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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 1, 2022

By June 1, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

GOP Plans To Subvert Elections And Sow Chaos On Election Day Revealed 

  • Politico: ‘It’s Going To Be An Army’: Tapes Reveal Gop Plan To Contest Elections: Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys. The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.
  • CNN: ‘The Horse And Buggy Era’: Attacks On Voting Machines Set Off Fresh Worries About Election Subversion: Despite warnings that ditching voting machines would delay election results and likely violate the law, county commissioners in a rural slice of western Colorado this year voted to stop paying the licensing fee on the county’s devices. Commissioners in Nye County, Nevada, meanwhile, want local election officials to begin hand-counting paper ballots in this year’s elections. And in Arizona, two Trump-aligned candidates for statewide office have gone to court in a long-shot bid to bar the use of machines to record and count votes in a battleground state with more than 4 million voters — and key Senate and gubernatorial races this year. These pockets of resistance to voting machines mark another attempt by Republicans sold on former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud to transform how US elections are run. So far, most efforts have been thwarted at the state level. But critics warn that the moves, if successful in just a handful of localities, would result in delays and chaos and potentially open the door to election subversion efforts.

Q-Anon Group Campaigns To Take Over Key States’ Election Administration Posts 

  • Daily Beast: This QAnon Leader Could Control Key Elections in 2024: While the 65-year-old Wayne Willott remains all but unknown outside of QAnon, he’s a figure with growing influence in both the conspiracy-theory universe and the broader conservative movement. Along the way, many of Willott’s supporters have come to believe he’s John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise. He’s also befriended Q-friendly celebrities, including comedian Roseanne Barr and The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel. At the Venetian, Willott and [Nevada Secretary of State Candidate Jim] Marchant set to work to uncover “the fraudulent election.” But by May 2021, they were looking to the future. They convened a meeting of conservative activists, donors, and media figures, all focused on seizing the secretary of state offices that administer elections. The group that emerged from that meeting, the America First Secretary of State Coalition, now stands poised to have its candidates win offices in key battleground states. One of the group’s candidates, Kristina Karamo, has already won the Republican nomination for the position in Michigan. Another candidate, 2020 election denier and Arizona state representative Mark Finchem, has won Trump’s endorsement and looks set to win his state’s primary as well. If victorious in the general election, both candidates could play a key role in how electoral votes from their states are allotted in 2024.

RNC Plans To Attack January 6 Committee, Downplay Its Involvement In Trump’s Election Lies 

  • Vox: The RNC’s January 6 Committee Strategy Seeks Some Distance From Trump’s Election Lies: Republicans’ strategy ahead of the first public hearings of the select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol reveals a rare glimpse of daylight between the aims of the party and the desires of former President Donald Trump. In a document obtained by Vox, a coordinated communications plan apparently sent from the Republican National Committee (RNC) recommends pushing back on the select committee as “partisan” while also taking care not to be seen as explicitly speaking on behalf of Trump or embracing his lies about the 2020 election’s legitimacy. The RNC declined to comment on whether it created or sent the document. Trump, according to the same document, is focused on amplifying that message, both in the mainstream media and in conservative media.

Republicans Who Claim The 2020 Election Was Corrupt Have No Problems With Their Own 2022 Primary Elections 

  • New York Times (Analysis): They Insisted the 2020 Election Was Tainted. Their 2022 Primary Wins? Not So Much: This spring, when Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama was fighting to win over conservatives in his campaign for Senate, he ran a television ad that boasted, “On Jan. 6, I proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud.” But when Mr. Brooks placed second in Alabama’s Republican primary last week, leaving him in a runoff, he said he was not concerned about fraud in his election. “If it’s a close race and you’re talking about a five- or 10-vote difference, well, then, it becomes a greater concern,” he said of his primary results. “But I’ve got more important fish to fry. And so, at some point, you have to hope that the election system is going to be honest.” Mr. Brooks was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hundreds more Republican state legislators across the country took similar action in their own capitals. President Biden’s victory, they said, was corrupted by either outright fraud or pandemic-related changes to voting. Now, many of those Republicans are accepting the results of their primaries without complaint. Already this year, 55 of the lawmakers who objected in 2020 have run in competitive primaries, contests conducted largely under the same rules and regulations as those in 2020. None have raised doubts about vote counts, even as Mr. Trump has begun to spread unfounded claims. No conspiracy theories about mail ballots have surfaced. And no one has called for a “forensic audit” or further investigations of the 2022 primary results.

