The War for the Future: Combat Voter Fraud and Campaigning for the Electoral Integrity of Donald J. Rice During the 2018 Insights from Cowboys
Exasperated, Mr. Rice put down the iPad. Listen to what he has to say. This is what I was running against!” He said that he heard gasps of disbelief when he said Mr. Trump had lost the election. It was very bad.
In July, he lost this primary after receiving less than a quarter of the vote. He had won the general election with 62 percent of the vote.
Mr. Meijer was surprised that Republicans didn’t suffer backlash from voters due to the protests and riot. He argued that the Biden administration had pushed voters back toward the candidacy of Mr. Trump due to executive orders that had stretched the authority of the White House.
He said that they made people feel like if they did not help the Democrats push on the gas, they would be helping them.
The Combat Voter Fraud Act was introduced by Mr. Budd of North Carolina. As a Republican candidate for the Senate, he warmed up a Trump rally this spring by accusing Democrats of opposing “election integrity” because “they know they can’t win elections on a woke left agenda.” (A spokesman for Mr. Budd said he had started pushing for tighter voter registration requirements long before the 2020 election, noting the experience of a major election fraud scandal in his state in 2018.)
Mr. Mullin introduced a bill to officially expunge the second impeachment of Mr. Trump. It said the Democratic impeachment leaders were faulted for not mentioning the unusual voting patterns andvoting anomalies of the 2020 election or why they doubted that Mr. Trump had won re-election. The resolution was co-sponsored by more than 30 lawmakers and it did not advance. Mr. Mullin was endorsed in July by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Mullin spent a hot Saturday campaigning for fellow cattlemen at the annual conference in Norman, Okla. One attendee, Joel Reimer, applauded him for taking a stand against the Electoral College count knowing he would be ridiculed by many for buying into conspiracy theories. The man who manages the beef ranch said he had doubts about the validity of the vote.
The campaign gave out fliers declaring that “no one in Congress has worked harder to SAVE AMERICA” and proclaiming Mr. Mullin “TRUMP-TOUGH.” At the top of a checklist of priorities was the party’s new refrain: “Secure our elections.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/us/politics/republican-election-objectors.html
The CNN Observer Report: Analysis and Analysis of 139 Objectors in the New York Times Investigative Report and Supplementary Report for the New Year
Reporting was contributed by Amudalat Ajasa, Michael H. Keller, Aimee Ortiz, Rachel Shorey and Julie Tate. Produced by Sean Catangui and Hang Do Thi Duc.
The Times drew on data from various sources to analyze the 139 objectors, including from the A-Mark Foundation, Ballotpedia, CQ, The Cook Political Report, Daily Kos, L2 and LegiStorm. Susan Weber and Andrew Beveridge contributed data analysis.
Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including his upcoming co-edited book, ‘Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggestlies andLegends About Our Past’. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
On the origins of the December 6 Capitol riot: When Donald Trump, Liz Cheney, Andreev, Arose from the Outburst
The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot broke new ground Thursday with two extremely dramatic moments. One was the extraordinary ending: the unanimous vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify about his role in the riot. Liz Cheney said they must seek the testimony of the central player.
At a time when shock and awe among the public seems impossible, the committee has done its job. The impact of congressional investigations has always depended on the ability of elected officials to move the political needle by producing findings that prove a leader acted far outside the parameters of what is acceptable.
The footage of Pelosi, Schumer, and other leaders scrambling to get more police and national guard forces to repel the rioters on Capitol Hill was the most important revelation.
In public hearings during the past four months, the bipartisan panel attempted to reveal the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.
Unlike the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, one of the most distinctive elements of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election is that so much of it happened in broad daylight.
With Mr. Donoghue on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had been making often at rallies. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
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.
There is intention. The committee demonstrated that January 6 was not some sort of one-off, unintended day of chaos where events unexpectedly spun out of control. It was premeditated.
The panel examined how intentional the Trump administration had been in attempting to spread doubt about the election results – from testing different theories about challenging the results, to leaning on state officials – like their push in Georgia – to literally change the vote, to mobilizing supporters to intimidate Congress as they certified the Electoral College results.
As viewers could hear, he said that the former president would say he was victorious, but it wasn’t true. According to Bannon, Trump will do crazy shit if Biden is able to win the election.
