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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — July 27, 2022

By July 27, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

The Justice Department Is Investigating Trump’s Actions  As Part Of The January 6 Criminal Probe 

  • Washington Post: Justice Dept. Investigating Trump’s Actions In Jan. 6 Criminal Probe: The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said. In addition, Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject.
  • NBC: Merrick Garland Calls Justice Department’s Jan. 6 Probe The ‘Most Wide Ranging Investigation In Its History’: The Justice Department plans to prosecute anyone who was “criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday, speaking more expansively than he has previously about a federal criminal investigation that appears to have moved far beyond the rioters who attacked the Capitol. In an exclusive interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, Garland said that the televised hearings by the House Jan. 6 committee highlighted “the truth of what happened…and what a risk it meant for our democracy.”  And he acknowledged that Justice Department investigators learned things from the congressional testimony. “Look, the Justice Department has been doing the most wide ranging investigation in its history,” he said. “And the committee is doing an enormously wide ranging investigation as well. It is inevitable that there will be things that they find before we have found them. And it’s inevitable that there will be things we find that they haven’t found. That’s what happens when you have two wide ranging investigations going on at the same time.”

New Details Emerge On The Scope Of Trump’s Fake Electors Scheme 

  • New York Times: ‘Kind of Wild/Creative’: Emails Shed Light on Trump Fake Electors Plan:  Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as “fake.” The dozens of emails among people connected to the Trump campaign, outside advisers and close associates of Mr. Trump show a particular focus on assembling lists of people who would claim — with no basis — to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he had lost. In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word “fake” to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome. And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny. “We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign. In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

Senate Republicans Have No Regrets About Acquitting Trump After January 6 

  • HuffPost: Republicans Say They Don’t Regret Acquitting Trump Over Jan. 6 Riot: The bipartisan House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection painted a damning portrait of an American president who sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol in hopes of overturning a free and fair election and then did nothing for hours as his aides begged him to help quell the violence. But to Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters who were at the Capitol as a medieval-style battle raged in its halls, the horrific events of that day and Trump’s decision not to lift a finger to stop them are just a big fuss over nothing. “What’s he gonna do? He told them not to go down there and be destructive. What else are you going to do?” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Tuesday. He added that he feels “100%” confident about his vote to acquit the former president in his February 2021 impeachment trial. “I’m OK with those decisions ― those are things you do with the information you have at the time,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) added. […] Trump is now flirting with another run for president, with GOP primary voters and nearly the entire House Republican conference behind him. Most Republicans in the Senate shy away from questions regarding his conduct and won’t condemn it despite all the new information presented by the Jan. 6 investigators. “I think we all sort of knew ― and know ― what happened. I don’t know how many minds have changed, because I think we knew the basic facts,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said without elaborating on said facts. Asked if he could support Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Cornyn dodged the question.

In Michigan And Washington Trump-Backed Extremists Rise In Primaries Against Republicans Who Supported Impeachment 

  • CNN: Trump’s Revenge Tour Over Michigan Republican’s Impeachment Vote Endangers A Gop House Seat: It was just three days into Republican Rep. Peter Meijer’s term when a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol. A week later, the freshman voted to impeach Trump. Now, that vote could end his House career. A week before his primary, Republicans in Michigan and Washington say that Meijer’s vote has made him the clear underdog in his primary race against John Gibbs, a former Housing and Urban Development department official backed by Trump, the latest sign that loyalty to the former President remains paramount in GOP intraparty battles. “I think it was the biggest career-ending move in history, possibly, for him to do that,” Gibbs told CNN, saying it “catastrophically” hurt the congressman’s chances of reelection. Meijer, 34, says he would do it again. “Not for a second,” he told CNN when asked if he regretted the vote.
  • Associated Press: GOP’s Links To Extremism Surface In Congressional Primary: A congressional candidate whose compelling personal story of military valor and unfathomable loss helped him win former President Donald Trump’s support has connections to right-wing extremists, including a campaign consultant who was a member of the Proud Boys. Republican Joe Kent, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state in the Aug. 2 primary, has also courted prominent white nationalists and posed recently for a photograph with a media personality who has previously described Adolf Hitler as a “complicated historical figure” who “many people misunderstand.”

Trump Returns To DC For More Lies About The 2020 Election While His Allies Plot His Return To Power 

  • HuffPost: Trump Returns To Scene Of Attempted Coup For First Time Since Leaving Office: The country’s only president to have attempted a coup to remain in power made his first return to the nation’s capital since leaving office, where he renewed the lies about a stolen election that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on American democracy. “It was catastrophe, that election. A disgrace to our country,” Donald Trump said Tuesday, and then he repeated his falsehood that he had won reelection in 2020. “I ran the first time and I won, and I ran a second time, and I did much better, got millions and millions of more votes.… It’s a very sad thing.” Trump spoke for 91 minutes at a conference of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit founded by his former aides and which received a $1 million grant from his own “leadership” political action committee. It was his first visit to Washington since he left the White House the morning of Jan. 20, 2021, a few hours before the inauguration of Democrat Joe Biden.
  • Washington Post: As Trump Speaks In Washington, His Allies Prepare For A Second Term: Former president Donald Trump returned to Washington on Tuesday for the first time since leaving office to deliver a dystopian speech that encouraged “tough,” “nasty” and “mean” new responses to violent crime and the forcible relocation of homeless people to quickly-built tent cities in the suburbs. The address — dripping with violent imagery of “streets riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims,” death penalty sentences for drug dealers and detailed tales of rape and murder — marked a return to the shocking rhetoric that Trump deployed in his 2016 campaign, as he considers launching another presidential bid as early as this fall. “Now, some people say, ‘Oh, that’s so horrible.’ No, what’s horrible is what’s happening now,” he said of his plan to relocate homeless people to the outskirts of urban areas. He proposed additional funding for police, additional jail time for immigration violations, a return of “stop and frisk,” an end to most early or electronic voting, and new restrictions on medical treatment for transgender youths. […] The AFPI event served as a public rebranding effort of sorts for Republican-backed policies, as a wide array of conservative stalwarts including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, Florida Sen. Rick Scott and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) all appeared under Trump’s “America First” banner. Event organizers made clear they saw “America First” as a rising identity for policies such as civil service reform, private-sector health-care reform and expanded fossil fuel development. Taken together, the apparatus of Republican groups are laying plans to transform the federal government, slashing the administrative power of agencies, making it easier to fire career civil employees, cutting the roster of those working for the government and vetting a generation of new loyalists to take positions to enact conservative change.

