Herschel Walker has to make three phone calls

Reply to the Rice Tear–Real Voting Fraud Against The Trump–DeMumford Second Impeachment

Mr. Rice was upset and put the iPad down. “Listen to what this moron says. This is what I was trying to avoid. He was shocked when he declared that Mr. Trump had lost the election at a campaign stop. It was very painful.

He lost this primary after getting less than a quarter of the vote. He had won the general election with a total of 62 percent.

Mr. Meijer, who lost his primary, said in an interview that he was surprised Republicans did not receive backlash from voters for their actions. The argument was that voters had switched back to Mr. Trump due to the left-ward tilt of the Biden administration.

“These massive uses of executive power,” he said, “make people feel like, if you are not with us pushing on the brake pedal, then you are de facto helping the Democratic majority push on the gas.”

The entire voting fraud industry has been a bad-faith invention that has allowed it to serve as cover for voter suppression targeting minorities. We know that because every Republican administration in the last quarter of a century has tried desperately to find evidence of such fraud on a scale sufficient to swing elections, and every such investigation has failed abysmally. Kemp tried to find such fraud while he was Georgia’s secretary of state. Ron DeSantis of Florida continues to try to find it, but so far he hasn’t found it.

In Oklahoma, Mr. Mullin stood out from the pack of Republican Senate candidates by introducing a bill to officially expunge Mr. Trump’s second impeachment. It faulted the Democratic impeachment leaders for failing to note the “unusual voting patterns” and “voting anomalies of the 2020 presidential election,” or to understand why Republicans doubted that Mr. Trump had “not won re-election.” The resolution co-sponsored by over 30 lawmakers did not advance, but it did curry favor with the former president. Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Mullin.

Mr. Mullin spent a hot Saturday at his ranch campaigning for his fellow cattlemen at their annual conference in Norman, Okla. One attendee applauded him for taking a stand against the Electoral College count, knowing he would be ridiculed for buying into conspiracy theories. Mr. Reimer, who manages a beef ranch, had questions about the validity of the vote.

The campaign gave out fliers declaring that “no one in Congress has worked harder to SAVE AMERICA” and proclaiming Mr. Mullin “TRUMP-TOUGH.” At the top of the list was a new refrain: secure our elections.

When did Donald Trump become a lawyer, he would make sure that he was not indicted on Fox News, nor would he be in a Georgia courtroom

The reporting was done by a group of people. Produced by Sean Catangui and Hang Do Thi Duc.

The Times drew on data from various sources to analyze the 139 objectors, including from the A-Mark Foundation, Ballotpedia, CQ, The Cook Political Report, Daily Kos, L2 and LegiStorm. Andrew Beveridge, and Susan Weber contributed to the data analysis.

Griggs calls her a great lawyer, a good prosecutor, but says that he just thinks that. And I think that justice is somewhere in the middle.” We met in his law office, and when I brought up Trump, Griggs pulled a book from his shelf and read aloud from Title 21, the state elections law, which bars “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” Griggs told me that if you played the recording of Trump’s phone conversations to the grand jury and read state codes, they would indict him. Griggs said it was interesting to find himself, in this case, on the “other side of the ‘v.’” — meaning, on the side of the prosecution rather than the defense. He didn’t say if this particular prosecutor gave him hope, but he sounded upbeat as he noted that the former president, if indicted, would receive his due process “not on Fox News, not on his Truth Social, but in a Georgia courtroom.”

Compelling testimony from witnesses who don’t live in Georgia requires Willis to use a process that involves getting judges in the states where they live to order them to appear. She filed petitions Friday that will be used for subpoenas.

The House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the Capitol: Directing the Chairman to issue a subpoena for relevant documents and testimony under oath from Donald John Trump

Flynn didn’t immediately respond to email and phone messages seeking comment, and his lawyer also didn’t immediately return an email seeking comment. Gingrich referred questions to his attorney, who declined to comment. Sheschmann couldn’t immediately be reached.

The case leading to the November election will be one month from now and she intends to take a monthlong break.

The petitions were filed to have the witnesses appear in November. But the process for securing testimony from out-of-state witnesses sometimes takes a while, so it appears Willis is putting the wheels in motion for activity to resume after her self-imposed pause.

We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion. And every American is entitled to those answers, so we can act now to protect our Republic. So this afternoon, I am offering this resolution that the committee direct the chairman to issue a subpoena for relevant documents and testimony under oath from Donald John Trump in connection with the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol.

He wrote, “I also told the President exactly how he can appoint a special counsel with full subpoena power to ensure those who are attempting to steal the 2020 election through voter fraud are charged and convicted and to ensure Donald Trump continues as our President.” As we know by now, the idea for a special counsel was not just an idle suggestion.

The fake electors’ plan was also tied to another plan, the coercive pressure campaign to make Vice President Mike Pence reject or refuse to count certain Biden electoral votes, so that President Donald Trump would, quote, win reelection instead. This is what the Vice President had to say about it.

The petition seeking Flynn’s testimony says he appeared in an interview on conservative cable news channel Newsmax and said Trump “could take military capabilities” and place them in swing states and “basically re-run an election in each of those states.”

He also met with Trump, attorney Sidney Powell and others at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, for a meeting that, according to news reports, “focused on topics including invoking martial law, seizing voting machines, and appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate the 2020 election,” Willis wrote.

She wrote that the House committee also revealed that Herschmann had “multiple conversations” with Eastman, Giuliani, Powell “and others known to be associated with the Trump Campaign, related to their efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.” She stated that he had a “heated conversation” with him concerning his concerns in Georgia.

She named Penrose as a cyber investigations, operations and forensics consultant who works with Powell and others associated with the Trump campaign.

He also communicated with Powell and others regarding an agreement to hire data solutions firm SullivanStrickler to copy data and software from voting system equipment in Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, as well as in Michigan and Nevada, Willis wrote. Penrose did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.

He wrote in a petition requesting Lee’s testimony that he was involved in an effort to pressure Ruby, who was the subject of false claims about election fraud. He could not be reached for comment.

Special Grand Juries: Why the 2019 November Voucher was on His radar, not in yours truly: Addressing a Problem with Elections in Georgia

In Georgia, special grand juries investigate complex cases with large numbers of witnesses and potential logistical concerns. They can compel evidence and subpoena witnesses for questioning and, unlike regular grand juries, can also subpoena the target of an investigation to appear before it.

When its investigation is complete, the special grand jury issues a final report and can recommend action. It’s then up to the district attorney to decide whether to ask a regular grand jury for an indictment.

Forrest K. Lehman, the director of elections and registration in the county, asked if the November election had become on his radar. “It should be number one.”

There are a lot of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of Absentee ballot envelopes and applications.

Sue Ertmer, a county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis. said she received 120 requests for records in a couple of weeks. She said that when you get those types of requests it can be hard to get other things done. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

A number of election officials said that the requests come from a variety of sources, but that one person has encouraged their supporters to submit them: the pillow seller who has been promoting theories about the 2020 vote. At a seminar hosted byMr. Lindell in Springfield, election deniers gave instructions on how to file records requests.

The job of an election worker is to give information to the public. He said that supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter in a number of election jurisdictions. The records support the theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide according to Mr. Lindall.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol. How Did President Donald Trump Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election?

Thank you, Mr. chairman. In our past hearings, you have seen direct evidence that President Trump sent a crowd of his supporters to the Capitol on January 6th, knowing they were armed and angry. This is the last chance he had to prevent the orderly transition of power and disrupt the joint session.

The mechanics of American democracy have become suspect two years after the presidential election was disrupted by violence. Insturment is on the rise, while self-appointed watchdogs search for fraud and monitor the vote, as another Election Day looms.

The Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol will be in order. At any time, the chair can declare the committee in recess. The chair states that the committee has approved the release of the material present at the hearing.

Good afternoon, and may God bless the United States of America. The committee has been presenting its findings to the American people for four months. We knew that some viewers of those proceedings would wrongly think that the committee’s investigation was partisan.

That’s why I asked those who were skeptical of our work to — simply to listen, to listen to the evidence, to hear the testimony with an open mind, and to let the facts speak for themselves before reaching any judgment. Over the course of these hearings, the evidence has proven that there were a multipart plan led by former President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Trump’s campaign learned very soon after election day that they had probably lost the election. The race for President Biden was called on November 7th, but his chances of pulling an upset were almost zero at the time. Begin the videotape.

Thank you for your words, Mr. Chairman. President Trump’s efforts to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election were not limited to the big lie and pressuring state officials and the Department of Justice officials. Another key part of the president’s effort was a scheme to assemble fake electors to cast false electoral votes in the states that President Trump lost.

How do we know? How have we been able to show a clear picture of what happened? Because of the testimony we’ve heard and that we have presented to you through these proceedings, because of the documentary evidence we’ve gathered and also made available directly to you, the American people.

In the end, the majority cooperated with the investigation, and we have shown you the evidence that has come from Republican witnesses. This investigation isn’t about politics, I told you in June. It’s not about partying.

Which one has that been? Aides who’ve worked loyally for Donald Trump for years, Republican state officials and legislators, Republican electors, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, political professionals who worked at the highest levels of the Trump campaign, Trump appointees who served in the most senior positions in the Justice Department, President Trump’s staff and closest advisers in the White House, members of the — President Trump’s family, his own White House counsel.

I’ve served in Congress a long time. It’s tough for Congressional investigations to obtain evidence like what we received, least of all a detailed view into a president’s inner circle. And I want to be clear. Not all these witnesses were thrilled to talk to us. Some up — put up quite a fight.

Summary of a Special Working Group Hearing on the Election of January 6th: Rudy Giuliani, Deputy Treasurer of Fulton County, Georgia

Today there is one more difference. Pursuant to the notice circulated prior to today’s proceedings, we are convened today not as a hearing but as a formal committee business meeting so that, in addition to presenting evidence, we can potentially hold a committee vote on further investigative action based upon that evidence.

Thank you very much, Chairman. Much has happened since our last public hearing on July 21st. We received new and old documentation from the Secret service as the chairman mentioned, and we continue to analyze it. New witness testimony includes claims of attempts to obstruct our investigation and cover up facts.

And according to public reporting, the Department of Justice has been very active in pursuing many of the issues identified in our prior hearings. Our committee may ultimately decide to make a series of criminal referrals to the Department of Justice, but we recognize that our role is not to make decisions regarding prosecution.

The preamble to our Constitution recites among its purposes, to “establish justice.” The US Department of Justice has that responsibility. The committee has a responsibility to propose reforms to prevent January 6th from happening again. The Electoral Count Act needs to be amended to make sure that no future plot to overturn an election can succeed.

We will see new evidence but also evidence you’ve seen before, as the chairman said. The overwhelming evidence shows that the central cause of January 6th was one man, Donald Trump. None of this would have happened without him.

A report about the criminal investigation of Fulton County cites Georgia law that states that if someone attempts to cause another person to commit election fraud, that person has committed a felony. Evidence suggests that Trump committed at least several acts between Election Day, 2020, and January 6, 2021, when Congress delayed certifying the election due to the Capitol insurrection.

Many of those who stepped forward to help, including Rudy Giuliani, knew they never had real evidence sufficient to change the election results. On January 5th, they acknowledged they were still trying to find that phantom evidence. Of course, as a result of making intentionally false claims of election fraud, Mr. Giuliani’s license to practice law has now been suspended.

The story of January 6, 2016: President Trump’s illegitimacy and the failure of the nation’s institutions to overturn the election

When security assistance arrived at the Capitol, and the tide began to turn against the insurrection, the president finally gave his instruction at 4:17 p.m. So after multiple hours of rioting and more than 100 serious injuries suffered by our law enforcement officers, the crowd finally began to disperse.

It was the Vice President, the Secretary of the Department of Justice, the White House staff, State Republican officials and others that helped defeat President Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

All of these people had a hand in stopping Donald Trump. This leads us to a key question. Why do Americans think that our Constitution and our institutions are invulnerable to another attack? Why would the institutions fail next time? A key lesson of this investigation is this.

Cheney asked why Americans should assume that the institutions will be in better shape the next time around, if the wrong people are in power. The story of January 6 turned out to be a string of officials, many of whom were Republicans, who refused to go along with the scheme. She said that the nation’s institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make sure that they are strong despite the political consequences.

And also, please consider this. The rulings of our courts are respected and obeyed because we as citizens pledge to accept and honor them. Most importantly, our president, who has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the laws, swears to accept them. What happens when the president disregards the court’s rulings as illegitimate, when he disregards the rule of law?

The courts rejected President Trump’s claims and his appointees in the Department of Justice did the same. President Trump was aware of the truth. His experts and staff were telling him what he needed to know. He made a decision to ignore the courts, to ignore the Justice Department, to ignore his campaign leadership and to pursue an illegal attempt to overturn the election.

I’m going to read from one of the judge’s statements at the sentencing hearing. “High ranking members of Congress and state officials, who know perfectly well the claim of fraud was and is untrue and that the election was legitimate, are so afraid of losing their power, they won’t say so. It needs to be clear that it’s not patriotism to support a man who lost the election and is not in favor of the Constitution. Mr. Chairman, the violence and lawlessness of January 6th was unjustifiable, but our nation cannot only punish the foot soldiers who stormed our Capitol.

So, as we watch the evidence today, please consider where our nation is in its history. Do we have enough time to live for another 246 years? Most people in most places on Earth have not been free. America is an exception, and America continues only because we bind ourselves to our founders’ principles, to our Constitution.

We recognize that some principles must be beyond politics, inviolate, and more important than any single American who has ever lived. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. I yield back.

The President’s Mind Was Made Up: Advising Donald Trump to Count Absence of Ballots, to Declar a Prediction for the Election

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Shortly after the election, we will begin this meeting by returning to election night. We’ve presented testimony before about how the election results were expected. In certain states, ballots cast by mail before Election Day would be counted only after the polls closed that evening.

That meant that election results would not be known for some time. Bill Stepien, the campaign manager for Donald Trump, and Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, had advised Donald Trump to encourage Republicans to vote, but he did not. [Begin videotape]

I just remember generally, you know, you had people arguing that we had a — a very, very robust get out the vote effort and that, you know, mail in ballots could be a good thing for us if we looked at it correctly.

I invited Kevin McCarthy to join the meeting, he being of like mind on — on the issue with me, in which we made our case for — for why we believed mail in balloting, mail in voting not to be a bad thing for his campaign, but, you know, the President’s mind was made up. [End videotape]

So it was expected before the election that the initial counts in some states, in other words, those votes cast on Election Day, would be more heavily Republican and this would create the false perception of a lead for President Trump, a so-called red mirage. But as the results of the absentee ballots that were later counted, there could be trends towards Vice President Biden as those mail in ballots were counted.

