772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Donald Trump held his first full-fledged rally since leaving office this past weekend in Ohio and nobody really cared. Sure, he packed the house with MAGA faithful, eager to see their idol and sing along to the greatest hits. But it landed with a thud in the media — and that’s got to hurt.

None of the major networks covered Trump’s first return rally live, not even Fox News, which stuck with “Watters World” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” instead. It looks like Trump is going to have to come up with some new schtick if he thinks he can run again. I suspect that only the most devoted MAGA fans really want to hear him mention Hillary Clinton so they can all chant “lock her up” for the ten-thousandth time and lurch into yet another awkward rendition of “YMCA.” 

It may even be possible that sore loser Trump’s pathetic obsession with the last election is why some of his former henchmen and sycophants are taking some tiny baby steps away from him in a vain attempt to salvage some shred of their reputations. Since they failed to save his wretched presidency, Trump rejected them anyway, so what do they have to lose?

Former Vice President Mike Pence has been out on the road trying to both stay loyal to the MAGA legacy (such as it is) while defending his decision on January 6th not to destroy the constitution for the dotty, orange man in the White House. This week he even went so far as to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan library in which he actually came close to suggesting that Trump is not, in fact, a living god:

“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.” 

It appears Pence has finally managed to wipe that adoring gaze off his own face. What good it does him remains to be seen?

Trump’s number one henchman, former Attorney General William Barr, is also on his own reputation rehab tour after having repeatedly protected Trump and his cronies and abruptly ending his disgraceful tenure at the top of Trump’s shit list. He spoke with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, a reporter known for being friendly to members of the right-wing, for Karl’s new book about the Trump administration’s final days called Betrayal, due out in December.

Karl published an excerpt in the Atlantic this weekend that shows Barr as an independent-minded tough guy hero, slinging around the word “bullshit” like he’s Robert DeNiro in “Goodfellas.” According to this version of events, Barr always knew that Trump was going to lose and he just pretended to be concerned about Joe Biden stealing the election so he’d have the credibility to say that the Democrats won fair and square. Sure, he did.

Yes, it is true that Barr told the AP on Dec. 1st that the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. That was big of him considering the stakes (and the fact that he broke yet another DOJ rule by prematurely “investigating” the issue in the first place.) But according to Karl, this was really done at the behest of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who believed they needed to admit defeat so he could win the two runoff races in Georgia by saying they needed a GOP firewall in the Senate. Barr told him he understood and would say the election was not stolen when the time was right. According to Karl, McConnell confirmed the conversation. Apparently, Barr and McConnell see absolutely nothing wrong with the Senate Majority Leader conscripting the attorney general to help him win a couple of races. They don’t even try to hide their corruption anymore. I’m not sure they even know what it is.

And let’s not forget that no one in the administration more eagerly followed Trump’s pre-election playbook, preparing his followers for The Big Lie. All the way back in June of 2020, Barr went on NPR and claimed that mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud, especially “counterfeiting,” none of which he could provide evidence for, simply saying “it’s obvious.” NPR’s public editor later admonished the network for airing these false claims, even quoting one expert saying they were “totally nuts.”

That didn’t stop him.

Barr continued to repeat his weird beliefs about “counterfeit” ballots in congressional testimony and in a wild CNN interview (which I wrote about here) leading up to the election. He never offered any evidence for his claims which, in many respects, were even more outrageous than Trump’s. The idea that Barr, of all people, was some kind of Big Lie skeptic is absurd. Nobody pushed it harder than he did — until the writing was on the wall and he realized that his place in history was going to be somewhere between Rudy Giuliani, Roy Cohn and Sidney Powell.

According to Karl, Trump went totally bonkers when he heard that Barr said there was no evidence of fraud, and you can’t blame him for being surprised. But in a faint echo of the famous march up to the White House by Barry Goldwater to tell Nixon that he had lost the support of Congress, this tale has Barr going to meet with an enraged, red-faced Trump who shrieked, “How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?” prompting the steely Attorney General to simply reply, “because it’s true.”

Trump then ranted and called him worthless and Barr left that meeting unsure if he still had a job. He and the White House worked it out the next day with Barr saying that he’d stay on a long as he was needed, which lasted for a few more days until the brave speaker of truth to power wrote one of the most obsequious resignation letters in history and snuck out of town just before all hell broke loose.  

Salon

Update: Orange Julius Caesar is not amused.

Somebody needs to give him a bottle and put him to bed.

