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see TRUMP COUP
SEE EASTMAN
see select comm
see proud boys tarrio
see ginni 3
bad trinity fox murdoch
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trump dangles pardons rally, again 6 22?!
an 10 23
a losing 2022 GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in prison and hit with a $5,000 fine over his involvement in January 6, The Associated Press (AP) reports.
"I think you misused the platform that you had as a candidate for elected office to minimize, and frankly, to lie about what happened,” United States District Judge Christopher R. Cooper told Ryan Kelley, which NBC News reports is a reference to " "'fundraising appeals' he "made years after the riot where he referred to the 2020 election as stolen and called the Jan. 6 riot an 'FBI set-up.''
Per AP, the failed Republican candidate "spoke at a 'Stop the Steal' rally at the state Capitol in Lansing in November 2020, shortly after the presidential election. Kelley urged others at the rally to 'stand and fight, with the goal of preventing Democrats from stealing the election,' the FBI said."
Kelley later referred to Jan. 6 as a "'false flag' event," according to NBC, telling Cooper he was "misled into believing" ex-President Donald Trump's promise to reveal "receipts" backing his claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
"To this day, those receipts never showed up," Kelley said.
"He shouted into the already riled up crowd; he consistently beckoned the crowd of rioters forward, closer towards the Capitol Building and police; he supported another rioter as he was moving a metal bike rack towards the front of the mob on the Northwest stairs, towards those rioters who were closer to officers; and he took a photograph of human blood by the stairs," prosecutors in the case wrote, NBC reports.
However, AP notes Kelley "doesn’t blame Trump for his conduct on Jan. 6," saying, "He did invite us there, but my actions were my actions."
AP reports ahead of sentencing the failed GOP candidate, Cooper said, "A lot of folks voted for you. A lot of folks followed you."
READ MORE:Trump channels Nixon with 'presidential immunity' defense in January 6 case
*The Associated Press' full report is available at this link. NBC's report is here.
https://democraticags.medium.com/republican-attorneys-general-attack-on-democracy-a-timeline-42ac4c3d4e34
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Republican Attorneys General Attack on Democracy: A Timeline
Former Republican Attorneys General Association Executive Director Adam Piper says of Republican AGs, “No group of elected officials have been more supportive of President Trump.”
Over the course of 2020 and into 2021, Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) attacked our democratic institutions and voting rights, and even attempted to overturn the will of the American people in the 2020 Presidential election.
In fact, the more we learn about the deadly attack on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, the more we learn about the Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association’s deep ties to the attack and the campaign to undermine our democracy.
The Republican AGs’ bad behavior is not something new, but as they attempt to deny responsibility and distance themselves from one of the most unpatriotic and darkest days in our nation’s history, it’s important to understand just how coordinated and connected the Republican AGs were to the insurrection.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s included in this blog post:
August — October: Republican AGs attack voting rights and refuse to protect democratic norms.
November — December: Republican AGs try to overturn the results of the election multiple times.
January: Republican AGs and RAGA’s connection to the Jan 6th deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol exposed.
February: Republican AGs continue pushing the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Below is a detailed timeline to help illustrate the un-American campaign waged by the Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association:
AUGUST 2020
Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues Harris County (largest county) over their plan to send all voters in the county mail-in ballot applications.
Republican Attorneys General FAIL to take action to protect the U.S. Postal Service after President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy alter mail delivery — with a goal of negatively impacting vote-by-mail.
SEPTEMBER 2020
Republican Attorneys General and the Republican Attorneys General Association FAIL to combat significant disinformation being put forth by President Trump:
Republican Attorneys General and RAGA do not correct President Trump for telling supporters to “vote twice.”
Republican Attorneys General and RAGA do not correct President Trump for attacking the vote-by-mail process.
Republican Attorneys General do not take action to protect voting rights that came under attack in more than 10 states.
Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files an appeal to block Harris County from sending mail-in ballot applications to voters across the county. Later, indicted Texas AG Ken Paxton asks the Texas Supreme Court to weigh in on the case — hoping they would block millions of people from safely voting during a pandemic.
September 24–25: Republican Attorneys General Association & Rule of Law Defense Fund hold a two day summit in Atlanta to discuss “election integrity.” Now resigned RAGA Executive Director Adam Piper refers to this meetings as “WAR GAMES — 32 AG Staff Members are huddled in Atlanta for a series of conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House.” This information becomes public as part of a public records request by a Missouri organization [see Page 56]. Read more about this alarming preparation to attack democracy here:
Missouri AG's office had invite to Jan. 5 conference call by group urging Capitol march
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt's office had an invitation to a conference call the day before the deadly…
www.kansascity.com
OCTOBER 2020
In the lead up to the election, Republican Attorneys General Association Executive Director Adam Piper says of Republican AGs, “No group of elected officials have been more supportive of President Trump.” This comes after Trump repeatedly attacks the U.S. electoral system, refused to denounce white supremacy time and time again, and went through an impeachment trial.
Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tries to block counties from having more than one ballot drop-off location.
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NOVEMBER 2020
Between Election Day and well past November 7 when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are declared the winners of the 2020 Presidential election, Republican Attorneys General — past and present — were sowing doubt in the election:
November 5: Former Florida Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi holds a press conference with Rudy Giuliani and Corey Lewandowski.
November 5: RAGA tweets “Don’t let #LawlessLiberals corrupt the election process.”
November 5: RAGA tweets “.@RepublicanAGs have boots on the ground in PA, NC, NV, AZ, WI, and MI to defend the rule of law. Don’t let #LawlessLiberals corrupt the process!”
November 6: Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes announces he will take time off to travel to Nevada in search of election fraud.
November 8: Former Nevada Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt and Chairman of the American Conservative Union Matt Schlapp hold a press conference in Las Vegas, NV.
November 8: Former RAGA Chair West Virginia Republican Attorney General Patrick Morriseytweets “Excited to weigh in with my colleagues at the US Supreme Court about the critical role state legislatures play in setting time, place, and manner restrictions on voting and why the PA Supreme Court cannot usurp that role. The Trump campaign is correct to fight to get this right!”
November 9: Utah Attorney GeneralSean Reyes, after spending a weekend in Nevada, says “voting problems occurred there.”
November 9: RAGA, along with 10 Republican Attorneys General, file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to throw out legally cast mail-in votes in Pennsylvania.
November 17: Former Nevada Republican Attorney General Adam Laxalt says 15,000 people voted in multiple states.
DECEMBER 2020
More than a month after Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ decisive victory in the 2020 election, Republican Attorneys General continued to take frivolous and unfounded action to sow doubt in the results.
December 8: Former RAGA Chair, indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, files a lawsuit against the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin seeking to overturn the results and throw out the votes of hard working Americans in these battleground states.
