Driving the Day:
NEW: A high-ranking member of the far-right Oath Keepers organization who has been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol exchanged messages in November 2020 with former Trump White House aide Andrew Giuliani about election issues. https://t.co/q6ffpViWKI
— Defend Democracy Project (@DemocracyNowUS) September 27, 2022
What To Watch For Today:
Jury selection begins in the trial of members of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy in the January 6 attack.
Must Read Stories
Jury Selection Begins Today In Oath Keepers Sedition Trial As New Details Emerge About The Militia Group’s Role On January 6
- Washington Post: Jury Selection Begins Today In Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial: Jury selection begins Tuesday in the highest-profile trial yet stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, with five members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, facing charges including seditious conspiracy. A panel of Washington, D.C., residents are due to report for in-person vetting by prosecutors, defense attorneys and U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse for a trial they have been told could last six to eight weeks. Another four co-defendants charged in the same nine-person indictment will begin jury selection and face a separate trial on Nov. 10. The jury pool for the first trial was winnowed down from 150 prospective jurors called to answer a written questionnaire. The document inquired about matters such as their availability and potential knowledge of defendants, witnesses and attorneys in the case, and their views on the Jan. 6 riot. Rhodes and the others stand accused of conspiring to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of power to President Biden. Prosecutors say his group called for civil war and staged firearms near D.C. on Jan. 6, when supporters of then-President Donald Trump attacked the Capitol. A 44-page indictment alleges that the group went to the Capitol ready “to answer Rhodes’ call to take up arms,” and that several breached the East Capitol Rotunda doors wearing camouflage vests, helmets, goggles and Oath Keepers insignia.
- NBC: Oath Keeper Charged In Jan. 6 Attack Texted With Andrew Giuliani About Election: A high-ranking member of the far-right Oath Keepers organization who has been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol exchanged messages in November 2020 with former Trump White House aide Andrew Giuliani about election issues, NBC News has learned. That same Oath Keeper member, Kellye SoRelle, also tried to text a White House number on Dec. 20, according to a new book from Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman from Virginia, and journalist Hunter Walker. That text message went to a White House switchboard line, so it could not be delivered.
The Trump White House Placed A Brief Call To A Rioter On January 6
- New York Times: Trump White House Called Capitol Rioter on Jan. 6, Book Says: On the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, shortly after President Donald J. Trump took to Twitter to tell the mob of his supporters assaulting the Capitol that “you have to go home now,” someone used a White House landline to call the phone of one of the rioters, according to a new book from a former staff member of the House Jan. 6 committee. The book, written by Denver Riggleman, who was also previously a Republican member of the House from Virginia, did not name the man whose phone was called by the White House. But in an interview on Monday, Mr. Riggleman said he and his staff determined that the phone belonged to Anton Lunyk, 26, of Brooklyn, who was later charged with breaching the Capitol and sentenced to a year of probation. The call lasted nine seconds and took place at 4:34 p.m. Mr. Lunyk’s name was reported earlier by CNN. A lawyer for Mr. Lunyk did not respond to requests for comment. In an appearance on Sunday night on “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Riggleman referred to the incident as an “aha moment” — but in the interview Monday he said he was not willing to call it a “smoking gun” showing a connection between rioters and the Trump White House.
- CNN: The Mysterious Nine-Second Call From The White House To A January 6 Rioter: Cnn Reveals The Rioter’s Identity For The First Time: At 4:34 pm on January 6, 2021, a cell phone registered to a Capitol rioter who had stormed the building, received a phone call from a White House landline, according to records obtained by CNN. The call lasted for only nine seconds. Who placed the call and why remains a mystery, but it is notable as the only known call made from the White House to the phone of a rioter during this critical time period. According to the records, the call came from 202-456-1414, the publicly available number for the White House. Like many businesses, outgoing calls from the White House do not show a specific extension. The call was placed in the late afternoon, shortly after former President Donald Trump posted a video message on social media telling the rioters at the Capitol, “go home, we love you, you’re very special,” at 4:17pm. It’s unclear what, if any, connection exists between the White House and the rioter, including whether the call was made by mistake or whether the call went to voicemail. […] The cell phone belonged to a 26-year-old Trump supporter from Brooklyn, New York named Anton Lunyk, who traveled to Washington DC the night before January 6 with two friends, Francis Connor and Antonio Ferrigno, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation, as well as a search of public records. The three men attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse and then, along with hundreds of others, entered and illegally demonstrated inside the Capitol, a charge they pleaded guilty to in April and were sentenced for earlier this month. Attorneys for all three men declined to comment to CNN. According to multiple sources familiar with the investigation, Lunyk says he doesn’t remember receiving the nine-second call and claims he doesn’t know anyone who worked in the Trump White House. The phone call was not mentioned in Lunyk’s sentencing or any court documents. A spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in Washington DC declined to comment.
National Archives To Report Today On Whether More Trump Documents May Be Missing
- Wall Street Journal: National Archives to Report on Whether More Trump Files Are Missing: The National Archives faces a Tuesday deadline to update a congressional committee on a key question: Are there still documents from the Trump White House that are unaccounted for? National Archives officials last month told staff for House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) that they aren’t sure whether all presidential records from the Trump administration are in its custody, as federal law dictates, prompting the committee to set Sept. 27 as a deadline for an update. The National Archives declined to comment. The whereabouts of those White House documents—both presidential records from everyday business and classified material—have been in the spotlight since the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. That was the culmination of more than a year of negotiations between the archives and Mr. Trump’s representatives over the custody of White House records, including boxes of papers that were returned to the archives in January and those seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in August.
