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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 21, 2022

By June 21, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

What to Watch Today: 

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

Must Read Stories

Today’s January 6 Committee Hearing Will Focus On Trump’s Pressure On State Elected Officials 

  • Politico: Jan. 6 Committee To Highlight Trump’s State-Level Pressure To Overturn The 2020 Election: Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election depended on one key thing that he never received: the blessing of Republican-controlled state legislatures. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The select committee intends to lay out Tuesday how Trump leaned on statehouse Republicans — from Pennsylvania, to Georgia, to Michigan, to Arizona and others — to pull off a scheme that would culminate on Jan. 6, 2021, when then-Vice President Mike Pence presided over the counting of electoral votes. Under Trump’s plan, Pence would be presented with competing slates of electors — those certified by the governors, and those certified by state legislators — and he would assert the extraordinary power to choose which slates to count. But no state legislature responded to Trump’s demand, and Pence, without any genuine controversy, rejected the scheme as illegal. In fact, the legality of the plan will be at the heart of Tuesday afternoon’s hearing, which will be led in part by panel member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). It’s the select panel’s fourth public hearing as investigators lay out their findings.
  • Los Angeles Times: House Jan. 6 Committee To Reveal Meadows’ Pressure On Georgia Election Officials: The House Jan. 6 committee plans to show in its fourth hearing Tuesday that President Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows “had an intimate role … in this plot to put pressure on [Georgia] state legislators and on elections officials,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the panel, told The Times in an interview. Among other things, Schiff said the committee investigating the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol will release new information about Meadows’ appearance at a key election meeting in Georgia and text messages revealing that he wanted to send autographed Make America Great Again hats to people conducting the audit.
  • Arizona Republic: ‘I Will Follow The Constitution’: Bowers To Testify Before Jan. 6 Panel About Pressure To Overturn 2020 Results: Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers will testify Tuesday before the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee wants Bowers to talk about the pressure he got from President Trump and his allies to overturn the results of Arizona’s 2020 presidential election. […] In late November 2020, while Arizona’s vote was counted but not yet certified, Bowers got a call from the White House. It was Trump and attorney Rudy Giuliani, telling him Arizona had a law that would allow the Legislature to pick the slate of presidential electors, overriding the choice made by voters. Bowers, R-Mesa, said he had never heard of that law and asked for proof. He was skeptical of the proposition and questioned how such a maneuver could be constitutional. The proof never arrived, despite assurances it would. In recounting the exchange to Arizona Republic reporters last year, Bowers said he told Trump and Giuliani it was an extraordinary request. “You are giving me nothing but conjecture and asking me to break my oath and commit to doing something I cannot do because I swore I wouldn’t. I will follow the Constitution,” he said.
  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Georgia Election Worker To Testify At Tuesday’s Jan. 6 Hearing: A former Georgia election worker whose life was turned upside down by Donald Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud at State Farm Arena will testify to congressional investigators Tuesday. Trump accused Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, of rigging the November 2020 election for Joe Biden with “suitcases” of ballots on election night. The pair were featured in a video that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani called a “smoking gun” for voting fraud at the arena. It was not a smoking gun. State and federal investigators reviewed the video, interviewed election workers and determined they did nothing improper. But Moss faced death threats and racist taunts, which forced her into hiding. Now Moss will testify at a congressional hearing that’s expected to focus on Trump’s actions in Georgia in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The hearing also will feature testimony from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his top deputy, Gabriel Sterling. Raffensperger is expected to testify about the infamous recorded phone call in which Trump asked him to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to defeat Biden in Georgia, citing the State Farm video and other false voting fraud allegations.

New Documents Will Show Trump Advisers Knew The Fake Elector Scheme Was Baseless

  • Washington Post: Trump Campaign Documents Show Advisers Knew Fake-Elector Plan Was Baseless: The convening of the electoral college on Dec. 14, 2020, was supposed to mark the end of the wild, extended presidential election that year. But when the day arrived, a strange thing happened. In seven swing states won by Joe Biden, when the Democrat’s electors assembled to formally elect him president, Trump supporters showed up, too, ready to declare that their man had actually won. “The electors are already here — they’ve been checked in,” a state police officer told the group in Michigan, according to a video of the encounter, as he barred the Republicans from the Capitol in a state Biden won by more than 154,000 votes. In Nevada, a state Biden had won by about 33,600 votes, a photo distributed by the state Republican Party showed Trump supporters squeezing around an undersize picnic table dressed up with a bit of bunting, preparing to sign formal certificates declaring that they were “the duly elected and qualified” electors of their state. At the time, the gatherings seemed a slapdash, desperate attempt to mimic President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede. But internal campaign emails and memos reveal that the convening of the fake electors was apparently a much more concerted strategy, intended to give Vice President Mike Pence a reason to declare that the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the congressional counting of the electoral college votes.