Here are some words from one of the 50 GOP ostriches who refused to vote for the Bipartisan January 6th Commission:

"Here in the US, there's a growing recognition that this is a bit like WWF — that it's entertaining, but it's not real…I think people recognize it's a lot of show & bombast, but it's going nowhere. The election is over. It was fair" — Romney on Trump's lies about the election pic.twitter.com/S277i7SN6O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 27, 2021

I’m watching CNN’s John Avlon patting Romney on the back for these comments as if he’s saying something truly brave.

He is not. Yes, this is like WWF (some of us have been pointing this out since 2015) and well over 50%of the country have known this from the beginning. But is there a “growing recognition” anywhere on the right that this is true?

Uhm. No. The cult is alive and well. Not even the unnecessary deaths of over half a million people changed it. Here are some poll results from the middle of this month:

Three quarters of Republican voters support state efforts to reexamine votes from last fall’s presidential election and over half believe the audits will change the outcome of the election, a poll published Wednesday suggests, after a previous survey found 3 in 10 Republicans believe a conspiracy theory that Trump could be “reinstated” this year as conservatives across the country lobby for audits in attempts to overturn the election results.

74% of Republican voters support state efforts to review the 2020 presidential election and 51% expected a change in outcome, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1,994 registered voters conducted Jun. 11-13. 

The findings complement polling last week indicating 3 in 10Republican voters buy into claims former President Trump will somehow be reinstated before the year is out, as well as other polling suggesting a persistent and widespread belief in baseless claims of electoral fraud.

Trump and his allies have consistently refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of November’s 2020 election, stirring up groundless claims of electoral fraud before voting was even underway. Though no evidence of fraud has ever been produced and volley after volley of election lawsuits have failed, Republican legislators in numerous states have nurtured and seized upon these fears to justify introducing more restrictive voting legislation. Trump’s latest obsession in pushing this conspiracy is ballot audits—even in places where past audits have found no evidence of fraud—which he believes could potentially prove his winning of the election.   

More Than Half Of Republicans Believe Voter Fraud Claims And Most Still Support Trump, Poll Finds (Forbes)

3 In 10 Republicans Believe Wacky Conspiracy Theory Trump Will Be ‘Reinstated’ As President This Year, Poll Shows 

But it doesn’t change a thing …

In a highly anticipated report released Wednesday, the Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee rebutted former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims, debunking allegations of malfeasance in the state’s election last fall and affirming that Joe Biden was victorious.

The report is the product of an eight-month inquiry and concludes there was no basis or evidence to support the Trump campaign’s repeated claims that the election results failed to reflect the will of the voters.

“As is often the case, the truth is not as attractive or as immediately desirable as the lies and the lies contain elements of truth,” state Sen. Ed McBroom, the Republican chairman of the committee that investigated the election, said in a statement that accompanied the report. “We must all remember: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’ and ‘claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'”

The report, which was supported by every Republican on the committee, was clear: “This Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election.”

Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes, a 3 percentage-point victory over Trump. The election results had already been affirmed by court rulings, state canvassers and earlier audits completed by the Michigan secretary of state.

Good news right? That ought to put an end to a lot of this Big Lie bullshit. Republicans have agreed the Michigan vote count was fair, there was no “late night” ballot dump of illegal Biden votes and all the Black people in Detroit didn’t steal the election. Huzzah.

Sadly, that doesn’t mean a thing:

McBroom said he feels confident the state’s results were accurate following his review, though he has continued to offer support for Republican-led voting law changes. McBroom said many of the claims of malfeasance were the result of “a misunderstanding or an outright deception.”

“Also, sources must lose credibility when it is shown they promote falsehoods, even more when they never take accountability for those falsehoods,” he said. “At this point, I feel confident to assert the results of the Michigan election are accurately represented by the certified and audited results.”

That is incoherent. These people will supposedly lose credibility except for the fact that he supports their push to change the laws so they can rig the vote in their favor in the future.

Still, I guess this is important for the history books is we manage to keep these people from passing laws that erase everything they don’t like in them:

The report singled out the false claims of fraud in Antrim County, a small county in the northern part of the state where human error by election officials initially led to results showing Biden winning the county. The error was quickly corrected, and the certified results showed a substantial Trump victory there. But the rectified error has fueled false claims of fraud in the state.

“The Committee recommends the attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends,” the report said, adding, “The many hours of testimony before the Committee showed these claims are unjustified and unfair to the people of Antrim County and the state of Michigan.”

In his statement, McBroom said, “All compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.”

Trump’s backers have alleged that the election technology used by elections officials there may have changed votes or otherwise incorrectly processed the results. Those claims have contributed to a push from some on the far right to conduct an Arizona-style partisan ballot review in the state.

“Most of the rigorous debate over additional audits comes from fears surrounding the technology used and its vulnerabilities as allegedly demonstrated in Antrim County,” McBroom said. “Without any evidence to validate those fears, another audit, a so-called forensic audit, is not justifiable.”

