Defending the 2020 Election: The Case of Joel Reimer and the Explicit Denial of the Voting Role of Mr. Trump

Exasperated, Mr. Rice put down the iPad. “Listen to what this moron says. This is what I was against. 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.”

He lost this primary after getting less than 25% 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. The left’s tilt in the Biden administration put voters back towards Mr. Trump, according to him.

If you do not help the Democrats push on the gas, then they are making people feel like they are helping them.

In the two years since Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede, the “big lie” of election fraud has metastasized in American politics, embraced not only by his most hardcore supporters but a significant swath of the Republican Party.

Mr. Mullin introduced a bill to 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 still liked the former president. In July, Mr. Trump officially endorsed Mr. Mullin.

Mr. Mullin, who owned a ranch, was campaigning in Norman, Okla., during the same month that his fellow cattlemen were at their annual conference. 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, added, “From a small-town guy’s perspective, I personally 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.” The party came up with a new phrase: “secure our elections.”

Subpoena Sen. Fani Willis in connection with the January 6th attack on the Fulton County Democratic Electoral Court: Correlating false claims and attempts to access voting machines

Reporting was contributed by Amudalat Ajasa, Michael H. Keller, Aimee Ortiz, Rachel Shorey and Julie Tate. Sean Catangui and Hang Do Thi Phuc were part of the production.

The Times analyzed the data from various sources to find the 139 objectors. Data analysis was also contributed by Andrew Beveridge and Susan Weber of SocialExplorer.com.

False claims of election fraud to state lawmakers and attempts to access voting machines in one Georgia County are some of the things Fulton County is investigating.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed petitions in court seeking to have Gingrich and Flynn, as well as former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and others, testify next month before a special grand jury that’s been seated to aid her investigation.

Flynn didn’t reply to email or phone calls, and his lawyer also didn’t respond to an email. Gingrich’s attorney did not say anything about the questions. Herschmann was unable to immediately be reached.

The case that’s leading up to the November midterm election is one month from Saturday, so Willis plans to take a break from public activity.

Each of the petitions filed Friday seeks to have the potential witnesses appear in November after the election. 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.

Committee Resolution 1, resolved, that the chairman be and is hereby directed to subpoena Donald J. Trump for documents and testimony in connection with the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, pursuant to Section 5(c4) of House Resolution 503 and clause 2(m) of Rule XI of the rules of the House of Representatives.

It says he was involved along with others associated with the Trump campaign in a plan to run television ads that “repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election” and encouraged members of the public to contact state officials to push them to challenge and overturn the election results based on those claims.

Gingrich was also involved in a plan to have Republican fake electors sign certificates falsely stating that Trump had won the state and that they were the state’s official electors even though Democrat Joe Biden had won, the petition says.

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.”

According to news reports, he met with Trump and Powell at the White House in December 2020 to discuss topics like “enacting martial law, seizing voting machines, and appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate the 2020 election.”

He was a senior adviser to Trump from August 2020 to the end of his term and was present for multiple meetings between former President Trump and others related to the 2020 election.

She said Penrose was a cyber investigations, operations and forensic consultant who worked with Powell and other people 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. The phone and email were not immediately answered by Penrose.

A petition was submitted to Lee seeking his testimony, which claimed that he was part of an effort to get the attention of Ruby Fitzgerald, who was the subject of false claims about election fraud. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Obtaining Election Records in Winnebago County, Wis., via Special Grand Jury Subsequent to Indict a Local Candidate

Special grand juries are impaneled in Georgia to 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.

A final report can be issued by the special grand jury when it completes its investigation. The district attorney can ask a regular grand jury to indict someone.

“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. “It should be number one.”

Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot envelopes and applications.

The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

The requests come from multiple sources but a number of election officials believe that one of the reasons for them is that the man who sells pillows encourages his supporters to submit them. During a seminar in Springfield, Mo. in August, election deniers gave instructions on filing records requests.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. Digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter from more than a thousand election jurisdictions had been sent to him by local supporters. Mr. Lindell said the records support his theory that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, although election experts repeatedly have debunked such claims.

Reply to Commission 7: Investigating the Iran-Contra Attack on the Capitol” by Bennie Thompson

It’s all about the facts. Making sure our government works under the law is what the Constitution demands. Today as in previous proceedings, my colleagues and I will present new evidence. The new testimony from Republicans in the Trump administration, along with new details about the threat from the Secret Service, was provided to the committee.

That Mr. Trump was willing to lie so baldly about a matter at the heart of our democracy — whether the American people can rely on elections to ensure the peaceful transfer of power — now seems self-evident, even unremarkable, when we consider the violent attack on the Capitol he incited days later. 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.

BENNIE THOMPSON: The Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol will be in order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare the committee in recess at any point. The committee has approved the release of the deposition material presented during today’s hearing.

The minority report from the congressional investigation of Iran-Contra was produced in 1987, but is no longer necessary. The power that the official findings will have is overshadowed by the different stories that the opponents of the committee are able to tell.

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. The evidence that has been presented in these hearings prove that there was a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 election.

Donald Trump didn’t win reelection. As shown from the testimony of some of the president’s closest allies and advisers, Donald Trump knew he lost. Despite this knowledge, Donald Trump went to court to contest the 2020 election, and he lost in court. The Electoral College met and declared Joe Biden the winner, yet Donald Trump continued to pull out all the stops in his attempt to stay in power.

What Donald Trump proceeded to do after the 2020 election is something no president has done before in our country. In a staggering betrayal of his oath, Donald Trump attempted a plan that led to an attack on a pillar of our democracy. The facts and testimony are clear and consistent, so it is still hard to believe.

How do we know this? How have we presented such a clear picture of what happened? We presented the testimony we heard to you through these proceedings, as well as the documentary evidence we collected, so that you, the American people, can learn about it.

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 had been extensive intelligence and Secret Service warnings about the serious threat of violence against the Capitol.

Who 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.

The Select Committee on the Committee on Investigations of the eviction of Donald Trump’s 2004 January 6th Flying Off and its Implications for the Department of Justice

The committee is reviewing additional information from the Secret Service and other sources after evidence shows that this testimony isn’t credible. The Secret Service was sharing and receiving information about the online activity it was monitoring. They’d worked closely with other agencies sharing intelligence from sources like social media and other sources.

There are more differences about today. 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.

From the Secret Service, the Select Committee has also obtained important new evidence on this issue. It shows the desperation of the Secret Service to get the president to back down after putting people in danger’s way.

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 and our nation’s judiciary are responsible for that. A key element of this committee’s responsibility is to propose reforms to prevent January 6th from ever happening again. We’ve already proposed and the House has now passed a bill to amend the Electoral Count Act to help ensure that no other future plots to overturn an election can succeed.

Today we will see new evidence but, as the chairman said, we will also synthesize evidence you’ve seen before. The overwhelming amount of evidence presented thus far shows that Donald Trump was the central cause of January 6th. He would not have had these things happen without him.

First, as you will see, President Trump had a premeditated plan to declare that the election was fraudulent and stolen before Election Day, before he knew the election results. He made false claims on election night, despite being told not to by his campaign. He sought out people who would help him spread the lies about the fraud.

Many of those who stepped forward to help, including Rudy Giuliani, knew they never had real evidence sufficient to change the election results. They admitted on the evening of January 5th that 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 Case of January 6th: President Trump, the Department of Justice, and the Defenders of the Faith in the United States and in the Cure of Election Violation

President Trump may not have gone to the Capitol on January 6th, but what he did from the White House cannot be justified. While Congressional leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, worked with Vice President Pence to try and address the violence, President Trump refused urgent pleas for help from nearly everyone around him.

You should consider the role played by the Department of Justice, White House staff and other people in defeating President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

There were people who worked to stop Donald Trump. This leads us to a question. Why are Americans so confident that our Constitution is impervious to another attack? Why would we assume that those institutions will not falter next time? A key lesson of this investigation is this.

During her opening remarks on Thursday, Cheney made this point clear when she asked why Americans should assume that “those institutions won’t falter next time” if the wrong people were in positions of power the next time around. 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 reminded everyone that our institutions only hold when the men and women of good faith are willing to stand up for what they believe in.

Our country is a country of laws where every person, including the President, must follow the law and respect the judgment of our courts. President Donald Trump’s closest advisers held that view, both now and then. [Begin videotape]

Not only did the courts reject President Trump’s fraud and other allegations, his Department of Justice appointees, including Bill Barr, Jeffrey Rosen, and Richard Donoghue did as well. President Trump knew the truth. He heard what all his experts and senior staff were telling him. He knew he had lost the election, but he made the deliberate choice to ignore the courts, to ignore the Justice Department, to ignore his campaign leadership, to ignore senior advisers, and to pursue a completely unlawful effort to overturn the election.

I wanted to read from a judge’s statement at a sentence hearing. High ranked members of Congress and state officials are afraid of losing their power because of the fraud claims in the election, which is why they won’t say so. It must be clear that patriotism isn’t what America stands for, it is just for one man who knows full well that he didn’t win and is trying to subvert the constitution. The violence and lawlessness of January 6th was unjustifiable but the nation can not only punish the foot soldiers who attacked our Capitol.

So, as we watch the evidence today, please consider where our nation is in its history. Consider if we can keep going for another 246 years. Most people in most places on Earth have not been free. America is not an exception because we bind ourselves to the principles of our constitution.

Some principles must be beyond politics, inviolate and more important than any American who has ever lived. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I let go of it.

Counting the Ballots: A Brief History of Donald Trump’s 2020 Campaign. The Case against Election Results Robustly Presented by the President

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The meeting begins shortly after the election on November 3rd, 2020. We have previously presented testimony regarding how the election results were supposed to come. In certain states, ballots cast by mail before Election Day would be counted only after the polls closed that evening.

It would not be known for some time when election results would be known. Although President Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, and Jared Kushner had advised Donald Trump to encourage mail in voting by Republicans, President Trump did not do so. You can begin the videotape.

You had people argue about whether or not mail in ballots was a good idea for us because of the robust get out the vote effort that we had.

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.

Some states may have a situation where votes cast on Election Day are reported first and heavily favor Republicans, while mail-in ballots which lean Democratic come in later. Two years ago, Mr. Trump suggested that Democrats had rigged the results.

Sending along again. Just talked to him about the draft below.” This plan to declaration victory was already in place before the results were announced. Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager for the President, was interviewed during our investigation. He said that in July, the president planned to say he won the election even if he lost.

It was far too early to be making any calls like that. There were still ballots 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 think that my recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race.

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were going to win the election. Frankly, we did win this election. [applause] We want all voting to stop. [End videotape]

What is the Threat to the Vice President? An Investigation into Mr. Fitton’s Outburst at the White House on Election Day

We’ve obtained new documents from the Secret Service, real time chats that underscore the threat they knew the Vice President would be facing because of the President’s escalating incitement of the mob. An agent in the intelligence division warned POTUS that he probably wasn’t going to be good for Pence.

Marc had indicated to me that there was a possibility that there would be a declaration of victory within the White House that some might push for, and this is prior to the election results being known. He was trying to figure out a way of avoiding the Vice President being thrust into a position of needing to opine about something when he doesn’t have enough information to do so. End videotape.

The National Archives gave a pre-prepared statement to the Select Committee. The draft statement sent on October 31st states, “we had an election today and I won.” And the Fitton memo specifically indicates a plan that only the votes counted by the Election Day deadline, and there is no Election Day deadline, would matter.

