Driving the Day:
“It is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests—who often work in tandem.”
MUST READ from @JaneMayerNYer: https://t.co/mgdHVTs0dY
— Defend Democracy Project (@DemocracyNowUS) August 8, 2022
Must Read Stories
The GOP Nominee For Michigan Attorney General Led An Illegal Election Machine Breach
- Reuters: Trump-Backed Michigan Attorney General Candidate Involved In Voting-System Breach, Documents Show: The Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general led a team that gained unauthorized access to voting equipment while hunting for evidence to support former President Donald Trump’s false election-fraud claims, according to a Reuters analysis of court filings and public records. The analysis shows that people working with Matthew DePerno – the Trump-endorsed nominee for the state’s top law-enforcement post – examined a vote tabulator from Richfield Township, a conservative stronghold of 3,600 people in northern Michigan’s Roscommon County. The Richfield security breach is one of four similar incidents being investigated by Michigan’s current attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel. Under state law, it is a felony to seek or provide unauthorized access to voting equipment.
- Detroit News: Nessel’s Office Seeks Special Prosecutor In Election ‘Conspiracy’ Probe Of Deperno, Others: Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office says a group of high-profile figures in the movement to dispute the 2020 presidential election, including the Michigan GOP’s likely nominee for attorney general, engaged in a “conspiracy” to gain improper access to voting machines. Following a months-long investigation, Nessel’s office is seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor to consider an array of potential criminal charges against nine individuals, including Republican attorney general candidate Matt DePerno, state Rep. Daire Rendon, R-Lake City, and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf. The group’s alleged activities were detailed in a Friday letter to Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson authored by Christina Grossi, the chief deputy attorney general. The group’s efforts involved convincing local clerks to hand over tabulators, taking the tabulators to hotels or rental properties in Oakland County, breaking into the machines, printing “fake ballots” and performing “tests” on the equipment, according to the letter.
Election Denier Chaos Engulfs The Wisconsin GOP With The Primary Tomorrow
- Washington Post: Trump Targets Top Wisconsin GOP Lawmaker For Not Overturning Election: One year ago this month, Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) sat on a private plane with Donald Trump and updated the former president on the investigation he had launched into the 2020 election, even though there was no evidence of widespread fraud. Since then, Trump has repeatedly pressured Vos privately and publicly to find a way to overturn the election results, which the state lawmaker has said is impossible and illegal. The 2020 results in Wisconsin still stand, showing that Joe Biden won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes. The alliance between the two came to a clear end Friday night as Trump held a rally in the Milwaukee suburbs and urged his supporters to vote for Vos’s challenger, Adam Steen, in the Tuesday primary. “Adam Steen is running to defeat your RINO speaker of the house, Robin Vos,” Trump said, using the acronym for “Republican in name only.” “Despite undeniable evidence of rigging and fraud, Speaker Vos has taken no steps to hold the Wisconsin Elections Commission accountable, clean up the voter rolls or right any of the other terrible wrongs.”
- New York Times: In Wisconsin, G.O.P. Voters Demand the Impossible: Decertifying 2020: When she started her campaign for governor of Wisconsin, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican, acknowledged that President Biden had been legitimately elected. She soon backtracked. Eventually, she said the 2020 election had been “rigged” against former President Donald J. Trump. She sued the state’s election commission. But she will still not entertain the false notion that the election can somehow be overturned, a fantasy that has taken hold among many of the state’s Republicans, egged on by one of her opponents, Tim Ramthun. And for that, she is taking grief from voters in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary. […] Ms. Kleefisch’s predicament illustrates how Mr. Trump’s supporters have turned fury over his 2020 election loss and the misguided belief that its results can be nullified into central campaign issues in the Republican primary for governor in Wisconsin, a battleground state won by razor-thin margins in the last two presidential elections. G.O.P. candidates have been left choosing whether to tell voters they are wrong or to engage in the fiction that something can be done to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat.
