Skip to main content
Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — June 27, 2022

By June 27, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Poll:  Half Say Trump Tried To Stay In Office Illegally, Should Be Charged With Crimes 

  • CBS: Half Say Trump Tried To Stay In Office Through Illegal Means, Should Be Charged With Crimes: Most Americans continue to feel U.S. democracy is threatened, and the Jan. 6 hearings offer a window into their different reasons why. From what they’ve seen of the hearings thus far, half the country thinks former President Donald Trump planned to remain in office through unconstitutional and illegal activities. Half think that he should, in turn, be charged with crimes, and that the attack on the Capitol was an “insurrection.” Meanwhile, though, most Republicans feel Trump had no such plans, and a big, unmoved majority of them still say President Joe Biden didn’t legitimately win. Half of Republicans still call that day’s events “patriotism,” a view that’s floated around the same mark since that day. 

The Far Right Rises In MAGA-Fueled Primaries Across The Country 

  • Washington Post: They Backed A Jan. 6 Commission. Now, They Face Heat In GOP Primaries:  In Illinois, a Republican congresswoman says her GOP colleague and rival “stabbed President Trump in the back.” In Mississippi, an insurgent conservative suggested his House Republican opponent should apologize. And in Utah, a candidate running to the right of a Republican member says his adversary “caved to the radical left.” All three were focusing attention on the vote last year by their competitors to create a bipartisan “National Commission” to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was done by a pro-Trump mob. Such criticism has put dozens of House Republicans on the defensive in this year’s primaries, forcing them to fend off condemnations from challengers who are using the vote to argue that the incumbents aren’t conservative enough, even though the commission, as specified in legislation, was never approved by the full Congress, much less assembled. The prevalence of the criticism reflects the unease some Republicans have sensed among GOP base voters about the House select committee currently investigating the Jan. 6 attack, which held its latest public hearing Thursday. Even though only two Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), who now sit on the panel — voted to create it, after the previous proposal failed in the Senate, many conservative candidates are zeroing in on the earlier vote for a commission as they try to tap into anger over the proceedings. The next test of these political fault lines comes Tuesday, when five of the 35 House Republicans who voted for the commission will be on the ballot. So far, 12 have won or advanced from their primaries. Two have lost. Nine others retired or resigned.
  • Axios: McCarthy’s Coming Headaches: Far-right candidates are surging in House races across the map: Republican leaders increasingly fear that a red wave will wash in a raft of conspiracy theorists and extremists. Why it matters: The establishment grows ever weaker. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — on the doorstep of the speaker’s office — can expect to be saddled with new members who have zero loyalty or predictability. What’s happening: Many of the GOP candidates expected to cause leadership headaches are backed by former President Trump, whose grip on McCarthy is as strong as ever. They play well with Trump’s MAGA base and are running in incredibly conservative districts. Several, like Loren Culp and Joe Kent in Washington, have made no secret of their disdain for McCarthy and GOP leadership overall. 
  • Associated Press: ‘Mitt Romney Republican’ Is Now A Potent GOP Primary Attack: Mitt Romney isn’t up for reelection this year. But Trump-aligned Republicans hostile toward the Utah senator have made his name a recurring theme in this year’s primaries, using him as a foil and derisively branding their rivals “Mitt Romney Republicans.” Republicans have used the concept to frame their primary opponents as enemies of the Trump-era GOP in southeast Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The anti-tax group Club For Growth, among the most active super PACs in this year’s primaries, used “Mitt Romney Republican” as the central premise of an attack ad in North Carolina’s Senate primary. But nowhere are references to Romney Republicanism as common as they are in Utah. Despite his popularity with many residents here, candidates are repeatedly deploying “Mitt Romney Republican” as a campaign trail attack in the lead-up to Tuesday’s Republican primary. […] The fact that his brand has become potent attack fodder reflect how singular Romney’s position is in U.S. politics: He’s the only senator with the nationwide name recognition that comes from being a presidential nominee and the only Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump twice.

Election Workers Fear For Their Safety As Threats Of Violence Grow 

  • New York Times: Violent Threats to Election Workers Are Common. Prosecutions are Not: “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.” In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and chief election official of Colorado. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail was unable to protect her, then added: “This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.” Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland established the federal Election Threats Task Force, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford’s guilty plea is the only case the task force has successfully concluded out of more than 1,000 it has evaluated. Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally sparse, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold said. The sluggish pace has sparked consternation among both election workers and their supporters, some of whom say they are souring on the idea of reporting the menacing messages to prosecutors if nothing comes of it.

