Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I’m not quite sure what I think about this push to invoke the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot. It certainly seems to be straightforwardly correct on the merits. But whether it’s politically viable — or wise — is still unresolved for me. Would it save democracy or destroy it?

TPM takes a look at the inside of the move to do this:

Those on the vanguard of invoking the seldom-used Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment, under which Trump’s role in Jan. 6 would preclude him from running for office again, acknowledge that what they’re doing is unprecedented in the modern era. But so is a president attempting to foment an insurrection. 

“It’s Donald Trump’s fault if some people end up not being able to vote for him,” Gerard Magliocca, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in the Disqualification Clause, told TPM. “He took that right away from them by his misconduct.” 

In interviews with TPM, some of the outside groups leading the charge to enforce the Disqualifications Clause acknowledged the legal realities and complexities involved in disqualifying a major presidential candidate in a country where each state runs its own election and has its own disqualification process. But they also hew to the belief that Trump’s attempt to stay in power against the will of the people not only should bar him from further office, but already does under the Constitution. 

Their plans involve a mixture of public campaigning to apply pressure on the state-level secretaries of state and election boards who decide matters of disqualification. Accustomed to asking judges to rule on petitions involving the age or citizenship of local candidates, good government groups are now crafting bids to have these officials disqualify Trump.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Free Speech for People (FSFP), among the groups most active on the Disqualification Clause, are tight-lipped about where they plan to file formal legal challenges to disqualify Trump, though FSFP sent letters this week asking officials in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and New Mexico to drop Trump from the ballot. That, in turn, has prompted some other states to start examining the process. 

Getting Underway

The disqualification clause has been the subject of renewed buzz since two conservative scholars — associated with the Federalist Society, no less — published a preview paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review endorsing the argument that Trump is disqualified from running. 

That buy-in forced a closer look from observers and even elected officials who might’ve been predisposed to shrug the argument off as the latest liberal wishcasting.   

But while the proposal’s resurgence in the post-Reconstruction era is new, CREW and FSFP have already tested it in court.  

FSFP, a Boston-based nonprofit helmed by attorney John Bonifaz, started filing in 2021 to disqualify candidates — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) — from the ballot. 

The group’s legal director, Ron Fein, told TPM that FSFP is gearing up for a legal fight to disqualify Trump in several states before the Republican primaries begin.

“We’re pursuing both advocacy to persuade secretaries of state to disqualify Trump on their own and we will also be filing formal legal challenges to Trump’s candidacy in multiple states,” Fein said.

FSFP has already gotten part of its plans underway. 

Their strategy is two-pronged: keep up public pressure via letters to secretaries of state, election boards, and public protests at state election offices. 

But it’s the second part that will constitute the real test of the process. That will come down to formal petitions and lawsuits that the group is planning to file, asking whichever the relevant authority is in a given state to find that Trump is disqualified. Fein said that that will require FSFP to prove not only that Trump’s effort to reverse his loss in 2020 qualified as an insurrection, but that he undertook real acts to “engage” in it — thereby meeting a Reconstruction-era legal standard.

“Our predecessors wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution because they learned a bloody lesson from the Civil War,” Fein said. “When someone foments a violent insurrection against the U.S., they can’t be trusted with public office.”

51 Different Elections

Many of the same archaic processes which Trump tried to use to his advantage in his attempt to undermine the 2020 election results also make disqualification difficult. Each state runs its own election for presidential electors, and each one has its own disqualification procedures to navigate. The effect is that piecemeal, individual efforts are less likely to achieve an outsized effect than organizations which can coordinate nationally. 

They also only need to knock Trump off a few swing state ballots before the electoral math becomes very difficult for him, meaning they don’t have to succeed in every state to effectively disqualify him nationally. That math will help inform the plan, as will homing in on venues where the challengers will have the latitude to collect and display evidence — something judges have blocked in other disqualification cases. 

“That very consideration is part of what informs where we’ll file — we want to file in a forum that will allow you to do those sorts of procedures,” Nikhel Sus, CREW’s director of strategic litigation, told TPM, adding: “We have trial plans, plans to put on evidence and witnesses. Just having some sort of evidentiary hearing or trial has value in and of itself.” 