Ginni Thomas-Linked “FrontLiners For Liberty” Could Become A New Focus Of Investigation 

  • Associated Press: Jan. 6 Committee Setting Its Sights On Pence, Ginni Thomas: Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Sunday they may subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence and are waiting to hear from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, about her role in the illegal plot to overturn the 2020 election. Lawmakers indicated they will release more evidence about Donald Trump’s alleged effort to defraud supporters by fundraising off false claims of a stolen presidential election. They also pledged to provide pertinent material to the Justice Department by the end of the month for its criminal investigation. The department complained in a letter last week that the committee was complicating its investigation by not sharing transcripts from its 1,000 interviews. “We’re not taking anything off the table in terms of witnesses who have not yet testified,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, who described a Pence subpoena as “certainly a possibility.” “We would still, I think, like to have several high-profile people come before our committee,” said Schiff, D-Calif.
  • CNBC: Ginni Thomas-Tied Facebook Group ‘Frontliners For Liberty’ Could Be A New Focus In Jan. 6 Investigation: A Facebook group that appears to be run by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, could become a new point of interest in the U.S. House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Congressional investigators said they planned to ask Ginni Thomas to testify before the committee hours after Trump attorney John Eastman on Thursday publicly posted a Dec. 4, 2020 email from Thomas asking him to speak to a gathering she called “Frontliners,” which she described as featuring “grassroots state leaders.” Ginni Thomas is listed as an administrator of a Facebook group that goes by a similar name and description: “FrontLiners for Liberty.” The private group, which listed more than 50 members, was created in August 2020, just two months before the November elections, according to the page’s description. The group, which CNBC reviewed before it was removed from public view, described itself as “a new collaborative, liberty-focused, action-oriented group of state leaders representing grassroots armies to CONNECT, INFORM and ACTIVATE each other weekly to preserve constitutional governance.” Although Thomas’ personal Facebook page isn’t verified, it contained numerous photos of Justice Thomas.
  • Washington Post: Speaker At Meeting Of Ginni Thomas Group Called Biden’s Win Illegitimate Long After Jan. 6, Video Shows:   Two months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to help President Donald Trump stay in office, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attended a gathering of right-wing activists where a speaker declared to roaring applause that Trump was still the “legitimate president,” a video recording of the event shows. “There is a robbery that is going on in this country right now,” pastor and conservative radio personality C.L. Bryant told the crowd, according to video posted to Facebook by an attendee. “In fact, I say it to you and I’ll say it loud and clear, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I won’t bite my tongue. I do believe that Donald John Trump is the only legitimate president.” The event on March 6, 2021, was a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty. The group vaulted from obscurity to national attention last week with the disclosure that Thomas had invited pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman to speak to its members in December 2020.

Open Threats Of Political Violence Are On The Rise 

  • Kansas City Star: Greitens Puts Out Gun-Toting Video Implying He’s Hunting Members Of His Own Party: Former Gov. Eric Greitens put out a video Monday that showed him and a group of men in tactical gear with guns hunting Republicans who they do not deem adequately conservative, ramping up the war-like messaging of his campaign for U.S. Senate. In the video Greitens, a Republican, carries a gun and identifies himself as a Navy SEAL. He says he’s hunting RINOs, an acronym that means “Republicans in name only.” “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” Greitens says in the video. “The RINO feeds on corruption and are marked by the stripes of cowardice.” The video was flagged on Twitter and removed from Facebook. It comes in the aftermath of two high-profile mass shootings and as Congress appears to be making progress on legislation to address gun violence.
  • CNN: Election Officials Worry About Their Safety Ahead Of Midterms: When US intelligence and national security officials gathered at a classified facility in April to speak with election officials around the country, there was no burning new intelligence to share about cyber threats to American democracy. The briefing covered Russia’s war on Ukraine and foreign and domestic sources of disinformation about US elections, according to three people familiar with the briefing. But there was a striking change from pre-2020 briefings: It touched on violent threats to election officials that stem from conspiracy theories about the voting process. Physical security concerns have “really ramped up since 2020 because of threats that we’ve seen to state and local officials across the country,” said Kim Wyman, the top election security official at the federal US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has encouraged election workers to report threats to law enforcement and is hiring more staff to advise election officials on physical threats.
  • Washington Post: GOP Member Of Jan. 6 Committee Warns That More Violence Is Coming: One of two Republican members of the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, starkly warned Sunday that his own party’s lies could feed additional violence. “There is violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.” Kinzinger, who defied party leadership by serving on the Democratic-led committee, described an alarming message he received at home in the mail several days ago threatening to execute him, his wife and their 5-month-old baby. “I’d never seen or had anything like that. It was sent from the local area,” he said. On Sunday evening, Kinzinger tweeted a copy of the letter addressed to his wife that read in part, “that pimp you married not only broke his oath, he sold his soul.” In his tweet, Kinzinger suggested that the Republican National Committee is encouraging such threats. “The Darkness is spreading courtesy of cowardly leaders fearful of truth,” he said.