Everyone knew that ballot counting would lawfully continue past Election Day, claiming that the counting on election night must stop before millions of votes were counted was as we now know a key part of President Trump’s pre-meditated plan. On Election Day, just after 5 pm, Mr. Fitton indicated he’d spoken with the President about the statement.

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. Start the videotape.

Is it possible that Trump will just declare victory? He’s going to say he’s a winner, but he’s not the winner. More of our people vote early for the Democrats. Theirs vote in mail, and so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it. That is our strategy.

I’m directing the Attorney General to shut down all ballot places in all 50 states. It’s going to be no, he’s not going out easier. If Biden wins, Trump is going to do some crazy things. [End videotape]

We investigated Mr. Bannon but he didn’t testify. He’s been convicted of criminal contempt of Congress and he’s awaiting sentencing. The evidence indicates Mr. Bannon was aware that Mr. Trump intended to make a false victory announcement on election night. Here’s what Bannon said on January 5th. Begin videotape.

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

All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. The close adviser of Donald Trump, Roger Stone, was pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020

All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It’s all converging and now we’re on, as they say, the point of attack, right, the point of attack tomorrow. I’ll tell you this, it’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. Alright, Ok. It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. I can only say that’s strap in. Tomorrow is game day and you’ve made it happen.

Another close associate of Donald Trump apparently knew of Mr. Trump’s intentions as well. Stone is a political operator with a reputation for dirty tricks. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison after he was convicted of lying to Congress. He’s also a longtime adviser to President Trump and was in communication with President Trump throughout 2020. Mr. Trump pardoned Roger Stone on December 23rd, 2020. And recently the Select Committee got footage of Mr. Stone before and after the election from Danish filmmaker, Christopher Gilbranson [ph], pursuant to a subpoena.

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

When Will the Senate Appoint Donald Trump Become a President? Roger Stone, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Oval. Where did the President come from?

I think it will be, I really do believe it will still be in the air. It’s important to claim victory when that happens. Possession is 9/10 of the law.

Stone’s social media posts say that he spoke with Donald Trump on December 27th as the preparations began for January 6th. In the post, you can see how Roger Stone talked about his conversations.

It is a conspiracy to use violent force against the United States in order to undermine their authority. Multiple associates of Roger Stone from both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been charged with this crime. The associates of Roger Stone have pled guilty to this crime.

At least seven Oath Keepers, who were criminally charged, provided personal security for Roger Stone in the weeks and days leading up to January 6th. For example, Joshua James, the leader of the Alabama Oath Keepers, provided security for Roger Stone and was with him on January 5th. This is the picture of the two together on January 5th. James entered the Capitol on January 6th. He had an altercation with a police officer.

Video evidence and phone records from the Select Committee show a connection between Roger Stone and the Proud Boys. Tarrio and the Proud Boys have been accused of seditious conspiracy in regards to the January 6th attack. Tarrio sent a message to other Proud Boys telling them we did that.

It was done in advance. It was not based on the election results or any evidence of actual fraud, but on problems with voting machines. His plan was to convince his supporters that he won. And the people who seemingly knew about that plan in advance would ultimately play a significant role in the events of January 6. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

I know that when the networks called, the President was made aware of the decision. 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.

We’re in the Oval and there is a discussion going on. And the President says, I think — it could have been Pompeo, but he says words to the effect of, yeah, we lost. President Biden is the next guy and we need to let that issue go to him.

After the election, I went to the Oval to see how the President was and give him the headlines. And he was looking at the TV and he said, can you believe I lost to this effing guy?

Mark raised it with me on the 18th. And so following that conversation with the motorcade ride driving back to the White House, I said, look, does the President really think he lost? And he said, you know, a lot of times he’ll tell me that he lost, but he wants to keep fighting it. He thinks that there might be enough to overturn the election, but you know, he — he pretty much has acknowledged that he — that he’s lost.

Knowing that he had lost and that he had only weeks left in office, President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business. One key example is this: President Trump issued an order for large-scale US troop withdrawals. He disregarded concerns about the consequences for fragile governments on the front lines of the fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda terrorists.

He knew that he was leaving office and immediately signed the order to immediately pull troops out of Afghanistan and Somalia, which was to be completed by January 20th. As you watch these clips, recall that General Keith Kellogg was the national security adviser to the vice president and had served as 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?

I think you’ve seen a memo from Johnny McEntee to Douglas Macgregor. It says that to get US forces out of Afghanistan, you have to do it here. When you first interviewed and met Colonel Douglas Macgregor, is it fair to say you discussed this decision of withdrawing from Somalia and Afghanistan, correct?

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

This was my answer to Mcentee after I explained in language that should be in the order. I said that if you want this to happen or the President wants this to happen, then he needs to write an order.

I sketched some key statements for him on a piece of paper. You know, the President directs. What is the right word for this?

McEntee brings it in to the President. The President signs it and boom, it’s over — faxed over e-mail, scanned over. Kash Patel delivers it to me.

What if I ever saw anything like that, I’ll do something physical,” General Relativity’s Attorney General Ann Stanley Macgregor [Jan-6]

I told the PPO and Macgregor that if I ever saw anything like that, I’ll do something physical. Because I thought what that was then was a tremendous disservice to the nation. That was a very contentious issue. There were people who did not agree with getting out of Afghanistan.

So, I responded to that. It would have had grave consequences for the country for the department to join the political process this way. It may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis. End the videotape.

The order was for immediate withdrawal and so we keep in mind. It would have been catastrophic. There was an order signed by President Trump. The actions of the President are consequential because he knows his term will end soon. President Trump was aware that he had lost the election but he was not aware there was evidence of fraud to change the outcome.

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

Hearing the Trump Campaign: No Evidence of Election Fraud or Irregularities in the High-Energy Civil Liberation Trials

I remember calling Mr.Meadows and asking if I was turning up anything. I remember telling him that we weren’t finding anything that would change the results in all of the key states.

Our job would be to track down the person who made the allegation and bring them to justice. 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. That will be our job as — as, you know, the truth-telling squad and, you know, not a fun job to be — you know, it’s — it’s an easier job to be telling the President about, you know, wild allegations.

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. Everyone that was in the room thought that it was not enough to be outcome determinant. Continue the videotape.

The claims were not supported by any sufficient evidence of fraud or irregularities. In fact, they were baseless as judges repeatedly recognized. There were no cases in which the president was able to prove election fraud to overturn the results. In those hearings, we told you the words that judges around the country used to reject the Trump campaign’s claims.

It’s strong language criticizing the lack of evidentiary support for the claims of election fraud in those lawsuits. The federal appeals court in Pennsylvania wrote that the charges required certain allegations and proof. We do not have either 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.

John Eastman, another attorney for Trump, responded to that email saying he agreed with the plan. In the email exchanges with several other lawyers working on Trump’s legal team, they were discussing filing a lawsuit that they hoped would result in an order that “TENTATIVELY” held that Biden electoral votes from Georgia were not valid because of election fraud.

The Trump’s lost a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court on December 11th, that he considered his last chance at success in the courts. The Secret Service said that the President was angry about the outcome. Quote, just FYI, POTUS is pissed. Breaking news, Supreme Court denied his lawsuit.

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. And as we were walking back from the Christmas reception that evening, the President was walking out of the Oval Office and we crossed paths in the Rose Garden colonnade.

The President was angry with the Supreme Court decision. I stepped back as I was standing next to Mr.Meadows. I was about two to three feet diagonal from him. The President was raging about the decision and how it was wrong, and why didn’t we call more, which is a typical anger outburst at this decision.

The states sent their votes to Congress on December 14th. And in my view, that was the end of the matter. I didn’t see — you know, I — I thought that this would lead inexorably to a new administration.

When I told him that I believed the electoral college had met, and that the means for him to pursue litigation was over, I thought he had abandoned any hope of winning a case.

The Dominion: You can vote for Trump or Biden without a voter’s license? A candidacy of Gene Scalia, the secretary of labor, visited the president in late December

Secretary of Labor Gene Scalia, the son of late Justice Scalia, visited President Trump in mid-December and explained the situation clearly. [Begin videotape]

So, I had put a call in to the president. I would have liked to call 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. When the legal process is done and the electors have cast their votes, that’s the point at which the outcome needs to be expected.

I believed that once the legal processes were finished, if fraud had not already been found, then I believed it was time to concede the outcome. End the tape.

The plan to overturn the 2020 election wasn’t a random one, but a concerted effort. Rather, key members of the administration, including the former president and key advisers, deliberately pushed to overcome electoral defeat. Roger Stone said that possession is nine tenths of the law. F–k you.”

I was horrified by the allegations against the voting machines from the Dominion, and I saw absolutely no basis for them. I told them that it was crazy. They were wasting their time on that and it was a grave disservice to the country.

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

Donald Trump Revisited: The Big Vote Dump in Antrim County, Michigan (An Example of a Case Study During the Hand Recount)

We definitely talked about Antrim County again. That was done at a point when the hand recount had been completed. This is an example of how people are saying things that aren’t supported by the evidence.

There is a concerning issue about the voting systems of the state of Virginia. The same voting systems are used in the majority of states as well as in one Michigan county where 6,000 votes were changed from Trump to Biden.

I went into this and would, you know, tell him how crazy some of these allegations were and how ridiculous some of them were. Some of it was easy to blow up like the example of more votes cast in Pennsylvania than Absentee ballots request. There wasn’t any indication of 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. It’s by the thousands, it’s easy to figure that out.

Then he raised the — the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit. He said that people at the counting station saw boxes coming in at all hours of the morning. In Detroit there are 630 places to vote. They centralized the process so that they are not counted in each precinct.

We saw the tape with regard to Georgia. We interviewed the witnesses. There is no suitcase. The president kept mentioning that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table and that there were fraudulent ballots in it. There is no suitcase, I said. You can watch that video over and over.

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 at all.

Election officials pulled boxes, Democrats, and suitcases of ballots out from under a table. It was completely fraudulent and you all watched it on television. [End videotape]

Our committee’s report will document the lies made in public in an effort to get away with what Donald Trump knew from reliable sources. Donald Trump repeated this nonsense multiple times to a wide audience.

His intent was to deceive. President Trump’s plan included trying to get government officials to change the result of the election in states he lost. He called many state officials and pressured them to change the results of the election. The actions of the president made it clear that he was trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power.

It was a stunning statement for a president who had abused his powers multiple times. Mr. Trump told the acting attorney general and his deputy to tell the truth and he would take it from there.

Jan 6 Committee-Hearing-Transcriptcript: Why you can’t win only a small number of votes, and how much will you need?

Now, all I want to do is this. I want to find 11,780 more votes, because we won the state. We need only 11,000 votes. We have far more than that as it stands now. We’ll have more and more. So, what are we going to do here, folks? I only need a small number of votes.

I just want to find 11,780 votes. The president already knew that there was no real reason for this request, so it was not a new demand. No one could think that the secretary of state could just find the votes that the president needed in order to win.

That’s the thing. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And — and, you know, 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 video.

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

The Real President of the United States and the Fauxtist Contributions to the Department of Justice: Jeff Clark’s Proposal to Overturn the Presidential Election

I looked at Mark. And I said, Mark, you can’t possibly think we’re going to pull this off. That call was crazy. And he looks at me and just 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.

