Driving the Day:
Homeland Security watchdog halted plan to recover missing texts from the Secret Service https://t.co/iJ4ZVX2BrJ
— Defend Democracy Project (@DemocracyNowUS) August 1, 2022
Must Read Stories
Tomorrow’s Primaries Show The Extent To Which The GOP Is Consumed By Conspiracy Theories And The 2020 Election
- Politico: Trump-Backed Conspiracy Theorist Makes Charge For Chief Election Position In Arizona: Mark Finchem — a poster child for election deniers following the 2020 election — is inching closer to becoming the chief election official in one of the most tightly divided battleground states in the country. Finchem, an Arizona state lawmaker, is running with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement in Tuesday’s Republican primary for secretary of state there. He has support from a coalition of other like-minded candidates running to be election administrators in their own states, which has gained traction in several other close 2020 swing states. And Finchem has a significant edge in a rare public poll of the secretary of state race published Friday. Should he win on Tuesday, Finchem will become the latest member of the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” to secure the Republican nomination in a key battleground, putting them a general election win away from running the 2024 presidential vote in their states — four years after working to subvert President Joe Biden’s election win and falsely claiming the vote was marred. The coalition’s founder, Jim Marchant, is the Republican nominee in Nevada, while Kristina Karamo is the de-facto GOP pick in Michigan. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor picks the state’s chief election official, coalition member Doug Mastriano is the GOP candidate.
- Washington Post (Analysis): Three More GOP Impeachers Face Their Primary Juries: Reps. Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse have not grabbed the same type of headlines that other Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump in January 2021. The Republican trio have remained steadfast in support of their votes against Trump but have otherwise mostly kept their heads down and tried to work hard on issues they have long focused on. Meijer, an Army intelligence officer in the Iraq War from Michigan, has been a major critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Herrera Beutler, from a massive rural district in southwestern Washington, just got a bill passed to transfer land from the U.S. Forest Service to a local county government. And Friday, Newhouse took to the House floor to speak out against Democratic legislation as “bureaucratic red tape” that would fail to combat wildfires, a perennial issue in his vast district in eastern Washington. On Tuesday, all three will learn their political fate with Republican voters back home, helping determine if there was ever a path to victory for a Republican who so directly rebuked Trump. And it will go a long way to determining whether there will be one, two or more pro-impeachment Republicans left when the new Congress is sworn in next January. […] Four of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach have opted to retire rather than face almost certain defeat in their primary races. Another, Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), lost by a more than a 2-to-1 margin last month, while Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has drawn the most vociferous opposition from Trump, faces an uphill battle in her August primary. That has left the anti-Trump faction of the party hoping that at least some victories come among the trio of Herrera Beutler, Meijer and Newhouse to provide voices inside a House Republican conference that are not in lockstep with the former president.
- New York Times: G.O.P. Feuding and Chaos Endanger the Party’s Chances in Michigan: For much of the spring and summer, Betsy DeVos and her billionaire relatives — the most influential Republican family in Michigan — have been at war with Donald Trump’s followers in the state, choosing different sides in consequential primaries for the state Legislature and endorsements at the state party’s convention. The former president’s late nod in the governor’s race only compounded the confusion and heightened the suspense about what his followers would do on Primary Day. Just the day before the endorsement, eight of his chosen down-ballot candidates sent him an open letter urging him not to do political business with the DeVos family. The open hostilities have emboldened an ascendant grass roots wing of Michigan Republicans who are devoted to Mr. Trump and his agenda. And his endorsement will test the degree to which the former president has the wherewithal to lead them. All told, Republicans are in danger of bungling what earlier this year appeared to be a promising opportunity to oust Ms. Whitmer. The party’s strongest two candidates were jettisoned from the ballot because of a signature-forgery blunder. The resulting field, aside from the untested Ms. Dixon, includes one candidate facing misdemeanor charges related to the Capitol riot and another dogged by years-old lawsuits over allegations that he made racist and sexually explicit comments to employees.
