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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — August 4, 2022

By August 4, 2022August 10th, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

What To Watch For Today: 

Tennessee holds its primary with Republican election deniers running up and down the ballot. 

Must Read Stories

Trump Has Unleashed A Swarm Of Election Denying Sore Losers On The GOP 

  • Axios: Trump’s Pandora’s Box: A growing number of Republican candidates this cycle are refusing to concede elections they indisputably lost, promoting conspiracy theories about the results and engaging in local battles over certification. Why it matters: The undercurrent of election denialism pervading the 2022 midterms is bubbling to the surface as more Trump-inspired candidates are tested in primaries. The big picture: The trend stretches across and beyond states at the heart of former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. What’s happening: In Michigan, Ryan Kelley, a gubernatorial candidate who was arrested by the FBI in June in connection with the Capitol riot, is refusing to concede and called his fourth-place finish in the GOP primary a “predetermined outcome.” Michigan election officials had also been worried in the run-up to the primary that local canvassers would refuse to certify the results, Axios’ Samuel Robinson reported last week. In Arizona, Trump-endorsed Mark Finchem — who won the state’s GOP nomination for secretary of state — said at an election party that “I’ve got people all over the state saying, ‘I’ve gotten ballots that I didn’t ask for,'” according to reports. Right-wing commentators also resurrected a baseless conspiracy theory in Arizona that claimed election officials were using Sharpies to invalidate ballots. The circulating conspiracy prompted Maricopa County’s top prosecutor to send a cease-and-desist letter to a local office-seeker demanding she stop telling voters to steal pens from polling places.

January 6 Investigations Continue To Expand, Move Closer To Donald Trump 

  • Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Subpoenas Top Trump White House Lawyers in Jan. 6 Probe: Two top lawyers who worked in the White House under former President Donald Trump have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury investigating the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, people familiar with the matter said, in the latest sign that the Justice Department’s probe is entering a more aggressive phase. Mr. Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Pat Philbin received subpoenas in recent days seeking documents and testimony, the people said. The subpoenas are the clearest sign yet that federal prosecutors are examining Mr. Trump’s own actions, not just those of his allies, in efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, including before and during the attack on the Capitol by his supporters. Prosecutors in recent days have also pressed witnesses, including two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence, about Mr. Trump’s push to stay in office, The Wall Street Journal reported, though the questioning doesn’t necessarily mean that prosecutors are pursuing a criminal case against the former president.
  • CNN: Justice Department Sues Former Trump Adviser Peter Navarro For Emails From His Private Account: The Justice Department sued former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Wednesday, seeking to force Navarro to turn over emails from a private account that he used while working at the Trump White House. According to the lawsuit, the National Archives learned of Navarro’s private account from the House committee investigating the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which obtained messages from the previously unknown email address. Between 200 and 250 of the emails on Navarro’s private account should have been given to the National Archives, prosecutors say. Navarro, however, did not copy these messages to his official government email account, according to prosecutors, and when the archivist attempted to contact Navarro in order to secure these records, Navarro did not respond.
  • Rolling Stone:  Jan. 6 Committee Prepares to Subpoena Alex Jones’ Texts, Emails: The January 6th House committee is preparing to request the trove of Alex Jones’s text messages and emails revealed Wednesday in a defamation lawsuit filed by victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, Rolling Stone has learned. On Wednesday, Sandy Hook victims’ attorney Mark Bankston told Jones that his attorney had mistakenly sent Bankston three years worth of the conspiracy theorist’s emails and text messages copied from his phone. Now — a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone — the January 6th committee is preparing to request that data from the plaintiff attorneys in order to aid its investigation of the insurrection. These internal deliberations among the committee, which is probing former President Donald Trump’s role in causing the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, began within minutes of the lawyer’s revelation being heard on the trial’s livestream on Wednesday afternoon.

