atlanta jrnl-const AJC

see politico baby BB

SEE VOTER SUPRESS

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The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports a network of far-right actors are working with President Donald Trump to derail elections in Georgia and cast doubt on any vote that removes Republicans from power.

“The meeting and the call recounting it offer a glimpse at how activists, once on the fringe of the conservative movement, are now trying to overhaul elections in Georgia and across the country,” reports AJC. “Now several are in the Trump administration, and Fulton County is firmly in their sights ahead of the 2026 midterms.”

For years, the AJC reports a “network of activists has cast doubt on Georgia’s 2020 election, questioning the integrity of the state’s voting machines and the voter rolls that determine who can vote.”

Legitimate election officials dismissed their challenges and investigators debunked their fraud claims, said AJC. But now several are in the Trump administration, “and Fulton County is firmly in their sights ahead of the 2026 midterms.”

The AJC reports a recent Zoom call revealed conservative activists eagerly sharing tips and tricks for election engineering, which they learned at a February summit in Washington with several Trump administration officials, including Kurt Olsen, Trump’s director of election security and integrity, who played a key role in the FBI’s January raid on an election warehouse in Fulton County.

“Kurt is leading a team and leading a charge of great people that are working together,” said Holly Kesler, a Georgia conservative activist, during a recent “election integrity” meeting of the Georgia Constitution Party, audio of which was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“It is a multiagency approach,” she said, reports AJC. “And there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes. I’ve been a part of some of that.”

“Others involved in the Election Integrity Summit included Brad Carver of the Georgia Republican Party; Marci McCarthy, a former DeKalb Republican official who now oversees public affairs at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert whose expertise was used by the U.S. Department of Justice to justify seizing troves of Fulton County’s 2020 election records,” said AJC.

The AJC adds that Carver currently leads the “Election Confidence Task Force” within the Georgia GOP and was one of the 16 Trump fake electors in 2020. More recently he called Georgia “the biggest topic” at the Washington summit and expressed frustration with people in the Trump administration who were not pursuing Trump’s attacks on elections with proper vigor.

“But some of those involved in efforts to overhaul elections have been careful about how much they reveal to the public,” reports AJC. “In the Zoom, Carver said meetings like the ones hosted by the Georgia Constitution Party and Signal group chats are helpful because they allow information to be shared without ending up ‘on the front page of liberal media.’”

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Atlanta Journal Constitution Senior Political columnist Patricia Murphy said the Wednesday FBI raid at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center was not about prosecuting President Donald Trump’s disproven claims of a stolen election in 2020 for the millionth time.

“Although the records they took were from the election five years ago, it’s important to understand that the raid in Fulton County is not really about the 2020 elections at all, which have long since come and gone,” said Murphy. “Instead, the raid is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.”

Trump may croon that “people will soon be prosecuted” but Georgia Election Commissioner Robb Pitts said the ballots that agents seized were the same ones “counted, recounted, hand-counted, debated, litigated and fought over” after Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia.

“Despite every attempt by the president and his legal team to prove the election had been stolen from him at the time, every road led back to the same result — Trump lost and Joe Biden won,” said Murphy. “The … question at hand is who will oversee Fulton County elections in 2026.”

Currently, elections are run by the Fulton County Election Board. But Republicans in the General Assembly passed a massive new voting law that contained language giving the Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any so-called “underperforming” county election board, including Fulton County’s, with an interim leader of their choosing.

“Replacement could only happen after an audit or investigation, and the state board left Fulton’s elections in the hands of county officials in 2023 after it said the county had made “substantial improvements” to its processes during a performance review,” said Murphy.

However, Fulton County is a large, cosmopolitan and overwhelmingly blue region of an otherwise red state, so Republicans consider it a bad actor interfering with their plan for political dominance. It was just a few years ago that the county’s population singlehandedly handed Trump his nasty defeat, turning the Southern state of Georgia blue for President Joe Biden.

Trump was furious, and so were his Republican allies — who seized upon the county’s past record of long lines, late returns and slow bookkeeping, mostly due to its inordinately high population.

“On 2020, the president went further, claiming that Fulton County was a hotbed of so much nefarious activity and rampant fraud that it cost him the election, all accusations that his White House staff dismissed and multiple courts in Georgia threw out,” Murphy wrote.

She added that thanks to the work of the state’s majority Republican government the current majority on the State Election Board “now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as ‘pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.’”

Two of the so-called “pit bulls” were actually with the FBI in Union City during the Wednesday raid, Murphy said.

“If this week’s raid produces enough of a pretext for the board to act in the future, the 2026 elections in Fulton County could be overseen by someone picked by the pro-Trump State Board, not by elected Fulton commissioners themselves,” Murphy warned.

Read the AJC report at this link.

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Pro-Trump Republicans aiding Georgia company seeking to 'aggressively cancel voter registrations': report

Brandon Gage August 14, 2023

A private company aided by Republican "election integrity activists" is "attempting to sell software to Georgia election officials and residents that would enable them to aggressively cancel voter registrations," Mark Niesse reports in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday.

EagleAI's "software could be used by local governments as well as individuals who have challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters since the 2020 presidential election," Niesse explains. "EagleAI's sales pitch has alarmed voting rights organizations that say it could be abused to attempt to disenfranchise legitimate voters."

Niesse finds that those efforts are compounding on former President Donald Trump's unsuccessful attempt to overturn President Joe Biden's 2020 victory in the Peach State. "Since then," Niesse reveals, EagleAI "filed challenges to nearly 100,000 Georgia voters' eligibility, in some cases forcing legitimate voters to defend their right to vote."

