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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 15, 2022

By August 15, 2022No Comments

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Must Read Stories

FBI And DHS Warn Of Threats To Federal Law Enforcement As Trump And His Allies Escalate Rhetoric

  • NBC: FBI and DHS Warn Threats To Federal Law Enforcement Have Spiked Since Mar-A-Lago Search: The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have issued a joint intelligence bulletin warning of a spike in threats to federal law enforcement officials since the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News. “The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in threats to federal law enforcement and to a lesser extent other law enforcement and government officials following the FBI’s recent execution of a search warrant in Palm Beach, Florida,” the document, dated Friday, reads, according to one official. The bulletin, which advises that such threats are occurring online, was sent out of an abundance of caution, the officials said. It calls on authorities to be vigilant and to be aware of issues surrounding domestic violent extremists, past and present incidents, and past behaviors. A third law enforcement official said the five-page document states that such threats are appearing across multiple platforms, “including social media sites, web forums, video sharing platforms and image boards.”
  • Washington Post: Federal Law Enforcement Leaders Warn About Danger As GOP Assails FBI: Law enforcement leaders are raising alarms about threats to federal agents as prominent Republicans attack the FBI for its search of Donald Trump’s residence and as authorities investigate an attempted breach at an FBI field office in Ohio. In interviews Thursday, Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, expressed alarm at GOP warnings to Americans that federal agents are “coming for you.” Politicians’ rhetoric could lead to more violence, regardless of what fueled the Ohio attack, he said, noting that online messages have advocated killing FBI agents. “The rank-and-file officers on the street and agents, they are career employees that … cherish the Constitution like the average American,” he said. “So for them to be attacked by these individuals that believe something else — or they’re believing, you know, someone’s rhetoric that’s uncalled for — to me, it’s shameful and disgusting.”
  • New York Times: As Right-Wing Rhetoric Escalates, So Do Threats and Violence:  The armed attack this week on an F.B.I. office in Ohio by a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump who was enraged by the bureau’s search of Mr. Trump’s private residence in Florida was one of the most disturbing episodes of right-wing political violence in recent months. But it was hardly the only one. In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, threats of political violence and actual attacks have become a steady reality of American life, affecting school board officials, election workers, flight attendants, librarians and even members of Congress, often with few headlines and little reaction from politicians. In late June, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade in Houston after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.” Even the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s beachfront home and club, became a target. On pro-Trump message boards, several threats were issued against him and his family, with one person writing, “I see a rope around his neck.” While this welter of events may feel disparate, occurring at different times and places and to different types of people, scholars who study political violence point to a common thread: the heightened use of bellicose, dehumanizing and apocalyptic language, particularly by prominent figures in right-wing politics and media.