The January 6 Committee’s August Plans: More Interviews, The 25th Amendment, And The FBI
- USA Today: Jan. 6 Committee’s August Plan: More Interviews With Trump Aides And Studying The 25th Amendment: After a series of eight blockbuster hearings in June and July, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, will continue working during August to interview more witnesses, draft recommendations for legislation and begin writing a report about what happened that day and why. The committee is exploring how members of former President Donald Trump’s Cabinet considered whether to invoke the 25th Amendment, to potentially remove him from office during the final two weeks of his term. The panel must also discuss legislative recommendations based on its findings, such as how to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, which lays out how Electoral College votes in presidential elections should be counted, and whether to set up a congressional body as an option to the Cabinet for invoking the 25th Amendment. As the panel continues interviewing witnesses, members must also deal with missing evidence such as Secret Service texts from Jan. 6 that were erased.
- NBC: FBI Failures Before The Capitol Siege Avoided The Jan. 6 Committee’s Scorn. Not For Long: Although the House Jan. 6 committee has presented evidence of the carnage law enforcement faced at the Capitol that day, it has devoted little time to law enforcement’s failure to predict and prevent the attack — at least not publicly. But behind the scenes, sources tell NBC News, those failures have not been forgotten. As the committee prepares for an additional round of public hearings in September, it’s expected to put more focus on the intelligence and law enforcement failures at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security that left police woefully underprepared for the mob that stormed the Capitol. Those failures will also be a key component of the committee’s final report on Jan. 6.
DHS Went To Great Lengths To Conceal January 6 Text Messages
- CNN: DHS Inspector General Knew Of Missing Secret Service Texts Months Earlier Than Previously Known: The embattled inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security first learned of missing Secret Service text messages in May 2021 — months earlier than previously known and more than a year before he alerted the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, that potentially crucial information may have been erased, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Earlier this month, Secret Service officials told congressional committees that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, the department’s independent watchdog, was aware that texts had been erased in December 2021. But sources tell CNN, the Secret Service had notified Cuffari’s office of missing text messages in May 2021, seven months earlier. The Secret Service now says the texts were lost as a result of a previously scheduled data migration of its agents’ cell phones that began on January 27, 2021, exactly three weeks after the attack on the US Capitol. After the data migration was completed, in May 2021 the Secret Service told Cuffari’s office that they tried to contact a cellular provider to retrieve the texts when they realized they were lost, a source told CNN.
- Washington Post: Homeland Security Watchdog Halted Plan To Recover Secret Service Texts, Records Show: The Department of Homeland Security’s chief watchdog scrapped its investigative team’s effort to collect agency phones to try to recover deleted Secret Service texts this year, according to four people with knowledge of the decision and internal records reviewed by The Washington Post. In early February, after learning that the Secret Service’s text messages had been erased as part of a migration to new devices, staff at Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari’s office planned to contact all DHS agencies offering to have data specialists help retrieve messages from their phones, according to two government whistleblowers who provided reports to Congress. But later that month, Cuffari’s office decided it would not collect or review any agency phones, according to three people briefed on the decision.
- Washington Post: Secret Service’s ‘Ludicrous’ Deletion Of Jan. 6 Phone Data Baffles Experts: Cybersecurity experts and former government leaders are stunned by how poorly the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security handled the preservation of officials’ text messages and other data from around Jan. 6, 2021, saying the top agencies entrusted with fighting cybercrime should never have bungled the simple task of backing up agents’ phones. Experts are divided over whether the disappearance of phone data from around the time of the insurrection is a sign of incompetence, an intentional coverup or some murky middle ground. But the failure has raised suspicions about the disposition of records whose preservation was mandated by federal law.
