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<b>Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Ariz. lawmakers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails show</b>By Emma Brown
Updated May 20, 2022 at 2:36 p.m. EDT|Published May 20, 2022
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Virginia
“Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas, attends the swearing-in ceremony for Justice
Amy Coney Barrett at the White House on Oct. 26, 2020. (Patrick
Semansky/AP)
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist
and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona
lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote
victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails
obtained by The Washington Post.
The emails, sent by Ginni Thomas
to a pair of lawmakers on Nov. 9, 2020, argued that legislators needed
to intervene because the vote had been marred by fraud. Though she did
not mention either candidate by name, the context was clear.
Just
days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and
nationwide, Thomas urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of
political and media pressure.” She told the lawmakers that the
responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone” and said
they had “power to fight back against fraud.”
<b>
Thomas sent the
messages via an online platform designed to make it easy to send
prewritten form emails to multiple elected officials, </b>according to a review of the emails, obtained under the state’s public-records law.
The
messages show that Thomas, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, was
more deeply involved in the effort to overturn Biden’s win than has been
previously reported. In sending the emails, Thomas played a role in the
extraordinary scheme to keep Trump in office by substituting the will
of legislatures for the will of voters.
Thomas’s actions also
underline concerns about potential conflicts of interest that her
husband has already faced — and may face in the future — in deciding
cases related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those questions
intensified in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text messages
that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows,
pressing him to help reverse the election.
The emails were sent
to Russell “Rusty” Bowers, a veteran legislator and speaker of the
Arizona House, and Shawnna Bolick, who was first elected to the chamber
in 2018 and served on the House Elections Committee during the 2020
session.
<b>
“Article II of the United States Constitution gives
you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” read the
Nov. 9 email. “… [P]lease take action to ensure that a clean slate of
Electors is chosen.”</b>
Thomas’s name also appears on an email
to the two representatives on Dec. 13, the day before members of the
electoral college met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory.
“Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to
the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.
It
included a link to a video of a man delivering a message meant for
swing-state lawmakers, urging them to “put things right” and “not give
in to cowardice.”
“You have only hours to act,” said the<b> speaker, who is not identified in the video.</b>
By
December, the claim that legislators should override the popular vote
in key states and appoint Trump’s electors was also being pushed
publicly by John C. Eastman, a former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
Trump allies argued that
pandemic-era changes in election administration and supposedly
widespread fraud meant that elections had not been conducted in
accordance with state legislatures’ directions and that, under the U.S.
Constitution, the results therefore could be cast aside. Many legal
experts have called those arguments unpersuasive and anti-democratic,
and no state legislature complied. Efforts to persuade state lawmakers
to name new electors are among the issues under examination by the
congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Courts
turned back dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies in an
attempt to challenge the 2020 election outcome, and there is no evidence
of voting machine manipulation or other widespread fraud.
Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to messages seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ginni
Thomas has insisted that she and her husband have kept their work
separate, but her political activism has set her apart from other
Supreme Court spouses. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Bannon —
who later became chief strategist in the Trump White House — were among
the organizers of<b> Groundswell, </b>a group formed to battle liberals
and establishment Republicans. Groundswell dedicated itself to “a 30
front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to
emails uncovered by Mother Jones at the time. “<b>Election integrity” was among the topics discussed in the group’s first months,</b> the emails show.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Thomas’s
influence in Washington grew during the Trump presidency as her views
moved into the GOP mainstream. Clarence and Ginni Thomas had lunch with
Trump at the White House in 2018, then attended a state dinner the
following year. Also in 2019, she and fellow right-wing activists
attended a White House luncheon, where the New York Times reported that
they told Trump his aides were blocking their preferred candidates for
administration appointments.</span>
Over those same years, at
annual luncheons, Thomas handed out “Impact Awards” to right-wing
figures. Recipients have included Meadows, then a congressman chairing
the hard-right Freedom Caucus; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe;
and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Thomas is a member of the Council
for National Policy, a network of prominent conservative activists,
some of whom helped press claims of election fraud. She recently said
she attended the pro-Trump rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6,
2021.