In some states, that’ll play out in administrative court. In others, normal state court.

Sus told TPM that the group will file lawsuits challenging Trump’s eligibility on the Republican primary ballot by the end of this year. 

That effort will encompass the idiosyncrasies of the various states, and will entail “a mix of both” complaints through election officials and complaints through the courts, befitting each state’s requirements.  

In North Carolina, for example, former state Supreme Court justice Robert Orr found himself combing through pages from an 1869 case testing the Disqualification Clause to see how it might apply.

“The intent of the framers of that constitutional amendment, that provision in the 14th Amendment, was to send a very distinct message not only to all the old Confederates, but to those who potentially might try it again,” Orr told TPM. 

Orr worked with FSFP on a bid to disqualify Cawthorn, and said he expects bids against Trump in his state.

Mixed Early Results

Most of those attempts, made after Jan. 6 to disqualify various Big Lie-friendly Republicans — Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, Green and Cawthorn — were unsuccessful. 

In the Georgia and Arizona cases, judges blocked the challengers from obtaining and displaying the evidence on which the disqualification was predicated. That made it very difficult to prove that the lawmakers had engaged in an insurrection. 

In the one successful disqualification so far — CREW’s effort to remove Otero County, New Mexico commissioner Couy Griffin, who joined the mob on Jan. 6, from his post — the challengers put on an extensive trial with witnesses and video footage. 

Some of the problems that plagued FSFP in these cases would be unlikely to so thoroughly bedevil attempts to disqualify Trump. Along with the groups’ wariness about the evidentiary roadblocks and plans to file where they can put on a whole trial, much more of Trump’s actions before and during Jan. 6 are in the public record. The House Jan. 6 committee and subsequent indictments create a comprehensive record of what exactly Trump did. 

These groups would also simply have more bites at the apple with Trump. Instead of relying on one judge, or at best, one series of courts, they’ll challenge Trump’s qualification in a wide swath of states with an eye to where they’ll most likely find success. 

“The odds that everyone is gonna agree that he’s eligible are pretty low,” Magliocca said. “As long as you have somebody saying he’s ineligible, this is going to the Supreme Court, and probably pretty quickly.” 

I dunno. It’s such a tremendous threat that it seems that any legal and constitutional means to keep him out of the White House again is justified. But what then? I’m not convinced that this particular cure wouldn’t end up being worse than the disease. I guess I’ll need to watch this play out and see where it leads.

Meadows may have committed perjury

Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, the legendary prohibition agents, raided illegal speakeasies a century ago, often using ruses and costumes to finagle their way inside to order drinks. Izzy would surreptitiously pour his drink down a funnel hidden in his vest. A hose led to a bottle for preserving evidence. He would announce he had “bad news.” You’ve just been raided.

There was more bad news for Mark Meadows and Donald Trump last week in Meadows’ hearing transcript.

But wait! There’s more. Ryan Goodman of Just Security observes in a thread that Meadows got involved in coordinating the fake electors scheme because he “would get yelled at” if he didn’t.

“By whom?” the judge asked Meadows.

“By the president of the United States,” Meadows replied, implicating both Trump’s knowledge of the scheme and active participation in it. It’s also a Hatch Act violation for a president, says Goodman.

Meadows also admitted involving Cleta Mitchell in Georgia to help the campaign.

“Note how these admissions also contradict Meadows’ attempt to claim he was trying to ‘land the plane’ to move toward the transfer of power to Biden,” Goodman told CNN. “Helping set up the false electors as a backup plan is NOT landing the plane.”

Right down the funnel

Special prosecutor “Jack Smith may need to consider possible perjury charges,” Goodman adds. “The entire house of cards – falsely claiming all his conduct was pursuant to government duties – fell apart under cross examination.”

In a court filing, Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis wrote that “after insisting that he did not play ‘any role’ in the coordination of slates of ‘fake electors’ throughout several states, the defendant was forced to acknowledge under cross-examination that he had in fact given direction to a campaign official in this regard.”

In a footnote, Willis adds, “The Court has ample basis not to credit some or all of the defendant’s testimony.”  

Trump may not, but Meadows may have needed a few drinks after his last week.