After A Hearing Revealed The Danger Mike Pence Faced On January 6, Trump Continued His Attacks On His Former Vice President While Pence Downplayed Them 

  • New York Times: A Day After a Portrait of Pence in Danger, Trump Attacks Him Again:  A day after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault illustrated the serious danger that rioters posed to Mike Pence, former President Donald J. Trump unleashed a new attack on the man who had served him as vice president, criticizing him for refusing to interfere with the Electoral College certification of the 2020 presidential contest. Speaking on Friday afternoon before a faith-based group, Mr. Trump said that “Mike did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Thursday, the House panel demonstrated that Mr. Trump and his advisers were told repeatedly that Mr. Pence had no power to block the certification and that doing so would violate the law, but pressed him to try anyway. The committee also used witnesses to dismantle and debunk Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud — arguments that he repeated in his keynote speech on Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville. Mr. Trump has grown angry watching the hearings, knowing that he lacks a bully pulpit from which to respond, according to his advisers. He used much of his Friday address to repeat his false election claims and to denigrate Mr. Pence.
  • Fox News: Pence Says He Won’t Let Dems Use Jan. 6 ‘To Distract’ From Their ‘Failed Agenda,’ Praises Trump Record:  Former Vice President Mike Pence said Monday he “will not allow the Democrats” to use Jan. 6 to “distract attention from their failed agenda” and praised former President Trump’s record, while indicating, though, that his decision on whether to run for the White House in 2024 will not be impacted by Trump’s own re-election plans. During a sit-down interview with Fox News Digital on the sidelines of a speech on economic policy at the University Club in Chicago, Pence reflected on the current state of the nation under the Biden administration, telling Fox News that President Biden is “embracing the politics of the radical left.”  […] “Jan. 6 was a tragic day, and I know we did our duty, but I will always be proud of our record,” Pence told Fox News. “And I am not going to allow the Democrats to use that tragic day to distract attention from their failed agenda or to demean the intentions of 74 million Americans who rallied behind our cause.”

In The States 

Texas GOP Embraces Extreme Right ing Platform Calling Biden An Illegitimate President And Proposing Secession 

  • Texas Tribune: Texas Republican Convention Calls Biden Win Illegitimate And Rebukes Cornyn Over Gun Talks: Meeting at their first in-person convention since 2018, Texas Republicans on Saturday acted on a raft of resolutions and proposed platform changes to move their party even further to the right. They approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden “was not legitimately elected” and rebuking Sen. John Cornyn for taking part in bipartisan gun talks. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and calls for Texas schoolchildren “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child.” The actions capped a convention that highlighted how adamantly opposed the party’s most active and vocal members are to compromising with Democrats or moderating on social positions, even as the state has grown more diverse and Republicans’ margins in statewide elections have shrunk slightly in recent years.
  • Mediaite: Dan Crenshaw & Staff Assaulted by Right Wingers Shouting ‘Eyepatch McCain’ and Saying He Should be ‘Hung for Treason’:  Rep. Dan Crenshaw and his staff were violently confronted at the Republican Party of Texas convention a short time ago, when far-right social media activist Alex Stein and others whom witnesses described as Proud Boys began shouting “eyepatch McCain” at him – an attempted insult coined by Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson. 

