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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — November 28, 2022

By November 28, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Trump Met with Holocaust Denier and White Nationalist Nick Fuentes

  • CNN: Arkansas GOP Governor Says Trump’s Meeting With Holocaust Denier Is ‘Very Troubling’ And ‘Empowering’ For Extremism: Former President Donald Trump’s meeting last week with White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was “very troubling” and “empowering” for extremism, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Sunday. “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or anti-Semite. And so it’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen and we need to avoid those kind of empowering the extremes,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” “You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from it.” Trump had dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate last Tuesday with both Fuentes and rapper Kanye West, who himself became engulfed in controversy after repeating antisemitic conspiracy theories and making other offensive claims last month.
  • The Hill: GOP, Trump’s Potential 2024 Rivals Criticize Nick Fuentes Dinner: Top GOP figures and potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates spent the weekend criticizing former President Trump after reports surfaced that he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with known white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Trump on Saturday blamed Ye, the rapper formally known as Kanye West, for arriving to a planned dinner between the two men with three additional guests, one of whom was Fuentes. Trump has insisted he didn’t know who Fuentes was before meeting him but several Republicans, including former members of his own Cabinet who are seen as gearing up for a potential 2024 run have voiced criticism of the meeting.
  • Axios: GOP Lawmakers Hushed On Trump’s Dinner With White Nationalist: Republican lawmakers have largely remained silent in the wake of former President Trump’s dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, reviving a tactic they frequently relied on during his presidency. Driving the news: Spokespeople for nearly two dozen House and Senate Republicans — including party leaders, co-chairs of caucuses and task forces focused on Judaism or antisemitism and sponsors of legislation to combat antisemitic hate crimes — did not respond to requests for comment. Why it matters: The dynamic highlights the stranglehold Trump still has on the Republican Party outside a small group of vocal critics, even in the aftermath of poor performances by his handpicked candidates in the midterm elections. […] The other side: Only a handful of Republican members of Congress have condemned the dinner. The big picture: Some Republican groups and figures outside Congress have weighed in — though mostly in vague terms that bypass direct criticism of Trump.

GOP-Backed Election Investigations Find No Evidence of Widespread Fraud

  • PBS: State GOP-Backed ‘Election Integrity’ Units Find Few Voter Fraud Cases After Midterms:  State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems. That’s just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level. […] The absence of widespread fraud is important because the lies surrounding the 2020 presidential election spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies have penetrated deeply into the Republican Party and eroded trust in elections. In the run-up to this year’s elections, 45% of Republicans had little to no confidence that votes would be counted accurately.
  • Rolling Stone: Search for Widespread Voter Fraud Finds Very Little Voter Fraud: In the wake of  Donald Trump’s allegations of massive voter fraud that he claims cost him the 2020 election, Republicans in a number of states set up law enforcement units to investigate potential instances of election fraud. According to an Associated Press investigation, these units have only received “scattered complaints” in the weeks following the midterms, and investigations have yielded “no indication of systemic problems.” […[ But according to the AP’s investigation in Georgia and five other battleground states that Trump claimed were stolen from him in 2020, there is no evidence that widespread fraud is taking place. In fact, the AP reported, certification of the results in most states are going “smoothly” and “with few complaints.” In fact, Georgia has not opened any election investigations under a newly passed law that gave state law enforcement the authority to investigate potential voter fraud without a request from election officials. Its only recent investigation into voter fraud concerns a 2021 allegation that voting equipment was breached in a county Trump won by almost 40 points.

In The States 

ARIZONA: Maricopa County Election Officials Debunk Fraud Claims As Kari Lake Demands “Redo Election”

