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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — January 9, 2023

By January 9, 2023No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

President Biden Marks January 6 Anniversary With Honors And Warnings While Prosecutions Of Rioters Continue To Grow 

  • Politico: Biden Marks Jan. 6 Anniversary With Emotional Tributes, Stark Warnings: Marking the second anniversary of one of the nation’s darkest days, President Joe Biden paid tribute Friday to the heroism displayed on Jan. 6, 2021, while also warning that the forces that fueled the violence at the U.S. Capitol still lurk. Biden touted the nation’s healing over the last two years but condemned the riot at the very citadel of the nation’s democracy. He derided the mob “as sick insurrectionists” who wreaked havoc and drew blood in the name of Donald Trump. “All of it was fueled by lies about the 2020 election,” Biden said. “But on this day two years ago, our democracy held. We the People, as our Constitution refers to us, ‘We the people’ did not flinch.” Biden also honored 14 Americans who stood up for democracy after the 2020 election, awarding medals to members of law enforcement, including Capitol Police officers who held off rioters, as well as election officials who stood their ground in the face of Trump’s onslaught of lies.
  • New York Times: Two Years Later, Prosecutions Of Jan. 6 Rioters Continue To Grow: The investigation into the storming of the Capitol is, by any measure, the biggest criminal inquiry in the Justice Department’s 153-year history. And even two years after Jan. 6, 2021, it is only getting bigger. In chasing leads and making arrests, federal agents have already seized hundreds of cellphones, questioned thousands of witnesses and followed up on tens of thousands of tips in an exhaustive process that has resulted so far in more than 900 arrests from Maine to California. But the inquiry, as vast as it has been, is still far from complete: Scores, if not hundreds, more people could face charges in the year — or years — to come, spread out over the course of many months so as not to flood the courts.

Republican Lawmakers Contributed To The January 6 Attack And Are Now Launching Investigations That Seek To Undermine Accountability For Donald Trump And Others 

  • Politico: Enablers, Line-Straddlers And Quiet Resisters: How Gop Lawmakers Contributed To Jan. 6: During its last days of existence, the Capitol riot panel unleashed a massive trove of evidence with an unmistakable conclusion: At every stage of former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election results, a phalanx of hardline GOP lawmakers were egging him on. The committee’s latest material, including 250 witness transcripts, often portrayed those House Republicans as drivers, enablers and even architects of Trump’s Jan. 6 scheme.  And several conservatives currently standing against Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the top gavel, including House Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), were among the handful of true believers in Trump’s efforts. […] But they weren’t the only congressional Republicans who took consequential actions as the Capitol hurtled toward what became a violent siege by his supporters two years ago. Others took a more nuanced tack, countenancing Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud while working to substantiate them and also pushing back against the most extreme impulses of his inner circle. Still more Republicans mounted a quiet resistance to Trump’s gambit, lobbying to contain the damage while doing little to publicly signal their disapproval.
  • New York Times: House Republicans Preparing Broad Inquiry Into F.B.I. And Security Agencies: Newly empowered House Republicans are preparing a wide-ranging investigation into law enforcement and national security agencies, raising the prospect of politically charged fights with the Biden administration over access to sensitive information like highly classified intelligence and the details of continuing criminal inquiries by the Justice Department. The House plans to vote this week on a resolution to create a special Judiciary subcommittee on what it calls the “weaponization of the federal government,” a topic that Republicans have signaled could include reviewing investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. The panel would be overseen by Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who is also poised to become the Judiciary Committee’s chairman. It remains to be seen who else Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who made numerous concessions to a far-right faction of his party to win the speakership, will put on it. In a Fox News interview on Friday evening, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a lead negotiator for hard-right lawmakers who pushed Mr. McCarthy’s team for concessions, portrayed the panel as part of the agreement they struck for their support. He said Mr. McCarthy had committed to giving the subcommittee at least as much funding and staffing as the House special committee in the last Congress that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Enabled By Trump’s Allies, Supporters Of Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Attack The Capital In Brasilia 

