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Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — October 13, 2022

By October 13, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Today’s January 6 Committee Hearing Will Present A Chilling Summation Of The Case Against Trump And A Warning Of The Ongoing Danger 

  • New York Times: House Jan. 6 Panel Plans a Sweeping Summation of Its Case Against Trump: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack is planning on Thursday to present a sweeping summation of its case against former President Donald J. Trump at what could be its final public hearing, seeking to reveal damning new evidence about Mr. Trump’s state of mind and his central role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Armed with new witness interviews and unreleased footage of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, the panel is planning to argue that Mr. Trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud inspired far-right extremists and election deniers who present a continuing threat to American democracy. Unlike previous hearings, which focused on specific aspects of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, members will attempt to portray the entire arc of the plan, demonstrating Mr. Trump’s involvement in every step — even before Election Day.
  • Washington Post: New Evidence To Show Trump Was Warned Of Violence On Jan. 6: The likely final public hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is expected to highlight newly obtained Secret Service records showing how President Donald Trump was repeatedly alerted to brewing violence that day, and he still sought to stoke the conflict, according to three people briefed on the records. During Thursday’s hearing, the committee plans to share new video footage and internal Secret Service emails that appear to corroborate parts of the most startling inside accounts of that day, said the people briefed, who, like others who spoke to The Washington Post, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive records and conversations. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in June that Trump was briefed on Jan. 6 that some of his supporters were armed for battle, demanded they be allowed into his rally and insisted he wanted to lead them on their march to the Capitol.
  • Politico: ‘Clear And Present Danger’: Jan. 6 Committee To Describe Lingering Trump Threat: Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election didn’t end on Jan. 6, 2021, or even when he left office. Since then he’s gone to even further lengths to delegitimize his defeat. That ongoing effort will be a centerpiece of the Jan. 6 select committee’s next — and perhaps final — televised pitch to Americans on Thursday. “Tune in for our discussion of Trump’s clear and present danger presented to democracy and freedom in America by a movement that he’s galvanized,” panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said this week at a virtual People for the American Way event. The panel intends to focus on evidence that Trump has “consistently and increasingly” been using rhetoric “that we knew caused violence on Jan. 6,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told reporters recently. Cheney cited recent comments by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in which she upbraided elected Republicans for continuing to indulge “one man, who knows full well that he lost, instead of the Constitution he was trying to subvert.”

Online Threats Against Election Workers And January 6 Witnesses Increase 

  • Washington Post: Violent Threats Against Jan. 6 Witnesses Spread On Fringe Sites: In the hours after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson shocked the country with her testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, people in the extreme corners of the internet started plotting their revenge. “She’d be fun to smash … with a hammer,” wrote one user on the anonymous forum 4chan. “cassidy hutchison must get the death penalty that is all,” said another person on the pro-Trump forum, Patriots.win. “Ropes, folks, more ropes,” said a user who claimed to be at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The person indicated in a later post that they were traveling to Hutchinson’s home. The attacks against Hutchinson are part of a broader pattern of violent threats on fringe social networks directed at witnesses testifying before Congress about the Capitol insurrection. Since the committee began hosting prime-time hearings in June, the nonprofit Advance Democracy has identified a tide of vitriol targeting key witnesses and prominent Jan. 6 committee lawmakers on online forums with reputations for fostering extremism and right-wing views. They include Gab, the .win forums and Truth Social, former president Donald Trump’s social media company.
  • Time: Election Workers in Battleground States Face Surge of Cyberattacks: Local election workers facing an uptick in physical threats and harassment have also been targeted by a recent wave of malicious email activity ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, according to a new analysis. While much of the security discussed about the midterms has focused on disinformation and countering foreign cyberattacks, county election workers in the key battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania dealt with a surge of phishing attacks coinciding with their primary elections, data shared with TIME by cybersecurity firm Trellix shows.

Corporate Leaders Pour Funds Into Election-Denier Campaigns For Secretary Of State 

  • CNBC: Some Corporate Leaders Are Funding Trump-Backed Election Deniers In Races For Secretary Of State, A Role That Administers Elections: More than two dozen corporate leaders and businesses are quietly donating to the campaigns of at least four Republicans who have pushed false claims about the 2020 election results while running to become secretaries of state, according to a review of state campaign finance disclosures. Secretary of state candidates Jim Marchant, running in Nevada; Mark Finchem, in Arizona; Kristina Karamo, in Michigan, and Chuck Gray, in Wyoming — all endorsed by former President Donald Trump — have disputed the 2020 election results on the campaign trail. If the candidates win, they would have a critical role in both administering the election and counting ballots in 2024 — when Trump could again lead the GOP presidential ticket. Nevada, Arizona and Michigan are each considered swing states during presidential elections, and Trump lost to President Joe Biden in all three of those states. The former president and his allies filed lawsuits challenging the results in those states, only for courts to reject them. The candidates have echoed Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election against Biden, allegations that led to dozens of failed lawsuits attempting to overturn state results and prompted the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. Trump’s political action committee, Save America, has donated $17,000 combined to the Finchem, Marchant and Karamo campaigns, according to a report by campaign watchdog Issue One.  Despite the fact they have embraced false election conspiracies, the candidates have received donations from corporate leaders across a variety of industries. Those business officials started financing the secretary of state candidates in August 2021 and continued their donations through September, according to state records.

