This Week: Trump Investigations Enter “Advanced Stages” as MAGA Republicans Continue Assault on Election Integrity
This week, the walls continued to close in on former President Trump and his legal advisors as “multiple investigations into him and his actions are entering advanced stages.”
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before a grand jury investigating hush money funneled to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged tryst with Trump. Trump declined to testify. Meanwhile, Trump legal advisor Jenna Ellis was censured by the Colorado Supreme Court after admitting that she lied when she repeatedly claimed to have proof that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
A tax return filed days ago by The America Project, a nonprofit launched by well-known election deniers including retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, shows that the group spent more than $7 million advancing claims that the 2020 election was rigged, while texts and emails made public this week show that prominent Fox News on-air election conspiracy theorists, including Tucker Carlson, did not believe the lies they were spreading on television.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, an election denier from Georgia, announced that he is leading an investigation into the congressional committee that investigated the January 6th insurrection, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene demanded access to alleged January 6th insurrectionists being held in a D.C. jail. The Georgia representative claims their human rights are being violated.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters in the Georgia House passed a bill to make it easy to remove elected prosecutors, in apparent retaliation for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis investigating Trump for election fraud.
In Arizona, the State Senate voted down a bill by Sen. Jake Hoffman, “best known for his role as one of 11 fake electors who tried to hijack Arizona’s vote after the 2020 presidential election,” to break up the largest county in the state into four counties as retribution for the accurate counting of votes. Also in Arizona, the state sued Cochise County, a “hotbed” of election conspiracy theories, for illegally transferring the oversight of elections from a nonpartisan office to an elected official who claims vote-counting machines have been rigged.
In Michigan, newly elected Republican Party Chair Kristina Karamo “boasted” in an interview that the state party “has turned ‘ultra conservative’” now that it is run by an election-denying insurrectionist.
In North Carolina, MAGA supporter and Trump “ally” Lynda Bennett pleaded guilty to breaking federal campaign finance law. And the North Carolina Supreme Court “reheard a critical gerrymandering case… that could have major implications for new political maps GOP legislative leaders draw later this year.”