December 9: RAGA Vice Chair Missouri Attorney GeneralEric Schmitt leads 16 other Republican Attorneys General in supporting indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s absurd lawsuit. This includes Florida AG Ashley Moody, Kansas AG Derek Schmidt, and South Carolina AG Alan Wilson.
December 9: Republican Attorneys General meet with President Trump at the White House.Attendees include: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Former RAGA Chair Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, Former RAGA Chair Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, RAGA Vice Chair Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Chair of RAGA’s Policy Arm — the Rule of Law Defense Fund — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, Chair of RAGA’s Policy Arm — the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF) — meeting with President Donald Trump shortly after Republican Attorneys General file lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election in four battleground states.
December 11: Alaska’s acting Attorney General Ed Sniffen (who has since resigned due to sexual misconduct allegations) announces his support of indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s frivolous lawsuit — bringing the total number of Republican Attorneys General attempting to overturn a free and fair election to 19. Later that day, the U.S. Supreme Court declines indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
JANUARY 2021
With President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration days away, indicted Texas Attorney General and former RAGA Chair Ken Paxton continues to sow doubt around the 2020 election:
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January 3: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton confirms he will be attending the January 6th event in Washington, D.C. saying, “All Patriots need to be present to stand with President Trump.”
January 4: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to promote the “Stop The Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. saying, “Join us in D.C. make this the largest MAGA rally ever.”
January 5: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton promotes “Stop The Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. saying, “Looking forward to standing with @realDonaldTrump tomorrow. It’s gonna be HUGE!”
January 5: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton retweets an account saying, “Someday they will say that on Jan 6, 2021 “some people did a thing”…those people were Patriots and what they did was save a nation.”
January 5: Reporting by the ALReporter uncovers a meeting at Trump Hotel between RAGA’s Executive Director, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, members of Trump’s family, and close campaign advisers. PIPER AG MARSHALL?
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January 5: Reporting by Documented later uncovers arobocall paid for by RAGA’s policy arm — the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF) — promoting the “Stop The Steal” rally occurs on this day. The robocall says, “At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight.” The same reporting uncovers that RAGA (later changed to RLDF) was listed as a sponsor on the march’s official website.
January 6: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks at the “Stop The Steal” rally in Washington, D.C. telling attendees, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength … we will not quit fighting. We’re not quitting.”
January 6: Indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweets, “Americans are here in Washington to stand up and support the President. A lot of voters, as well as myself, believe something went wrong in this election. I’m here to support @realDonaldTrump #MarchToSaveAmerica”
After the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building, indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton falsely tweets, “These are not Trump supporters” and spreads disinformation that “Antifa” was actually the cause for the violence.
January 7: RAGA and Republican Attorneys General attempt to distance themselves from the robocall that promoted the January 6 insurrection saying, “The Republican Attorneys General Association and Rule of Law Defense Fund had no involvement in the planning, sponsoring, or the organization of yesterday’s rally,” which is quickly dismissed.
January 8: RLDF Chair Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall indicates he will lead an internal review of how RAGA/RLDF became affiliated with the Jan 6 insurrection. More than one month later, they remain silent.
January 11: RAGA’s Executive Director [REYES?] resigns from the Republican Attorneys General Association without taking responsibility and refuses to address their support of the rally turned deadly insurrection. This includes RLDF Chair Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall saying, “Every decision Adam made on behalf of RLDF was with the best of intentions and with the organization’s best interests in mind.”
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January 21: The New York Times reports that a RAGA/RLDF “donor had demanded [the robocall] and made a contribution contingent upon its release.”
January 31: The New York Times reports that Trump’s legal team drafted the lawsuit indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton would eventually bring against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in an attempt to overturn their results and thus give the election to President Trump.
FEBRUARY 2021
More than 40 days after the deadly attack at the U.S. Capitol, and more than three months since the 2020 Presidential election results were known, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita continues to spread disinformation around the results of the election.
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Republican Attorney General and RAGA behavior during the 2020 election was par for the course for a group of election officials who jumped off the deep end following the 2018 Midterms elections. From flirting with QAnon, to promoting COVID-19 scams, to attempting to overturn a free and fair election, the top legal officers and law enforcement officials of the so-called party of “law and order” are now legally and morally bankrupt.
RAGA Chair (and former Vice Chair) Chris Carr refuses to take responsibility and refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the organization he leads — and has been a leader of for years.
In 2022, there are more than 30 state AG seats on the map including many of the same Republican AGs who drove distrust in our democracy and supported the events on January 6, 2021 that led to a deadly attack.
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Jan 22, 2021
Republican Attorneys General Under Pressure to Address Ties to January 6 Attack on the Capitol
In case you missed it, the policy arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) — known as the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF) —
https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/guest-words/24209-the-money-trail-ginni-thomas-emails-to-overturn-biden-s-election-leads-to-charles-koch
2020 ELECTION CONSPIRACY - The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of CBS News have unleashed a fury of renewed interest in the work of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Last Thursday, Woodward and Costa set off a political firestorm when they released the contents of emails that Ginni Thomas, wife of the sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, had sent to President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in 2020, urging him to overturn the Biden election win and attempting to steer his efforts in that regard.
A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through January 20, 2021 when Biden was sworn in.
Much of the current news debate around the emails is focusing on whether Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases involving groups with which his wife is involved and whether the Select Committee should subpoena Ginni Thomas to testify. While those are certainly important issues, what has thus far been ignored is the smoking gun trail that leads directly to the doorstep of billionaire and right-wing Republican political mastermind, Charles Koch, the Chairman, CEO (and majority owner with the heirs of his deceased brother David) of the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries.
Wall Street On Parade has previously documented that at least three of the front groups that fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump and that actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event at the Capitol, were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.
The smoking gun in the Ginni Thomas email thread occurs in an email dated November 10, 2020 when she tells Meadows to “Listen to Rush. Mark Steyn, Bongino, Cleta.” Thomas is clearly referring to conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn and Dan Bongino, and lawyer, Cleta Mitchell.
Cleta Mitchell is best known in the Trump election saga as the lawyer who was on the January 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump when he phoned the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and told him this: “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” That call took place two months after the presidential election. (Mitchell stepped down from her long-term employment at law firm Foley & Lardner after her presence on that call made the news cycle.)
But Cleta Mitchell’s relationship with Ginni Thomas dates back at least a decade earlier – and not in a good way.
Cleta Mitchell had filed an amicus briefin the Citizens Unitedcase before the Supreme Court that was decided on January 21, 2010. That case would be the tipping point to allow unlimited sums from corporations – like Koch Industries — in U.S. elections.