Judge slaps down DeSantis redistricting map

“Today’s redistricting victory in Florida was proof that if you aren’t paying attention to the courts you aren’t paying attention to democracy,” Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias posted Saturday after a Florida circuit judge struck down a Republican congressional map promoted by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Republicans “hate me because I fight, they fear me because I win,” Elias crowed.

Because the plan diminishes Black voters’ “ability to elect representatives of their choice,” per the Fair Districts Amendments, “The Enacted Plan is DECLARED an unconstitutional violation of the Florida Constitution, Article III, Section 20,” wrote Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh who sent it back to the Florida Legislature for a do-over (Politico):

Judge J. Lee Marsh’s ruling is a rebuke to the governor, who previously vetoed the Legislature’s attempts to redraw Florida’s congressional maps and pushed lawmakers to approve his map that dismantled a North Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat.

Yeah, they’re predictable that way.

The congressional map pushed by DeSantis broke up Lawson’s district, which linked Black neighborhoods and towns stretching from just west of Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Lawson, who lost election last year, previously said he would consider running for his old seat if lawmakers reinstate it to a similar configuration as when he held it.

Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, in a text message, said that he disagrees with the decision and that the state will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

PBS provides some background:

The decision was the latest to strike down new congressional maps in Southern states over concerns that they diluted Black voting power.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Republican-drawn map in Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting the effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law. Not long after that, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on a Louisiana political remap case, increasing the likelihood that the Republican-dominated state will have to redraw boundary lines to create a second mostly Black congressional district.

In each of the cases, Republicans have either appealed or vowed to appeal the decisions since they could benefit Democratic congressional candidates facing 2024 races under redrawn maps. The Florida case likely will end up before the Florida Supreme Court.

Yeah, they’re predictable that way.

In an unprecedented move, DeSantis interjected himself into the redistricting process last year by vetoing the Republican-dominated Legislature’s map that preserved Lawson’s district. He called a special session, submitted his own map and demanded lawmakers accept it.

In their lawsuit, the voting rights groups claimed the redrawn congressional map violated state and federal voting rights protections for Black voters.

Yeah, they’re … it’s Ron DeSantis fer cryin’ out loud. He signed the maps into law in April 2022.

Here in the Tar Heel State, the governor has no veto over redistricting. Democrats led by then-state Sen. Roy Cooper saw to that back in the late 1990s when they ran the show. Should a Democrat ever regain control in Florida, expect a lame duck Republican legislature to attempt to replicate that posthaste.

You’d think that would give GOP voters pause. But …

The WSJ reports:

Donald Trump has expanded his dominating lead for the Republican presidential nomination, a new Wall Street Journal poll shows, as GOP primary voters overwhelmingly see his four criminal prosecutions as lacking merit and about half say the indictments fuel their support for him.

The new survey finds that what was once a two-man race for the nomination has collapsed into a lopsided contest in which Trump, for now, has no formidable challenger. The former president is the top choice of 59% of GOP primary voters, up 11 percentage points since April, when the Journal tested a slightly different field of potential and declared candidates.

Trump’s lead over his top rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has nearly doubled since April to 46 percentage points. At 13% support, DeSantis is barely ahead of the rest of the field, none of whom has broken out of single-digit support.

I’m actually a little surprised it took this long. There was never a question that this would be the dynamic. I suppose anything can happen but if all goes as usual, Trump will be the nominee.

By the way, for those tormented by Biden’s low approval rating and the close general election poll, this is Obama’s approval rating at this time in the 2012 election cycle:

Here’s Biden’s (they only publish them monthly now)

Just saying.

CNN reports:

The breach of the Coffee County elections office can seem almost out of place in the 97-page Georgia indictment of former President Donald Trump and associates.

The sprawling racketeering allegations spread from centers of power with pressure on the vice president to ignore the Constitution, reported calls to secretaries of state to change vote counts, and the creation of slates of fake electors for Congress. They also include the invitation of a tech team to a non-public area of a small-town administration building.

But to some people in Coffee County, deep in southern Georgia and far from interstates, the alleged crimes were merely the latest chapter in a local history of failing to secure the rights and votes of residents. And they worry it’s a history that will repeat…

Douglas is a majority Black city, and the surrounding Coffee County is about 68% White and 29% Black. Like many places in the South, Black citizens have had to fight for democratic rights in court – repeatedly suing for representative districts for the election of local officials since the 1970s. In the late summer, it’s unbearably hot – so hot that if you sit outside too long people ask if you’re crazy. If you have a latent southern accent, the town will draw it out.