Far Right Republicans Have A Long Plan To Rewrite The Constitution
- Insider: Republicans’ Next Big Play Is To ‘Scare The Hell Out Of Washington’ By Rewriting The Constitution. And They’re Willing To Play The Long Game To Win: As former Republican senator Rick Santorum addressed Republican lawmakers gathered in San Diego at the American Legislative Exchange Council policy summit, he detailed a plan to fundamentally remake the United States. It would become a conservative nation. And the transformation, Santorum said, culminates with an unprecedented event: a first-of-its-kind convention to rewrite the Constitution. “You take this grenade and you pull the pin, you’ve got a live piece of ammo in your hands,” Santorum, a two-time GOP presidential candidate and former CNN commentator, explained in audio of his remarks obtained by the left-leaning watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy and shared with Insider. “34 states — if every Republican legislator votes for this, we have a constitutional convention.” The December 2021 ALEC meeting represents a flashpoint in a movement spearheaded by powerful conservative interests, some of whom are tied to Trumpworld and share many of Trump’s goals, to alter the nation’s bedrock legal text since 1788. It’s an effort that has largely taken place out of public view. But interviews with a dozen people involved in the constitutional convention movement, along with documents and audio recordings reviewed by Insider, reveal a sprawling, well-funded — at least partly by cryptocurrency — and impassioned campaign taking root across multiple states. […] This isn’t an exercise, either. State lawmakers are invited to huddle in Denver starting on Sunday to learn more about the inner workings of a possible constitutional convention at Academy of States 3.0, the third installment of a boot camp preparing state lawmakers “in anticipation of an imminent Article V Convention.” Rob Natelson, a constitutional scholar and senior fellow at the Independence Institute who closely studies Article V of the Constitution, predicted to Insider there’s a 50% chance that the United States will witness a constitutional convention in the next five years. Whether it happens, he said, is highly dependent on Republicans’ success winning state legislatures during the 2022 midterm elections.
In The States
MINNESOTA: Election Workers Play “Whack A Mole” Fighting Misinformation
- Minneapolis Star Tribune: ‘Feels Like It’s A Whack-A-Mole’ Minnesota Election Officials On Misinformation Front Lines: One by one, dozens of activists filed into the Sherburne County Board room and unleashed a litany of complaints. The jailing of Jan. 6 “political prisoners.” Allegations of “obsolete” operating systems on Minnesota county voting machines. Claims of flipped votes and manipulated voter databases in other states. “You hold the precious key to preserving our vote,” Kari Watkins told commissioners earlier this month, closing out with the group’s refrain: “Hand count or no certification.” Despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the last election, the same activists have lodged similar complaints in Dakota County. And Carver. And Rice. And Wright. And many more. Distrust stemming from former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election has rippled across the nation and landed on the doorstep of the thousands of Minnesotans who run elections in all 87 counties. It’s forcing many state and local election officials to juggle two jobs: administering the upcoming election while responding to concerns and debunking misinformation stemming from the last one.
NEVADA: Election Conspiracies Consume A Rural Nevada Community
- Associated Press: Election Conspiracies Grip Nevada Community, Sowing Distrust: The Nye County Commission is used to dealing with all sorts of hot-button controversies. Water rights, livestock rules and marijuana licenses are among the many local dramas that consume the time of the five commissioners in this vast swath of rural and deeply Republican Nevada. Last spring, it was something new: voting machines. For months, conspiracy theories fueled on social media by those repeating lies about former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 inflamed public suspicions about whether election results could be trusted. In response, the commission put a remarkable item on its agenda: Ditch the county’s voting machines and instead count every vote on every ballot — more than 20,000 in a typical general election — entirely by hand.
