The research was commissioned by Trump’s campaign, but it did not prove election fraud

Teaser of a Tear: The Hustle of Republican Candidates During the 2018 U.S. Presidential Reionization Reloaded

Mr. Rice put the iPad down. “Listen to what this moron says. This was what I was trying to avoid. He described gasps of disbelief at a campaign stop at the same country club when he matter-of-factly declared that Mr. Trump had lost the election. “It was painful.”

In July, he lost this primary after receiving less than a quarter of the vote. In the 2020 general election, he had coasted to victory with 62 percent.

In an interview, Mr. Meijer, who had also voted to impeach and lost his primary, said he was surprised Republicans had not suffered a backlash from voters over the objections and the Jan. 6 riot. He claimed that the liberals of the Biden administration had pushed Mr. Trump’s candidacy back into the voters’ minds.

“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.”

Mr. Budd of North Carolina signaled support for Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in the weeks after the election by introducing the Combat Voter Fraud Act. As a Republican candidate for the Senate, he warmed up a Trump rally this spring by accusing Democrats of opposing “election integrity” because “they know they can’t win elections on a woke left agenda.” (A spokesman for Mr. Budd said he had started pushing for tighter voter registration requirements long before the 2020 election, noting the experience of a major election fraud scandal in his state in 2018.)

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 was co-sponsored by more than 30 lawmakers, and it did not advance, but it had favor with the former president. In July, Mr. Trump officially endorsed Mr. Mullin.

Mr. Mullin, who owns a ranch, spent a hot Saturday that same month campaigning among his fellow cattlemen at their annual conference in Norman, Okla. One attendee, Joel Reimer, applauded him for taking a stand against the Electoral College count knowing he would be ridiculed by many for buying into conspiracy theories. Mr. Reimer, who manages a beef ranch, had questions about the vote from his small-town perspective.

The campaign distributed fliers that said that no one from Congress had worked harder to save America than Mr. Mullin. At the top of a checklist of priorities was the party’s new refrain: “Secure our elections.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/politics/republican-election-objectors.html

CNN Observations of the 2016 White House Reaction Committee on “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggestlies and Legends About Our Past”

A lot of the reporting was done by Amudalat Ajasa, Michael H. Keller and others. Sean Catangui and Hang Do Thi Duc worked on the project.

The A-Mark Foundation, Ballotpedia, CQ, The Cook Political Report, Daily Kos and LegiStorm are some of the sources that The Times used to analyze the 137 objectors. Data analysis was also contributed by Andrew Beveridge and Susan Weber of SocialExplorer.com.

A professor of History and Public Affairs at PRINCETON University is a CNN political analyst. He is the author of and editor of 24 books, including his upcoming co-edited work, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggestlies andLegends About Our Past”. You can follow him on the social networking site. The views expressed in this commentary are not of his own. More opinions on CNN.

The committee also revealed evidence of the extensive contact between Trump’s allies, particularly Roger Stone, and militant right-wing extremist groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. There was a serious Threat of Violence against the Capitol and Secret Service warnings about it.

Cheney explained that the committee is “obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion. We can protect the republic now because every American is entitled to the answers.

When they saw little sign of help on the way, they all exploded. Schumer demanded that the Attorney General be asked to tell them to leave the Capitol. The legislative leaders were not as focused on restoring peace as Trump was when he watched the riot unfold from the West Wing of the White House.

During the past four months, the bipartisan panel has held public hearings in an attempt to get the full story of what happened on the day.

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 rhetoric of a stolen election would frame the entire operation, sowing doubt among his supporters about the legitimacy of Biden’s victory and creating a basis for going to court and leaning on state officials. Trump’s team constantly discussed and deliberated over how to achieve their goal.

Intentionality, Justice, and Failure in the Campaign for the Reconciliation of the 2016 Axiomatic Presidential Campaign, January 6, 2021

The committee provided shocking evidence and details that we did not know about how dangerous the events of those months were.

Intentionality: The committee demonstrated that January 6 was not some sort of one-off, unintended day of chaos where events unexpectedly spun out of control. It was premeditated.

Orchestration is the key to the campaign to overturn the 2020 election, where Trump employed a chaotic plan, desperate to keep power. Rather, key members of the administration, including the former president and key advisers, deliberately pushed to overcome electoral defeat. Roger Stone said that possession was nine tenths of the law. F–k you.