Trump Supporters Engage In Violent Actions And Threats Across The Country 

  • Daily Beast: Ex-Trump Aide Sics MAGA Lackeys on Alleged FBI Agents’ Families: Just hours after a list began circulating among right-wing media of FBI agents who signed off on the search warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, a former Trump aide tried to sic MAGA fans on the family members of the purported agents. Garrett Ziegler, who recently went on a sexist tear against former White House colleagues, took to Telegram to post the personal information of men he identified as agents. “This is one of the two feds who signed the ‘Receipt for Property’ form, which detailed—at a very high level—the fishing expedition that the FBI performed at Mar-a-Lago,” Ziegler said on both Truth Social and Telegram. The former Trump administration staffer that worked under White House trade adviser Peter Navarro further listed out the FBI agents’ date of birth, work emails and linked to alleged family members’ social media accounts. “Hope he doesn’t get a good night’s sleep for the rest of 2022,” Ziegler wrote on Truth Social, responding to another Truth Social user’s photos of one of the alleged FBI officials who signed off on the inventory receipts on the warrant.
  • KSAZ: Armed Trump Supporters Protest Outside Of FBI Office In Phoenix Following Mar-A-Lago Probe: Signs reading “Honor your oath” and “Abolish FBI” were seen outside the FBI office in Phoenix on Aug. 13, just days after news broke that the agency searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Several of those who were there were armed with guns.
  • Politico: Florida Judge Who Approved FBI Search Of Mar-A-Lago Faces Barrage Of Antisemitic Online Attacks: The Florida federal magistrate judge who approved the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach County residence has faced an onslaught of antisemitic attacks and threats online, some of which targeted the synagogue he belongs to. Magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart, a board member at Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens, has seen sustained antisemitic attacks on right wing message boards and other social media platforms like 4Chan since his name surfaced as the judge who signed off on the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. Republicans, too, have been heavily critical of the judge, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who questioned Reinhart’s impartiality during an appearance on Fox News earlier this week when he claimed: “They found some Obama donor judge, not even a judge, a magistrate, to give them the search warrant.”
  • Washington Post: FBI Attacker Was Prolific Contributor To Trump’s Truth Social Website: In the minutes after an armed man in body armor tried to breach an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Shiffer, posted to former president Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I.” The Shiffer account appeared to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, writing 374 messages there in the past eight days — mostly to echo Trump’s false claims about election fraud and, in the hours after FBI agents searched Trump’s Florida home, call for all-out war. “Be ready to kill the enemy,” Shiffer had posted on Tuesday. “Kill [the FBI] on sight.” Shiffer was killed Thursday in a shootout, police said, and the Truth Social account has since been taken down. But the calls for pro-Trump violence are still a common presence online — including on Truth Social, where the top “trending topics” Friday morning were “#FBIcorruption” and “DefundTheFBI.”

Extensive Criminal Investigation Of Mar-A-Lago Documents May Take Months 

  • Wall Street Journal: FBI Search of Mar-a-Lago Achieved a DOJ Top Priority: Get the Documents:  The FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property dealt with the Justice Department’s most urgent priority in the monthslong showdown, according to officials, which was retrieving classified information. Investigators are now pursuing the next steps of the department’s criminal investigation into the handling of national security material and presidential records, a process that may take many months to play out, and will be shaped by several factors. They include what specifically investigators find in the seized documents; why they ended up at Mar-a-Lago; who accessed them at the Florida resort; and the actions of Mr. Trump and his lawyers as the two sides negotiated for months in the spring for the return of the records, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
  • New York Times: Trump Lawyer Told Justice Dept. That Classified Material Had Been Returned: At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said. The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division. The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves. It also helps to further explain the sequence of events that prompted the Justice Department’s decision to conduct the search after months in which it had tried to resolve the matter through discussions with Mr. Trump and his team.

Voting Machine Plot By Michigan Republicans Part Of  A National Pattern 

  • Washington Post: Michigan Plot To Breach Voting Machines Points To A National Pattern: In states across the country, including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia, attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote. In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state attorney general, Dana Nessel (D), requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno. The expected Republican nominee, Nessel’s office wrote in a petition filed Aug. 5 based on the findings of a state police investigation, was “one of the prime instigators” of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. Others involved, according to the filing, included a state representative and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.

Election Misinformation Proliferates On TikTok 

  • New York Times: On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms: Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain. Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times. Some videos urged viewers to vote in November while citing debunked rumors raised during the congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. TikTok posts have garnered thousands of views by claiming, without evidence, that predictions of a surge in Covid-19 infections this fall are an attempt to discourage in-person voting.

In The States 

ARIZONA: Arizona GOP Engaged In “Anti Democracy Experiment” 

  • New York Times: The Arizona Republican Party’s Anti-Democracy Experiment: Arizona has become a bellwether for the rest of the nation, and not just because of its new status as a swing state and the first of these to be called for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It was and has continued to be the nexus of efforts by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the 2020 election results. At the same time, party figures from Trump down to Rose Sperry have sought to blacklist every Arizona G.O.P. official who maintained that the election was fairly won — from Gov. Doug Ducey to Rusty Bowers, speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Such leaders have been condemned as RINOs, or Republicans in name only, today’s equivalent of the McCarthy era’s “fellow travelers.”

