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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — November 18, 2022

By November 18, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

January 6 Committee Enters Final Stages Before Report Publication 

  • The Guardian: January 6 Subcommittee To Examine Criminal Referrals It Might Make To DOJ: The House January 6 select committee has created a subcommittee to examine the scope of potential criminal referrals it might make to the justice department over the Capitol attack as well as what materials to share with federal prosecutors, its chairman and other members said on Thursday. The special subcommittee – led by Congressman Jamie Raskin, overseeing a four-person group that also involves Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren – has been chiefly focused on whether they have uncovered sufficient evidence that former US president Donald Trump violated civil and criminal statutes. The subcommittee has also been tasked with resolving several other outstanding issues, the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson said. They include what materials to share with the justice department before the end of December, and its response to Trump and Republican lawmakers who have not complied with subpoenas.
  • Politico: Jan. 6 Panel Brushes Off Trump 2024 In Critical Final Sprint: Trump 2024 isn’t top of mind for the Jan. 6 select committee. Not when it still has work to do investigating the former president’s 2020 pressure campaign. “Nothing that goes down in Florida is going to affect our focus on” Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told reporters, referring to the Trump’s campaign launch from his gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom. “Our mission remains the same,” added Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Weakened after his preferred candidates took a drubbing in the midterms and beset by rising Republican rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump entered the presidential field with less punch than expected. And while most members of the Jan. 6 select committee say Trump’s third run at the presidency has little bearing on their work, some also suggested he’s lost momentum as a political force. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said she was “confident” voters wouldn’t return Trump to the Oval Office, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Trump’s candidacy may be a bigger headache for Republicans than Democrats at the moment.

Great Lakes States Delivered A Stiff Rebuke To Election Deniers On November 8

  • Washington Post: Voters In Great Lakes States Deliver Election Deniers A Stiff Rebuke: Voters rejected election deniers across the country last week. But they did so with particular verve along the Great Lakes. In Minnesota, the Democratic secretary of state defeated by a 10-point margin a Republican challenger who baselessly called the 2020 election rigged and pushed for restricting early voting. In Wisconsin, voters handed Gov. Tony Evers (D) a second term, declining to reward a candidate backed by former president Donald Trump who left open the possibility of trying to reverse the last presidential election. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) crushed Republican Doug Mastriano, who had highlighted his willingness to decertify voting machines if he won the governorship. But perhaps the biggest statement on democracy came in Michigan, where voters by large margins rebuffed a slate of Republican election deniers running for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. They also embraced an amendment to the state constitution that expands voting rights and makes it much more difficult for officials to subvert the will of voters. In the process, they flipped the legislature with the help of new legislative maps drawn by a nonpartisan commission, giving Democrats complete control of state government for the first time in 40 years.

Trump Still Faces A Constellation Of Legal Problems And Investigations 

  • New York Times: Trump Organization Finance Chief Details the Birth of Tax-Fraud Scheme: The criminal trial of Donald J. Trump’s family business took an emotional turn Thursday as one of the former president’s most loyal executives laid bare the machinery of a sprawling tax fraud, scoring points for both prosecution and defense during hours of illuminating testimony. The executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, several times bolstered Manhattan prosecutors’ contention that the scheme benefited not just himself, but the Trump Organization. He testified that the off-the-books luxuries he and other executives received saved the company money in taxes. Yet Mr. Weisselberg, 75, who started working for the Trumps decades ago, rose to become chief financial officer and is now the prosecution’s star witness, also distanced Mr. Trump and his family from the wrongdoing. He testified that they did not team up with him, nor authorize him to commit crimes. He agreed more than a dozen times that he had acted only for himself. Near tears, he testified that he had betrayed a company he had served for decades.
  • New York Times: Writer Who Accused Trump of Rape to File New Defamation Lawsuit: When the writer E. Jean Carroll three years ago accused President Donald J. Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room, he denied having assaulted her and branded her a liar. Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump for defamation, claiming his statements had harmed her reputation. Mr. Trump and the Justice Department pushed back, arguing that he made his comments in his official capacity as president — which for legal reasons meant Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit would have to be dismissed. But Mr. Trump is no longer president. And on Thursday, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer said in a court filing that her client would bring a new defamation lawsuit against Mr. Trump, this time based on statements he made last month in a social media post that accused Ms. Carroll of lying, and labeled her case “a complete con job.”
  • Washington Post: GOP Operative Found Guilty Of Funneling Russian Money To Donald Trump: A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts. Elections “reflect the values and the priorities and the beliefs of American citizens,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Parikh said in her closing argument this week. “Jesse Benton by his actions did damage to those principles.”