<b>Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a website
meant to give political organizers an efficient means of conducting
email campaigns</b>. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is displayed as <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Ginni Thomas</span>@freeroots.com>.”
A representative of FreeRoots did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The
Nov. 9 email carried the subject line, “Please do your Constitutional
duty!” In addition to pushing the lawmakers to appoint electors, the
email asked for a meeting to discuss pursuing an “audit” of the vote.
Under
the U.S. Constitution, states appoint presidential electors “in such
manner” as the legislatures direct. Historically, some state
legislatures appointed electors directly, but in the modern era states
have delegated that responsibility to voters. In urging Arizona
lawmakers to “choose” electors after Biden had already prevailed,
Thomas’s messages claimed lawmakers could intervene in that process.
The
records obtained by The Post do not show any response from <b>Bowers,</b>
whose refusal to help overturn Biden’s victory in Arizona made him the
target of a recall campaign. When Trump’s legal team pressed to replace
Biden electors with Trump electors, Bowers released a public statement
explaining that they were asking legislators to do something forbidden
by state law.
“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the
results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and
worked hard to reelect him,” it said. “But I cannot and will not
entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome
of a certified election.”
A spokesman for Bowers told The Post
that hundreds of thousands of messages were sent to the speaker’s office
in the post-election period. “Speaker Bowers did not see, much less
read, the vast majority of those messages, including the form email sent
by Mrs. Thomas,” said the spokesman, Andrew Wilder.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><span style="background-color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Bolick
is married to Clint Bolick,</span> an associate justice of the Arizona Supreme
Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas early in his career and has said
he considers the justice a mentor.
Shawnna Bolick wrote back to
Ginni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing
great!” She gave Thomas guidance on how to submit complaints about any
of her experiences with voter fraud in Arizona.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Bolick,
who is now seeking the Republican nomination to be Arizona’s secretary
of state, told The Post that she received tens of thousands of emails in
the months after the election and responded to Thomas in the same way
she responded to everyone else.
Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In
the reply, Thomas’s personal email address is visible, and it matches
an address she has used previously, The Post confirmed. Under her
message is an <b>unusual tag line that has appeared in other emails that
are confirmed to have been sent by Thomas, including in 2021 to the
staff of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “Sent from Ginni’s iPhone, a
by-product of entrepreneurial free market capitalism.</b> Competition, hard work, innovations and lack of government interference make great things possible! God bless America!”</span>
Thomas was then serving on the board of<b> CNP Action</b>,
the political advocacy arm of the Council for National Policy. CNP
Action was using its influence in Republican circles at the time to try
to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a workshop
titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” featuring, among
other speakers, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Cleta Mitchell, </span>according
to an agenda that researcher Brent Allpress provided to the
left-leaning watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, which
published it that same month. Mitchell, a lawyer, assisted Trump in his
efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia.
<b>After that workshop, the group circulated guidance to focus efforts on legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona</b>.
“Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities at a
time such as this,” read the guidance, which was also obtained by
Allpress and first published by the Center for Media and Democracy. It
said to push for new electors “in states where constitutional rights
have been violated and evidence of substantial fraud has been
established.”
The guidance advised visiting the website everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”
Visitors
to the site could click a button and be taken to freeroots.com,
according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback
Machine. That landing page urged visitors to press the “take action”
button to “email every swing House and Senate leader in one easy click.”
<b>Because
that landing page is no longer online, it is no longer possible to
click through on the link. But language in Thomas’s first email aligns
closely with language that appears in a preview when a FreeRoots link
that was archived several days after that email is shared on messaging
platforms</b>.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The site everylegalvote.com initially said that it was produced in partnership with <b>United in Purpose, </b>a
nonprofit group known for gathering and deploying data to galvanize
conservative Christian voters. That organization has hosted the
luncheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But
the reference to United in Purpose was deleted within days. It was
replaced with language identifying three “Founding Sponsors”: the Texas
security firm Allied Security Operations Group, the Texas nonprofit
group Liberty Center for God and Country, and the online talk show
“Economic War Room.”</span>
Representatives of United in Purpose
and the three sponsors of everylegalvote.com did not respond to messages
seeking comment. All three sponsors have promoted election-fraud
claims, according to previous Post reports.