Here is Jeff Clark who conspired with Donald Trump to corrupt the Department of Justice. President Trump wanted to appoint Jeff Clark as acting attorney general. As you can see in the call log, he did so. Mr. Clark is speaking to our committee. Begin the videotape.

For example, when Richard Donoghue and Jeff Rosen, both appointed by President Trump, learned of Mr. Clark’s proposal, here’s why they said they forcefully rejected it. Begin the videotape.

Toward the end of your proposal, I recall saying that what you’re proposing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department being involved in the outcome of a presidential election. But more importantly, this was not based on fact. This was actually contrary to the facts as developed by department investigations over the last several weeks and months.

The President ultimately relented only because the entire leadership of the Department of Justice as well as his White House counsel threatened to resign. I 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.

The RNC was going to help the campaign gather these contingent electors if the legal challenges that were continuing changed the result of any of the states. End videotape.

These fake electors were part of a plan to replace genuine Biden electors with the fakes of Trump. The electoral slates were sent to the National Archives.

President Trump disagrees with him and said he had the right to overturn the election. I have no right to change the result. The presidency belongs to the American people and 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.

And Dr. Eastman confirmed this in writing. Recall this email written on January 6 in which Vice President Pence’s counsel asked Dr. Eastman; did you advise the President that in your professional judgment, the Vice President does not have power to decide things unilaterally? 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. Mr. Cipollone gave testimony. Start the videotape.

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

Did President Donald Trump Waver? Do you remember the time his father called him the Vice President? And did President Trump waver on January 6th?

I apologize for being rude, but do you remember the time she said her father called the Vice President?

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. A federal judge concluded, based on this and other evidence, that President Trump’s pressure campaign against the Vice President likely violated multiple criminal statutes.

On December 19th, President Trump first told his supporters to come to Washington. He promoted January 6 as a day when Americans could come in and change the outcome of the election. For weeks, President Trump worked with others to plan the rally, intending all along that he would send an assembled crowd of angry supporters to the Capitol after his speech on the Ellipse on January 6. On January 4th, a rally organizers sent us a text message. In part it reads that, quote, POTUS is going to have us march there at the Capitol.

On the morning of the 6th, the Secret Service was at the Ellipse screening the members of the crowd as they entered the rally site. And they noticed something significant about the crowd. Tens of thousands of people were outside a large rally site but did not want to go through the metal detectors used to screen for dangerous weapons.

The committee has gotten more help from the Secret Service. Nevertheless, Secret Service text messages from this period were erased in the days and months following the attack on the Capitol, even though documents and materials related to January 6th had already been requested by the Department of Justice and Congress.

But the Trump administration was aware of this type of violent record — rhetoric prior to January 6th. The Secret Service and other agencies knew of the possibility of violence prior to the president’s speech. Despite this, certain White House and Secret Service witnesses previously testified that they had received no intelligence about violence that could have potentially threatened any of the protectees on January 6th, including the vice president.

I only remember that he was almost like a psychic. Norquist says during one of these calls, the greatest threat is a direct assault on the Capitol. I will never forget it. [End videotape]

Intelligence reports said that President Trump’s supporters had plans to occupy Capitol Hill. They noted spikes in violent phrases like We Are the Storm and 1776 Rebel. On January 5th the Secret Service opened a investigation into a social media account that made threatening statements about a rally on January 6th. The picture of a handgun and rifle was posted on Sunday Gun Day, which will be January 6th.

The Secret Service field office gave the FBI tip that was relayed in this report. The Proud Boys plan to march with guns 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.

The Secret Service was briefed by the FBI on January 5th regarding right-wing groups setting up Quick Reaction Force to deploy on January 6th. The Oath Keepers were prepared if the president requested assistance by using the Insurrection Act.

One report from the rally site at 7:58 a.m. said, some members of the crowd are wearing ballistic helmets, body armor, carrying radio equipment and military grade backpacks. Another from 9:30 a.m. said that there were possibly OC spray, meaning 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.

Over the next hour, agents reported possible man with a gun reported, confirmed pistol on hip located in a tree; and one detained at 14th an individual with an assault rifle on his person

The members of the Federal Protective Service, an agency tasked with protecting federal buildings, heard about the arrest of a protester with a gun minutes before the president began his speech. And during the speech, the weapons related arrests continued. The man was arrested by the park police in front of the memorial with a rifle. Some agents were speculating that the situation could get worse after a number of weapons had been seized that day.

The Donald.win was one of those sites that you’ve heard about. The Select Committee got a text message from the senior communications adviser that was sent just a week before January 6th. “I got the base fired up,” he wrote in all caps. TheDonald.WIN was the location of the link he sent.

The linked web page had comments about the joint session of Congress on January 6th. Take a look at some of the comments. “Gallows don’t require electricity.” “If the filthy commie maggots try to push their fraud through, there will be hell to pay.” After certifying Trump the winner, our lawmakers in Congress are able to either leave one of two ways: one in a body bag, or both. Mr. Miller claimed that he had no idea about the hundreds of comments like these in the link that he sent to Mark Meadows.

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

A videotape of an angry mob rally in the Oval Office: The president’s anger at a protest on January 5th, 2001

If I had seen something like that, I would have told the Secret Service or something like that, because I don’t want to hurt their reputations. End the videotape.

On the day that Miller sent his text, agents received reports of a spike in activity on another platform called Parler. The date was December 30th. In this email, an agent received a report noting a lot of violent rhetoric on Parler directed at government people and entities, including Secret Service protectees.

On the evening of January 5th, President Trump gathered a few of his communications staffers in the Oval Office. The door was unlocked and the president and others could hear the sounds of the crowd at Freedom Plaza. President Trump could tell that his supporters were riled up. Judd Deere, a deputy White House press secretary, described the president’s reaction.

Just that they were — they were fired up. 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]

Yes, the president knew the crowd was angry because he had stoked that anger. He told them that the election had been rigged and they believed it to have been 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

Reply to the “Commission on ‘Hearing the Capitol with the Secret Service and the Military’” by P. J. Aguilar

The gentleman yields back. We’ll take a brief break at this point. The chair decided to adjourn the committee for 10 minutes due to the order of the committee. The chair recognizes Mr. Aguilar for his opening statement.

He wanted it full, and he was angry that we weren’t letting people through the mags with weapons, what the Secret Service deemed as weapons and are — are weapons. I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, I don’t f’ing care that they have weapons.

They aren’t here to hurt me. Take the magazines away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take away the magazines. Continue the videotape.

I would like to have the military, the Secret Service, and the police allowed, and we would like to thank you and the police. You’re doing a good job. [Applause] I want them to be able to come with us. Is that possible? Can you just let them come up, please?

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

Reply to Commission on ”President of the Capitol” Hearing’ by J. J. Ornato [Appendix]

As the professional told us, they remember hearing about how angry the president was after he was in the limo. That professional also testified that they were specifically informed of the –president’s irate behavior in the SUV by Mr. Ornato in Mr. Ornato’s office. Mr. Ornato was in that office.

And I will also note this. 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 will address this matter in our report.

At 1:19, the president’s Emergency Operations Center sent an e-mail to Secret Service, national security, and military advisers, to the president and vice president informing them that “hundreds of Trump supporters stormed through metal barricades at the back of the Capitol building about 1:00 PM Wednesday, running past security guards and breaking fences.

All of us were 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 don’t know what you want to call it. We all knew that this would move from a normal democratic, you know, public event into something else. Why were we concerned?

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

An Exchange between President Trump’s White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his White House Adviser Michael Hutchinson about the Mob Affair on the Capitol

According to testimony from several members of the president’s White House staff, President Trump wouldn’t tell his supporters to leave the Capitol even after they begged him to do so. Here’s the testimony of President Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone.

Here’s Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, describing an — an exchange she had with the president as soon as he arrived back at the White House. [Begin videotape]

I can’t remember what he said, but I think he said that if he had to ride in the limo, he would do so. Do you want the end videotape?

The Secret Service email was sent after President Trump got out of the presidential vehicle and returned to 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 cannot talk about the conversations I had with the president, but I do say that people need to be told quickly that they need to leave the Capitol.

Approximately when? It was violent after I found out people were approaching the Capitol in a way that was violent.

I can’t think of anyone who didn’t want the violence to get out of the Capitol and people to leave. I mean that.

I’m sorry. I — I apologize. I thought you said who on — who else on the staff. I can’t say anything about communications, but I think. yeah. End the video.

The testimony of several White House staff members is in agreement with that of Mr. Cipollone. Ms. Hutchinson is talking about what Mark Meadows said to her. [Begin videotape]

You heard him say something and he had said something. He doesn’t want to do anything else. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong. [End videotape]

A former employee of the White House recalled an interaction between Mr. Cipollone and Eric Herschmann about the mob assault on the Capitol. Mr. Herschmann said something to Mr. Cipollone. He said the president didn’t want anything done.

The president’s most important allies, family members, and senior staff all begged him to let the people go home. 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.

All of them made appeals to Donald Trump, which he rejected and he ignored. 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.

Did the president stay in the private dining room for the whole time of the Capitol attack or did he leave only to the White House Situation Room?

Yeah. What did they say, Mr. Meadows or the president, at all during that brief encounter with you in the dining room? What do you remember? I think they were — everyone was watching the TV. When you talked to him on January 6th, did he watch TV in the dining room?

When you were in the dining room in these discussions, was that it — was the violence at the Capitol visible on the screen on the — in — on the television?

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 are taking the scaffolding. Unless we get more munitions, we are not going to be able to hold. People have gained access to the Capitol by breaking the door.

There must be a way to maintain a sense of security that the government can work and that we can vote for the president of the US. Did we go back into session?

Everyone on the floor is wearing tear gas masks now that we are back into session. I am trying to get more information.

I can’t. We need a area for the House members. They are walking through the tunnel. Here is where you can bring her. We are going in if you don’t bring her out.

I am going to call the secretary of the DOD. We have some Senators who are still in their hideaways. They need a lot of people now. Can the Maryland National Guard come with you?

Mr Secretary, I have something to say. I’m going to call the mayor of Washington DC right now, and see what she has going on with the other police departments.

Hi, Governor. This is Nancy. I have no idea if you’ve been approached about the Virginia National Guard. I still think that you need the permission 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. At the instigation of the president of the United States. Thank you, Governor. I appreciate what you’re doing. I’d like to stay in contact if you don’t mind. Thank you. Thank you so much.

You know, I was just talked to Governor Northam, and what he said is they sent 200 state police and a unit of the National Guard. They broke windows and went in and ransacked the place. That’s nothing. We have concerns about personal harm.

Personal safety is — it just transcends everything. They are breaking the law in many different ways, and most of it is at the direction of the United States president. Now if he could, at least 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.

The Capitol Police: How the Mob Could End Its Violent Siege of the Pentagon and the White House, and Where Do We Stand?

I do not want to say that the leadership is going to be responsible for executing the operation. They are the experts because they are meeting on the ground. It’s somewhat inaudible.

Pretend for a moment that the Pentagon or White House was under siege because you don’t know what will happen. Let me say you can logistically get people there as you make the plan. We’re trying to figure out how we can get this job done today. We talked to Mitch about it earlier. 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 Capitol is where the majority of people want to do it. The Capitol will take days to be Ok again, according to the information that we are being told directly. 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 it is difficult to clean up, but I think it is more about security and how long it will take for everyone to leave the building.