KANSAS: Republicans Pay For Recount Of Landslide Loss For Abortion Restriction Amendment 

  • Kansas City Star: Kansas Plans To Recount Abortion Amendment Vote, Despite Proposal’s Landslide Defeat:  Kansas election officials plan to conduct a statewide recount of the vote rejecting an amendment to remove abortion rights from the state constitution after a citizen posted a $200,000 bond for the recount, the state Secretary of State’s Office said. Separately, Kansas state Sen. Caryn Tyson asked for a recount in 55 counties in the Republican race for Kansas treasurer. Tyson, of Parker, currently trails state Rep. Steven Johnson, of Assaria, by 375 votes. Melissa Leavitt, who has been fundraising for a recount based on vague suspicions of fraud, asked for the abortion amendment recount ahead of a 5 p.m. Central time Friday deadline. A crowd-funding account set up by Leavitt showed less than $3,000 raised as of Friday afternoon, but Whitney Tempel, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office, said Leavitt posted a $200,000 bond. Kansas elections director Bryan Caskey plans to go along with the request, The Associated Press reported. Caskey said it would be the first recount of votes on a statewide ballot question in at least 30 years.

TEXAS: Election Office Staff In Bright Red Texas County Resigns After Threats And Stalking 

  • Fredericksburg Radio-Star: Threats, Stalking Lead To Election Office Resignation: Energy has been high around elections for several years alongside escalating political polarization nationwide. Despite this, Gillespie County has been a mostly peaceful political climate. But the 2020 presidential race brought election integrity to the forefront of many American minds. With passions ignited, the political climate around elections has been a blazing fire for some election officials. Nobody knows this more than Anissa Herrera, elections administrator for Gillespie County since 2019. She is resigning from her position as administrator largely due to the heightened, and even dangerous circumstances surrounding the voting process. “After the 2020 (election), I was threatened, I’ve been stalked, I’ve been called out on social media,” said Herrera. “And it’s just dangerous misinformation.” Herrera is an inaugural member of the elections office for the county and has worked for Gillespie County for nine-and-a-half years. Prior to her role as elections administrator, she worked as the elections clerk under the county clerk’s office. What had been an enjoyable job for Herrera took a different turn following the most recent presidential election. “The year 2020 was when I got the death threats,” said Herrera. “It was enough that I reached out to our county attorney, and it was suggested that I forward it to FPD (Fredericksburg Police Department) and the sheriff’s office.” Other resignations have occurred in the Elections Department for similar reasons. The dangers were dire enough that some members of the department hired off-duty law enforcement officers and security guards.

WISCONSIN: Robin Vos Ends Election Investigation, Fires Michael Gableman 

  • Associated Press: Wisconsin GOP Leader Ends Election Probe, Fires Investigator: Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly leader on Friday ended a 14-month, taxpayer-funded inquiry into the 2020 election by firing his hand-picked investigator. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ firing of Michael Gableman came just three days after the lawmaker narrowly survived a primary challenge from an opponent endorsed by former President Donald Trump and Gableman. While Gableman found no evidence of widespread fraud during his inquiry, he had joined Trump in calling for lawmakers to consider decertifying the 2020 election — something Vos and legal experts say is unconstitutional and impossible. Vos announced the investigation last year under pressure from Trump and chose Gableman, a conservative former Supreme Court justice, to lead it. But as the investigation progressed, Vos’ relationship soured with both Gableman and Trump. When he hired Gableman, Vos had said he was “supremely confident” in his abilities. By Tuesday night, Vos was calling him an “embarrassment.”

