Skip to main content
Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — October 5, 2022

By October 5, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Hundreds Of Election Deniers Running For Office Pose Major Threat To US Democracy 

  • USA Today: Hundreds Of Elections Deniers Running For Office Nationwide In 2022 Pose ‘Major Threat’ To U.S. Democracy: Across the country more than 300 candidates who have either questioned or renounced the 2020 outcome without providing evidence will be on the ballot in 2022. They are vying for Congress, governor, attorney general and secretary of state, and a significant number are running in vital battleground states that propelled Joe Biden into the White House. Many were targeted by former President Donald Trump and his allies, according to sworn testimony given to the Jan. 6 congressional committee, as part of a multilayered plot to overturn the 2020 election, including a plan to use alternate slates of electors in those seven battleground states to say Trump won there despite having officially lost. Fake electors met in those states and submitted false documents to the National Archives saying Trump won. Each state has electors appointed by political parties who make up the electoral college that formally elects the president. The Jan. 6 committee said the Trump campaign plan was to pressure the swing states to put forth alternate electors so Vice President Mike Pence could reject Biden’s votes, which he did not do.  Experts warn that any who win these crucial seats will have various tools that could throw the country into chaos in 2024.

Ron Johnson Says January 6 Wasn’t An “Armed Insurrection,” Admits To An Even Bigger Role In The Scheme To Overturn The Election 

  • CNN: Ron Johnson Again Says January 6 Was Not An ‘armed Insurrection,’ Adds ‘protesters Did Teach Us’ How To Use Flag Poles As Weapons: Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson repeated his claim Tuesday that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol was not an “armed insurrection,” adding however, that protesters “did teach us how you can use flagpoles, that kind of stuff, as weapons.” “There weren’t thousands of armed insurrectionists. I asked the question of the FBI agent at a hearing on this, I said, ‘How many firearms were confiscated either in the Capitol or on Capitol ground?’ I didn’t know the answer. For all I know it was going to be a thousand. No, zero. Zero,” Johnson said at the Rotary Club of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, according to a video posted online by an NBC reporter at the event. Johnson added that “protesters did teach us how you can use flagpoles, that kind of stuff, as weapons. But to call what happened on January 6 an ‘armed insurrection,’ I just think, is not accurate,” he added. In a statement to CNN Tuesday, Johnson campaign spokesperson Alexa Henning said the senator was comparing the methods used by racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020 with the January 6 rioters.
  • NBC: Ron Johnson Acknowledges Texting With Trump Attorney On Jan 6: Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., acknowledged Tuesday that he exchanged text messages with one of Donald Trump’s attorneys before and after Johnson’s staff tried to deliver a package to then-Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021. He added that the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack “smeared” him because it didn’t publicize all the text messages between his and Pence’s aides.  Johnson, in response to questions from NBC News, said “the entire episode lasted about an hour,” referring to his ties to a fake electors scheme he said he knew nothing about. He also said he didn’t know the contents of the package he said the attorney wanted to be delivered. “You can’t even call it participation. I wrote a couple texts,” Johnson said. Johnson has previously distanced himself from the scheme, telling WISN-TV of Milwaukee in August: “My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds.”

State Republican Parties Implicated In 2020 Election Plot:  AZ GOP Chair Pleads The Fifth, Georgia GOP Is Funding Attorneys For Fake Electors 