Here he goes again with the bullshit:

“Michigan’s already completed post-election audit and risk-limiting audit are also far more substantive than Arizona’s standard audit,” he added. “However, I am keeping a close eye on the legislatively-initiated forensic audit in Arizona and will continue to ask questions regarding other election issues I feel are not settled.”

Right. That chinese bamboo in the ballot thing is something they really need to keep an eye on.

Nonetheless, they found zero proof of anything:

The report examined, point by point, other theories of election fraud promoted by Trump and his supporters, including votes by dead people. The report said such claims were researched and the committee “concluded that most were false.”

“There were two claims of deceased individuals casting votes that were found to be true; one was a clerical error while the other was a timing issue,” the report said. “The Committee concluded that none of these constituted fraudulent election activities or manipulations.”

The committee also found no evidence “indicating that hundreds of thousands of absentee voter ballots were mailed to Michigan voters without previously being requested,” though it recommended that the secretary of state discontinue mailing out unsolicited ballot applications.

The report also addressed claims of late-night “ballot dumps” in Detroit. The basis of one claim was a video that actually showed a local news photographer hauling equipment, not ballots. A second video, the committee said, depicted the unloading of absentee ballots from a van around 3:30 a.m. after Election Day, but there was no evidence the ballots were fraudulent.

Had ballots been fraudulently counted that were not cast by authentic voters, there would have been evidence of irregular turnout. But the inquiry found turnout was not irregular in any way.

Additionally, the report stated “the data suggests that there was no anomalous number of votes cast solely for the President, either in Wayne County or statewide.”

THERE WAS NO CHEATING BY THE DEMOCRATS!!! The only cheating that has been going on is by these Republicans. I know you know that. But sometimes you just have to say it out loud.

Last night in Ohio, for some reason, Trump was talking about voter fraud in Montana, a state he won by 16.4 points:

Not sure what happened here but either the former President can’t read his speech or he is now challenging the vote in Montana pic.twitter.com/lG1aoTaobv

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 27, 2021

He seemed confused. I would guess he was actually talking about this:

Wisconsin Republican leaders on Saturday pushed back against former President Donald Trump’s claim they aren’t doing enough to investigate the November 2020 election, saying Trump was “simply misinformed.”

A day before Saturday’s Republican state convention, Trump lashed out at Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester; Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg; and Senate President Chris Kapenga, R-Delafield, for not conducting a forensic election audit, particularly in Milwaukee.Listen now: Badgers men’s basketball players talk ‘disconnect’ with coach Greg GardPlay Video

University of Wisconsin men’s basketball players Brad Davison, Micah Potter and Walt McGrory give pointed feedback to coach Greg Gard in a secretly recorded meeting between seniors and coaches on Feb. 19, 2021.

“I think this is one of those cases where the president was just misinformed by his staff or he didn’t see the media reports,” Vos said Saturday. “At the end of the day, I am very confident we are doing the right thing.”

LeMahieu said Trump’s statement was “really unfortunate.”

“I don’t know where he got that information from,” he said. “We’re auditing the election results.”

The episode underscores the needle Republicans must thread to respond to the party’s ardent base while trying not to alienate other voters who were turned off by Trump.

The GOP-controlled Legislature in February authorized a 2020 election audit to be conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau. It will examine such issues as how the state maintains its voter rolls and when it allows voters to get absentee ballots without showing identification.

Vos has hired retired police officers to “to investigate ‘potential irregularities and/or illegalities’ in the 2020 presidential election.” They are to be paid as much as $9,600 in taxpayer funds apiece for three months of work.

During Saturday’s convention, Vos announced that former conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman will serve as the attorney who will oversee the election probe.

Gableman served on the court from 2008 to 2018. Gableman was a reliable conservative on the court, and was in the majority in a pair of 2014 cases that upheld Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

Trump on Friday said the leaders are “working hard to cover up election corruption” in the state and are “actively trying to prevent a forensic audit of the election results.”

“Don’t fall for their lies!” Trump said.

Despite Trump’s claims, Wisconsin officials have not found any widespread fraud during the November elections.In Wisconsin, local election officials identified just 27 cases of potential voter fraud out of nearly 3.3 million votes cast in the November election that they forwarded to prosecutors. No charges have been brought in any of the cases.

It’s tempting to laugh uproariously because it’s so stupid. But the potential fallout from all this is quite serious.