Just eight days after Justice Thomas voted in favor of that decision to open the floodgates to corporate money in campaigns, Cleta Mitchell made a move that looked very much like a quid pro quo to Ginni Thomas. Mitchell, then still a partner at Foley & Lardner, filed an application with the Internal Revenue Service to set up a nonprofit called Liberty Central, Inc.on behalf of Ginni Thomas. According to IRS tax filings, Liberty Central received a combined $1.478 million from dark money donors in 2009 and 2010.
On the IRS tax filings for Liberty Central for 2009 and 2010, Ginni (Virginia) Thomas is listed as President and CEO. The 2010 tax filing shows that Ginni Thomas received $120,511 in compensation from Liberty Central that year. She eventually stepped down from an official post at the nonprofit, stating she would serve as a consultant.
Liberty Central had the fingerprints of Charles Koch all over it. Acting as General Counsel in 2010 for Liberty Central was a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Liberty Central at inception.
Mitchell’s law firm, Foley & Lardner, employed three attorneys working as lobbyists for a Koch Industries affiliate, Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011. The Koch-related lobbyists were Ray Carey, Jason Childress and Kathleen Walby.
Mitchell, herself, was a former lobbyist at the federal level in years 2005 through 2008 for the Alliance for Charitable Reform, a project of The Philanthropy Roundtable, another tax-exempt organization. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark money groups which also have Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over them, were spun off from the Philanthropy Roundtable in 1999. (See our report: Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)
Mitchell is listed on the 2018 federal tax filing for SteveBannon’s charity, Citizens of the American Republic, as an officer of the organization, holding the position of Secretary. Bannon and others were charged in August of 2021 by the Department of Justice with bilking donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through that charity.
Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, was one of those pushing the narrative on television that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lawyers and staff ofFoley & Lardner were the third largest donor to Johnson’s campaign committees since 2015. Employees and officials of Koch Industries ranked fifth.
There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. Those Republican Senators were: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.
Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, whom Ginni Thomas enlisted in the White House to help overturn Biden’s election win, was previously a member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina from 2013 to 2020. He also received campaign funding from the Koch Industries PAC throughout his time in Congress.
Charles Koch is usually very careful in keeping an arm’s length relationship between himself and his political operations. But on at least one occasion Koch conducted a dinner meeting directly with sitting Justice Clarence Thomas at a private club in California.
In January 2008, Justice Thomas attended an all-expenses-paid, four-day trip to the Koch brothers’ semi-annual political gathering in the Palm Springs area of California. (According to his 2008 disclosure form and the Supreme Court’s public information office, Thomas’ expenses for that trip were paid by the Federalist Society, a conservative nonprofit that Koch foundations have generously supported.)
Justice Thomas’ trip to the Koch event occurred in the same year that the Citizens United case was accepted by the Supreme Court. The Court accepts less than two percent of all cases appealed to it.
Wall Street On Parade was previously able to confirm with Scott Markley, Public Information Specialist at the Supreme Court, that during that January 2008 visit to the Koch political gathering, Justice Thomas was hosted by Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club where Charles Koch is a member.
The Citizens United decision did not pass the smell test when it was approved in a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices wrote a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior, writing that the majority had ruled on issues that were not even legally before the court.
The money that the Koch political machine pumped into putting Trump in the Oval Office quickly paid big dividends in his first term (and made it clear as to why Charles Koch would have wanted to see a second Trump term).
Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since sacked the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.
Once Trump was settled in the Oval Office, a Koch front group, then known as Freedom Partners, mapped out the agenda it expected Trump to march to. In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the group listed the laws and regulations it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration. The Trump administration dutifully marched to the beat. Repeal the Paris Climate Accord – done. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy – done. Gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency – done.
By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. Freedom Partners has since disbanded but when we last took a look at the nonprofit in July 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries.
It’s time for the House Select Committee to subpoena not just Ginni Thomas and Cleta Mitchell. It’s time to hear from Charles Koch directly on how so much money bearing his fingerprints ended up fomenting the attack on the Capitol on January 6.
There will never be a better time than now for the American people to finally get at the truth.
(Pam Martens & Russ Martens are authors at CounterPunch.org. This originally appeared on Wall Street on Parade.)
ref 1/20/21
Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries
the FBI has asked the public for help in collecting evidence surrounding the siege at the Capitol on January 6 — an insurrection that left five people dead, dozens injured, and Congressional members’ offices ransacked and laptops stolen. The violent scenes at the Capitol played out live on TV, humiliating the United States around the world. The world will watch President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration today, surrounded by 25,000 National Guard Troops in Washington, D.C. These images will further undermine the standing of the United States among world leaders.
Because the FBI seems to have ignored for decades the serial warning signs regarding Charles Koch, Koch Industries and their intrusions into elections, we’re providing the FBI a simple and clear roadmap today.
Charles Koch is the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. Koch Industries is a conglomerate with interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations. For the past forty years, Charles Koch has been involved in a stealthy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory functions and kill off popular federal programs like the U.S. Post Office, Social Security and Medicare.
To understand the full scope of Koch’s involvement in the events of January 6, let’s first remember what actually fomented the attack on the Capitol. It was based on the Big Lie that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump through voter fraud — something that Trump’s own cyber security chief, Chris Krebs, and Attorney General, William Barr, dismissed as lacking a factual basis. The playbook for the Capitol attack on January 6 was to intimidate Republican members of the Senate and House into refusing to certify the election results, thus withholding the Presidency from Joe Biden.
These are the red flags that lead to the doorstep of Charles Koch and Koch Industries and should play a significant role in any serious investigation conducted by Congress, the FBI, or U.S. intelligence agencies.
Red Flag # 1: There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. (All Democrats voted to certify all states.) Those Republican Senators are: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.
On January 2, ten Senators joined with Senator Ted Cruz to announce that they planned to “vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ ” until an emergency audit was commissioned. Six of those Senators backed down from challenging the certification after the attack on the Capitol occurred. Those six Senators were: Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; James Lankford of Oklahoma; Steve Daines of Montana; Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Mike Braud of Indiana; and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. All six of these Senators have also been on the receiving end of campaign largesse from the Koch Industries PAC and/or Koch family members.
The money to these 14 Senators from Koch-related entities has been documented by Alex Kotch and David Armiak in a January 5 report at the Center for Media and Democracy. Kotch and Armiak also note that Koch-funded Super PACs boosted the election chances for Blackburn, Daines, Hawley and Marshall, writing that Americans for Prosperity Action has “spent $11.9 million” to promote those candidates.
The authors also note that the Koch-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund, “dropped nearly $3 million into the Wisconsin Senate race to support Johnson and attack his liberal opponent, Russ Feingold.”
