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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 24, 2022

By August 24, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

The January 6 Committee Continues A Busy August, Interviewing Cabinet Members About 25th Amendment Discussions And Dispatching Staff To Copenhagen To Review Documentary Footage 

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Questions Trump Cabinet Members on 25th Amendment Talks: The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack has used the August congressional recess to gather more evidence as it prepares to resume public hearings next month, dispatching investigators to Europe and digging deeper into discussions by former President Donald J. Trump’s cabinet after the riot about removing him from office. The panel has been holding closed-door interviews with senior Trump administration officials in an effort to uncover more about the period between Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked Congress, and Jan. 20, when President Biden was sworn in, including talks about invoking the 25th Amendment. On Tuesday, the panel interviewed Robert O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, for several hours, according to two people familiar with the committee’s work. Investigators asked Mr. O’Brien about discussions inside the cabinet about whether to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office; about whether he considered resigning; and about the access that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and election conspiracy theorist, had to Mr. Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.
  • Politico: Jan. 6 Panel Investigators Traveled To Copenhagen To View Stone Footage:  Aides to the Jan. 6 select committee traveled to Copenhagen last week to review documentary footage related to Donald Trump ally and pardon recipient Roger Stone, according to two people familiar with the trip. The select panel aides viewed portions of more than 170 hours filmed by a Danish documentary crew led by Christoffer Guldbrandsen. That team, known as The Ark, tracked Stone for long stretches of time over two years — including on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob swarmed the Capitol in an effort to keep Trump in power. The research trip to Denmark is the latest indication of a still ongoing and active investigation by the Jan. 6 committee, even as it nears the release of its final report and legislative recommendations this fall. The panel has signaled it intends to maintain its aggressive pace through the end of the current Congress: Jan. 3 of next year.

MAGA Candidates Fall Short In Republican Primaries 

  • Axios: Mainstream Strikes Back: About last night: Several “ultra-MAGA” candidates fell short in their primary bids – due in large part to not having former President Trump’s endorsement. NY-2: Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who broke with his party on votes on infrastructure, gay marriage and the Jan. 6 committee, fended off right-wing challenger Robert Cornicelli. NY-23: New York State GOP chair Nick Langworthy beat scandal-ridden developer and former gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. FL-7: Army veteran Cory Mills, a more conventional conservative, beat right-wing state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, who called for the arrest of FBI agents. FL-11: Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) beat Laura Loomer, a prominent far-right, anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist.

The FBI Search At Mar-A-Lago Followed Months Of Resistance From Trump – And He’s Still Desperate To Get “His” Top Secret Documents Back 

  • Washington Post: FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Search Followed Months Of Resistance, Delay By Trump: Donald Trump’s lawyers received ominous news in an April 12 email from the National Archives: The FBI would soon examine sensitive documents the former president had reluctantly returned to the government from his Florida club three months earlier. The communication, which has been reviewed by The Washington Post, was a crucial pivot point in the probe of Trump’s handling of classified documents that led to the dramatic search of his Mar-a-Lago Club earlier this month. Within weeks, Trump would have new lawyers to deal with the documents, and the FBI’s attention would shift from top-secret material Trump returned to the Archives to classified items they believed he had kept in Florida. One lawyer who received the email, former White House deputy counsel Pat Philbin, would be interviewed by FBI agents who considered him a witness in the rapidly expanding investigation. Some of Trump’s allies have blamed the rushed and haphazard packing process during Trump’s final days in office for the presence of documents the FBI found in Trump’s bedroom, office and a first-floor storage room at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8. But the key events that led to the FBI search took place only this year, after months of slow-rolling conflict between the former president and law enforcement agencies.
  • Rolling Stone: Trump Tells His Lawyers: Get ‘My’ Top Secret Documents Back: In the weeks after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid, former President Donald Trump repeatedly made a simple-sounding but extraordinary ask: he wanted his lawyers to get “my documents” back from federal law enforcement. Trump wasn’t merely referring to the alleged trove of attorney-client material that he insists was scooped up by the feds during the raid, two people familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone. The ex-president has been demanding that his team find a way to recover “all” of the official documents that Trump has long referred to as “mine” — including the highly sensitive and top secret ones.    Sources close to Trump agree with outside legal experts that such a sweeping legal maneuver would be a long-shot, at best.  “I hate to break it to the [former] president, but I do not think he is going to get all [the] top-secret documents back,” says one Trump adviser. “That ship has probably sailed.”

In The States 

ARIZONA: GOP Candidate For Attorney General Bragged About Committing Voter Fraud As A Teenager 

  • Phoenix New Times: Abe Hamadeh Wants to be Arizona’s Top Cop. As a Teen, He Bragged About Voter Fraud: Abe Hamadeh has built his campaign for attorney general around cleaning up elections in Arizona. Yet as a teenager, he boasted to an online message board about voting before he was legally allowed to and altering his mom’s ballot. The posts were among thousands Hamadeh made to an online message board beginning in 2007. When he wasn’t bragging about altering ballots, he was offering antisemitic and sexist rants, backing Sheriff Joe Arpaio and arguing that voting should be limited to college graduates who pass intelligence tests.