In The States 

COLORADO:  Too Close To Call, Lauren Boebert’s Race Heads To A Recount 

  • Associated Press: Republican Boebert’s Tight Race Likely Headed To Recount: Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, a renowned conservative firebrand whose combative style helped define the new right, is likely headed to an automatic recount in her bid to fend off a surprisingly difficult challenge by a Democratic businessman from the ritzy ski town of Aspen. The Associated Press has declared the election in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District too close to call. AP will await the results of a potential recount to call the race. With nearly all votes counted, the incumbent Boebert leads Democrat Adam Frisch by 0.16 percentage points, or 551 votes out of nearly 327,000 votes counted. A margin that small qualifies for an automatic recount under Colorado law, in a race that has garnered national attention as Republicans try to bolster their advantage in the U.S. House after clinching a narrow majority Wednesday night. As counties finalized unofficial results on Thursday, Boebert’s already slim lead was cut in half. All but one of the 27 counties in the district had reported final results by Thursday evening. Otero County plans to finalize its numbers on Friday.

ARIZONA: Kari Lake Refuses To Concede Election She Lost, Travels To Mar A Lago 

  • Associated Press: Lake Refuses To Concede In Arizona Governor’s Race She Lost: Refusing to concede, Kari Lake, the defeated Republican candidate for Arizona governor, said Thursday she is assembling lawyers and collecting evidence of voters having trouble casting ballots on Election Day as she considers her next move. Lake, who was endorsed by Donald Trump, traveled to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Thursday, her campaign spokesman told The Associated Press. The Washington Post first reported that she attended a luncheon held by the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group created by former Trump advisers. In a 2 1/2-minute video, Lake made no mention of giving up in her most extensive public comments since losing the election. Before the election, she had refused to say that she would concede if she lost the race to Democrat Katie Hobbs. “Rest assured I have assembled the best and brightest legal team, and we are exploring every avenue to correct the many wrongs that have been done this past week,” Lake said. “I’m doing everything in my power to right these wrongs.”
  • Washington Post: Kari Lake Travels To Mar-A-Lago, Fresh Off Projected Loss In Arizona: Kari Lake, who was projected Monday to lose her race for governor of Arizona, traveled Thursday to former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, according to two people familiar with the activity. One of the people said she received a standing ovation when she entered a luncheon hosted at the club by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded last year by Trump allies and former members of his administration. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private events. The think tank is holding a “Gala and Experience” at Trump’s club on Thursday and Friday. An agenda says the event’s aim is to “ensure polices are prepared and finalized for new sessions of Congress and the state house.” Lake has not conceded defeat. The visit to Mar-a-Lago, while vote counting continues in Arizona, signals that she is already taking steps to maintain her profile in the former president’s orbit. Her support also could prove consequential for Trump, who launched his 2024 presidential campaign this week under criticism for his role in the party’s underwhelming performance in the midterm elections.

WISCONSIN:  Democrat Doug La Follette Declares Victory In Secretary of State Race 

  • Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Doug La Follette Declares Victory In Secretary Of State Race That Remains Too Close To Call: Longtime Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette declared victory Thursday in his latest race for the position, more than a week after Election Day with the contest still too close to call. But La Follette’s challenger, Republican Amy Loudenbeck, won’t concede and said her rival’s statement “doesn’t change anything.” “A lot of people were getting exasperated that it had gone more than a week and I hadn’t said anything,” La Follette told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “After looking at all the numbers, Waukesha County came in, and I decided OK, we won the election, let’s go.” In her statement, Loudenbeck said: “It’s just another attempt by him to mischaracterize this race by framing my platform as his own while making a veiled and completely inappropriate accusation of corrupt influences. My team and I will continue to await the final results of the canvass.”

What Experts Are Saying

Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School: “The fact that many of the most vocal election deniers lost was a significant development in this election. It possibly signals a retreat to normalcy in part since the 2020 election. I think that the more false claims of vote rigging are defeated, the better it is for American democracy. I think those concerns still resonate with tens of millions of Americans, and many of them are going to hold elected office, so they’re not going away anytime soon. But I think that it’s quite an important signal from this election. Many people said that democracy was on the ballot in this election. And they were right because the very basic question as to whether we could continue to run elections that were free, fair, and trustworthy was an open question coming into this election, and I think that the professional running of this election suggested that we could.” Stanford Law School 

Sean Westwood, associate professor of government at Dartmouth College: “Three political scientists — Sean Westwood of Dartmouth, Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford — created the Polarization Research Lab, which conducted weekly surveys with YouGov of a total of 13,000 voters during the final seven weeks of the campaign. Westwood observed in an email that the major finding of the survey ‘is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.’ Republican candidates, Westwood added, ‘running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.’” NYT Thomas B. Edsall Column 

Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor: “Ever since Trump refused to return all the classified material he held at Mar-a-Lago, even after the Justice Department served him with a grand jury subpoena and demanded its return, charges relating to his willful retention of classified material have been likely. Obstruction of justice is also a possibility, depending on the evidence developed by prosecutors.” Politico Magazine (Opinion): This Is What’s Going to Happen If Candidate Trump Gets Indicted

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Washington Post (Analysis): A rare loss for voter ID cements ugly 2022 for election deniers

January 6 And The 2020 Election

WAGA: Officials delay Lindsey Graham’s testimony before grand jury in Georgia election investigation

In The States 

Texas Tribune: Election Day Problems Inflame Voter Fraud Conspiracies in Houston