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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 16, 2022

By June 16, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

What To Watch For Today: 

The House select committee investigating January 6 will hold a hearing at 1:00 PM. 

Must Read Stories

Trump’s Pressure On Pence Will Be The Focus Of Today’s Hearing 

  • Bloomberg: How Trump Pressured Pence Is Focus as Jan. 6 Hearings Resume: The House committee investigating the 2021 insurrection of the US Capitol will focus Thursday on Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into using his role as the Senate’s presiding officer to block congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election win. The 1 p.m. hearing is expected to present evidence Trump was repeatedly warned his plans to block election certification were illegal and may include testimony from Trump aides on how the president responded when he learned rioters invading the Capitol on Jan. 6 were calling for Pence’s lynching. Pence, who is to speak in Cincinnati Thursday afternoon, won’t be at the hearing. Witnesses scheduled to testify live include Greg Jacob, who was Pence’s chief counsel, and J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative former federal appeals court judge, both of whom advised Pence he had no legal authority to block or delay certification. Video testimony will also come from depositions by Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, who was with him at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Excerpts may also be shown of testimony by the then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann, who was another White House lawyer.
  • CBS: Former Federal Judge Michael Luttig Has Stark Message For Jan. 6 Committee: Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, a staunch conservative long admired by many Republicans, will testify before the House’s Jan. 6 committee on Thursday with an urgent and stark message for the panel about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election: “America’s democracy was almost stolen from her.” Luttig will also likely state that the Republican National Committee is wrong to have referred to some of the events of Jan. 6, 2021 as “legitimate political discourse” and warn fellow conservatives to not ignore the gravity of what Trump did as he scrambled to hold onto the presidency that day. 
  • NBC: Trump Knew Capitol Was Breached When He Disparaged Pence In Jan. 6 Tweet, Key Democrat Says: Former President Donald Trump knew violence had taken hold at the Capitol on Jan. 6 when he tweeted that Mike Pence wasn’t willing to overturn the election, according to a member of the House committee investigating the insurrection who told NBC News the panel will show the former vice president was in more physical danger than previously known. Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., who will play a key role in leading the committee’s third public hearing on Thursday, previewed the panel’s findings by telling NBC News that Pence was “evacuated in just the nick of time” from the quickly advancing mob after a disparaging tweet from Trump. Aguilar said that just minutes after the doors to the Capitol had been breached, while Pence was in his ceremonial office, Trump tweeted that his second-in-command didn’t have the courage to overturn the election results. Moments later Pence was whisked to an evacuation area by Secret Service agents, Aguilar said.
  • ABC: Photos Show Vice President Mike Pence, Family In Hiding On Jan. 6: A new photo obtained exclusively by ABC News shows then-Vice President Mike Pence and his family in hiding after rioters broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and he was evacuated from the Senate floor. ABC News is publishing the image for the first time on the eve of the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearing Thursday focused on former President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence. In it, Pence can be seen with members of his family — second lady Karen Pence, his brother, Rep. Greg Pence and his daughter — in the vice president’s ceremonial office just steps from the Senate floor. Taken just minutes after the mob had breached the Capitol and as Pence and his family were evacuated from chamber by his Secret Service detail, the photo shows Karen Pence hurriedly closing the curtains in the room, as her daughter looks on with fear. According to a source who was in the room, the second lady could see rioters outside the Capitol, so she closed the curtains, worried that the attackers would see her and her family.

Trump Attorney John Eastman Appeared To Have Inside Insight Into “Heated Fight” At Supreme Court Over Election Suits 

  • New York Times: Trump Lawyer Cited ‘Heated Fight’ Among Justices Over Election Suits: A lawyer advising President Donald J. Trump claimed in an email after Election Day 2020 to have insight into a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the president’s efforts to overturn his defeat at the polls, two people briefed on the email said. The lawyer, John Eastman, made the statement in a Dec. 24, 2020, exchange with a pro-Trump lawyer and Trump campaign officials over whether to file legal papers that they hoped might prompt four justices to agree to hear an election case from Wisconsin. “So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” Mr. Eastman wrote, according to the people briefed on the contents of the email. Referring to the process by which at least four justices are needed to take up a case, he added, “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.” The pro-Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
  • Washington Post: Ginni Thomas Corresponded With John Eastman, Sources In Jan. 6 House Investigation Say: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation. The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.

Contrary To His Previous Claims, Rep. Barry Loudermilk Led Suspicious Tour Of Capitol On January 5 

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Says Capitol Marcher Toured With G.O.P. Congressman: A man who toured the Capitol complex with a Republican lawmaker the day before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack later marched on the building while making threats against Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats, the House committee investigating the attack said on Wednesday. The panel released surveillance video of a tour of parts of the Capitol complex conducted by Representative Barry Loudermilk, Republican of Georgia, a day before the violence. During the tour — which lasted several hours, despite the complex being closed to the public at the time — he is seen with the group entering three different office buildings and approaching the entrances to tunnels leading to the Capitol. Individuals on the tour photographed and recorded areas of the complex that are “not typically of interest to tourists, including hallways, staircases and security checkpoints,” the committee said. The video that the committee released also featured footage apparently taken by a person who is marching toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, and can be heard saying, “There’s no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler. We’re coming for you.”