When CNN asked local people how to put the alleged election office breach in the broader context of voting rights in the county, nearly everyone suggested we speak to “Miss Livvy.” Olivia Coley-Pearson is a Douglas city commissioner, the first Black woman elected to the position. She’s a tall woman who wore a Barbie-pink blazer when we met, and like many others CNN spoke with in Coffee County, she saw the involvement of her county in the alleged Trump scheme as part of a long local pattern of voter suppression and intimidation.

“There’s power – a certain amount of power and control when you’re in certain offices,” Coley-Pearson told CNN. “Some people will do whatever it takes to maintain it. … And if it takes voter intimidation to do it, some people willing to intimidate to maintain that power and control.”

Coley-Pearson, named a “human rights hero” by the American Bar Association, follows in the footsteps of her mother, who was a political activist in Coffee County in the 1970s, the decade after segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox had picked the county to host many of his speeches. Gladys Coley is commemorated with others in a memorial plaque for fighting for civil rights in Douglas and across the county.

Coley-Pearson is well-known for helping people who may need a ride to the polls. Not everyone around town appreciates her efforts, however. In a Facebook Live video posted a couple days before the alleged breach, Latham complained about Coley-Pearson’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Georgia’s runoff elections to the US Senate.

“Olivia Pearson’s up to her normal – handing out hamburgers and hot dogs … to people who voted and stuff,” Latham said, running her fingers through her cropped blonde hair in apparent exasperation. “So, all kinds of things happening in Coffee County just to get people to come vote. Yeah, it’s not a really good situation down here.”

Latham urged her viewers to vote. “We got to out-vote the fraud,” she said. She has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

‘Crooked Coffee’

Coley-Pearson had tangled with local officials over voter access several times. Georgia law allows people who are disabled or illiterate to get assistance in voting, and Coley-Pearson helped with that in the 2012 election. At the time, it seemed uneventful.

But Coffee County officials complained to the Georgia secretary of state’s office that she helped people who didn’t qualify for assistance. It led to a years-long investigation, and though the state didn’t prosecute her, she was charged locally with two felonies. After one trial ended in a hung jury, she was found not guilty in the second in 2018.

Then, during early voting in October 2020, Coley-Pearson asked a question about the buttons on a voting machine, sparking a confrontation with then-election supervisor Misty Hampton. Coley-Pearson says Hampton was “hollering” that she must not touch the machine. Hampton, who is White, has said in a deposition that she spoke in a “normal voice” and told Coley-Pearson she was being “disruptive.” The voter Coley-Pearson assisted said in a deposition she felt afraid of Hampton.

Coley-Pearson left the polling place to pick up another voter, Rolanda Williams. In the meantime, Hampton called the police. “She’s out here touching my darn machines,” Hampton told the police, as recorded in a police video. At one point, after saying Coley-Pearson had improperly touched the ballot, Hampton said, “I don’t care what I got to file, what I got to do, she is not to come back to my office. If I have to say I feel threatened I don’t care. Because I do!” Hampton has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

When Coley-Pearson returned to the polling place with Williams and stepped out of the car, she was met by police officers. They said she was banned from the property for yelling, she remembers. “I guess they didn’t like me asking why, and I got arrested. I was put in handcuffs,” Coley-Pearson said, beginning to cry at the memory.

“She was telling the cop that the handcuffs were too tight. And to me, he was trying to get them tighter,” Williams, the voter Coley-Pearson was driving, told CNN. When Williams went inside the polling place, she said Hampton began asking her questions. “She was asking me where I work – which, I felt was none of her business. … She actually pulled up a Facebook page of mine. And I felt like I was into some type of trouble or something.”

“I was scared and fearful,” Williams said. “I didn’t want to go back up there to vote. And I won’t go back and vote, because of everything that’s going on. I didn’t understand why they call this ‘Crooked Coffee.’ But now I understand.”

I think we all understand. That’s the old Georgia that’s trying to maintain its stranglehold on power. Donald Trump articulates that for them but they would do it anyway. They’ve always done it.