A Republican “Doomsday Ticket” Emerges 

  • Politico: Republican ‘Doomsday Ticket’ ready for November: Even before Donald Trump, Arizona Republicans had a soft spot for hard-liners. Think Evan Mecham and Joe Arpaio, or the party’s pre-Trump censuring of the late Sen. John McCain. But what may soon be different after Tuesday’s elections is that with Kari Lake poised to win the gubernatorial primary alongside a stable of fellow election conspiracy theorists, there is no longer any traditionalist wing of the Republican Party in Arizona holding the line. Not McCain or Doug Ducey, the outgoing Republican governor who went in for Lake’s more establishment-minded opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson. Not former Vice President Mike Pence, whose own trip to the state to help Robson — and oppose Trump — fell flat. In some states where Trump’s endorsed candidates have lost primaries this year, including in Georgia, Nebraska and Idaho, institutionalists held on. But in one of the most critical swing states in the country — and in a place where Trump’s brand may be especially damaging in the general election and in 2024 — the old Republican establishment has been replaced with election deniers from the top to the bottom of the statewide ticket. “I will call in a bit to talk about the doomsday ticket,” Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in the state, said today, when Nightly reached out to him to talk about the results. “Let me wake up and finish crying.”
  • New York Times: In 4 Swing States, G.O.P. Election Deniers Could Oversee Voting: With Tuesday’s primary victories in Arizona and Michigan added to those in Nevada and Pennsylvania, Republicans who have disputed the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and who could affect the outcome of the next one are on a path toward winning decisive control over how elections are run in several battleground states. Running in a year in which G.O.P. voters are energized by fierce disapproval of President Biden, these newly minted Republican nominees for secretary of state and governor have taken positions that could threaten the nation’s traditions of nonpartisan elections administration, acceptance of election results and orderly transfers of power. Each has spread falsehoods about fraud and illegitimate ballots, endorsing the failed effort to override the 2020 results and keep former President Donald J. Trump in power. Their history of anti-democratic impulses has prompted Democrats, democracy experts and even some fellow Republicans to question whether these officials would oversee fair elections and certify winners they didn’t support. There is no question that victories by these candidates in November could lead to sweeping changes to how millions of Americans vote. Several have proposed eliminating mail voting, ballot drop boxes and even the use of electronic voting machines, while empowering partisan election observers and expanding their roles.

Election Officials Are Under Siege By Conspiracy Theorists 

  • Washington Post: Over 1,000 Election-Worker Threats Reported In Past Year, Official Says:  The Justice Department has reviewed more than 1,000 hostile threats against election workers over the past year, leading to federal charges in five cases and one conviction, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Polite, who heads the department’s criminal division, described an increasingly rampant problem across the country, detailing for lawmakers repeated and often graphically violent threats that have targeted election officials in Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and other states. The hearing focused on the findings of a Justice Department task force that convened last summer to examine threats against election workers, which officials say increased sharply after President Donald Trump and his supporters falsely claimed that the results of the 2020 election were tainted. Polite said about 10 percent of the 1,000 or so complaints the tasks force received met the threshold for a criminal investigation. Many were referred to the task force by state law enforcement agencies.
  • Reuters: Pro-Trump Activists Swamp Election Officials With Sprawling Records Requests: Pro-Trump operatives are flooding local officials with public-records requests to seek evidence for the former president’s false stolen-election claims and to gather intelligence on voting machines and voters, adding to the chaos rocking the U.S. election system. The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Arizona, an election battleground state, has fielded 498 public records requests this year – 130 more than all of last year. Officials in Washoe County, Nevada, have fielded 88 public records requests, two-thirds more than in all of 2021. And the number of requests to North Carolina’s state elections board have already nearly equaled last year’s total of 229. The surge of requests is overwhelming staffs that oversee elections in some jurisdictions, fueling baseless voter-fraud allegations and raising concerns about the inadvertent release of information that could be used to hack voting systems, according to a dozen election officials interviewed by Reuters.

In The States 

ARIZONA: Rusty Bowers Has No Regrets 

  • Associated Press: Jan. 6 Witness Rusty Bowers Has No Regrets In GOP Race Loss: Arizona voters relegated House Speaker Rusty Bowers to the history books after the conservative Republican crossed former President Donald Trump and refused to back his unsupported claims that he lost in 2020 because of fraud. Bowers was thoroughly trounced in Tuesday’s GOP primary, losing to a former state senator by nearly 2 to 1 among voters in his district in the eastern Phoenix suburbs. He was trying to move to the Senate after term limits barred another state House run. Bowers knew his seat was on the line and said he had no regrets for standing up to Trump. “I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he said Wednesday. “I’d do it 50 times in a row.”

