By Joe Miller
This Week: MAGA Threats To Democracy Escalate As Jan. 6 Committee Expedites Investigations
As the January 6 Committee gears up for perhaps a final public hearing (originally scheduled for this afternoon), staffers are working overtime to process a new batch of texts from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, conduct more interviews scheduled with Trump loyalists, and finish a final report due by the end of the year — not to mention an effort to get the Presidential Election Reform Act through Congress.
In Arizona, the Jan. 6 committee has been working to uncover efforts to overturn the 2020 election by prominent Republican officials. A federal judge approved the Committee’s phone records subpoena for Arizona GOP Chairwoman and false elector Kelli Ward, and far-right state Rep. Mark Finchem recently revealed that he sat for interviews with both the Jan. 6 committee and the Department of Justice over his attempts to convince former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. In Wisconsin, the Jan. 6 Committee subpoenaed Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to testify about Trump’s attempts to coerce him to illegally “decertify” the 2020 election over the summer. Just before his scheduled deposition, Vos filed a lawsuit aiming to block the subpoena and avoid accountability.
Like the Jan. 6 committee probe, other investigations are pursuing evidence of an ongoing criminal conspiracy to overturn election results. Last week, Georgia false elector Cathy Latham appeared at a deposition to testify about her role in a voting systems breach in Coffee County, invoking the fifth amendment multiple times for self-incriminating answers. In a Minnesota federal court, far-right MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell is the subject of a new criminal investigation scrutinizing his efforts to damage election equipment across the country.
As the investigations move forward, election deniers have continued their ongoing plot to threaten the electoral process. In Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, and eight other states, MAGA groups are knocking on doors in search of election fraud, raising concerns among civil rights groups and local election officials of harassment and voter intimidation.
Elsewhere, in ongoing anti-democratic efforts to subvert the will of voters:
In Nevada, voting rights experts are raising concerns that time-intensive plans to hand-count ballots this year in Nye and Esmeralda counties could give rise to distrust, false theories, and misinformation about the election results in November.
In Michigan, former state senator Patrick Colbeck announced a new voter intimidation effort deploying election deniers across the state to harass and threaten local administrators. Meanwhile, Antrim County election officials are still being bombarded with public records requests by election deniers.
And finally, in Georgia, new polling shows that Georgia voters prioritize threats to democracy as the second-most-important issue in the country, above the economy, immigration, and abortion. Georgia election officials are swamped by a continuous flood of voter registration challenges from election deniers ahead of the midterm elections — even as Atlanta-based Gwinnett County has rejected more than two-thirds of the 37,000 challenges so far.
