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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — May 27, 2022

By May 27, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Republican House Members Signal Refusal Of January 6 Subpoenas, Attempt To Undermine Legitimacy Of The Committee 

  • New York Times: Republicans Signal Refusal of Jan. 6 Subpoenas, Setting Up a Showdown: Four House Republicans including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, signaled on Thursday that they would not cooperate with subpoenas from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, posing a dilemma for the panel that could have broad implications for the inquiry and for Congress itself. Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona each sent letters to the committee objecting to the investigation ahead of the depositions scheduled for this week, and Mr. McCarthy, of California, filed a court brief arguing the panel’s subpoenas are illegitimate.
  • Wall Street Journal (Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan): The Jan. 6 Committee Is Weaponizing Majority Rule: With no effective check on its power, the Select Committee is trampling on fundamental Constitutional rights. It is investigating the political speech of private citizens and demanding access to their personal records and private communications. When disputes over the requests arise, the committee refuses to engage and seeks to punish. There is no presumption of innocence; instead Chairman Bennie Thompson declared citizens who invoke the Fifth Amendment are “part and parcel guilty to what occurred.” Rather than operating openly, the Select Committee is working behind closed doors and selectively leaking cherry-picked information. When it has presented some evidence in public, the committee’s been caught deliberately altering documents—including a text message pertaining to one of us—to malign conservatives. One would expect this sort of inquiry from a banana republic, not from the U.S. House of Representatives. By subpoenaing us and three other Republican members, the Select Committee is escalating its abusive tactics. This attempt to coerce information from members of Congress about their official duties is a dangerous abuse of power, serves no legitimate legislative purpose, and eviscerates constitutional norms. Just because members of Congress are responsible for writing the laws doesn’t give a select few license to subvert them.

DOJ Interviews Georgia Republicans In Fake Elector Probe 

  • CNN: DOJ Interviews Georgia Republicans About Interactions With Trump Campaign In Fake Elector Probe: Federal investigators have interviewed Republicans in Georgia about interactions with people in former President Donald Trump’s orbit and his 2020 reelection campaign, as the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal probe examines efforts to put forth alternate slates of electors to displace Joe Biden electors in battleground states Trump lost. In one case, FBI agents asked a prominent Georgia Republican whether he had direct conversations with Trump. “They just asked who talked to me. If anyone from the Trump campaign had been in touch with me. Did Giuliani talk to me? Did Trump talk to me?” said Patrick Gartland, who was set to serve as an elector but dropped out

January 6 Witness Asserts That Former Chief Of Staff Mark Meadows Burned Papers After Meeting With Rep. Scott Perry 

  • Politico: Meadows Burned Papers After Meeting With Scott Perry, Jan. 6 Panel Told: Then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his office after meeting with a House Republican who was working to challenge the 2020 election, according to testimony the Jan. 6 select committee has heard from one of his former aides. Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under Meadows when he was former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, told the panel investigating the Capitol attack that she saw Meadows incinerate documents after a meeting in his office with Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.). A person familiar with the testimony described it on condition of anonymity. The Meadows-Perry meeting came in the weeks after Election Day 2020, as Trump and his allies searched for ways to reverse the election results.

Appeals Court Rules Trump Must Give Deposition In NY Civil Probe  

  • Washington Post: N.Y. Appeals Court Rules Trump Must Give Deposition In Civil Probe: An appellate court panel has upheld an order requiring Donald Trump and two of his adult children to sit for depositions as part of the state’s long-running civil investigation into the former president’s business practices at the family-run Trump Organization. The decision published on Thursday rejects Trump’s argument that investigators from New York Attorney General Letitia James’s (D) office were trying to get evidence against him to use in a parallel criminal case through improper channels. A four-member appellate panel sided with James on Thursday in upholding a ruling by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in late February that required the Trumps to comply with subpoenas for testimony. It was not immediately clear when depositions would happen or if Trump’s team would ask the state’s highest court to review the matter.