Donald Trump was told by advisers that he would need to wait for the remaining votes to be counted to declare victory. Here is campaign manager, Bill Stepien. [Begin videotape]

It was too early to be making that kind of call. Ballots — ballots were still being counted. Ballots were still going to be counted for days. And it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that. I believe my recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race.

The American public does not find this a good thing. This is a serious problem for our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We want everyone to stop voting. End the videotape.

There is no doubt that President Trump’s pressure campaign on Vice President Pence was significant. On January 6th, the President called the Vice President to demand that he overturn the results of the election. The witnesses to the Select Committee told them about President Trump’s invective towards his own Vice President.

I was told that there was a chance that a declaration of victory within the White House would be sought by some prior to the election results being known. He was trying to figure out how to avoid the Vice President having to opine on something when he might not have enough information to do so. [End videotape]

Now following this conversation, Mr. Jacob drafted a memo to Mr. Short, which the Select Committee got from the National Archives. The memo was sent on November 3rd, Election Day, and advised, “it is essential that the Vice President not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts.” Mr. Trump consulted with one of his outside advisers about his election night strategy, Tom Fitton.

Everyone knew that the counting of the votes would not stop until after the election, but that this was part of the plan of President Trump. Mr. Fitton spoke with the President after 5 pm on Election Day.

And just a few days before the election, Steve Bannon, a former Trump chief White House strategist and outside adviser to President Trump, spoke to a group of his associates from China and said this. [Begin videotape]

He’s going to say he was a winner. It’s going to be a huge topic of discussion when you wake up. It’s going to be crazy if Trump is losing by 10:00 or 11:00 at night because he’s going to say they stole it.

I want the Attorney General to shut down ballot places in all 50 states. It’s going to be no, he is not going out easy. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit. End videotape.

Mr. Bannon didn’t testify in our investigation. He’s awaiting sentence after being convicted of criminal contempt of Congress. But the evidence indicates that Mr. Bannon had advance knowledge of Mr. Trump’s intent to declare victory falsely on election night, but also that Mr. Bannon knew about Mr. Trump’s planning for January 6th. Here’s what Bannon said on January 5th. [Begin videotape]

The Senate Appropriate Hearings of Donald Trump’s Close Adviser and President Trump: A View of Mr. Stone’s Execution

Tomorrow is going to be a terrible day. It’s all near each other. and now we’re on, as they say, the point of attack, right, the point of attack tomorrow. I will tell you that it’s not going to happen like you think it will. I’m ok. It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. Tomorrow is game day, thanks to you, and it’s because you made this happen.

Another close associate of Donald Trump apparently knew of Mr. Trump’s intentions as well. Roger Stone is a political operative with a reputation for dirty tricks. He was sentenced to over three years in prison after being convicted of lying to Congress and other crimes. He’s also a longtime adviser to President Trump and was in communication with President Trump throughout 2020. On December 23, 2020, Mr. Trump pardoned Roger Stone. The Select Committee got a look at Mr. Stone before and after the election. [ph], pursuant to a subpoena.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

‘Are We Up in the Air?’ A Conversation with Roger Stone on December 27th, January 6th, 2012 at the Capitol

I suspect it’ll be — I really do suspect it will still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is 9/10 of the law.

Even though we don’t have much else relating to Roger Stone’s communications, there are still posts on social media that say he spoke with Donald Trump on December 27th as they prepared for January 6th. Roger Stone talked about his conversations with President Trump.

Roger Stone also maintained direct connections to two groups that were responsible for violently attacking the Capitol, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. Individuals from both of these organizations have been charged with the crime of seditious conspiracy. Seditious conspiracy, what is it?

As we all know now, the Oath Keepers did play a specific role in January 6th and had stashed weapons in Virginia for further violence that evening. Also, on that day, the Secret Service was readying its security precautions for the President’s speech at the Ellipse the next day. The items that would not be allowed at the rally site are armored, tactical vests, and ballistic helmets, which were ordered by the Secret Service deputy chief.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

Enrique Tarrio and the Proud Boys: The January 6 Events in Washington, D.C., February 23, 2016, 13:10 – 11:00 AM ET, Detected

Roger Stone’s connection with Enrique Tarrio and the Proud Boys is well documented by video evidence, with phone records the Select Committee has obtained. Tarrio, along with other Proud Boys, has been charged with multiple crimes concerning the attack on January 6th, including seditious conspiracy. During the attack, Tarrio sent a message to other Proud Boys claiming, we did that.

Chairman Bennie Thompson said that the Trump administration started a multi-part plan to overturn the election. The rally, and the violence, of January 6 were just one piece of a much bigger strategy.

The network decision was given to the president when the networks called it. That afternoon at some point, myself And a handful of other folks went over and sat down with the President and communicated that the odds of us prevailing in legal challenges were very small.

There’s a discussion going on in the Oval. The President says it could have been Pompeo but he said words to the effect that we lost. We — we need to let that issue go to the next guy, meaning President Biden.

I remember maybe a week after the election was called, I popped into the Oval just to like give the President the headlines and see how he was doing. He was looking at the TV and wondered if he had lost to the effing guy.

And the President said I think — so he had said something to the effect of, I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost. [End videotape]

President Trump knew he had only weeks left in office and he rushed to finish his unfinished business. One key example is this: President Trump issued an order for large-scale US troop withdrawals. He didn’t think about the consequences for fragile governments on the front lines of the fight.

He immediately signed the order to immediately withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Ethiopia, all required to be completed before Biden’s inauguration, knowing he was going to leave office. As you watch this video, remember that Generalkear was the national security adviser to the vice president and the chief of staff to the National Security Council for President Trump.

Are you familiar with a memo that the President reportedly signed on November 11, 2020, ordering that troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan and Somalia?

You may have seen things where a memo was from Johnny McEntee to Douglas Macgregor. It says, here’s your task, to get US forces out of out of Somalia, get US forces out of Afghanistan. Do you think it is appropriate to say that you discussed the decision to leave Afghanistan with Colonel Douglas Macgregor when you first met him?

DOD leadership was not going to take any of those steps without an order after he responded back to you on the same day.

I told Mc Entee that he should be in the order I was in when I spoke to him. I said, If you want this to happen or the President wants this to happen, he’s got to write an order.

Well, I sketched on a piece of paper for him some key statements. The President orders it. What is the right word for this type of language?

Mc Entee took it up, and brought it to the President. The President signs it and boom, it’s over — faxed over e-mail, scanned over. Kash has delivered it to me.

Reply to “Comment on ‘Understanding the decision to leave Afghanistan” by S.A. Macgregor and P.P. Omar’s son, S.J. PPO and S. A.

As soon as I saw that, I would do something physical, I told the PPO and Macgregor. Because I thought what that was then was a tremendous disservice to the nation. That was a very hard fought issue. There were people that did not agree with the decision to leave Afghanistan.

I appreciate their concerns. An immediate departure that was said to be a catastrophic would have happened. It’s the same thing what President Biden went through. It would have been a debacle if it happened. [End videotape]

Keep in mind the order was for an immediate withdrawal. It would have been very bad. Nevertheless, President Trump signed the order. The actions of a President who knows his term will end are of the most consequential kind. At the same time that President Trump was acknowledging privately that he had lost the election, he was hearing that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

When wasn’t everything that was found to matter in the presidential campaign? (I’m sorry if you’re not finding anything to change the results in the states)

I remember a call with Mr. Meadows, where Mr. Meadows was asking me what I was finding and if I was finding anything. I told him we were not finding anything that would be enough to change the results in any of the states.

It would be our job to track it down and come up dry because the allegation didn’t prove to be true. And we’d have to, you know, relay the news that, yeah, that that — that tip that your — someone told you about those — those votes or that fraud or, you know, nothing came of it. It’s an easier job to tell the President about wild allegations than it is to tell the truth.

What was generally discussed on that topic was whether the fraud, maladministration, abuse or irregularities if aggregated and read most favorably to the campaign, would that be outcome determinative. And I think everyone’s assessment in the room, at least amongst the staff, Marc Short, myself, and Greg Jacob, was that it was not sufficient to be outcome determinant. [End videotape]

The Case that President Donald Trump and his Allies Lost in a U.S. Supreme Court Decision: The White House Christmas Eve Addressed by Mark Meadows

It’s the right of any candidate to make arguments in an election dispute. Nobody believes that President Trump’s litigation was unsuccessful. The committee told you at previous hearings that a total of 62 election lawsuits were filed by the Trump campaign and his allies between November 4th and January 6th of 2021. There were 61 losses and only one victory in those cases, which has no affect on the outcome for any candidate.

The language criticizes the lack of evidence for election fraud in those lawsuits. For example, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania wrote, quote, charges require specific allegations and proof. We have neither here. A federal judge in Wisconsin wrote, quote, the court has allowed the former president the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.

Another judge in Michigan called the claims, quote, nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were either destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden. The case that Sidney Powell was implicated in was described by a federal judge as a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.

On December 11th, Trump’s allies lost a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court that he regarded as his last chance at success in the courts. A newly obtained Secret Service message from that day shows how angry President Trump was about the outcome. Quote, just FYI, POTUS is pissed. His lawsuit was denied by the Supreme Court.

He is livid now. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows, was present for that conversation and described it in this way. [Begin videotape]

This is the day that the Supreme Court had rejected that case. Mr. Meadows and I were in the White House residence at a Christmas reception. As we were walking home after the Christmas reception, the President walked out of the Oval office and we crossed paths in the Rose Garden colonnade.

The President was fired up about the Supreme Court decision. And so I was standing next to Mr. Meadows, but I had stepped back. I was at least two or three feet diagonal from him. The President raged about the decision, and why didn’t we call, as well as this typical anger at the decision.

December 14th was the day that the states certified their votes and sent them to Congress. That was the end of the matter for me. I didn’t see — you know, I — I thought that this would lead inexorably to a new administration.

I told him that I thought there was no point in pursuing litigation if the Electoral College had met, and I believed that the means for him to do so were closed at that point.

Dominion: Is It Really Necessary to Use a Voting Machine? — Gene Scalia and the President of the United States

Gene Scalia visited the President in December and explained to him the situation clearly. Begin videotape.

So, I had put a call in to the president. I might have called on the 13th. We spoke, I believe, on the 14th, in which I conveyed to him that I thought that it was time for him to acknowledge that President Biden had prevailed in the election. I said that when the legal process is exhausted and the Electoral College has voted, that’s the point at which the outcome needs to be expected.

I told him that I did believe, yes, that once the — those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established that had affected the outcome of the election, then unfortunately I believed that what had to be done was concede the outcome. [End videotape]

The campaign to overturn the 2020 election was organized, even if it was chaotic. Rather, key members of the administration, including the former president and key advisers, deliberately pushed to overcome electoral defeat. “Possession is nine tenths of the law,” Roger Stone said, “We won. F–k you.”

I was most disturbed by the allegations against the voting machines from the Dominion and found absolutely zero basis for them. I told them it was crazy. and they were wasting their time on that, and it was doing a grave — grave disservice to the country.

We have a company that’s very suspect. Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this?

More voters than Absentees in the United States. The Antrim County Election Commission: What Donald Trump lacked in 2011 and what he had to say

We definitely talked about Antrim County again. That was sort of done at that point because the hand recount had been done and all that. But we cited back to that to say, you know, this is an example of what people are telling you and what’s being filed in some of these court filings that are just not supported by the evidence.

In addition, there is the highly troubling matter of Dominion voting systems. In one Michigan county alone, 6000 votes were changed from Trump to Biden, and the same system is used in most states in the country.

I would tell him how crazy some of the allegations were, and how ridiculous they were. I’m talking about things like more votes cast by Absentees in Pennsylvania than by Absentees in the state, which was easy to blow up. There was never an interest in what the actual facts were.

There were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more people vote for you than people vote against you. To figure it out is easy, it’s by the thousands.

He called it a big vote dump in Detroit. And that — you know, he said people saw boxes coming in to the counting station at all hours of the morning. And I said, Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit. TheyCentralized the Counting process so they don’t count in each precinct.

With regard to Georgia, we looked at the tape. The witnesses were interviewed. There is no luggage at all. The president kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, no, sir, there is no suitcase. You can see that video again and again.

There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that’s just how they move ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that.

There were boxes, Democrats, and suitcases of ballots under the table. You all saw it on television, totally fraudulent. End the videotape.

This happened over and over again, and our committee’s report will document it, purposeful lies made in public directly at odds with what Donald Trump knew from unassailable sources, the Justice Department’s own investigations and his own campaign. Donald Trump maliciously repeated this nonsense to a wide audience over and over again.

His intent was to deceive. President Trump’s plan involved trying to get officials to change the result of the election in states he lost. He personally contacted state officials and pressured them to change the election results in some states. The actions taken by the president made it clear how he intended to prevent the orderly transfer of power.

It was the duty of the president to ensure the integrity of the election in Georgia and he did that in two phone calls, the ex-president said.

What Will We Do Now? – Jan-6 Committee Hearing Tracscript: The Secretary of State Can’t Just Obtain 11,780 Votes

So, look, now all I want to do is this. I want to find 11,780 votes because we won the state. Look, we need only 11,000 votes. As it stands now, we have more than that. We will have more and more. What will we do here, folks? If I only need 11,000 votes.

I just want to find 11,780 votes. There was no genuine basis for this request, despite the fact that the president knew from the Justice Department. No one could think it would be legal for the secretary of state to simply find the votes the president needed in order to win.

That’s the thing. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. You can’t let that happen. That’s — that’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk. End videotape.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

A Call to the White House: ‘Mirror of the American President, I’m afraid I can’t change the outcome of the election’

I remember looking at Mark. “Mark, you don’t think we’re going to pull this off?” I said. That call was crazy. He looked at me and started shaking his head. He was like, no, Cass, you know, he knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying. There’s some good options out there still.

Jeff Clark accepted the acting attorney general job and was offered it by President Trump, according to our investigation. There was only one reason this didn’t happen, and that was the fact that the president was confronted in the Oval Office by the White House counsel and Justice Department officials.

When President Trump found out that Mr. Clark had come up with a proposal, he said they forcefully rejected it. [Begin videotape]

Toward the end of your proposal, I recall you saying that what you are proposing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department interfering in the outcome of a presidential election. This wasn’t based on fact. Over the past several weeks and months, department investigations have shown that this was not true.

