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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — January 17, 2023

By January 17, 2023No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Failed GOP Candidate In New Mexico Who Believes His  Election Was “Stolen” Arrested In Shootings Targeting The Homes Of Democratic Politicians 

  • Albuquerque Journal: Former Republican Candidate Arrested In Shootings Targeting Democratic Politicians’ Homes:  Albuquerque police on Monday arrested the man they say is the “mastermind” behind a recent string of shootings targeting Democratic lawmakers’ homes. The suspect, Solomon Pena, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office in November, has made repeated claims that the election was rigged and appears to have attended the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in Washington, D.C. Around 3 p.m. APD’s SWAT team swarmed a condominium complex near the ABQ BioPark Zoo to execute a search warrant. They made announcements for Pena — who they said may be armed with a firearm — to surrender as drones flew overhead. Within an hour officers had arrested Pena, who is accused of paying four men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators, Police Chief Harold Medina announced Monday evening. Investigators also believe Pena was present for at least one of the shootings. Pena ran unsuccessfully in the House District 14 race and claimed on social media he should have won the election. He also visited three of the targeted officials’ homes unannounced in November complaining the election was fraudulent and should not be certified.

Election Deniers Try New Tactics But Their Goal Remains The Same 

  • Votebeat: Stop the Steal Is Using New Tactics. The Goal Is The Same: Two years after supporters of former President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election, attempts to undermine the 2022 midterms in key states took a different form.  It tells us something, at least  about the next step in the evolution of the Stop the Steal Movement.  This time around, more than a dozen losing candidates in Harris County filed election contests with slim prospects of success after some Harris County polling places ran out of ballot paper. It’s certainly less violent than an armed insurrection, but the problems will hang over Harris County elections for some time. And in Pennsylvania and Michigan, obscure provisions of state law allowed election skeptics to force recounts without providing evidence of problems. In Arizona, the GOP candidate for governor has seized upon technical problems in Maricopa County to assert the election should be overturned.  In some states, these tactics forced delays in certification, even though they had little chance of ultimately changing the outcome of the election.

Heritage Foundation Poured Millions Into Ongoing Effort To Suppress Votes 

  • The Guardian: Rightwing Group Pours Millions In ‘Dark Money’ Into US Voter Suppression Bid:  Tax filings reveal advocacy arm of Heritage Foundation spent $5m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground states. The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states. Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states. The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy. The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.

Trump Organization Fined $1.6 Million After Being Convicted Of 17 Felonies 

  • CNN: Trump Org. Fined $1.6 Million After Conviction For 17 Felonies, Including Tax Fraud: The Trump Organization was fined $1.6 million – the maximum possible penalty – by a New York judge Friday for running a decade-long tax fraud scheme, a symbolic moment because it is the only judgment for a criminal conviction that has come close to former President Donald Trump. Two Trump entities, The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp., were convicted last month of 17 felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. Under New York law, the most the companies can be fined is about $1.6 million, a penalty the Trump Organization can easily afford.

In The States 

IOWA:  Republican Candidate’s Wife Charged With Casting 23 Fraudulent Ballots In 2020 Election 

  • Insider: Republican Candidate’s Wife Arrested, Charged With Casting 23 Fraudulent Votes For Her Husband In The 2020 Election: The wife of an Iowa Republican who ran for Congress in 2020 was arrested Thursday and accused of casting 23 fraudulent votes for her husband. In an 11-page indictment, prosecutors say Kim Phuong Taylor “visited numerous households within the Vietnamese community in Woodbury County” where she collected absentee ballots for people who were not present at the time. Taylor, who was born in Vietnam, then filled out and cast those ballots herself, the indictment alleges, “causing the casting of votes in the names of residents who had no knowledge of and had not consented to the casting of their ballots.” Taylor is also accused of signing voter-registration forms on behalf of residents who were not present. In all, prosecutors charged her with 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 counts of fraudulent voting. Each charge carries a maximum five-year prison sentence. The goal, prosecutors allege, was to get her husband, the Republican politician Jeremy Taylor, elected to public office.