Crowd chants Trump won pic.twitter.com/mi1d5jB8Vv

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 27, 2021

Some good news from Ari Berman:

“Today the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia,” Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference at the Justice Department headquarters.The lawsuit challenges a number of provisions of the law, including a ban on election officials sending unsolicited mail ballot request forms to voters, a shorter period of time for voters to request absentee ballots, new voter ID requirements for mail ballots, restrictions on the number of mail ballot drop boxes, a ban on giving out food and water to voters in line, and throwing out provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Gov. Brian Kemp has said “there is nothing Jim Crow” about the Georgia law, enacted in March, but it includes 16 different provisions that make it harder to vote and that target metro Atlanta counties with large Black populations.Advertise with Mother Jones

The lawsuit is being overseen by Kristen Clarke, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general—two longtime civil rights lawyers with extensive records litigating against new restrictions on voting.

The Georgia law, known as SB202, appears to have been part of a coordinated national effort by conservative activists to make it harder to vote in states across the country. The dark money group Heritage Action for America bragged in a leaked video to donors in April, first reported by Mother Jones, that the Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” including several targeted by the Justice Department lawsuit. 

In a speech earlier this month, Garland said he would double the number of lawyers in the department’s voting section to scrutinize new laws making it harder to vote. Still, litigation against new voter suppression laws faces an uphill battle against a conservative-dominated judiciary.

The Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act means that states with a long history of discrimination—including Georgia—no longer need to get their voting changes approved by the federal government. Since that decision, 26 states have enacted new restrictions on voting, according to an analysis by Mother Jones published on Friday. Garland said Friday that if not for that Supreme Court ruling, “it is likely that SB202 would have never taken effect.”

It is a welcome move but these things take time and there are few guarantees so it’s unlikely it will positively affect the 2022 election which features the all-important Warnock race.

And the election subversion and voter nullification stuff that happening all over the country isn’t being addressed yet, which is very disturbing. The next two elections are going to be very dicey. And keep in mind that even if the Democrats succeed beyond all expectations at getting out their vote, the way the right has framed their narrative means they will take that huge turnout as proof that the Democrats engaged in voter fraud and use their new laws to overturn the election. It’s a real heads we win, tails you lose situation.

They have convinced their voters that it is impossible for them to lose.

Remember:

“There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”

Thus saith the three Republicans and one Democrat from the Michigan Senate oversight committee charged with investigating allegations of fraud in 2020. Their report issued Wednesday recommended that the attorney general “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” It would be “a complete waste of time” to consider their allegations further since those making them have “zero credibility.”

Detroit News:

The northern Michigan Republican stronghold of Antrim County initially reported that Democrat Joe Biden won the county, but canvassing led to the correction of the results and showed Trump overwhelmingly won there.

The report also delved into controversial claims made after the election, including that hundreds of dead people voted and almost 290,000 illegal votes were cast by absentee ballot.  

While the investigation found that there are “glaring issues that must be addressed” in state election law, it added there is “no evidence presented at this time” to prove “significant acts of fraud” occurred to subvert the will of voters. The committee recommended giving county clerks the ability to remove deceased voters from the Qualified Voter File, opposed the mass mailing of absentee voter applications and urged the Michigan Bureau of Elections to investigate possible partisan poll worker recruitment in Detroit and Wayne County.

Clerical errors were made

The supposed fraud allegations are typical.

A clerical error assigned the vote of a dead man to his son with the same name living at the same address.

The Voter Integrity Project alleged hundreds of thousands of absentee voter ballots were mailed to Michigan voters without previously being requested. That never happened. VIP called 1,500 persons “and asked if they had received a ballot without requesting it.” VIP then extrapolated from positive responses to there being hundreds of thousands of “illegal ballots.” The investigation found that many on the list “equated receiving an absentee ballot application with receiving an absentee ballot” and did not know the difference. Voting a ballot after requesting one via an unsolicted application “is not an illegal action by a lawful voter and it is not indicative of fraudulent or illicit behavior of the voter nor of an illegitimate vote.”

And the alleged middle-of-the-night “ballot dump”? No evidence for that either, the committee concluded (whatever claims witnesses made in Rudy Giuliani’s binder of affidavits). “Those drawing such conclusions in their affidavits and testimony were asked to provide proof that something illegal actually occurred but no proof that ballots were fraudulent was provided or found by the Committee in testimony or in subpoenaed records.”

Not that the committee found no issues. Just not so much with actual voters. Initial vote-counting errors in Antrim county resulted from “human errors by election officials, including the failure to update equipment after changing the ballot design,” reports Detroit News. Those errors sparked a cascade of conspiracy theories.

Eric Boehlert at PressRun:

The withering Michigan rebuke is reminiscent of Arizona Republican election officials who have strenuously denounced the charade “audit” that Trump conspiracists have been conducting for months there with no end in sight. (Most recently, they transported Arizona voting system data to a secret hideout in Montana.)