In the month after
the election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans filed dozens of
lawsuits challenging the outcome. By early December, Eastman and
Giuliani were telling lawmakers in key swing states won by Biden that
they had the authority and even the obligation to disregard the vote and
select their own electors.
“Your argument is that essentially we
have a failed election that would require the legislature to step in
and assign electors. Am I correct?” a Georgia senator asked Eastman
during a Dec. 3 hearing.
“Yes,” Eastman said.
The Dec. 13 emails repeated the claim that legislators could “choose” electors.
“As
state lawmakers, you have the Constitutional power and authority to
protect the integrity of our elections — and we need you to exercise
that power now!” the email said. “Never before in our nation’s history
have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional
procedures.”
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To
Heroic Legislators,” has since been removed from YouTube for violating
community guidelines. The video’s Web address, which is visible in the
email, was included in a December 2020 newsletter written by activist<b> Geoffrey Botkin,</b> who appears to be the person featured in the video.
Botkin,
who has published numerous podcasts and videos about the election and
other matters, wrote in the newsletter that he had uploaded “A Word To
Heroic Legislators” to another video hosting service. The video remains
visible there.
“I’m asking you to stand up and lead heroically,” Botkin says in the video, urging lawmakers to appoint electors.
“We
have to admit, legally and politically it’s way too late for other
people to do it. Clever lawyers or the Supreme Court, they cannot now
come to the rescue,” he continues. “This is a moment, a unique moment in
American history, demanding that state legislators set America back on
her foundations by using a power that you may never have known that you
had — but you do have it.”
Botkin did not respond to a message seeking comment.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The
video link and some of the language in the email match language that
appears in an archived version of the landing page for a freeroots.com
email campaign organized by <b>Act for America</b>, a group that has accused
U.S. Muslim organizations of supporting terrorism and of trying to
impose Islamic law across the country.</span>
A representative of <b>Act for America </b>did not respond to requests for comment.
On
Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the
election results were certified by Democratic Secretary of State Katie
Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
On that same day<b>, Bolick </b>was among dozens of Arizona lawmakers who
signed on to a letter to Congress calling for the state’s electoral
votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic
audit can be conducted.”</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
Bolick
told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea
of an audit, not because of any communication she received from Thomas.</span>
Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
More from Investigations
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</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">from chis adams pilf:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president</b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">, J. Christian Adams</b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">and another board member, Hans von </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Spakovsky</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they <b>began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials.</b> Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with<b> serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence </b>of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> <b>sustained partly by Bradley funds.</b> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases.</b> But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Even Benjamin Ginsberg</b>, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office.</b> In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">More than a year before the 2020 election,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> Council for National Policy,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine.</b> The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive</b>. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the<b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Independent Legislature Doctrine</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. </span>Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons</span>. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state</b>. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election result</b>s. That February, she told a private gathering of the <b>Council for National Policy</b> </span>about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was <b>working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Although the law bars charitable organizations such as the<b> Council for National Policy </b>from engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.”</span> One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">,<b> echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda</b>.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">A younger member of the organization, <b>Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA</b>, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!</span>”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,”</b> on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">headquartered in Arizona,</span> and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committee </b>and a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. <b>Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. </b>In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to <b>spread incendiary misinformation </b>about the coming elections. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign</b>. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. S<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ome messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Forge</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs,</span> a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House</b>—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality. </b>Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman,</b> instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. </b>The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral. </font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Among the first to spread the <b>Sharpiegate conspiracy </b>was another one of<b> Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump</b>. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.”</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found”</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.</b>” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”</span></font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence</b>.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “<b>We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.</b>” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined the<b> Federalist Society, </b>the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since....</font></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div></div><div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div>