What Experts Are Saying

Joyce Vance, former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama: “On Trump Georgia tape, @JoyceWhiteVance: ‘I remember the first time I heard it, it was astonishing. It’s clear from the tone and the content of the president’s comments that he’s ultimately threatening and cajoling Raffensperger, trying to get him to engage in a fraud.’” Tweet of MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports

Julian E. Zelizer, Historian at Princeton University: “The 1/6 hearings have reaffirmed the urgent need to reform the Electoral Count Act. During the 1970s, Congress passed many government reforms in response to Watergate. Fixing glaring weaknesses in the system is crucial to avoiding a repeat of 2020.” Tweet

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, scholar on fascism and MSNBC columnist: “The GOP responds to exposure of a Trump plan to harm/assassinate Pence with more threats against its own. This is what real-time radicalization of a party looks like.” Tweet

Noah Bookbinder, President of CREW: “As the January 6 hearings continue to show how dangerous Donald Trump’s election lies are, we need to keep the pressure on the corporations that are donating to members of the Sedition Caucus who acted on Trump’s lies and continue to spread them.” Tweet

Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy: “The wheels very nearly came off American democracy on January 6, 2021. Whenever possible, political reforms should be pursued in ways that recruit broader political coalitions that transcend existing partisan divides while marginalizing the political extremes. This is why I believe that ranked-choice voting is the master reform that will unravel the Gordian Knot of our democratic sclerosis and enable a new era of democratic innovation, engagement, and effectiveness.” Democracy Journal

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Associated Press: Justices seem poised to hear elections case pressed by GOP

Bloomberg: Liz Cheney Is Paying the Price for Crossing Trump in Her Home State

ProPublica: “Big Lie” Vigilantism Is on the Rise. Big Tech Is Failing to Respond.

January 6 And The 2020 Election

ABC: Dominion’s 2020 election lawsuit against Newsmax to move forward, judge rules

CBS: Lofgren says Trump intended to “accelerate that violence” against Pence on Jan. 6

CNN: Georgia officials set to testify at Tuesday’s hearing before January 6 committee

CNN (Analysis): January 6 committee wrestles with the same unsolvable question about Trump — how to hold him to account

The Guardian: Kinzinger: Trump’s actions surrounding January 6 amount to ‘seditious conspiracy’

The Guardian: Searing testimony increases odds of charges against Trump, experts say

The Hill: Doctor who pushed hydroxychloroquine gets 60-day prison sentence for storming Capitol on Jan. 6

Insider: Trump said it was a ‘foolish’ decision for GOP to not be represented on the January 6 panel. He and Republican lawmakers rejected a bipartisan commission last year.

NBC: For Jan. 6 rioters who believed Trump, storming the Capitol made sense

New York Times: Despite Growing Evidence, a Prosecution of Trump Would Face Challenges

New York Times: Proud Boys Led Major Breaches of Capitol on Jan. 6, Video Investigation Finds

New York Times (Analysis): Amid Jan. 6 Revelations, Election Lies Still Dominate the G.O.P.

Politico: Jan. 6 panel subpoenas unseen Trump tapes

Rolling Stone: Trump’s Team Setting Up Eastman to Take Blame for Jan. 6

Washington Post (Analysis): All the Jan. 6 evidence that Trump and Co. knew their plot was corrupt

Washington Post (Analysis): Pete Aguilar’s rising star status meets the moment at Jan. 6 hearing

Republican Response to the January 6 Committee Hearings 

Associated Press: Jan. 6 witnesses push Trump stalwarts back to rabbit hole

The Atlantic: The Insurrectionist In The Flower Shop

NBC: ‘Impeachment No. 3’: Jan. 6 panel isn’t swaying these swing-state Republicans

Opinion 

CNN (Laurence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut): Our electoral house is on fire. New Mexico is proof of that

Los Angeles Times (Laurence Tribe, Phillip Lacovara, and Dennis Aftergut): The insurrection won’t end until Trump is prosecuted and disqualified from future office

NBC (Casey Michel): Pro-Trump Republican secession rhetoric in Texas and elsewhere is more than a punchline

New York Times (Jack Goldsmith): Prosecute Trump? Put Yourself in Merrick Garland’s Shoes.

Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin): The Jan. 6 hearings show urgency of Electoral Count Act reform

Washington Post (Paul Waldman): Texas’s new secessionist platform exposes a big GOP scam

Political Violence 

Associated Press: Facebook removes GOP Senate candidate’s ‘RINO hunting’ video

NBC: Self-proclaimed ‘sovereign citizens’ arrested in California after deputies allegedly find explosives

In The States 

Baton Rouge Advocate: John Kennedy’s vote not to certify President Biden’s election becomes issue in Senate race

CNN: Pennsylvania Democrat keeps focus on January 6 in campaign for governor against an election denier

St. Louis Post Dispatch: ​​Missouri political group eyes former prosecutor to run as independent for U.S. Senate

Washington Post: New Mexico county certifies election results, bowing to court order