MICHIGAN:  Michigan Biden Electors Sue Fake Trump Slate Seeking A Declaration That The Plot Was Illegal 

  • Detroit News: Michigan Biden Electors Sue False Trump Slate, Seeking Declaration Plot Was Illegal: Three of Michigan’s presidential electors who cast votes for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a group of 16 Republicans who submitted official documents falsely claiming Donald Trump had won the state. The filing in Kent County Circuit Court added to the potential legal troubles for the slate of GOP electors who signed a certificate that attempted to direct the state’s 16 electoral votes to Trump after the Republican president had lost Michigan by 154,000 votes or 3 percentage points in the certified results. The three Democratic electors — Blake Mazurek of Kent County, Robin Smith of Ingham County and Timothy Smith and Ottawa County — are seeking damages amounting to at least $25,000 and a declaration from a judge that the “fake elector scheme was illegal under Michigan law.”

PENNSYLVANIA: Lycoming County Conducts Hand Recount Of 2020 Election, Finds No Major Changes, But Election Deniers Claim They’re “Not Done” With Contesting The County 

  • New York Times: Driven by Election Deniers, This County Recounted 2020 Votes Last Week: On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020. Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series. The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday. Mr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount. Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020? It did not. “This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”

TEXAS:  AG Ken Paxton Seeks More Power To Prosecute Election Crimes 

  • Texas Tribune: Ken Paxton Wants More Power To Prosecute Election Crimes. These Bills In The Texas Legislature Would Give It To Him: Two bills filed in the Texas House of Representatives seek to expand the Texas attorney general’s power to prosecute election crimes. One allows the office to appoint special prosecutors to such cases, while the other empowers the office to penalize local prosecutors who “limit election law enforcement.” Although no evidence of widespread voter fraud has been found, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been actively pursuing election-related crimes since he took office in 2015. In at least the past two years, his office opened more than 300 investigations of potential crimes by voters and election officials but has successfully convicted only a handful. Experts and voting rights advocates say the bills would continue to empower state officials to scrutinize elections administrators, ignite more lawsuits and intimidate voters.

What Experts Are Saying

Jennifer Dresden, policy advocate at Protect Democracy and former associate director of Georgetown University’s Democracy and Governance Program: “Brazil experienced a dangerous and lawless demonstration of political rage this week. It may even have been a quixotic attempt to provoke a military intervention and suspend democracy altogether. But unlike January 6, it was not a coordinated effort to block a constitutional transfer of power before it could take place. Conflating this week’s events in Brazil with January 6 deprives Americans of the chance to learn important lessons as we look ahead to the 2024 election in the U.S.” Talking Points Memo: January 8 Was A Terrible Day For Brazilian Democracy. It Was Not Another January 6.

Norm Eisen, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: “Norman Eisen, the lead author of the Brookings report and former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, said he thinks charges against Trump are ‘highly likely’. ‘The evidence is powerful and the law is very [favorable] to the prosecutors in Georgia,’ he said. ‘I believe the [special grand jury] report very likely calls for the prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators.’ Eisen said that the federal case is not as far along but that the congressional committee investigating the events of January 6 laid out a ‘powerful case’ for charges against Trump. He said that the prosecution of a former president would be “momentous”. ‘But, of course, so was Trump’s decision to lead an attempted coup. That was momentous in a very negative way. This is momentous as a [defense] of the rule of law and American democracy,’ said Eisen.” The Guardian 

Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket: “Republicans found themselves unable to persuade a majority of the electorate to support their candidates. This sparked a conviction among many on the right that their best hope to win elections rested on restricting who can vote and shaping the electorate. While Republicans and their allies filed more election-related lawsuits than Democrats and progressives in 2022, the results of those lawsuits tell a different story. According to Democracy Docket’s data, of the 175 total consequential orders handed down last year, Republican and anti-voting forces prevailed a mere 20% of the time. In fact, almost half of the victories for voters we saw last year were a result of failed lawsuits brought by anti-voting litigants. These lopsided results from 2022 speak to a longer-term trend in democracy-related litigation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is Republicans and their allies who are most often turning to courts. And, more often than not, courts are protecting democracy.” Democracy Docket: The Courts Protected Democracy in 2022

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Washington Post: McCarthy says he’s willing to look at expunging a Trump impeachment

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Politico: Judge finds Jan. 6 defendant who breached Senate chamber not guilty of obstruction

Politico: Revealed: Who visited the Trump White House before Jan. 6

Rolling Stone: Secret Video Reveals Twitter Team Warned of ‘Shooting in the Streets’ Ahead of Jan. 6

Other Trump Investigations

Associated Press: Under oath, Trump hurled insults at woman who alleges rape

In The States

Texas Tribune: The fringe ideology of “constitutional sheriffs” is attracting believers within Texas law enforcement

Votebeat: No significant changes found in hand recount of 2020 presidential election in Lycoming County