In The States 

After Petition Fraud Scandal, A January 6 Rioter Is The Frontrunner For Michigan’s GOP Gubernatorial Nomination 

  • Talking Points Memo: Michigan’s Signature Forgery Scandal Clears Ways For Capitol Rioter, Right-Wing TV Host:  The lawsuits are flying in Michigan after a long list of candidates, including five Republicans running for governor, failed to make the Aug. 2 primary ballot because they submitted thousands of forged signatures to the state. There’s still a chance the disqualified candidates, including former GOP gubernatorial frontrunners James Craig and Perry Johnson, can sue their way to the ballot box.  But for now, the sudden upheaval in the race to challenge Gov. Grethen Whitmer’s (D) reelection bid has completely reshaped the campaign: One new poll from the firm Target Insyght found that, confronted by the slimmed-down list of Republicans who actually qualified for the ballot, nearly half of Republican voters were still undecided. There are just three weeks until the state is scheduled to send primary ballots to overseas and military voters.  […] The gubernatorial candidates who did seem to interest at least a few voters were all over the map: Ryan Kelley made his name protesting Whitmer’s COVID-19 public health rules and stormed the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, though he says he didn’t go inside. He was the highest-polling Republican in the new Target Insyght poll, with 19% support.

Some States Hire Misinformation Chiefs To Protect Elections 

  • New York Times: Help Wanted: State Misinformation Sheriff: Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway. Concerned about a similar deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this year’s midterm elections, the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation. With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information. […] Connecticut joins a handful of states preparing to fight an onslaught of rumors and lies about this year’s elections. Oregon, Idaho and Arizona have education and ad campaigns on the internet, TV, radio and billboards meant to spread accurate information about polling times, voter eligibility and absentee voting. Colorado has hired three cybersecurity experts to monitor sites for misinformation. California’s office of the secretary of state is searching for misinformation and working with the Department of Homeland Security and academics to look for patterns of misinformation across the internet.

What Experts Are Saying

Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University: “Trump is now emailing that Kemp ‘stole’ the GOP primary election in Georgia from Perdue even though Kemp won by a staggering margin of 3 to 1. It’s now clear what Trump means by a stolen election: He means any election whose result he doesn’t like.” Tweet 

Norman Eisen, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution: “The Jan. 6 hearings in the House are going to be very important. The DOJ typically starts at the bottom and works their way up the food chain. They’ve done that with the hundreds of insurrectionists that they’ve charged. We know they’re asking them about the involvement of the White House and other members of the inner circle. There are other signs that are pointing, at the very least, to a DOJ investigation.” Salon 

Jason Stanley, Philosophy Professor at Yale University: “In this piece in @tabletmag , Eliyahu Stern and I argue that Putin aims for Russian fascism to be the model for a global fascist movement. It is aimed at the destruction of liberal democracy worldwide. LINK” Tweet  

Daniel Hopkins and Hans Noel, political scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University in “Trump and the Shifting Meaning of ‘Conservative’: Using Activists’ Pairwise Comparisons to Measure Politicians’ Perceived Ideologies”: “[S]enators with very conservative voting records were sometimes perceived as less conservative if they did not support Trump. A confirmatory test shows that these trends extended into 2021. Even among activists, perceived ideology appears to be anchored by prominent people as well as policy positions.” Thomas B. Edsall NYT Column

NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall on Hopkins and Noel’s research findings: “In other words, in the minds of these activists conservatism was defined less by a given politician’s stands on issues than by his or her loyalty to Trump.” New York Times 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Washington Post (Analysis): Trump’s voter fraud claims are growing more outlandish

January 6 And The 2020 Election 

Associated Press: Clinton 2016 campaign lawyer acquitted of lying to the FBI

NBC: Jan. 6 rioter who was turned in by ex he called ‘a moron’ pleads guilty to a felony

Reuters: Attorney Lin Wood loses appeal over state bar’s mental health probe

Opinion 

Washington Post (Dana Milbank): There’s no reasoning with a GOP hijacked by disinformation

Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin):  Garland’s mushy speech to Harvard grads does not inspire confidence

In The States 

Bolts: “A Systematic Assault”: GOP Rushes to Change Election Rules to Block Medicaid in South Dakota

Politico: Pa. GOP Senate race upended by court cases