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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — December 14, 2022

By December 14, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Announces Final Public Meeting On December 19 And Prepares Multiple Types Of Referrals 

  • ABC: Jan. 6 Select Committee Announces Final Public Meeting Monday: House Jan. 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters on Tuesday that the panel plans to hold its final public meeting on Monday, Dec. 19 at 1 p.m. ET — two days earlier than expected. Thompson said the committee will vote on criminal referrals and on report approval next Monday and that its final report will come two days later, on Wednesday, Dec. 21.
  • Politico: Breaking Down The Jan. 6 Committee’s Possible Referrals — Criminal And Beyond: The Jan. 6 select committee’s final act won’t just include recommendations for criminal charges against allies of Donald Trump. Chair Bennie Thompson indicated on Tuesday that the panel was likely to make “five or six” categories of referrals to outside entities for potential misconduct by figures in the former president’s orbit. It was the most specific detail yet that Thompson (D-Miss.) has provided about some of the committee’s most anticipated final decisions. Thompson said the announcement of the referral targets would come on Monday, when the committee convenes for what is likely to be its last public meeting. “Different strokes for different folks,” quipped panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is leading a subcommittee that will present final recommendations on potential referrals. “Everybody has made his or her own bed in terms of their conduct or misconduct.”

New Revelations About Congressional Involvement In The Plot To Overturn The 2020 Election Found In Mark Meadows’ Text Messages 

  • Talking Points Memo: A Plot To Overturn An American Election: TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications.  The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.  The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.
  • Talking Points Memo: Mark Meadows Exchanged Texts With 34 Members Of Congress About Plans To Overturn The 2020 Election: White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged text messages with at least 34 Republican members of Congress as they plotted to overturn President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. Those messages are being fully, publicly documented here for the first time.  The texts are part of a trove Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack that was obtained by TPM. For more information about the story behind the text log and our procedures for publishing the messages, read the introduction to this series. Meadows’ exchanges shed new light on the extent of congressional involvement in Trump’s efforts to spread baseless conspiracy theories about his defeat and his attempts to reverse it. The messages document the role members played in the campaign to subvert the election as it was conceived, built, and reached its violent climax on Jan. 6, 2021. The texts are rife with links to far-right websites, questionable legal theories, violent rhetoric, and advocacy for authoritarian power grabs. One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office. 

Threats To Democracy Remain In 2023 And 2024 

  • The Atlantic: The Threat to Democracy Is Still in Congress:  The defeat of prominent election deniers around the country in last month’s midterm elections is cause for relief and maybe even tempered celebration, but not complacency about the dangers to democracy. Unexpectedly bad results for Republican candidates were, I have written, the result of an anti-MAGA majority that has turned out in three consecutive elections to rebuke Donald Trump and his coalition. But far too many prominent members of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election remain in office for anyone to rest easy. On January 6, 2021, 147 Republicans, including eight senators, voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. All eight senators remain in office. Of the 139 representatives who objected, 124 ran for reelection, and 118 of those won. Each of their votes is inexcusable, but not all objectors are equally egregious; some were more actively involved in the paperwork coup than others. A series of stories at Talking Points Memo, based on former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s text messages, spotlights how many of the worst plotters are still in office. The threat to democracy is coming from inside the House—and Senate.
  • Los Angeles Times: They Beat Election Deniers In The Midterm Elections. Now They’re Gearing Up For 2024: In battleground states, candidates for offices that play key roles in election administration — secretary of state, governor and attorney general — made defending the electoral process against opponents who had helped spread misinformation a central part of their campaigns. Now they’re gearing up for the next challenge: running the 2024 presidential election. After races that were seen by many as referendums on election denialism, the winners say that voters selected them to fight back against conspiracy theories and restrictive voting laws. In a bid to bolster their state election systems, they are advocating for new protections for workers, limits on efforts to block the certification of results and increased funding for equipment and security measures.

In The States 

ARIZONA:  Stop The Steal’s Last Stand In Arizona

  • Semafor:  Kari Lake And ‘Stop The Steal’ Make Their Final Stand In Arizona: The effort to overturn Arizona’s gubernatorial election entered its final stage on Tuesday, after a judge set a late-December schedule for Kari Lake’s challenge to Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs. Democrats have until Thursday to file a motion to dismiss Lake’s lawsuit, which blames “illegal votes,” “intentional misconduct,” and a “botched” election in Maricopa County for Hobbs’s 17,117-vote victory last month. If the motion is denied, evidentiary hearings will be held on Dec. 21 and 22 — not long after Lake addresses Turning Point USA’s “AmericaFest” in Phoenix, where two candidates to run the Republican National Committee will also speak. “I’ve read a lot of crazy election contest lawsuits and this is one of the craziest I’ve seen,” said Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney whose firm is representing Hobbs’s campaign. “Kari Lake’s legal team might as well have unveiled this lawsuit from the parking lot of an Arizona landscaping company.” Christina Amestoy, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Governors Association, called the lawsuit Lake’s “final act” in a “constant ploy for attention,” and the continuation of “the assault on Arizona’s election process that began in 2020.” Neither the Republican Governors Association nor the Republican National Committee has backed Lake’s lawsuit, though the RNC is part of attorney general nominee Abe Hamadeh’s challenge to his 509-vote loss to Democrat Kris Mayes.