“This is insane just from a competence standpoint,” Arizona Republican Stephen Richer recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I mean, there is no good reason for doing this.” Added former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R): “I think they should maybe just call it quits. I don’t think that it’s going to serve any purpose. It’s not going to change the election.” 

The sweeping Michigan conclusions this week come as Trump loyalists there push for an Arizona-style ballot review.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

The thorough debunking by the Republican-led senate panel would not stop the Republican-led Michigan state legislature from moving swiftly to make voting harder anyway, including passing on Wednesday bills tightening voter ID rules (Detroit Free Press):

Michigan already requires voters to present an ID at their polling locations. But under current law, voters who don’t have an ID when they show up can sign an affidavit affirming their identity and vote normally. SB 303, which passed the House along a party-line vote, would eliminate that option. 

Instead, voters who don’t present an ID on Election Day would have to cast a provisional ballot. SB 304, which also passed the House along party lines, would allow those provisional ballots to be counted  only if a voter goes to his or her local clerk’s office and presents an ID within six days of the election. Earlier versions of the bills were passed in the Senate June 16. The two bills have been returned to the Senate.

Because for voter fraud conspiracists and their lawmaking enablers, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Voter confidence they have worked assiduously to undermine must be restored. Someone must be punished. Those someones are voters Republicans believe are likely to vote for Democrats.

The only organized, wide-scale effort to subvert the will of voters is happening in plain view in GOP-controlled legislatures across the country.

TPM’s Josh Kovensky this morning delves into the origins of one of the most “whackadoodle Big Lie claims” popular in the Maga-QAnon-sphere. ItalyGate alleges that in the middle of the night in November 2020, “An Italian defense contractor teamed up with the U.S. Embassy in Rome to use satellite transmissions to switch millions of Trump votes to Biden votes, thus stealing the election.”

No, really. Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked the Department of Justice to look into it. The DOJ thought he was nuts. TPM has identified other purveyors of this wild-ass theory:

It’s not clear where the bogus allegations originated. But one of the earliest examples of them spreading, Reuters reported, was in a December 2020 recording of a Florida woman named Maria Zack.

Zack runs Nations in Action, a non-profit that describes itself as devoted to addressing “the collapse of the civil society with families struggling to maintain faith, values and virtues.” A longtime conservative election law firm, Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, incorporated the company.

It has not been previously reported that longtime Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a leading voter fraud alarmist, served on the board of Nations in Action. More on von Spakovsky in a moment.

Nations in Action became one of ItalyGate’s main proponents.

The theory even made it to Mar-a-Lago, where Zack said that on Christmas Eve she gave Trump a note about an affidavit that supposedly supported the allegations.

That would have been enough for Trump, clearly. Zack claims to have brought the affidavit to D.C. on Jan. 6. The group issued a press release claiming proof enough “for each state to recall their slate of electors immediately.”

Having von Spakovsky, the Harold Hill of voter fraud, on the board of Nations in Action should be enough to discredit the rest. For his part, von Spakovsky claims he resigned on Jan. 8, was never really on the board, and has nothing to do with the ItalyGate conspiracy theory. His name on their corporate filing is “their mistake.”

But wait, there’s more. Nations in Action in a press release thanked the Institute for Good Governance for partnering on its investigation. The latter group is connected to one Michele Roosevelt Edwards, who runs another firm called USAerospace Partners. The letter Meadows forwarded to Jeffrey A. Rosen at the DOJ originated with Carlo Gloria, allegedly with USAerospace Partners and typed on its letterhead.

TPM tried to reach both Goria and Roosevelt Edwards to gain clarity on why these companies were promoting allegations that Italy changed the result of the 2020 election.

Someone at a number listed for Goria picked up the phone but hung up after a TPM reporter identified himself, and refused to take further calls.

There was more on Edwards Roosevelt, however. The USAerospace chair also goes by other names: Michele Ballarin, Michele Golden, and Amira Ballarin.

She denies knowledge of the letter Meadows obtained, etc., etc. It gets weirder from there.

Mass hysteria.

Update: Weirder still.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform released this extraordinary statement this morning. Please read it all the way through. It is unbelievable:

On May 21, 2021, the Committee sent a letter to DOJ requesting documents relating to President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election prior to the January 6 attack. 

Documents obtained by the Committee in response to this letter show that in December 2020 and early January 2021, President Trump, his Chief of Staff, and outside allies repeatedly put pressure on senior DOJ officials to challenge the results of the presidential election and advance unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, with the apparent goal of keeping President Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election.

