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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — July 28, 2022

By July 28, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

More Former White House Officials Cooperate With DOJ And January 6 Committee Investigations 

  • ABC: Former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson Cooperating With DOJ’s Jan. 6 Probe, Say Sources: Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top adviser to then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, has recently cooperated with the Department of Justice investigation into the events of Jan. 6, according to sources familiar with the matter. The Justice Department reached out to her following her testimony a month ago before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the sources said. The extent of her cooperation was not immediately clear.
  • CBS: Mick Mulvaney Will Testify Thursday Before House Jan. 6 Committee: Former Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is scheduled to testify Thursday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Mulvaney, who joined CBS News as a contributor earlier this year, had already left the Trump White House by Jan. 6, 2021. Mulvaney was ousted by Trump from his chief of staff role in March 2020, and Mulvaney resigned from his subsequent post as the special envoy to Northern Ireland following the Capitol riot.  Mulvaney told CBS News that he believes Cassidy Hutchinson and other top former Trump officials who have testified about him before the panel. “She’s a lifelong Republican,” Mulvaney said of Hutchinson on “The Takeout.” “She worked for Ted Cruz. She worked for Steve Scalise. She was in the White House for four years. There’s no reason for her to lie.” After the Capitol attack, Mulvaney told CNBC he couldn’t “stay here, not after yesterday.”
  • CNN: DOJ Has Reached Out To More Former White House Officials, Ex-Trump Official Says: The Department of Justice has reached out to other Trump White House officials regarding the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in addition to two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence, a former administration official told CNN on Wednesday. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications director during the Trump administration who is now a CNN political commentator, said she had not been contacted by the Justice Department but she was “aware of other White House officials who have been reached out to by DOJ and are planning to cooperate.” “I don’t want to get ahead of their announcements but I think you could piece it together based on who has testified before the January 6th committee. Again, these are not — these are related but separate-track investigations and I think DOJ is keeping an eye on who is coming before January 6th and who may have helpful information,” Farah Griffin told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day.”

New Reports Detail Doug Mastriano’s Growing Ties To The Anti-Semitic Far Right 

  • New York Times: Doug Mastriano Faces Criticism Over His Backing From Antisemitic Ally: Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, is under increasing scrutiny over his connections to the far-right social media platform Gab and its founder, who has repeatedly made antisemitic remarks defending their ties. Early this month, news emerged that Mr. Mastriano’s campaign had paid Gab, a haven for white nationalists and users banned from other platforms, $5,000 for “consulting,” according to a state filing that was first uncovered by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group. Since then, Mr. Mastriano, a far-right state senator who has falsely argued that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and who rarely speaks to traditional news outlets, has ignored criticism of his association with Gab. But the platform’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Torba, has hit back — most recently, using an anti-Jewish trope. “We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore,” Mr. Torba said in a video this week, an apparent reference to the rough percentage of the country that is Jewish.
  • Jerusalem Post: Jews, Non-Christians Not Part Of Conservative Movement – GOP Candidate Consultant: Jews and other non-Christians are “not conservative” because it is “an explicitly Christian movement” and because the US “is an explicitly Christian country,” said Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab and reportedly a consultant for state senator Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, in a livestream responding to recent condemnations of Mastriano and Gab. Mastriano has come into the public eye in recent weeks after US media outlets reported that he had spent $5,000 on advertising on Gab, a social media network favored by the far-right. The candidate has also reportedly paid for “campaign consulting” from the platform, with reports that new Gab users are set to automatically follow him. […] “My policy is not to conduct interviews with reporters who aren’t Christian or with outlets who aren’t Christian and Doug has a very similar media strategy where he does not do interviews with these people. He does not talk to these people. He does not give press access to these people,” said the Gab founder. “These people are dishonest. They’re liars. They’re a den of vipers and they want to destroy you. My typical conversation with them when they email me is ‘repent and accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.’ I take it as an opportunity to try and convert them.” Torba called Mastriano’s opponent, Josh Shapiro, “a Soros puppet” (a reference to Jewish billionaire George Soros) and reiterated claims that he was involved in voter fraud in the 2020 election. Torba stressed that Mastriano “answers only to Jesus Christ.”

Democrats Organize To Fight Back Against Conspiracy Theorist Takeover Of Local Election Offices 

  • Time: Backers of the ‘Big Lie’ Are Trying to Run Local Elections. Democrats Are Finally Fighting Back: As the executive director of Colorado Common Cause, [Amanda] Gonzalez has spent much of her career focused on state voting-rights policy. Much of that work involved crafting reforms that local election clerks would implement, including major nonpartisan election-protection efforts in 2018 and 2020. When the Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder—the official in charge of elections in the county—decided not to run again, Gonzalez decided to run for the post herself. “If it’s not me, it’s bad actors,” she says. Gonzalez is referring to the grassroots right-wing campaign to install election deniers—MAGA hardliners who trumpet former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—in positions that oversee elections at the state and local levels. Inspired by Steve Bannon’s so-called “precinct strategy,” far-right activists have flooded local precincts, signed up en masse to be poll workers, and orchestrated harassment of existing officials. At the same time, election deniers are winning GOP nominations for key election-related roles in major swing states. According to data compiled by States United Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to protecting elections, 13 election-deniers are running for Attorney General in 11 states, 19 are running for Secretary of State in 15 states, and 25 election deniers are running for Governor in 15 states as of July 11. More than one-third of Attorney General and Governor races in 2022 include an election denier, and more than half of the candidates for Secretary of State have embraced some form of the Big Lie. Many Democrats have expressed concern that the national party has failed to muster an effective counter-campaign. So Run For Something (RFS), a Democratic-aligned group that recruits and trains young people to run for state and local offices, has stepped into the breach. Initially formed after Trump’s election to encourage young people to run for state and local office, RFS now focusing much of its energy on recruiting and training pro-democracy candidates to run for often-obscure election positions across the country. So far, the group’s election official recruitment program, called Clerk Work, has recruited nearly 300 people to run for local offices that oversee elections, with 200 of those candidates in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and Nevada.