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.

Nancy, I am at the Capitol building. I’m standing with the chief of police of the Capitol Police. He just informed me what you will hear through official channels, Paul Irving, your Sergeant-at-Arms, will inform you that their best information is that they believe that the House and the Senate will be able to reconvene in roughly an hour.

Senator Chuck Schumer urged acting attorney general Jeff moss to get the president to call off the rioters. Many other officials took action to defend the government, as did acting AG Rosen. But Congressional leadership recognized on a bipartisan basis that President Trump was the only person who could get the mob to end its violent siege of the Congress, leave the Capitol and go home.

The only way President Trump could end this was by himself. He was the only person that could. Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the administration. The President didn’t act quickly. He didn’t do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be 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 have to have a presence on the social networking site. These people need to be called off. You know what the President said to him? This is what is happening.

He said, well, Kevin, these aren’t my people. These are, of course, anti-fascist. Kevin said that they’re your people. The staff are running for their lives after they just came through the office windows. I mean, they’re running for their lives. You have to call them off. There was a chilling response from the President to Kevin.

He said, well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election, you know, theft than you are. And that’s — you know, you’ve seen widespread reports of Kevin McCarthy and the President having a — basically a swearing conversation. The President said, no, I’m alright with this, as he began the swearing in.

I talked to Kevin McCarthy at some point after the riot. It was similar to what she had said when he called and asked the president to stop. Kevin was told something along the lines of “Maybe these people are more angry about this than you are” by the President.

When President Trump was angry, he would have killed. What happened next? Anika Navaroli, a former Twitter employee, warned the committee to be clear about what happened

Let’s be clear: I am very clear with you. I have told the President to be clear with his words and actions, no ifs or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he needed to acknowledge that he was responsible for what happened.

It further inflamed the mob which was chanting, hang Mike Pence, and provoked them to even greater violence. 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. It was at that time when the Secret Service was most concerned about the safety of the Vice President.

The company detected a spike in violent terms on the platform, including “Execution of Mike Pence” as the afternoon progressed. Listen to this former Twitter employee, Anika Navaroli, who first came to the committee anonymously, but has now bravely agreed to be named because she wants to speak out about the magnitude of the threats facing our people.

Yes, and after in response to this, too. As many Donald Trump’s posts did, it fanned the flames again. 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 Day of D-Day: Mike Pence and the State of the Capitol, a Day in the Life of Donald Trump and his White House

Mike Pence will not stick up for Donald Trump. Mike Pence was a traitor. Mike Pence has screwed us, in case you haven’t heard yet. What happened? What happened? I have heard that Mike Pence has messed with us. That’s the word I keep hearing reports that Mike Pence has screwed us. [End videotape]

Within 10 minutes of the President’s message, people overran the line that the police were holding on the west side of the Capitol. This was the first time in the department’s history that a security line like that had been broken.

The conduct of President Trump that day caused many of his appointees and White House staff to resign. You have heard deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews explain why they were compelled to resign.

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 stunned by violence, and I was stunned by the President’s apparent indifference to the violence. And now is the time for the President to be presidential. I didn’t believe he did it well. I thought he wasn’t the kind of leader the nation needed.

The events at the Capitol were shocking. I mentioned in my statement that I couldn’t put it aside. It was impossible for me to continue given my values and philosophy because of the events at a particular point. I came to this nation as an immigrant.

I believe in this country. I believe in a peaceful transfer of power. I believe in democracy. And so I was a — it was a decision that I made on my own. [End videotape]

The President’s message is being delivered. Donald Trump has asked everybody to go home. That’s our order. [Inaudible] He says, go home. [End videotape]

He wrote proudly that this day was remembered forever, as though he were saying that he had talked about D-Day. Trump did nothing to stop the deadly violence for obvious reasons. He thought it was all justified. He incited it and he supported it. [Begin videotape]

He said that these are the things that happened in the game. Trump was telling us that the Vice President, the Congress, and all the injured and wounded cops, some of whom are with us today, got what was coming to us. According to Trump. January 6 should not be a day that lives in shame in infamy in our history, but rather in glory.

If the president had wanted to make a statement and address the American people, he could have been on camera almost instantly. And conversely, the White House press corps has offices that are located directly behind the briefing room. The White House press corps could be assembled very quickly to get them into the Oval for him to give the address on camera.

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

Reply to Comments on ‘The First Hearing on the January 6th Reaction” by John J. Hodges

Mr Chairman, the Constitution strongly forbids insurrection and rebellion. Congress has the power to order the militia to suppress insurrections. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualified from holding federal and state office anyone who has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, but betrays it by engaging in insurrection or rebellion.

It was President Lincoln who explained why democracy rejects insurrection in the start of the Civil War. Insurrection, he said, is a war upon the first principle of popular government, the rights of the people. The American people own the democracy of the country. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The gentleman yields back. Four police officers who helped deter the January 6th riots were witnesses during this first hearing in July of last year. We asked them what they hoped to see the committee accomplish over the course of our investigation. He wanted to find out why the rioters believed that the election process was rigged.

Officer Fanone asked us to look at the actions that happened during the day. Officer Hodges was concerned about whether anyone in power had a role. OfficerDunn told them to get to the bottom of what happened. We’ve worked for more than a year 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 tell the most complete story and provide recommendations so nothing like January 6th will happen again. We need to be fair and thorough and gain a full context for the evidence we’ve obtained.

Indicators of a Fifth Amendment: General Flynn Walks with Oath Keepers on December 12, 2020, and Andrew Eastman’s email on December 31, 2020

In American history, Congress has the right to force the testimony of a precedent. There’s also precedent for presidents to provide testimony and documentary evidence to Congressional investigators. It’s a serious and extraordinary act to issue a subpoena to a former president.

The subject matter at issue is so important to the American people, and the stakes are so high, that we want to take this step in full view of the American people. And so, I recognize the Vice Chair, Ms. Cheney of Wyoming, to offer a motion.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, our committee now has sufficient information to answer many of the critical questions posed by Congress at the outset. We have sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals and to recommend a range of legislative proposals to guard against another January 6th, but a key task remains.

We must seek the testimony under oath of January 6th’s central player. More than 30 witnesses have invoked their FifthAmendment right against self incriminating themselves, and several did so specifically in response to questions about their dealings with Donald Trump. 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 the video.

Eastman raised the issue in an email on December 31, 2020, as Trump’s lawyers were planning to file in federal court to challenge the election result. Trump had made notarized verifications in the case that the facts presented were true to the best of his knowledge, but both he and his attorneys knew the data they were using in the case was misleading, according to another email.

The Committee on the Investigating of Political Aspects of the Russian-President’s Relations with the Media, but Not with the House Select Committee

Is your position that you can speak to the President of the United States about in the media, but not with this committee?

Other people have tried to avoid testifying about their dealings with Donald Trump. A jury of his peers convicted him of contempt of Congress. He is going to be sentenced later this month. The criminal proceedings regarding Peter Navarro are continuing.

Ivanka Trump and Kushner previously testified to the House select committee, which expired in January after Republicans took control of the House. The panel had referred the former president to the Justice Department on four criminal charges in December, and while largely symbolic in nature, committee members stressed those referrals served as a way to document their views given that Congress cannot bring charges.

The resolution is agreed to. A motion is laid on the table without objection. The chair requested that the people in the hearing room remain seated until the police have left the room. Without objection, the committee stands adjourned.

CNN’s Theoretical Panel on the Campaign of Donald J. Trump to Overturn the 2019 2020 Election: The Case of Donald Cheney, Steve Bannon, and the “Stop the Steal”

A professor of History and Public Affairs atPrinceton University, Zelizer is a CNN political analyst. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” He can be reached on the Twitter account at@julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are of his own. View more opinion on CNN.

At one of the committee’s public hearings, Cheney stated that “every American must consider this.” Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made on January 6 be trusted with authority again?

The panel tried to reveal the full context of the day in public hearings over the last four months.

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.

Yet the committee managed to fill out the story in very important ways, providing shocking evidence and details as to how the events of those months were even more dangerous than we understood at the time.

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.

When they were warned repeatedly that the claims of fraud were a lie, Trump and his inner people ignored them and moved forward with reckless abandon.

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. He wanted to hold on to power.

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 agent and tried to steer the car when he learned he couldn’t leave, according to Cassidy Hutchinson.

In order to see if any state officials would be willing to do the bidding of Trump and his attorneys. During a phone conversation in late November 2020, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani pressured the speaker of the Arizona House to call a legislature session to invalidate the results 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.

December 6, 2018: The January 6 Committee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Investigating the 2020 Midterm Election Campaign

January 6 was just one part of a larger story. The January 6 committee is a committee that is supposed to investigate the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.

In these events, we have been told, Trump understood what was happening. He was warned a few times that he was making untrue claims and that he was taking risks. Even advisers, lawyers such as Barr and conservative media figures such as Sean Hannity who publicly supported him were privately urging him to stop.

There is an ongoing threat. The committee wants to make it clear that the danger is not over in 2022, that’s why they had a crucial hearing Thursday. “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 we’re talking about; this 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 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. The former president is the leading contender for the Republican nomination.

The committee was able to unpack the dark days that followed the election. They were exposed right in front of our eyes. The biggest mystery left is whether as a nation we will close our eyes and simply move forward without demanding accountability, justice and reform.

The FBI is investigating the January 6, 2016 insurrection of the ex-President Donald J. Trump and he may be facing further investigations

Even though his attorneys had told him that the information in the case was false, Donald J. Trump signed a document to say that the information was correct even though he didn’t know it.

In his ruling, the US District Judge found that the Trump team was trying to meddle in the congressional proceedings despite the fact that they were using litigation not to get court relief. Carter, in deciding last month that the emails should be released to the House committee, said that some of them showed evidence of obstruction of an official proceeding.

The federal appeals court in Atlanta decided on Thursday that Lindsey Graham needs to testify before the grand jury looking into the dealings of former President Donald Trump.

Mr Graham will have to go to the Fulton County courthouse in downtown Atlanta where he’ll have to answer questions about the phone calls he made to the Georgia secretary of state.

These unprecedented referrals suggest that Mr. Trump, who as president took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not only violated that oath, but also committed a series of specifically indictable crimes. The crime of inciting an insurrection is the most stunning, most unpredictable and the most crucial, for its implications and remedy includes barring the former president from holding political office.

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 never really went away after losing reelection in 2020, but a dizzying catalog of confrontations is vaulting him back into the center of US politics. It is likely to further divide the nation. Trump returning to the spotlight probably means the early parts of his presidency will be disrupted by his chaotic style.

The ex-President’s claims of political persecution, and his open legal and political loops, could cause even more upheaval than his four years in office.

While many voters are concerned about the economy, abortion, foreign policy, and crime, Democrats and Republicans appear to be on opposite sides of the issue, and there is every chance the next election will be dominated by the past and future of the ex- President.

The House committee is investigating the January 6 insurrection and has subpoenaed Trump. The Justice Department is almost ready to make a decision over whether to charge the ex-president over the mob riot.

Trump, Stefanik, and the Plight of a Pro-Trump Candidate: A Political Scenario for 2020 Elections in Arizona

In Arizona, one of the ex- President’s favorites to be governor is raising doubts about the election system. “I’m afraid that it probably is not going to be completely fair,” Lake told AZTV7 on Sunday.