President Trump Sent Bogus Election Fraud Claims to Top DOJ Officials Minutes Before Announcing Their Promotions to the Top Two Spots in the Department

On December 14, 2020—the day electors in each state certified the Electoral College votes—President Trump’s White House Assistant sent an email with the subject “From POTUS” to then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.  The email attached materials about alleged voter fraud in Antrim County, Michigan, including “talking points” that asserted, “a Cover-up is Happening regarding the voting machines in Michigan,” and, “Michigan cannot certify for Biden.”

Just two minutes after President Trump’s assistant sent these documents to Mr. Rosen, then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, through his assistant, sent the same documents to the U.S. Attorneys for the Eastern and Western Districts of Michigan. 

Approximately 40 minutes after sending this phony voter fraud information, President Trump tweeted that Attorney General Barr—who had said publicly that he had not seen widespread election fraud—would be stepping down, that Mr. Rosen would serve as Acting Attorney General, and that Mr. Donoghue would serve as Acting Deputy Attorney General.

President Trump Used Official White House Channels and a Private Attorney to Pressure DOJ to Urgently File a Supreme Court Lawsuit to Nullify the Election

On December 29, 2020, President Trump’s White House Assistant emailed Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue, and Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, attaching a draft legal brief to file in the Supreme Court.  She wrote, “The President asked me to send the attached draft document for your review,” and provided a phone number so they could contact the President directly. 

The draft 54-page complaint demanded that the Supreme Court “declare that the Electoral College votes cast” in six states that President Trump lost “cannot be counted,” and  requested that the Court order a “special election” for president in those states.

On the very same day, a private attorney, Kurt Olsen, contacted multiple senior DOJ officials on President Trump’s behalf to urge them to file this complaint.  In one email to Mr. Rosen’s Chief of Staff, he wrote:  “As I said on our call, the President of the United States has seen this complaint, and he directed me last night to brief AG Rosen in person today and discuss bringing this action.  I have been instructed to report back to the President this afternoon after this meeting.”  In a separate email to the Acting Solicitor General, Mr. Olsen added, “This is an urgent matter.”

Emails indicate that Mr. Rosen discussed the filing with Mr. Olsen on or around December 29, 2020, and asked Mr. Olsen to send him Supreme Court precedent supporting the arguments in the complaint.  Mr. Olsen previously represented Texas in its failed lawsuit to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

President Trump Enlisted Assistant AG Jeffrey Clark in an Attempt to Advance Election Fraud Claims

Emails confirm that on December 31, 2020, and January 3, 2021, President Trump met with Mr. Rosen, then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, and other DOJ officials.  During these meetings, President Trump reportedly pressured them to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

On January 1, 2021, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows directed Mr. Rosen to have Mr. Clark look into “signature match anomalies in Fulton county, GA.”  Later that day, Mr. Rosen sent Mr. Clark the cell phone number of then-U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Byung J. Pak with the subject line “atlanta.”   That day, Mr. Clark also emailed Dustin Carmack, Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence, to request a call. 

On January 2, 2021, Mr. Rosen followed up with Mr. Clark regarding his call with Mr. Pak.  Mr. Clark replied, “I spoke to the source and am on with the guy who took the video right now.  Working on it.  More due diligence to do.”  Later that day, President Trump referred to Mr. Pak as a “never-Trumper U.S. Attorney” while discussing two videos purporting to show fraudulent votes in Fulton County with Georgia Secretary of Secretary Brad Raffensberger.

The January 3 meeting was described in press reports as an “Apprentice”-like battle during which President Trump considered “whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark” who was sympathetic to the President’s election fraud claims.  After the meeting, Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Hovakimian reported to his colleagues:  “it sounds like Rosen and the cause of justice won.”

Later that evening, Mr. Donoghue emailed Mr. Pak with the subject line “Please call ASAP.”  Mr. Pak resigned less than 10 hours later, reportedly under pressure from the Trump White House.

The White House Chief of Staff Pressured DOJ to Investigate Conspiracy Theories At Least Fives Times

Newly released documents substantiate recent reports that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pressured DOJ officials—on at least five occasions—to investigate baseless claims of election fraud or put pressure on other officials to pursue these claims.

On December 30, 2020, Mr. Meadows forwarded Mr. Rosen an email from Cleta Mitchell, a Trump advisor who later participated in a January phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.  During that call,  President Trump reportedly asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner of the state.  The December 30 email contained allegations of “video issues in Fulton County.”  Mr. Meadows wrote to Mr. Rosen:  “Can you have your team look into these allegations of wrongdoing.  Only the alleged fraudulent activity.” 