TEXAS: North Texas Conservatives Investigate High Turnout And Close Races As Evidence Of Fraud
- Bolts: North Texas Conservatives Police High Turnout and Close Races as “Anomalies” Suggesting Fraud: As his surname might suggest, Fort Worth attorney Bill Fearer played an alarmist emcee for the late January gathering of election deniers hosted by the conservative group Tarrant County Citizens for Election Integrity. Before introducing a parade of speakers spreading baseless conspiracies about fraud in elections ranging from Donald Trump’s 2020 loss to local races, Fearer had some startling figures of his own that he wanted to show the crowd—“anomalies,” he said, “that certainly don’t prove anything, but they raised our concerns.” On the list of bullet points Fearer splashed on a big screen behind him was the name of Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, a tough-talking cop who first won in 2016 with an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote but only narrowly prevailed when he went up for re-election in 2020. To Fearer, that slide is enough to suggest fraud. “There was no glaring issue with the job that he (Waybourn) had done that we could perceive, yet in 2020 the margin was only 5 percent,” Fearer said. That remark would shock Waybourn’s local critics, who have organized against the scandal-plagued sheriff and his policies for years. They have protested the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that pervade inside the jail he oversees, which has seen a spike in deaths since he took office. […] But Fearer’s slideshow to the Tarrant County group drew on rhetoric that has spread among conservatives, pointing to bare election results they dislike as reason enough for suspicion. Rather than providing documentation that justifies those doubts, they treat outcomes that deviate from their expectations—including Trump’s loss, Waybourn’s close call, and even signs of increased civic engagement, like recent record-high turnout—as signs of fraud.
What Experts Are Saying
Marc Elias, Founder of Democracy Docket: “This is how Republicans are planning to steal elections in the future. By refusing to count lawful votes and then certifying incomplete and inaccurate results, Republicans hope to create a veneer of legitimacy around an illegitimate outcome.” Tweet | More details in recent Democracy Docket piece
Eliza Sweren-Becker, Brennan Center’s Voting Rights & Elections Counsel: “As you know, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, a case in which some North Carolina legislators have asked the Court to embrace the so-called independent state legislature notion. This is the radical claim (‘theory’ is too generous a term) positing that the Constitution removes the normal checks on state legislatures when they regulate federal elections. You’ve already heard that this claim is wrong. Constitutional text, American history, Supreme Court precedent, sound policy, and common sense all refute the idea.” Brennan Center
Jill Wine-Banks, Watergate scandal prosecutor: “I opposed pardon for Nixon and even more vehemently oppose it for Trump. House arrest is fine. More important, penalty must include barring him from future office. Without accountability, he — or other wannabe dictator — will repeat the conduct threatening our democracy.” Tweet
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
ABC: ‘I’ll never vote again’ for former President Trump: Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers
The Atlantic: How Six States Could Overturn The 2024 Election
New York Times: Pushing an Immigration Conspiracy Theory, While Courting Latinos
Vox: Arizona’s 2022 GOP Primary Is All About 2020
Votebeat: Conservative groups raise money for voter-fraud probes as states ban election grants
Washington Post: A Jan. 6 defendant is running for office in Florida — from jail
January 6 And The 2020 Election
CNN: Bill Barr subpoenaed by voting tech company Smartmatic in company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News
The Hill: McCarthy says he does not recall Jan. 6 Cassidy Hutchinson call on Trump going to Capitol
Politico: The RNC ‘election integrity’ official appearing in DOJ’s Jan. 6 subpoenas
Rolling Stone: Trump’s Lawyers Are Preparing Legal Defenses Against Criminal Charges
Other Trump Investigations
Washington Post: Russian national charged with U.S. political influence operation
Washington Post: Hot mic captured Gaetz assuring Stone of pardon, discussing Mueller redactions
WUSA: Steve Bannon accused of defying another subpoena, this one from a former Trump campaign staffer
Political Violence
Axios: Congress on “high alert” amid security threats
CNN: Man arrested after alleged bomb threat against Arizona election official
In The States
Atlanta Journal Constitution: AJC poll: Most Georgia voters say Trump at least partly to blame for Jan. 6
CNN: Republican nominee for Maryland attorney general hosted 9/11 conspiracy radio shows
HuffPost: Doug Mastriano Is Keeping A Big Secret From Pennsylvania Voters
Washington Post: Kari Lake wants to upend how Arizonans vote, how their votes are counted
Washington Post: Wisconsin DOJ probes voter fraud stunt as election officials debate absentee rules