Limiting Abortion Rights Is Consistent With Declining Democracy 

  • Washington Post (Analysis): Scaling Back Abortion Access Is Consistent With Declining Democracy:  The pattern over the past 25 years has been fairly steady: Many countries with prohibitions against abortion have unwound those laws either slightly or substantially. Places like Nepal and Ireland and Colombia have loosened bans on abortion since the turn of the century, as have dozens of other countries. Most countries, of course, didn’t effect any changes at all from 2000 to the beginning of this year. Two, Nicaragua and Poland, scaled back access to abortion. On Friday, the United States joined them. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization repealed its decision in Roe v. Wade, allowing states to prohibit abortion entirely. Several states that had previously passed “trigger” laws that would go into effect upon repeal of Roe quickly implemented such bans. It’s tricky to extrapolate outward from three examples, certainly. But it’s worth noting — particularly given broader international trends — that Poland, Nicaragua and the United States had all moved measurably away from liberal democracy before abortion bans were expanded.

In The States 

COLORADO: Fueled By A Network Of Conspiracy Theorists, The Far Right Is Poised For Victory In The Colorado Primary Tomorrow  

  • New York Times: The Strange Tale of Tina Peters: Just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election — game day for vote-counting bureaucrats — Tina Peters was so proud of her operation at the Mesa County clerk’s office that she invited a film crew in to show it off. There’s no chance of mishap here, she boasted. “The Russians can’t hack into and start casting votes for someone,” she said, as a few in the office chuckled. By May 2021, it was Ms. Peters, not the Russians, who had helped engineer an audacious breach of voting machines, according to an indictment charging her with seven felonies. Ms. Peters arranged to copy sensitive election software from county voting machines in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to court records. Prosecutors said she committed identity theft and criminal impersonation, and violated the duties of her office in the process. Ms. Peters has pleaded not guilty. The strange tale of Tina Peters — a once-ordinary public servant consumed by conspiracy theories and catapulted to minor stardom by believers — will take its next twist on Tuesday, when voters decide whether to make the indicted public official the Republican nominee for secretary of state, the top election official in Colorado. Polls are sparse in the primary race, but Ms. Peters is considered a contender. Ms. Peters did not just stumble into the world of election conspiracy theories. A review of public statements and interviews with people involved in her case showed she was repeatedly assisted by a loose network of election deniers, some of whom worked alongside Donald J. Trump’s legal team to try to subvert the presidential election in 2020. They are still working to undermine confidence in elections today.
  • Washington Post: With Violent Rhetoric And Election Denial, Podcaster Becomes GOP Force:  From a corporate office park in the Denver suburbs, podcaster Joe Oltmann spins a daily vision of America’s dark and violent future. “Pretty soon we’ll have gallows being built all over the country. We can take care of all these traitors to our nation,” he told listeners during an episode late last year. “Stretch that rope,” he intoned during another, suggesting that Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) be hanged, before going on to explain that it was just a joke. The violent rhetoric has contributed to such a tense political climate that the Democratic secretary of state — a frequent target of Oltmann’s denunciations — now travels with a security detail, a first for the office, she said. Oltmann, a businessman who gained a national profile on the far right after he claimed he had personal knowledge that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, is hardly a fringe figure. He now leads an influential and growing political movement in Colorado that is shaking up the state Republican Party. Oltmann’s political organization — FEC United, standing for “Faith, Education and Commerce” — is less than two years old, but it has been advocating for candidates up and down the Colorado ballot, from key statewide positions to obscure county jobs. It has challenged GOP incumbents who want to pivot from the 2020 election obsession and will face a critical test of its influence in the state’s primary Tuesday, when candidates Oltmann has supported will be on the Republican ballot. Success for the group would add Colorado to the growing ranks of states where election deniers have triumphed in Republican primaries.

ILLINOIS:  MAGA Voters Poised To Hand A Conspiracy Theorist Victory In The Republican Gubernatorial Primary 

  • New York Times: MAGA Voters Send a $50 Million G.O.P. Plan Off the Rails in Illinois: A 56-year-old farmer whose Southern Illinois home is closer to Nashville than to Chicago, [State Sen. Darren Bailey] wears his hair in a crew cut, speaks with a thick drawl and does not sand down his conservative credentials, as so many past leading G.O.P. candidates have done to try to appeal to suburbanites in this overwhelmingly Democratic state. On Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Mr. Bailey at a rally near Quincy, Ill. Mr. Bailey rose to prominence in Illinois politics by introducing legislation to kick Chicago out of the state. When the coronavirus pandemic began, he was removed from a state legislative session for refusing to wear a mask, and he sued Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, over statewide virus mitigation efforts. Painted on the door of his campaign bus is the Bible verse Ephesians 6:10-19, which calls for followers to wear God’s armor in a battle against “evil rulers.” He is the favored candidate of the state’s anti-abortion groups, and on Friday he celebrated the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade as a “historic and welcomed moment.” He has said he opposes the practice, including in cases of rape and incest. Mr. Bailey has upended carefully laid $50 million plans by Illinois Republican leaders to nominate Mayor Richard C. Irvin of Aurora, a moderate suburbanite with an inspiring personal story who they believed could win back the governor’s mansion in Springfield in what is widely forecast to be a winning year for Republicans.