Later on December 30, 2020, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen a translation of a document from an individual in Italy claiming to have “direct knowledge” of a plot by which American electoral data was changed in Italian facilities “in coordination with senior US intelligence officials (CIA)” and loaded onto “military satellites.”  This individual claimed that the true data, as well as sources within the conservative wing of the Italian secret service, confirmed that Donald Trump was “clearly the winner” of the 2020 election.

On January 1, 2021, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen on three separate occasions to provide unsubstantiated claims about election fraud or ask him to take direct action to change the results: 

At 3:08 p.m., Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link referencing the Italy conspiracy, labeled “Brad Johnson:  Rome, Satellites, Servers:  an Update.”  Mr. Rosen forwarded the email to Mr. Donoghue, who responded:  “Pure insanity.”  Mr. Rosen explained to Mr. Donoghue that after receiving the message, he was asked to have the FBI meet with Brad Johnson, who Mr. Rosen learned “is working with Rudy Giuliani.”  Mr. Rosen said he refused the request.

At 4:13 p.m., Mr. Meadows sent another email to Mr. Rosen, writing:  “There have been allegations of signature match anomalies in Fulton county, Ga.  Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation.”  Mr. Rosen forwarded this email to Mr. Donoghue with the comment:  “Can you believe this?  I am not going to respond to the message below.” 

At 6:56 p.m., Mr. Meadows forwarded Mr. Rosen a document alleging voting irregularities and problems with Dominion machines in New Mexico and asking Mr. Rosen for his “team to review the allegations contained herein.”

The idea that Trump may very well end up being the GOP nominee for president in 2024 is mind-boggling. He’s a traitor to the constitution and so are his henchmen.

By the way, Meadows is still in the club, hanging with the boys in the Senate dining room:

I asked former WH chief of staff Mark Meadows if it was appropriate for him to email acting AG Rosen pushing election claims.

“I’ll let you answer that,” he said leaving the Senate dining room. “Obviously I’m not going to comment on anything that may or may not have happened.”

— Jeremy Herb (@jeremyherb) June 15, 2021

They’re all getting away with plotting a coup. Nothing is happening to any of them.

Update —

From election law expert Rick Hasen:

It begins on page 33 of these documents released by the House Oversight Committee. It’s very similar to the dangerous, awful brief filed by Texas in the Supreme Court that was summarily rejected by the Court. Yes it cites debunked conspiracy theories and dubious legal theories and the Epoch Times as authority. But let’s not let the ludicrous nature of the complaint overshadow how dangerous this was: here is the President of the United States directing a lawyer to pressure the Department of Justice into filing a brief in the Supreme Court that would have enjoined the appointment of presidential electors by 5 states that Biden won (and that had already appointed electors pursuant to legal state process).

This is nothing less than an attempt to use the courts to steal the election. It is brazen, and dangerous, and an affront to the rule of law. We are lucky that enough election administrators, elected officials, judges, governors and members of Congress blocked these attempts from going forward.

Dahlia Lithwick shares concerns that without consequences for Trump & Co. the country puts itself at greater risk. His administration and his Department of Justice engaged in practices that might have made Richard Nixon blush:

In the past few days we have learned—among other object horrors—that Donald Trump’s Justice Department seized metadata records for members of the House Intelligence Committee and their families, whom it suspected of leaking. We learned that Trump supporters have been leveling crippling death threats against state election workers. We learned that White House counsel Don McGahn had been instructed to fire Robert Mueller. We learned that in 2019, Rudy Giuliani, acting in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, pressed Ukraine to announce baseless investigations about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. And yet as Richard Painter and Claire O. Finkelstein showed last week, the Justice Department has worked to stymie investigations and litigation that would unearth at least some of these truths, in a quest to protect institutional prerogatives and values.

Meaning the Trump administration ain’t over until the legal paperwork is complete. Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to prevent that. The Biden administration so far seems to be in “moving on” mode. A significant fraction of Americans still believe the sitting president is illegitimate. Republican legislatures that previously used voter fraud as a pretext for restricting voting rights are now moving to allow election rigging by law: theirs.

Without consequences, a Josh Hawley or a Marco Rubio might do it again, Lithwick warns. The Boston Globe urged prosecution. “That’s not a recommendation made lightly,” the Glode wrote:

In the case of Trump, prosecutors would have plenty of potential crimes from which to choose. While Trump may be prosecuted for financial crimes he potentially committed before he became president, what is most important to go after are his actions during his time in office, especially those after the 2020 election, which culminated in fomenting a full-on, violent assault on American democracy.

To assemble a bill of particulars for Trump’s crimes in office, one merely needs a set of newspaper clippings. Putting that all behind us is the kind of behavior the Silents were known for. Joe Biden is one of them. But even they knew enough to prosecute Nixon and enact a set of reforms in the wake of Watergate.