Pro-Trump Officials In Georgia Caught Plotting To Steal Voting Data

  • Rolling Stone: Pro-Trump Georgia Officials Plotted to Swipe Voting Data. We Caught Them: Weeks before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump’s legal team went to Georgia in a last-ditch effort to find election fraud. Led by lawyer Sidney Powell, the team copied data from voting machines in Coffee County. The effort represented a new front in the MAGA assault on elections, with Trump’s team colluding with friendly local election officials to pull sensitive data out of election equipment. That search has landed Trump’s team in court, with groups charging Powell and company of potentially compromising sensitive data in a failed, partisan effort to overturn the 2020 election. The illegal data breach in Coffee County is now being investigated by a district attorney looking into Republican attempts to overturn the election here. The Washington Post and CNN, among others, have reported extensively on the developments in Coffee County, which come with an undercurrent of the unknown about what exactly the purpose was for the illegal data breach.  But it turns out, Coffee County wasn’t the only Georgia county where pro-Trump forces were working to swipe election data in search of nonexistent fraud. And in Spalding County, it wasn’t Trump’s team leading the effort — it was the election officials themselves. Emails and contracts obtained by Rolling Stone reveal that Spalding County election officials hatched a plan to illegally obtain data from voting machines. A pair of pro-Trump members of the county election board, alongside the election supervisor, plotted to hire a third-party tech firm to copy data from voting machines, the election server, and even iPhones used by election staff. The plotted data swipe was an effort to prove Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in Georgia, and in Spalding County, the trio wanted to do it all with up to $10,000 in taxpayer dollars.

Key New Evidence Shows That Trump May Have Directed The Movement Of Documents At Mar-A-Lago

  • Washington Post: Trump Worker Told FBI About Moving Mar-A-Lago Boxes On Ex-President’s Orders: A Trump employee has told federal agents about moving boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago at the specific direction of the former president, according to people familiar with the investigation, who say the witness account — combined with security-camera footage — offers key evidence of Donald Trump’s behavior as investigators sought the return of classified material. The witness description and footage described to The Washington Post offer the most direct account to date of Trump’s actions and instructions leading up to the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the Florida residence and private club, in which agents were looking for evidence of potential crimes including obstruction, destruction of government records or mishandling classified information. The people familiar with the investigation said agents have gathered witness accounts indicating that, after Trump advisers received a subpoena in May for any classified documents that remained at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told people to move boxes to his residence at the property. That description of events was corroborated by the security-camera footage, which showed people moving the boxes, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
  • New York Times: Trump Aide Was Seen on Security Footage Moving Boxes at Mar-a-Lago: A long-serving aide to former President Donald J. Trump was captured on security camera footage moving boxes out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s residence in Florida, both before and after the Justice Department issued a subpoena in May demanding the return of all classified documents, according to three people familiar with the matter. The footage showed Walt Nauta, a former military aide who left the White House and then went to work for Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, moving boxes from a storage room that became a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation, according to the people briefed on the matter. The inquiry has centered on whether Mr. Trump improperly kept national security records after he left the White House and obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to get them back.

In The States 

GEORGIA:  Thousands Of Georgia Voters’ Eligibility Challenged In Coordinated Republican Attack On Voting Rights 

  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Thousands Of Georgia Voters’ Eligibility Challenged Before Election: While working for the U.S. Navy in California, Gamaliel Turner learned that his right to vote in Georgia had been challenged by the chairman of his home county’s Republican Party. Turner was one of over 4,000 Muscogee County voters whose Georgia residency was questioned before the January 2021 runoff elections for U.S. Senate. But Turner was still a Georgia homeowner, taxpayer and eligible voter. This year, the eligibility of tens of thousands more voters has been contested under a provision of last year’s election law that allows any resident to challenge the qualifications of an unlimited number of voters within their county. “I’m just regular people. I’m paying my taxes. I haven’t even changed my driver’s license. Everything about me is Georgia,” said Turner, a retired major and military contractor who was able to vote after a judge prohibited the county from upholding challenges based solely on change-of-address lists. “It angered me. It hurt me.” County election officials have so far rejected most voter eligibility challenges, including 22,000 in Gwinnett County, 15,000 in Forsyth and 1,350 in Cobb County this month. Across Georgia, about 65,000 voters challenges have been filed this year, with over 3,000 of them upheld, according to a count by the voting rights organization Fair Fight Action.

