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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — May 23, 2022

By May 23, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Prepares For Public Hearings To Demonstrate How Trump Broke The Law 

  • The Guardian: Capitol Attack Panel To Hold Six Public Hearings As It Aims To Show How Trump Broke Law: The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to sources familiar with the inquiry. The hearings are set to be a pivotal political moment for the country as the panel aims to publicly outline the potentially unlawful schemes that tried to keep the former president in office despite his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. According to a draft schedule reviewed by the Guardian, the select committee intends to hold six hearings, with the first and last in prime time, where its lawyers will run through how Trump’s schemes took shape before the election and culminated with the Capitol attack.
  • CNN: Giuliani Meets With January 6 Committee For More Than 9 Hours: Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s onetime personal attorney and a lead architect of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results, on Friday met with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection, two sources told CNN. Giuliani’s original deposition with the committee had been postponed after the former New York City mayor asked to record the interview, with both audio and video. At the time, Giuliani’s attorney Robert Costello said the committee rejected that request. Despite Giuliani backing out of the original deposition, the two sides continued to negotiate an appearance, which led to a virtual appearance Friday that lasted for more than nine hours, sources said.

2020 Election Lies Have Consumed State Legislatures 

  • New York Times: How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures:  At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times. The tally accounts for 44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided. In each of those states, the election was conducted without any evidence of widespread fraud, leaving election officials from both parties in agreement on the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories.

New Evidence Highlight The Involvement Of Ginni Thomas And Billionaire Larry Ellison In The Plot To Overturn The 2020 Election 

  • Washington Post: Ginni Thomas, Wife Of Supreme Court Justice, Pressed Ariz. Lawmakers To Help Reverse Trump’s Loss, Emails Show:  Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails obtained by The Washington Post. The emails, sent by Ginni Thomas to a pair of lawmakers on Nov. 9, 2020, argued that legislators needed to intervene because the vote had been marred by fraud. Though she did not mention either candidate by name, the context was clear. Just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, Thomas urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” She told the lawmakers that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone” and said they had “power to fight back against fraud.”
  • Washington Post: Oracle’s Larry Ellison Joined Nov. 2020 Call About Contesting Trump’s Loss: Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant. The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud. Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss, an effort still coming into focus more than 18 months later. It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.

A Lawyer Who Helped Trump Pressure Georgia To “Find” More Votes Is Now On A Federal Election Advisory Board 

  • CNN: Inside The Push That Landed A Trump Legal Adviser On A Federal Election Advisory Board: While Donald Trump has maintained a laser focus this primary season on ousting those Republicans who crossed him over the 2020 election — especially in Georgia on Tuesday — the Republican effort to elevate proponents of dubious election fraud allegations in the government runs deeper than the former President. Emails obtained by CNN reveal how the push extended to a federal election advisory board and resulted in the 2021 appointment of one of Trump’s legal advisers who helped his failed efforts to pressure Georgia officials into overturning the state’s election results. The emails, obtained by CNN through a Freedom of Information Act request, show conservatives were working even before the 2020 election to gain a seat for an ally on the advisory board of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent government agency that provides voluntary election guidelines for states. The story of how Cleta Mitchell — the legal adviser who took part in Trump’s phone call where he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win — was appointed to that board underscores how a core faction of Republicans has focused on pushing unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud even before Trump convinced much of the Republican Party to buy into his election lies that the 2020 election had been stolen.

In The States 

Election Deniers Are Running For Attorney General In Key Battleground States – Including Georgia Tomorrow 