  • Washington Post: Maricopa County Says Printer Glitches Didn’t Prevent Anyone From Voting: Maricopa County, facing a storm of GOP criticism over its handling of the Nov. 8 election, said in a report issued Sunday that problems with printers that surfaced on Election Day did not violate the Arizona Constitution or other guidelines intended to ensure free and fair elections. The county instead blamed prominent Republicans for making their own supporters suspicious of a secure alternative allowing voters who encountered mechanical issues to cast ballots. The report comes in response to a request from the Arizona attorney general’s office election integrity unit for an account of the Election Day problems before the county is set to certify its results on Monday. State certification is set for Dec. 5.
  • CNN: Election Deniers Faced Defeat But Election Denialism Is Still Swirling In Arizona: Many of the candidates who promoted former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” were defeated in November, a pattern heralded by Democrats that is already reshaping the contours of the 2024 election – leading the former president to modulate his tone when he recently launched another bid for the White House. But the efforts to cast doubts about the management and operation of the 2022 election are still festering in Arizona, long a hotbed of election conspiracies that spawned the sham audit of the 2020 Maricopa County results by the now-defunct firm Cyber Ninjas after Trump questioned Joe Biden’s victory there. The continuing election denialism underscores that although the highest profile promoters of Trump’s election lies were defeated, the efforts to undermine democracy will carry on. Several Trump-backed Republican candidates at the top of Arizona’s ticket, including defeated GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, defeated Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, as well as GOP Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh – who is trailing his opponent Democrat Kris Mayes by 510 votes as their race heads toward a recount – have seized on a problem with Maricopa County’s printers on Election Day to make exaggerated claims about the election.
  • Vanity Fair: Kari Lake Sues Maricopa County Officials After Election Loss: Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor who lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs but refuses to admit it, filed a public records lawsuit requesting that Maricopa County turn over election-related records. Her lawyer Tim LaSota filed the suit on Wednesday, stating that “many eligible voters may not have been able to vote” due to election officials’ “failures.” According to the complaint, the Trump-backed candidate alleged that Maricopa County election officials broke election laws, citing that 118 polling centers had a “printer/tabulation problem,”  that “many poll observers saw poll workers mix counted and uncounted ballots,” and that election officials have not fulfilled Lake’s initial public records requests filed on November 15 and 16. […] Two Arizona counties are delaying their certification dates in protest of Maricopa County’s election results; Democrats Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs secured victories in Arizona. Although tabulators were unable to read some ballots, officials said it did not affect voters’ ability to cast their ballots.

GEORGIA: Early Voting For Senate Runoff Begins Following Two State Supreme Court Rulings on Abortion and Saturday Voting

  • Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Voters Turn Out For Saturday Voting In Georgia Senate Runoff: Two counties, DeKalb and Douglas, hosted some advance in-person voting prior to Thanksgiving. But in Fulton and about two dozen other jurisdictions across Georgia, Saturday marked the first day of early voting for the Dec. 6 U.S. Senate runoff. […] Impressive lines were reported throughout the morning — and in some places, only grew from there. Wait times at the DeKalb County elections office eclipsed two hours. A huge line of voters was already gathered in Marietta when Cobb County opened polls at noon. […] As of 1:30 p.m., Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office, reported that more than 11,100 votes had been cast in Fulton. More than 7,500 people had voted in Gwinnett and about 3,400 in DeKalb. Just under 1,500 ballots had been cast in Cobb. Many counties will also offer voting on Sunday. Every Georgia jurisdiction is mandated to have early voting Monday through Friday.
  • Atlanta Journal-Constitution: A Pair Of Georgia Supreme Court Orders Jostle Pre-Runoff Landscape: A pair of one-page orders by the Georgia Supreme Court jostled the political landscape days before the Dec. 6 runoff between Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. The rulings issued Wednesday reject a Republican attempt to ban Saturday voting and temporarily reinstate abortion restrictions that were blocked last week by a Fulton County judge’s decision. Taken together, they represent two of the core issues — reproductive rights and ballot access — that many Georgia voters say helped shape their decisions in a midterm election that ended with clear Republican victories in every statewide race except the U.S. Senate contest. It’s impossible to pinpoint how the rulings could influence a high-stakes runoff. A Walker victory would put Republicans on the cusp of flipping the Senate, while Warnock’s win would provide Democrats a 51st seat in the chamber, giving them more leverage to enact their policies. But analysts from both sides of the aisle expect the decisions to refocus the spotlight on policy debates that have helped shape the campaign. Fred Hicks, a veteran Democratic strategist, predicted Tuesday that when the rulings were issued, it “very well might be the day when the runoff was decided” for Warnock.

PENNSYLVANIA: MAGA Supporters Are Flooding Courts With Recount Petitions

  • Philadelphia Inquirer: Doug Mastriano Supporters Are Flooding Pa. Courts With Baseless Recount Petitions In The Governor’s Race: The effort could sow confusion about the validity of the election, tie up state courts, and disrupt officials’ work to audit and certify the results. Mastriano lost by almost 15 percentage points. Doug Mastriano lost by a lot. But some of his supporters wrongly believe the results are inaccurate, and they think they’ve found a way to do something about it. So now election denial groups are flooding Pennsylvania courts with petitions seeking to force hand recounts under a little-known provision of state election law.