SOUTH DAKOTA:  GOP Ousts Incumbent Secretary Of State, Replacing Him With An Election Denier 

  • Associated Press: South Dakota GOP Picks Experience For AG, Bumps An Incumbent:  South Dakota Republicans looking to regroup after the impeachment and conviction of the GOP attorney general gave their support for the job Saturday to a man with extensive experience in leading state and federal law enforcement agencies. Delegates at the Republican convention in Watertown also bounced an incumbent. […] The day featured one upset. Delegates denied Secretary of State Steve Barnett the opportunity for a second term. Monae Johnson won easily in a campaign where she stressed her opposition to online voting, online voter registration and online registration updates. Johnson said Saturday that “election integrity is all on our hearts on minds.”

What Experts Are Saying

Joyce Vance, former United States attorney: “The Committee, flush with success, is taking in new evidence. And just like you don’t dump raw data out and expect people to make sense of it, it’s important for the committee to interview new witnesses, assess their evidence, and assemble it in a narrative with other evidence that makes the full story accessible. What’s important during the break? We can’t let the committee’s work drop off of our radar screen. It would be easy to let that happen. Losing Roe is an event of such enormous proportions that it’s taken our collective breath away. Make sure you have bandwidth to continue to talk with friends about the committee’s work. It’s important to share what we’re learning and help people who may not have had the chance to follow as closely to appreciate that there is evidence that it’s worth their time to take a look at that strongly suggests Trump knew he’d lost the election and nonetheless dragged the country through the agony of the big lie and the insurrection. The country will be better off with an informed electorate make choices in primary and midterm elections this year and into the future.” Civil Discourse 

Katherine Stewart, expert on Christian nationalism: “At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.” The Guardian

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU professor: “DEAN OBEIDALLAH: ‘Says here a right women had since 1973 was just taken away by six people sitting in a court.’“RUTH BEN-GHIAT: ‘Yeah. This is not democracy. And this is well, it is connected to authoritarianism because the kind of– I see this as a right wing counter-revolution. They’re trying to literally go back in time and take away rights, including voting rights and and racial equity rights. And there’s that. And the other thing is, I have a line in my book, Strongmen, that women are always as much the targets of authoritarians as prosecutors and journalists and opposition politicians. They want control of those bodies. And so it’s a very sad day.’” SiriusXM radio’s The Dean Obeidallah Show

Brookings Institution’s Norman Eisen and Colby Galliher: “The Supreme Court may have taken away Americans’ right to choice over their bodies, but they have not yet stolen our power to vote. With this deeply unethical screed, Alito and the rest of the Trump Court majority have given many millions of angry Americans a reason to turn out in November.” The Brookings Institution

Bob Bauer, former White House Counsel: “In this age of alarming autocratic pressures bubbling up in U.S. politics, close attention should be paid to the risks of presidents who are also political candidates and whose dual roles in seeking reelection pose unique dangers. Americans have had enough experience with the problem. In its most extreme forms, we have suffered through Nixon and Watergate, then Trump and Jan. 6; and there is no basis for assuming that it will end now, or that only one party will ever produce the presidents who will go to disastrous lengths to hold on to power.” Lawfare

Barbara McQuade, former United States attorney: “Path to prosecuting Trump is the same as it is for Capitol stormers.Belief in a righteous cause is no defense to vigilante justice. If Trump tried to pressure Pence OR Raffensperger OR Bowers to cheat, it doesn’t matter if he believed he actually won the election.” Tweet 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Associated Press: 2 GOP congressmen in Mississippi at risk of defeat in runoff

New York Times: The Leader of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory Returns

Politico: The Supreme Court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act for 9 years. This case could be the next blow.

Politico: Trump fatigue sets in: ‘Some donors are getting sick of the sh–show’

January 6 And The 2020 Election

CNN: ‘Stop the Steal’ leader Ali Alexander testifies to Jan. 6 grand jury

HuffPost: Brian Kilmeade Becomes Latest Fox Host To Rip Trump Over Baseless Election Claims

Los Angeles Times: Trump lawyer John Eastman’s Jan. 6 notoriety was decades in the making in California

New York Times: How the House Jan. 6 Panel Has Redefined the Congressional Hearing

New York Times: Proud Boys Ignored Orders Given at Pre-Jan. 6 Meeting

Washington Post (Analysis): What is defensible in the case against Trump?

Washington Post: Oath Keepers’ defense ordered to disclose if Sidney Powell is funding attorneys

Washington Post: Jan. 6 committee, DOJ seek footage of Roger Stone from Danish filmmakers

WKOW: Kind calls for Justice Dept. to investigate Johnson over fake elector slate

Opinion 

New York Times (Andrew Kirtzman): Giuliani’s Loyalty to Trump Was Born in His Darkest Moment

Political Violence 

New York Times: Rudy Giuliani Struck While Campaigning on Staten Island

Providence Journal: Providence police officer charged with assault after chaos erupts at protest of Roe ruling