One of the most powerful pro-Trump Republicans, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the party’s number three leader in the House, told the New York Post last week that impeachment of Biden was “on the table.” During an interview on CNN on Sunday, Nancy Mace stated she did not want to see impeachment proceedings again after Trump was impeached twice. She said she was against the process being “weaponized.” She said that there would have to be an investigation if Biden had committed impeachable offenses.

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.

Trump, who denies any wrongdoing, is yet to be charged in any of the cases and there’s no certainty he will be. The legal clouds surrounding him have been showing in the recent days.

Democrats have made their own attempts to return Trump to the political spotlight. With the help of President Joe Biden, some campaigns tried to scare suburban voters with warnings that pro-Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.

What Will the Ex-President Tell Us About America? The Case for a New White House Candidate and the Ultimate Risks of a Presidential Campaign?

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 the crowd at a Texas rally that he will likely have to run for president again.

It may take a few days, but Cheney said it will be done with the right level of rigor and seriousness.

“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 quite a serious set of issues.

The prospect of video testimony over an intense period of days or hours is likely to be unappealing to the former President because it would be harder for him to dictate the terms of the exchanges and control how his testimony might be used.

This could all become academic anyway. The issue could go on for months and become meaningless since a new Republican majority in the congress would likely sweep the January 6 committee away as one of its first acts.

Garland would have to decide whether the national interest was served by implementing the law to its fullest extent or if the consequences of prosecuting the former president could tear the country apart.

A former president could be indicted for the first time ever if the country gets closer to a political and judicial precipice. The ex-commander in chief’s 2024 White House bid would make this historic twist even more inflammatory and amount to his greatest stress test yet of America’s legal and governing institutions and its brittle unity.

How Voters Will Turn Out: Jay Bookman’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution Report on the Early-Voter Suppression in Georgia’s Senate and Governor’s Elections

Jay Bookman has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers and is a nationally award-winning political columnist. He has a writing account for the Georgia Recorder. Follow him on Twitter at @jaysbookman. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.

Georgia has seen a record number of voters turn out for early voting in the presidential election year. It’s natural to ask what it means, in a bitterly fought campaign season.

It’s difficult to say when outcomes will occur. high turnout is not the advantage that it used to be for Democrats in the Trump era and we don’t know how much the early-voter surge represents newly motivated voters or voters who would have cast their ballot anyway. Voters will be propelled to the polls this year by high profile candidates in both the Senate and governor’s races, but with so many different variables in play, it’s hard to know what to expect.

It’s a nightmare for pollsters. Predicting how people will vote can be done in a very easy way. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. With a lot of variables, it is a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters.

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. Federal officials in the Department of Justice and state and federal judges agreed with Raffensperger that they had safe, secure, honest elections. What happened if fraud wasn’t the real reason for those changes?

The fear and anger that drove voters of both parties to the polls this year may have overwhelmed the impact of the Senate Bill 202 that was supposed to suppress it.

The Counting of Georgia Electoral Votes: Trump, Chesebro, and the Road to Fairness: The Case Against Voting Fraud

The Democratic party built a well-funded voter-protection apparatus to help people get to the ballot box.

That last point is critical. Republicans say that the changes made to Absentee Balloting and the number of drop boxes in urban areas were necessary to fight voter fraud. That motive doesn’t make sense.

And it’s the consequences of that bad-faith narrative that ought to worry us. 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.

Trump is still making that argument to this day, telling supporters at rallies this fall that “I don’t believe we’ll have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.

In suburban Gwinnett County, for example, “voting integrity” activists have challenged the eligibility of more than 40,000 registered voters in the increasingly diverse, increasingly Democratic county, putting an incredible burden on the county’s small elections staff. The challenges that have been acted upon so far have been rejected in a 3-2, party-line vote, with two Democrats and an independent outvoting Republicans.

Conservatives are frustrated that they cannot challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on flimsy grounds because those challenges have not been successful.

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

“We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue” a temporary order putting Georgia’s results in doubt, Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in a December 31, 2020, email, adding that a favorable order from Thomas was their “only chance” to hold up Congress from counting electoral votes for Biden from Georgia.

The email referencing Thomas was first reported by Politico. The House obtained several emails from the company, and they are still subject to litigation before an appeals court. The emails were made available by the house committee in a court filing.

Reply to Eastman’s Correspondence with the House and Senate Select Committees on a Case of Unconstitutional Voting

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%.”

But, he wrote, “a lot can happen in the 13 days left,” and having the election results of multiple states under review in the courts and in state legislatures could bolster the push to extend Congress’ debate over certifying the results.

In an email two days later, Chesebro said that having Georgia “in play” on a Supreme Court filing could be “critical.” Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to open proceedings of the electoral votes if there was a Georgia case before the Supreme Court.

Such a move by Pence would force the court to act on the petitions, Chesebro said. As of January 6, there are procedural options available to Trump and Pence that could create additional delay and put pressure on the court to act.

The House General Counsel told the appeals court that it was a mistake to include a public link to the files.

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

“Although the President signed a verification for that back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate,” Eastman wrote to two other lawyers on December 31, 2020. It would not be an accurate sign for him to sign a new verification with that knowledge. And I have no doubt that an aggressive DA or US Atty someplace would go after both the President and his lawyers once all the dust settles on this.”

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.

According to an email from Eastman, Herschmann was going to consult with Trump about signing the verification while he was in flight.

Elections lawyers Cleta Mitchell and Alex Kaufman then suggested using a notary over zoom – instead of having Trump sign the document with the language “under penalty of perjury,” according to the emails.

Norman Eisen was the White House ethics czar and he advised on election law when he was there. Taylor Redd is a researcher focusing on national elections. The opinions expressed in the commentary are of their own. CNN has more opinion.

These victories can provide some peace of mind to voters in Arizona, Michigan and across the nation. They show that – just as they did with challenges during our last election – courts will enforce the law to protect voting rights and the election system.

A heightened threat advisory was issued in late October by the US security agencies. 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 RNC and the Michigan Republican Party filed a lawsuit in order to get more Republican poll workers to vote in its precinct. The suit cited a state statute requiring boards of election to “appoint an equal number, as nearly as possible” of poll workers from each major political party.

A request by the Republicans to hire more poll workers was apparently accepted by the city. In late October, the Michigan Republican Party and Republican National Committee had sent city election officials a letter with the names of interested Republicans candidates, and the city hired approximately 50 more Republican poll workers, bringing the number to 120 Republican poll workers out of the 682 total.

The case was dismissed on technical grounds but it marked a significant milestone. The judge, who was not familiar with the case, did not appearinclined to consider the suit. The city is now complying with the law. And even parties with standing will likely face tough sledding if they file a similar suit in the future.

The GOP brought this suit because it was clearly non-meritorious. 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 considered a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election, as was the case in the two cases outlined here. Rule of law still works to protect democracy against intimidators and election deniers in these cases.

All the same, election denial and voter intimidation efforts are well-organized across the United States. It is critically important to continue to monitor legal developments leading up to the midterm election to preserve a tradition all Americans should be proud of: free, fair, secure and accurate elections.

The contentious electoral environment, the threat of political violence, and the possibility of disputed races are all present in the final hours of the campaign, raising the stakes for the first nationwide vote since former President Donald Trump tried to block the 2020 election.

“What we saw in 2020 was this effort to undermine the elections, but, for the most part, it happened after the elections,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the organization Common Cause, which advocates on democracy issues. The prep is the thing we are seeing this time.

A court ordered armed activists to stop patrolling, but the broad view is not evidence of strain. There are many challenges of voter registration in Georgia. Voting rights groups teach their volunteers how to de-escalate the situation. The groups videotaped voters as they dropped off their ballots.

Election officials say they are ready for the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow, and they feel like they are on edge too.

High-profile lawsuits against the fortification office of Alabama in the era of the Republican-Republican-inspired Right-wing protests

“I’ve felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back repeatedly so much that I don’t have anything but scar tissue,” said Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., home to Phoenix.

The election office in the state of Alabama has increased its security in preparation for Tuesday. The building was fortified in response to the right-wing protests 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. It was referred to the F.B.I. by the Arizona secretary of state.

Not all of the lawsuits have been successful. But even the cases that have failed to produce the orders that the challengers were seeking could be a source of post-election litigation, particularly if the margin of an election is close enough that the group of disputed ballots would make the difference.

It is easy to see the potential hot spots. In Pennsylvania, thousands of ballots have been set aside because they do not include proper signatures or dates. The supreme court decided that they shouldn’t be counted in the lawsuit. But the court also ordered election officials to segregate and preserve them, setting the stage for a future legal fight.

A Republican state lawmaker is trying to prevent the state from counting military ballots because they say there are security weaknesses. The lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Society, a conservative legal group that has backed the election denial movement.

120 cases surrounding voting have been filed, more than half of which sought to restrict access to the ballot according to the Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning voting rights and media platform that tracks election litigation. The group said that election lawsuits had been filed before Election Day in 2020.

Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, often pushing for leniency in counting absentee ballots and challenging local Republican officials’ plans to hand-count ballots — a nod to newfound, widespread suspicion of electronic voting machines on the right.

In Nevada, where Republicans hope to flip a Senate seat and control of the governors’ office, the GOP Secretary of State stopped hand counting in rural Nye County. The action came after the state Supreme Court sided with the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada’s contention that volunteers reading aloud the votes each candidate received within ear shot of public observers violates state law, barring the early release of election results.

Republicans secured information and party affiliation in Clark County Nevada, home to Las Vegas, but their attempt to get a court order requiring the county to hire more GOP workers was rejected.

In Mesa, the Phoenix suburb, armed volunteer protesters dressed in tactical gear positioned themselves outside a ballot drop box on the first day of “Stop the Steal” after the 2020 election.

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 encourage voter to cast ballot in person on Election Day in order to argue that Democrats used expanded access to Absentee Voting to win the election. The crowd roared when candidates at a rally called on them to vote in person.

An earlier version stated that Ms. Flowers is involved in election protection efforts on Election Day. Ms. Flowers is not from Atlanta and works from home on Election Day.

In places where Mr. Trump was a big winner election denial has spread. Tensions over election and other issues have been rising in Northern California, where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020. There have been calls for a halt to early voting, a requirement of voter ID at polling places that are not legal in the state, and a push for ballots to be counted by hand.

Counting Georgia’s Voting Problems: How Administrators, Registrars and Churches Respond to Public Concern about Election Day

In the face of public protest, the county’s chief executive resigned, its health officer quit and the health board publicly denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said she has familiar Election Day worries: A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent some of the 180,000 voters in her mountainous county from getting 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.

“I will admit I’m apprehensive about Election Day because you never know what some people will do,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. “And I look at Arizona, people dressed in these outfits, it can be intimidating.”

In Georgia, more than 68,000 voters had their registration challenged by fellow citizens under 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. Barbara Helm, a homeless woman in Forsyth County, Ga., was forced to vote on a provisional ballot because her registration had been removed during one of the mass challenges brought by Republican voters. Her dilemma was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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.

Secretary of State Defeats 2024 Republican President Joe Biden: The Case For Trump and the Benson-Karamo Correspondence

Secretary of state contests — typically low-profile races that determine who helps administer elections in a state – have drawn national attention and millions of dollars in political spending this year as several Republican nominees who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election pursue the jobs.

In the upcoming elections, voters in 27 states will choose their Secretaries of State. Fourteen of those seats currently are held by Republicans and 13 by Democrats.