Wall Street On Parade also looked at data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics based on Federal Election Commission records. We found that since 2012 Koch Industries has ranked between the second to six largest donor to Ron Johnson in every fundraising cycle. The Center’s data also shows that Koch Industries was the number one donor to Senator Lankford in the current 2019-2020 cycle. (The money comes from the Koch PAC, employees or family members of employees of Koch Industries, not the corporation itself.)
Red Flag # 2:At least three of the “nonprofit” groups that fomented the Big Lie that the election had been stolen and actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.
According to the TrumpMarch.com website, which was sponsored by Women for America First, its “Coalition Partners” for the January 6 event at the Capitol included the Rule of Law Defense Fund; the Tea Party Patriots; and Turning Point Action, among others. The TrumpMarch.com website has since been taken down but it was captured on January 2, 2021 (give it a little time to load) by the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.
Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money arm of Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that is raising millions of dollars from corporate felons in order to elect the highest law enforcement officers at the state level. (See our in-depth report of January 14, 2021.) According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014.
A division of Koch Industries, i360, has a massive voter database that some suggest is far more sophisticated than that of the Republican National Committee.The database includes phone numbers of people likely to turn out for an event of this nature. Its program, Predictive Dialer, says it can “scale call volume quickly so you aren’t let down as you ramp up your campaigns, from hundreds of outbound calls per hour to more than 100,000.” The Congressional Committees that are investigating the attack at the Capitol need to ascertain if Koch’s i360 services were used to make robo calls for the event.
As originally reported by Jamie Corey at the watchdog group, Documented, the dark money arm of RAGA made robo calls to boost turnout for the January 6 event at the Capitol. The message was as follows:
“I’m calling for the Rule of Law Defense Fund with an important message. The ‘March to Save America’ is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, 202-796-5838.”
Another of the Coalition Partners, Turning Point Action, Tweeted that it was “honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The Tweet was first reported by DailyDot.com.
Turning Point Action is a dark money group that does not report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. However, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, its sister group, Turning Point USA, has received $610,000 from Donors Trust since 2017. (We should note that the IRS has not posted the 990 tax filings as yet for Donors Trust’s tax years of 2019 and 2020 so it is quite possible that the cash haul is far greater than $610,000.)
Charles Koch’s footprints are all over Donors Trust, another dark money group, as we exclusively reported in 2010. (See Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.) We wrote at the time:
“There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust. Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies. Another tie is Claire Kittle. A project of Donor’s Trust isTalent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the ‘right’ people. Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Ms. Ball [now deceased] was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year,as reported by ThinkProgress.org. Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund. Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust. Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.”
According to the April 1, 2020 report at the Center for Media and Democracy, “In 2014-15, the Koch’s Knowledge and Progress Fund gave $5.3 million to Donors Trust, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given $980,000 to it since 2014. The connected Donors Capital Fund, to which Koch family foundations have also contributed large sums, donated $100,000 to TPUSA [Turning Point USA] in 2016.”
Another Coalition Partner for the January 6 event, Tea Party Patriots, has received at least $200,000 from Freedom Partners, a Koch front group. Tea Party Patriots has also received donations from Donors Trust.
We are unable to report if Women for America First, which obtained the permit for the speeches and rally that preceded the march on the Capitol, has ties to Koch funding because it is such a new group that it has yet to file an IRS 990 form. However, its Chair, Amy Kremer, held previous positions in two tea party groups. The tea party movement was a Koch Industries and Big Tobacco creation, as insider Jeff Nesbit explains in his book, :{Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.
Red Flag # 3: Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in wanting to ensure that Donald Trump had another four-years as President.
One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election was Freedom Partners, which closed up shop in 2019. It was hard to tell where Freedom Partners begins and Koch Industries ends. When the group was still active in 2018, we took a look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.
Freedom Partners Action Fund,a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.
Freedom Partners laid down their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo and their handmaidens in the Trump administration delivered: from the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord to the massive tax cut for corporations and one percenters to the gutting of federal regulations and putting industry lobbyists in charge of federal agencies.
But that was just the beginning. Koch Industries law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal. Wall Street On Parade also reported on it at the time, finding it unusual that the Trump transition team would give so many key slots to Jones Day when its partners had supported Hillary Clinton for President. This is another matter worthy of Congressional and FBI investigation.
Red Flag # 4: Koch Industries, through its ownership of i360, was deeply entangled in the campaigns of members of Congress who voted against certifying the votes for Joe Biden. (What kind of intelligence agencies and FBI would allow a private fossil fuels conglomerate like Koch Industries to directly run campaign activities for federal candidates for Congress?) We broke the news in 2018 that Koch Industries had purchased i360. We obtained that information from an internal newsletter at Koch that was available online and from the fact that help-wanted ads for i360 sent applicants to apply at Koch Industries. (The company hasn’t denied our reporting over the past two years.)
We reported this at the time:
“The i360 website says that its database now has information on 199 million voters from all 50 states; information on 290 million consumers with 700+ data points; information on precinct election returns as well as data from the Census, NOAA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and geo-spatial data; individual sentiment information on candidates and issues from its social media operations; and information from its grassroots groups (read Americans for Prosperity) and paid door-to-door knockers who are using a sophisticated hand-held device to update the database in real time in the pivotal weeks before an election.
“But i360 is far more than just a voter database. It has social media targeting operations and really scary data collection that reaches into people’s homes. Consider this from their website:
‘Through an exclusive partnership with D2 Media Sales, the strategic relationship between DirectTV and Dish, i360 is able to identify households that meet your target criteria and serve ads uniquely to those households – no matter which stations or programs they are watching. With dozens of i360 custom segments pre-matched to more than 20 million DIRECTV and DISH homes, campaigns can now reach the largest addressable TV advertising platform in the nation. One-to-one television targeting combines the emotional impact of TV advertising with the precision and accuracy of direct mail marketing – resulting in the most cost-effective and high impact buying solutions.”
According to Federal Election Commission records, a number of Republican House Reps who objected to the certification of Biden’s win utilized the services of i360. For example, Mike Johnson of Louisiana paid i360 $15,580 for what he called “electronic media expense.” Elise Stefanik of New York paid i360 more than $128,000 which she tagged as telephone service, web service, equipment rental, or simply “subscription.” Barry Moore of Alabama paid i360 $12,815 in 2020 for fundraising mailouts and ad buys.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, who objected to the certification of Biden’s win, also engaged the services of i360 in 2020. Tuberville paid i360 $50,875 for data subscriptions and making phone calls. As the Capitol was under siege and Trump was watching these scenes on TV, he spoke with the newly-sworn in Senator Tuberville by phone, urging Tuberville to make more objections to the certification of the vote, according to reporting at CNN.At around 7 p.m., Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made a second call to Tuberville. The call went to voice mail. Giuliani left this message for Tuberville, according to CNN, based on a report from The Dispatch:
“Sen. Tuberville? Or I should say Coach Tuberville. This is Rudy Giuliani, the President’s lawyer. I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you. I know they’re reconvening at 8 tonight, but it … the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow — ideally until the end of tomorrow…”
The nagging question, of course, is what Trump and Giuliani had planned for “tomorrow.”