The Department of Justice’s leadership as well as his White House Counsel threatened to resign, which led to the President relenting. Mr. Chairman, please yield back.

When I received the call — again, I don’t remember the exact date — it was — it was from the White House switchboard and it was President Trump who had contacted me.

And then essentially, he turned the call over to Mr. Eastman who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors, in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states. [End videotape]

These fake electors were ultimately part of the President’s plan to replace genuine Biden electors with Trump electors on January 6. false electoral slates were sent into the Capitol as part of the plan.

President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election, but President Trump is wrong. I have no right to change the result of the election. The presidency is held by the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American President.

In writing, Dr. Eastman confirmed this. Do you advise the president that the vice president does not have the power to do what he wants, in your professional judgment? Dr. Eastman replied, he’s been so advised.

Of course, President Trump’s own White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, also recognized that this plan was unlawful. Here is Mr. Cipollone speaking. [Begin videotape]

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

The Call to Washington: President Trump and the Capitol Attack on January 6, 2017, in the Voice of the Vice President, Sen. Rob Ornato

And the word that she relayed to you that the President called the Vice President, I apologize for being impolite, but do you remember what she said her father called him?

But Vice President Pence didn’t waver even when his own life was endangered by President Trump and the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, as you’ll see in more detail later. The evidence shows that President Trump’s pressure campaign against the Vice President probably broke multiple criminal statutes.

In the end, all these people, Department of Justice officials, state elections’ officials, his own Vice President, stood strong in the face of President Trump’s immense pressure. We know that the President summoned tens ofthousands of his supporters to Washington on January 6 to take back their country.

The head of the President’s Secret Service protective detail, Robert Engel, was specifically aware of the large crowds outside the magnetometers. Tony Ornato was in the chief of staff’s office and he passed that information along to him. The documents we obtained from the Secret Service make clear that the crowd outside the magnetometers was armed and the agents knew it. Take a look at what they were seeing and hearing.

Since our last hearings, the select committee has received greater cooperation from the Secret Service. The Department of Justice had requested documents related to the January 6th attack on the Capitol and Secret Service text messages from that time period were erased.

The president watched a bloody attack on Fox News from his dining room and as he watched, members of Congress and other government officials joined him in a huge leadership void. The previously unseen footage is of the Congressional leaders being taken to a secure location during the riot and you’re about to see it.

So during these calls, I — I only remember in hindsight because he was almost like clairvoyant. One of these calls is the most likely to result in an assault on the Capitol. I will never forget it. End the videotape.

On December 31st, agents circulated intelligence reports that President Trump’s supporters had proposed a movement to occupy Capitol Hill. They flagged spikes in violent terms, like We Are the Storm and 1776 Rebel. On January 5th, a Secret Service open source unit flagged a social media account on thedonald.win that threatened to bring a sniper rifle to a rally on January 6th. A Sunday Gun Day picture of a gun and a rifle was posted by the user.

In this report received on December 26th, the Secret Service field office relayed a tip that had been received by the FBI. According to the source of the tip, the Proud Boys plan to march armed into DC. They think that they will have a large enough group to march into DC armed, the source reported, and will outnumber the police so they can’t be stopped.

Later on the evening of January 5th, the Secret Service learned during an FBI briefing that right-wing groups were establishing armed QRFs or quick reaction forces readying to deploy for January 6th. Groups like the Oath Keepers were standing by at the ready should POTUS request assistance by invoking the Insurrection Act, agents were informed.

According to one report from the rally site, members of the crowd are wearing body armor and carrying military grade backpacks. The person said there could be pepper spray and/or plastic riot shields. At 11:23 a.m., agents also reported possible armed individuals, one with a glock, one with a rifle.

After an hour, agents reported a man with a gun, a pistol on his hip, and one who was taken into custody. An individual had an assault rifle on his person.

An arrest of a protester with a gun was notified to members of the Federal Protective Service, who were tasked with protecting federal buildings. Weapons related arrests continued during the speech. At 12:13 PM, United States Park Police arrested a man with a rifle in front of the World War II Memorial. These agents remarked on the number of weapons that had been seized that day, speculating that the situation could get worse.

One of those sites was called The Donald.win. The Select Committee obtained a text message from a senior communications adviser, that was sent to MarkMeadows less than a week before January 6th. “I got the base fired up,” he wrote in all caps. He sent a link to this page on TheDonald.win.

The linked web page had comments about the joint session of Congress on January 6th. Take a look at some of the comments. “Gallows do not require electricity.” “If the filthy commie maggots try to push their fraud through, there will be hell to pay.” Our lawmakers in congress can either leave one of two ways; one, in a body bag, or, after certifying Trump the winner. Mr. Miller said that he had no idea about the hundreds of comments that had been sent to him.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

Judd Deere, a White House press secretary, told an angry mob that the election had been rigged and stolen

If I had seen something like that, I probably would have flipped it to someone at the White — or if I had seen something of that nature, I would have said we gotta flag this for Secret Service or something of that nature.” [End videotape]

Parler, another platform, saw a spike in activity on the day that Miller sent his text message. This was December 31st. The agent received an email about a large amount of violent rhetoric directed at government people and entities including the Secret Service.

President Trump gathered a few of his communications staff in the Oval Office on January 5th. The president and others were able to hear the sounds of the crowd gathered at Freedom Plaza because the door was open. President Trump could sense that his supporters were angry. Here again is Judd Deere, a deputy White House press secretary describing the president’s reaction.

They were fired up, just that they were. They were angry. They feel like the election’s been stolen, that the election was rigged, that — he went on and on about that for a little bit. [End videotape]

The president knew that the crowd was angry and that he had made it worse. He knew that they believed that the election had been rigged and stolen because he had told them falsely that it had been rigged and stolen. And by the time he incited that angry mob to march on the Capitol, he knew they were armed and dangerous, all the better to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

The Assembly of the Standing Committee on Reconciliation and Reconciliation: The California Senator apologizes to the President for being so irate during the motorcade

The gentleman yields back. We’ll take a brief break at this point. The chair of the committee declares the committee in recess for a period of about 10 minutes. The gentleman from California was recognized by the chair for his opening statement.

He wanted it full and he was upset that we weren’t letting people with weapons through the mags. I overheard the president say to the effect that he doesn’t care that they have weapons.

They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f’ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take that f’ing mags away. The end of videotape.

And I’d love to have, if those tens of thousands of people would be allowed, the military, the Secret Service — and we want to thank you, and the police, law enforcement, great. You’re doing a good job. [Applause] I’d love for them to come up here with us. Is that possible? Please, can you just allow them to come up?

“They’d expressed to me that the president was irate, you know, on the drive up. Mr. Engle did not deny the fact that the president was irate.” That of course corresponds closely with the testimony you saw this summer from Cassidy Hutchinson, a Metropolitan Police officer who was in the motorcade, and from multiple sources.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

The Secret Service and the OTR Movement: When President Trump walked into the Capitol, he rode in the Presidential Limo, and he walked away

I will note this as well. The committee is reviewing testimony regarding potential obstruction on this issue, including testimony about advice given not to tell the committee about this specific topic. We are going to address this in our report.

The people sworn to protect the safety of the president of the United States and who routinely put themselves in harm’s way were convinced that this was a bad idea. Secret Service documents also reveal how agents were poised to take President Trump to the Capitol later that afternoon. Agents were instructed to don their protective gear and prepare for a movement.

To be completely honest, we were all in a state of shock. Why? Because — because we just — one, I think the actual physical feasibility of doing it, and then also we all knew what that indicated and what that meant, that this was no longer a rally, that this was going to move to something else if he physically walked to the Capitol.

I — I don’t know if you want to use the word insurrection, coup, whatever. We knew the public event would move into something else. Why were we are alarmed?

When the president returned to the White House, he was told of the violence at the Capitol and entered the Oval Office. From that point until approximately 4:00 PM, over the next two hours and 40 minutes, the president stayed in the White House dining room attached to the Oval Office and watched this unprecedented assault take place at the Capitol.

As the president arrived back at the White House, McEnany described an exchange she had with him. [Begin videotape]

So, to the best of my recollection, I recall him being — wanting to — saying that he wanted to physically walk and be a part of the march, and then saying that he would ride the beast if — if he needed to, ride in the presidential limo. End videotape.

Take a look at the Secret Service email from 1:19 PM on January 6th, the minute that President Trump got out of the presidential vehicle back at the White House. As soon as the president left his motorcade, leadership from the Secret Service contacted Bobby Engel, the lead agent for the presidential detail, and warned him that they were “concerned about an OTR,” an off the record movement to the Capitol.

I can’t speak about the conversations that took place with the president, but I can say that people need to be told quickly that they need to leave the Capitol.

Approximately when? It was very violent almost immediately after I found out people were getting into the Capitol.

I don’t think anyone on that day who didn’t want the violence to end at the Capitol would have left. I mean —

Oh, I’m sorry. I apologize. I thought you were referring to everyone on the staff. I can’t reveal communications, you know what I mean. Yes. [End videotape]

Mr. Cipollone’s testimony is corroborated by multiple other White House staff members, including Cassidy Hutchinson. Here’s Ms. Hutchinson talking about what she heard. [Begin videotape]

He had said something to the effect of, you know, you heard him, Pat. He doesn’t want to do anything more. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong. [End videotape]

A former White House employee with national security duties similarly recalled an exchange between Mr. Cipollone and Eric Herschmann about President Trump’s inaction against the mob assault underway at the Capitol. Mr. Herschmann spoke to Mr. Cipollone. He seemed to relay that, you know, the president didn’t want anything done.

The president’s most important political allies, family members and senior staff begged him to tell his supporters to leave. They included Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other allies at Fox News, his son Donald Trump Jr, the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, others in Congress, and officials in the cabinet and the executive branch.

Donald Trump ignored all of the appeals that they made to him. The Select Committee interviewed several people who were in the dining room with Donald Trump that afternoon, and every single one of these witnesses told us that he was watching the violent battles rage on television. He did not call his secretary of defense or the National Guard, the chief of the Capitol Police, or the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department.

And to your knowledge, was the president in that private dining room the whole time that the attack on the Capitol was going on, or did he ever go to — again, only to your knowledge, to the Oval Office, to the White House Situation Room, anywhere else?

Yeah. What did they tell you during that brief encounter in the dining room? What do you recall? I think they were — everyone was watching the TV. Do you remember if he was in the dining room on January 6th?

When you were in the dining room, did you see the violence at the Capitol on the TV?

The other key revelation was the never-seen-before footage showing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and other legislative leaders, along with Vice President Mike Pence, scrambling to obtain more police and national guard forces to repel the rioters on Capitol Hill as they realized the threat that was unfolding – not only to their personal safety but also to their ability to carry out their constitutional function of certifying the election.

We’re starting to get surrounded. They’re taking the north front scaffolding. Unless we get more munitions, we are not going to be able to hold. The people are getting into the capitol after a door was broken.

There has to be some way we can maintain the sense that people have that there is some security or some confidence that government can function and that we can elect the president of United States. Did we go back in session?

Everybody on the floor is putting on tear gas masks to prepare for a possible break-in. I’m trying to find out more.

I can’t. The House members need a place to go. They are all walking through the tunnel. Bring her here. We’re coming in if you don’t bring her out.

I’m going to call the secretary of the DOD. We have some Senators who are still in their hideaways. They need massive personnel now. Can you get the Maryland National Guard to come too?

I have something to say, Mr. Secretary. I’m going to speak with the mayor of Washington DC right now to see what other outreach she has to other law enforcement agencies.

Hey governor, what’s up? This is Nancy. I am not sure if you have been approached about the Virginia National Guard. Mr. Hoyer was connect — speaking to Governor Hogan, but I still think you probably need the Ok of the federal government in order to come in to another jurisdiction. Thank you.

All kinds of — it’s really that — they said somebody was shot. It’s just — it’s just horrendous. And all at the instigation of the president of the United States. Thank you, governor. I am appreciative of what you’re doing. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to stay in touch. Thank you. I thank you very much.

The governor told me that he sent a unit of the national guard and 200 state police. They broke windows and went in, ransacked our offices and all of that. That’s nothing. There is a concern about personal harm.

Personal safety is something that doesn’t need to be related to everything. They are breaking the law in many different ways, and a great deal is done at the instigation of the US president. Maybe he could at least have someone.

Yeah, why don’t you get the president to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr. Attorney General, in your law enforcement responsibility, a public statement they should all leave.

Towards a Resolution of the Arizona Reionization Violation In The Presence of an Unarmed Black Hole: Congressman Mike Schumer

I don’t want to speak for the leadership that’s going to be responsible for executing the operation, so I’m not going to say that. Because they are meeting on the ground and they’re the experts [Inaudible]

For a moment, pretend that it was the Pentagon or the White House that was under siege. You can get people to the location as you make the plan. We’re trying to figure out how we can get this job done today. We talked toMitch about it. He’s not in the room right now, but he was with us earlier and said, you know, we want to expedite this and hopefully they could confine it to just one complaint, Arizona, and then we could vote and that would be — you know, then just move forward with the rest of the state.

The overriding wish is to do it at the Capitol. What we are being told very directly is it’s going to take days for the Capitol to be Ok again. We’ve gotten a very bad report about the condition of the House floor, defecation and all that kind of thing as well. I don’t think that that’s hard to clean up, but I do think it is more from a security standpoint of making sure that everybody is out of the building and how long will that take.

I said, we’ll, we’re getting a counter point that is — that could take time to clean up the poo poo that they’re making all over the — literally and figuratively in the Capitol, and that it may take days to get back.

I am at the Capitol building. The US Capitol Police are with me. I was informed by him that the best information he can give you is that the House and Senate are going to be back in action in roughly an hour.

When they saw little sign of help on the way, they all exploded. Schumer wanted the Attorney General to get the President to tell them to leave the Capitol. The legislative leaders’ frantic efforts to restore peace were in marked contrast to Trump’s failure to take action as he watched the riot unfold from the confines of the West Wing of the White House.

It was obvious that only President Trump had the ability to end this. He was the only one who could. Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the administration. But the President did not act swiftly. He didn’t do his job. He didn’t do anything to have federal law faithfully executed and order restored.

Another witness, Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s former chief of staff, has also come forward and corroborated her shocking account. [Begin videotape]

You know, I asked Kevin McCarthy who’s the Republican leader about this and — and he said he called –he finally got through to Donald Trump and he said, you have got to get on TV. You need to be on the micro internet site, Twitter. You’ve got to call these people off. The President said something to him. This is happening at the same time.