  • Politico: Arizona GOP Chair Pleaded The Fifth, Jan. 6 Committee Attorney Says: Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions from the Jan. 6 select committee, a lawyer for the panel revealed in federal court Tuesday. “Dr. Ward was deposed by the select committee, and she declined to answer on every substantive question and asserted her rights under the Fifth Amendment,” select committee attorney Eric Columbus said during a court hearing before Arizona-based U.S. District Court Judge Diane Humetewa. Columbus did not say when Ward’s deposition took place, though the select panel’s subpoena instructed her to appear on March 8, 2022. Columbus revealed Ward’s posture during a hearing on the committee’s attempt to obtain her phone records from cell phone carrier T-Mobile. Ward sued the panel to block T-Mobile from cooperating, but Humetewa recently rejected her effort. Tuesday’s hearing came amid Ward’s effort to ask Humetewa to delay the impact of her ruling while she seeks a review from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
  • Yahoo News: Georgia GOP Bankrolls Lawyers For ‘Fake’ Trump Electors In Fulton County DA Probe: The Georgia Republican Party is bankrolling the legal defense of most of the so-called fake electors in the state as part of a controversial arrangement that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charges in a new court filing is “rife with serious ethical problems” and “actual conflicts of interest.” A Yahoo News review of campaign finance filings shows that the Georgia Republican Party paid $35,419 last July to two lawyers who are representing 11 of 16 party operatives and activists who declared themselves on Dec. 14, 2020, “the duly elected and qualified” electors from the state pledged to Donald Trump despite the fact that Joe Biden had won the popular vote there. That move, which was memorialized in a false certificate the electors sent that day to the Senate and the National Archives, has become a central focus of Willis’s probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. But Willis, an elected Democrat, substantially escalated the legal battle over the issue this week when she moved to disqualify the two lawyers being paid by the state GOP. She argued that their representation of the 11 electors resulted in ethical conflicts given the potentially divergent interests between some of those electors and top party officials, including state party chairman David Shafer, who organized the Dec. 14 meeting and arranged for it to take place behind closed doors at the state Capitol.

Trump Asks Supreme Court To Intervene In The Mar-A-Lago Search Case 

  • Washington Post: Trump Asks Supreme Court To Intervene In Mar-A-Lago Search Case: Former president Donald Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in the Mar-a-Lago documents-seizure case, saying the outside legal expert appointed to review the materials should be allowed to examine roughly 100 classified items found during the search. The petition came after a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit granted the Justice Department’s request to keep the classified documents separate from a review of documents being conducted by the outside expert, called a special master. Authorities have launched a high-stakes investigation to determine if the former president or his advisers mishandled national security secrets, or hid or destroyed government records. By taking the case to the Supreme Court, Trump gets another chance to publicly argue that he is being treated unfairly by the Justice Department, and if he succeeds, it could stymie or stall the ongoing investigation into his conduct.

In The States 

GEORGIA: Mass Voter Challenges Thrown Out In Gwinnett County 

  • Atlanta Journal Constitution: Mass Georgia Voter Challenges Thrown Out In Gwinnett: The Gwinnett County Board of Elections voted Monday night to dismiss all remaining challenges to voter eligibility that had been filed by conservative residents who alleged 22,000 voter registration records were invalid. The board’s 3-2 vote found that there wasn’t probable cause to move forward with the voter challenges because they were primarily based on records of voters’ mailing addresses rather than more specific allegations that they were no longer eligible to vote in Georgia. The challenges were an effort to disqualify registrations from this fall’s election based on the belief that voters had likely moved out of state. They were filed last month by Gwinnett residents and VoterGA, an advocacy organization that claims the 2020 election — including President Donald Trump’s defeat at the polls — was fraudulent.

NEVADA: ACLU Sues Nye County Over Plan To Hand Count Mail Ballots 

  • New York Times: The A.C.L.U. Sues a Nevada County Over Its Plan to Hand-Count Mail Ballots: The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against a rural county over its move to start hand-counting mail-in ballots two weeks before Election Day, saying it would violate state and federal laws. The lawsuit is the latest effort to fight the Nye County commission’s plans to conduct the Nov. 8 election almost entirely with paper ballots and have the vote tallied by hand, in addition to machine tabulation. Election experts have warned that such measures could lead to lengthy delays and chaos. The changes, encouraged by Jim Marchant, the Republican who is running for the state’s top election post, are rooted in baseless conspiracy theories being circulated on the right that voting machines are being used fraudulently.

PENNSYLVANIA: Central PA County To Hold Yet Another 2020 Recount 

  • PennLive: Lycoming County To Do Hand Recount Of 2020 Votes For President, One Row Office: A hand recount of all ballots cast in the 2020 general election for president and one of the state row offices will take place in Lycoming County starting in January. The county commissioners sitting as the board of elections Tuesday voted 2-1 to do the recount and to do a random hand count of 2 percent of the votes in this November’s election. The November hand recount is different from the required state audit of 2 percent of the votes cast. […] Metzger and Mussare stressed they voted for the 2020 recount to put to rest allegations of voter fraud in Lycoming County. They expressed confidence the recount will show the results were accurate. The county does not use drop boxes, said Metzger who joined with Mussare to claim there was fraud elsewhere, especially with them. Metzger said he supports President Biden but does not believe he was elected legitimately. Mussare has publicly stated he is a Patriot.

