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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — January 31, 2023

By January 31, 2023No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

State Legislatures Gear Up For Another Round Of Debate Over Voting Rules With Election Deniers In Top Roles In At Least Two States 

  • Associated Press: Election-Denying Lawmakers Hold Key Election Oversight Roles: Republican lawmakers who have spread election conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential outcome was rigged are overseeing legislative committees charged with setting election policy in two major political battleground states. Divided government in Pennsylvania and Arizona means that any voting restrictions those GOP legislators propose is likely to fail. Even so, the high-profile appointments give the lawmakers a platform to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections in states that will be pivotal in selecting the next president in 2024. Awarding such plum positions to lawmakers who have repeated conspiracies and spread misinformation cuts against more than two years of evidence showing there were no widespread problems or fraud in the last presidential election. It also would appear to run counter to the message delivered in the November midterm elections, when voters rejected election-denying candidates running for top offices in presidential battleground states.
  • Votebeat: As State Legislatures Convene, Election Laws Are Up For Another Round Of Changes: State legislatures around the country are starting up, and lawmakers have already filed hundreds of bills that could, yet again, overhaul the running of elections. If you’re feeling deja vu, that’s not surprising. After all, just about every voter in every state has already likely experienced some kind of change in their election law since the 2020 presidential election. That’s a conclusion of the Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit that tracks election legislation, in a report late last year. As always, the hundreds of bills are a mixed bag. Some would institute changes that election officials have lobbied for, such as improved voter registration. But others show election conspiracy theories are still finding support among state lawmakers, even after voters around the country rejected many of the candidates most associated with them last November. In Texas and Arizona, for example, state lawmakers kicked off their sessions by providing platforms to election conspiracy theorists who made wide-ranging allegations of fraud without providing evidence, setting a tone for the sessions to come.

Manhattan Prosecutors Begin Presenting Trump Case To A Criminal Grand Jury 

  • New York Times: Manhattan Prosecutors Will Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury:  The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday began presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The grand jury was recently impaneled, and the beginning of witness testimony represents a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump.

Trump Ramps Up His 2024 Campaign With More Conspiracy Theories And Lies 

  • New York Times: Trump’s Evolution in Social-Media Exile: More QAnon, More Extremes: In September, former President Donald J. Trump went on Truth Social, his social network, and shared an image of himself wearing a lapel pin in the form of the letter Q, along with a phrase closely associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement: “The storm is coming.” In doing so, Mr. Trump ensured that the message — first posted by a QAnon-aligned account — would be hugely amplified, visible to his more than four million followers. He was also delivering what amounted to an unmistakable endorsement of the movement, which falsely and violently claims that leading Democrats are baby-eating devil worshipers. Even as the parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced this past week that Mr. Trump would be reinstated — a move that followed the lifting of his ban from Twitter, though he has not yet returned — there is no sign that he has curtailed his behavior or stopped spreading the kinds of messages that got him exiled in the first place. In fact, two years after he was banished from most mainstream social media sites for his role in inciting the Capitol riot, his online presence has grown only more extreme — even if it is far less visible to most Americans, who never use the relatively obscure platforms where he has been posting at a sometimes astonishing clip. Since introducing his social media website in February 2022, Mr. Trump has shared hundreds of posts from accounts promoting QAnon ideas. He has continued to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen and that he is a victim of corrupt federal law enforcement agencies. And he has made personal attacks against his many perceived enemies, including private citizens whose names he has elevated.
  • Time: Trump Delivers Bitter Speech Filled With Falsehoods in New Hampshire: On Saturday, former President Donald Trump pushed false claims about his own electoral losses and suggested foreign leaders shared his doubts about the outcome of the 2020 vote during his Saturday drop-by in the first-in-the-nation primary state. Speaking to activists in southern New Hampshire, the ex-President revived his greatest hits as he joined his first campaign event of his 2024 chase of the Republican Party’s White House nomination and tested a new idea—that every day in Joe Biden’s America is a cruel April Fools Day joke. “I think of the United States. Every day is April Fools Day,” Trump said. “We have open borders when they should be closed. It’s April Fools Day. … We have prisons—people from mental institutions and terrorists—being dumped into our country when they should not be accepted. April Fools Day, right? Who would do that?” The event’s tone and substance suggested the looming two-year campaign is going to match—if not surpass—the toxic tone of his past attempts.

Arizona Secretary Of State Seeks Campaign Violation Investigation Of Kari Lake 

  • Washington Post: Top Arizona Election Official Seeks Campaign-Violation Probe Of Kari Lake: Arizona’s top election official has asked the attorney general to investigate Kari Lake, the Republican candidate who lost her bid for governor in 2022, over potential campaign violations involving the disclosure of voter signatures. The complaint could set up a legal showdown in the battleground state between a prominent conservative election denier backed by Donald Trump and two newly elected Democrats who campaigned with messages of strengthening public trust in elections. The referral from Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) to Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) comes as Lake has doubled down on her unproven claims that administration of the state’s midterm elections resulted in her loss. 

Paul Pelosi Attacker Continues To Espouse Violent Conspiracy Theories From Behind Bars 

  • CNN: Paul Pelosi Attacker Trafficks In Conspiracy Theories In Call To TV Station After Video Release: The man who attacked the husband of Nancy Pelosi in their home last year showed no remorse and continued his dangerous fixation on the former House speaker in a bizarre phone call to a San Francisco reporter on Friday, according to the Bay Area station’s reporting. David DePape called KTVU’s Amber Lee from the San Francisco County Jail on the same day the attack footage was released, with what he called “an important message for everyone in America.” Without mentioning Pelosi by name, DePape said he had gathered “names and addresses” of people he believed were “systematically and deliberately” destroying American freedom and liberty and said he wanted to “have a heart-to-heart chat about their bad behavior.” DePape added that he should have been “better prepared,” adding that he was sorry that he “didn’t get more of them.”