He told Kevin that these aren’t his people. You know, these are — these are Antifa. And Kevin responded and said, no, they’re your people. They literally just came through my office windows, and my staff are running for cover. They are running for their lives. You have to stop them. The President’s response to Kevin was very chilling.

He told Kevin that they’re more upset about the election than they are about theft. And that’s — you know, you’ve seen widespread reports of Kevin McCarthy and the President having a — basically a swearing conversation. That’s when the swearing commenced, because the President was basically saying, no, I’m — I’m Ok with this.

I had — I had a conversation at some point in the day or week after the — the riot with Kevin McCarthy. It was very similar to the conversation Jaime had with the President, in which she told of how he asked him to get them to stop. And the President told him something along the lines of, Kevin, maybe these people are just more angry about this than you are, maybe more upset.

A Response to the “Mike Pence Condemnation” Committee on a “Hot-Sky” Violence in the U.S. Senate

But I want to be very clear about what I mean. I’ve made it clear to the President that he bears responsibilities for his words and actions, no ifs or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he think he did a bad thing? He told me that he has to take responsibility for what happened.

The mob was provoked even further by this because they were chanting hang Mikepence. This deliberate decision to further enrage the mob against Vice President Pence cannot be justified by anything that President Trump might have thought about the election. At that time, the vice president’s Secret Service detail was most worried about his physical safety.

As the afternoon progressed, the company was able to see a surge in violent hashtags, including calls for the execution of Mike Pence. Anika was one of the first people to come to the committee and now she wants to speak out about what’s happening in our society.

Yes, and after in response to this, too. Because I think as many as many of Donald Trump’s tweets did, it again fanned the flames. And it was individuals who were already constructing gallows, who were already willing, able and wanting to execute someone and looking for someone to be killed. Now, the individual was called upon then to begin this coup is now pointing the finger at another individual while they’re ready to do this.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

The president has told everyone to go home. That’s our order. We’re going home, but we don’t wanna go home

Mike Pence won’t be supporting Donald Trump. Mike Pence was a traitor. Mike Pence has screwed us, in case you haven’t heard yet. What happened? What happened? I’m told thatMike Pence has messed with us. That’s the word I keep hearing reports that Mike Pence has screwed us. End video.

Within ten minutes of the president’s statement, thousands of rioters overran the line that the Metropolitan Police Force’s Civil Disturbance Unit was holding on the west side of the Capitol. This was the first time in the history of the Metropolitan Police Department that a security line like that had ever been broken.

President Trump’s conduct that day was so shameful and so outrageous that it prompted numerous members of the White House staff and other Trump appointees to resign. You have heard Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger explain why he decided to quit on that day.

Since then, we’ve spoken to more high ranking officials like President Trump’s envoy to Northern Ireland and former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who resigned after the 6th in protest of Trump’s misconduct and to dissociate themselves from his role in the violence.

I was horrified by violence and shocked by the apparent indifference of the President to it. The President needs to bepresidential right now. I thought he failed at doing it. I thought he was not the right leader at the right time.

The events at the Capitol were shocking, even though they occurred. I mentioned in my statement that it was something that I couldn’t put aside. It was impossible for me to continue given my personal values and philosophy at a particular time. I came as an immigrant to this country.

I think in this country. A peaceful transfer of power is something I believe in. I believe in democracy. It was a decision that I made on my own. End video.

We are delivering the president’s message. Donald Trump has asked everybody to go home. That’s our order. He says to go home. [End videotape]

Finally, at 6:01, President Trump tweeted again not to condemn the mass violence in any way, but rather to excuse and glorify it. He made it clear he considered the violence to be inevitable and predictable. Check it out. These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously, viciously, stripped away from great patriots who have been badly unfairly treated for so long.

These are the things that don’t happen, he said. Some of the injured and wounded cops are with us today, and Trump told us that they got what was coming to them. It was said by Trump. January 6 should not be viewed as a bad day in our history but rather as a great one.

At any time between when you first gave the president the advice at 2pm and when the video statement was broadcasted, would it be possible for the president to speak to the nation at a moment’s notice? Would that have been possible?

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/13/1125331584/jan-6-committee-hearing-transcript

On the January 6th Reaction of the Committe Against Insurrection and Rebellion. Thank you. I’m glad to have the opportunity to hear what happened in January

Our Constitution strongly opposed insurrection and rebellion, stated Chairman Mr. Chairman. Article I gives Congress the power to call forth the militia to suppress insurrections. Section 3 of the 14th amendment bars anyone who has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution from holding any office within the federal or state government.

It was President Lincoln, at the start of the Civil War in 1861, who best explained why democracy rejects insurrection. He said that insurrection was a war against the rights of the people. American democracy is not for a single man. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The gentleman yields back. During the committee’s first hearing in July of last year, we had four police officers testify about how they helped repel the January 6th riots. We asked them what they wanted to see the committee accomplish. Officer Grinnell wanted to know why the rioters were made to believe that the election process was rigged.

Officer Fanone asked us to look into the actions and activities that resulted in the day’s events. The officer was concerned about if anyone in power had a role. Officer Dunn put it simply, get to the bottom of what happened. We’ve spent more than a year working to get those answers. We’ve conducted more than a thousand interviews and depositions.

He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6th, so we want to hear from him. The committee needs to do everything in our power to tell the most complete story possible and provide recommendations to help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We need to be sure that we have a full understanding of the evidence that we have obtained.

General Michael Flynn before Oath Keepers: The Test of the Fifth Amendment against Self-Incrimination in the First Three Months of the Bipartisan Referendum

The testimony of the president is a precedent in American history. Past presidents have provided testimony and evidence to Congressional investigators. We also recognize that a subpoena to a former president is a serious and extraordinary action.

That’s why we want to take this step in full view of the American people, especially because the subject matter at issue is so important to the American people and the stakes are so high for our future and our democracy. Ms Cheney of Wyoming is the Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our committee has sufficient information to answer the many questions Congress posed at the beginning. A key task still needs to be accomplished, despite the fact that we have sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals.

We must seek the testimony under oath of January 6th’s central player. More than 30 witnesses in our investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and several of those did so specifically in response to questions about their dealings with Donald Trump directly. Here are a few examples.

This is General Michael Flynn walking with Oath Keepers on December 12, 2020, and here is General Flynn’s testimony before our committee. [Begin videotape]

The issue was raised in an email on December 31, 2020, as Trump’s lawyers were about to file in a federal court challenge to the election result. According to an email, Trump’s attorneys knew the data they used in the case was misleading, even though he had made sure that the facts in the case were true to his knowledge.

Reply to Comment on the ‘Consequences of Standing with Donald Trump and the Congress of the House of Representatives”

It’s a question of whether or not your position that you had with the President of the United States can be discussed in the media with this committee.

Other witnesses have also gone to enormous lengths to avoid testifying about their dealings with Donald Trump. A jury of his peers found him guilty of contempt of Congress. He is scheduled to be sentenced for this crime later this month. The criminal proceedings for Peter Navarro are going on.

And Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, has refused to testify based upon executive privilege. The committee is still in litigation with him. Mr. Chairman, at some point the Department of Justice may well unearth the facts that these and other witnesses are currently concealing. Our country, our children and our Constitution need to be of our highest priority.

The resolution is agreed to. Without objection, a motion was laid on the table. The Chair requests that those in the hearing room remain seated until the Capitol Police have escorted members from the room. Without objection, the committee stands adjourned.

Donald Trump’s 2020 Campaign for the Clean Watergate: Myth America: The Biggest Lüsses and Legends About Our Past

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. His upcoming co-edited work, which will be called “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest lies and legends about Our Past”, is one of the 24 books he is an author and editor. There is a link to follow him on social media. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinions on it.

Adam Kinzinger explained his actions in seeking to hold Trump toaccount in his retirement speech on the House floor last week, and he will not return to Congress.

In public hearings during the past four months, the bipartisan panel attempted to reveal the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.

Unlike the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, one of the most distinctive elements of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election is that so much of it happened in broad daylight.

The committee gave us shocking evidence and details as to how dangerous the events of those months were, and we didn’t know it.

As viewers could hear, Steve Bannon said to a group of non-identified associates that the former president would declare victory, which didn’t mean he was victorious, just that he would say he was. Trump is going to do crazy shit if Biden is in the Oval Office.

When the claims of fraud were first brought up, Trump and his inner cohort moved forward with reckless abandon despite repeated warnings from top election and legal advisers.

The committee provided a flurry of testimony from figures such as Alyssa Farah Griffin, who headed White House strategic communications, confirming that Trump knew he lost. He didn’t care about it. He wanted to hold on to the power.

The January 6, 2021, rally was held when Trump knew the protesters were dangerous but did not do anything to stop them. Indeed, he wanted to go to Capitol Hill but was only stopped because a Secret Service agent wouldn’t allow him to do so. Cassidy Hutchinson said the former president lunged at a Secret Service agent and tried to steer the car when he wasn’t allowed to go.

The Arizona Senator’s January 6 Committee: Understanding the 2020 Election Campaign from a New Look at the Correspondence Between Donald Trump and Mark Flaherty

Arizona: The Republican voters in Arizona picked state representative Mark Flaherty as their standard-bearer because of the election conspiracy theories that have flourished ever since Biden won this red state by fewer than 11,000 votes. Trump was the first person to give an endorsement to Finchem, who has described himself as a member of the Oath Keeper. The GOP lawmaker has lobbied to toss out the results of the 2020 election in some of the state’s largest counties – including Maricopa, home to Phoenix, where a widely derided review of ballots ordered by Republicans in the state Senate still concluded that Biden had won more votes than Trump did.

On January 6th, there was just one part of a bigger story. Although the panel is called the January 6 committee, it would be more accurate to call it a committee to investigate the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. The months between November 2020 and January 2021 can be understood using this reframing.

During these events, we’ve learned that Trump understood what was happening. He was told many times about how he was making claims that were untrue and warned of the dangers he was taking. Advisers, lawyers and conservative media figure who supported him were privately urging him to stop.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/dramatic-moments-january-6-hearing-zelizer/index.html

The Commission on Investigating Executive Malfeasance Against the Ex-President of Georgia, A.D. Eastman, in its Final Hearing

There is an ongoing threat. In its pivotal hearing Thursday, the committee wanted to make one thing clear, the danger is not over in 2022. There is a clear and present danger to our electoral system and democratic institutions, and that will be something that comes through in our final hearing. This is not an ancient history; it is a continuing threat. Many levels of that continued threat exist. The rhetoric of election denialism has taken hold among many of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans who agree with this agenda are also running for a number of key offices, ranging from governor to secretaries of state, all of whom will play a crucial role in overseeing future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.

Which is a reminder that, when it comes to accountability and reform, the work extends well beyond the lifespan of the committee. Safeguarding democratic systems falls now on a variety of groups. The Department of Justice has to decide whether to act on the committee’s referrals, including the historic criminal referrals against Trump. Congress is aware of the need to create more legal constraints for executive malfeasance after theWatergate scandal. The recent passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act is a major step in that direction.

Even though his own lawyers had said that information in the Georgia lawsuit was false, former President Donald Trump swore under oath that it was true.

The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Mr. Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a “crime-fraud exception” pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients.

The former President’s Georgia legal team – Drew Findling, Jennifer Little, and Marisa Goldberg – previously wrote in a January statement that because he was never subpoenaed or asked to appear before the grand jury voluntarily, “we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump.”

Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court stated in a court document issued this summer that Mr. Graham inquired about the re-examination of certain absentee ballots in Georgia.

Two Years after Trump: The End of the Reionization War in the United States and the Implications for the Future of the Political Landscape

All of this underscores the fact that more than two years after Trump left office, the nation is nowhere near working through the enormous political and legal trauma of his term. And if the events of recent days are any indication, Americans may be in for another round of turmoil.

Trump dropped his clearest hint yet Saturday of a new White House run at a moment when he’s on a new collision course with the Biden administration, the courts and facts.

Trump’s current status on the political scene was not normal. One-term presidents typically fade fairly fast into history. But it is a testament to the firm hold he maintains over much of the GOP that he’s still a key player nearly two years after losing reelection. And while there is growing talk about whether his thicket of legal and political controversies could convince some GOP primary voters it’s time to move on, Trump still seems to have plenty of juice.

Those controversies also show that given the open legal and political loops involving the ex-President, a potential 2024 presidential campaign rooted in his claims of political persecution could create even more upheaval than his four years in office.

In the upcoming elections there will be lots of differences between Democrats and Republicans on issues like the economy, abortion, foreign policy and crime but there is a small chance that the coming period will be dominated by the past of the former President.

The hush-money case against Donald Trump and Kari Lake revisited: Are the 2020 elections going to be terribly different from last year?

— This development came with all eyes on New York after expectations soared this week that Trump could soon face indictment in a distinct case arising from an alleged scheme to pay hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. The grand jury didn’t meet on Wednesday. A source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN that it will sit on Thursday.

In Arizona, one of the ex-President’s favorite candidates, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake – a serial spreader of voter fraud falsehoods – is again raising doubts about the election system. “I’m afraid that it probably is not going to be completely fair,” Lake told AZTV7 on Sunday.

Next month’s election could potentially install a Republican majority in the House that will bring Trumpism back to political power because of his hold over the House GOP. Some leading “Make America Great Again” Republicans are already speaking of a possible drive to impeach Biden and have already signaled they will use their powers to investigate to rough up Biden for a possible clash with Trump in 2024.

An already pro-Trump Republican presence in Washington is likely to expand after the midterms. Scores of Trump-endorsed candidates are running on a platform of his 2020 election fraud falsehoods, raising questions over whether they will accept results should they lose their races in just over two weeks.

There have been increasing indications an indictment could be near, especially since Trump predicted over the weekend, inaccurately, that he would be arrested this past Tuesday. But the possible charges in this yearslong and somewhat obscure case could center on business violations or infringements of campaign finance law. All of which raises the question of whether it’s truly in the national interest to cross the Rubicon of charging a former president in a case that may be hard to explain to the public, lacks profound constitutional implications and may not be a slam dunk at trial.

The Future of Political Science: The Challenge of Investigating the Inflaton, Gas Price Spikes and Other Implications to the Ex-President in a Possible White House Run

Democrats have attempted to bring Trump back to the forefront. Some campaigns are trying to scare suburban voters by telling them pro-Trump candidates are a danger to democracy, for example, after President Joe Biden equated Maga followers with fascists.

But raging inflation and spikes in gasoline prices appear to be a far more potent concern before voters head to the polls, which could spell bad news for the party in power in Washington.