  • New York Times: Bolsonaro Supporters Lay Siege to Brazil’s Capital: Thousands of supporters of Brazil’s ousted former president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Sunday to protest what they falsely claim was a stolen election, the violent culmination of years of conspiracy theories advanced by Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies. In scenes reminiscent of the Jan. 6 storming of the United States Capitol, protesters in Brasília, Brazil’s capital, draped in the yellow and green of Brazil’s flag surged into the seat of power, setting fires, repurposing barricades as weapons, knocking police officers from horseback and filming their crimes as they committed them. “We always said we would not give up,” one protester declared as he filmed himself among hundreds of protesters pushing into the Capitol building. “Congress is ours. We are in power.” For months, protesters had been demanding that the military prevent the newly elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office on Jan. 1. Many on the right in Brazil have become convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that October’s election was rigged.
  • BBC: How Trump’s Allies Stoked Brazil Congress Attack: The scenes in Brasilia looked eerily similar to events at the US Capitol on 6 January two years ago – and there are deeper connections as well. “The whole thing smells,” said a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October last year. The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud. Across several episodes of his podcast and in social media posts, he and his guests stoked up allegations of a “stolen election” and shadowy forces. He promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring, and continued to encourage opposition even after Mr Bolsonaro himself appeared to accept the results. Mr Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, was just one of several key allies of Donald Trump who followed the same strategy used to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 US presidential election. And like what happened in Washington on 6 January 2021, those false reports and unproven rumours helped fuel a mob that smashed windows and stormed government buildings in an attempt to further their cause.

In The States 

MICHIGAN: Attorney General Dana Nessel Reopens Fake Electors Investigation 

  • Detroit News: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel Reopens Investigation Into False Trump Electors: Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said Friday her office is reopening its investigation into the 16 Republican electors who signed a certificate falsely claiming that Donald Trump had won the state’s 2020 election. Nessel, a Democrat, previously referred the matter to federal prosecutors. But she cited new documents released by a U.S. House committee and said there was “clear evidence to support charges” against the group of 16 Michigan Republicans who signed a document that was submitted to the National Archives and was intended to help Trump supporters challenge his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. “I think that type of activity can’t go without any consequences,” Nessel said.

OHIO: Gov. Mike DeWine Signs Voter ID Law 

  • Cleveland Plain Dealer: Ohio Voters Will Need Photo ID For In-Person Voting, Under Bill Signed By Gov. Mike DeWine: Gov. Mike DeWine on Friday signed a bill that will require Ohio voters to show a photo ID when voting in person, either early or on Election Day. House Bill 458 replaces current law, which gives voters the option of presenting alternate forms of ID, like a current utility bill, bank statement or paycheck with their current address. The bill includes a provision requiring the state BMV to issue free state ID cards to those who request them. The new law also includes a slew of other measures, including largely ending special elections in August, specifying that county boards of election can offer only a single drop box for completed absentee ballots, and eliminating the day of early, in-person voting the day before Election Day.

PENNSYLVANIA:  More Than Two Years After The 2020 Election Lycoming County Is Set To Begin A Hand Recount Today 

  • Bucks County Beacon: Lycoming County Set To Begin State’s Largest Hand Recount Of The 2020 Election. Here’s What To Expect: More than two years after the last ballot was cast in the 2020 election, Lycoming County plans to recount all presidential votes by hand — an extraordinary step no other Pennsylvania county has taken.   County commissioners ordered the recount under pressure from activists associated with an election conspiracy group and against the advice of the local election director, who told proponents it would be a poor use of resources and unlikely to show the fraud they feared. The county will begin the recount of roughly 60,000 ballots Monday in a labor-intensive process that could last as long as three weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

SOUTH CAROLINA:  Federal Court Rules That An SC Congressional District Is An Illegal Gerrymander 

  • New York Times: Federal Panel Rules South Carolina Congressional District Is Illegal Gerrymander: South Carolina’s First Congressional District is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and its boundaries must be redrawn before future elections are held, a panel of three federal judges unanimously ruled on Friday. But the judges rejected arguments that two more of the state’s seven House districts were also illegally gerrymandered, saying voting-rights advocates had failed to show that their boundaries were predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power. Legal scholars said the ruling was notable because it relied on a legal doctrine that has largely been used by conservatives to limit the creation of political districts that empower minorities — not, as in this case, to justify them.

