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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 13, 2022

By June 13, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

What To Watch For Today: 

The select committee investigating the January 6 attack will hold a hearing at 10:00 AM today. 

Must Read Stories

Today’s January 6 Committee Hearing Will Focus On Trump’s Election Lies 

  • Politico: Jan. 6 Committee To Detail The Origins And Reach Of Trump’s Election Lies: When Donald Trump stepped to a podium Nov. 4, 2020, and declared himself the winner of the presidential election, millions of his supporters apparently believed him — but Trump’s own advisers and campaign operatives knew better. The Jan. 6 select committee, in its second of six scheduled public hearings, plans to highlight Monday the corrosive effect of Trump’s lie — and his weeks pumping it up with the help of political allies, friendly media megaphones and members of Congress. Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in the weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, a haul heavily influenced by those efforts to sow doubt about the results of the election. Those lies became the scaffolding on which every other aspect of Trump’s effort to remain in power depended — a push to get the Justice Department to legitimize his false claims, an effort to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to derail the transition of power. Eventually, they became the fuel for the pro-Trump mob the battered its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 The select committee says it intends to show that many of the people who joined that mob had been inundated by those messages from Trump and his allies, which may have contributed to their radicalization.
  • New York Times: Trump Campaign Chief to Headline Jan. 6 Hearing on Election Lies: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol plans to use the testimony of former President Donald J. Trump’s own campaign manager against him on Monday as it lays out evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him in an attempt to overturn his defeat. The committee plans to call Bill Stepien, the final chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, who is expected to be asked to detail what the campaign and the former president himself knew about his fictitious claims of widespread election fraud. Those claims will be the focus of the second in a series of hearings the panel is holding this month to reveal the findings of its sprawling investigation. After an explosive first hearing last week in prime time, leaders of the committee are aiming to keep up a steady stream of revelations about the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the election and how it sowed the seeds of the violent siege of the Capitol by his supporters last year.
  • Axios: Former Fox News Editor To Testify At Jan. 6 Committee Hearing: Former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt said Friday that he will testify at a Jan. 6 committee hearing next week. Driving the news: “I have been called to testify before this committee and will do so on Monday,” Stirewalt confirmed during an appearance on NewsNation, where he serves as a political editor. Stirewalt was fired by Fox News after the 2020 presidential election, per CNN. He came under intense criticism from supporters of former President Trump for defending the network’s decision to call the state  Arizona for now-President Joe Biden on election night.

The Committee Appears To Lay Out The Road Map For Prosecuting Trump 

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Committee Appears to Lay Out Road Map for Prosecuting Trump:  He had means, motive and opportunity. But did Donald J. Trump commit a crime? A House committee explicitly declared that he did by conspiring to overturn an election. The attorney general, however, has not weighed in. And a jury of his peers may never hear the case. The first prime-time hearing into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol this past week confronted the fundamental question that has haunted Mr. Trump, the 45th president, ever since he left office: Should he be prosecuted in a criminal court for his relentless efforts to defy the will of the voters and hang on to power? For two hours on Thursday night, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack detailed what it called Mr. Trump’s “illegal” and “unconstitutional” seven-part plan to prevent the transfer of power. The panel invoked the Justice Department, citing charges of seditious conspiracy filed against some of the attackers, and seemed to be laying out a road map for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to their central target. Several former prosecutors and veteran lawyers said afterward that the hearing offered the makings of a credible criminal case for conspiracy to commit fraud or obstruction of the work of Congress.
  • Associated Press: Jan. 6 Panelists: Enough Evidence Uncovered To Indict Trump:  Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Sunday they have uncovered enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider an unprecedented criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The committee announced that Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is among the witnesses scheduled to testify at a hearing Monday that focuses on Trump’s effort to spread his lies about a stolen election. Stepien was subpoenaed for his public testimony. As the hearings unfold, Rep. Adam Schiff said he would like the department to “investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump.” Schiff, D-Calif., who also leads the House Intelligence Committee, said that ”there are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election that I don’t see evidence the Justice Department is investigating.”
  • NBC: Does The Justice Department Want To Charge Trump? Here’s What Could Happen: Liz Cheney’s powerful remarks at Thursday night’s Jan. 6 congressional hearing on the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — which sounded a lot like a lawyer’s opening statement at a criminal trial — have renewed a debate in legal circles about whether the Justice Department could, and should, prosecute Donald Trump. With a growing body of evidence that Cheney and others say points to criminal acts involving Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Attorney General Merrick Garland may ultimately be faced with an excruciatingly difficult decision about whether prosecuting a former president is in the national interest.  A person familiar with the matter told NBC News there have been conversations inside the Justice Department about the far-reaching implications of pursuing a case against Trump, should it come to that. So far, no public evidence has surfaced that the former president has become a criminal target.  “We will follow the facts wherever they lead,” Garland said in his speech at Harvard University’s commencement ceremony last month. His deputy, Lisa Monaco, has confirmed that prosecutors were looking into the legal ramifications for those who took part in schemes to push slates of fake Electoral College members declaring Trump the winner of states Joe Biden won.