In The States 

“Dark MAGA” Candidate Rises For Arizona Senate 

  • Politico: The ‘Dark MAGA’ Peter Thiel Protégé Aiming for the Senate: Despite Trump’s four years in the White House and his enduring dominance over the GOP, Trumpism as an ideology is still largely inchoate. And this is where Thiel, Vance and [Arizona Senate Candidate Blake] Masters come in. The Masters and Vance candidacies offer an opportunity to flesh out Trumpism — or Thielism — and reshape the GOP. Tucker Carlson, who brings Masters on his Fox News show regularly, calls him “the future of the Republican Party.” But first Masters has to get elected. And his campaign offers a test for whether the New Right can gain traction — both in the GOP and with a broader electorate in a key swing state. Masters’ views, while hard right, are not quite fringe in today’s Republican Party. He’s a harsh critic of Big Tech and says Trump was robbed in 2020. He traffics in the “replacement theory” that Democrats want to change the electorate through a wave of undocumented immigrants. He opposes aid to Ukraine and the right to an abortion. (He recently faced controversy for criticizing Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraceptives nationally, though he said he doesn’t want to outlaw contraception and, taking a page from Thiel, threatened to sue an Arizona news outlet for defamation.)

Former Fake Elector Now Set To Take Control Of Wisconsin Elections Commission 

  • Talking Points Memo: Fake Trump Elector Now On Track To Take Over Wisconsin Elections Commission: Republican Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) member Robert Spindell, who was one of the fake Trump electors in the MAGA scheme to overturn the 2020 election, now appears poised to become the chair of the six-member board after a fellow GOP commissioner abruptly resigned on Wednesday. The departing Republican commissioner, Dean Knudson, announced his resignation during a meeting with the declaration that “I cannot be effective in my role representing Republicans on the commission,” per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The WEC is tasked with administering elections in the state, and has become a target of those who falsely claim Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

What Experts Are Saying

Glenn Kirschner, former U.S. Army Prosecutor: “‘These fake electors, these fraudulent electors for Donald Trump, signed certificates swearing, certifying, that they were the duly appointed electors, that Mr. Trump won states he lost,’ Kirschner explained. ‘Then they sent those fake certificates to the National Archives and to Congress.’ ‘That’s a crime,’ Kirschner said. ‘It was so brazen, it was so corrupt. It would be like if they took somebody and put that person in prison and their justification was ‘Well, who knows? Maybe someday somebody will determine there’s evidence that that person did something wrong.’” Newsweek 

Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University: “Some observers have suggested that American politics is self-correcting—that the pendulum will inevitably swing toward centrist, reasonable and pluralistic policies. This approach neglects the work required for democracy to function. In that work, we can find reasons for hope. Periods of democratisation in the US have featured chaos and conflict. This includes the civil rights era of the 1960s, marked by intense political violence, the civil war and the early republic… Unlike any point in our own past, the US has the potential for a multi-racial coalition with the potential to win national majorities—as it did in 2020… The troubles with American democracy are deep and concerning. Some of the main threats to the nation’s pluralistic democracy emanate from problems deep in its history and fundamental to its Constitutional structure. The 2020 election affirmed, in part, a desire on the part of the American public to return to a state of “normal”—of a politics that is both milder in tone and more inclusive and bound by institutions. Yet events since that election have shown that achieving these goals requires a more radical departure from our current path—and a restoration of so-called normal politics will require extraordinary effort.”  Prospect Magazine 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections 

Associated Press: ‘Trump is in the past’: Mounting losses show limits of power

Axios: Capitol Hill’s smallest committee takes center stage

Business Insider: Trump says Kellyanne Conway can ‘go back to her crazy husband’ after she concedes he lost the election

HuffPost: How Brad Raffensperger Bucked Trump And Beat Back The ‘Big Lie’

Politico: As Cheney files for reelection, poll from rival group shows her trailing badly

January 6 And The 2020 Election 

Politico: Eastman said dueling electors were ‘dead on arrival’ without state legislature backing

Politico: Twenty former House Republicans are imploring current GOP lawmakers, including Kevin McCarthy, to comply with the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoenas.

Politico: Behind the Jan. 6 panel’s last-minute efforts to win 3 key Trump-world lawsuits

Opinion 

CNN (Norm Eisen and Dennis Aftergut): Opinion: Perdue’s loss is good for democracy; Kemp’s win is not

In The States 

Talking Points Memo: They Submitted Thousands Of Fraudulent Signatures. They Still Want To Be Michigan’s Next Governor.