DeSantis wouldn’t be seen with him. Naturally.

Luckily some people in Florida still have good manners:

And here’s a surprise:

Heh. Somebody just stuck it to both Trump and DeSantis.

That’s pretty much what Truth Social is all about. Just Trump worship. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be enough:

The  complex deal to take Donald Trump’s social-media platform Truth Social public faces a crucial test next week that could determine whether it becomes a multibillion-dollar company that the former US president once vowed would stand up to “big tech” or instead languish in financial limbo.

Under the terms of the deal, announced in October 2021, Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group was destined to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company, or Spac.

But shareholders in Digital World are now being asked to give the company another year to complete the deal. If they refuse to do so at a meeting on 8 September, the enterprise may never become the $1.7bn company it once envisioned.

The path to tech riches the deal floated for Trump and his supporters has not been smooth.

Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor, told the Washington Post this week that the merger has “been pretty much unprecedented in terms of all of the glitches”. The Post published a detailed exploration of the platform’s current position, prompting Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media, to accuse the paper of posting “a heaping pile of bias”.

Soon after it was announced Digital World’s plan to merge with Trump Media was hit with allegations that conversations between the two had taken place before they were permitted under Spac rules.

In March, Patrick Orlando was fired as CEO by Digital World’s board and a former board member was accused of insider trading.

Deadlines for closing the deal have already been extended five times. Digital World is facing warnings from the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange that its shares could be delisted over a reporting issue.

In July, Digital World’s shares rallied 93% before a preliminary $18m settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over accounting fraud charges.

Last month, the company and Trump Media urged investors to vote for an extension to prevent DWAC’s dissolution.

“If you are a DWAC stockholder who believes in Truth Social’s mission to reopen the Internet and give people their voices back, we strongly urge you to vote TODAY,” the notice said, Bloomberg reported.

But Trump Media has blamed regulators for the deal’s delays. Last year, it accused the SEC of working to “sabotage” the merger, telling the Washington Post that agency had tossed “the matter into a bureaucratic black hole of inaction” and violated its own charter.

Even his businesses whine and complain that everything is rigged against Trump. But if you look at that comment to Trump’s bleating above you can see that he’s such a martyr to his followers that it all serves to reinforce his position as the second coming.

He seems to really loathe teenagers

We all know that Ron DeSantis has a real problem with kids. Scolding a little kid for eating ice cream because it has too much sugar was bad enough. Humiliating those high school students who wore masks waseven worse. Now this:

Quinn Mitchell has seen at least 35 presidential candidates in person since 2019, when he first started showing up at New Hampshire primary events to ask them questions.

Not a single one of them had ever treated the now-15-year-old as if he were a threat—until Ron DeSantis came to town.

It all started with a straightforward question. In June, when DeSantis stopped for a town hall event in Hollis, Mitchell raised his hand in the crowd.

“Do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power,” the teenager asked the governor, “a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold?”

DeSantis dodged the question and said Americans shouldn’t get stuck in the past, but not before remarking—in a somewhat impressed, incredulous tone—on Mitchell’s age. “Are you in high school?” the governor asked.

The moment went viral, with DeSantis’ non-answer encapsulating how even Donald Trump’s lead primary rival could not bring himself to acknowledge the former president’s efforts to undo the 2020 election. CNN even played it during an interview with Chris Christie to tee up a question to the Trump foe.

[…]

Across all of the reboots and turmoil, a consistent thread apparently remained: the DeSantis team’s willingness to go to unusual lengths to prevent a teenage boy from having a chance to follow up with the candidate on his question—and, to hear Mitchell tell it, personally express regret that he made the governor look bad.

More broadly, the teenager’s story distills some key reasons why DeSantis’ presidential bid is struggling: a candidate with clear difficulty making personal connections, a team obsessed with managing every detail on the campaign trail, and a pervasive anxiety over the idea of alienating Trump voters.

Combined together, those factors may ensure DeSantis gets nowhere near the White House in 2024. In New Hampshire, they’ve already pushed a precocious and passionate teenager to consider quitting politics altogether.

“I may be older now and know I can handle this a lot more, but if they had done that to me a few years back, I don’t know if I could have handled that,” Mitchell said. “It’s unfortunate, because I just want to ask my question.”