In The States 

ARIZONA:  Election Deniers Solidify Their Hold On The Arizona GOP 

  • Washington Post: Election Losses Only Deepen Arizona Republicans’ Insistence On Fraud: Just a few months ago, Arizona Republicans lost nearly every major statewide midterm race after campaigning for months on false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. That was not always a winning strategy in Arizona or in many other states, but many Republican leaders and their supporters here are still clinging to election-fraud falsehoods, refusing to acknowledge that their candidates lost and resisting attempts to lessen the extreme divisions in the state. The recent Saturday gathering of the Maricopa County Republican Committee to pick new leadership could have been a day of reflection, but it instead showcased how conspiratorial claims of voter fraud remain a litmus test for leaders in the GOP’s state and local party apparatus.
  • Washington Post: New Arizona Gop Chairman Solicits Election Deniers To Secure Spot: The Arizona Republican Party, reeling from statewide drubbing in a historic stronghold, chose a new leader Saturday who managed to hold together a coalition of activists from warring factions. Jeff DeWit, the former state treasurer who worked as chief operating officer for former president Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, was viewed by activists as a competent Republican best positioned to appease the grass-roots demands for changing election rules while moving away from being focused on the 2020 contest. His candidacy for chair got a last-minute push from Trump, whose intervention may have widened his margin over far-right activists. […] In one-on-one calls to more conventional Republicans, DeWit cast himself as the only candidate who could move the party past the intensity of election denialism. But when he took the stage Saturday, DeWit tailored his message for a pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” audience. He touted endorsements from some of the state’s loudest evangelists of Trump’s election falsehoods: Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who lost her gubernatorial bid, failed secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem (R), state Sen. Wendy Rogers, (R) former national security adviser Michael Flynn and above all, Trump. Additional hard-line validators included former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio and former acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker.

FLORIDA:  Local Election Officials Call For Scrapping ID Requirement For Mail In Ballots 

  • NPR: Local Election Officials In Florida Call For Scrapping New ID Rules For Mail Voting: County election supervisors in Florida are urging the state to throw out new vote-by-mail restrictions that are set to be rolled out next year, saying the measures could present serious logistical and security issues. In a report sent to the Florida Department of State earlier this month, a working group of local elections officials warned that the new identification requirements — which will require voters to provide a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number on their ballots — will create significant election reporting delays and a slew of costs for local election offices, and could disenfranchise large numbers of voters. “Unanimously, Florida Supervisors of Elections view this legislative proposal as unnecessary and lacking adequate feasibility for implementation,” they wrote in their report. Florida’s new vote-by-mail measures are part of sweeping legislation signed into law last year by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Provisions in the law, known as Senate Bill 524, are similar to vote-by-mail ID rules that went into effect in Texas last year

What Experts Are Saying

Norm Eisen, executive chair of the States United Democracy Center, Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor, and Christine P. Sun, senior vice president of the States United Democracy Center: “Accountability is among the strongest tools we have to prevent another attack on our country. Swift action from the bar is critical to stopping [Donald Trump’s lawyer John] Eastman from continuing to undermine both the legal profession and our democracy — and to warn other lawyers never to take this dangerous path.”  The Los Angeles Times 

James Sasso, senior investigative counsel for the Select Committee on January 6: “Mr. Trump did not appear out of a vacuum to upend democracy. His presidency was the culmination of years of political degradation during which voters watched our political institutions rust to the point of breaking. Like any good liar, Mr. Trump succeeded by building his lies off a truth; people no longer trust the federal government because they see its corroded institutions as corrupted for the few against the many. Until we fix that problem, we will not free ourselves from the threat of future political violence and upheaval worse than Jan. 6.” The New York Times 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “‘The House Republican leader’ IS an extremist who paid homage to Trump when he became Speaker. They are all arsonists wedded to the values of Jan 6.” Tweet

Headlines

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: Trump investigations: Georgia prosecutor ups anticipation

Bloomberg: Trump Fails to Persuade Judge to Throw Out Jan 6. Civil Suit

CNN: Jan. 6 Committee failed to hold social media companies to account for their role in the Capitol attack, staffers and witnesses say

The Guardian: Revealed: Trump secretly donated $1m to discredited Arizona election ‘audit’

Politico: Secret hold restricts DOJ’s bid to access phone of Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry

Washington Post: Calif. seeks to disbar Trump adviser John Eastman over Jan. 6 charges

Other Trump Investigations

Bloomberg: Trump Sues Journalist Bob Woodward for Releasing Interview Recordings

New York Times: Barr Pressed Durham to Find Flaws in the Russia Investigation. It Didn’t Go Well.

Political Violence

Politico: New video, audio show attack on Paul Pelosi in excruciating detail

In The States

Atlanta Journal Constitution: Faith in Georgia elections rises as fraud frenzy fades, AJC poll shows

Arizona Mirror: Election denial is lucrative: Kari Lake raised $2.5 million after Election Day

Arizona Republic: Arizona election ‘audit’ full of ineptitude, infighting and deceit, messages show

Washington Post: Arizona Republicans exempt lawmakers from the state’s open-records law