===
lilsis
leadership & Staff
Maggie Mulvaney Jan. 6 rally "VIP Lead", Mick Mulvaney niece
• VIP Lead
Megan Powers Supoened by Jan. 6th Committee; Trump 2020 campaign director of operations
Donors
Julie Fancelli Publix Super Markets heiress
• Donation/Grant · 300,000 USD
United Medical Freedom Super PAC COVID-19 Conspiracy Group
Virginia Freedom Keepers Anti-Lockdown Org
Turning Point Action Conservative youth group
Services & Transactions
Women For America First Tax-exempt social welfare pro-Trump group
Right Side Broadcasting American media company founded by Joe Seales in 2015
Amy Kremer WFAF founder/chair, teapartypatriots.org National Coordinator; co founder, Women for Trump
• Service/Transaction (Jan 6 '21)
Rule of Law Defense Fund Offshoot of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Republican attorneys general have been heavily involved in efforts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election.
• made robo calls to increase turnout at the rally (?→Jan 6 '21)
Mo Brooks US Representative from Alabama (2011-present)
Miscellaneous Relationships
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lara Trump Former personal trainer; associate producer, Inside Edition
Donald Trump Jr. EVP, The Trump Organization
Donald Trump 45th President of the United States
Rudy Giuliani Trump adviser; former mayor of New York City
• speaker at (Jan 6 '21)2 :{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;cursor:pointer"):}:
Ali Alexander Right-wing activist, Stop the Steal organizer
Stop the Steal national coordinator
Kimberly Fletcher President and Founder of Moms for America
Justin Caporale Jan. 6 rally project manager, Director of Operations, Melania Trump
• planner
Caroline Wren President & Founder of Bluebonnet Fundraising, LLC; Finance consultant to "Trump Victory" fundraising committee.
Paula White White House advisor, former Senior Pastor of New Destiny Christian Center
• speaker
Global Frontline Nurses Nurses Group
Vladimir Zelenko, MD Orthodox Jewish Doctor, Hydroxychloroquine Proponent
Alex Bruesewitz Conservative Activist
Eric Trump EVP, The Trump Organization; The Eric Trump Foundation; president, Trump Winery
===
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washington (CNN)US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick suffered strokes and died of natural causes one day after responding to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, Washington DC's chief medical examiner has determined.
The medical examiner, Francisco Diaz, didn't note any evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemical spray or list any internal or external injuries, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the ruling. Still, Diaz told the newspaper that "all that transpired" on January 6 "played a role in his condition."
The ruling all but ensures that the Justice Department won't be able to pursue homicide charges in Sicknick's death. In March, two men -- Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios, 39, of West Virginia -- were arrested and charged with assaulting Sicknick.
Attorneys for Khater and Tanios declined to comment to CNN in response to the Post report. [had (used?) bear spray but they had no intent to use on humans, just bears on the mall?]
no lnx
The pair traveled together to DC for the pro-Trump rally and have been charged with 10 criminal counts including conspiring to injure police and assaulting officers using a dangerous weapon. The charges have never connected the assault to Sicknick's death, and prosecutors have not sought to hold any rioters accountable for murder.
Prosecutors say Khater and Tanios brought bear spray that wasn't intended for use toward humans to Washington, DC, then Khater grabbed it during the siege in retaliation toward police protecting the Capitol building.
He allegedly sprayed three officers in the face including Sicknick, causing them all to have to take time out from manning the police barrier outside the Capitol building. Tanios is alleged to have brought the bear spray in a backpack.
Both defendants have pleaded not guilty.
Capitol Police said in a statement Monday that the department "accepts the findings from the Office of the Medical Examiner, but this does not change the fact Officer Brian Sicknick died in the Line of Duty, courageously defending Congress and the Capitol."
"The Department continues to mourn the loss of our beloved colleague. The attack on our officers, including Brian, was an attack on our democracy," the statement said.
The Justice Department has charged more than 100 defendants for assaulting officers during the riot -- and in many cases have used police body camera and surveillance video to show the gruesome attacks to judges. More than 80 US Capitol Police, who work for the federal government, and more than 60 Metropolitan Police, who work for the city, were assaulted, the DOJ said last week.
In videos shown in court previously, Sicknick and other officers whom Khater sprayed can be seen lurching away as they are hit in the face. Sicknick can be seen walking by himself, stopping to put his hands on his knees on the steps of the Capitol. The clip has not been released publicly aside from being played in court once in March.
In court, lawyers involved have made clear that Khater spoke extensively to investigators already. Khater and Tanios have been in jail since their arrests more than a month ago.
Determining what happened to Sicknick on January 6 has been a focus of the Capitol riot investigation for months.
Initially, the Capitol Police said in a statement he died "due to injuries sustained while on-duty," and prosecutors were pursuing a murder investigation.
Government leaders, including from the White House and the acting House Sergeant at Arms, acknowledged he died in the line of duty, and then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said Sicknick "succumbed" to injuries "he suffered defending the U.S. Capitol."
"The FBI and Metropolitan Police Department will jointly investigate the case and the Department of Justice will spare no resources in investigating and holding accountable those responsible," Rosen said in the days after the attack.
But by February, the investigation had stalled because of lack of evidence of any fatal injury, CNN previously reported.
By that time, medical examiners had not found signs of blunt force trauma -- dispelling reports that Sicknick had been struck by a fire extinguisher -- and were still looking at the possibility of a preexisting medical condition or whether he became ill after being hit with the bear spray.
In February, President Joe Biden paid his respects to Sicknick as his remains were lying in honor in the US Capitol Rotunda.Sicknick's family released a statement at the time thanking "congressional leadership for bestowing this historic honor on our fallen American hero."
"We also wish to express our appreciation to the millions of people who have offered their support and sympathies during this difficult time. Knowing our personal tragedy and loss is shared by our nation brings hope for healing," the statement said.
This story has been updated with additional information Monday.
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150 gop cands 2022 BIG LIE? provides rationale for voter suppression and coup 2024
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an 6 22 pro publ
The dummied-up flyer bore the hallmarks of a real WANTED poster. A grainy photo of a woman outside an election office in the suburbs of Atlanta stamped with the word “WANTED.” An image of a sheriff’s badge and the phone number for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. The implication was clear: The woman was being sought by the local sheriff for voter fraud.