In the nation’s first primary state, where individual voters can have an outsized impact on the process, Mitchell made himself a staple of the New Hampshire political scene before he was even a teenager.

A self-described political independent who loves history and politics, Mitchell sees it as his “civic duty” to show up to ask questions, especially on behalf of “people who live in other states and the people who want to ask those questions,” who “don’t always get the opportunity.”

Before DeSantis, presidential candidates have not just tolerated the teenager but seemed to genuinely appreciate him. In the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) met with Mitchell and later worked his enthusiasm for politics into her stump speech.

More recently, Christie not only gave him a shoutout during the CNN interview—“he goes to every town hall meeting… he asks really tough questions”—but was quoted in a recent USA Today profile of Mitchell. “Quinn, remember me when you are president,” the former New Jersey governor quipped.

‘They’re Watching You’

After his question about Jan. 6 blew up on DeSantis, Mitchell—who was not intending to land a punch on the governor—said he “genuinely felt bad about it.” A few days later, he woke up early for the hour-and-a-half drive to Merrimack, where he intended to personally say as much to DeSantis at the town’s Fourth of July parade.

Once there, the high level of security around the governor’s contingent stood out to Mitchell and other observers. Staffers for the super PAC, Never Back Down, “were nudging the security guys and pointing at me,” Mitchell said. “I actually had a reporter come up and just say, ‘They’re pointing at you and they’re watching you.’”

Unfazed, Mitchell patiently walked along as the candidate crossed from curb to curb, shaking hands with voters; each time he came close to DeSantis, however, the security guards would hold their arms out in front and parry him away.

Finally, Mitchell was able to get within earshot of the governor. When he passed by, he told him, “I’m so sorry that I got you in all that trouble,” and offered him a chance to give a different or more detailed answer to the question.

According to Mitchell, DeSantis nodded in response, at least acknowledging his question, and the two had a quick handshake. That’s when things went south: right after the handshake, Mitchell recalled his shock when he felt a firm tug on his shirt, pulling him away from DeSantis. Suddenly, all he could see were the outstretched arms of security guards and plain clothed aides.

“Usually what they do is they don’t push you or anything, but they put their hands out and kind of body you, so you just don’t move, basically,” Mitchell said, describing a shuffling motion more akin to an offensive line on a football team than a presidential candidate’s security detail.

If that were not startling enough, right after the fracas, a DeSantis security guard cornered Mitchell and ordered him not to move from the spot for another five minutes. In response, he did what almost any 15-year old would do.

He texted his mom.

Toward the end of the parade, Mitchell’s mother reunited with her son and then demanded an explanation from DeSantis for why his security detail was putting their hands on her boy, an interaction that was observed by a Boston Globe reporter on the scene.

What the Globe didn’t catch was the involvement of the second most important person in the DeSantis campaign: Casey, the governor’s wife and arguably his top political adviser.

Instead of diffusing the situation, however, the Florida First Lady suggested to Mitchell’s mother that she was overreacting—and that her son was fibbing.

“Well, I’m a mother, too,” Casey said, according to Mitchell and other witnesses, along with multiple sources who shared contemporaneous communications on the incident with The Daily Beast. “I know what you’re experiencing, and we’re all very afraid for our children—even if they’re exaggerating.”

As for the candidate himself, DeSantis told Mitchell he would “get to the bottom” of the one-sided encounter with security, and even told the teenager to come to his next event.

‘Got Our Kid’

Ahead of their August 19 event, a staffer for Never Back Down reached out to Mitchell. USA Today let the PAC know that a photographer wanted to come photograph Mitchell for the upcoming profile. The staffer just wanted to confirm he would be in attendance.

The teenager obliged. But after walking into the event, held in a firearm factory in Newport, he noticed something odd.

It wasn’t just that he saw a pair of security guards flanking him as he made his way to the far side of the venue. The weird part was that Never Back Down staffers were taking photos of him. It was notable to Mitchell, even before he learned of the ominous caption—“got our kid”—that one staffer was seen attaching to a Snapchat photo.

The governor kept audience questions to a tight 15 minutes, throwing Mitchell a glance but ignoring his outstretched hand, though the teenager now stands over 6 feet tall.