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. “If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit,” Bannon predicted.

The executive summary states that the president was made aware many times that his election fraud allegations were not true. Some of Trump’s top advisers gave testimony that helped the panel build its case.

On the day of the “Stop the Steal” rally, January 6, 2021, Trump knew that the protesters were armed and dangerous but did nothing 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. The former president lunged at the Secret Service agent and tried to drive the car when he was told he couldn’t go, according to Cassidy Hutchinson.

Trump and his attorneys, such as Rudy Giuliani, probed to see if various state officials would do their bidding. The Speaker of the Arizona Legislature, who supported the administration, was concerned when Giuliani and Trump tried to have the legislature invalidate the results of the election in his state. The president’s lawyer John Eastman, who had written the road map for their attempted election steal, pressured Pence’s aides to have him reject the results.

The Trump Campaign for 2020: The Case for a Critical, Strategic, and (Mis)Abundant Capitol Hill Committee of the Landau Caucus

Continuum: January 6 was just one piece of a much larger 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. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.

Chairman Bennie Thompson said that the Trump administration embarked on a systematic plan to overturn the election. The January 6 rally and the violent events that followed were just part of a larger strategy.

Throughout these events, we have learned, Trump understood exactly 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 even conservative media figures urged him to stop.

When the Capitol was attacked by a mob, Trump sat and watched the violence on television. Cheney said that his actions were unlawful and an utter moral failure. He used language that justified what rioters had done to call off his supporters, according to Rep. Elaine Luria.

Ongoing Threat: In its pivotal hearing Thursday, the committee wanted to make one thing clear, the danger is not over in 2022. “There remains a clear and present danger to our electoral system and to democratic institutions,” Raskin said, “So, that is something that will come through in our final hearing. This is not ancient history; it is a continuing threat. That continued threat exists on many levels. The rhetoric of election denialism has taken hold among many of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans who subscribe to this agenda are also running for several key offices, ranging from gubernatorial positions to secretaries of state in key states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, all of whom will play a key role in overseeing future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.

When Cheney asked why Americans should assume that those institutions will do well if the wrong people are in power again, she made it clear she was referring to the fact that the wrong people would be in power. The story of January 6 was a bunch of officials who refused to be involved in the scheme. She reminded the nation that our institutions are only strong when men and women of good faith are behind them.

Cheney said the committee is considering making a referral to the Justice Department, but it’s up to prosecutors to decide what will happen. If Congress can finish work on the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which Trump had promised to do in the future, we will know if it’s worth the trouble. We will watch as voters determine, in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, whether to send a clear message to Washington that messing with democracy will not be tolerated. Right now, January 6 has not been a major issue in most of the campaigns.

Barring successful prosecutions of key players, the odds are that within a few months many Americans may tragically think of the report as ancient history, rather than compelling evidence accusing a major 2024 presidential candidate of coming close to overturning results of the election system that’s the best our democracy has to offer.

It’s a foregone conclusion that this fall’s mid-term elections in the US will be a referendum on the power of the party in power. Voters need to think about the intentions of the party they are voting for, as well as the future of this country, when they cast their votes.

Following 18 months of deliberations and hearings, more than 1,000 witnesses and countless documents, the committee has produced a blistering account accusing former President Donald Trump and his allies of attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

In 2020, the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories and election audits, all of which were related to Donald Trump. The embrace of violent extremism by a small but growing splinter of the Republican Party comes alongside that test.

The House January 6 Insurrection Committee: Report of a “Measurement of Law and Order in the United States”

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.

The final report should clear up any beliefs that the January 6th insurrection was a sham or an amateur effort. The recommendations are historic.

The panel made four criminal referrals against Trump, with one of them going to the US Justice Department. If the United States is to survive as a “nation of laws and democracy,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, said we can “never let this happen again.”

Even though he lost the election, Trump planned to overturn votes to try to get new votes and to stoke an attack on the Congress, according to the committee.

Republican Liz Cheney, who is on the panel, said that only one President had failed to abide by the process of peaceful transfer of power, and that they were a miracle.

The findings are definitely 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 in addition to the abuses of power that President Richard Nixon engaged in and the violations of law under the Reagan administration.