The ex-President told supporters at a rally in Texas on Saturday regarding the possibility of a new White House bid, “I will probably have to do it again.”

“It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves,” Cheney told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“This isn’t going to be, you know, his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became. This is a serious set of issues.

Video testimony is likely to be unattractive to the former President as he would no longer be able to control how his testimony is used.

The whole thing could become an academic. Given the possibility of a Trump legal challenge to the subpoena, the issue could drag on for months and become moot since a possible new Republican House majority would likely sweep the January 6 committee away as one of its first acts.

If there is evidence a crime was committed, Garland would face a dilemma over whether the national interest lay in implementing the law to its full extent or whether the consequences of prosecuting a former commander in chief in a fractious political atmosphere could tear the country apart.

A decision to charge an ex-president running for a non-consecutive second White House term would undoubtedly cause a firestorm. If there is evidence of a crime, sparing him from accountability would be bad for future presidents with strongman instincts.

Jay Bookman: Why Voting Hasn’t Worked So Well in the Georgia Legislature, And How Much Has It Been Done?

Jay Bookman is an award winning author and political columnist from Georgia who has written for newspapers across the country. He is writing regularly for the Georgia Recorder. He can be followed at #JAYS bookman on his TWITTER account. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.

Georgia has seen record turnout of voters, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season like this one, the question is natural: What does it mean?

In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. High turnout is not the advantage it used to be in the Trump era and we don’t know how much of the early- voter surge is actually new voters or voters who would have cast their ballot anyway. With so many wild-card factors happening this year, it is impossible to understand what motivates voters to go to the polls in the governor and Senate races.

That uncertainty is a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people vote is fairly easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. In a tumultuous year like this one, with so many variables, that’s a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters’ work product.

Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for it, had already conceded that voter fraud played no role in recent election outcomes. In Raffensperger’s words, “we had safe, secure, honest elections,” a conclusion shared by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, federal officials in former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, and state and federal judges. And if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes, what was?

That’s what happens when you sell people on a false narrative, then rewrite state law to encourage taking action on that false narrative. If voting isn’t being suppressed so far, confidence in voting surely has been.

Democrats have built an effective, well-funded voter-protection apparatus to help people overcome whatever bureaucratic hurdles are placed between them and the ballot box.

That last point is critical. To their base, Republicans have said the changes implemented in SB 202 – making absentee balloting more difficult, significantly reducing the number of drop boxes in urban areas – were necessary to fight voter fraud. There is no reason why that motive makes no sense.

It should worry us about the consequences of that bad-faith narrative. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.

At his rallies this fall, Trump told his supporters that he didn’t believe there would be a fair election. I don’t believe it.”

Georgia Republicans added a clarification to a part of state law regarding how a voter can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. There won’t be a limit on how many persons the elector may challenge. The new law requires local election boards to have a hearing on the challenges within 10 days.

Conservatives in the state are trying to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on very flimsy grounds and are frustrated at the failure of those challenges.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. Get your county in order or let it be disorganized.

The Case for a Democratic Supreme Court Justice to Count Biden’s Electors: Early Preliminary Emails from the Georgia Department of Public Works

The Senate would not be allowed to count Biden’s electors if the Supreme Court were to refuse to hear the case. The key here would be Thomas, the justice assigned to deal with emergency matters from the southeastern part of the country.

The email mentioning Thomas was the first one to be reported. The House has obtained some of the emails sent from the company under an order from a court, which is still subject of litigation. A link to the emails was provided in a court filing.

In a separate email Chesebro acknowledged their plans were a long shot, putting the odds of success at the Supreme Court before the January 6 congressional certification at “1%.”

There is a chance that the election results from multiple states could be reviewed in courts and state legislatures, as well as bolster the push for Congress to extend debate over certifying the results.

Georgia could potentially be critical if a Supreme Court filing is made. If a Georgia case were to go before the Supreme Court, Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to open any of the envelopes documenting the state’s electoral votes during the January 6 proceedings.

It’s a foregone conclusion that the court’s actions would be affected by a move by Pence. There are procedural options available toTrump andPence starting January 6, which could result in more delay and pressure on the court to act.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/politics/clarence-thomas-trump-eastman-emails/index.html

Comments on Election Laws in Arizona, Michigan and Michigan: House Attorney General Counsel Doug Letter on Emails from the 2020 House Investigation of Fraudulent Spammation

House General Counsel Doug Letter on Wednesday afternoon told the appeals court – where Eastman is still asking for help to claw back the eight emails – the inclusion of a publicly available link to the files was inadvertent.

In a recent decision, Carter said he believed the exchanges were possible evidence of a fraudulent scheme after the 2020 election. Though he described this set of emails in an order last month, the full text of the exchanges is now available.

He and other private attorneys considered changing the verification for Trump to sign. Emails show that there was no one at the White House to witness the signing before the new year. ChristopherGardner wrote that apresidential trip to aUPS store was something he would like to do.

Eastman also wrote that a White House adviser and lawyer, Eric Herschmann, had “concern about the President signing a verification when specific numbers were included” regarding votes cast. He was specifically concerned about numbers that implied that felons, dead people and people who had moved had voted improperly, another Eastman email showed.

At the time that the lawyers were in discussions, Trump was in flight, returning to the White House, and was set to consult with Herschmann about signing the verification, another December 31 email from Eastman said.

If Trump wanted to sign the document with the language ” under penalty of perjury” he’d have to use an edward over zoom, according to the emails.

Editor’s Note: Norman Eisen is a political law expert who advised the White House on election law when he served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar. The researcher is working on national elections. They have their own views in this commentary. Read more opinion at CNN.

It is possible that these victories will provide some peace of mind to voters in Arizona and Michigan. The courts will enforce the law to protect voting rights and the election system just as they did during the last election.

The security agencies issued a threat alert in October that warned of possible attacks on political candidates. And days before voting ended, a federal judge ordered one group that had been conducting surveillance of Arizona ballot drop boxes, sometimes with armed individuals, to stay at least 250 feet away and prohibited them from filming or following people.

The Michigan Democratic Party is Up to Speed in 2020: Why the Republican Party and Michels failed to win the midterm elections on Wednesday. A spokeswoman warned that public opinion should be’respectful’

But the Republican candidates for Michigan governor and attorney general both acknowledged defeat on Wednesday, as did Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, who campaigned on a promise to change the voting system so that Republicans never lost elections again in the state.

The Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee got an update on the new hires from the City ofFlint, which said it would contact the remaining individuals on the list to provide an equal number. The Republicans gave a list that included names and people who were already working as election inspectors.

Despite the case being dismissed on technical grounds, it was of significant significance. The judge, who made extremely short work of the case, appeared disinclined to indulge the suit. Flint is now complying with the law. If the same suit were to be filed in the future, parties with standing will be in for a rough ride.

Why did the GOP bother to bring this clearly non-meritorious suit here and now? We spoke to Michigan elections expert Aghogho Edevibe who told us that it is common across Michigan for predominantly Republican areas to have predominantly Republican poll workers, and vice versa with Democratic areas.

The courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election with the two cases outlined here. The cases suggest that the rule of law is being used to protect our democracy from people like drop box intimidators.

Across the United States, voter intimidation and election denial efforts are well-organized. To protect the tradition of free, fair, secure and accurate elections, it’s critical to continue monitoring legal developments leading up to the election.

Midterm elections in the United States are often presented as a referendum on the party in power, and that message appears to be resonating this fall. Voters need to consider the intentions of the party that wants to return to power, and what it means for the future of this country.

The director of voting and elections at the organization Common Cause said that the effort to undermine the elections was the main thrust of the 2020 campaign. “This time what we are seeing is the prep beforehand.”

In some states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, voting rights and civil rights groups have trained volunteers in methods of de-escalation, stationing them around polling places and setting up hotlines to respond to issues. In Ohio, for example, a coalition specifically enlisted religious leaders from multiple denominations for the task.

election officials say they are ready for the chaos of misinformation and dispute that could follow if there are not enough voters.

Why the F.B.I. won’t go to the polls again: The case of Nye County, Arizona, where the first “Stop the Stealth” was thrown out

Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Arizona that is home to Phoenix, has felt stabbed in the back repeatedly and doesn’t have anything but scar tissue.

The election office in Maricopa has beefed up its security in order to be ready for Tuesday. A metal perimeter fence surrounds the building after it was a target of right-wing protesters in 2020. Last month, an email to election officials promised to “find” their personal addresses and made reference to the violence of the French Revolution. The Arizona secretary of state referred it to the F.B.I.

There have been scores of lawsuits filed in battleground states before the election, signalling the likelihood of more high-stakes and controversial court fights as voting finishes and local officials start counting ballots.

The pre election litigation focused on whether all the classes of ballots should be tossed, with many of the lawsuits stating that the ballots missing information should be thrown out.

In a separate case, conservative activists say that they are asking for a court to segregate military ballots from the state’s count, after a Milwaukee election official successfully requested ballots in the names of fictitious military members and sent them to a state senator. Lawyers who were involved in reversing the 2020 election and promoting theories of a conspiracy are trying to get a lawsuit brought against them.

More than 100 lawsuits have already been filed, compared with 70 two years ago, a surge of litigation from both parties and their allies. On the Republican side, dozens of lawyers and firms that sought to overturn the 2020 election are again working for parties and candidates this cycle.

Democrats and outside groups have been involved in litigation, often pushing for a lighter count of Absentee Ballots and challenging Republican plans to hand-count them.

In Nye County, Nev., one such plan to count early ballots by hand has been halted by a lawsuit from the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. The effort is in court in Cochise County, Arizona.

In Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, election skeptics have been monitoring the absentee ballot processing, asking questions rooted in conspiracy theories about hacking voting machines.

In Maricopa County, where the first “Stop the Steal” protest was held outside the county Elections Department office the day after the 2020 election, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stationed themselves outside a ballot drop box in Mesa, the Phoenix suburb.

So far, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, has sent 18 referrals of voter intimidation to law enforcement authorities. In the complaints, which were heavily redacted, voters described being watched, photographed with long-lens cameras and having their license plates recorded. Some, including one filed on Thursday from a voter in Phoenix’s Central City neighborhood, came after the judge’s order had been filed.

Republican candidates and party officials have made it a point to convince their voters to cast their votes in person on Election Day, in light of two years of legal arguments and talk that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting to illegitimately win the election. At a rally on Thursday night, candidates who spoke at it were met with cheers and applauded when they called on the crowd to vote in person.

“I was an absentee, mail-in voter for years,” said Janelle Black, a homemaker from Phoenix who attended the Lake rally. But Ms. Black said that since the 2020 election, which she believed was stolen, she did not trust Ms. Hobbs, who is both the secretary of state and a Democratic candidate for governor, to oversee the process. She wants to vote on that day so it’s counted. I don’t want to take any chances.”

But election denial has spread even to places Mr. Trump won handily. Tensions surrounding elections and other issues have been rising for months in Northern California where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020. Local activists have demanded that early voting be stopped, that ballots be counted by hand and that voter ID be required at polling places that are not legal in the state.

Intimidating Georgians in the ‘Lambda’: A.M.E. churches in protest of a new voting law

The county’s CEO resigned, its health officer left and the health board publicly opposed the state’s vaccine mandates.

The clerk of voters in her county is concerned about a forecast of 10 inches of snow on Sunday night which could make it difficult for many voters to get to the polls.

In Georgia, a state with a long history of intimidation and tension at the polls, some community leaders expressed similar unease, amid rising threats of political violence.

The leader of more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia admitted that he wasn’t sure what would happen on Election Day. “And I look at Arizona, people dressed in these outfits, it can be intimidating.”

More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. Even though most of the challenges have been thrown out, it has unsettled some Georgia voters, and tossed some off the rolls. Helm was homeless and forced to vote on a provisional ballot because her registration had been taken away because of Republican challenges. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported her dilemma.

But Bishop Jackson was also buoyed by surging turnout in the state, and pointed to efforts of his church and many other voting rights organizations to ensure voters were prepared for the midterms.

The Case for a Fair Election: A Case Study of a Democratic Candidate Overturning Trump’s 2020 Election Campaign and the Rule of Law

The low-profile races of Secretary of state, which typically decide who helps administer elections in a state, have drawn national attention and millions of dollars in political spending this year, as several Republican candidates doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

In all, voters in 27 states will choose secretaries of state in the midterms. Fourteen of those seats currently are held by Republicans and 13 by Democrats.

There are some places where clerks and monitoring groups are still concerned that election deniers could try to disrupt the certification of the vote.

The Georgia contest is one of the best in the country, as Republican Brad Raffensperger refused to help Trump get the votes he needed to win the state. (That campaign by Trump and his allies is the subject of a special grand jury investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.)

The one of the Michigan Fair Elections preferred candidates, Kristina Karamo, has not conceded despite losing by 14 percentage points, but she did send out a list of electoral violations on Thursday afternoon.

Karamo, a community college professor who secured an endorsement from Trump last year, has said he won the election, and she signed on to an unsuccessful Supreme Court lawsuit that challenged Biden’s victory in four states.

Some of the cases have been brought by the same fringe legal groups that sought to bolster former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 electoral loss.

The court fights over the midterms may play a pivotal role in determining the winners in this week’s elections and even, perhaps, the balance of power in Washington. They may be able to set the ground rules for the next presidential election, in 2024, if Trump is on the ballot again after lying about a stolen 2020 election.

David Becker, who leads the center for election innovation and research, said that his concern was that the number of mail ballots might exceed the margin of victory in some races. It is better to resolve those disputes before you get to see the results. Once the margins are clear, that could create a political axe to grind.”

The RNC Chairwoman said in a statement that the ruling was a victory for the rule of law and made it easier to vote and cheat in Pennsylvania.

The Republican candidate for Michigan secretary of state is trying to get a court to toss out thousands of Detroit-based Absentee Ballots because he says they were not sent in person.

A post- election challenge could be brought by the state if their allegations are proven to be correct, in which case the ballots would be invalid.

The GOP is challenging county requirements for poll workers in a second case, as well as the county’s efforts to increase the number of Republicans working voting sites.

In Virginia, meanwhile, a judge last week ordered officials in Prince William County to appoint more Republicans to top election spots in individual precincts – following legal action by the state and county GOP.

Gates said they were responsive and bent over backwards. For some reason, there are certain people out there, and I hate to say it, but Arizona Republican Party. The chair is one who is more interested in disrupting the election process than creating concern.

“We are filing, and mostly winning, these lawsuits because counties in various states are violating the law, plain and simple,” the RNC said in a statement to CNN. “Every decisive victory is a win for transparency at the ballot box.”