Security kept their defensive posture as Mitchell tried to make his way to stage right—where DeSantis was attempting to chat with voters and take selfies—blocking him from getting toward the group of voters waiting to chat with the candidate.

Even after Mitchell gave up on his months-long pursuit of a follow-up question to DeSantis about his views on Trump and the transfer of power, security prevented him from crossing the room to see a family friend, until they eventually relented.

Since the incidents, Mitchell has not heard from the DeSantis campaign, or the PAC, though he expected to. He could not reach an in-state contact for the governor’s team himself.

“The campaign, they could have called and said, ‘We’re so sorry, this should have never happened, we’ll get to the bottom of it,’” Mitchell said. “Never got a call like that. They never apologized to us for any of it.”

Mitchell often says that it’s a privilege to live in New Hampshire, a state where even a determined teenager can have the power to influence the presidential election in a small way. His dream is to become a political reporter, but he said the DeSantis events almost made him want to hang it up for good.

Whatever happens, Mitchell is likely to keep up his rigorous primary schedule—even if he’s unlikely to try to see DeSantis again anytime soon. But the teenager said if he ran into him “at conventions or a multiple candidate event, I will do my best to press him.”

I guess this is the sort of thing they’ve spent their hundreds of millions on. The campaign is like their candidate, creepy, paranoid and cruel. And I especially like that wife Casey shows up to claim the kid is a liar. Sweet lady. Really nice.

We’re still waiting for Jan. 6 ‘masterminds’ to get theirs

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs to 17 years in prison this week. Someone on “formerly known as Twitter” snarked that by the time he gets out of jail, Biggs will be a proud man.

The Lincoln Project is having fun with the fate of the furious.

Comeuppance is a guilty pleasure we were denied in the wake of the banking collapse of 2008. Those assholes got $1.6b in bonuses.

But these threats are not funny. We covered some of this nascent Rwanda talk on Friday. But threats of violence against election workers are widespread enough to deserve an Election Threats Task Force. At least some people are being charged:

More than a dozen people nationally have been charged with threatening election workers by a Justice Department unit trying to stem the tide of violent and graphic threats against people who count and secure the vote.

Government employees are being bombarded with threats even in normally quiet periods between elections, secretaries of state and experts warn. Some point to former President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen and spreading conspiracy theories about election workers. Experts fear the 2024 election could be worse and want the federal government to do more to protect election workers.

The Justice Department created the Election Threats Task Force in 2021 led by its public integrity section, which investigates election crimes. John Keller, the unit’s second in command, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the department hoped its prosecutions would deter others from threatening election workers.

I got dispatched in 2022 to investigate reports that some guy with a weapon (unspecified) was spotted outside a local polling station standing (legally) just outside the electioneering limit. He was gone by the time I arrived. The photo I received on my phone was of some morbidly obese dude wearing a .38 revolver that looked so tiny on his hip that it might have come in a box of Cracker Jack.

He may have been a joke, but these real threats are no joking matter.

A Texas man was given 3 1/2 years earlier this month after suggesting a “mass shooting of poll workers and election officials” last year, charges stated. In one message, the Justice Department said, the man wrote: “Someone needs to get these people AND their children. The children are the most important message to send.” His lawyer did not return a message seeking comment.

One indictment unveiled in August was against a man accused of leaving an expletive-filled voicemail after the 2020 election for Tina Barton, a Republican who formerly was the clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, outside Detroit. According to the indictment, the person vowed that “a million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it” and “we’ll … kill you.”

Barton said it was just one of many threats that left her feeling deeply anxious.

“I’m really hopeful the charges will send a strong message, and we won’t find ourselves in the same position after the next election,” she said.

Maybe. Maybe not. Although some of Trump’s followers who found out are figuring it out:

Pam Hemphill was sentenced in May 2022 to 60 days in jail for her involvement in the U.S. Capitol riot. She told Trump to stop using her story for personal political gain.

A self-avowed “ex-MAGA Granny” who served jail time for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot has called out Donald Trump for “using” her story for political gain.

[…]

“Please,” she wrote in a tweet directed at Trump, “don’t be using me for anything.”

“I’m not a victim of Jan6, I pleaded guilty because I was guilty!”