January 6 Participants And Election Deniers Are Succeeding In GOP Primaries While Republicans Spend Millions To Hunt For “Fraud”

  • Axios: Jan. 6-Linked Candidates Are Outperforming Expectations: Across the country, candidates who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 are running for office — and, in some cases, finding shocking success. Driving the news: Ryan Kelley, a leading Republican candidate for Michigan governor, was arrested by the FBI last week on misdemeanor charges related to the Capitol riot, including engaging in violence on restricted grounds. Why it matters: Rather than struggling due to their association with the violent assault, a number of the candidates are winning their primaries and even being embraced by the GOP establishment. Several are in highly competitive races, including Ohio House candidate J.R. Majewski and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. On Tuesday, Majewski received House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s blessing: He was added to the House GOP’s “Young Guns” program, which entitles candidates who meet certain organizing thresholds to party support. By the numbers: At least 14 people who were present at the Capitol, with varying degrees of involvement in the riot, have run for federal or statewide office this year. Four have already won their primaries. Several others are well-positioned to win, including Trump-endorsed candidates for U.S. House in Wisconsin and Arizona secretary of state. Even candidates who lost their respective races finished with surprisingly strong results.
  • CNN: Election Deniers Are Winning Political Nominations Across The Country: Republican voters this week picked Nevada businessman Jim Marchant as their nominee for secretary of state, bringing yet another 2020 election denier closer to overseeing elections in 2024 in a presidential battleground state. Last month, Pennsylvania Republicans chose as their gubernatorial nominee a staunch defender of former President Donald Trump and his election falsehoods And in New Mexico this week, a GOP-led county commission refused to certify the results of the June 7 primary election in the county, citing concerns about election fraud. The move prompted legal action from Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who this fall will face a Republican rival who has called the 2020 election that Trump lost a “coup” and has argued that vote-tallying machines manipulate election results. As a House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol seeks to shed light on the falsehoods that swirled around the last presidential contest, a growing number of midterm results underscore how much deep suspicion of the 2020 election has taken root among Republican primary voters and some of the officials they already have installed in key positions.
  • Washington Post: GOP Spends Millions On Election Volunteers To Search For Fraud: The Republican National Committee is spending millions this year in 16 critical states on an unprecedented push to recruit thousands of poll workers and watchers, adding firepower to a growing effort on the right to find election irregularities that could be used to challenge results. The RNC was until recently barred from bringing its substantial resources to bear on field operations at polling sites because of a decades-old court order. Now, the party apparatus is mobilizing volunteers to scrutinize voting locations for suspected fraud. “It’s super, super critical that if issues are identified, they’re identified real time,” Melissa Conway, the RNC’s election integrity state director in Texas, said in a virtual meeting last year, so that Republicans can “have a legal footing in addressing the election and if need be, doing any overturning of the election.”

In The States 

New Mexico Supreme Court Orders Otero County To Certify Vote 

  • Washington Post: New Mexico’s Supreme Court Orders County Commission To Certify Vote: New Mexico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the county commissioners in rural Otero County to do their jobs and certify election results, two days after they refused, citing unsubstantiated concerns about fraud. The court granted the emergency motion by New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, who earlier this week asked the court to intervene and compel the three-member board to approve vote totals from a June 7 primary. The commission had voted on Monday not to do so. That move had potentially disenfranchised “every Otero County voter who legally and securely cast a ballot” and harmed candidates “seeking to have their names on the General Election ballot” in November, Oliver argued.

Wisconsin Vote “Audit” Leader Faces Discipline For Misogynistic Comments, Failure To Follow Open Records Law 

  • Wisconsin Public Radio: Dane County Judge Calls For Disciplining Michael Gableman Over ‘Misogynistic Comments’: A Dane County judge said former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman should face disciplinary action for disrupting a hearing and making “misogynistic comments” about a fellow lawyer. The recommendations were contained in a ruling that comes nearly a week after Gableman’s Office of Special Counsel probing 2020 election results was found in contempt for not following the state’s open records laws.  In a scathing written ruling, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington said Gableman’s conduct during a June 10 contempt hearing and court recess was “an affront to the judicial process” and an insult to Attorney Christa Westerberg. Westerberg is representing liberal watchdog American Oversight in its lawsuit demanding records from the special counsel’s 2020 election investigation. During a June 10 court hearing in which Gableman was to answer questions about his office’s refusal to provide records to American Oversight, he refused to testify.  Gableman then accused Remington of abandoning “his role as a neutral magistrate” and “acting as an advocate” during the hearing. Gableman was caught on a live courtroom microphone during a subsequent court recess insinuating that Westerberg could not do her job without consulting on strategy with the judge in his chambers.  “The Court will ignore the personal insult,” Remington wrote. “However, the Court cannot ignore Gableman’s disruptive conduct and misogynistic comments about a fellow lawyer.”