The flyer was fake, and though the sheriff’s office eventually called it out, the false poster went viral, amassing tens of thousands of shares, views and threatening comments on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok and raising fears that harm could come to the unidentified woman.
Stolen-election activists and supporters of former President Donald Trump have embraced a new tactic in their ongoing campaign to unearth supposed proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential race: chasing down a fictional breed of fraudster known as a “ballot mule” and using social media to do it.
Inspired by a conservative documentary film that has won praise from Trump and his allies — and debunking from critics including former Attorney General William Barr — self-styled citizen sleuths are posting and sharing photos of unnamed individuals and accusing them of election crimes. They are calling on their followers to help identify these “ballot mules,” who are accused of having violated laws against dropping off multiple absentee ballots during the 2020 election. A state lawmaker in Arizona has even encouraged people to act as “vigilantes” and catch future “mules.”
Promoting such false information violates the policies of Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. Facebook’s “Community Standards” says its policy is to remove content that incites harassment or violence or impersonates government officials. Twitter and TikTok have similar rules and guidelines for what can and can’t appear on their platforms.
ProPublica identified at least a dozen additional posts on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok that accuse unnamed individuals of being “ballot mules” and engaging in allegedly illegal activity. Some of these posts echo the “WANTED”-style language seen in the Gwinnett County meme, while others include similar calls to action to identify the individuals.
None of the posts reviewed by ProPublica include evidence that any of the people depicted in the posters engaged in illegal activity. Yet the social media companies have reacted slowly or not at all to such posts, some of which clearly violate their policies, experts say.
Disinformation researchers from the nonpartisan clean-government nonprofitCommon Causealerted Facebook and Twitter that the platforms were allowing users to post such incendiary claims in May. Not only did the claims lack evidence that crimes had been committed, but experts worry that poll workers, volunteers and regular voters could face unwarranted harassment or physical harm if they are wrongfully accused of illegal election activity.
So far, there is no sign that any of the people depicted have been identified or suffered any threats.
Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst with Common Cause who sent warnings to the social-media companies, says the lack of action suggests that tech companies relaxed their efforts to police election-related threats ahead of the 2022 midterms.
“This is the new playbook, and I’m worried that platforms are not prepared to deal with this tactic that encourages dangerous behavior,” Steiner said.
Spokespeople for Facebook and TikTok said they would remove posts flagged by ProPublica for violating their respective community standards policies. A Twitter spokesperson did not comment.
Thirty-one states allow a third party to collect and return an absentee ormail-in balloton behalf of another voter. These laws help voters who are disabled or infirm, live in spread-out rural areas or reside on tribal lands with limited access to polling places or ballot drop boxes. In states with a history of absentee voting, both Democratic and Republican operatives have engaged in organized ballot-collection drives.
Critics, labeling the practice “ballot harvesting,” have sought to restrict its use, warning about the potential for fraud. However, incidents of proven fraud related to ballot collection are extremely rare. A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation identifies just 238 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” since 1988. One high-profile case of fraud involving absentee ballots occurred in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race. A Republican operativeengaged in a ballot-tampering scheme involving hundreds of ballots. The state election board later threw out the election result and ordered a redo. It was likely the first federal election overturned due to fraud, according to historians and election-law experts.
The phrases “ballot mules” and “ballot trafficking” — with their intentional echoes of the language of drugs and cartels — started to gain traction online in 2021, according to Mike Caulfield, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. An analysis by Caulfield and his colleagues found that prominent Republicans including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel invoked “ballot trafficking” last spring.
But it wasn’t until conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza and a discredited conservative group called True the Vote last fall began to tease findings that would later appear in D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules” that uses of “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules” shot up, according to Caulfield’s research.
The “2000 Mules” film claims that a network of thousands of people illegally stuffed ballot boxes in swing states to steal the presidency for Joe Biden. It draws heavily on the work of True the Vote, which purported to use surveillance footage and geolocation data to make its claims of illegal ballot activity.
Numerous fact-checks of the film have cast serious doubt over its central premise. In a deposition with the Jan. 6 select committee, Barr said he found the conclusions of “2000 Mules” far from convincing. “My opinion then and my opinion now,” he said, “is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”
D’Souza and True the Vote did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite its flimsy conclusions, “2000 Mules” found an enthusiastic audience in Trump and his supporters. In early May, Trump screened the film at his Mar-a-Lago private club. The film has since earned nearly $1.5 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. In a recent 12-page letter responding to the public hearings organized by the Jan. 6 select committee, Trump cited “2000 Mules” nearly 20 times.
As the film’s dubious claims have spread online, stolen-election activists are creating and sharing online content purporting to reveal more “mules” and accusing those individuals of illegal behavior without actual evidence of wrongdoing.
The most striking example is the meme that depicts an older white woman leaving a ballot drop box in Georgia’s suburban Gwinnett County. The word “WANTED” appears above her head as does the image of a sheriff’s badge labeled “Gwinnett County” and the sheriff office’s phone number.
“Ballot mule,” the meme says. “If you can ID her, call Gwinnett Co. sheriff’s office.”
A spokeswoman for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office says the meme is fake. The sheriff’s office hasn’t received calls purporting to identify the woman. The spokeswoman said that the office was investigating who created the meme.
ProPublica was unable to identify the woman in the “WANTED” meme. A spokesman for the Gwinnett County elections office confirmed that the name tag worn by the woman in the meme matched those worn by county election workers in 2020. He also verified that the drop box in the video was located outside of the county’s election headquarters.
The origins of the woman’s photo in the “WANTED” meme appear to point back to a Georgia businessman and self-described election-fraud investigator named David Cross.
For months Cross has posted short clips of surveillance footage showing people depositing ballots at drop boxes in Gwinnett County. Cross sometimes narrates these videos and makes unverified accusations of illegal ballot harvesting. In a clip that Cross posted online on May 3, an older white woman — the same woman in the “WANTED” meme — deposits multiple ballots into the drop box outside the headquarters for Gwinnett County’s elections office. In his narration, Cross accuses the woman of depositing as many as 35 ballots, though it’s not at all clear from the video exactly how many ballots the woman deposited. “Totally illegal,” he says in the video. (Cross did not respond to requests for comment.)
Georgia law prohibits many third parties from submitting a ballot that’s not their own. However, the law makes exceptions for caregivers for the elderly and the disabled, immediate family members, members of the same household, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and more.
Cross, the Georgia activist, has filed complaints with the State Election Board and secretary of state’s office alleging illegal ballot deliveries and citing his surveillance footage clips. Last month, the State Election Board dismissed three complaints alleging “ballot harvesting” after an investigation by the secretary of state’s office found that the alleged “mules” were voters dropping off ballots for themselves and family members.