In The States 

GEORGIA: New Georgia Voting Law Limited Ballot Dropboxes In The Places That Use Them Most 

  • NPR: A New Georgia Voting Law Reduced Ballot Drop Box Access In Places That Used Them Most: Poole is one of millions of Georgia voters affected by sweeping changes to state election laws enacted by lawmakers last year. The changes include restricting access to drop boxes in counties that used them the most, which also have the highest number of voters of color and Democrats, according to an analysis by NPR, WABE and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) of drop box locations, voter registration and other data. NPR, WABE and GPB compiled drop box usage data by reviewing thousands of forms used to document the number of ballots deposited in drop boxes daily across Georgia in 2020 and calculating travel time intervals to a drop box for more than 7.5 million voters. 2022 drop box locations are current as of Georgia’s May 24 primary. An analysis by NPR, WABE and Georgia Public Broadcasting also found: More than half of the roughly 550,000 voters who cast their ballot using a drop box in the state’s 2020 general election lived in four metro Atlanta counties — Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — where about 50% of the voters are people of color. Under the new law, the number of drop boxes in these four counties plummeted from 107 to 25. Nearly 1.9 million people, a quarter of the state’s voters, have seen their travel time to a drop box increase from the 2020 election. More than 90% of voters who saw an increase in their travel time to a drop box live in cities or suburbs, which are home to most of the state’s minority voters and vote heavily Democratic.

WISCONSIN: Mike Pence Endorses Rebecca Kleefisch For Governor In A New Split With Trump 

  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Former VP Mike Pence Endorses Rebecca Kleefisch For Governor In His Latest Break With Donald Trump: Wisconsin became the latest political battleground Wednesday in the growing rivalry between former President Donald Trump and Mike Pence, once a loyal lieutenant to Trump as Vice President and now a political foe.  With less than two weeks leading up to the closely watched primary for Wisconsin governor, candidate Rebecca Kleefisch picked up an endorsement from Pence, coming on the heels of Trump endorsing Kleefisch’s rival, businessman Tim Michels.  Pence and Trump were on opposite sides earlier this week in Arizona, another state, like Wisconsin, where Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election have been a flashpoint. The rift between the former running mates broke open on Jan. 6, 2021 when Pence refused Trump’s calls to overturn the election results of battleground states like Wisconsin.

What Experts Are Saying

Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, and Norman Eisen, senior fellow at Brookings: “Attorney General Merrick Garland has recently redoubled the resources devoted to the Jan. 6 investigation. That—plus the rest of the day’s breaking news—signals that Garland meant exactly what he said on Tuesday when NBC’s Lester Holt asked him about prosecuting the former president: ‘We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January sixth, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable. That’s what we do.’” Slate Op-Ed: Yes, Donald Trump Is at Significant Risk of Federal Prosecution

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “Should former president Donald Trump be prosecuted for criminal behavior in connection with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in inciting violence on Jan. 6? What are the risks of taking such an action –and what are the possible consequences of not acting? For a century, ‘getting away with it’ has been the bedrock of authoritarianism. Prosecuting bad actors, no matter who they are, is essential to safeguarding our democracy now and in the future.” Lucid 

Joyce Vance, law professor at the University of Alabama School of Law: “[T]here is one thread Garland and team should prioritize: bad lawyers. First off, these lawyers need to be held accountable for any criminal behavior. But beyond that, these inept and unscrupulous advisers may help lead investigators to those most culpable for the big lie and Jan. 6 insurrection.” MSNBC Column 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

ABC: RNC warning to Trump: If you run for president, we stop paying your legal bills, says official

Daily Beast: Pro-Trump Lawyer Lin Wood Now Posts Videos of Himself Shooting Rivals

New York Times: Fox News snubbed Trump’s speech, in what’s becoming a pattern.

Reuters: Former Republicans and Democrats to form new third U.S. political party

January 6 And The 2020 Election

The Atlantic: The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds

Daily Beast: ​​Grinning Josh Hawley Says He Doesn’t ‘Regret Anything’ About Jan. 6

NBC: Man charged in connection with Jan. 6 assault on Officer Sicknick takes plea deal

New York Times: ​​The Fake Electors Scheme, Explained

Politico: Feds get new warrant to search contents of pro-Trump lawyer’s phone

The Hill: Trump threatens CNN with lawsuit over ‘defamatory’ reporting

Politico: DOJ, Georgia, New York: A guide to Trump’s legal threats

Washington Post: The Georgia criminal investigation into Trump and his allies, explained

Opinion

Harrisburg Patriot-News (Andrea Kesack): Doug Mastriano is unfit for office

MSNBC (Joyce Vance): DOJ’s Jan. 6 investigation is zeroing in on Trump. These bad lawyers could be the key.

New York Times (Charles Blow): MAGA Doesn’t Care About Cops

Slate (Dennis Aftergut and Norm Eisen): Yes, Donald Trump Is at Significant Risk of Federal Prosecution

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Explosive revelations about Trump’s coup plot demand a quick response

Political Violence

CNN: FBI says man accused of attempting to kill Brett Kavanaugh said he was ‘shooting for 3’ justices

Politico: Death Weapons: Inside a Teenage Terrorist Network