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. In this case, the term “unprecedented” works because it has been overused a lot.

In 1974, politicians used the “smoking gun” tape that allowed legislators to hear Nixon obstructing an investigation as a reason to say enough.

The discoveries that national security officials in the Reagan administration violated the Boland Amendment by sending money and arms to the Nicaraguan Contras caused Reagan’s approval ratings to plummet and put his legacy in jeopardy.

The president was saved because the committee was unable to connect the illegal operation to him and because the administration mounted a effective public relations campaign to win back public support. Congressional Democrats decided not to pursue impeachment.

Even Clinton’s scandal, which was over an issue far less relevant than what faced Nixon or Reagan, clearly contradicted his public statements and legal testimony about the subject after DNA evidence emerged of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

We live in a period today where it is unclear that any congressional investigation can still have an outsize impact. There are a few factors that make it difficult for Congress to shift political momentum.

Even 9/11 or the pandemic didn’t produce a serious political realignment. Polarization is almost always triumphant, even when the leader of a party is found to have committed egregious abuses of power.

Social scientists call it asymmetric polarization. The Republican Party has gone further to the right than did the Democrats. Some party leaders have embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship with no guidelines as to what is allowed in the GOP.

The chances that the relevant party is going to respond or change its ways are small. The plan to set up an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 was nixed by Senate Republicans because they refused to cooperate with the congressional committee that was 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. Republican candidates ran away from the issue of election denialism, but it was a central theme of the campaign.

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

January 6: Another Day in the Watergate Paradigm and a New Beginning in our Understanding of Public Policy, Media and Media Ecologies

Nor does our media ecosystem lend itself to the sort of reaction that took place with Watergate. When professional journalists banded together around the facts presented by an investigation in the 1970s, those times are long gone.

The weight of evidence is ignored by Fox News. Show hosts are more than willing to spin the news in a particular direction that satisfies political yearnings.

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 is a good place to push misinformation that isn’t in line with the stories found in the report.

The opposition in the congressional investigation of Iran-Contra put out a minority report in 1987, but today that is no longer necessary. Opponents of the committee have multiple platforms and opportunities to spin a different tale that undercuts the power that the official findings will have.

The broader national culture seems to be incapable of staying focused on issues for long, and thus the forces that will check the impact of the report stem from that. In our short attention span, everything must be new and fresh; we push the media from one issue to the other — and much of the news media happily oblige — with the lightning speed of TV commercials.

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.

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

Demystifying Donald Trump: A Response to a Trump-Leading Attorney General’s Big Lie on Election Correlations

Finally, Attorney General Merrick Garland now faces a politically perilous decision of whether to indict Trump, especially since he is now officially one of President Joe Biden’s campaign opponents in 2024. Garland has appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, who is overseeing the investigations of Trump and will make recommendation s.

The question is whether the report will push Garland to take action to ensure accountability, rather than focusing on the concerns of the electorate.

The January 6 report is a stress test for the problematic state of our democracy. It is not very likely that the basic dynamics will be changed.

On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. The resignation of the attorney general less than a month later was a sign that he had been lied to by Mr. Trump about the election fraud claims.

Even for a president who had abuse his power multiple times, it’s remarkable. The acting attorney general and his deputy were told that Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud were false, and he told them to lie about it.

We consider the attack on the Capitol to be unremarkable, even banal, since we know that Mr. Trump had lied when he claimed that the American people could not rely on elections to ensure the peaceful transfer of power. But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how this behavior indicts the former president, and not just the former president but the Republican members of Congress whom he knew would go along with his big lie.

The firm’s findings also refuted some of Trump’s voting conspiracies, including the identities of dead people used to vote and Dominion voting systems used to manipulate the outcome, the paper reported.

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

The research was conducted in the last weeks of 2020 and before the January 6 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 repeat his election lies as he focuses on his 2024 White House bid.

CNN previously reported that following two years of advice from allies and advisers to stop exhaustively relitigating the 2020 election, his first rally late last month showed an attempted forward-driven message of what he would aim to accomplish with a second term.

One source close to the former president said his proclivity for focusing on the 2020 election will be difficult to break, because he still often hears from members of his base who believe so.

Despite the defeat of some Trump-backed candidates who lied about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Trump does not believe their losses are tied to their election lies, said another adviser.