This week, the investigations by the House Select Committee on January 6th and the Department of Justice continue to ramp up. Elsewhere in the country, election deniers continue to win their primaries, and states are attempting to increase restrictions on voting, making it harder for Americans to exercise their fundamental right to choose who leads us.
Here’s what you need to know for the weekend:
Main Points for the Weekend:
1. To prepare for their return, the Select Committee is diving deeper into more top Trump allies for the information they have on the former president’s attempt to overthrow the will of the people. The committee is even considering issuing subpoenas to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and has received more information from Secret Service.
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- Top point to make: The Committee has already shown that Trump and MAGA Republicans planned, promoted, and paid for a violent criminal conspiracy to overturn an election they knew they’d lost – and will continue to expose Trump and MAGA Republicans’ plot.
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- If you read one thing: CBS News, 9/13/22: House Jan. 6 committee chair says “goal” is to restart public hearings on Sept. 28. “Thompson said Tuesday that the committee intends to put together an interim report two weeks after the proposed late September hearing, in mid-October, and will finalize the report before the end of the year… Thompson said the committee still wanted to speak to conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas… The committee is also seeking to speak to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Thompson said Tuesday that the committee is ‘in the process of working through a response’ with Gingrich… [Vice President] Pence said in Aug. that he would ‘consider’ speaking to the committee, calling it ‘unprecedented in history’ for a vice president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill, although there have been several instances of both presidents and vice presidents appearing before Congress.”
2. The Justice Department is now investigating more approaches that Trump tried to pursue to overturn the results of the 2020 election. This includes everything from the “fraudulent electors plot, efforts to push baseless election fraud claims and how money flowed to support these various efforts”. Trump’s top-most officials, including Mark Meadows, are complying with the investigation.
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- Top point to make: Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans engaged in a violent criminal conspiracy to overturn the will of the people. They are not above the law and must be held accountable.
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- If you read one thing: New York Times, 9/12/22: Justice Dept. Issues 40 Subpoenas in a Week, Expanding Its Jan. 6 Inquiry. “Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants took phones last week from at least two people: Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, people familiar with the investigation said… The new subpoenas encompass a wide variety of those in Mr. Trump’s orbit, from low-level aides to his most senior advisers… The Justice Department has spent more than a year focused on investigating hundreds of rioters who were on the ground at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But this spring, it started issuing grand jury subpoenas to people like Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer with the pro-Trump Stop the Steal group, who helped plan the march to the Capitol after Mr. Trump gave a speech that day at the Ellipse near the White House. While it remains unclear how many subpoenas had been issued in that early round, the information they sought was broad.”
3. Across the country, MAGA Republicans and activist judges are pushing for laws that will restrict our fundamental rights to choose who leads us. In Wisconsin, the elections commission voted to ban ballot curing. In Pennsylvania, conspiracy theorists are working to push the stop of using voting machines. In Minnesota, MAGA Republicans continue to push for needless rule changes. In Georgia, a new report detailed how voting access has decreased since the 2021 restrictions were passed.
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- Top point to make: The effort by MAGA Republicans to make it harder for people to vote didn’t end on January 6th. They continue to engage in ways to make it harder for the voters to determine who represents us.
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- If you read one thing: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9/15/22: Georgia voting access slips under new laws, research shows. “‘The trend that I see in Georgia overall is that the Legislature has restricted access more than it has expanded it,’ said Liz Avore, vice president of law and policy at Voting Rights Lab, an organization that studies election laws. ‘We’ve seen other states move toward making it easier to vote.’… ‘Some of the changes enacted since the 2020 election have been driven by concerns about voter fraud that weren’t necessarily legitimate, such as restricting drop boxes,’ said Brian Hinkle, senior voting policy researcher at Movement Advancement Project, an organization that ranked Georgia’s policies 39th in the nation. ‘Georgia is one of a handful of states that has moved to implement restrictions on drop boxes after that was a very popular option.’”