TEXAS:  Houston Republican Seek To Overturn Election Results 

  • New York Times: After Election Problems in Houston, Republicans Seek to Overturn Results: Jon Rosenthal has seen some close races, but his re-election to the Texas State House in November, in a Houston district redrawn to be a virtual lock for Democrats, was not one of them. Mr. Rosenthal won by 15 points. So it came as a surprise when his Republican challenger in the race contested the results, petitioning the State Legislature to order a new election. Another surprise came late Thursday when the Republican candidate for the top executive position in Harris County, which includes Houston, announced that she, too, would contest her much narrower loss, by about 18,000 votes, to the progressive Democrat who is the county’s incumbent chief executive, Lina Hidalgo. By Friday, more than a dozen losing Republican candidates had filed suits to contest the results of their races. Election Day in Harris County, Texas’ largest county, saw a range of problems at polling places, including some that opened late and others that ran out of paper for printing voted ballots. A court ordered the polls to stay open an extra hour to compensate; then the Texas Supreme Court stepped in and halted the extra voting. Republicans, who have been watching closely for election issues in races around the country, seized on the difficulties in Harris County, which is becoming a Democratic stronghold. Candidates called into question the reliability of the results in a bitter and expensive campaign that failed to dislodge Ms. Hidalgo and a slate of Democratic judges.

What Experts Are Saying

Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute: “called the ‘explosion of mob violence’ [in Brazil] an ‘insurrection foretold.’ ‘The similarities of Brazilian far-right mobs storming Congress, the Supreme Court and Presidential Palace with the Jan. 6 insurrection of the Capitol are not coincidental,’ he continued. ‘Like their MAGA counterparts, Bolsonaro supporters have been fed a steady diet of misinformation and disinformation for years, much of it modeled on the narratives pedaled by far-right influencers in the U.S.’” The Washington Post 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “The GOP, which has been Trump’s partner and accomplice in the diffusion of an authoritarian political culture in America, was ready for a strongman leader. By the time Trump took office in 2017 the GOP was on the way to abandoning the values and practices of democracy, such as mutual tolerance (respect for the political opposition) and trust in government. This is why Trump was able to quickly domesticate the GOP, controlling it completely by the time he lost the 2020 election.” Lucid 

Heather Cox Richardson, historian at Boston College: “[E]mbracing Trump after his influence on the Republican Party has made it lose the last three elections suggests that, going forward, the party is planning either to convince more Americans to like the extremism of the MAGA Republicans—which is unlikely—or to restrict the vote so that opposition to that extremism doesn’t matter.” Letters from an American   

Dean Jackson, served as an investigative analyst with the Select Committee on January 6, Meghan Conroy, served as an investigator with the Select Committee, Alex Newhouse, served as an investigative analyst with the Select Committee: “Our findings suggest that the intersection between social media and violent extremism remains pervasive and, in fact, a central component of the Internet. Recognizing and confronting the threat posed by this phenomenon is key to preventing another January 6th.” Just Security: Insiders’ View of the January 6th Committee’s Social Media Investigation 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Politico: Corporations gave $10M to election objectors after pledging to cut them off

Votebeat: Two years after Jan. 6, has Congress done enough to protect elections?

Washington Post: Supporters raise millions to rebrand Jan. 6 rioters as ‘patriots’

Washington Post: Ashli Babbitt’s mother arrested on Capitol riot anniversary

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: Biden to honor 12 people with Presidential Citizens Medal on two-year anniversary of January 6 insurrection

CNN: Special counsel Jack Smith gets trove of new documents from local election officials

NBC: The feds say they’re in for the long haul in the Jan. 6 investigation. There is a time limit.

Washington Post: Social Security numbers of Trump officials, allies posted in Jan. 6 files

Other Trump Investigations

New York Times: Judge Scolds Trump Legal Team and Lets James’s Lawsuit Proceed

Political Violence

NPR: Five Democratic politicians’ homes or offices have been shot at in Albuquerque

Opinion

Politico (Donell Harvin): What the Jan. 6 Committee Report Left Out

In The States

Associated Press: Majority of 16k canceled Pa. mail-in ballots were from Dems

Columbus Dispatch: Ohio Republican Party censures GOP lawmakers who backed new House speaker

New York Times: Republican Who Rebuffed Trump Is Democrat’s Pick for Pennsylvania Election Post