This week, as the January 6 Committee prepares to restart public hearings in the fall, the former president and his allies continue their pursuit of overturning the will of the people. This includes people like Senator Lindsey Graham, who is pushing back against the investigation into election interference in Georgia. While MAGA Republican candidates continue to win their primaries, Americans want those who pose a threat to democracy held accountable and kept out of elected offices.
Here’s what you need to know for the weekend:
Main Points for the Weekend:
1. Recent polling finds that voters across the country believe ‘threats to democracy’ is one of their top issues. Americans recognize the threat posed by the former president and MAGA Republicans who are running for office and want to see them held accountable for their actions.
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- Top point to make: If elected to office, MAGA Republicans will work together to infringe on our fundamental rights, including our right to vote. We must stop them at the ballot box to protect our rights and our country.
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- If you read one thing: NBC News, 8/21/22: NBC News poll: 57% of voters say investigations into Trump should continue. “A clear majority of American voters believe that the various investigations into alleged wrongdoing by former President Donald Trump should continue, according to a national NBC News poll conducted after the FBI searched Trump’s Florida home and recovered documents marked as “top secret” earlier this month… but with Democrats nearly tying Republicans on voter enthusiasm — and with “threats to democracy” overtaking the cost of living as the top issue facing the country for voters.”
2. Senator Lindsey Graham continues to avoid participating in the investigation into the criminal conspiracy to throw out legally cast ballots and attempt to change Georgia’s 2020 election results. To this day, Senator Graham refuses to testify and participate in lawful investigations to help hold those responsible for attempting to take away the people of Georgia’s right to choose their own representatives accountable.
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- Top point to make: No one is above the law, including former presidents, members of Congress, or other elected officials. They all must be held accountable.
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- If you read one thing: New York Times, 8/24/22: For Lindsey Graham, a Showdown in Georgia. “On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit temporarily blocked Mr. Graham from testifying and directed a lower court to determine whether he was entitled to a modification of the subpoena based on constitutional protections afforded to members of Congress. After that, the appeals court said, it will take up the issue “for further consideration.” The matter is now back before Leigh Martin May, a Federal District Court judge who already rejected Mr. Graham’s attempt to entirely avoid testifying; she asked the sides to wrap up their latest round of legal filings by next Wednesday. It seems increasingly likely that Mr. Graham will testify next month.
3. The National Archives wrote a letter claiming Donald Trump had over 700 pages of classified documents with him at Mar-A-Lago. These classified documents were filled with some of the nation’s most vital national security information. And the former president knew having them in his presence was illegal, but kept the documents anyway.
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- Top point to make: Donald Trump took these classified documents from the White House because he believes he is above the law. He must be held accountable for his illegal actions.
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- If you read one thing: New York Times, 8/23/22: Trump Kept Over 700 Pages of Classified Documents, Letter Says. “President Donald J. Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January 2021… The New York Times reported on Monday that investigators had recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club, with each document potentially comprising multiple pages… At one point in the letter, Ms. Wall told Mr. Corcoran that Mr. Biden had agreed with her and others that Mr. Trump’s attempts to assert executive privilege over the materials were baseless… In fact, the letter could further implicate Mr. Trump in a potential crime.”
4. Following the unlawful lead of the former president, GOP candidates across the country put up a fight when they lose elections. After a primary election in Florida this week, Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, Laura Loomer, is following in Trump’s footsteps by threatening to contest the certification of the results of an election she knows she lost.
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- Top point to make: Donald Trump set a dangerous precedent for his followers. The ongoing plot to change the results of elections continues.
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- If you read one thing: Insider, 8/24/22: Far-right GOP candidate Laura Loomer refuses to concede after losing Florida primary, baselessly alleging voter fraud. “Far-right Republican Laura Loomer refused to concede after she lost her primary election in Florida on Tuesday, baselessly blaming voter fraud for her loss… ‘I’m not conceding because I’m a winner, the reality is our Republican Party is broken to its core,’ she said… ‘It breaks my heart that we are in a position in this country today where the Republican Party establishment is participating in the voter fraud machine,’ she said, without providing evidence, or specifying which election she was referring to.”