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Robin Vos Gave Michael Gableman $11,000 A Month To Review The 2020 Election. Now Gableman Wants Vos To Lose His Job: Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman wants the man who gave him a national platform and more than $100,000 to lose his job. Gableman, who gave an invocation at former President Donald Trump’s Waukesha rally on Friday, is endorsing Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ primary opponent and plans to campaign with the longshot candidate in the days before Tuesday’s election. Trump shared Gableman’s endorsement of Adam Steen, a Republican who is challenging Vos in the 63rd Assembly District, at his Friday rally — an announcement that appeared to catch Gableman by surprise.
State Threats To Democracy Rise With 2024 On The Horizon
- Bloomberg: Five US States Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen: Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden failed, but his loyalists have never stopped trying to turn the US election system into one that would return him to the White House in 2024—fairly or otherwise. In the last two years, Republicans have sought to remove state officials who wouldn’t manufacture votes and falsely declare him the winner. They changed the way elections are run in response to his conspiracy theories. Most importantly, they’ve nominated people who insist Trump won as candidates for US Congress and governor, and for offices that certify the outcome. Has it worked? To answer that question, a team of Bloomberg journalists set out to find which states are most vulnerable to political election interference—and what it means for elections this fall and in 2024, when the White House will once again be at stake. We dug into laws in all 50 states and scrutinized the thousands of election-related bills proposed nationwide since 2020. We consulted election-security experts, voting rights advocates, election lawyers, academics and current and former elections administrators as well as decades of political research to zero in on how elections work. The bumper-sticker version of what we found: The 2022 vote should be fine. The most far-reaching attempts by Republicans to overhaul election laws have so far stalled as Americans head into November’s midterm elections to decide governors in 36 states and control of the US Congress. So even though it’s a safe bet that at least a handful of candidates will follow Trump’s lead and claim their opponent cheated if they lose, it won’t be any easier than it was two years ago for them to overturn the results. But the picture two years from now is shaping up to be much darker.
- New Yorker: State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy: Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America’s state legislatures. […] Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring “the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.” Pepper said of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “It’s so disingenuous—total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they’ve been gerrymandered, they don’t reflect the will of the people.” With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse—the former President “made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy.” But Pepper thinks that “people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him.” In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that “the Republican attack on democracy preceded him”—and that “if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue.”
Republicans On The January 6 Committee Plan Their Next Moves To Protect Democracy
- New York Times: Liz Cheney Is Ready to Lose. But She’s Not Ready to Quit: The most closely watched primary of 2022 has not become much of a race at all. Polls show Ms. Cheney losing badly to her rival, Harriet Hageman, Mr. Trump’s vehicle for revenge, and the congresswoman has been all but driven out of her Trump-loving state, in part because of death threats, her office says. Yet for Ms. Cheney, the race stopped being about political survival months ago. Instead, she has used the Aug. 16 contest as a sort of high-profile stage for her martyrdom — and a proving ground for her new crusade. She used the only debate to tell voters to “vote for somebody else” if they wanted a politician who would violate their oath of office. Last week, she enlisted her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to cut an ad calling Mr. Trump a “coward” who represents the greatest threat to America in the history of the republic. In a state where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote two years ago, Ms. Cheney might as well be asking ranchers to go vegan. “If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,” she said in an interview last week in the conference room of a Cheyenne bank.
- Politico: Kinzinger Allies Launch ‘Pro-Democracy’ Candidate Recruitment Program: An organization founded by allies of Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) is launching a program to recruit “pro-freedom, pre-democracy” candidates for office, with a particular focus on election officers across the country. Keep Country First Policy Action, a nonprofit group, is kicking off its “Country First Academy” on Monday, according to plans for the program shared first with POLITICO. The organization plans to recruit and train candidates considering running for all levels of government. But it will have a particular focus on recruiting for local election official positions in counties, along with finding and training volunteers who staff polling places and count ballots.
In The States
ARIZONA: How Arizona Became The Capital Of Conspiracy Theories
- New York Times: How Arizona Became an Abyss of Election Conspiracy Theories: Of the roughly three dozen states that have held primary elections this year, Arizona is where Donald Trump’s conspiratorial fantasies about the 2020 election seem to have gained the most purchase.