What Experts Are Saying

Brendan Nyhan, American political scientist at Dartmouth College: “The GOP whip laying the groundwork for overturning the 2024 election. Happening right in front of us. ‘And GOP Whip Steve Scalise explained his objection vote at a presser: ‘You saw some states not follow their state-passed legislation. I mean, the Constitution doesn’t say states determine how to pick electors, it says state legislatures determine how to pick electors,’ he said.” Tweet 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “The big lie — we are going to study that for decades as one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in modern history. And it did many things, the big lie. Most concretely, it allowed Trump to convince people that he was not a loser, that he actually won the election, and thus the whole justification for overturning the election. So that is for his followers, who may truly believe that he won the election. So he duped them. But what’s very sad is it’s been an element of corruption of the Republican Party, because all of the Congress people who are supporting the big lie, they know perfectly well that Trump lost the election. But they’re choosing for political reasons to go along with this fantasy. This is part of the GOP becoming an authoritarian party..And Exhibit A of that is look what happened to Mike Pence. I am absolutely haunted by the fact that people were trying to kill Pence and that Trump said that he deserved to hang. This kind of party, authoritarian discipline, where you follow the leader or you deserve to die, that’s not democracy. That has nothing to do with democracy. So the challenge in the coming time will be that one of our two parties is really exited from democracy and right now it’s following the rules of authoritarianism. I don’t know where this is gonna take us, but it’s not a very good place for a country to be.” Business Insider 

Harry Litman, former U.S. attorney and deputy assistant attorney general: “[U]ltimately, it falls on the American public — including the 65% of Republicans who still believe in Trump’s Big Lie — to repudiate that lie and the insurrection. No institution can do it for us.” Los Angeles Times Column  

NYT’s Spencer Bokat-Lindell on the recent Brookings “Trump on Trial” report: “But it’s also conceivable that they would have to prove that Trump knew with certainty that those efforts were illegal. Some legal experts believe that prosecutors could meet even that higher burden. In a new report for Brookings, Bookbinder, Norman Eisen, Donald Ayer, Joshua Perry and E. Danya Perry note that Trump was repeatedly told by trusted advisers, experts and courts that his claims of election fraud were unfounded, and that he attempted to coerce Georgia state officials to ‘find’ just enough votes for him to win — a request plainly inconsistent with the desire to legally contest the falsely alleged fraud.” New York Times 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

New York Times: Democrats’ Risky Bet: Aid G.O.P. Extremists in Spring, Hoping to Beat Them in Fall

Rolling Stone: Another Republican Who Has Promoted QAnon Is Headed to Congress

Washington Post (Analysis): A small county in New Mexico shows where ‘big lie’ delusions can lead

Yahoo: Poll: Half of Americans now predict U.S. may ‘cease to be a democracy’ someday

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: Judge rejects Steve Bannon’s motion to throw out contempt of Congress charges

Mother Jones: Insurrectionist Tells Judge Her Elite Credentials Should Keep Her Out of Prison

NBC: Court document in Proud Boys case laid out plan to occupy Capitol buildings on Jan. 6

New York Times: Judge Convicts Man Who Carried Confederate Flag in Capitol Attack

New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Says Capitol Marcher Toured With G.O.P. Congressman

Politico: Proud Boys leader seeks transfer of trial after Jan. 6 committee builds case he instigated riot

Politico: The Guilfoyle email that illustrates Cheney’s pre-Jan. 6 assistance to Trump World

Washington Post: How Americans feel about the Jan. 6 hearings so far

Republican Response To The January 6 Hearings 

Grid: Why the political right and Fox News ignore the Jan. 6 hearings

The Hill: Bannon rips Barr over Jan. 6 testimony

Opinion 

The Guardian (Emma Brockes): Trump thought he would get away with it. The US Capitol attack hearings prove that’s not true

New York Times (Charles Blow): Normalizing Mass Hysteria

New York Times (Alex Kingsbury): Who Is Financing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Caucus? Corporations You Know.

Salon (Heather Digby Parton): Accomplices to a coup: Trump’s lackeys must be held to account for the Big Lie

Washington Post (Greg Sargent): Decoding Liz Cheney’s big hint about John Eastman — and Donald Trump

In The States 

Arizona Republic:  Biden nominates Arizona attorney who fought attempts to overturn election as judge for 9th Circuit

Daily Beast: Subpoenas Probe GOP Mission to Breach Georgia Voting System

Slate: The Leader of Trump’s Favorite 2020 Election “Audit” May Be Disbarred After Courtroom Meltdown