GEORGIA: Trump Allies Launch Recall Campaign Against Fulton County DA 

  • Yahoo: Trump Allies Launch Effort To Recall Fulton County DA Fani Willis: Donald Trump’s allies in Georgia are mounting a campaign to recall Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over her investigation into the then president’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and are seeking to recruit high-dollar donors to fund it, according to sources familiar with the effort. The organizers of the campaign concede that the obstacles to a successful recall in Georgia are high, making the chances of getting a recall vote on the ballot before Willis makes her decision on whether to indict Trump and his associates remote at best. But a source involved in the effort told Yahoo News that the aim is to use the recall campaign as a way to politically damage the Democratic district attorney, portraying her as a partisan actor who is ignoring soaring crime rates in Atlanta in order to target high-profile Republicans. A side benefit of that game plan, another source familiar with the campaign said, is to potentially influence a jury pool down the road should a case against Trump go to trial.

What Experts Are Saying

Rick Hasen, legal scholar and director of UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project: “‘Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this [refusing to concede and pushing conspiracy theories] has become mainstream,’ said Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project. ‘It’s exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers’ consent.’ ‘If people believe the other side is consistently stealing elections, first of all, you completely delegitimize people in office … but second, you create the conditions where people might be more willing to engage in fraud themselves as a way of trying to even the score,’ he said.” Axios 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “A subtle point about the value of J6C hearings: Ongoing revelations from the House..select committee are keeping the public informed about the sort of wrongdoing a criminal probe might focus on, making it harder for Trump to demagogue an investigation away” Tweet 

Heather Cox Richardson, scholar of American history: “Part of why the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has been so effective is that it has carefully built a story out of verifiable facts. Because House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) withdrew the pro-Trump Republicans from the committee, we have not had to deal with the muddying of the water by people like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who specializes in bullying and hectoring to get sound bites that later turn up in on right-wing channels in a narrative that mischaracterizes what actually happened.” Letters from an American 

Dan Barr, Arizona elections lawyer: “Establishment AZ Republican leaders enabled and excused the birthers, election deniers, conspiracy mongers and Covid deniers when it was convenient for them. Yesterday, the people they enabled for far too long kicked them in the teeth and threw them to the curb.” Tweet 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “The speeches former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence gave this past week brought to mind two types of democracy destroyers. There are the brutes with the stick, who act loudly and quickly, and there are the soft-voiced bureaucratic types who act methodically. To use a popular metaphor, one whomps the frog to death in public and leaves its corpse there as an example to others. The other boils the frog slowly, attracting less notice, and then conceals its remains. The latter is no less deadly but is more discreet.” Lucid

Rachel Kleinfeld, Carnegie Endowment senior fellow (Podcast Audio): Republicans Have a Militia Problem The Bulwark 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Associated Press: Election skeptics rise in GOP races to run state elections

Axios: Impeachment Republicans dwindle

Mother Jones: Eric Defeats Eric in a Battle of GOP Election Deniers

NBC: ‘The 800-pound gorilla’: Trump boosts endorsement record with Arizona and Michigan wins

New York Times: Momentum Builds for Overhaul of Rules Governing the Electoral Count

Washington Post: Arizona Republican slate packed with Trump-backed election deniers

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: Former Deputy White House Counsel Subpoenaed In January 6 Probe

New York Times: Democrat Seeks Inspector General Inquiry Into Pentagon’s Missing Jan. 6 Texts

New York Times: Trump Lawyer Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud

Politico: Trump faces uphill fight on executive privilege in DOJ probe

Wall Street Journal: Justice Department Subpoenas Top Trump White House Lawyers in Jan. 6 Probe

Washington Post: Homeland Security watchdog previously accused of misleading investigators, report says

Other Trump Investigations

CNN: Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. sit for depositions as part of NY probe into Trump Organization’s finances

Opinion

New York Times (Editorial): A Cynical Low for the Democratic Party

In The States 

Forward: Mastriano fights back against antisemitism accusations, citing use of shofar