Conspiracy Theories And Election Lies Are Dominating Republican Primary Season 

  • Politico: Trump Backers Unbowed In Push To Overtake State Election Offices: Nevada Republicans are about to decide whether the leader of a Trump-aligned group of election conspiracy theorists will be one step away from becoming the battleground state’s chief elections officer. In the past two years, former state Assemblymember Jim Marchant lost a congressional race by 5 points — then sued unsuccessfully to overturn the defeat. He said he wouldn’t have certified President Joe Biden’s 2-point victory in Nevada had he been secretary of state. And he has pushed to do away with ballot-counting machines and instead count votes only by hand, which officials say would make tallying election results slower, more expensive and less accurate. Marchant, one of several Republicans running in Tuesday’s primary for secretary of state, has also been a leader of the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” — a collection of like-minded candidates running in states across the country. Marchant arranged a “private strategy session” in Las Vegas in May 2021 to coordinate, according to the group’s website, and he regularly promotes the effort in far-right media outlets including Steve Bannon’s podcast. The primary in Nevada is another reminder of the unusually high stakes in this year’s campaigns for election administration positions — longtime political backwaters that have gotten little attention in the past. But followers of former President Donald Trump — and his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him — have poured into secretary of state races in 2022, especially in the battleground states that will play a key role in deciding the next presidential contest.
  • Associated Press: Conspiracies Dominate GOP Primary For Nevada Elections Post: Nationally, there are nearly two dozen Republican candidates running to be their state’s top election official who deny the result of the 2020 presidential election, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan advocacy organization tracking the candidates. Among those who have advanced to the November election are Kristina Karamo in Michigan, Kim Crockett in Minnesota and Audrey Trujillo in New Mexico. Last month, Georgia’s Jody Hice lost his bid to oust Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in that state’s GOP primary despite having Trump’s endorsement. Raffensperger drew Trump’s ire after he refused the former president’s request, in a phone call, to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. Nevada — a state Trump lost twice but where he remains popular among Republicans — is a top priority for the GOP this year as the party looks to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Trump has endorsed his 2020 Nevada campaign chair, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, in his effort to unseat first-term Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto. He’s also backed Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo for governor. Laxalt has repeated Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, but faced criticism at a recent debate from one of his primary opponents for not doing enough.
  • CNN: Republican Candidates With January 6 Ties Are Winning Primaries For Competitive House Seats. Will Voters Care In November?  A string of Republican candidates who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and marched to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, are winning or could win primaries in competitive congressional districts, offering what could be the clearest test yet of whether general election voters still care about the fallout from the insurrection inspired by former President Donald Trump. In Ohio, J.R. Majewski, a candidate who has shared material from the false QAnon conspiracy theory and was a January 6 rally participant, unexpectedly won a primary to face vulnerable Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a newly drawn Republican-leaning district. Majewski has denied being a QAnon follower. In North Carolina, Sandy Smith, who tweeted on January 6 that she had just “marched from the Monument to the Capitol,” won a primary for an open seat that leans Democratic but is winnable for Republicans in a good year — which 2022 is shaping up to be. And across the country, other Republican candidates with alleged ties to the events in Washington, DC , on January 6 — from Annie Black in Nevada to Jason Riddle in New Hampshire to Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin — are on the ballot for competitive seats. Not all candidates who were in DC on January 6 to protest the 2020 election have won, but the results from Ohio and North Carolina make clear that the association with January 6 isn’t a disqualifying factor with many Republican primary voters. Whether general election voters in November will care about those ties 18 months removed from January 6, 2021, is an open question as the House select committee holds public hearings on the January 6 attack.