Sweeping Trump under the rug is an invitation to disaster, just as the Savings and Loan debacle presaged the Great Recession. Hundreds went to jail for what was then “one-seventieth the size” of the 2008 financial meltdown that triggered the Great Recession. The Obama administration let the latter financial crimes go virtually unpunished.

Then came Trump, a man who cut his teeth on financial crimes and went on to crimes against the Constitution:

Pretending Trump was a crazy dream and it’s all normal again is now a bipartisan sport. As David Graham warned last week, the only thing more dangerous than the claims that “this is not normal” that pervaded the Trump years is the thin veneer of “normalcy” that characterizes the present illiberal moment. But what is most bizarre, troubling, and painful about this current attempt to move forward and revert to normal without properly reckoning with what has happened is that the message is emanating from the Biden Justice Department and White House. They are now the folks arguing that everything that happened over the course of the Trump years was an aberration and a one-off, and that the best response to all of that is to ignore, ignore, ignore.

Lithwick has no better idea than I of how to de-radicalize a Trump electorate in the throws of mass hysteria. But letting Trump off the hook will further destroy the links between reality and fantasy, truth and lies:

With all due respect to those who would like to continue to lecture us about the mathematically correct ratio of concern to destabilizing danger, we’ve actually done a fairly decent job of understanding that ratio intuitively all along. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, and being told to get over it is just as jarring when it comes from inside the guardrails of democracy as it was when it came from the smirking authoritarians that has replaced. That’s why it doesn’t feel any better. If anything, gaslighting about ongoing threats to democracy might be even scarier when it comes from the very people who were supposed to protect us.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is a Boomer, not a Silent. Any suggestion that his department should just not get involved in Trump investigations because that might seem political deserves a shouted, “OK, Boomer!”

Why not ridicule? Scientist and science fiction writer David Brin asks (essentially) that if shame does not work to quash Stop the Steal (and perhaps other mass hysterias), try ridicule:

The Republican voter fraud fraud is over half a century old by now, old enough to be “genetically” passed on within its ranks. Sam Levine at The Guardian recounts its recent hits. But the contagion metastasized with the GOP’s transition to the Party of Trump:

For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.

If things were bad before (ask me about North Carolina), they are worse now.

“We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”

“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.

The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.

“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”

As Brin’s post observes, the states where “the Steal” is alleged to have occured were Republican-controlled, either wholly (Arizona and Georgia) or by Republican legislatures and Democratic governors (Pennsylvania).

The stolen election narrative is nonsense, and perhaps a form of mass hysteria. But then in Trump world, up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. And, by the way, Covid vaccines make you magnetic.

“Na-No, Na-No”

Wow. An anti-vaccine nurse in Ohio tried to prove the Vaccines Cause Magnetism theory in an state legislative committee. The demonstration did not go to plan pic.twitter.com/0ubELst4E8

— Tyler Buchanan (@Tylerjoelb) June 9, 2021

This “vaccines magentize you” conspiracy has spread worldwide so fast that the Centers for Disease Control posted a recent bulletin to attempt to knock it down:

The CDC went so far as to insist itemize “All COVID-19 vaccines are free from metals such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys, as well as any manufactured products such as microelectronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors.”

As Mork from Ork might say, “Na-No, Na-No.”

The Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri adopted the persona of X-Men villain Magneto. He was as disappointed as someone watching a friend’s amateur magic show:

Nobody, as far as I could tell, was magnetic at all. They also said they would be able to do something involving 5G, but if they could, they never explained what it was, or did it. One nurse who was testifying in Ohio put a key and a bobby pin on herself and they both fell off immediately. “Explain this,” she said, which I could — the surface tension between a flat metallic object and the body’s surface oils that can sometimes hold objects on the body had failed her.

What is really behind the mass hysteria in this country is loss of white-conservative power and something else I mention too rarely:

Demographic changes mean white people may soon (or eventually) be just another minority in this country. These people know how this country treats minorities. They and their ancestors have been doing most of the “treating” for 400 years. As Stephen Stills once said, they’re scared shitless.

What conservatives are most afraid of is that when they are a minority, they will be treated the same way they treated minorities. So they don't want kids learning about just how awful they were because they're terrified of being tested the same way if people learn. https://t.co/rlrTFTkdsY

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) June 14, 2021

But I’m afraid ridicule will not work to snap such people back to reality, satisfying though ridicule may be. Making fun of people’s mental illness as gauche these days as drunk humor. Like other recent mass hysterias, this one may just have to run its course. The question is whether there will be where the United States of America is now a functional democractic republic remaining when the fever breaks.

(h/t/ BF)