What Experts Are Saying

Helen Purcell, a Republican and former Maricopa County recorder, and Tammy Patrick, a Democrat and former federal compliance officer for Maricopa County: “As former Arizona election officials, we know well that Arizona law is clear: once the voters have spoken, it is the duty of the board of supervisors in each county to canvass the election results within 20 days of the election (this year, Nov. 28) and to send the certified results to the secretary of state so that the statewide canvass can be completed by the fourth Monday following the election (this year, Dec. 5). This duty is not optional — it is mandatory.” The Arizona Republic Op-Ed | Tweet  

Michael McDonald, professor of political science at the University of Florida: “Voting experts were pleasantly surprised there weren’t more problems with poll watchers, marking the second general election in a row when a feared threat of aggressive Republican observers did not materialize. ‘This seems to be an increase over 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,’ said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. ‘It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let down our guard.’” Associated Press

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: “[Sarah] Palin unleashed some extraordinarily toxic elements into the body politic, and they never disappeared. The Tea Party carried them forward on Capitol Hill and Donald Trump brought them to the world stage with his presidency. Only time can tell how long the staying power of the toxic changes wrought by Palin will be. But there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.” CNN Op-Ed: Sarah Palin lost the battle, but won the war 

Joyce Vance, former US attorney, re: 11th Circuit’s expected ruling in the Mar-A-Lago documents case: “It seems to me that it’s all over but the shouting, or in this case, the legal writing, which I’d thought the Court might finish with ahead of Thanksgiving. In the earlier motion involving the classified documents, the Court ruled within 24 hours of DOJ filing its final brief. Even though they didn’t do it in advance of the holiday, I wouldn’t expect them to delay too long. Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master Judge Cannon appointed, is looking to close out his review of seized materials in December, but it doesn’t end there. His decisions will be subject to objections by the parties, a briefing to the judge, and an appeal, so it could be months down the road before final decisions are made and the government can proceed unhindered with its investigation. That’s something the 11th Circuit is unlikely to tolerate. As DOJ argued, Trump’s position is “fatal to the vindication of criminal law” — former presidents, like anyone else, must be able to be held accountable in a timely fashion when they break the law. Whatever Trump’s attorneys may have claimed, they’re looking for special treatment for him here. The 11th Circuit didn’t seem interested in letting him have it. Let’s hope the tea leaves here turn into the reality.” Civil Discourse 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Axios: The growing, unchecked power of state legislatures

PBS: Midterms Free Of Feared Chaos As Voting Experts Look To 2024

Trump 2024

Politico: The GOP’s great Trump reckoning begins at the state party level

Bloomberg: Key Trump 2024 Rivals Silent After His White Supremacist Meeting

The Hill: Hutchinson calls Trump meeting with Nick Fuentes ‘very troubling’

Mother Jones: Yes, Donald Trump Dined With White Supremacist Nick Fuentes

New York Times: Biden Helped Democrats Avert a ’22 Disaster. What About ’24?

Special Counsel

Semafor: The conservative attacks on Jack Smith are just starting up

The Hill: Trump blasts special counsel Jack Smith as ‘political hit man’

Axios: Trump rips into new “compromised” special counsel with a “soft name”

Salon: Trump’s latest Truth Social tirade is over special counsel Jack Smith

January 6 And The 2020 Election

Washington Post: Jan. 6 panel staffers angry at Cheney for focusing so much of report on Trump

CNN: Schiff says January 6 committee will decide what goes in the final report ‘in a collaborative manner’

The Hill: Schiff pushes back on reported tension between Cheney, Jan. 6 panel staffers

Other Trump Investigations 

Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court to weigh Cuomo-era New York corruption cases

Opinion

The Hill (Juan Williams): DeSantis is 2022’s most important politician, unfortunately

New York Times (Jesse Wegman): Is Donald Trump Ineligible to Be President?

Philadelphia Inquirer (Will Bunch): The far right is losing. That’s why America has never been so dangerous.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star (Robert B. Talisse): What the midterm results say about U.S. voters in 2022 

Washington Post (Fernanda Santos): Forget about Kari Lake’s loss. Here’s the biggest sign of Arizona’s moderation.

Political Violence

Salon: FBI and DHS failing to address threat of domestic terrorism, according to new Senate report

In The States 

Arizona Republic: ‘Serious Voter Suppression’: Calls For A Redo Election Heard At Arizona Capitol

Arizona Republic: Unexpected Problems Don’t Invalidate Elections, County Says In Response To State’s Questions

Arizona Daily Star: Mayes sues to toss Hamadeh’s election challenge 

Arizona Capitol Times: Election challenges mount

MLive: Wentworth nixes 2022 election probe

The Charlotte Observer: NC case headed to Supreme Court could introduce ‘chaos’ into elections, opponents say

The Charlotte Observer: ’The single-most important case on American democracy.’ Could it overturn elections?

WRAL News: One-term congressmen? Who Republicans could target in the upcoming redistricting process

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Nye County confusion highlights voting barriers for Nevada Native tribes

The Patriot-News: Doubts about ‘extreme’ candidates prompted more split-ticket voting in Pa. and beyond

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Doubts about candidates tipped the scales in tightest midterm races, including Pennsylvania

WDIO (Associated Press): Wis. election officials weigh changes to military voting