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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 22, 2022

By August 22, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

NBC Poll Shows Threats To Democracy Are The Top Concern For Voters 

  • NBC: NBC News Poll: 57% Of Voters Say Investigations Into Trump Should Continue: A clear majority of American voters believe that the various investigations into alleged wrongdoing by former President Donald Trump should continue, according to a national NBC News poll conducted after the FBI searched Trump’s Florida home and recovered  documents marked as “top secret” earlier this month.  The poll also shows a dissatisfied public, with three-quarters of voters saying the county is headed in the wrong direction, a record 58% who say that America’s best years are behind it and 61% who say they’re willing to carry a protest sign for a day because they’re so upset.  And it paints a mixed picture of the 2022 midterm landscape, with President Joe Biden’s job rating mired in the low 40s, and with Republicans narrowly leading on congressional preference — but with Democrats nearly tying Republicans on voter enthusiasm — and with “threats to democracy” overtaking the cost of living as the top issue facing the country for voters.

Officials Fear Further Violence Over Trump’s Lies 

  • The Intercept: FBI Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Triggers Slow-Motion Rerun of Jan. 6 Insurrection: The brutal days since the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home have brought America a slow-motion rerun of the January 6 insurrection. Pro-Trump cultists have once again declared war on the U.S. government, just as they did on January 6, 2021, and are once again bent on overturning the rule of law. It is yet another warning of what the pro-Trump Republican Party has become: a violent, apocalyptic cult of personality. The nation is on notice of what will happen if Trump once again becomes president. Ricky Shiffer, who died at age 42 for Trump’s sake, is the perfect symbol of Trump’s rage-filled GOP. Shiffer tried to attack the FBI’s Cincinnati office on August 11 in an act of revenge for the bureau’s court-authorized search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Just after the FBI’s August 8 search, an account under Shiffer’s name on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, urged people to “get whatever you need to be ready for combat.” He tried to break through a bulletproof barrier outside the FBI’s office by shooting his nail gun, then fled into a running gun battle with police. While he was fleeing, he apparently took time to post on social media again, writing, “Well, I thought I had a way through bullet proof glass, and I didn’t.  If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I., and it’ll mean either I was taken off the internet, the F.B.I. got me, or they sent the regular cops.” Within hours, he was dead in a cornfield after a shootout with police. Shiffer was just one of many Trump supporters who have engaged in either violence or threats of violence in recent days against the FBI, the Justice Department, and the federal judge who approved the warrant used by the FBI in last week’s search.
  • NBC: Capitol Sergeant Who Survived Jan. 6 Fears Another Attack Over Trump’s Election Lies: A U.S. Capitol Police sergeant who came face-to-face with a Proud Boy during the deadly riot on Jan. 6, 2021, said this week that he fears another attack could stem from Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and rage over the search of his Mar-a-Lago home. “I live with the fear of another attack happening due to the rhetoric that is currently discussed ad nauseum on social media, radio, and the news,” wrote the sergeant, identified only by the initials “C.T.” in court documents. “It is exhausting to the point where I don’t watch/follow any form of media anymore since I seem to live the news daily.” He delivered the remarks in a stark victim impact statement in the case of Joshua Pruitt, a member of the far-right Proud Boys organization who will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly on Friday. Americans can’t “stand back and stand by” and “become complicit” about the election lies that are undermining American democracy, he wrote. 