A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told ProPublica that the office has a pending investigation into the woman in the “WANTED” meme. The spokesman, Walter Jones, stressed that no one should assume that an individual shown in a video delivering multiple ballots is automatically guilty of a crime, nor would the ballots in question be invalidated even if someone had violated the state’s ballot-collection law.
The video published by Cross of the woman at the Gwinnett County drop box spread rapidly online. Twitter users accused the woman of being one of the “2000 mules” and urged their followers to “MAKE HER FAMOUS!” — in other words, reveal her identity and share it widely.
One Twitter user shared the woman’s image with the “WANTED” text and the fake Gwinnett County sheriff’s badge. “Once we find out who paid these people the whole story will become clear,” the account wrote. That tweet amassed more than 9,000 retweets and more than 14,000 likes before Twitter removed it.
The “WANTED” post spread across Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. A Facebook group called “Celebrities for Trump” shared it. “We need more if [sic] these,” the post said, referring to the WANTED sign. “Keep your eyes open. Report them all it is a crime.”
Several days after the “WANTED” flyer surfaced and reached a large audience, the Gwinnett County sheriff stated that the post was “false.” Yet despite the post impersonating a law-enforcement agency, social-media companies have been slow to remove it.
While Twitter removed dozens of posts with the “WANTED” sign, ProPublica was able to find instances of it still on the platform.
Disinformation researchers tell ProPublica that they also identified posts accusing people of being ballot mules in other states with laws that restrict third parties from submitting people’s ballots. “Mule right here in PA,” one TikTok post read. “Make this Upper Dublin resident famous #2000Mules #2000MulesDocumentary #2000MulesTheMovie.”
In Arizona, a Republican state senator named Kelly Townsend has encouraged people to camp out at ballot drop boxes and write down license plate numbers of people deemed to be suspicious. “I have been so pleased to hear of all you vigilantes that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Townsend recently said. “So, do it. Do it.”
Even if “2000 Mules” were accurate — which experts stress it almost certainly is not — the ballot-trafficking theory put forward by the film would not change the result of any election. Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, says he believes the rigged-election message in “2000 Mules” is just the latest attempt to more broadly lay the groundwork for challenging and overturning the outcome of a future election.
“If you believe the last election was stolen, you’re going to be more likely to take steps to steal the next one back,” Hasen said. “It’s pretty obvious that what’s going on here is using false claims of fraud as a potential pretext to engage in election subversion in 2024 or another future election. That’s very dangerous for American democracy.”
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battle plan
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/read-directions-carefully-proud-boys/
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/jan-6-2657514043/
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pelosi target?
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foia permit
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...SPEAKERS LINEUP
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5TH
TIMING SPEAKER/PROGRAMING LEAD SPEAKERS EMCEE
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM March to Save America
Katrina Pierson, Dr. Gina Loudon, Chris Cox, TBD,
TBD. TBD, TBD (5-7) Katrina Pierson
(b)(6)• (b)(7)(E)
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Stop the Steal TBD (15-20) All Alexander
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Peaceably Gather Prayer Virgil. TBD (2-3) TBD
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Eighty Percent Coalition Alex Jones, Roger Stone, TBD (8-10) TBD
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Eighty Percent Coalition TBD (10-15) TBD
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6TH
TIMING SPEAKER/PROGRAMING POC SPEAKERS EMCEE
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM N/A
Pastor Mark Burns, Julio Gonzalez, Sherriff, Alex
Jones. TBD (5-7) TBD
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Stop the Steal
Ali Alexander. TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD (8-
10) Ali Alexander
10:00 AM - 10:45 AM March to Save America Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani. TBD, TBD (4-5) TBD
10:45 AM - 11:00 AM Videos Rule of Law Defense Fund, Turning Point Action N/A
10:55 AM - 11:00 AM Women for America First Amy Kremer Amy Kremer
11:00 AM - 11:08 AM Rule of Law Defense Fund
(b)(6) (b)(7)(C)
Attorney General Ken Paxton Amy Kremer
11:08 AM - 11:15 AM Congressman X Congressman TBD Amy Kremer
11:15 AM - 11:30 AM Senator X Senator TBD Amy Kremer
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM Videos Women for America First, Stop the Steal, TBD N/A
11:40 AM - 12:00 PM Hold Music N/A N/A
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM POTUS N/A N/A
...
Organizers
Stop The Steal (NRID), Million MAGA March (NRID), Women for America First (NRID), March for Trump
(NRID), Proud Boys (RID), and other pro-Trump groups, along with private citizens, have promoted event
pages for the event.
Stop The Stealis a loosely organized group which emerged on November 7, 2020, with the belief the
election is being stolen from President Trump due to election fraud. The group began organizing
demonstrations nationwide called "Stop The Steal." According to the website,invited speakersand
featured guests for the January 6, 2021 event include Rep. Paul Gosar, Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, Rep-Elect Marjorie Greene,
Rep. Lance Gooden, Rep-Elect Lauren Boebert, State Rep. Vernon Jones, State Rep.
Mark Finchem,State Sen. Doug Mastriano, State Rep. Anthony Kern, and several others.
One
spokesperson from Stop The Steal, Ali Alexander (NRID), has encouraged followers to bring tents, sleeping
bags, food, and water. Alexander claimed,"if DC escalates...so do we. Do not wear a mask. Stand with
others bullied by staff." Twitter removed this tweet as it violated the spread of COVID-19 harmful
information.
The Million MAGA March has been involved in organizing both large protests in November and December.
The website was created early November prior to the first Million MAGA March, which spurred several
social media groups and pages supporting this movement.
Women for America First is a pro-Trump, female led group. The group was the center of organization for
both the November and December protests. The group plans to host a "March for Trump" bus tour from
California to Washington, DC, arriving on the January 6, 2021.
Although March for Trump is listed as a group, several different smaller factions are listed under this
name. The group name is considered more of a movement than an organization.
Proud Boys is a right-wing group founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes as a "pro-Western fraternal
organization." They are of record with USSS for demonstration activity since 2017; no civil disobedience
or arrests have been recorded. For more information on the Proud Boys, please see the Protective
Intelligence Brief Proud Boys Talking Points.
Hotel Harrington, an alleged hangout/hotel for the Proud Boys, made a statement on December 28, 2020,
announcing their closure from January 4-6, 2021, for "safety of visitors and employees." According to
news media, four individuals were stabbed outside the hotel during the protests on December 12, 2020,
when Proud Boys members clashed with counter protesters. Proud Boys' self-proclaimed chairman,
Enrique Tarrio (NRID), made a statement on Parler regarding the closing of Hotel Harrington, claiming the
Proud Boys outgrew the hotel and are planning on protesting during the January 4-6, 2021, time frame
and will be staying at various other locations
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/January-6-Clearinghouse-US-Secret-Service-FOIA-CREW-June-29-2021-2.pdf
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/aoc-american-terrorism-january-6th/
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'This is what American terrorism looks like': AOC blasts participants and enablers of January 6th coup
no lnx twt]
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement June 10, 2022
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out swinging after watching Thursday night’s House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, lambasting both her Republican congressional colleagues and “right-wingers” in general.