When told in subsequent weeks repeatedly by top election and legal advisers, such as then-Attorney General William Barr, that the claims of fraud were “bullshit,” Trump and his inner cabal ignored those warnings and moved forward with reckless abandon.
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 tried to steering the car when told he couldn’t go, but he lunged at a Secret Service agent.
Trump and his attorneys, such as Rudy Giuliani, sought out officials from various states to see if they would help them. During a phone call in late November 2020, Giuliani and Trump urged the Speaker of the Arizona state legislature to invalidate the results if they did not follow their orders, which he did not. The road map for the attempted election steal was written by the president’s lawyer, who pressed Vice President Mike Pence’s aides to reject the results.
The Story of January 6: The Campaign to Overturn the 2020 Election, a Committee to Investigate It. A View from the House of Representatives
January 6 was just part of a larger story. Although the panel is called the January 6 committee, it would be more accurate to call it a committee to investigate the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.
The Trump administration embarked on a systematic “multi-part” plan, as Chairman Bennie Thompson said, to overturn the election. The January 6 rally and the violence that followed are just part of a larger strategy.
We have learned that Trump was aware of what was happening. He was warned many times that he was making false statements and that he was taking dangerous drugs. Even advisers, lawyers such as Barr and conservative media figures such as Sean Hannity who publicly supported him were privately urging him to stop.
When the mob attacked the Capitol, Cheney added, Trump engaged in “shameful” behavior by sitting and watching the violence on television. His actions, Cheney said, were “unlawful” and “an utter moral failure” and a “clear dereliction of duty.” When he finally agreed to leave, Rep. Elaine Luria said he used language that justified what the rioters had done.
Ongoing Threat: In its pivotal hearing Thursday, the committee wanted to make one thing clear, the danger is not over in 2022. There’s still a danger to our electoral system and democratic institutions, and that will be part of our final hearing. This is not ancient history we’re talking about; this is a continuing threat.” There’s a continued threat on many levels. Republican candidates for the midterm elections in a few years have been using the rhetoric of election denialism.
Republicans who subscribe to this agenda will run for several important offices, from secretaries of state in states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona, to Governor, all of which play a key role in overseeing future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.
The point was made clear by Cheney when she said Americans should assume that the institutions will be strong the next time they are in power. The story of January 6 turned out to be a string of officials, many of whom were Republicans, who refused to go along with the scheme. She reminded the nation that our institutions “only hold when men and women of good faith” make sure that they are strong regardless of the political consequences.
According to Cheney, the committee is considering making criminal referrals to the Justice Department, but will be up to prosecutors to decide what will happen. We will find out if Congress can complete work on reforms, such as the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, that renders some of the mechanisms Trump was counting on incapable of doing damage in the future. We will watch as voters determine, in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, whether to send a clear message to Washington that messing with democracy will not be tolerated. January 6 has not been a major issue in most of the campaigns.
The committee got to the bottom of the dark days after the election. They were exposed in a clear detail right before 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 message of the midterm elections in the United States is often a referendum on the party in power, and this year that seems to have worked out well. But voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, too, and what each vote they cast will mean for the future of this country.
After the presidential election in 4 years, the next Congress will have power to consider and respond to any objections to the vote. Eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud and other irregularities. Many of them are likely to win re-election, and they may be joined by new members who also have expressed baseless doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Their presence in Congress poses a danger to democracy, one that should be on the mind of every voter casting a ballot this Election Day.
It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. That test comes alongside the embrace of violent extremism by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party.
The House Jan. 6 Subcommission on “Insurrections” – The Unprecedented Action of President Donald J. Nixon
Even though the House January 6 committee did not give a final report, it released a summary of its findings, which were devastating even if they lacked all the details.
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 committee’s recommendations are historic.
The panel made four criminal referrals against Trump, including charges of insurrection, to send to the US Justice Department. If the United States is to survive as a “nation of laws and democracy,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, said we can “never let this happen again.”
The committee found that Trump stoked the violence with incendiary tweets and that the White House was purposely slow in responding to the insurrection at the US Capitol.
Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican on the panel, said that only one President had failed to abide by the transfer of power process and that it was a miracle.
The findings certainly rank among the worst scandals in presidential history. It is obvious that President Nixon’s abuses of power as well as the law violations of the Reagan administration are related to the concerted effort to reverse his own election.
In other words, the committee concluded that Trump made history by participating in an unrivaled abuse of presidential power that threatened the very foundation of our democracy: elections. While the term “unprecedented” has been grossly overused, in this case the term works.