States Prepare For Onslaught Of “Poll Watchers” And The Potential For Violence 

  • Votebeat: Election Officials Brace For Onslaught Of Poll Watchers: North Carolina’s May primary was “one of the worst elections I’ve ever worked,” said Karen Hebb, the elections director in Henderson County. “It was worse than COVID.”  In addition to long conversations with skeptical voters bringing her misinformation they read on the Internet, Hebb said she and her staff were blindsided by the sheer number of election observers who wanted to watch voting during the primary. There were at least 20 from the Republican Party alone, she said, compared with five or six observers total in the past. “We’ve never had that before,” she said.  Hebb stresses she’s fine with having observers. But some of the people watching the primary were disruptive, endlessly questioning workers and demanding to approach tabulators to verify totals, she reported to state officials in a post-election survey.  And in one alarming case, Hebb said in an interview with Votebeat, an observer followed an election worker from a voting site to the elections office “to make sure that they actually brought the ballots.” In the wake of the primary, Hebb is one of many local election officials nationwide worried about an onslaught of election observers. 
  • Bloomberg: States Are Bracing for Social Media-Enabled Election Violence: State elections officials say they’re seeing an uptick in a new kind of social media-fueled danger to US midterms: online anger that threatens to spill over into real-world violence. In Arizona, online conspiracy theories resulted in so many harassing phone calls to the secretary of state’s office, employees had to take a break from answering. In Michigan, officials have seen such a flood of violent rhetoric online that this week they sent letters to tech company CEOs pleading with them to do more to control their platforms. In Maine, a state where Election Day is associated with patriotic pie-eating, a poll worker last year received a credible death threat on Facebook. Bloomberg reached out to all 50 secretaries of state and spoke with representatives of 12 offices, from Texas to Hawaii. All of those who commented said they’ve seen an increase in online suspicion about the electoral process, which in many states has led to threats for staff or poll workers and resignations of these crucial employees.

Liz Cheney’s New Group To Target Trump Allies And Election Deniers 

  • Wall Street Journal: Liz Cheney Says New Political Group Will Target Trump Allies: Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) said on Sunday that her political focus after leaving Congress would go beyond challenging former President Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party to include opposing candidates who promote Mr. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. “I’m going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers,” Ms. Cheney said on ABC. “We’ve got election deniers that have been nominated for really important positions all across the country. And I’m going to work against those people. I’m going to work to support their opponents.”

In The States 

FLORIDA: Some Voters Arrested In DeSantis Election Investigation Were Told They Were Eligible To Vote 

  • Miami Herald: ‘How Did I Commit Fraud?’ Ex-Felon Voters Confused By Arrests, Desantis’ Announcement: When Romona Oliver registered to vote in early 2020 at the Hillsborough Tax Collector’s office, she was asked if she had a felony conviction. She said yes. The women helping her with the form submitted it, Oliver said. She said she was never asked specifically if her right to vote had been restored. Oliver, a Tampa resident, had recently been released from a women’s prison in Florida after serving a 20-year sentence for second-degree murder. In the 2020 presidential election, she voted. It was the first time Oliver, 55, ever did. “It was exciting for me because I felt like after all that time, I want to get out and try to do the right thing,” she said. “Give back to the community.” On Thursday morning, Oliver was arrested on a charge of voting as an unqualified elector and false affirmation. That afternoon, Gov. Ron DeSantis touted the arrests of 20 people, Oliver included, who had voted despite having a felony conviction for murder or a sex offense. Those arrested spanned five different counties: Hillsborough, Orange, Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. “That is against the law and now they’re going to pay the price for it, so they will be charged,” DeSantis said. Five of those arrested Thursday on voter fraud charges told the Herald/Times they believed they were able to vote and had faced no issue registering. They said they would not have voted had they known their previous convictions made them ineligible.

KANSAS: Recount Confirms Landslide Loss For Anti-Abortion Amendment, Highlights Threats To Democracy.  

  • Kansas City Star: Kansas Recount Confirms Landslide Win For Abortion Rights, But Highlights Risk To Democracy: Kansas reaffirmed its landslide vote to uphold abortion rights after election officials on Sunday finished a recount that never had any chance of changing the outcome but was sought by an election denier and anti-abortion activist advancing baseless allegations of fraud. The exercise instead delivered a second victory for opponents of an amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution. But the recount of such a lopsided vote, rather than building credibility in the results, risks undermining trust in elections because the process provided fringe, diehard amendment supporters an opportunity to attempt to create an aura of uncertainty surrounding the vote when, in fact, none ever existed.

