significantly expanded power over election laws — and virtually unlimited authority to draw gerrymandered maps. The landscape is familiar. Democrats who took control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota are preparing legislation to broaden voting access, including measures in Michigan that would mandate absentee ballot drop boxes. Republicans, who control a majority of legislatures across the country, are proposing new restrictive legislation they say would combat election fraud, though it remains exceedingly rare. And though both parties have benefited from gerrymanders, Republicans are far more likely to make it a centerpiece of their electoral strategy.

Special Counsel Jack Smith Is Speeding Ahead On Trump Criminal Probes 

  • CNN: Special Counsel Smith Speeds Ahead On Criminal Probes Surrounding Trump: Newly-appointed special counsel Jack Smith is moving fast on a pair of criminal probes around Donald Trump that in recent months have focused on the former president’s state of mind after the 2020 election, including what he knew about plans to impede the transfer of power, people familiar with the matter tell CNN. Though he remains in Europe recovering from a biking accident, Smith has made a series of high-profile moves since he was put in charge last month, including asking a federal judge to hold Trump in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena ordering him to turn over records marked classified. Since Thanksgiving, Smith has brought a number of close Trump associates before a grand jury in Washington, including two former White House lawyers, three of Trump’s closest aides, and his former speechwriter Stephen Miller. He has also issued a flurry of subpoenas, including to election officials in battleground states where Trump tried to overturn his loss in 2020. Smith takes over a staff that’s already nearly twice the size of Robert Mueller’s team of lawyers who worked on the Russia probe.  A team of 20 prosecutors investigating January 6 and the effort to overturn the 2020 election are in the process of moving to work under Smith, according to multiple people familiar with the team. Smith will also take on national security investigators already working the probe into the potential mishandling of federal records taken to Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Would Have “Won” January 6 With Armed Protestors 

  • HuffPost: Marjorie Taylor Greene Says ‘We Would’ve Won’ If She Organized The Jan. 6 Attack: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) suggested the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol would have been successful if she’d been running the show. “I want to tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” she said of the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt by supporters of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the New York Post. Greene made the comment during a speech filled with “one-liners trolling the political left” at an annual gala hosted by the New York Young Republican Club in Manhattan, the Post reported. The guest list included a range of high-profile right-wingers, including Rudy Giuliani and Bannon, both former Trump advisers, and Donald Trump Jr., who reportedly spoke after Greene. Members of the white nationalist website VDARE, right-wing propaganda group Project Veritas and far-right political operative Jack Posobeic were also at the event. Republican speakers repeatedly voiced anti-democratic and authoritarian ideology, which received loud cheers from audience members, SPLC reported.

In The States 

ARIZONA:  Kari Lake And Other Arizona Republicans Sue To Overturn Their Election Losses 

  • Arizona Republic: Kari Lake Alleges ‘Intentional Misconduct’ In Lawsuit That Seeks To Overturn Election Loss To Hobbs: Former candidate for governor Kari Lake on Friday filed a lawsuit asking the courts to set aside her electoral loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs and declare her the winner instead. If a judge won’t declare her the winner, Lake wants an order requiring Maricopa County to re-do the gubernatorial election. Lake, a former television news anchor and first-time candidate for office, has signaled for weeks she would file a legal challenge over the election, which saw her fall 0.7 percentage points — or about 17,000 votes — short of Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state. That filing came Friday, within a five-day window from certification of the election result that is set in Arizona law, and on the same day that several defeated Republican candidates filed their own challenges. Former candidate for governor Kari Lake on Friday filed a lawsuit asking the courts to set aside her electoral loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs and declare her the winner instead. If a judge won’t declare her the winner, Lake wants an order requiring Maricopa County to re-do the gubernatorial election. Lake, a former television news anchor and first-time candidate for office, has signaled for weeks she would file a legal challenge over the election, which saw her fall 0.7 percentage points — or about 17,000 votes — short of Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state. That filing came Friday, within a five-day window from certification of the election result that is set in Arizona law, and on the same day that several defeated Republican candidates filed their own challenges.

What Experts Are Saying

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: “Over the past six years, Republican officials, and the rank and file, have learned how to live with Trump because they believe that he can win, and that his loyal base can help them be victorious. Whether it was out of fear or hope, Republicans showed that they would tolerate almost anything – even trying to overturn an election – to protect him.  A week like this might shatter that status quo. Now that there are more Republicans, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who could possibly do Trumpism in more effective fashion, the former president’s standing within the party inevitably becomes more precarious.” CNN Op-Ed: Trump’s terrible week sends a message to GOP

Aziz Huq, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School: “Both phenomena [election violence and Moore v. Harper] instead suggest a much more profound dissatisfaction with the orderly operation of democracy. Both imply a deeply felt resistance to popular rule in favor of a political order of yesteryear that has the trappings, not the substance, of democracy. Trump himself may or may not be fading from view. But such well-rooted resistance to the idea of fair and orderly elections is not going away. Whatever the Court ultimately decides, we will be living in the shadow of these antidemocratic fever dreams for some time to come.” TIME Op-Ed: American Democracy Is Under Threat—Again

Evan Caminker, former dean and current Branch Rickey Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School: “The checks and balances currently in place for federal election rules are critical to ensure that partisan politicians in state legislatures do not abuse their power and subvert the will of voters. But the aggressive view of ISLT pressed in the Moore litigation could pave the way for partisan gerrymandering, vote suppression and other tactics that undermine democracy. In Michigan, the Supreme Court’s decision on ISLT could open the door to eliminating legislative no-excuse absentee voting, automatic voter registration and even the independent redistricting commission. It is critical to protect the role of state courts as a check on state legislatures — because ultimately, state courts protect the people’s voice at the ballot box.” Detroit News Op-Ed: Supreme Court must protect fair elections from partisan legislators 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

New York Post: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump Jr. bash Dems at NY Young Republican gala

Politico: Inside the secret $32M effort to stop ‘Stop the Steal’

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: January 6 committee ends meeting on criminal referrals

Other Trump Investigations

ABC: Judge declines DOJ request to hold Trump team in contempt over classified documents: Sources

Washington Post: Congressional Republicans divided on attacking Trump investigations

Opinion

New York Times (Nicholas Kristoff): Trump Struggles, but America Is Still Feverish

In The States

Washington Post: How Kari Lake’s campaign to be the Trump of 2022 unraveled