Expert voices
UPDATED REPORT: States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward: A Democracy Crisis In The Making: August 2022 Edition: As of July 31, 2022, with most state legislative sessions having drawn to a close, there have been at least 244 bills introduced in 33 states that would interfere with election administration—and 24 of this year’s bills have become law (or have been adopted) across 17 states. Overview | Report PDF
Matt Cleary, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University: “In Bolivia in 2019 and Honduras in 2009, incumbent presidents manipulated the election law to try to extend their stay in office. And they did so in a way that you couldn’t quite call a coup, but you would have to call it something like hardball politics. And both of those cases eventually failed because the incumbents didn’t have sufficient support among other powerful institutions in the government. And so they were removed from office. That’s directly comparable to what happened here. Trump did his best. Every political institution in the country said, ‘No, that’s not how we do things here.’ And so he was out.” Politico Magazine
Scott Althaus, political science professor and director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “I think we see very consistent evidence that the American media has been struggling to understand how to responsibly report on a series of events that fall so outside the contemporary norms of American politics that the norms of professional journalism in the United States simply are not able to come to grips with that very easily. And there, I think American journalists have begun to look to places like Italy and South America for models of journalism within systems where the veracity of information coming from political leaders, where the motivation to try to polarize and outrage your constituents for political ends is more normal.” Politico Magazine
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University: “[A]s authoritarianism looks different today, so coups can change. The wild card about the U.S., which really is unique, is guns. There are 400 million guns in circulation. There are people with private arsenals. We tolerate militias, de facto paramilitaries, sovereign sheriffs. What other countries — democracies — have these sovereign sheriffs? Trump couldn’t get the military to help him. And so he’d been cultivating all these different extremists and giving them a big tent for years. And he was able to have a kind of bespoke thug army to converge. This is something that is possible only because we have a very different situation in terms of who can have arms and who can carry them in public and all of that.” Politico Magazine
Norm Eisen, Brookings Institution senior fellow: “In the flurry of attention to Trump, we sometimes neglect perhaps the second greatest threat of autocracy: Ron DeSantis. @AndrewWarrenFL’s 1st amendment lawsuit is #1 some of the most important pushback out there” Tweet
Ty Cobb, Trump White House special counsel in 2017 and 2018: “‘No matter what, the most serious case he faces is the January 6 investigation…Not necessarily because of January 6 alone but coupled with the fake electors scheme and the interference alleged in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.’ ‘”That’s the case that has him at the most risk and is more at the heart of what the Justice Department would take seriously[.]’” Business Insider
Peter Zeidenberg, former federal prosecutor: “told Insider on Monday that he believes the department’s investigation into Trump’s handling of the documents is ‘the most direct and immediate threat by far’ to the former president. He added that Attorney General Merrick Garland and other top DOJ and FBI officials are ‘politically savvy’ and likely anticipated the blowback from Trump and his allies following the raid. ‘The only reason they would open themselves up to it is if they thought’ that the public would view the raid as ‘being completely defensible once the facts came out,’ Zeidenberg said. ‘I think that it’s going to be a pretty clean case,’ he said, adding that by contrast, the department’s Capitol riot probe is much more complex.” Business Insider
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “The district judge overseeing Lindsey Graham’s subpoena quashal has set an expedited briefing schedule that ends 8-31. After her decision, the case will return to the 11th Circuit. The order is a good read-she sets forth the precise speech & debate clause issue she will consider.” Tweet
Barbara McQuade, former US attorney: “Again (deep breath), the statutes listed on the search warrant for which probable cause was found do NOT require that the documents be classified. Trump’s ‘declassification’ defense is not just made-up and silly, it’s an irrelevant distraction to give defenders a talking point.” Tweet
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University, Dennis Aftergut, former federal prosecutor, and Jeffrey Abramson, professor of law and government at the University of Texas, Austin:“In this sense, all of us who opt for legal process over threats of war and violence are conservatives. The system of checks and balances at work in the Mar-a-Lago search is familiar, tried, fact-based, and limited by oversight. On this foundation lies whatever hope there is that reasonable people on both sides of the political divide may find common ground and avoid the chaos that threatens everyone’s liberty.” Fox News Op-Ed: Checks and balances on search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and resort display limited government at its best
Nicholas Valentino, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and a principal investigator on the American National Election Studies 2024 project: “Two types of events in upcoming elections, Valentino writes, ‘indicate that the U.S. has broken from mainstream democratic systems’: ‘First, widespread refusal among losing candidates and members of their party to accept their losses in these elections; and second, state officials in certain states refusing to certify elections where candidates of their own party lose. Note these types of threats are significantly more serious to democracy even than the myriad changes to election laws that make it harder for citizens to vote, even when those laws disproportionately affect some groups more than others. This would be voter nullification after the fact.’” NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall Column: When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner
Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at M.I.T.: ““The widespread acceptance among Republican voters of Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is, in Acemoglu’s view, ‘a ‘signal.’ You are signaling to the rest of the population and especially to the media that you are highly discontented, and you are distinct from the well-educated elites benefiting from the current system. If so, the more outrageous this signal sounds, the more effective it may be to some of the people who are trying to send the signal.’ Acemoglu acknowledged that this ‘is just a hypothesis, but if it were true, it would imply that demonizing Trump supporters would make things worse for Democrats. It may not be so much that they are completely delusional, but they are angry and feel outside of the mainstream. If so, finding ways of broadening the mainstream coalition may be a much more effective response.’” NYT’s Thomas B. Edsall Column: When It Comes to Eating Away at Democracy, Trump Is a Winner
Robb Willer, professor of sociology and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab: “There are also concerning levels of anti-democratic attitudes in the American mass public, both Democrats and Republicans report being willing to vote for candidates who would even if those candidates broke longstanding norms and laws we associate with democratic practices if the voters thought that it would serve their partisan interests…This is a really dangerous situation, a recipe for potential further democratic backsliding, and that motive motivated us to do this project, which is a very large-scale effort to identify effective ways to intervene on this problem.” KOMO News
Harry Litman, former US attorney: “The obstruction just keeps getting stronger and stronger. Several witnesses now saying [T]rump went through boxes personally. That puts him 4-square in obstruction land. Moreover, looking more righteous–far from a picayune case, it captures his basic sin of thinking he is the gov” Tweet
Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): “After years of fighting and @CREWcrew’s recent appeals court win, the Department of Justice released the legal memo former AG Bill Barr relied on to say there was no basis to charge Donald Trump with obstruction of justice. And it’s a doozy. The memo presents a breathtakingly generous view of the law and facts for Donald Trump. It twists the facts and the law to benefit Trump and does not comport with a serious reading of the law of obstruction of justice or the facts as found by Special Counsel Mueller… The memo is not just wrong; it is dangerous coming from a usually respected office at the Department of Justice. It is clear why Barr did not want the public to see it.” Twitter Thread
Hakeem Jefferson, political scientist at Stanford University: “‘It’s not by some dent of the universe or some sort of random act that the faces that we see in these photographs and videos from Jan. 6 are a bunch of white people,’ Jefferson says. ‘We were watching, in real time, a racial backlash.’ More precisely, he says, it is part of a white backlash against the very perception of racial progress and the idea, unrealized though it may be, of multiracial democracy. ‘Some white people are really concerned about a loss of power and status in American society,’ Jefferson says.” NPR
Robert Pape, political scientist and director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats: “‘What we are really observing are the consequences of the fear of white status decline,’ Pape says. Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats, has been researching those who were arrested for storming the Capitol, digging into the data of who was there that day. The results have surprised him. ‘Of the over 800 people who have been arrested on Jan. 6, we see a striking pattern,’ he says. The pattern? ‘They don’t fit the profile of a far-right extremist.’” NPR
Norm Eisen, chair of States United Democracy Center (Video): “Elections are big national events, but they’re run by the states. It matters that your governor, attorney general & secretary of state believe in & are committed to defending free, fair & secure elections. They’re the guardians of our democracy. At @Statesunited we lay it out:” Tweet
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, NYU professor: “Victimhood cults allow setbacks the leader experiences due to his own incompetence or corruption to be explained away to his faithful supporters. That’s the core intuition of Trump’s Big Lie, which claims his victimization on an unprecedented scale –a whole presidential election stolen from him!– while allowing Trump’s followers to avoid reckoning with his many failures as president.” Lucid
Amy Cooter, Senior Research Fellow at Middlebury College’s Center for Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism: “I do know that violent threats and plots need to be treated seriously – especially those that focus on specific people and their supposed tyranny. It will also be important to observe how militias and related groups respond to these convictions: Claims that the judicial process was corrupt have already surfaced, which could fuel additional mistrust in American political systems as the nation heads into midterm congressional elections.” Tweet | The Conversation
Victoria Bassetti, Senior Counsel with States United Democracy Center: “The election subversion trend in state legislatures is evolving and deepening. …In barely 7 months more than 244 bills that would increase the risk of subversion have been introduced. That’s more than at this time in 2021. The perverse creativity of election subversion is growing.” States United Democracy Center + Protect Democracy Press Briefing
Rachel Homer, Counsel with Protect Democracy: “[T]he Independent State Legislature theory increases the risk of election subversion. It’s not a separate issue from the threats we’ve identified – it’s part of this same trend.” Though she noted, due to federal law, “even under the most expansive version of the theory, it would not directly give state legislatures the authority to determine election winners contrary to the will of the people.” States United Democracy Center + Protect Democracy Press Briefing
Megan Boler Bellamy, Vice President of Law and Policy at Voting Rights Lab: “From Georgia to Texas, in the past two years, we have seen state legislators introduce a range of legislation that has had a chilling effect on both voters and election officials – legislation essentially treating the places Americans vote like crime scenes.” States United Democracy Center + Protect Democracy Press Briefing
Olivia Troye, Founder of The Troye Group and former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence: “[Disinformation campaigns] are profoundly damaging to our democracy, but they also present a serious risk to our national security as we head into the midterms. Adding that, “As someone who has experienced some of the uglier consequences of election lies and conspiracy theories firsthand with threats to my personal safety and who has spent my career dedicated to keeping this country safe, I am deeply concerned for the future of our free and fair elections.” States United Democracy Center + Protect Democracy Press Briefing
Barbara Walter, political scientist at UC San Diego: “Modi and the BJP are to India what Trump and the Republican Party are to the US. It’s impossible to read this article and not see the parallels in how democracy is being consciously destroyed in both places.” NYT Piece | Tweet