The presence of election deniers on general election ballots in key battlegrounds has set off alarms for voting rights advocates due to the important role these offices will play in affirming the outcome of future elections, including a possible 2024 redo between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

In January of 2021, Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to demand more votes for him because he had won the state. The ire of Trump supporters and death threats was caused by the fact that the man wouldn’t go along with the request. Raffensperger defied political odds, handily dispatching a Trump-backed primary challenge en route to reelection in 2022.

Michigan: The race pits the incumbent, Democrat Jocelyn Benson – a leading national voice countering election denial – against Republican Kristina Karamo, who has made false claims about the 2020 election and who was behind the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

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. The parties and groups are testing their strategies for when Donald Trump could be back on the ballot in the presidential election of 2024, as his lying about a stolen 2020 election has changed the legal environment.

“My concern is that the number of those undated mail ballots could exceed the margins in some of those races, which could create real problems,” said David Becker, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. It is better that the disputes are resolved before you know the results. The political axe could be created once the margins are clear.

RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement after the state Supreme Court ruling that it was a “massive victory for Pennsylvania voters and the rule of law” and a “milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”

In Michigan, the Republican candidate for secretary of state has asked a court to throw out some Absentee Ballots in Detroit because they didn’t request or return them in person.

Jeff Loperfido, a senior counsel at the civil rights group the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, pointed to a lawsuit where North Carolina Republicans failed to block state election board guidance barring the use of signature matching to verify absentee ballots.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, meanwhile, the poll worker litigation is two cases: one demanding more records one about poll workers hired and the county’s efforts to increase the number of Republicans working voting sites; and a second challenging county requirements for poll workers that the GOP alleges is impeding the hiring of Republicans to staff election 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.

CNN has reached out to the Arizona Republican Party, the lawyer representing the party and Ward for comment. The RNC argued that the effort to get in court was to ensure robust representation in how the elections are run.

“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 victory for transparency.

Albert said that there could be attempts to toss out votes from election sites in dispute following the election if more Republican workers aren’t hired.

She said she’s worried that Republicans “are going to basically say, ‘If an election wasn’t run exactly perfect – if we didn’t have an even split of poll workers – then, all of those ballots don’t count,’ which is absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical. 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.

With the election only days away, Cochise County is taking action which includes changing voting rules for governor, US Senator, and the state elections chief.

David Stevens, one of the hand count’s proponents, didn’t respond 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.

The Nye County spokesman said that the officials there hope to revive the hand counting if a new plan is approved by the secretary of state. Nye will use electronic machines in the election.

Critics of these parallel counts say they could, if allowed to proceed, set the stage for dueling results – feeding further distrust of the election among some voters and the county officials charged with certifying the general election results in the weeks ahead.

A dispirited nation worn down by crises and economic anxieties votes Tuesday in an election that is more likely to cement its divides than promote unity.

Elections are often cleansing moments setting the country on a fresh path powered by people freely choosing their leaders – and those leaders accepting the results.

Control of the House of Representatives is currently up in the air. The GOP majority is expected to be narrow, nowhere near a red wave. The Senate will be in Democratic control after the losses of Nevada and Arizona.

Above all, the midterm campaign turned on the cost of living crisis, with polls showing the economy by far the most important issue for voters, who are still waiting for the restoration of normality after a once-in-a-century pandemic that Biden had promised in 2020.

A gusher of news on job losses just before polls opened worsened worries about a slowdown that could destroy one the bright spots of the Biden economy – historically low unemployment. Americans are already struggling with higher prices for food and gasoline and now need to cope with the Federal Reserve’s hikes in interest rates that not only make credit card debt and buying a home more expensive, but could tip the economy into a recession.

The economy threatens to bring a rebuke for a first-term president in the upcoming elections, which would be a sign that democracy is working. For generations the public has been encouraged to express their displeasure with the direction of the country through elections.

Tuesday looks set to be a tough day for Biden. In a critical swing state, the president didn’t spend the last hours of the campaign trying to get vulnerable Democrats over the line. He chose to stay in Maryland because his low approval ratings won’t hurt Democrats who are running for office. While he was stumping for John Fetterman over the weekend, the venue of his last event made him feel drained as he ponders a 2024 reelection campaign.

Biden said it would be tough. He admitted life would be more difficult if the GOP took control of congress, but he thought he would win the Senate.

The day before an election in which he is not on the ballot, Trump made it all about himself, even as he claimed 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, he plans to proclaim that he is the victim of state-style persecution.

Trump also vowed to make “a very big announcement” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on November 15, which appears to be the worst kept secret in politics – that he will seek another term in the White House. The turbulence of our time is highlighted by 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 if most voters appear more concerned with the cost of feeding their families than democracy, the false reality that Trump spun about a stolen election was enough to make Biden’s warnings of democracy on the ballot valid.

The aftermath of the Pelosi tragedy: How Republicans and the left will look after us in the midterm elections, and why they are poised for more lawsuits

Nancy Pelosi had a moment of trauma when police told her Paul had been attacked with a hammer, and the shadow of violence hung over American policies. She condemned certain Republicans for joking about it in an exclusive interview with CNN.

One party in our democracy ridicules the violence that happens in the election, feeding the flames that make us doubt the outcome. “That has to stop,” Pelosi said.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader and likely next speaker if the Republicans win the five seats they need in the House, blamed Democrats in an exclusive interview for heating up the political rhetoric as he laid out an aggressive agenda that included border security and relentless investigations. He did not rule out impeaching Biden, a step radical members of his conference are already demanding.

“We will never use impeachment for political purposes,” McCarthy told CNN’s Melanie Zanona. It does not mean that something will not be used once it rises to the occasion.

And Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who says he’s in line to be chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations if he wins reelection and Republicans take the Senate, said he’d use the power granted him, in what is likely to be a very narrowly decided election, to further crank up the partisan heat in Washington.

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.

For months, election officials have worried that activists convinced that the election system is corrupt and broken would cause significant problems in the midterms. But the scattered episodes during the vote did not disrupt the system.

He said the victory in Arizona might have been enough of a shot across the bow to stop some activists, but emphasized that the most serious attacks on elections didn’t emerge until weeks and months after the 2020 election, when lawyers for Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to reverse the outcome. “We’re poised to be ready for more lawsuits,” Mr. Danjuma said.

They pointed out the benefits of better and more frequent communication by elections officials, and the use of live cameras at ballot boxes and counting rooms. Some speculated that polling and right-wing media reports promising a Republican blowout in races across the country may have discouraged some right-wing activists from provocations at polling places.

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

Election deniers: Putting out fires in Michigan and putting out turbulence with election lawyer’s tools at the end of the week

Dozens of races are still undecided and counting could continue into 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.

The Republican candidate for Arizona’s secretary of state compared the election process in Florida to that in Arizona, and also derided the election system in a county home to Phoenix.

The Arizona Republican Party’s chairwoman promised to pursue such actions. “We have been preparing for this for over a year,” she said in a tweet on Thursday. “We have a huge team of lawyers ready to take action if needed.”

Regardless of Tuesday’s results, voices pushing election conspiracy theories are unlikely to be muted soon. Despite the fact that Democrats won nearly all of the major races in Michigan on Tuesday, a group of election deniers should redouble their efforts.

The organizers of Michigan Fair Elections wrote that they can either choose to slide down the mountain and die or get back up. Thursday was the date for the online meeting.

Concessions by candidates who spread unfounded theories of voting fraud are critical to ensure the stability of the election system, elections experts say. In addition, they note public outreach from election officials can help put out fires.

The Johnson County, Kan., election chief found a solution after getting calls and emails from voters demanding that their ballots be counted by hand rather than on machines. Voters who raised that question in the district, Kansas’ most populous, would be given the option to place their ballot in a specially marked white envelope in a sealed red ballot bag and were given assurances that they would be hand counted.

“They obviously created a little bit of turbulence,” Mr. Sherman said. It is like running a treadmill on an 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. Under that logic, he said, attempts to undermine faith in the results would only have discouraged Republican voters.

One coalition, called Election Defenders, organized dozens of sessions to train people posted at polling places to help prevent voter intimidation. The goal was to recruit 1,250 volunteers but instead it was overwhelmed with more than 2,000 who completed hours of online training on how to calm things down, de-escalate conflicts, and even 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 worked 20 hours on Tuesday monitoring social media and checking in with partners around the country.

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.

Ms. Flowers said that she believes there are more Americans who would like to see everyone who could vote allowed to do so.

“Stop the count! Stop the count! The people yelled at the people trying to tally votes and at the windows that stood between them. Social media was awash in false claims of ballots being under the cover of night.

Candidates who lost have conceded as well as some who questioned the results. In the case in which Republican candidates did not concede, their cries of malfeasance seemed to have fallen flat this cycle.

At that particular moment, she realized that the nation’s election workers were going to pass their first real test since Donald Trump launched his attack on democracy.

“That was like the confirmation that we did it, so I was a little teary up,” he said. “We ran a smooth election. People were prepared to pounce on anything. But it didn’t work.

The election results will not be officially certified until weeks after the election, because the counting is not done in many races. Some candidates and pundits have focused on Election Day issues and the slow pace of vote counting to sow suspicion and make claims of malfeasance.

But so far, that chatter has not yet incited the chaos that many had feared would ensue, stoked by a mythos of election fraud that has become a core belief for many Americans on the right.

How Did We Stop the Steal Before We Went to the Capitol? Investigating the Online Narratives of “Stop The Steal”

“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.

Even as election officials, civil society groups and researchers who study online narratives brace for a prolonged post-election period of risk and uncertainty, they are cautiously hopeful the country is not headed for a repeat of 2020, when just hours after polls closed hundreds of thousands of Americans rallied online under the banner of “Stop the Steal,” a movement that culminated in violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“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 right now but I’m still in this ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ mode.”

The election deniers declared the vote rigged even before the results were known. According to a survey before the election, less than 40% of GOP voters were very confident in their poll workers.

“The scene was set that there would absolutely be fraud, and it was just a matter of needing to observe, collect and report the evidence,” said Cindy Otis, a disinformation expert and former CIA analyst.

“We had a lot more parameters and protections in place than we did in 2020,” said Benson. “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.”

Recent years have seen the spread of election falsehoods and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have expanded their policies to help combat the issue.

“They use the same statement over and over again to remind the public that election officials are the best place to get information about elections, and that is why they use this language all the time,” Amy Cohen said. The goal isn’t to address a narrative or false information; it is to drive it. anybody who’s interested back to the party that can actually answer the question, which is election officials.”

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

How Voting About Elections Went Misinformation: The Maricopa, Arizona, An Area Where Charlie Kirk, Kirk, Sharpie Pens and Printers Formed on Twitter

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. It’s not as if the lies about the ballots with Sharpie pens being thrown out are the same as in 2020, they took more than one day to abate.

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.

On election night in the Phoenix area, law enforcement agencies and election agencies worked together in a way not previously seen. In the area, police on horses patrolled the streets outside the Phoenix tabulation center.

“It’s an unfortunate sign of the times, but it was comforting to see the protection of election officials taken so seriously,” Jennifer Morrell, a former elections official in Utah and Colorado, said during a briefing by the National Task Force on Election Crises on Wednesday.

She credits officials’ communication that voter intimidation is illegal with helping to turn out to be a lot of talk. “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 Had Went Misinformation During the Counting March of Marcopa, South Carolina, and the Democratic Primary in 2022

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.