In 1974, politicians from both parties spoke up after they saw the “smoking gun” tape that allowed legislators to hear Nixon obstructing an investigation.
Reagan’s approval ratings plummeted when it was discovered that national security officials in his administration violated the Boland Amendment and sent money and arms to theContras.
The President was only saved by the fact that the committee could not directly connect the illicit operation to him and by the fact that the administration mounted an effective public relations campaign to win back public support. Congressional Democrats decided not to pursue impeachment.
Even Clinton’s scandal, which was over an issue far less relevant than what faced Nixon or Reagan, clearly contradicted his public statements and legal testimony about the subject after DNA evidence emerged of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
There is a period today where it is difficult to know if any congressional investigation can still have an impact. One of the factors that makes it difficult for Congress to shift political momentum is that intense political polarization overwhelms all other concerns.
Even 9/11 or the pandemic didn’t produce a serious political realignment. Even when the leader of a party is found to have committed abuses of power, polarization is still very much a winner.
Social scientists call the phenomenon asymmetric polarization. The Republican Party has moved further to the right than Democrats have to the left. The GOP has been very tactical, where party leaders embraced a form of smashmouth partisanship that did not put limits on what was permissible.
The odds of the relevant party changing its ways or responding is very low. There was a plan to set up an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6 but Senate Republicans had refused to cooperate with the congressional committee set up instead.
The Republicans who did serve on the committee have suffered from being marginalized and 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
The Watergate scandal revisited: When the media stopped reporting, and what happened when Iran-Contra was found in the first congressional investigation of the human rights violations
It’s not possible for our media to have the kind of reaction that took place with Watergate. There was a time when professional journalists came together around the facts presented by an investigation, but those times are over now.
Partisan media outlets such as Fox News ignore the weight of evidence. Show hosts are more than willing to spin the news in order to satisfy political longings.
In the coming weeks, there will likely be stories that misrepresent what the committee discovered and that will promote conspiratorial claims with no basis in fact. The filter-less world of social media probably will offer ample opportunity to push disinformation that contradicts the harrowing stories found in the report.
The opposition in the congressional investigation of Iran-Contra put out a minority report in 1987, but today that is no longer necessary. The official findings of the committee can be swayed by different stories being spun by opponents of the committee.
And some of the forces that will check the impact of the report stem from a broader national culture that seems incapable of staying focused on issues for long. In our brief attention span, everything must be fresh and new, and so we push the media from one issue to the other with the lightning speed of TV commercials.
The Watergate scandal was the story that defined much of the period between 1972 and 1974, but for many Americans January 6 has just become one other thing among many that happened in the chaos of our era.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/opinions/historical-context-january-6-committee-report-zelizer/index.html
The 2020 Florida Electoral Fraud Investigation by the Berkeley Research Group – How President Donald Trump and Joe Biden lost their re-election
Finally, Attorney General Merrick Garland now faces a politically perilous decision of whether to indict Trump, especially since he is now officially one of President Joe Biden’s campaign opponents in 2024. Jack Smith, a special counsel, has been appointed by Garland and will make recommendations regarding the investigations of Trump.
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.
Given its expected dramatic findings, the January 6 report is certainly a stress test for the problematic state of our democracy. It is unlikely, however, to change the basic dynamics.
On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.
It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had abused his powers many times. The acting attorney general and his deputy were told by the department that Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud were false and that he would take it from there.
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. The former president, and the Republican members of congress whom he knew would be along with his big lie, should not be forgotten.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that a research firm hired by the 2020 campaign team to prove Donald Trump’s electoral fraud claims didn’t back up his theories.
The Berkeley Research Group was commissioned to look into voting data from six states according to the Post and a source said the campaign wanted about 12 claims tested. 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 January 6 US Capitol attack, according to the Post. Two sources told CNN the January 6 committee did not know about the work done by the firm. As he attempts to win the White House in two years, Trump has continued to repeat his election lies.
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.
The former president has often pushed back on that advice, arguing that his message is strong enough as it is, and one source close to him told CNN his proclivity for focusing on the 2020 election will be tough to break because he still regularly hears from members of his base who believe so-called election integrity is an important talking point as he seeks reelection.
According to one adviser, President Trump has said he does not believe the losses of several Trump-backed candidates in the last election were tied to their lies.