  • NBC: Election Deniers Who Say Trump Won In 2020 Are Running To Be Top Cop In 4 Battleground States: In four crucial battleground states, Republican candidates who falsely contend that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are running for state attorney general. If they win, they’d serve as their states’ top law enforcement officers and would have the power to use their office to tilt the outcome of presidential elections. If Trump should run again in 2024, and the outcome is close in a handful of states, the actions attorneys general are able to take could also give Trump cover to claim falsely claim victory once again.
  • HuffPost: Georgia’s GOP Attorney General Primary Is The Next ‘Big Lie’ Battleground:  “After 2020, I saw what you saw,” John Gordon, the insurgent challenger in Georgia’s upcoming Republican primary for attorney general, told a dozen or so Georgia GOP voters gathered in the dining room of a Golden Corral on Thursday evening. “I was shocked. Frustrated. Mad. Disappointed. I went through those stages of grief. And I felt called to try and do something.” Gordon, who is attempting to knock off incumbent Attorney General Chris Carr in a race that will conclude Tuesday, has received considerably less attention than former Sen. David Perdue or Rep. Jody Hice, the conservatives waging similar challenges against Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, respectively. But he is no less enthusiastic in his embrace of the idea that the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was stolen from Donald Trump, a lie that has become the cause célebre of the GOP and, in Georgia, of the trio of Trump-backed candidates challenging the state’s top three Republicans. “There’s no question in my mind that he won Georgia,” Gordon said in an interview a few minutes later, as he sipped a soft drink across a four-top table inside the restaurant. “This was a coup d’etat, and people need to wake up.”

What Experts Are Saying

Nathan P. Kalmoe, Associate Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University and co-author of “Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy”: Q: “After the 2020 election, you found that ‘about a fifth of American partisans were ready for a full-blown violent rebellion against the newly elected president and his government.’ What are the implications of that?”  Kalmoe: “Clearly, several thousand Americans went beyond support for violently overthrowing the newly-elected government to acting on that view in the 2021 Capitol attack. That episode, and the thousands of death threats targeting election administrators and others for upholding their civic duties after the 2020 election, are the clearest implications. Most people who support political violence won’t act on it. Of course, that’s true in wars too. A majority of Americans initially supported the Iraq war, for example, even though a tiny fraction actually did the fighting. But their support for violence has important effects on the actions of those few, and helps determine whether the numbers of combatants will grow in spirals of provocation.” Salon 

ICYMI: MinnPost: Assessing the depressing state of democracy around the globe: David Rieff, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Barbara F. Walter and Michael Tomasky sounded off. MinnPost 

Duke Historian Nancy MacLean on Durham County Board of Education Elections in NC: “‘Without exit polls or interviews on why the stealth Republican slate captured up to one-fifth of the vote in some of these races, I would not infer motives,’ MacLean told the INDY when asked if significant support for the BBBS slate is a harbinger of a lighter shade of blue in Durham’s political future. ‘But if local Republicans are willing to vote for candidates as extreme as some of these demonstrably were, that is a troubling sign that the MAGA faction which has overtaken the national party has many local followers.’” Indy Week

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

CNN: Ohio GOP House candidate J.R. Majewski called for secession in livestream following 2020 election

Florida Politics: Rick Scott says Republicans ‘still want the facts to come out’ about the 2020 election

The Guardian: Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and antisemite

Newsweek: Donald Trump’s ‘Civil War’ Post Sparks Backlash: ‘Beyond Dangerous’

Popular Information: Major cinema chain brings the Big Lie to theaters nationwide

Talking Points Memo: After Quitting, Election Official Has Grim Warning About A Future Of More Big Lies

January 6 and the 2020 Election

Mother Jones: An Infamous MAGA Lawyer Is Funding Wacky Legal Defenses for January 6 Suspects

NJ.com: Donald Trump talks PGA Championship, Super Golf League at Bedminster, Saudi Arabia, Capitol insurrection: ‘I had nothing to do with January 6th’

Washington Post: Far-right UCLA student who sat in VP’s chair on Jan. 6 pleads guilty

Opinion 

New York Times (Jamelle Bouie): It’s Trump’s Party, and He’ll Lie if He Wants To

Wall Street Journal (Editorial): Welcome to Stop the Steal, Pennsylvania Primary Edition

In The States 

The Atlantic: The Election Denier Who Could Run Michigan’s Elections

Washington Post: Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump. Now he’s courting Trump’s base.

Washington Post: Inside the Republican push to stop Trump’s ‘vendetta tour’ in Georgia