In addition, the landscape of social media has changed with the rise of alternative platforms popular with the right that advertise few limits on what users can post.

Donald Trump was banned from both social media sites, cutting off his ability to reach an audience of over 100 million followers.

Trump now posts exclusively on his own social network, 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.

His Truth Social post that called for protests in Detroit was copied, pasted and shared on the social media platform but failed to gain traction or reach a large audience.

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 notably in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis was given a second term with a 20-point margin.

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

The Misleading Side of New Mexico: How Do Social Media Platforms Have a Role Played in Trump’s Presidency?

“Any county that isn’t finished counting is cheating,” a user wrote on Thursday. “[Y]eah but what happens if Kari Lake wins? That means we cheated? another person asked.

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 it in audio and podcasts, in newsletters, in emails, in text messages, in apps, news apps and from political campaigns — they’re just getting hammered with it. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s going viral on a mainstream platform to have continued 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. The House race was a concern going into Election Day. 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. “And it makes me feel hopeful for the first time in quite a while.”

Geoff Duncan: A CNN Political Contributor and Republican: The Case for a Great Way Forward for America’s Conservative Party. An opinion piece on Georgia

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.” The views in this commentary are of his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

A year and a half ago I wrote a book about it, and I predicted this outcome. But I take no pleasure in being correct. I am a tried-and-true conservative. I think that America is going in the wrong direction because of the policies of President Joe Biden and his congressional cronies.

I am not the only one who is unhappy. More than 7 in 10 people say they are angry with the direction of the country, according to CNN exit polls.

There is a December runoff election in Georgia between the incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael and Republican Herschel Walker. Along with mashed potatoes and stuffing, my fellow Georgians are in for a heavy dose of television commercials on their Thanksgiving tables. The race will be hard-fought with each party wanting to end the cycle with a win or at least keep their current majority in the Senate.

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

The Ubiquitous Legacy of Brian Walker: A Conversation with a SuperPAC Candidate in Georgia Governor’s Mansion after the 2016 GOP Primary

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

Walker needs the voters beyond his base to support his candidacy. The GOP has had to run different types of campaigns with different messages as a result of the state’s growing population.

Besides, as poor as Biden’s favorability numbers are in Georgia – 44% approve of his job performance while 53% disapprove, according to a recent Quinnipiac University survey – his predecessor’s standing is even worse. 40% approve of Trump.

Place a call to the Georgia Governor’s Mansion and try to get support from Brian Kemp, who was reelected. Six months ago he beat Perdue by over 50 points in the primary, a result that galvanized Trump and helped him win the governor’s race.

Perdue agreed to run in the primary to re-litigate his conspiracy theories after Trump recruited him to do so. The evidence is compelling.

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

His team should call Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis first when they finish their wish list. DeSantis is the talk of the town right now, and for good reason. He won reelection with the largest margin of any Florida governor in 40 years. Four years after a small victory, the margin of victory was over 1.5 million. He carried almost every demographic, including a sizeable margin with Latino voters. He achieved this with a conservative record in a state that used to be considered a battleground.

The talk about his national ambitions will be a factor, but for now it’s worth taking stock of his recent accomplishment. It proves that effective and decisive GOP leadership can yield significant electoral success.

I think Walker won’t take advice from me. I have been a nuisance at the garden party for speaking out against Trump. If the GOP can’t match the Democratic Party with an approval rating in the low 40s, something needs to change. Don’t accept my word for it.

2020 Election and Jan. 6 Insurrection: The Justice Department Investigates Mar-a-Lago: Did Trump White House Documents Mishandle?

2020 Election and Jan. 6 insurrection: Justice Department investigation: The Justice Department has an investigation of its own into the post-2020 election period. While the DOJ has not acted publicly during the so-called quiet period leading up to the midterms, a grand jury in Washington has been hearing from witnesses. In recent weeks, the DOJ moved to get additional testimony from former White House attorneys Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin.

Trump and his company deny any wrongdoing or criminality in all matters, state and federal, and have aggressively maintained innocence. Trump has also won dismissals of two lawsuits this week in cases brought by his niece and his former attorney.

Mar-a-Lago documents: Did Trump mishandle classified material? The Justice Department investigation continues into whether documents from the Trump White House were illegally mishandled when they were brought to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office. A federal grand jury in Washington has been empaneled and has interviewed potential witnesses to how Trump handled the documents. 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.

One question hanging over the congressional committee is whether higher standards by a court could cause prosecutors to think it would be hard to convict the former president. The strength of any criminal case over Trump is hard to judge because the witnesses and evidence were not subjected to the kind of challenge and cross-examination seen in court.

The panel is doomed to be wiped out next month by a new Republican-led House majority with many legislators who voted against certifying the election and who still whitewash it almost 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. While working as election workers in Georgia, a mother and her daughter received racist threats after Rudy Giuliani accused them of vote stealing. Rusty Bowers, the outgoing Republican speaker of the Arizona state House, testified that Trump’s calls for him to meddle with the election were “foreign to my very being.”

Often, it was Republicans – some who were with Trump in the West Wing on January 6 – who courageously testified about his assault on the Constitution, including Cassidy Hutchinson. The ex-aide to the White House chief of staff was very upset about it. It was not American. We were watching the Capitol building being vandalized.

It is not clear whether any indictments for perjury or anything else would involve Trump or those close to him. The grand jury didn’t hear from the ex-president. And Trump maintains he did nothing wrong.

The committee contended that Trump helped to plan a scheme to use fake electors to subvert the election in Congress. When those efforts failed, after then-Vice President Mike Pence refused to wield powers he did not have, the committee argued that Trump called a mob to Washington and incited a vicious attack on the Capitol. The committee members argued that his failure to act as the violence raged was a grave violation of his duty to protect Congress, the Constitution and the rule of law.

“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 the thing is if it’s not criminal.

Yet the committee is not in control of the ultimate fate of its work. The panel can’t compel the Justice Department to open a prosecution of a president who had an election campaign that guaranteed divisions would arise in another election.

Could the act of sending criminal referrals to the DOJ affect the perception of separate investigations into the aftermath of January 6?

Will an impression that Trump is being hounded by any referrals nearly two years after he left office help rally Republicans to his misfiring 2024 campaign?

And do Americans as a whole, at a time of national strain amid high inflation and the aftermath of a once-in-a-century pandemic, really care about events that rattled US democracy nearly two years ago?

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. It was not believable that the public was so fascinated with this act of accountability as it was with the Senate Watergate hearings, which eventually resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Today’s polarized times and the power of conservative media to distort what really happened on January 6 may help explain this dichotomy.

The House Jan 6 Subcommittee on “Trump Peculiarity and the First Truth about the 2016 Insight into the U.S. Capitol”

Some desire to protect America’s democracy is one of the reasons Americans rejected a number of Trump’s candidates in the November elections.

It is difficult to say how the work done by the committee affected voters. The former president began a campaign to cast the probes into his conduct as politicallymotivated persecution, even as it maintained evidence of his insurrection in the news throughout the year. This is especially valuable as some pro-Trump Republicans, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, escalate their attempts to distort what happened in the unprecedented attack on the Capitol.

This is a huge investigation that the committee has undertaken. 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 detail that accompanies the referrals are what will give the DOJ a path to follow. DOJ has been kind of late to this party and they are playing catch-up but that detail could be very helpful to them and will put a lot of pressure on them as well.”

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, America’s elected leaders, do not search within ourselves for a way out, I fear that this great experiment will fall into the ash heap of history.”

The committee showed it’s seriousness by refusing to give a laundry list of defendants. The committee members have thought of themselves as legislators and public educators but also as prosecutors. That lead them to focus on a list of potential defendants, who are likely to be the most damaging witnesses in the case. 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.

For anyone who continues to believe that the January 6, 2021, insurrection was exaggerated or was a haphazard, amateurish effort gone bad, the final report should throw cold water on those beliefs. The recommendations are historic.

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.

One of the panel’s two Republicans, Liz Cheney, claimed that the peaceful transfer of power was a miracle and that only one president, Donald Trump, had failed to abide by it.

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.

The committee concluded that Trump made history by abusing presidential power and threatening our democracy by voting in the elections. The term “unprecedented” has been overused, but it works in this case.

The’smoking gun’ tape that allowed legislators to hear Nixon obstructing an investigation was enough for politicians in both parties to say enough.

The Reagan administration’s illegal arms-for-hostages deals that funneled money to rebel groups in Nicaragua despite a congressional prohibition initially resulted in a number of resignations, indictments and convictions. Some officials who were implicated in government corruption were freed because of a flurry of presidential pardons, allowing them to return to high-profile careers within the Republican Party and conservative movement. The Iran-Contra cover-up has been going on for over six years, the special prosecutor said after the pardons.

The President was saved by the fact that the committee could not connect the illegal activity to him and by the fact that the administration mounted a campaign to win back public support. Congressional Democrats, moreover, decided that they wouldn’t pursue impeachment.

Clinton’s scandal, which was over an issue much more irrelevant than the one faced by Nixon or Reagan, showed that he had lied in his testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

On the polarization of the GOP in the wake of the January 6 committee report: a case study of the Kinzinger and Cheney scandals

Dramatic televised hearings, which were capable of shifting attention from how bad the coup attempt was, were quickly drowned out by the latest scandal or news story coming from Washington when the January 6 committee already experienced this challenge. It’s nearly impossible to keep the public eye on a single subject, as there are so many outlets for information.

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.

Another related challenge stems from what social scientists call “asymmetric polarization.” The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. Many of the extremists in the GOP are tactical, where leaders embraced smashmouth partisanship with no limits to 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 Senate Republicans originally filibustered the plan to set up an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 and 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. During the 2022 midterms, election denialism was a central campaign theme for the GOP rather than an issue candidates ran away from.

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

Watergate: When The News Meets the Media: When the Investigative Report of Donald Trump’s Black Hole Comes to an End

Nor does our media ecosystem lend itself to the sort of reaction that took place with Watergate. When professional journalists worked together to present the facts of an investigation in the 1970s, it was a times when those times were still alive.

Partisan media outlets such as Fox News ignore the weight of evidence. Show hosts like to tell the news in a particular way that gets the attention of political leanings.

In the coming weeks, there are likely to be stories that exaggerate the committee’s findings and make up conspiratorial claims. The filter-less world of social media probably will offer ample opportunity to push disinformation that contradicts the harrowing stories found in the report.

The national culture seems incapable of staying focused on issues for a long time, which is the reason that some of the forces will check the report’s impact. 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 dominated much of the time between 1972 and 1974 but many Americans don’t think about it anymore, because January 6 has become one of the craziest days of our era.

The Attorney General must decide whether to indict Trump since he is one of President Joe Biden’s campaign opponents in eight 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 push Garland toward taking action to ensure accountability rather than focusing on concerns about fueling division within the electorate.

The January 6 report is a stress test for our democracy and it is expected to be dramatic. The basic dynamics are unlikely to be changed.

With Mr. Donoghue also on the line, Mr. Trump made the same tired and disproved allegations that he had made many times before. Mr. Donoghue told him it wasn’t true. 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 was looking at the past when making these referrals. Representative Liz Cheney spoke of her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Cheney, who was a soldier in the Ohio Infantry during the Civil War. He passed President Andrew Johnson in the reviewing stand when 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. Liked Donald Trump. He was found not guilty of the same crime as Donald Trump.