WISCONSIN:  Wisconsin Republicans Are Still Rushing To Embrace Trump’s Election Lies 

  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Governor Candidate Tim Michels, Fired Election Reviewer Michael Gableman To Headline GOP Fundraiser:  Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels will appear next month with former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who oversaw a failed taxpayer-funded GOP review of the 2020 election. The pair will be joined by lieutenant gove nominee Roger Roth at the Republican Party of Outagamie County Constitution Day Dinner on Sept. 9 at The Grand Meridian in  Appleton.  Tickets are $50 per person, $90 per couple or $500 for a table of eight. Michels’ campaign did not immediately return requests for comment from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Friday afternoon. The announcement comes the same week a Dane County Judge said Gableman “accomplished nothing” while costing state taxpayers more than $1 million.  Judge Frank Remington also ordered Gableman to pay the court $24,000 for 12 days he was found in contempt of the order, imposed June 15.
  • Washington Post: After Attacks And Primary Challenge, Wisconsin GOP Leader Still Stands By Trump: Over the past 15 months, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly has sought to placate Donald Trump as the former president bombarded him with phone calls about the 2020 election, accused him of covering up corruption, labeled him a Republican in name only and endorsed his little-known primary opponent. After winning his primary by just 260 votes this month, Robin Vos expressed no regrets and stood by Trump. “I think Donald Trump has done a lot of good things for our country, and if he runs again, he could do a lot more,” Vos said in an interview in his state Capitol office. “But I’m not going to say that just because Donald Trump believes something, that I’m going to change what I believe — unless I’m persuaded.”

WYOMING:  Meet The First Election Denier Guaranteed Election As Secretary Of State In November 

  • Bolts: Meet the First Election Denier Poised to Win for Secretary of State This Year:  Chuck Gray, a Wyoming lawmaker, became the first election denier running in 2022 to effectively secure promotion to secretary of state, the chief office that oversees elections in the state.  Boosted by Trump’s endorsement, Gray prevailed in a competitive GOP primary to replace retiring incumbent Ed Buchanan; he beat fellow lawmaker Tara Nethercott 50 to 41 percent. His path forward is unobstructed since he is running unopposed in the general election. There will be no Democrat on the November ballot. An independent candidate still has until Aug. 29 to file a petition to run; the state’s election division told Bolts that no independent candidate had been certified as of Thursday. Someone could also mount an uphill write-in bid.  Gray’s win in the smallest state in the union comes as politicians similarly aligned with Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential race are advancing toward these critical election offices all around the country, including in critical swing states like Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  Already, sitting GOP secretaries of state who have ostensibly stayed away from the lie that the 2020 election was stolen have nevertheless trumpeted vague and baseless claims of widespread voter fraud to push for new voting restrictions. Gray has outright called the 2020 presidential election “clearly rigged” and has echoed Trump’s specific lies about the race. He has developed relationships with like-minded Republicans elsewhere in the country who are pushing to audit results. He traveled to Arizona last year to observe an audit ordered by state Republicans—the operation ended up uncovering no major problems—and he has sought to bring that approach to Wyoming, a state dominated by Republicans that Trump won by 43 percentage points in 2020.   

