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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — May 2, 2022

Driving the Day: 

What To Watch For Today: 

A special grand jury considering Trump’s election interference in Georgia convenes today. 

Must Read Stories

More And More Evidence Shows The Depth Of GOP Involvement In The Conspiracy To Overturn The Election 

  • Associated Press: Evidence Mounts Of Gop Involvement In Trump Election Schemes:  Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House. Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing. Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states. Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote. “I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.” The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.
  • CNN: New Text Messages Reveal Fox’s Hannity Advising Trump White House And Seeking Direction:  Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Fox’s Sean Hannity exchanged more than 80 text messages between Election Day 2020 and Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, communications that show Hannity’s evolution from staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump’s election lies to being “fed up” with the “lunatics” hurting Trump’s cause in the days before January 6. CNN obtained Meadows’ 2,319 text messages, which he selectively provided in December to the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. While the logs show Meadows communicating with multiple Fox personalities, as well as a number of journalists from other organizations, Hannity stands out with 82 messages. The texts, including dozens of newly disclosed messages, offer a real-time window into how Hannity, a close friend of Trump, was reacting to the election and its aftermath.

In A Major Victory For The January 6 Committee, Federal Judge Upholds Subpoena For RNC Records 

  • Politico: Judge Upholds Jan. 6 Committee Subpoena For RNC Records: A federal judge late Sunday resoundingly supported the Jan. 6 select committee’s effort to obtain internal Republican National Committee data about efforts to fundraise off claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In a landmark ruling rejecting an RNC lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly said the select committee had demonstrated its need for the party’s data on its fundraising emails between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021 — when the RNC and Trump campaign sent supporters messages falsely suggesting the election was stolen. The committee contends those emails helped sow the seeds of the violence that erupted on Jan. 6. “[T]he Select Committee seeks reasonably relevant information from a narrow window during which the RNC sent emails promoting claims that the presidential election was fraudulent or stolen,” Kelly, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the 53-page ruling. Kelly issued an injunction to allow the RNC to appeal his ruling by May 5. The decision is a major victory for the select committee and could open the doors to reams of internal RNC data held by Salesforce, a third-party vendor that the RNC used to run email fundraising campaigns and analyses. 

Editorial Boards Agree:  Congress Must Act To Prevent An Election Coup In 2024 

  • Washington Post (Editorial): Congress Must Act To Prevent An Election Coup In 2024:  Simply updating the [Electoral Count Act] would be an important victory for democracy. Following the 2020 vote, Mr. Trump’s lawyers cooked up cockamamie interpretations of the act that would have, among other things, permitted Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes at will. Thankfully, Mr. Pence resisted Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to act on these fatuous arguments. But a future vice president might not be so principled. An alarming number of GOP lawmakers also used the act’s vague language — reading into the act broad congressional authority to intervene when electoral appointments are not “lawfully certified” or when electoral votes are not “regularly given” — to object to counting electoral votes from a series of swing states that Joe Biden carried. This language was not supposed to empower partisan congressional majorities to reject presidential electors at will, but that was essentially the interpretation most House Republicans embraced. […] The country cannot limp into another presidential election with electoral rules open to partisan misinterpretation and abuse. Congress should have no higher priority than fixing the Electoral Count Act, immediately.
  • Boston Globe (Editorial): Blueprint For A Coup Comes Into Focus: The [January 6 Committee] will probably take a good look at the 1807 Insurrection Act, which gives the president authority to federalize the National Guard to quell local violence — as President George H.W. Bush did in Los Angeles in the wake of the beating of Black motorist Rodney King — or to enforce federal law, as President Eisenhower did to protect Black students as they integrated Little Rock (Ark.) High School. However, as the Brennan Center noted in a recent report, it is long past time for an overhaul of a law whose “require­ments are poorly explained and leave virtu­ally everything up to the discre­tion of the pres­id­ent.” The Jan. 6 committee certainly has it within its power to set that overhaul in motion. But most of all, while a wary nation awaits whatever action may come from the Justice Department, the committee must connect the dots of this probe in a way that compels the attention of the American public. This may be the last, best chance for those on the committee and for all of those in Congress who care about the rule of law to tell the story of what really happened in the days after the 2020 election, to build a consensus around that narrative — a consensus that can lead to real reform.

What Experts Are Saying 

  • ICYMI (Video): Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University: Why A ‘Big Lie’ Is So Powerful And So Hard To Undo: Snyder talks with Rachel Maddow about the manipulative power of a “Big Lie” and why it’s so difficult to untangle a person from a Big Lie once they’ve bought into it. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show 
  • Barbara F. Walter, Professor of Political Science and Rohr Chair in Pacific International Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego: “The January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was a window into what has been brewing beneath the surface of the United States for years…Why is this happening now? We don’t know yet, but we have hunches. The rise of social media is likely driving some of it. Open, unregulated social media platforms have made it easier for demagogues to use disinformation and misinformation to help get themselves elected—something that has happened in the United States, Britain, India, Brazil, and the Philippines…But certain groups of citizens around the world are also becoming increasingly fearful and insecure as a result of the longer-term effects of globalization, technological advances, and shifting demographics. The United States, for example, will be the first Western democracy where white citizens lose their majority status as a result of immigration and low birth rates.” The New Republic   

Headlines

The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

The Hill: Biden gets ‘deadly earnest’ about threats to democracy amid jokes at correspondents’ dinner

In The States 

Washington Post (Analysis): 2020 lives on in Wisconsin, Michigan. Will it hurt the GOP this fall?

January 6 Conspiracy

CNN: Georgia Official Frantically Texted Mark Meadows As Trump Badgered Secretary Of State To ‘Find’ Votes:

Trump Investigations

Washington Post: Trump grand jury ending in N.Y. with no charges against ex-president

Opinion

Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin): The Jan. 6 hearings should follow 5 basic rules