GEORGIA:  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger Subpoenaed In DOJ Trump Investigation 

  • Axios: Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger Subpoenaed in DOJ’s Trump investigation:  Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has joined the ranks of election officials subpoenaed in the Department of Justice’s special counsel’s investigation of former President Trump. Why it matters: Subpoenas had previously been sent to officials in Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan — indicating the investigation has broadened past just Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack Driving the news: Raffensperger received a subpoena broadly for communications with or involving Trump, his campaign or staff and relevant records or documents, Axios has confirmed. The request also specifically asked for communications with more than a dozen individuals known to have been involved in Trump’s efforts after the 2020 election, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Cleta Mitchell.

NORTH CAROLINA:  Scrutiny Ramps Up On Mark Meadows In NC And DC

  • Raleigh News and Observer:  Scrutiny Ramps Up On Meadows At The Capitol And In NC. The Latest On Two Investigations: North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation has finished its inquiry into whether Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, committed voter fraud. Meanwhile, a U.S. House committee is wrapping up its own investigation into the Jan. 6, 2022, riot at the Capitol, and Meadows has emerged as a key player in the events of that day. The committee has said it plans to make criminal referrals of unspecified people to the U.S. Department of Justice next week. Many of Meadows’ text messages were turned over to the committee, and some have been published in the months since its investigation began, showing what Fox News personalities, members of Congress, a Supreme Court justice’s wife and others said to Meadows. In the latest disclosure, the website Talking Points Memo obtained some 450 texts between Meadows and Republican members of Congress — including Reps. Ted Budd and Greg Murphy of North Carolina — and published many on Monday. The latest texts show lawmakers egged on opposition to the 2020 election results and stoked Trump’s claims of fraud.

What Experts Are Saying

Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor, and Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor emeritus and a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School: “We’ve long known that Trump and his campaign ran a multipronged, post-election scheme to persuade battleground state Republicans to reverse their state’s certifications of President Joe Biden’s win. Trump lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman seem to have led it, appearing before battleground state legislative bodies to argue Trump’s case. And Trump personally participated. He called for friendly legislatures to help him stay in office. He introduced Giuliani on a call where the former New York City mayor made an unsuccessful pitch to Arizona’s then–Senate Majority Leader Rusty Bowers to appoint “fake electors” to cast Electoral College votes for Trump. The concerted, multistate effort looks very much like the basis for charging a conspiracy to defraud the United States of its lawful government function in a presidential election. Smith’s Dec. 6 subpoenas aim to collect evidence of the scheme held by state officials.” Slate Op-Ed: The Special Counsel Investigating Trump Is Wasting No Time

Barbara McQuade, former US attorney (MSNBC Video): “‘If they’re still out there in a storage locker or somebody’s basement, that exposes the US to grave harm.’ @BarbMcQuade says Trump’s team needs to attest that there are no more classified documents floating around, which is a huge national security risk.” The Katie Phang Show Tweet 

Colby Galliher, research analyst at the Brookings Institution, and Norman Eisen, Brookings senior fellow: “A survey of the seven states [Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin] where Republican electors are reported to have met on December 14, 2020—the day the Electoral College convened to cast its votes for president—reveals a factual and legal basis for other state investigations of those officials who took the origins of the election denial movement to an extreme: potential criminal wrongdoing. The false electors signed their names to documents that claimed they were “duly elected and qualified” electors from their state (implying President Trump won the popular vote in their states, when he did not). Then those documents were submitted to Congress and the National Archives, raising the question of whether the false electors may have violated state laws in jurisdictions other than Georgia. This essay summarizes the known facts surrounding the false electors’ activities in each of the seven states where false slates were created, as well as a sampling of potentially applicable state laws that may be implicated by the electors’ conduct.” Brookings: Democracy on the ballot—will false electors be investigated? 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

CBS: White House: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest Jan. 6 comments a “slap in the face” to law enforcement, victims’ families

Politico: Post-Jan.-6 presidential certification reform included in spending package, Schumer says

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: Appeals court weighs DOJ’s use of obstruction charge in January 6 Capitol rioter cases

HuffPost: Ralph Norman Only Regrets Misspelling ‘Martial’ In ‘Marshall Law’ Text

Rolling Stone: Jan. 6 Staffers Prepare for All-Out Republican Assault

Talking Points Memo: Texts Reveal Four Trump Allies Mixed Requests For Pardons With Big Lie Boosterism

Talking Points Memo: As The 2020 Election Slipped Away, Andy Biggs And Mark Meadows Schemed To Reverse The Vote In Arizona 

Talking Points Memo: Rep. Rick Allen Shared ‘Wild’ Romanian YouTube Conspiracy Theories As He Challenged The 2020 Election

Other Trump Investigations

New York Times: Trump Organization Was Held in Contempt After Secret Trial Last Year

Washington Post: House committee asks National Archives to review Trump storage unit

Opinion

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): The plan to stop a future Trumpist coup moves closer to reality