Expert voices
Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University: “For 30 years, too many Americans took for granted that democracy was something that someone else did—or rather, that something else did: history by ending, alternatives by disappearing, capitalism by some inexplicable magic. (Russia and China are capitalist, after all.) That era ended when Zelensky emerged one night in February to film himself saying, ‘The president is here.’ If a leader believes that democracy is just a result of larger factors, then he will flee when those larger factors seem to be against him. The issue of responsibility will never arise. But democracy demands ‘earnest struggle,’ as the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said. Ukrainian resistance to what appeared to be overwhelming force reminded the world that democracy is not about accepting the apparent verdict of history. It is about making history; striving toward human values despite the weight of empire, oligarchy, and propaganda; and, in so doing, revealing previously unseen possibilities.” Foreign Affairs
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University: “[I]t’s one thing to call Tucker Carlson a fascist or Paul Gosar or all these people or Trump himself. It’s another thing to label all Republican voters who might like Trump for many reasons. It’s to label them all. Fascists isn’t perhaps very productive, because if you’re trying to get them away, if you’re trying to pry them away. And that’s why Biden was very careful to say MAGA extremists are a part of the Republican, you know, universe. But there are many Republicans who are not like that. And I think that’s probably accurate because we know even from studying regimes, there are people who go along with things or they’re just brainwashed. And secretly those some of those people are looking for an offramp. They’re looking for an exit.” Crooked Media’s Positively Dreadful podcast
Barbara McQuade, former US attorney: “It’s telling that Trump’s lawyers do not repeat in court filings his claims of declassification or planted evidence. In court, lies can get you sanctioned or disbarred. But Trump’s baseless claims undermine public trust and fuel extremist violence.” Tweet
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Here’s the thing: Trump was an elected president, there to serve the country for 4 years. Once gone, he had no more right to gov’t property than any other citizen. He is acting like a king exercising royal prerogatives when in fact, he’s just a law breaker.” Tweet
Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Donald K. Sherman, deputy director for CREW: “The 246-year-old American experiment in self-governance cannot continue if our leaders are free to disregard the very principles on which it is based, and even incite mobs to take up arms against the Constitution and laws, without consequence.” NBC News (Think): Why our 14th Amendment lawsuit against a Trump fanatic sets a key American precedent
Francis Fukuyama, political scientist at Stanford University: “SARGENT: ‘It’s like a right-wing authoritarian Internationale. How do you think about the global right?’ FUKUYAMA: ‘I think it’s much deeper than most people realize. Russia has been giving support to every single one of these right-wing populists. I don’t know of a single democracy that’s not been hit by mountains of Russian disinformation, all of which is trying to weaken people’s confidence and trust in their existing institutions and leaders.’” The Washington Post
Adrienne Jones, assistant professor and pre-law adviser at Morehouse College in Atlanta: “The right to vote, access to healthcare, education, and a habitable environment all matter to democracy. We need to accept that unless these fundamental tenets are protected, our democracy will continue to erode.” Telegraph Herald
Robb Willer, professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior and the director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University, and Jan Voelkel, PhD candidate in sociology at Stanford University: “What worked to increase Americans’ commitment to democracy? One of the most effective approaches showed respondents vivid images of societal instability and violence after democratic collapse in several countries, including Venezuela and Zimbabwe, before culminating in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with narration highlighting the potential for democratic failure in the United States. The success of this approach — which on average reduced support for undemocratic candidates by 4.5 points on a 100-point scale — suggests that Americans simply aren’t imagining what might happen to their own society if democracy were to fail.” Washington Post (Monkey Cage): Here’s what persuades Americans to support democracy over party
Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket (Video): “Republicans are intentionally overwhelming election offices with frivolous requests and mass challenges against thousands of voters, diverting resources when election workers should be focused on preparing for the midterms. This is not an accident. This is part of the plan.” Tweet
Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney, re: Trump’s Save America PAC: “Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, points out that a Justice Department investigation into this scheme would likely build on what the Jan. 6 committee learned. Federal prosecutors have likely collected much of the same documentation. If so, McQuade says, it might implicate something such as wire fraud, which requires use of electronic communications. ‘Proving a fraud can sometimes be a fairly easy task,’ McQuade told me. ‘All you need to show is that people raised money by representing one set of facts, while knowing that those facts were false.’ McQuade characterized how these charges might look: ‘They said the election was stolen because they wanted to get people riled up and extract money from them.’ An alternate falsehood, McQuade said, might be that the cash was raised with the promise of fighting the ‘stolen’ election but was funneled to other purposes.” Washington Post
Patrick Iber, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, re: considerations of the 1930s and democratic reform today: “FDR just had very large majorities! So whether this is possible today is really going to depend on uniting left, center-left, and center around a democracy-protection agenda. Everybody’s got some work to do” Tweet
Jon Steinman, communications & advocacy at Protect Democracy, and Ryan Goodman, NYU law professor and founding co-editor-in-chief of Just Security: ICYMI: discussion with Redditors about the Select Committee on January 6, what to expect from the upcoming weeks and months, and their publication, “Citizens Guide to January 6th.” Reddit | Tweet
Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the States United Democracy Center: “Here’s something we all can agree on: People who don’t believe in our free, fair & secure elections should not be trusted to run them. #SUAction| Timely, important research from our team @statesunited.” Tweet
Noah Bookbinder, president of CREW: “Frightening that a major party nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, who if he wins would oversee elections in that state, recently accused former Vice President Pence of orchestrating a coup in 2020.” Tweet
Julian Zelizer, Princeton University professor of history and public affairs (Audio of radio interview): As criminal investigations against former President Donald Trump mount, a familiar question arises again: Will Republican leaders pull away from Trump? Here & Now’s Anthony Brooks talks with Julian Zelizer, Princeton University professor of history and public affairs. WBUR