In The States 

GEORGIA: Republicans Target Thousands Of Georgians For Voter Registration Cancellation 

  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Voter vs. Voter: Georgia Conservatives Target Thousands For Cancellation: Bearing long lists of voters’ names, a determined group of Republicans is asking local election boards to cancel thousands of Georgia voter registrations, using a new power bestowed by the state’s voting law. These amateur operatives are trying to purge the registrations of people who they suspect have moved away based on voter lists, address records or property tax documents. They’re relying on Georgia’s law passed last year in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election that allows any voter to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of their neighbors, an effort that’s taking place outside the routine government-run process of removing people who have moved or died. It’s voter against voter, with conservatives taking matters into their own hands to police Georgia’s voter list. No fraud has been proved among registrants who moved from Georgia or used P.O. boxes as their addresses.

WISCONSIN: A Third Lawmaker Joins Scheme To “Decertify” Election Results 

  • Wisconsin Examiner: Ramthun Says Third Lawmaker Has Joined Effort To Decertify 2020 Election Results:  Wisconsin state Rep. Tim Ramthun (R-Campbellsport) said at a news conference Monday that a third lawmaker has signed on as a co-sponsor in his effort to have the Legislature decertify the state’s 2020 election results and recall its 10 electoral votes.  “This subject matter of elections is number one in the state and it will not go away until it’s resolved,” he said at the news conference.  Ramthun said that Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego) has “extended his support” for the bill, which advocates for an action that legal experts say is both impossible and unconstitutional. Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) signed on to Ramthun’s bill on Friday.  “Fair and honest elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and we know that the 2020 presidential election was neither fair, nor transparent,” Brandtjen said in a news release announcing her support. “Tyranny is at Wisconsin’s door.”

What Experts Are Saying

Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “The speech Trump came to D.C. to give only reinforced the need for him to be held accountable. He had the audacity to say, ‘There is no longer respect for the law and there is no order.’ That might have been accurate if he was pointing at himself, but of course, he wasn’t. His insistence on perpetuating the big lie demonstrates that unless he’s held accountable, he’ll continue to present a danger to the republic.” Civil Discourse 

Julian Zelizer, American historian at Princeton University: “The committee investigation has been  successful at undercutting the perception that the post election period—culminating with the violence of 1/6–was a product of ad-hoc chaos rather than an orchestrated plan.” Tweet 

Frank Figliuzzi, former federal law enforcement agent: “Trump can’t skirt accountability by announcing his candidacy:” Tweet 

Barbara McQuade, former US attorney, re: news in fake electors investigation: “This is why prosecutors start with the communications records” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Axios: Jan. 6 committee divided on Dem meddling in GOP primaries

Bloomberg: Viktor Orban Will Still Speak at CPAC Despite ‘Nazi’ Speech Backlash

CBS: Cheney’s new campaign ad focuses on opponents’ claims about the 2020 election

CNN: Fearing a wipeout, Democrats try to unify around a simple midterm message: Republicans are ‘extremists’

New York Times: OAN, a Dependable Trump Promoter, Faces a ‘Death Blow’

New York Times: Trump-Pence Ticket, Torn by Jan. 6, Becomes an Unequal Rivalry

Politico: House Dems berate campaign arm over ‘very dangerous’ GOP primary scheme

January 6 And The 2020 Election

ABC: House Jan. 6 committee in discussions with Mike Pompeo for testimony, sources say

CNN: CNN Poll: January 6 hearings haven’t changed opinions much, but most agree Trump acted unethically

CNN: Trump’s defense secretary denies there were orders to have 10K troops ready to deploy on January 6

NBC: Former Ohio school employee seen in the Senate chamber on Jan. 6 pleads guilty

NBC: Trump supporter who assaulted police at the Capitol gets five years in prison

New York Times: Justice Dept. Asking Witnesses About Trump in Its Jan. 6 Investigation 

Washington Post (Analysis): An intriguing new detail on Trump’s ‘fake’ electors

Washington Post: Key Dems want DHS inspector general removed from Secret Service probe

Opinion

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): A repulsive new breed of Trumpist candidates poses a fresh threat

Political Violence

New York Times: How Did a Man Accused of Attacking Lee Zeldin Go Free Without Bail?

In The States 

Arizona Republic: With few public records released, Arizona Supreme Court keeps $50K in daily fines for Cyber Ninjas

Associated Press: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Eligible To Run For Reelection: Judge

Chicago Tribune: Darren Bailey declines to answer questions on Trump, Jan. 6 committee and call to censure Adam Kinzinger

Colorado Times Recorder: Young Colorado GOP Activist Identified as White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Making Antisemitic Threats