What Experts Are Saying

Lilliana Mason, associate research professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University: “It’s a good time to remember that the VAST majority of Americans do not think that political violence is acceptable – ever. Acts of violence are deterred by social and community norms. It’s up to leaders and all of us to publicly reject violence as soon as we hear a whisper of it” Tweet 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Gotta say this again. It was not a ‘raid.’ The FBI executed a search warrant that was authorized by a federal judge based on a showing of probable cause.” Tweet 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor who studies authoritarianism and political violence: “‘We are likely to see continued acts of violence and attacks…There is a vast right-wing media and messaging universe, from Fox News to Breitbart to former president Trump to sitting GOP lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene,’ Ben-Ghiat said, ‘that traffics in conspiracy theories and seeks to keep people in a state of agitation and fear sufficient to lead some people to make recourse to violence.’” Washington Post 

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Still, Ms. Kleinfeld said, there are ways of encouraging the average person to accept violence. If political aggression is set in the context of a war, she suggested, ordinary people with no prior history of violence are more likely to accept it. Political violence can also be made more palatable by couching it as defensive action against a belligerent enemy. That is particularly true if an adversary is persistently described as irredeemably evil or less than human. ‘The right, at this point, is doing all three of these things at once,’ Ms. Kleinfeld said.” New York Times 

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: “Why does Trump focus on discrediting institutions?…Attacking the institutions of government and the media serves two main purposes. For a public figure frequently mired in scandal and accused of wrongdoing, this has been a way to turn the tables against the investigators, shifting the national focus on those who are tasked with asking the questions. Whether filing a lawsuit or unleashing wild accusations, Trump can always exploit the attacks against him by playing victim…Discrediting institutions is also a way to paint himself as an outsider — even when that is far from the truth. And by positioning himself in an adversarial stance, he can stoke distrust in institutions and make the case to his supporters that he is still one of them — rather than a part of the establishment.” CNN Op-Ed: Why Trump thinks the FBI search could be a winner for him

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Associated Press: GOP Backs Trump, Escalates Dark Rhetoric After FBI Search: 

Axios: Cracks emerge in GOP’s Mar-a-Lago response

The Guardian: GOP governors rebuke party members’ ‘outrageous rhetoric’ over Trump search

New York Times: Some Republicans Make a More Restrained Case for Defending Trump

Politico: Anti-Trump GOP group spends big to shrink his base

Politico: FBI warns of heightened threats as Hill Republicans demand more from Garland on Mar-a-Lago search

Rolling Stone: MAGA Fanatics Have a New Enemy: ‘TINOs’ — Trump In Name Only

Washington Post: House GOP stands by Trump despite revelation FBI searched for nuclear documents

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: Some Capitol rioters try to profit from their Jan. 6 crimes

NBC: Trump supporter who called Capitol cops ‘weasels’ on Jan. 6 sentenced to prison

New York Times: Defamation Suit About Election Falsehoods Puts Fox on Its Heels

Other Trump Investigations

CNN: Mar-a-Lago — and its owner — have long caused concerns for US intelligence

CNN (Analysis): Responding to FBI search, Trump and allies return to his familiar strategy: flood the zone with nonsense

NBC: Trump says he declassified Mar-a-Lago documents. Experts say it’s unclear whether that will hold up.

New York Times (Analysis): Trump’s Shifting Explanations Follow a Familiar Playbook

The Hill: Trump calls for return of privileged documents reportedly seized at Mar-a-Lago

Politico: Search warrant shows Trump under investigation for potential obstruction of justice, Espionage Act violations

Politico: Trump Org. can’t shake Manhattan DA’s criminal fraud case

Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Final Days Draw Scrutiny as Handling of Documents Investigated

Washington Post: Trump’s secrets: How a records dispute led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago

Political Violence

New York Times: Man Dies by Suicide After Ramming Car Into Barricade Near U.S. Capitol

In The States 

Detroit Free Press: Alleged rogue juror under investigation in Whitmer kidnap retrial

Vox: Liz Cheney’s primary is all about Donald Trump — except in Wyoming