Albert said that the demand for more Republican workers could be a sign of attempts to throw out the ballots at the election site in a dispute.

She is concerned that Republicans will say if an election isn’t run perfect, then all of the ballots won’t count. An election has never run perfect in the history of the world.”

Western battleground states have become the sites of disputes over the technology that is used for voting, where outlandish theories about fraud in the 2020 election have manifested in pushes to conduct aspects of the midterm elections by hand.

The governorship, a Senate seat and the state elections chief are on the ballot in Cochise County, which has 80,000 registered voters.

David Stevens, one of the hand count’s proponents, did not reply to a CNN request for comment. During a court hearing Friday, Stevens said he believed the county had the authority to proceed and said the count would involve about 40,000 ballots, according to The Arizona Republic.

Nye County spokesman Arnold Knightly said that if the secretary of state okays a new plan in which volunteers tally the results in silence, they will be able to revive the hand counting. Nye plans to use electronic machines in the election.

If these parallel counts are allowed to go forward they could potentially set the stage for dueling results, which could further sour the relationship between the voters and the officials who certify the election results.

The election on Tuesday is more likely to cement the divides of a nation worn down by crises than it is to promote unity.

There are many times when elections set the country on a new path because people are free to choose their leaders.

The control of the House of Representatives is hanging in the balance. The expected result of a GOP majority isn’t very different from the anticipated red wave. The Senate will remain in Democratic control after the Republican losses.

The cost of living crisis became a topic of concern for voters as polls showed that the economy was still the top issue for them and that Biden didn’t do enough to address it.

There was a rush of news regarding job losses just before the polls opened, causing jitters about a possible turnoff of the Biden economy, which is historically low unemployment. Americans are already struggling with higher prices for food and gasoline and now must cope with the Federal Reserve hikes in interest rates that not only make credit card debt, buying a home and rent more expensive, but could tip the economy into a recession.

The economic situation could cause a classic midterm election rebuke of a first-term president, which would be a sign that democracy is working. Elections have for generations been a safety valve for the public to express dissent with the country’s direction.

Tuesday looks set to be a tough day for Biden. The president was not involved in the final moments of the campaign trying to get vulnerable Democrats over the line. Instead, he was in the liberal bastion of Maryland – a safe haven where his low approval ratings likely won’t hurt Democrats running for office. He did campaign for John Fetterman over the weekend but at his final event he demonstrated his drained political juice as he contemplated a reelection campaign.

“I think it’s going to be tough,” Biden told reporters. “I think we’ll win the Senate and I think the House is tougher,” he said, admitting life would become “more difficult” for him if the GOP takes control of Congress.

On the eve of an election in which he will not be on the ballot, Trump made it all about himself as he claimed that he did not want to overshadow Republican candidates. At a rally ostensibly for GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance in Ohio, Trump unleashed a dystopian, self-indulgent dirge of a speech laced with demagoguery, exaggerated claims that America was in terminal decline, and outright falsehoods about the 2020 election. If he is indicted for his conduct in a number of criminal investigations, he will proclaim that he is the victim of totalitarian state-style persecution.

The worst kept secret of politics is that Trump will seek a second term in the White House, and he will make a big announcement at Mar-a-Lago on November 15. The turbulence of our time reflects on the fact that a twice-impeached president, who left office in disgrace after legitimizing violence as a form of political expression, has a good chance of winning.

Even though Trump made no evidence to support his claims about a stolen election and the Republicans carried a flag with their names on it, the false reality of Biden warning the electorate that democracy is on the ballot reinforced his warnings, even though most voters seem more concerned with the high cost of feeding their

She didn’t cry. She had to give up on right-wing agendas. After his victory, Biden would not be impeached

Nancy Pelosi recalled a traumatic moment when she heard that her husband was attacked with a hammer when she spoke to police about her husband’s attack. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she also condemned certain Republicans for joking about it.

There’s one party that does not believe in the outcome of the election, and mocks any violence that happens. That has to stop,” Pelosi said.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is the likely next speaker if Republicans net the five seats they need for the House majority, blamed Democrats for heated political rhetoric as he laid out an aggressive agenda, targeting border security and relentless investigations in an exclusive interview with CNN. The conference members are demanding that Biden be impeached, and he didn’t rule it out.

McCarthy told CNN that impeachment won’t be used for political purposes. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”

Ron Johnson said that if the Republicans took the Senate, he would use the power granted him to further his campaign, because he was in line to be chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations.

There’s something magical about democratic elections, when differences are exposed in debates and fierce campaigns. But there’s mostly, until now, been an expectation that both sides would then abide by the verdict of the people.

The election system is corrupt and broken in some parts and it’s a concern that election officials have had for months. The system was not disrupted by the scattered episodes during the vote.

But the incidents reported by officials this week were far less stark. Despite widespread accusations of fraud, Republican candidates so far have mostly accepted the results when they’ve lost — including some of the loudest promoters of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump called for a protest. Technical problems in Arizona and Michigan have been mostly ignored.

They noted that elections officials used better and more frequent communication along with live cameras at ballot boxes and counting rooms. The polling companies and the right-wing media may have discouraged some right-wing activists from provocations at polling places.

The chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections felt that it was smooth. “You can tell by my giddiness I was not expecting that.”

Election deniers in Michigan are still running on turbulence, even though they are running a little bit harder than the hanging chads

There are dozens of undecided races and they could continue next week in a few places. Two states in particular, Nevada and Arizona, feature several election-denying candidates in tight races and elections lawyers say they are gearing up for legal challenges aiming to once again put the soundness of the system on trial.

On Thursday, Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, disparaged the election system in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, and compared one part of the process to the notorious hanging chads of the 2000 election in Florida.

Indeed, Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, vowed to pursue such actions. She wrote “We have been prepared for this for over a year.” If need be, we have a large team of lawyers ready to take action.

Even if Tuesday’s results were a wash, conspiracy theorists are likely to keep pushing their theories. Despite the fact that Democrats won every major race in the state, the organizer of the election deniers in Michigan urged them to keep fighting.

“We can choose to curl up on the ledge and succumb, or we can dust ourselves off and restart the arduous climb up the steep slopes” of election integrity, wrote Patrice Johnson, the organizer of Michigan Fair Elections in a blog post. The group’s next online meeting was scheduled for Thursday.

Candidates who spread false voting fraud theories are important to stability of the election system, elections experts say. Election officials can help put out fires by talking to the public.

After getting calls and emails from voters demanding that their ballots be counted by hand instead of on machines, Fred Sherman, the election chief in Johnson County, Kan., came up with a solution. Voters in the most populous district in Kansas would be offered an option to place their vote in a specially marked white envelope, sealed in a red bag, and given assurances that it would be counted.

“They obviously created a little bit of turbulence,” Mr. Sherman said. “It’s like running a treadmill always on incline.” Mr. Sherman said he’d like “an easy run and you don’t have that when you have constant election denial.”

According to Douglas Wilson, a Democratic strategist in Charlotte, N.C., polling predicting a large Republican wave may have also worked to cool the ardor of election deniers. He said that attempts to undermine faith in the results would only cause Republican voters to desert them.

A coalition called Election Defenders organized training programs to educate people posted at polling places about voter intimidation. The organization was meant to have 1,250 volunteers, but it was overwhelmed with over 2000 people who had completed online training on how to de-escalate confrontations with potentially armed activists, and keep things calm.

“We had the good problem of more people signing up than we had a place to put them,” said Tiffany Flowers, a lead organizer of the campaign. She said she was on social media for 20 hours on Tuesday.

One of the few incidents came in late from Maricopa County, involving a man who tried to physically prevent a woman from entering a voting center minutes before it was set to close. Ms. Flowers said several Election Defenders on hand stepped up and escorted the woman in, then waited outside to walk her back to her car afterward.

“I strongly believe that there are more Americans who wanted to see everyone who was eligible to vote be able to vote fairly, freely and with dignity,” Ms. Flowers said.

“Stop the count! Stop the count! People banged on the windows that stood between them and people trying to count votes. Social media had false claims of ballots being wheeled in under the night sky.

The 2018 Georgia Republican Primary: How Voting Versus Trump’s Attack On Democracy Was Done, and How Counting Has Not Been Done

On the Wednesday after voting finished, Republican candidates for governor and state attorney general, who had denied the 2020 election results, conceded their races.

It was at the time that she realized the nation’s election workers were on their way to passing their first test since Donald Trump’s attack on democracy.

I get emotional when I see that, that’s like the affirmation we did it. We ran an election that went smoothly. There were folks who were ready to pounce on anything. … But it didn’t work.”

It will be weeks before all of the election results are officially certified, and the counting isn’t done in many races. Some candidates and online commentators have seized on the election day problems and the slow pace of vote counting in some states to make allegations of malfeasance.

The chaos that many had feared would take place is not yet occurring because of the chatter.

“We need all candidates who come up short to acknowledge it and to come back and fight within our system another day, if that’s their choice,” said Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Wednesday, after winning reelection.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

How Voting Got Misinformation? Reconciling Social Media and Politics in the Context of Post-Election Predictions

Even as election officials, civil society groups and researchers prepare for a lengthy post election period of uncertainty and risk, they are cautiously hopeful that the country is not headed for a repeat of 2020.

“It feels like the air has been taken out of the sails somehow,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, said last week. “That’s how it looks at the moment but I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

In the weeks ahead of the midterms, election deniers were already declaring the vote rigged — no matter what the outcome. Less than 40% of GOP voters said they were very confident in their community’s poll workers.

Cindy Otis, who was a former CIA analyst, said that the scene was set for fraudulent activity and it was just a matter of collecting and reporting the evidence.

“We had more protections than we did in 2020,” said a person who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That translated into a much smoother process that was ready to withstand challenges and I think deterred many from coming forward with attempts to intervene in the process, because we had successfully shown and convinced them that would have been a futile effort.”

Election offices also leveraged social media strategies similar to those used by bad actors spreading false narratives. Local governments were given the chance to use the templates created by the National Association of State Election Directors.

“They use very similar language over and over and over again to emphasize that election officials are the trusted source or the most reliable place to get information about elections,” NASED Director Amy Cohen said. The goal is not a specific narrative or a specific piece of false information, it’s to drive. If you’re interested in the party that can answer the question, it’s election officials.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

Elections in Arizona: How Voting Turned Msail in Maricopa, Ariz., After the Cigarette Flare

The payoff from that preparation was perhaps most evident in Maricopa County, Ariz., which was the focus of some of 2020’s most viral fraud conspiracy theories.

After a surge of posts immediately after problems were reported Tuesday and early Wednesday, the researchers found discussions surrounding tabulation machines and printers in Maricopa had tapered off. That’s different from 2020, when false claims that ballots marked with Sharpie pens would be invalidated in Maricopa County gathered steam in the days after voting ended, and took about a day longer to taper off.

Less than an hour and a half after conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk started to claim on Twitter that the problems were actually an intentional effort to disenfranchise Republicans, Maricopa officials released a video explaining the problems and reassuring voters their ballots would be counted.

Researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership, a research coalition that focuses on misinformation around elections, pulled tweets related to technical issues in Maricopa up until Monday and found that while the most retweeted accounts promoted false narratives, the county election websites were the most frequently included links in the online discussion. The websites were used for both spreading facts and speculation.

Another difference from 2020 was closer coordination between election agencies and law enforcement in places like Maricopa County, where on election night, police on horseback patrolled the streets outside the Phoenix tabulation center — itself surrounded by a newly erected permanent black security fence.

“It’s unfortunate, but it was comforting to see the protection of election officials taken so seriously,” said a former elections official in Utah and Colorado.

“It turned out to be a lot of talk,” she said, crediting officials’ communication that voter intimidation is illegal. “There’s a huge amount that can be done on a political level by defining what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

How Voting Goes Disinformation: The Case of a Large Demonstration in Maricopa County, Florida, During the 2022 Election

Over the weekend, dozens of protesters showed up outside of Maricopa County’s counting site in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, in what appears to be the largest post-election protest of 2022.

“Based on what we see before us in the breadth and supply of disinformation right now, there is seemingly a disconnect between how much is available and how relatively resilient people have actually been and not falling for lies that would sway them towards certain candidates, particularly those that are election denial champions,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press.

Alternative platforms with the right’s support now advertise few limits on what users are allowed to post, as a result of changing landscape of social media.

The clearest example is Trump, who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, cutting off his ability to reach a combined audience of over 100 million followers.

Trump’s social network is Truth Social. His following there is smaller — 4.5 million — and while his posts are often screenshotted and shared across mainstream platforms, his reach is more limited than it was in 2020.

He made a Truth Social post on Election Day calling for protests in Detroit but his post hasn’t been widely shared or gotten traction.

Another challenge for those eager to cast doubt upon the results of the election is that they appear to be struggling to cohere around a narrative to advance conspiracy theories.

The party won important victories, most importantly in Florida, where the governor was re-elected by a near-20-point margin.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/11/14/1136537352/2022-election-how-voting-went-misinformation

The End of the Frontier: How New Mexico Attorney General Jen Benson and I found out about a voter’s decision to vote for Trump in 2020

“Any county that hasn’t finished counting is cheating, full stop,” a user on one website wrote on Thursday. “[Y]eah but what happens if Kari Lake wins? That means we cheated then?” another replied.

While the fringe platforms have siphoned off some of the more notorious sources of false information and conspiracy theories, they’ve created an ecosystem that’s powerful in its own right.

“You have this content being delivered now in so many different ways,” disinformation expert Otis said. They’re getting hammered with it, and they’re getting it in a wide range of places, from political campaigns to news apps. It doesn’t have to be something that’s happening on a mainstream platform in order to continue its impact.

Still, as Benson noted in Michigan, maybe the clearest sign that the atmosphere this cycle is less receptive to contesting results is that so few candidates — even those who falsely believe that Trump won in 2020 — have decided to do so.

New Mexico Secretary of State Oliver pointed to her state’s 2nd Congressional District. Going into Election Day, she was worried that the House race could be a hotspot. It’s switched hands between the two major political parties each of the past three elections, and barely a thousand votes separate the two candidates this year.

“It’s been really nice to have a return to what I consider the norms of our democracy — you know, accepting election results, the peaceful transition of power,” Oliver said. “It makes me feel hopeful, for the first time in a while.”

Geoff Duncan: CNN Sensitivist and Former Pro Bowler: What Do We Really Need to Know About The 2020 Georgian Presidential Election?