What Experts Are Saying

Steve Vladeck, Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at University of Texas Law School: “It’s amazing how many misstatements Trump’s emergency #SCOTUS application fits into the very first paragraph. As one example, the order DOJ appealed from was the district court’s entry of an *injunction,* which is expressly subject to immediate appeal under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a).” Tweet 

Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action: “States United Action, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting U.S. elections, released a study in early September that found that roughly 55% of the entire nation’s population will see at least one election denier on their ballot running for an office to oversee elections. ‘A single election denier winning a statewide office in a single state is a five-alarm fire for our democracy,’ Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action, said. ‘Many of these down-ballot contests had narrow margins in the last midterm election, and voters can’t afford to sit these races out.’” USA Today 

Matthew Dalek, a political historian at George Washington University: “Experts warn that any who win these crucial seats will have various tools that could throw the country into chaos in 2024. ‘The reason that this is a major threat is that if part of the country or half the country believes that their candidate — the person they supported, and the issues they care about — was illegitimately defeated because of a conspiracy, you cannot have a functioning democracy,’ Matthew Dalek, a political historian at George Washington University, told USA TODAY.”  USA Today 

Ryan Goodman, chaired professor at New York University School of Law (CNN Video): “I dissected with 

@ErinBurnett new reports:

— Trump personally packed boxes for Archives

— Trump lawyer refused to make false statement to Archives on Trump’s behalf

— Trump admitted to 

@maggieNYT

 “most of” docs returned to Archives

— Oath Keepers dead-end defense” Tweet 

Barbara McQuade, former US attorney: “‘The lawyer for Stewart Rhodes said in opening statement that Rhodes will testify in his own defense. Court filings indicate that his defense centers around the idea that he was expecting President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the Oath Keepers to active military duty on Jan. 6. For Rhodes to pursue this defense, he will have to testify or otherwise present evidence about the basis for this belief. It will be interesting to see whether he is able to connect the Oath Keepers to the former president or any of his associates.’ She adds, ‘If so, he may be able to provide the evidentiary link necessary to charge Trump or others with seditious conspiracy.’” Jennifer Rubin Washington Post column 

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program: “The Supreme Court should resist Alabama’s invitation to take a further knife to the Voting Rights Act. But if it does not, Congress must overcome its nearly decade-long failure to restore and strengthen the protections of the Voting Rights Act. States also will need to step up efforts to ensure representation for communities of color that are driving the country’s population growth in a world where race-conscious remedies may no longer be an option. It won’t be easy, but too much is at stake. Multiracial democracy is literally on the line.”  Boston Globe Op-Ed: Multiracial democracy is under threat at the US Supreme Court

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

The Guardian: Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level

New York Times: Election Deniers in U.S. Push Idea That Brazil’s Voting Was Tainted

New York Times: Supreme Court Leans Toward Alabama in Voting Rights Dispute

January 6 And The 2020 Election

NBC: A cop in a MAGA hat and an Oath Keeper: Inside one of Jan. 6’s strangest moments

Politico: Texts, recordings show Oath Keepers’ early talk of armed resistance to Biden presidency

Raw Story: Trump Threatens To Sue Jan. 6 Committee For Not Investigating Vote Fraud Claims Debunked By His Own Officials 

Other Trump Investigations 

Bloomberg: Inside Mar-a-Lago: Pardons, White House Emails, Legal Bills

Political Violence

Rolling Stone: Activists Filing Ethics Complaint Against Marjorie Taylor Greene for Allegedly Kicking Teen

In The States 

Los Angeles Times: Arrest made in breach of L.A. County election worker data

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ron Johnson calls for ‘snap audits’ to restore confidence that voting results are accurate

Politico: Storm-battered Florida may need major election fixes before November