MICHIGAN: Major Swing County Hired “Stop The Steal” Ringleader To Recruit Poll Workers 

  • Politico: Michigan County Hires ‘stop The Steal’ Ringleader To Recruit Poll Workers: A social media influencer who implored a crowd to “storm the gates” of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has been hired by a Michigan county clerk as the “talent development specialist” working with poll workers in one of the battleground state’s biggest swing regions, according to an email obtained by POLITICO. The talent-development official, Genevieve Peters, also joined armed members of the Proud Boys for a 2020 rally at the Michigan Capitol and live-streamed a “Stop the Steal” protest outside the home of Michigan’s secretary of state. She has made numerous social media posts of herself mingling with Proud Boys including marching alongside its leader, Joe Biggs, according to social media postings by citizen journalists tracking extremists including Chad Loder, whose work to identify Jan. 6 participants has been cited in at least one Department of Justice charging document. Peters, a Michigan native who has also lived in California, videotaped herself vowing Jan. 6 was “only the beginning.” Peters has not been charged with any crime related to the Capitol riot. Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini, a Republican, told POLITICO Peters was hired in May to help recruit poll workers. She applied for a position that was newly created in response to concerns of city clerks about staffing shortages ahead of the November midterm elections that include races for governor, secretary of state and attorney general, he said.

What Experts Are Saying

Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor emeritus: “Day by day the evidence that proves Trump personally orchestrated the theft and concealment of top secret documents becomes stronger. Any shadow of a doubt about his guilt is rapidly vanishing.” Tweet 

Protect Democracy and Citizen Data: “We found that between April and July, the share of Americans who believed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election increased by 5%. We saw declines in the share of people who did not believe he won the election, and in those who had doubts. Many of those surveyed who held onto their doubts or Big Lie beliefs changed their original view that Jan. 6 was a peaceful protest. Nearly twice the number of Americans who view the 2020 election as “stolen” and Jan. 6 as peaceful now view the events of Jan. 6 as a violent attempt to overthrow the government. As the hearings continued, we also saw an increase in the proportion of Americans who viewed the committee hearings as fair and who believed that the committee’s recommendations should be taken seriously. This trend coincided with an increase in awareness about the hearings, suggesting that the more people learned, the more they came to trust.” TPM: The Jan. 6 Committee Is Having A Measurable Impact On Voter Attitudes | Tweet  

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: ““Election denial” is an insufficient term because rejecting certified electoral results is not really a belief (other than the belief that respecting election results is for the weak) but a practice that, as we saw on Jan. 6, has real-world outcomes. An entire political party decided to subvert the will of the people and seize power illegally on Jan. 6, even if Capitol Police officers had to die for that to happen. Autocratic (or fascist) takeover may be a better term than election denial to convey the corrupt intent and violent consequences of the collective conspiracy among GOP politicians and operatives to refute the results of the 2020 election and all future elections that don’t go their way.” Lucid 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

Bloomberg: Democrats Spend $46 Million to Expose ‘Extreme’ Election Deniers

New York Times: Leonard Leo Pushed the Courts Right. Now He’s Aiming at American Society.

New York Times: ‘We Told the Truth’: Sandy Hook Families Win $1 Billion From Alex Jones

New York Times: Misinformation Swirls in Non-English Languages Ahead of Midterms

New York Times: In Utah, a Trump Loyalist Sends an S.O.S. to Romney, of All People

Politico: Why Jan. 6 is mostly absent from the midterms

Washington Post: Most Republican candidates endorse the ‘big lie’ — even when voters don’t

January 6 And The 2020 Election

New York Times: Lawyers Group Asks Court to Punish an Author of Trump Electors Scheme

NPR: DHS watchdog appointed by Trump has fueled an exodus of agency lawyers, sources say

Politico: Oath Keeper describes group’s large weapons cache ahead of Jan. 6

Talking Points Memo: The Jan. 6 Committee Is Having A Measurable Impact On Voter Attitudes

Washington Post: Secret Service reached out to Oath Keepers before Jan. 6 riot

Other Trump Investigations 

Associated Press: Trump angrily lashes out after his deposition is ordered

CNN: Trump can’t get out of deposition in E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit, judge rules

Political Violence

Philadelphia Inquirer: Trump supporters convicted of bringing guns near the 2020 Philly vote count, but cleared of election interference

In The States 

Associated Press: Members of Nevada senate candidate’s family endorse opponent

Daily Beast: Can Ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard Bail Out This Election Denier?

Votebeat: Hand-counting of ballots in Arizona county deemed illegal