Editor’s Note: Geoff Duncan, a CNN political contributor and Republican, served as Georgia’s lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2023. He is a former professional baseball player and the author of “GOP 2.0: How the 2020 Election Can Lead to a Better Way Forward for America’s Conservative Party.” His views are his own in this commentary. View more opinion articles on CNN.

Heck, I even wrote a book about it more than a year ago predicting this outcome. But I take no pleasure in being correct. I am a conservative. I believe that America is headed in the wrong direction, fueled by the hangover of the Trump years and the policies of President Joe Biden and his congressional enablers.

There is a group of people in my unhappiness. According to CNN exit polls, over 70% of people said they were dissatisfied or angry with the direction of the country.

A high-stakes December runoff election between incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia still looms large. Georgians are going to see a lot of commercials on their Thanksgiving tables. The race will be hard-fought, with each party eager to end the cycle with a win and to preserve (or narrow) the current make-up of the Senate.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/opinions/georgia-runoff-herschel-walker-three-calls-duncan/index.html

A Call-to-DeSantis Campaign for Robust Reelection. A Brief Survey of Republicans and Democrats During the First Two Years of Electoral Success

Yes, they are longtime buddies dating back to the United States Football League (USFL). The first time Walker and Trump met, it was while Walker was the star running back for the New Jersey Generals. And, yes, Trump’s endorsement helped propel Walker to an overwhelming primary win.

But Walker needs to convince voters beyond his base to get behind his candidacy. Our state’s growing population, especially in Atlanta’s northern suburbs, have forced Republicans to run different types of campaigns than years past, with messages tailored to swing voters.

According to a recent survey, Biden has poor favorability numbers in Georgia, and his predecessor’s is even worse. Only 40% approve of Trump.

Second, place a call to the Georgia governor’s mansion and ask for all possible support from the freshly reelected Brian Kemp. The victory of the governor over the Democratic nominee came six months after he defeated Perdue by over 50 points in the Republican primary.

Trump recruited Perdue into the primary to re-litigate his baseless conspiracy theories, and the former senator obliged, arguing, “in my election and the president’s election, they were stolen. The evidence is compelling now.”

After dispatching Perdue, Kemp earned more than 200,000 votes than Walker in their respective general elections. Walker and Warnock are separated by about 35,000 votes. Do the math. It’s undoubtedly part of the reason that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Kemp had a formidable political operation that was tapped for support.

Finally, as his team compiles their surrogate wish list, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should be their first call. DeSantis is the talk of the town right now, and for good reason. He was reelected with the biggest margin of any Florida governor in the last 40 years. The win of just over 30,000 votes four years ago has turned into a 1.5 million win. He had a comfortable 56-43 margin with Latino voters. He achieved all of this with a record that was fiercely conservative.

Although there will be a lot of talk regarding his national ambitions, it is worth taking stock of his recent accomplishment. It proves that effective and decisive GOP leadership can yield significant electoral success.

Walker isn’t expected to get advice from me. I have been at many Republican garden party where I have spoken out against Trump. The status quo isn’t cutting it because the GOP can’t best a president with an approval rating in the low 40s. Take my word for it.

Sessions of the Mueller Select Committee on Mar-a-Lago: Investigating a Democratic Presidential Candidate who wrongfully attempted to steal Joe Biden’s presidency

Multiple federal and state investigations are still going on relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and his family business.

Trump, who has launched his 2024 campaign for the White House, denies any criminal wrongdoing. He has claimed that Willis, a Democrat, is politically biased, and still regularly promotes the false claim that he won the election in Georgia.

Mar-a-Lago documents: Did Trump mishandle classified material? The Justice Department is investigating to see if documents from the Trump White House should have been mishandled after he left office. Potential witnesses to how Trump handled the documents are being interviewed by a federal grand jury in Washington. The National Archives, charged with collecting and sorting presidential material, has previously said that at least 15 boxes of White House records were recovered from Mar-a-Lago, including some classified records.

The congressional committee is looking at whether the higher standard of evidence needed by the court will make it hard to convict the former president. The committee hearings were full of evidence suggesting a weeks-long pattern of wrongdoing by Trump, but they did not include the sort of cross-examination witnesses would see in court.

The panel is likely to be wiped out by an incoming Republican House majority next month because many lawmakers who refused to certify the last presidential election whitewashed that day over two years later.

In its highly produced hearings, the committee – with its seven Democrats and two Republicans who split with their own party to take part – painted scenes of horrific violence and intense efforts by Trump to steal Joe Biden’s presidency.

A Capitol Police officer told how she had slipped on spilled blood during the melee caused when the ex-president’s mob smashed its way into the Capitol. A mother and daughter that worked as election workers in Georgia were the target of racist threats after Rudy Giuliani accused them of vote stealing. The speaker of the Arizona state House testified that Trump’s calls to meddle with the election were foreign to his very being.

Republicans who were with Trump in the West Wing testified about his attack on the Constitution, including Cassidy Hutchinson. The former aide to the White House’s chief of staff was upset about it. It wasn’t American. We were watching the Capitol building being defaced.

From the moment that conservative retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig warned in a June committee hearing that Trump and supporters still posed “a clear and present danger to American democracy,” it’s been clear the panel believes that Trump was in the middle of an alleged election-stealing conspiracy. If the 45th president was referred to the DOJ for criminal actions, it’s likely because he earned his second impeachment over the insurrection.

The committee found that Trump stoked the violence with incendiary tweets and that the White House was purposely slow in responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol.

“This is someone who in multiple ways tried to pressure state officials to find votes that didn’t exist. This is someone who tried to interfere with a joint session, even inciting a mob to attack the Capitol,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the January 6 committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. I don’t know what it is if that’s not a crime.

Yet the committee is not in control of the ultimate fate of its work. The panel can’t force the Justice Department to prosecute a former president whose election guarantees the divisions caused by January 6 will persist in another US election.

Is sending criminal referrals to the DOJ going to increase the perception of political vendettas in the wake of January 6?

Will there be an impression that if a person has been in office for two years they will be harassed by referrals, and that this will help the Republican cause?

Do Americans care about events that have taken place in the last two years, at a time of high inflation and the aftermath of a once-in-a-century epidemic?

The refusal of many of Cheney’s fellow Republicans to even acknowledge the ex-president’s conduct suggests that her effective sacrifice of her career in the House GOP may be in vain. Certainly, there was little sense during the compelling hearings that the public was as transfixed with this act of accountability as it was, for instance, with the Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s that helped lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The power of conservative media to distort is one of the reasons for the dichotomy.

The Senate Investigation of the Decree of the 2016 U.S. Census and the 2016 Insurrection: Summary of the Committee Report

Despite the fact that many of Trump’s election candidates had amplified his false claims of election fraud, Americans rejected many of them.

It is not possible to quantify how the committee affected voters. As the ex-president launched a campaign meant to cast the probes into his conduct as politically motivated persecution, it kept the evidence of Trump’s insurrection in the news for the entire year. This is important because some pro- Trump Republicans are trying to distort the facts about the attack on the Capitol.

“This is a massive investigation that the committee has undertook. Huge amounts of evidence, a huge amount of witnesses being identified,” former federal prosecutor Shan Wu told CNN’s Pamela Brown on “CNN Newsroom” on Saturday.

I think the report that accompanies the referrals will give a road map to the DOJ. The DOJ is late to the party and they are trying to catch up but that detail could be very helpful to them and will put a lot of pressure on them.

If nothing else, future generations will be able to judge the determination of the panel members, especially its two Republicans, and the courage of witnesses who told the truth to try save democracy.

“Unfortunately we now live in a world where a lie is Trump’s truth, where democracy is being challenged by authoritarianism,” the Illinois Republican said.

If we do not search for a way out, the experiment will fall into the ash heap of history.

The committee demonstrated its seriousness of purpose by refusing to put forth a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have thought of themselves as both legislators and public educators, but they have also placed themselves in the minds of prosecutors. They should focus on a short list of people who are most likely to be charged with a crime. Focusing on the very best cases avoids diluting the effect of the referrals with more tenuous theories against a large number of actors, and emphasizes the cases the prosecutors can actually win.

Concluding its final public meeting Monday, the House January 6 committee released a summary of its key findings — the conclusions of which are devastating, even if they lack all the details expected in the final report.

But it would be wrong to think of the report as the closing chapter of the insurrection and its aftermath. Instead, it represents another test: for the justice system, for elected officials and for the American people. How each responds to the report will determine whether the insurrection at the Capitol was a wake-up call or, as the committee put it, “a precedent, and invitation to danger, for future elections.”

But the committee’s findings have provided a formidable body of evidence that there was an elaborate effort, led by the President of the United States and his Republican allies in Congress, to systematically overturn an election that he lost.

Citing former President Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon, Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the panel’s two Republicans, argued that the “peaceful transfer of power” was a “miracle” of our system and only one President — Trump — had failed to abide by this process.

The findings certainly rank among the worst scandals in presidential history. It is fair to say that a sitting President being part of a concerted effort to reverse his own election stands alongside the abuses of power that President Richard Nixon engaged in and the violations of law under the Reagan administration exposed during the Iran-Contra hearings.

In other words, the committee concluded that Trump made history by participating in an unrivaled abuse of presidential power that threatened the very foundation of our democracy: elections. The term “unprecedented” has been used a lot but it works in this case.

The “smoking gun” tape that allowed legislators to hear Nixon obstructing an investigation were enough in 1974 for politicians in both parties to say enough.

Reagan’s approval ratings fell and his legacy was put in jeopardy by the discoveries that national security officials broke the law when they sent money and arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, which is against the Boland Amendment.

The president was saved by the fact that the committee couldn’t directly connect the illegal operation to him, and the fact that the administration mounted a public relations campaign to win back public support. The Congressional Democrats decided that they wouldn’t pursue impeachment.

Clinton had lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky in public and in his legal testimony, but it was only after the evidence of his infidelity began to surface that his public statements changed.

January 6 Committee Report Zerizer: Why the GOP Appropriate Sensitivity was Thrown OFF-Sensitive

The January 6 committee already has experienced this challenge as dramatic televised hearings, which proved capable of shifting attention to how bad the coup attempt had been, were quickly drowned out by the latest celebrity scandal or news story coming from Washington. There are so many outlets for information that it is virtually impossible to keep the public eye committed to any single subject.

Even 9/11 or the pandemic didn’t produce a serious political realignment. When a leader of a party is found to have committed abuses of power, polarization is usually triumphant.

Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has been to the right of the Democrats. Many of the extremists within the GOP have been tactical, where some leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no limits on what is permissible.

In this case, the odds that the relevant party will change its ways or respond are minimal. It is worth remembering that the plan to set up an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 was nixed by Senate Republicans who did not cooperate with the congressional committee set up instead.

The Republicans who did serve on the committee — Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — have been attacked, marginalized and essentially pushed out of the party. The GOP used election denialism as a central campaign theme and it was the issue that the candidates ran away from.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/opinions/historical-context-january-6-committee-report-zelizer/index.html

Watergate was not the first scandal in our country. Donald Trump confronts the problem of governing the next four years with the Watergate investigation

The kind of reaction that took place with Watergate is not what our media system is capable of. When professional journalists coalesced around facts presented in a proper way, those times were past.

Partisan media outlets such as Fox News ignore the weight of evidence. The show hosts are happy to spin the news in ways that satisfy political desires.

In the coming weeks, there will likely be stories that misrepresent what the committee discovered and that will promote conspiratorial claims with no basis in fact. The world of social media will provide plenty of opportunity to spread misinformation that is contrary to the harrowing stories of the report.

And some of the forces that will check the impact of the report stem from a broader national culture that seems incapable of staying focused on issues for long. Our attention span is very short, so we have to push the media from one issue to the other, and much of the news media happily oblige.

The Watergate scandal was the story that defined much of the period between 1972 and 1974, but for many Americans January 6 has just become one other thing among many that happened in the chaos of our era.

The Attorney General now faces a difficult decision regarding whether or not to indict Trump, since he is now one of Biden’s campaign opponents in four years. Garland has appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, who is overseeing the investigations of Trump and will make recommendation s.

The question is whether this report will make Garland want to take action to ensure accountability, rather than only focusing on division within the electorate.

The January 6 report is a stress test for the problematic state of our democracy. The basic dynamics are unlikely to be changed.

With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

The committee looked at the past in making these referrals. She spoke of Samuel Cheney, her great-great- grandfather, who was a member of the Ohio Infantry during the Civil War. He passed President Andrew Johnson in the reviewing stand while he was in the Grand Review of the Armies after the war. She might also have added that Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, would soon be impeached. Like Donald Trump. And like Donald Trump, he was acquitted.

Reports of Grant, the Starr Report, and the 9/11 Commission – Two Years After the Return of Ulysses S. Grant

After Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868, Johnson went home to Tennessee, where he began to plot his comeback. Since he possessed a talent for uniting moderate and radical Republicans along with Democrats and former secessionists, many of whom either hated him or now wanted nothing more to do with him, it wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t illegal.

But sales and awards, while signs of public interest and literary merit, are not the best measures of a report’s success. Accountability and reforms are what matters the most. In the case of the Church Committee, intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency were brought to heel. Accountability was short-circuited in the reports of the Tower Commission and Independent Counsel, which were related to the Iran-Contra affair.

Reports often found eager audiences, in part for their explosive revelations but also in part for their style. The Starr Report covered both the investigations into President Clinton’s sexual relationships and his efforts to hide them. It became a top seller. The 9/11 commission report, which details the terror attacks and their causes in such captivating detail, sold so fast it was a finalist for the National book awards. The report on the Attica prison uprising was a finalist for the prestigious prize.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/23/opinions/jan-6-report-mirror-test-hemmer/index.html

The January 6 Commission Report on the Insurrection and the Birth of Democracy: A Detailed Account of a Critical Reflection by a Conservative Senator Hutchinson

For the January 6 commission, this is a real danger. If he is reelected to the presidency, Trump has said he would consider pardoning those involved in the insurrection.

For Hutchinson, that moment led her to reach back out to the committee and offer the detailed, shocking testimony that she shared in public hearings this summer. For the rest of us, it is a guide. The January 6 committee report provides a detailed account of an intentional, carefully planned attack on democratic governance, an account that creates an obligation for Americans who want that form of government to continue — a mirror test for 330 million people and the government agencies that serve them.

Which led to a crisis when she realized that, in a character-defining moment, she had failed what she called the “mirror test” — the ability to look in the mirror and be proud of who she was. She told the committee that she was disappointed in herself. “I was frustrated with myself. I was pretty much disgusted with myself. I became somebody I never thought that I would become.”