FLORIDA: Defeated Extremist Candidate Claims Voter Fraud And Refuses To Concede 

  • HuffPost: Defeated GOP Extremist Laura Loomer: ‘I’m Not Conceding, Because I’m A Winner!’:  ​​Extremist Laura Loomer lost a Florida GOP primary challenge against House incumbent Dan Webster on Tuesday ― but she didn’t quite see it that way. “I”m not conceding, because I’m a winner!” Loomer yelled to supporters after her defeat, per video posted by News 6′s Mike DeForest. “And the reality is, this Republican Party is broken to its core.” “What we have done tonight is really, honestly shocked the nation,” she continued. “We have further exposed a corruption within our own feckless, cowardly Republican Party. And that is exactly the reason why, right, I decided to go against the RINO Republican Daniel Webster, do-nothing Daniel Webster.” Loomer, a self-proclaimed white nationalist and Islamophobe who suggested the Buffalo supermarket shooting was set up by Democrats, got closer than many expected on Tuesday. In 2020, the Donald Trump-backed Loomer won a GOP primary, but lost the general election in a landslide.

MICHIGAN: Two Men Convicted In Plot To Kidnap Governor Whitmer 

  • Associated Press: 2 Men Convicted In Plot To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer:  A jury on Tuesday convicted two men of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, delivering swift verdicts in a plot that was broken up by the FBI and described as a rallying cry for a U.S. civil war by anti-government extremists. The result was a big victory for the U.S. Justice Department. A different jury just four months ago couldn’t reach unanimous decisions on Adam Fox or Barry Croft Jr. but acquitted two other men, a stunning conclusion that led to a second trial. Their arrests nearly two years ago came at an extremely tense time: the volatile homestretch of the election between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump playing out against a backdrop of armed protests over COVID-19 restrictions, especially in Michigan. Jury selection in the retrial of Fox and Croft coincidentally occurred a day after FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate for documents, putting the agency in headlines at the same time that the judge was trying to detect any biases about law enforcement in the jury pool. Fox and Croft were convicted Tuesday of two counts of conspiracy related to the kidnapping scheme and attempts to use a weapon of mass destruction. 

What Experts Are Saying

Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and a principal investigator on the American National Election Studies 2024 project: “Two types of events in upcoming elections, Valentino writes, ‘indicate that the U.S. has broken from mainstream democratic systems’: ‘First, widespread refusal among losing candidates and members of their party to accept their losses in these elections; and second, state officials in certain states refusing to certify elections where candidates of their own party lose. Note these types of threats are significantly more serious to democracy even than the myriad changes to election laws that make it harder for citizens to vote, even when those laws disproportionately affect some groups more than others. This would be voter nullification after the fact.’” NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall Column: When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner

Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T.: ““The widespread acceptance among Republican voters of Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is, in Acemoglu’s view, ‘a ‘signal.’ You are signaling to the rest of the population and especially to the media that you are highly discontented, and you are distinct from the well-educated elites benefiting from the current system. If so, the more outrageous this signal sounds, the more effective it may be to some of the people who are trying to send the signal.’ Acemoglu acknowledged that this ‘is just a hypothesis, but if it were true, it would imply that demonizing Trump supporters would make things worse for Democrats. It may not be so much that they are completely delusional, but they are angry and feel outside of the mainstream. If so, finding ways of broadening the mainstream coalition may be a much more effective response.’” NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall Column: When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner

Robb Willer, professor of sociology and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab: “There are also concerning levels of anti-democratic attitudes in the American mass public, both Democrats and Republicans report being willing to vote for candidates who would even if those candidates broke longstanding norms and laws we associate with democratic practices if the voters thought that it would serve their partisan interests…This is a really dangerous situation, a recipe for potential further democratic backsliding, and that motive motivated us to do this project, which is a very large-scale effort to identify effective ways to intervene on this problem.” KOMO News 

Harry Litman, former US attorney: “The obstruction just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Several witnesses now saying [T]rump went through boxes personally. That puts him 4-square in obstruction land.  Moreover, looking more righteous–far from a picayune case, it captures his basic sin of thinking he is the gov” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

CNBC: The Koch network and other Trump allies are quietly backing his biggest GOP critic: Rep. Liz Cheney

New York Times: Deniers, Enablers, Accepters

Other Trump Investigations

New York Times: Trump, Without the Presidency’s Protections, Struggles for a Strategy

Politico: Judge seeks clarity about Trump’s move on records seized from Mar-a-Lago

In The States 

Missouri Independent: NAACP, League of Women Voters sue to block Missouri’s new election law

Missouri Independent: Citing Greitens defeat, John Wood abandons independent run for U.S. Senate in Missouri