What Experts Are Saying

Matt Cleary, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University: “In Bolivia in 2019 and Honduras in 2009, incumbent presidents manipulated the election law to try to extend their stay in office. And they did so in a way that you couldn’t quite call a coup, but you would have to call it something like hardball politics. And both of those cases eventually failed because the incumbents didn’t have sufficient support among other powerful institutions in the government. And so they were removed from office. That’s directly comparable to what happened here. Trump did his best. Every political institution in the country said, ‘No, that’s not how we do things here.’ And so he was out.” Politico Magazine 

Scott Althaus, political science professor and director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “I think we see very consistent evidence that the American media has been struggling to understand how to responsibly report on a series of events that fall so outside the contemporary norms of American politics that the norms of professional journalism in the United States simply are not able to come to grips with that very easily. And there, I think American journalists have begun to look to places like Italy and South America for models of journalism within systems where the veracity of information coming from political leaders, where the motivation to try to polarize and outrage your constituents for political ends is more normal.” Politico Magazine 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University: “[A]s authoritarianism looks different today, so coups can change. The wild card about the U.S., which really is unique, is guns. There are 400 million guns in circulation. There are people with private arsenals. We tolerate militias, de facto paramilitaries, sovereign sheriffs. What other countries — democracies — have these sovereign sheriffs? Trump couldn’t get the military to help him. And so he’d been cultivating all these different extremists and giving them a big tent for years. And he was able to have a kind of bespoke thug army to converge. This is something that is possible only because we have a very different situation in terms of who can have arms and who can carry them in public and all of that.” Politico Magazine 

Norm Eisen, Brookings Institution senior fellow: “In the flurry of attention to Trump, we sometimes neglect perhaps the second greatest threat of autocracy: Ron DeSantis. @AndrewWarrenFL’s 1st amendment lawsuit is #1 some of the most important pushback out there” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Associated Press: Pro-Trump wins in blue states threaten GOP hopes in November

Axios: Polls reveal Trump’s FBI search bump

The Guardian: Ousted Republican reflects on Trump, democracy and America: ‘The place has lost its mind’ 

NBC: Trump thinks the Mar-a-Lago search will help him in 2024. Some allies aren’t so sure.

New York Times: An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives

New York Times: DeSantis, Eyeing 2024, Rallies With the Trump-Backed Far Right

Politico: There’s a Huge Divide Among Democrats Over How Hard to Campaign for Democracy

Vox: The Never Trump wing of the GOP never had a chance

January 6 And The 2020 Election

New York Times: Giuliani Associate Sought Pardon for Him After Jan. 6, Book Says

Newsweek: Johnson Says Involvement With 1/6 Fake Electors Plan Only ‘Lasted Seconds’

Politico: Appeals court temporarily blocks subpoena to Graham in Georgia election-fraud probe

Other Trump Investigations

Associated Press: Pence says he didn’t leave office with classified material

New York Times: The Final Days of the Trump White House: Chaos and Scattered Papers

Politico: Appeals court backs ruling to release DOJ memo on Trump prosecution

Politico: Trump’s throw-everything-against-the-wall response to the Mar-a-Lago search

Opinion

NBC (Leslie Brook): Republican scare tactics about IRS funding are becoming increasingly dangerous

Philadelphia Inquirer (Will Bunch): The barely hidden fascism of Ron DeSantis makes a Pa. pit stop on a race to ’24

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Trump’s next Mar-a-Lago move will escalate his supporters’ rage

Washington Post (Editorial): Election data breaches don’t ‘protect’ democracy. They harm it.

Political Violence

NBC: GOP candidate for Florida House is booted from Twitter after post about shooting federal agents

News From The States: Election Officials Can’t Access Federal Funding For Security As Violent Threats Mount: 

In The States 

Lancaster Online: ‘Flow from the pulpit:’ The LifeGate church members providing security to Doug Mastriano

New York Times: Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Georgia Election Law Said to Harm Black Voters

NH Journal: Sununu: Bolduc a ‘Conspiracy Theorist Extremist;’ Will Make it Harder for GOP to Win

Orlando Sentinel: Orange County GOP challenges mail ballots under new Florida election law

Politico: N.H. Republicans damage Senate chances in rough primary

Raleigh News & Observer: NC’s highest court rules on gerrymandered legislature’s power, but the case isn’t over

Washington Post (Analysis): A Republican who says Trump lost looks to put Colorado’s Senate race in play