Do the Marchs of Jan. 6 Demonstrations Lead to Leftist Claims? An Investigative Study of a Politically-Informed Investigation of the Capitol Explosion

As an investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 Committee’s “Red” Team, which investigated the people who planned and attended the riot, as well as the domestic extremist groups responsible for much of the violence, I tracked more than 900 individuals charged by the Department of Justice with everything from parading in the Capitol to seditious conspiracy. About 30 of the defendants were interviewed about their motives. What my team and I learned is that distrust of the political establishment lead many of the rioters to believe that only revolution could save America, even though we did not have the capacity to detail this in the report.

Other factors beyond the former president had a part to play in radicalizing thousands of Americans to believe that they needed to attack America’s democracy. Only by understanding how those people lost faith in our governing institutions can we as a country figure out how to protect our democracy from threats like the attack on the Capitol.

If Willis has ambitions beyond the office of the Fulton County district attorney, she hasn’t spoken publicly about them. From a political standpoint, her only real misstep thus far has been hosting a fund-raiser last summer for Charlie Bailey, a former colleague at the D.A.’s office who was running for lieutenant governor. Bailey’s Republican opponent, Burt Jones, was one of 16 fake Trump electors Willis’s office was investigating, and the fund-raiser drew a sharp rebuke from Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court — the same judge tasked with deciding whether to make public the special grand jury’s report — who called it a “what are you thinking” moment that created “horrific” optics and disqualified Willis from proceeding with her investigation of Jones.

There was a scenario in which a Democrat like Willis, with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, could have been not entirely unlike Governor Deal before her, better positioned to deliver on some reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for — especially considering how, over the past year, reformists have experienced backlashes in places like San Francisco and New York. Kim Jackson, the pastor at the protests, has since become a state senator, and she told me that she was excited because she had supported a Black woman on a platform against the death penalty. A mass shooting at several Atlanta spas that left eight dead, mostly Asian women, is believed to have been a hate crime. Not long after, Willis announced that she would seek the death penalty for the accused shooter. According to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail, insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner was two major reform issues that were championed by Willis.

All Black men were sitting in the back of a courtroom where the judge was holding several preliminary hearings for those who had been arrested and held since July. One, accused of stealing equipment from a landscaping truck, had been in jail for 112 days; another, accused of smashing storefront windows, had been locked up for 116. It turned out that the initial police report had overestimated the amount of damage, presenting the crime as a felony rather than what it actually was, a misdemeanor.

Mark Binelli: Investigating the role Donald Trump used in the 2016 midterm election in the aftermath of the June 13th, 2016 Insurrection

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the opera director Yuval Sharon, and before that about the tangled legal aftermath of a deadly Waco, Texas, biker brawl. Atlanta-based artist is interested in telling stories through the perspective of a black female. She was named one of The British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019.

The paper reported that the firm had found that the voting systems used by Trump did not manipulate the outcome.

The Berkeley Research Group was commissioned to look into voting data from six states, according to the Post, and a source told the publication that the campaign team wanted about a dozen claims tested. The findings did not match what the team had hoped for, and the findings were never released, according to people familiar with the matter.

The research was done before the US Capitol attack, according to the Post. Two sources told CNN that the House January 6 committee looking into the role Trump played in inciting the insurrection did not know about the firm’s work. Trump has continued to lie in his campaign for the White House.

CNN previously reported that the first rally after two years of advice from alliances and advisers to stop relitigating the 2020 election was an attempt by him to communicate a second term agenda.

The former president has often pushed back on that advice, arguing that his message is strong enough as it is, and one source close to him told CNN his proclivity for focusing on the 2020 election will be tough to break because he still regularly hears from members of his base who believe so-called election integrity is an important talking point as he seeks reelection.

Another adviser said that despite the defeat of several Trump-backed midterm candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Trump has said he does not believe their losses were tied to their election lies.

The Fulton County Circuit Judge’s Final Report of the Special Grand Jury Investigating Donald Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Georgia Election Results

A special grand jury in Atlanta heard testimony from 75 witnesses over seven months and had access to some of Donald Trump’s closest advisers in the last weeks of his presidency. The jury foreperson spoke out in a media campaign, saying that they would issue multiple indictments in their final report.

The limited release was ordered by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who stated in his order that the report’s introduction and conclusion would be made public on Thursday.

The big question is whether or not the portions will include new information about what the former president did and if the special grand jury concluded that he committed any crimes.

In document preservation requests to Georgia officials in February 2021, Willis said she was investigating potential crimes, including solicitation of election fraud, making false statements to government bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and violence or threats related to election administration.

Cunningham told CNN the report is saying either that Donald Trump did something himself or that he did it for him.

“That would tell us that this cross section of citizens, having spent nine months working hard at this, has concluded that at least some of what was done on behalf of the former president to overturn the election results was a crime,” he said. “I think that’s terrifically significant.”

The final report of the grand jury, which was barred from issuing indictments, was a culmination of the seven months of work that saw them interview 75 witnesses, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Its final report is likely to include some summary of the panel’s investigative work, as well as any recommendations for indictments and the alleged conduct that led the panel to its conclusions.

The source said that the District Attorney could decide on charges in the spring. Willis will bring her charging recommendations to the regularly seated grand juries, who each serve two-month terms. The next group of grand juries in Fulton County are scheduled to be sworn in early May.

During a hearing last month on whether to publicly release the report, Willis, a Democrat, suggested the special grand jury has recommended multiple indictments and said that her decision on whether to bring charges is “imminent.”

In Georgia, the foreperson of the Atlanta-based grand jury that investigated former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election told CNN on Tuesday that the panel is recommending multiple indictments and suggested “the big name” may be on the list.

Questions about Georgia are complicated by the fact that Thursday’s excerpts came from a grand jury report that was only partially released. It’s not a one-sided document since witnesses don’t testify and can’t rebut accusations. The rights of people who may or may not be charged in the case were not adequately addressed in the rest of the report. Although non-binding, the recommendations of perjury prosecutions are still a small step towards criminal accountability for an attempt to subvert democracy.

Whether Willis concludes the same thing and if there is evidence sufficient to make indictments or to win a such a critical case is not yet clear. But the answer may be coming soon.

“I am convinced there will be indictments, either for perjury or for other crimes,” Thomas Dupree, a former deputy assistant attorney general in ex-President George W. Bush’s administration, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Thursday.

One of the potentially most significant excerpts of the report deals with the grand jury’s unanimous conclusion that there was no evidence of voter fraud in Georgia that could have altered the result of an election won by Biden by just under 12,000 votes.

Norm Eisen told CNN on Thursday that the conclusion was an important building block of any case against Trump. The core of what Donald Trump has been talking about happened in Georgia according to the finding. It repudiates him,” Eisen said on CNN “Newsroom”

It establishes a basis for bringing charges when there is a solicitation of election fraud. There is another nail in the coffin that was already full.

Still, Alberto Gonzales, who served as attorney general in the Bush administration, cautioned that it would be wrong to get “terribly excited” by Thursday’s events in Georgia or to over-interpret them.

The Michigan Capitol Countdown to the 2019 January 2, 2021 Black-Hole Supermajority Strikes Again: Special Counsel Tim Heaphy

This is all I want to do. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” Trump said, according to a transcript of the call that took place on January 2, 2021.

Timothy Heaphy told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “Erin Burnett OutFront” that “unless there is information inconsistent, which I don’t expect, I think there will likely be indictments both in Georgia and at the federal level.”

“They were present for really significant events. The special counsel will want to hear about the president’s understanding of the election results and also what happened on January 6. He said that they both had communication with him about the events preceding the Capitol riot.

The special counsel has a massive amount of evidence already in-hand that it now needs to comb through, including evidence recently turned over by the House January 6 committee, subpoena documents provided by local officials in key states and discovery collected from lawyers for Trump allies late last year in a flurry of activity, at least some of which had not been reviewed as of early January, sources familiar with the investigation told CNN at the time.

Smith will not stop because of his family relationship, according to Heaphy. “He believes that the law entitles him to all of that information, and he’s determined to get it.”

The situation is not unique to Michigan, as the threat to Nessel and other officials is a classic example of the problem with political hate and extremism.

Police last month arrested a man accused of posting a Twitter threat to “carry out the punishment of death” against anyone Jewish in the Wolverine State’s government. Michigan’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, said on Thursday she was one of the targets.

Another Michigan lawmaker who was also allegedly targeted in the threat, state Rep. Samantha Steckloff, said that such incidents made her question her public service but that she felt a duty to fight for her community.

The country was shocked by a Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting in which 11 people were killed. The year before, White supremacists converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” in a march over which then-President Donald Trump equivocated. Scores more incidents failed to make national headlines but have had a corrosive and frightening impact on America’s Jewish community. The Anti-Defamation League, in the latest available annual figures, found that a total of 2,717 antisemitic incidents were reported in 2021 – a 34% increase on the 2,026 incidents reported the year before.

“This is right in the wheelhouse of what the FBI and Director [Chris] Wray have told us. That … the most dangerous, the most concerning threat that they face on the counterterrorist side, and that is the threat from domestic violent extremists,” McCabe said on “CNN Newsroom.” He added that such offenders were often “motivated by racial animus, they’re motivated by antisemitic feelings, by anti-immigrant feelings, charged sometimes with political grievance and then motivated to act violently on their own.”

A federal judge in December sentenced one of the masterminds of the plot to kidnap the governor to nearly 20 years in prison. The man’s lawyers argued he had descended down a “conspiracy rabbit hole” during long solo trips as a truck driver. The Secretary of State in Michigan, a state crucial to the election’s outcome, said that armed protesters showed up outside her home in late 2020 to repudiate her as a traitor because of the lying Trump had done about the election.

Democrats aren’t the only victims of extremists. In 2017, Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who now serves as House majority leader, was seriously injured in a shooting at a congressional baseball practice by a man claiming to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. Last year, police arrested a man and charged him with attempting to murder a justice of the Supreme Court.

The story of a Vermont rioter who allegedly threatened to kill her husband, aka Katelyn Jones, before the 2020 election

And as recently as Thursday, New Hampshire woman Katelyn Jones, 25, pleaded guilty to sending a series of threatening texts to a Michigan county election official after the 2020 election. She faces up to 10 years in prison when she is sentenced in July, according to the Justice Department.

Individuals act on their own agency but they may be persuaded by heated political rhetoric. This can be used to claim that their words caused violence. But the House January 6 committee aired video of Trump supporters on the day of the riot saying they were inspired by his false claims of election fraud. More than 34% of Americans think violent action against the government is sometimes justified, according to a poll conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland.

The Georgia lawmaker berated the Republican election official from the Peach State who was resisting Trump’s baseless claims that he won the state at a meeting on election integrity. The claims and conspiracy were almost all false.

In order to ensure that Americans can vote, local public officials like Michigan’s Nessel have to be careful about how they act, because it can lead to dangerous consequences.

“It’s happening in almost every state. It’s happening against regular people,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Who is willing to take these jobs?” she asked, before warning: “Our democracy is only as good as the people we elect, and we can only elect the people willing to run. And polling is showing that people are stepping back from running when they have to add this to a stressful job that doesn’t pay particularly well and puts them in the literal targets of their fellow citizens.”

The Fulton County District Attorney’s Investigation of a Newly-Indicated Judge-Client Controversy Using the RICO Act

The reason that I love RICO is that jurors are very intelligent, so I am a fan of it. “They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.”

John Floyd, a lawyer with deep expertise in racketeering cases, is assisting Fulton County on multiple cases, including Willis gang indictment against the rapper Young Thug, where she is currently using the RICO Act and introducing song lyrics as evidence.

A source familiar with the investigation says a Fulton County judge approved the district attorney’s request to record testimony of all 75 witnesses who appeared before the grand jury. Although, timing details of when this treasure trove of information could be released is still unclear.

Norm Eisen said the piercing of this bedrock legal protection was highly unusual and an ill omen for Donald Trump since it could be used to suggest he committed a crime. This could involve not just the mishandling of classified documents but also possible obstruction of justice. Eisen told CNN in an interview that the situation worsened what was probably Trump’s most federal legal peril.

One witness might be asked to come back. CNN was told that the Manhattan District Attorney, who has been attacked by Trump’s allies, was taking a break. Miller reported that Bragg’s team is working out whether to call back a pivotal witness – Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen – to refute testimony this week by Robert Costello, an attorney who previously represented several Trump allies and appeared before the grand jury at the request of Trump’s legal team.

Heavily covered in the media, the episode involves key testimony from star witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s once close ally and personal fixer, a convicted felon and now disbarred lawyer, who paid Daniels $130,000 on behalf of Trump to keep her from going public about an alleged affair with the former president a decade earlier.

There could be a thread of political drama that could happen with Trump’s potential biggest rival in the GOP primary choosing this week to twist the knife while other potential GOP White House hopefuls were rushing to defend him. If he won the Oval Office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis implied in an interview, he would be much more disciplined than Trump was during his chaotic four years as president. While Trump had served up some daily drama, he told Piers Morgan on TalkTV to focus on the big picture and put points on the board.

The advisers told Steve Contorno the governor couldn’t afford to be marginalized from the get go. “He clearly made the calculus it was time to push back.”

The reaction from Republicans is telling. As the world braced for breaking news in Gotham City, most members of the GOP, from reliable allies like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to potential presidential rivals, rushed to Trump’s defense. House Republicans denounced the abuse of prosecutorial authority and called for an investigation into the Manhattan District Attorney.

CNN reported that the Fulton County investigation is focusing on potential racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, charges that are more often associated with TV crime dramas like “The Sopranos” than a former president of the United States.

It can be hard to keep the multiple and simultaneous investigations straight, but there is a distinction between New York and Georgia. The former involves a probe into Trump’s alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 presidential campaign.

TheGeorgia GOP was ruined by Trump’s actions. Any news cycle about his legal trouble will outlive the damage. History will not be kind to people who undermine and overturn the outcome of an election.

Trump and his legal team were urging Republican legislators in Georgia to call a special session to overturn Biden’s victory. The Georgia House Speaker stood his ground and told Trump to do what he said was appropriate, according to media reports.

Trump rumors: What do we need to do about the election? How to stop rumors and start writing the next chapter of the Republican Party

These rumors were intended to sow doubt about the election because no one has ever presented credible evidence of widespread fraud.

To move forward, we must accept the results of 2020, put Trump in the rearview mirror and start writing the next chapter of the Republican Party. Rather than attempting to overturn the election, we should focus on winning hearts and minds before the next round of votes are counted.