Skip to main content
Defend Our Country Digest

Defend Our Country Digest — October 7, 2022

By October 7, 2022No Comments

Driving the Day: 

Must Read Stories

Indictments In Fulton County Election Probe Could Come As Soon As December 

  • CNN: Fulton County Prosecutor Investigating Trump Aims For Indictments As Soon As December: The Georgia prosecutor leading an investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election is aiming to quickly wrap up the grand jury’s work after the midterm elections and could begin issuing indictments as early as December, sources familiar with the situation tell CNN. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said that her investigation into attempts to subvert the 2020 election will go quiet beginning later this week to avoid any appearance of influencing the upcoming election. But while her investigation will not make any overt moves in the next few weeks, her team is gearing up for a flurry of activity after Election Day.

Threats And Harassment Pour In Against Election Workers 

  • NBC: Authorities Arrest Man, Accusing Him Of Threatening To Hang Arizona Official: An Iowa man was arrested Thursday on charges that he left a pair of threatening voicemails for a local election official in Arizona and an official associated with the state attorney general’s office nearly a year after the 2020 election, the Justice Department said. Mark A. Rissi, of Hiawatha, Iowa, is accused of threatening to hang Clint Hickman, a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. Rissi also allegedly left a threatening voicemail for an employee in Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office. Rissi, 64, was charged with two counts of making a threatening interstate communication and one count of making a threatening telephone call, the Justice Department said. The case is part of the department’s Election Threats Task Force, which was launched in June 2021. It has charged people in numerous states.
  • Vice: Armed Fringe Groups Are Gearing Up to ‘Protect’ Midterm Ballot Dropboxes: A “patriot group” in Arizona called Lions of Liberty—which is closely tied to the Oath Keepers—is organizing their supporters to go out and conduct round-the-clock surveillance of ballot dropboxes during the midterm elections. It’s the latest sign that groups with clear ties to extremists, galvanized by conspiracy theories, are seeking to take matters into their own hands this election season.  Ballot dropboxes have become the central focus of election fraud conspiracy theorists, thanks to the debunked documentary 2,000 Mules, by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza. That film claims that a shadowy network of hired “mules” in contested states were hired by nonprofits as part of a giant ballot trafficking operation to stuff dropboxes with fake absentee ballots, all with the goal of stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The film was released in May, six months before the midterms, reinvigorated the “Stop the Steal” movement and inspired vigilante efforts around the country—in some cases spearheaded by innocuous-sounding groups that obscure the known ideologues and extremists behind them.
  • Washington Post: RNC Seizes On Political Affiliations Of Poll Workers In Swing States: For months, conservative activists who tried to overturn the 2020 election results have urged Republicans to become poll workers so they can be on the front lines of watching for fraud. Yet for the August primary in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the number of Democrats working at the polls was 18 percent higher than the number of Republicans. Such a gap is typical and legal, county leaders say, but Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has seized on it in an effort to cast doubt on the way elections are run in the swing state’s most populous county that is home to Phoenix. That has angered county officials, many of them fellow Republicans, who see this as a new attempt to spread misinformation, erode faith in the voting process, lay the foundation to contest results should GOP candidates lose and unfairly focus attention on election workers, some of whom have endured threats and harassment after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020. The RNC and the Arizona GOP filed two lawsuits this week that seek to make the county shorten shifts for poll workers to make the jobs more accessible and force the release of records about who worked the polls in the primary. McDaniel mischaracterized the scope of the lawsuits in a tweet Wednesday, falsely claiming that Arizona Republicans have been “shut out of the process.” The RNC did not respond to a request to explain how Republicans have been excluded.
  • Associated Press: Falsehoods, Harassment Stress Local Election Offices In US: ever since former President Donald Trump began falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, Mickley, Whipkey and local election workers like them across the country have been inundated with conspiracy theories and election falsehoods, and hounded with harassment. They’ve been targeted by threats, stressed by rising workloads and stretched budgets. The stress and vitriol have driven many workers away, creating shortages of election office staff and poll workers. […] And then there’s the stream of misinformation falsely alleging that voting systems across the country are riddled with fraud. Unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machines, manipulation of elections by artificial intelligence or ballot fixing have found a wide audience among Republicans. The claims sometimes lead voters — usually friends and neighbors of the Carroll County election staff — to question them about voting equipment and election procedures, no longer clear what to believe about a system they’ve trusted all their lives. The false claims about the 2020 presidential election also have led believers to inundate election offices around the country with public records requests related to voting processes or equipment, demands to retain the 2020 ballots instead of destroying them, and attempts to remove certain voters from the rolls.

Final January 6 Committee Hearing Rescheduled For October 13

  • New York Times: Jan. 6 Panel Reschedules Final Hearing as Key Questions Remain Unresolved:  The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has rescheduled its next and potentially final hearing for Thursday, Oct. 13 at 1 p.m., when it will attempt to refocus the country’s attention on former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the continuing threat that election deniers pose to American democracy. Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee, said last week he expected the hearing to be the panel’s first without live testimony from witnesses. But he promised the committee would present new revelations about the Capitol riot and the events that led to it. “We still have significant information that we’ve not shown to the public,” Mr. Thompson told reporters on Capitol Hill. The hearing, which Mr. Thompson had previously said would be the panel’s last barring unforeseen revelations, was postponed abruptly last week as Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida.