MICHIGAN: Pro-Impeachment Republican Peter Meijer Embraces The Trump-Backed Conspiracy Theorist Who Defeated Him
- Insider: Pro-impeachment Republican Rep. Peter Meijer Introduced And Congratulated His Trump-Backed Primary Challenger For A ‘Hard-Fought Race’ At GOP Unity Event: After losing this week to a primary challenger endorsed by former President Donald Trump, Republican Rep. Peter Meijer congratulated his opponent on his victory. “This was a hard-fought race,” said Meijer at a unity reception held by the Kent County GOP in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Wednesday. “You know, it was a long race but a race that John ran very well.” He then introduced John Gibbs, who served in the Trump administration in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Meijer had criticized Gibbs just last week for questioning the results of the 2020 election while highlighting his baseless claims that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, took part in Satanic rituals. “Just want to now officially introduce, send my congratulations and wish you the best of luck and all that is to come,” he said, gesturing towards Gibbs. “Your Republican nominee for Michigan’s 3rd congressional district, Mr. John Gibbs.”
WASHINGTON: Pro-Impeachment Republican Dan Newhouse Wins Primary, Jaime Herrera Beutler’s Lead Shrinks
- Roll Call: Newhouse Declared Winner While Herrera Beutler’s Lead Narrows: Rep. Dan Newhouse is the projected winner of his primary in Washington’s 4th District, but Republican colleague Jaime Herrera Beutler’s lead over a challenger backed by former President Donald Trump has narrowed significantly in the state’s 3rd District as votes from Tuesday continue to be tallied. […] Newhouse and Herrera Beutler were among the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after his supporters stormed the Capitol in 2021, and the former president urged supporters to defeat them this year. One other impeachment supporter, Rep. Peter Meijer, was defeated in Tuesday’s primary in Michigan.
What Experts Are Saying
Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: “[Viktor] Orban’s presence at the convention throws cold water on those hoping for some deep-seated change in the GOP after the Trump presidency. The movement called Trumpism is much deeper than Trump. Regardless of whether he is the Republican nominee in 2024, the party likely will continue bearing his stamp.” CNN Op-Ed: Why conservatives gave a big welcome to leader who suppressed Hungary’s democracy
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University: “Tellingly, he [Viktor Orban] did not mention Trump in his speech, although he had privately visited the former president at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on his way to Texas. As Orban knows, Trump is currently under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. So the Hungarian leader is clearly leaving his options open, signaling that he will deal with whomever may emerge as Republican kingpin. In the meantime, he is all too happy to assist the GOP in wrecking American democracy.” MSNBC Op-Ed: CPAC 2022 features Viktor Orban, Donald Trump — a celebration of autocracy
Neil Eggleston, White House counsel in the Obama administration, re: DOJ subpoenas of Trump WH counsel: “‘I think that’s [Trump v. Thompson] probably the way the courts are going to think about this as well,’ he said. ‘Because if you just apply a standard balancing test under U.S. v. Nixon, I think it is overwhelming that the Department of Justice will have shown compelling need for this testimony and President Trump’s interest in confidentiality at this stage, particularly after the January 6 hearings, is virtually zero.’” The Hill
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Axios: Trump gives House a break
CNN: Trump Wins CPAC Straw Poll In Dallas
Politico: Among Donald Trump’s endorsements, one holds a special place in his heart: Kari Lake
Vice: The Surreal Spectacle of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Capitol Riot Rage Cage
Wall Street Journal: Possible Trump Run in 2024 Draws Tepid Reactions From GOP Lawmakers
Washington Post (Analysis): What would happen if a state official refused to certify an election?
January 6 And The 2020 Election
ABC: Secret Service hands agents’ phone numbers to Jan. 6 committee: Sources
CBS: Former Attorney General Bill Barr says Jan. 6 grand jury activity suggests prosecutors “taking a hard look at the group at the top, including the president”
New Yorker: Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals
Politico: Mastriano threatens to renege on testifying to Jan. 6 panel
Other Trump Investigations
Axios: Exclusive photos: Trump’s telltale toilet
Insider: Paul Manafort in his first in-depth interview since going to prison for Trump: ‘I don’t apologize’
Opinion
Washington Post (Max Boot): The GOP is Viktor Orban’s party now
Political Violence
CNN: Man who threatened Anthony Fauci sentenced to over 3 years in federal prison