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Niesse points out that despite Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defending "Georgia's voter lists" as "the cleanest in the nation,'" EagleAI's "presentation alleges the state's voter rolls are bloated with people who have died or moved away."

Raffensperger's spokesman, Mike Hassinger told Niesse that "EagleAI data offers zero additional value to Georgia's existing list maintenance procedures," adding, "We already utilize the most accurate death data through our Department of Public Health and the Social Security death master list. We already check for duplicates."

Moreover, Niesse questions EagleAI's non-partisanship because Chief Executive Officer Rick Richards "frequently speaks during Zoom calls hosted by Cleta Mitchell,an attorney who supported efforts to overturn Trump's loss and participated in the former president's call to Raffensperger asking him to 'find' enough votes to reverse the outcome."

Niesse notes that "the Zoom calls, which bring together members of Mitchell's Election Integrity Network group, also included Jason Frazier, a Republican Party nominee to the Fulton County election board who has challenged the registrations of almost 10,000 people since last year."

READ MORE: Fani Willis’ 'entire career has been preparing her' to prosecute Trump: report

EagleAI "is negotiating with Columbia County's election board and has discussed working with a dozen more Georgia counties, according to emails obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution under the state's open records law," Niesse writes.

Meanwhile, Niesse continues, "EagleAI says it plans to start its voter registration list efforts in Georgia, then expand to other states, including Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas."

READ MORE: Trump’s 'demographic war' is 'far more dangerous' than 1930s American fascism: report

Niesse's report is at this link (subscription required).

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John Fredericks and Georgia Star News

John Fredericks rose to regional right-wing stardom as an early adopter of the MAGA movement and as the host of the John Fredericks Show, a daily radio program that was based out of Central Virginia until recently. He also owns three conservative talk radio stations, and he has joined Leahy, who helped found the Star News Network, in expanding its operation to more battleground states.

Since its inception, the Star News network has been an adept misinformer. In recent months, the sites hawked the same bill of goods as national right-wing media outlets: stories that conflated racial justice marches and protests with violence and rioting, every hair-brained conspiracy theory about President-elect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as up-to-the-minute reports on the latest mail carrier to not deliver between one and three mail-in ballots -- ahem, “voter fraud.”

In the last few months, Fredericks and Bannon have formed quite a tandem. Bannon has appeared on Fredericks’ talk show more than a dozen times. Fredericks’ radio network was also the first to broadcast Bannon’s War Room podcast on the airwaves and has continued to amplify the former Trump adviser’s message even as his show has been removed from other platforms for using violent language. (Most recently, Twitter banned Bannon and YouTube and Facebook removed an episode of his show in which he called for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.) Bannon’s show is embedded on the home page of each of the Star News pages.

In the past two weeks, Fredericks, who has temporarily moved his operation to Atlanta till after the Senate runoff elections in January, has served as Bannon’s go-to source for the news coming out of Georgia, appearing on nearly a dozen War Room episodes to spread misinformation about the Georgia elections. He has claimed that Democrats, led by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, are encouraging each other to exploit a loophole that would allow them to briefly visit Georgia, register to vote, and vote in the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, Fredericks has his own plans to invade Georgia ahead of the runoff elections. Fredericks has recently pitched Georgia Star News -- which changed its name from the Georgia Star after Media Matters reported that the original name was already in use -- as a competitor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We're launching that so we can combat the fake-news, corporate AJC and the other crap here in Georgia you have to deal with, all of the corporate media,” Fredericks told his audience.

Fredericks has also repeatedly used his own radio program to float inflammatory conspiracy theories about the election and to lash out at Georgia Republicans whom he sees as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump -- likely a preview of what readers can expect from Georgia Star News.

Fredericks has reserved special acrimony for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger -- whom he calls a “weasel” -- criticizing him for not throwing out thousands of legally cast mail-in votes to help bridge the tens of thousands of votes Trump would need to flip the state. Bannon and Fredericks have also joined a growing chorus of right-wing figures who are criticizing and pressuring Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to not certify the state’s election results.

Michael Patrick Leahy

While Fredericks is the face of the Star’s Georgia operation, the network owes its existence in large part to Michael Patrick Leahy, a Breitbart contributor and host of the Tennessee Star Report.

Leahy co-founded the Star News Network’s first site, the Tennessee Star, in 2017, withtwo fellow tea partyers (one of whom resigned from the company shortly after he was jailed for failing to pay child support to his ex-wife). At first, the operation was purposefully opaque. The Star featured no masthead, its articles often had no bylines, and the company was incorporated in Delaware, a state businesses often make use of to minimize tax burdens and avoid certain legal liability. (The company introduced bylines and a masthead shortly after Politico raised questions about its practices.)

Leahy, who is based in Nashville, has been a player in the constellation of right-wing media figures since 2009, when he helped organize a series of anti-government protests that helped fuel the tea party movement. Leahy has been a Breitbart contributor since at least 2012.

Bannon and Leahy have worked together for about a decade — most prominently at Breitbart. And the association abides. On November 7, Leahy used an appearance on Bannon’s podcast to promotea website that shares aggregate post-election content from various right-wing sites and invites readers to report “election irregularities.”

Bannon, Fredericks, and Leahy -- like many right-wing media figures -- have signaled a desire to become more invested in Georgia. The Star launches today, so readers need to be on guard.