Proud Boys Leader Pleads Guilty To Seditious Conspiracy 

  • Politico: Proud Boys Leader Pleads Guilty To Seditious Conspiracy Over Jan. 6 Actions: Jeremy Bertino, a North Carolina leader of the Proud Boys, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy on Thursday, becoming the first member of the group to admit to the charge stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Bertino appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly to enter his guilty plea, which also included a count of unlawful possession of a firearm.Bertino, who previously testified to the Jan. 6 select committee, was involved in key conversations and chats with other members of the group, including national chair Enrique Tarrio and other leaders facing seditious conspiracy charges in the weeks before Jan. 6. Tarrio is set to go on trial in December, along with Proud Boys Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, who was the first member of the Jan. 6 mob to breach the Capitol when he shattered a Senate-wing window with a police riot shield. Prosecutors say Tarrio and his allies developed a plan to besiege the Capitol, relying on — and in fact organizing and spurring on — members of the mob to help break through police lines and get inside the Capitol. It was part of an effort that prosecutors say was intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

The DOJ Believes Trump Still Has Classified Documents 

  • New York Times: Justice Dept. Is Said to Have Told Trump Lawyers It Believes He Has More Documents: A top Justice Department official told former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the department believed he had not returned all the documents he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter. The outreach from the official, Jay I. Bratt, who leads the department’s counterintelligence operations, is the most concrete indication yet that investigators remain skeptical that Mr. Trump has been fully cooperative in their efforts to recover documents the former president was supposed to have turned over to the National Archives at the end of his term. It is not clear what steps the Justice Department might take to retrieve any material it thinks Mr. Trump still holds. And it is not known whether the Justice Department has gathered new evidence that Mr. Trump has held onto government material even after the court-authorized search in August of his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and 18 months of previous efforts by the federal government to convince the former president to return what he had taken on leaving office.

In The States 

COLORADO: Man Sentenced To 18 Months In Prison For Threats Against Colorado Secretary of State 

  • Associated Press: Man Gets Prison For Threatening Colorado Election Official: A Nebraska man was sentenced Thursday to 18 months in prison for making online threats against Colorado’s top elections official, one of the first cases brought by a federal task force devoted to protecting elections workers nationwide from rising threats. The sentence came the same day an Iowa man was arrested for allegedly leaving voicemail threats for an Arizona official and the Arizona’s Attorney General’s Office.

WISCONSIN: Election Deniers Didn’t Give Wisconsin To Trump In 2020, But They Paved The Way For Future GOP Success 

  • ProPublica: Election Deniers Failed to Hand Wisconsin to Trump but Have Paved the Way for Future GOP Success: Ever since claims of election fraud arose in 2020, Wisconsin has seen its share of quixotic attempts to taint the presidential results. A group of phony electors tried to claim the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top lawmaker launched a yearlong inquiry led by a lawyer spewing election fraud theories. And its courts heard numerous suits challenging the integrity of the 2020 election and the people administering it. But on a more fundamental level, the election deniers succeeded. They helped change the way Election Day will look in 2022 for crucial midterm elections in Wisconsin — and they are creating an even more favorable climate for Trump and Republicans in 2024.

What Experts Are Saying

Larry Jacobs, politics professor at the University of Minnesota: “‘It’s quite possible in 2022 we’re going to have a serious set of challenges before the new Congress is seated, and then this will escalate as we move toward 2024 and another presidential election, in which the candidates, again, almost required by the Trumpians, will be challenging election outcomes,’ said Larry Jacobs, a politics professor at the University of Minnesota whose areas of study include legislative politics. In the longer term, Jacobs said, the country’s democratic foundations are at risk. ‘It is a disease that is spreading through our political process, and its implications are very profound,’ Jacobs said. ‘This is no longer about Donald Trump. This is about the entire electoral system and what constitutes legitimate elections. All of that is now up in the air.’” Washington Post 

Harry Litman, former US attorney: “I try to resist eg Nazi or Stalin analogies, but what other historical precedents are there for entire houses of national government(if Rs take House) being controlled by cadre dedicated to false claims of a strongman? Has it ever happened in a democracy?” Tweet 

Jenny A. Durkan, mayor of Seattle from 2017 to 2021 and also served five years as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington: “If Trump’s right to assert privilege as a private citizen is expanded by the Supreme Court, or even the 11th Circuit, all pending investigations of Trump would need to assess what evidence was privileged and therefore off-limits to state and federal probes. Those assessments would be subject to court challenge by the former president. The results could range from lengthy delay to total dismissal of cases.” Washington Post Op-Ed: Trump filing offers the Supreme Court wide purview in executive power

Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center: “Thread: NEW: The @BrennanCenter’s latest roundup of voting legislation is out. A key takeaway: voters in 20 states will face 33 new restrictive voting laws since last election…In every year since we started tracking restrictive voting laws over a decade ago, a large # of restrictive laws were blocked by courts in advance of the next election. Not so this year. #SCOTUS has made it unreasonably hard to stop vote suppression over the past few years. Our roundup also found that 7 states have passed 12 election interference laws–meaning laws that open the door to partisan interference in elections or threaten the people and processes that make elections work. 11 of those will be in effect this year.” Voting Laws Roundup: October 2022 | Twitter Thread 

Headlines

The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections

CNN: Money flowing to some election deniers sets off scramble in secretary of state races

January 6 And The 2020 Election

The Hill: Trump says CNN should ‘prove the big lie’ in defamation case

NPR: Fox News CEO warned against ‘crazies’ after 2020 election, Dominion says

Politico: Washington Dissed a Jan. 6 Hero Cop. He Has the Tapes to Prove It.

Politico: Top ally in Trump’s 2020 election plot fights professional sanctions

Other Trump Investigations 

ABC: On Trump’s last day in office, why were sensitive documents allegedly in such disarray?

Opinion

Washington Post (Editorial): How to confront the rising power of the GOP’s election-denying wing

In The States 

Rio Rancho Observer: Sandoval residents still question voting machine integrity