The Starr Report, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the Near-Infrared Report of a Comeback from 1868 to Tennessee

After Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868, Johnson went home to Tennessee, where he began to plot his comeback. It would be difficult since he had the ability to unite Republicans and Democrats and many of them either hated or wanted nothing more to do with him. But it wasn’t illegal.

These reports often captured the attention of the public. The church committee’s report exposed many transgressions in the intelligence community in the 1970s, including assassination efforts, support for international coups, drug experiments, and domestic espionage. It led then-President Gerald Ford to issue an executive order barring political assassinations, but it also broke the reign of secrecy that had allowed intelligence operatives to act in lawless and often bizarre ways.

Reports often found eager audiences, in part for their explosive revelations but also in part for their style. The Starr Report, which covered investigations into then-President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationships and his efforts to conceal them, combined a peek-through-the-keyhole tone with lascivious details of the president’s liaisons. It became a bestseller. As did the 9/11 Commission Report, which presented the details of the terror attacks and their causes in such captivating detail that it not only sold briskly, but it was a finalist for the National Book Awards. (The report on the Attica prison uprising, written for a state-level commission in 1972, was also a finalist for the prestigious prize.)

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

A warning on pardons for the insurrection commission: The moment that Hutchinson had a moment like that to test democratic governance

For the January 6 commission, this is a real danger. Trump has already indicated that, should he be reelected to the presidency, he would seriously consider pardoning those involved in the insurrection — no idle threat, given his frequent pardons for political allies while in office.

The moment that led Hutchinson to reach back out to the committee and give her testimony in public hearings this summer was when she had a moment like that. For the rest of us, it offers a guide. The committee’s January 6 report provides a detailed account of an attack on democratic governance, and it shows how important it is for Americans to want that form of government to continue.

She had failed the mirror test, meaning she wasn’t proud of who she was in a character- defining moment. “I was disappointed in myself,” she told the committee. I was frustrated with myself. I was kind of disgusted with myself. I didn’t think I would become that person.

How Will Willis Behaving in Congress After the Jan. 6 Riot? The Case for Burt Jones and the House of Representatives

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. We interviewed roughly 30 of those defendants about their motives. The team and I found out that the rioters were led to believe only revolution could save America because of their distrust of the political establishment.

Other political, social, economic and technological forces beyond the former president had a hand, whether intentionally or not, in radicalizing thousands of people into thinking they needed to attack the seat of American 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.

Jackson gave her all the positive marks for going after Trump, almost two years into her term. “I think it’s a courageous move. And I believe it is the right move. She paused. “Yeah, that’s my praise.” And her criticism? Jackson sighed and said Willis had come to the State Senate to make a presentation about public safety, talking about gangs and other crime. Jackson looked at local crime figures during the flu and found that murders were up while other major crimes were down. As Willis spoke, “I’m literally looking at the statistics — like, they’re on my desk right in front of me,” Jackson recounted. She said that she had Struggled with that. “I mean, I understand what it is to be a politician. And I understand that we have to respond to public pressure. But I don’t think we have to add fuel to the fire. I respect her but at times I felt like she added fuel to a fire that we could have easily put out.

The report was a joke, and several arguments for why it was flawed were offered by the man. “We’ve probably got 25 people in Fulton County Jail on a misdemeanor, and they’re there for 48 hours,” she said. A lot of people with crimes that I think a normal citizen would want to stay in jail for are not that kind of people. People are given bail.”

Trump and the 2020 Insurrection: A Failure of a Bayesian Research Firm to Document Election Fraud Claims in the U.S.

Mark Binelli is a writer. He had previously written about the tangled legal aftermath of the fatal biker brawl in Texas, and the opera director Yuval Sharon. A black female visual artist who lives in Atlanta is interested in telling stories. She was named one of The British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019.

The Washington Post reported that a research firm commissioned by the campaign of former President Donald Trump to prove his electoral fraud claims failed to do so.

A source told the Post that the campaign team wanted about twelve claims to be tested, as 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 did not match what the team had hoped for, and the findings were never released.

The research was conducted in the last weeks of 2020 and before the attack on the US Capitol. 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 keeps repeating his election lies while he focuses on his 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 told CNN that his proclivity for focusing on 2020 will be hard to break because he hears from members of his base who believe so.

One adviser said that despite the defeat of several Trump-backed candidates who questioned the legitimacy of the election, Trump does not think their losses were tied to their election lies.

The Atlanta-area Special Grand Jury’s Final Report on Donald Trump’s 2020 2020 Attempts to Overturn the 2020 Election: Correspondence with the Report

The public will get a detailed look at the investigations into Trump and his associates as part of a report from the Atlanta-area special grand jury.

The report’s introduction and conclusion will be made public on Thursday. McBurney noted that some information in those sections might be redacted.

There are questions about whether the portions will contain any new information about what happened two years ago and whether the grand jury concluded that the former president committed any crimes.

“The Grand Jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place,” the special grand jury wrote in its report.

Cunningham added to CNN that “there is no doubt that whatever (the report is) referring to is either conduct that was done directly by Donald Trump or done on his behalf.”

“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 from the grand jury was a culmination of its seven months work, which included interviews of 75 witnesses, from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Lindsey Graham to ex-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 special grand jury that looked into the case in Fulton County has presented its findings, and if anyone is found to have committed a crime it would be foisted on another grand jury.

At a hearing last month on her decision to bring charges, a democrat suggested the special grand jury has recommended multiple indictments and 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. A document of this nature is one-sided since witnesses don’t have a chance to tell their side of the story. The rest of the report was not released to avoid prejudicing the rights of people who may or may not end up being charged in the case. The recommendations of perjury prosecutions represent a small step forward on the issue of whether there would be criminal accountability for an attempt to subvert democracy.

Some legal analysts have concluded that the atmospherics of the case and the signals being sent by Willis mean that some indictments are likely – though of course charges do not mean that someone will be convicted at trial.

Thomas Dupree is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration and he told CNN that he is certain there will be indictments for perjury or other crimes.

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, a former diplomat and legal and ethics expert, told CNN on Thursday that the conclusion was a possibly important building block in any case against Trump. The finding supports what Donald Trump has said happened in Georgia. Eisen said on CNN’s newscast that it repudiates him.

It establishes a basis for bringing charges when it comes to solicitation of election fraud. This is another nail in the coffin that already had them.

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.

Trump, Nessel, Steckloff, and the FBI: a case study of antisemitic threats against Jews in the Wolverine State

“All I want to do is this. According to the transcript of the call, which took place on January 2, 2021, Trump said he wanted to find 11,780 votes because he had won the state.

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 learn more about the president’s understanding of the election results. They both had direct communication with him about the riots at the Capitol.

Investigators have a large volume of substantial evidence related to a possible conspiracy from inside and outside the state, including recordings of phone calls, emails, text messages, documents, and testimony before a special grand jury.

Smith will not stop because of his relationship with his family, said Heaphy. He is determined to get all of that information because he believes the law entitles him to it.

This is the latest example of a growing trend of intimidation and attacks targeting Jewish people at a time when extremists, who might once have been isolated, find affirmation and spurs to act from social media.

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 Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Thursday she was among those targeted.

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.

There was a shooting at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue that killed 11 people. 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. America’s Jewish community has been impacted by scores of incidents that did not make national headlines. 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.

Andrew McCabe, former deputy FBI director, said on Thursday that the increasing risks of political attacks were underscored by the detailing of the alleged threats to Nessel.

In December, a federal judge sentenced one of the convicted leaders of a separate plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer 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 that voted for Donald Trump, said armed protesters descended on her house in late 2020 to accuse her of being a traitor when Trump lied about a stolen election.

Democrats are not alone in their persecution by 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. A man was arrested and charged with attempting to murder a justice of the Supreme Court.

The New York Times Investigates the Decay of a Michigan Democrat Electoral Official After the 2018 Nov. 12 Riot: When Donald Trump and Katelyn Jones meet Donald Trump

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.

If they are swayed by political rhetoric they may act on their own agency. Politicians often use this to claim plausible deniability that their words caused violence. Video of Trump supporters on the day of the riot was broadcast by the House on January 6. And a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland in January 2022 found that 34% of Americans – and 41% of Republicans – think violent action against the government is sometimes justified.

The Georgia lawmaker berated the Republican election official from the peach state who opposed Trump’s claims that he won the swing state at a meeting on election integrity. Greene fired off a flurry of claims and conspiracies for the cameras, which were almost all false.

Behavior like that often seen from Greene and Trump risks damaging democracy at its roots, since it comes with sometimes dangerous consequences for local public officials like Michigan’s Nessel, who are critical to ensuring Americans can vote.

It is happening in almost every state. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has a senior fellow named Rachel Kleinfeld who works in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program.

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 Grand Jury in the Willis Indictment: One Witness to Refuse Testifying Against the Other Witnesses in the RICO Case

“The reason that I am a fan of RICO is, I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said at a news conference about a broad gang-related indictment over the summer of 2022. They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. 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 Fulton County judge approved the district attorney’s request to document testimony by all 75 witnesses who appeared before the special grand jury, so the full record of transcripts could become public record, according to a source familiar with the investigation. Although, timing details of when this treasure trove of information could be released is still unclear.

— On Wednesday, his problems deepened when an appeals court ruled that Trump’s defense attorney, Evan Corcoran, must testify before a grand jury in the case surrounding classified documents that Trump ferreted away at his resort at Mar-a-Lago. The ruling, which came with surprising speed and thwarted Trump’s typical monthslong delaying tactics, was so significant because the Justice Department had to convince the court there was sufficient evidence to show Trump committed a crime in order to puncture the convention of attorney-client privilege.

There are signs that one witness could be asked to reappear. And sources told CNN that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been under fierce attack from Trump’s GOP allies, was also taking a moment to regroup amid the furor. 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.

The GOP presidential race is getting even more competitive as Trump lashes out at DeSantis, who is yet to declare a campaign, while the former president’s legal problems are getting worse. “The fact is, Ron is an average Governor, but the best by far in the Country in one category, Public Relations, where he easily ranks Number One,” Trump said in a Wednesday statement savaging the record of the man he once considered a protégé. The facts and figures don’t lie, we don’t want Ron as our president, that’s all a Mirage!

An adviser to the governor told CNN that the governor can’t afford to be marginalized from the beginning. He made clear that 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. The abuse of prosecutorial authority was denounced by the House Republicans and they called for investigations into the Manhattan District Attorney.

The attention shifted to the district attorney afterDonald Trump predicted his impending arrest in New York City. Yet his more serious legal peril may lie 900 miles south in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation into the efforts by pro-Trump forces to overturn the 2020 election continues.

It can be hard to keep investigations straight but this is the key difference 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.

The story in Georgia could not be more different with Trump’s legal team leading the counteroffensive. With very little exception, the state’s leading Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have remained out of the fray and have been conspicuously silent.

Trump and his legal team were getting pressure to call a special session of the Georgia Assembly to overturn Biden’s victory. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, who died in November, stood his ground and told Trump he would do everything in his power, according to media reports.

Sowing doubt about the election: Where do the rumors go? How to make the next chapter of the Republican Party happen instead of losing the election

These rumors succeeded in sowing doubt about the election because they did not present 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, our efforts should be focused on winning hearts and minds before the votes are counted.