Election Lies And Threats Are Fueling Poll Worker Sign Ups In Key States
- Associated Press: False Claims, Threats Fuel Poll Worker Sign-Ups For Midterms: Nearly two years after the last presidential election, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines. Numerous reviews in the battleground states where former President Donald Trump disputed his loss to President Joe Biden have affirmed the results, courts have rejected dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies, and even Trump’s own Department of Justice concluded the results were accurate. Nevertheless, the false claims about the the 2020 presidential contest by the former president and his supporters are spurring new interest in working the polls in Georgia and elsewhere for the upcoming midterm elections, according to interviews with election officials, experts and prospective poll workers. [S]ome aim to shore up a critical part of their state’s election system amid the lies and misinformation about voting and ballot-counting. But the false claims and conspiracy theories also have taken hold among a wide swath of conservative voters, propelling some to sign up to help administer elections for the first time.
In The States
GEORGIA: Gwinnett County Rejects Thousands Of Voter Challenges Brought By Trump Supporters
- Bloomberg: Georgia County Rejects Most Voter-Registration Challenges by Trump Supporters: More than two-thirds of the 37,000 voter-registration challenges submitted by Donald Trump supporters in metro Atlanta’s Gwinnett County have been rejected or withdrawn, according to county spokeswoman Deborah Tuff. The challenges, deposited at the county elections office in eight boxes on Aug. 29, were assembled by a group backed by former US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, former chief executive officer of Overstock.com. The pair have been pushing the former president’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. More than 64,000 registration challenges have been filed to county elections offices in Georgia this year. They seek to either disqualify voters ahead of the Nov. 8 election or to make it more difficult for them to cast ballots. Georgia has two closely watched races this year, for the U.S. Senate and governor. Gwinnett County is a former Republican stronghold that has been reliably Democratic since 2016. The challenges were allowed under a 2021 state law passed in response to Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia. The new law allowed individual citizens to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters and required county elections offices to respond within weeks.
NEW HAMPSHIRE: GOP Senate Candidate Don Bolduc Flip Flops Again On Election Denial
- New York Times: Bolduc Indicates He Has Not Entirely Turned His Back on Election Denial: All through his primary, Don Bolduc, a far-right Senate candidate in New Hampshire, said the 2020 election was stolen. A day after his victory was called, he reversed course. But eight days after that? He indicated on a podcast that he had not completely turned his back on the stolen-election movement, conveying that he found it unclear why his election-denial message had not been resonating with voters in the battleground state. “The narrative that the election was stolen, it does not fly up here in New Hampshire for whatever reason,” Mr. Bolduc said in a Sept. 23 appearance on The Mel K Show, a podcast aligned with the QAnon conspiracy movement. Then he renewed his false claim there had been fraud in the election. “What does fly” in New Hampshire, Mr. Bolduc said, “is that there was significant fraud and it needs to be fixed.” For about five minutes on the podcast, Mr. Bolduc attacked the expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic and said voters in New Hampshire should be forced to present identification at the polls. He further stated his opposition to college students from out of state voting in New Hampshire. Shortly after winning his primary, Mr. Bolduc struck a far different tone in a Fox News interview, saying, “I want to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.”
What Experts Are Saying
Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University: “We are at a turning point with our democracy. While the campaign to overturn the election failed, the Republicans pursuing this strategy came extraordinarily close to victory – and they engaged in dangerous violence along the way.” CNN Op-Ed
Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on political violence: “‘We know in other countries that when a political party normalizes violence, their followers are more likely to commit it,’ Kleinfeld said in an interview. ‘What we’re seeing is high levels of desire for violence on both the left and the right, but actual violence is vastly disproportionate to the right. And that has a lot to do with the fact that we’re seeing this assumption that violence is normal that it’s part of normal politics…The most important thing, frankly, is for candidates of all parties to make this less normal, to not normalize this kind of violence and threats[.]” MLive
Kevin Morris, researcher focused on voting rights and election administration at the Brennan Center: “Last month we published a Brennan report on where restrictive voting laws were coming from. That piece focused on the results, but now there’s a full working paper, too” Tweet | Working Paper
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “This week’s trial will be the first of three seditious conspiracy trials DOJ will conduct this fall. The trials include members of both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. DOJ will have to prove a conspiracy involving the use of force in order to convict. That’s the key to a seditious conspiracy charge, distinguishing it from a more general conspiracy or obstruction charges. Because force must be proven, there can be tension during investigations of this type of situation between getting enough evidence to convict and stopping the conspiracy before anyone is harmed. But in the case of the Oath Keepers, boom happened.” Civil Discourse
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Axios: Democratic super PAC announces $15 million campaign to fight voter suppression
January 6 And The 2020 Election
Associated Press: Wisconsin’s top Republican sues to block Jan. 6 subpoena
Associated Press: Former U.S. Capitol Police chief has deal for Jan. 6 book
Axios: Mark Meadows’ inbox
NBC: Secret Service took the cellphones of 24 agents involved in Jan. 6 response and gave them to investigators
Washington Post: Jan. 6 committee hearing will use clips from Roger Stone documentary
Other Trump Investigations
CNN: Justice Department asks judge to order former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to return federal records
CNN: DOJ declares seized Mar-a-Lago materials list full and accurate despite Trump’s claims of planted evidence
Opinion
New York Times (Michelle Goldberg): Trump’s Heartless QAnon Embrace
In The States
New York Times: Mastriano’s Sputtering Campaign: No TV Ads, Tiny Crowds, Little Money
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Mastriano’s supporters say they want Liz Cheney to campaign against their candidate, say she’s out of touch with GOP voters