In The States 

New Evidence Emerges About Unauthorized Breaches Of Election Equipment In Georgia And Other States 

  • Washington Post: Court Filing Offers New Evidence Of Post-Election Breach In Coffee County, Ga.: A cybersecurity executive who has aided efforts by election deniers to investigate the 2020 vote said in a recent court document that he had “forensically examined” the voting system used in Coffee County, Ga. The assertion by executive Benjamin Cotton that he examined the county’s voting system is the strongest indication yet that the security of election equipment there may have been compromised following Donald Trump’s loss. Representatives of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) said in April that while his office had investigated several election-related issues in Coffee County, none appeared to amount to a breach of equipment. In May, The Washington Post reported that former county elections official Misty Hampton had opened her offices to a man who was active in the election-denier movement to help investigate after the 2020 vote. Recounting the incident to The Post, Hampton said she did not know what the man, bail bond business owner Scott Hall, and his team did in her office. In the new document, a sworn declaration filed Wednesday in a civil case in federal court in Arizona, Cotton, founder of the digital forensics firm CyFIR, wrote that he had examined Dominion Voting Systems used in several jurisdictions. Among them were Coffee County, Mesa County, Colo., and Maricopa County, Ariz., where he worked as a contractor on a Republican-commissioned ballot review.

Wisconsin Election “Audit” Leader Held In Contempt Of Court 

  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Judge Finds Michael Gableman’s Office In Contempt During Tense Court Appearance In Which The Former Justice Refused To Respond To Questions:  Former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and his Assembly office were held in contempt Friday after he refused to answer any questions about his handling of public records requests and lambasted a judge overseeing a lawsuit alleging Gableman is refusing to follow transparency laws governing his taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election. Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington ordered Gableman to testify Friday to help determine whether Gableman and the Assembly’s Office of Special Counsel created to examine the 2020 election were violating Remington’s orders to preserve public records and release them to requesters.  But Gableman said he was being “railroaded,” called Remington a partisan advocate and refused to answer anything beyond his name and occupation.  The dramatic episode took place two days after Remington suggested one of Gableman’s staffers who had been put in charge of requests for records might need to think about getting his own attorney because of the possibility of jail time for disobeying court orders. 

What Experts Are Saying

Neal K. Katyal, former acting solicitor general: “‘I think the committee, especially Liz Cheney, outlined a powerful criminal case against the former president,’ said Neal K. Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama. ‘A crime requires two things — a bad act and criminal intent,’  Mr. Katyal said. By citing testimony by Mr. Trump’s own attorney general, a lawyer for his campaign and others who told him that he had lost and then documenting his failure to act once supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Katyal said, the panel addressed both of those requirements.” New York Times 

Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard University: “Don’t think Donald Trump can escape conviction by persuading gullible jurors that he really believed his own toxic BS even if Ivanka didn’t. That’s not an available legal defense for the federal and state crimes of trying to change the electoral outcome!” Tweet 

WATCH: Julian Zelizer, Princeton University professor of history and public affairs, talks to PBS NewsHour on what we’ve learned about January 6 since that day. PBS NewsHour via YouTube  

Nancy MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University: “‘The efforts at election sabotage continue,’ she said, ‘with the spread of disinformation, attempts at the state level to alter the way future elections are conducted and counted – and even, at the grassroots, so many threats to election officials of both parties that many who have served with integrity for years, even decades, are leaving the field.’ ‘Too many Americans imagine that our country is immune to authoritarianism. That assumption is making us vulnerable to a threat like none we have ever experienced,” MacLean said. “We faced an attack on our country that has brought us to a constitutional crisis. The sooner millions of Americans realize it, the better are our chances of curing the cancer.’” Duke TODAY

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders at New York University: “‘Coups are very fast and violent, but they are the product of months and years of planning, and that’s what happened in this case,’ says @ruthbenghiat, who lent her expertise on protecting democracy to the Jan. 6 committee. #Velshi” Tweet | MSNBC’s Velshi 

Asher Hildebrand, associate professor of the practice at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy: “‘The question before the committee is whether former President Trump, his top lieutenants, and his allies in Congress committed federal crimes in their plot to overturn the election,’ Hildebrand said. ‘If the hearings reveal that President Trump or his aides knew he had lost the election but sought to overturn it anyway, that they communicated or coordinated with the right-wing militias that participated in the attacks, or that they intentionally sought to interfere with the counting of electoral votes, this will provide compelling evidence of criminal conduct.’” Duke TODAY

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

CNN: Trump endorses Katie Britt in Alabama’s US Senate race after pulling support from Mo Brooks

New York Times: Two Targets of Trump’s Ire Take Different Paths in South Carolina

Washington Post: Tom Rice tries to survive his Trump impeachment vote — and stay in the House

Washington Post: The town crier

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Associated Press: Dad who carried Confederate flag into Capitol heads to trial

CNN: DC bar brings ethics charges against Rudy Giuliani over election fraud claims

Daily Beast: Hannity Proposed Hunter Biden Pardon to ‘Smooth Over’ Jan. 6

Harrisburg Patriot News: Woman accused of stealing Nancy Pelosi’s laptop met with man who planned to shoot up synagogue: prosecutor

New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Puts Focus on Cabinet Discussions About Removing Trump

New York Times: More Than 19 Million Watched Jan. 6 Hearing, Early Tally Shows

New York Times: Pence Aide Warned Against Blocking Electoral College Count, Memo Shows

Politico: Pence-world’s final takedown of Trump’s Jan. 6 bid to remain in power revealed in his lawyer’s memo

Politico: Pence team couldn’t verify Trump campaign’s election fraud claims, new memo shows

Rolling Stone: Jared Kushner Wasn’t Just Involved in Trump’s Push to Overturn 2020. He Helped Start It

Variety: Trump’s Truth Social Is Banning Users Who Post About Jan. 6 Hearings, According to Reports

Washington Post: Rep. Liz Cheney tells America why Jan. 6 should terrify them

Washington Post: Ginni Thomas pressed 29 Ariz. lawmakers to help overturn Trump’s defeat, emails show

Republican Response To The January 6 Hearings 

Bloomberg: Even Donald Trump Is Using the Jan. 6 Hearings to Appeal for Donations

CBS: Rep. Scott Perry denies Jan. 6 committee accusation that he sought a Trump pardon

The Hill: GOP governor says Trump is ‘politically, morally responsible’ for Jan. 6

Insider: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweets at Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene wanting to know if they asked for pardons after January 6

Insider: Giuliani says Trump ‘had nothing to do’ with Jan 6. attack and that the Democratic party ‘needs to be destroyed at the top’

New York Times: Trump Hits Back at Daughter’s Account That She Accepted His Election Loss

Talking Points Memo: Jordan Emphasizes How Much He Won’t Be Cooperating With Jan. 6 Panel

Washington Examiner: Former AG Barr: Jan. 6 panel not ‘optimal mechanism’ to probe ‘legitimate areas of inquiry’

Washington Post: How the Jan. 6 hearing played out on the pro-Trump web

Opinion 

The Atlantic (Kate Shaw): The Other Cause of January 6 

New York Post (Editorial): Donald Trump, Democrats are obsessed with 2020 — GOP should look to the future

New York Times (Ross Douthat): Why the Memory of Jan. 6 Can’t Prevent a Trump Resurgence

New York Times (Charles Blow): Trump Is Still a Threat

Wall Street Journal (Editorial): The Evidence of the Jan. 6 Committee

Washington Post (Editorial): The Jan. 6 committee’s new bombshells still don’t complete the story

Washington Post (Karen Tumulty): The sedition didn’t stop on Jan. 6. It must be stopped.

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Why Liz Cheney’s ‘seditious conspiracy’ talk is awful for Trump

Washington Post (EJ Dionne): Cheney leaves Trump and his GOP apologists reeling

Political Violence 

Associated Press: 31 Patriot Front members arrested near Idaho pride event

KQED: Sheriffs Investigating Hate Crime After Alleged Proud Boys Disrupt ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ with Homophobic Slurs

In The States 

Arizona Republic: Cyber Ninjas let Arizona right-wing activist decide who counted ‘audit’ ballots, emails show

Madison Capital Times: Election reviewers earned $11,000 for ‘almost no substantive work’

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin Elections Commission picks Republican tax attorney as its new chair

MSNBC: How one state’s GOP gubernatorial primary has gone off the rails