“AOC,” as the New York Democrat is often called, tweeted what appears to be her own cellphone recorded clip of a portion of the 11-minute documentary the Committee included in Thursday’s hearing. In that tweeted video someone, presumably the Congresswoman, can be heard saying, “Jesus Christ” when viewing the insurrectionists on the Capital grounds.
“In the days and weeks after the attack, right-wingers tried to downplay what happened,” she tweeted. “They said it was small. They accused us of lying by saying the attack was ‘only’ @ the dome. No. They were everywhere. The screams were everywhere. This is what American terrorism looks like.”
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, like most members of the House and Senate, was at the Capitol on January 6. Her commentary reveals how difficult it is for those who were there to relive the experience.
Tweeting out another clip, AOC reminds that U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was “tweeting the Speaker’s location as this was all happening.”
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“When I spoke of my fear of being raped again while locked in my office bathroom,” she adds, Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson “mocked it. So did Boebert.” South Carolina GOP Congresswoman Nancy Mace “insinuated to her supporters it was a lie.”
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An incriminating new email obtained by both CNN and The Washington Post is shedding light on an election plot in Georgia that was reportedly orchestrated by former President Donald Trump's campaign.
According to CNN, the Trump campaign is said to have advised fake electors to infiltrate the Georgia State Capitol and cast fake electoral votes for the former president. The email correspondence, which was dated December 13, 2020, included detailed instruction for electors to get themselves in position to cast Georgia's electoral college votes although President Joe Biden had already been announced as the election winner of the state.
In the email, Robert Sinners —a Georgia-based elections operations director for the Trump campaign— advised that the group of fake electors to use "complete secrecy and discretion." The email also included instructions for the fake electors to sign certificates confirming they had the authority to cast the votes on behalf of the state.
"I must ask for your complete discretion in this process," wrote Sinners. "Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion."
Per The Washington Post, the fake electors were also instructed to tell Capitol security that they actually had appointments with a state senator in order to be allowed entry into the building. Sinners also emphasized the importance of the group not drawing attention to themselves or having any contact with the media.
"Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media," Sinners wrote in bold text, per The Post.
In wake of the email being made public, Sinners released a statement to The Washington Post. According to the Trump campaign staffer, he simply followed the orders of Georgia Republican Party chairman David Shafer and other senior campaign staffers.
"Following the Former President's refusal to accept the results of the election and allow a peaceful transition of power, my views on this matter have changed significantly from where they were on December 13th," said Sinners, who now works for Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R).
Shafer's lawyer also confirmed his client's cooperation with the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
"None of these communications, nor his testimony, suggest that Mr. Shafer requested or wished for confidentiality surrounding the provisional electors," Shafer's lawyer said, according to the news outlet.
Despite the efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia, all 16 of the state's electoral votes went to Biden.
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presumably 1/6 hearings will tell us much more
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/trump-2657468781/
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2019 proto big lie
https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/hillbilly-spoof-big-lie-kentucky/
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raw story
when election night returns came in for the Kentucky election on Nov. 5, 2019, Matt Bevin, the Republican incumbent governor trailed Democratic challenger Andy Beshear by about 5,000 votes.
A brash businessman who antagonized the state’s teachers, Bevin had gone into his reelection campaigns as one of the most unpopular governors in the country. But with Republicans prevailing in every single remaining statewide race, his supporters couldn’t believe it was possible for Bevin to lose.
One the day after the election, Bevin refused to concede, making baseless allegations to reporters, as the Courier Journal reported, “that absentee ballots were illegally counted, people were turned away from the polls, voting machines malfunctioned and ballots were stored in open boxes” — claims that were systematically refuted by state and local election officials.
By Saturday, with Bevin still refusing to concede, two far-right influencers jointly appeared on a podcast cross-published on their respective platforms to herald what sounded like an earth-shattering development.
“We have literally been given the motherlode of leaked documents from a whistleblower that appears to be someone who might be working inside the elections,” declared Millie Weaver, an Ohio-based media provocateur who was a correspondent for the conspiracy theory hub InfoWars at the time.
Weaver introduced Terpsehore “Tore” Maras, a pro-Trump podcaster who lived in North Dakota. Weaver said she and Maras had been on the phone the night before when she checked her email and discovered “that some whistleblower, anonymously, decided to send me hundreds of documents — hundreds — these documents are confirmed legitimate documents — we have official, like, ballots, Kentucky ballots, audit logs, you know, all this crazy information, bank transactions, checks, papers that have literally been taped back together that went through shredders. Somebody must have been doing a lot of work to compile all of this information. But this information looks like there’s significant amount of voter fraud going on in Kentucky.”
Indeed, someone had broken into Harp Enterprises, a Lexington-based company that supplies voting machines, and had accessed checks received by the company and other internal documents. Roger Baird, the company’s owner, told Raw Story he believes either a disgruntled former employee or someone associated with a losing campaign put a janitor up to stealing the documents.
But almost nothing about what the two women said about the documents — starting with Weaver’s claim that Harp Enterprises “runs the electronic voting machines for the entire state of Kentucky” — was true. Harp Enterprises, which exclusively purchases voting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic, services only some of the precincts in Kentucky’s 120 counties.Voters in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville and holds the largest share of Democratic voters, vote on ES&S machines.
Maras claimed that the documents included hand-written notes showing employees coaching each other on “how to manipulate the votes.” And based on a financial transaction from a company with foreign ownership, Maras concluded, “You can’t get any more smoking gun with regards to foreign-entity meddling, let’s say.”
Chagrined to see his private documents tweeted out and displayed on a video stream, Baird showed Weaver’s video presentation to his banker.
“He was like, ‘This is like a hillbilly spoof,’” Baird recalled. “There was just enough little droplets of real information that you might scratch your head, and say, ‘Huh, maybe there is something there.’ When they started connected me to George Soros….” As he recounted the story, Baird’s voice trailed off in incredulity and he burst into laughter.
As the joint podcast crept into its second hour, Weaver noted with approval that her boss, Alex Jones, was in the chat watching her video.
“This is election fraud,” Maras said. “Kentucky was a dry run. In 2020, they’re coming for everything.”
“We need to blow the lid off this now before they steal the 2020 election,” Weaver agreed.
“Yeah, but look at the losers they’ve got running on the Democratic ticket,” Maras chimed in. She ticked through the list of Democratic presidential primary contenders, noting each candidate’s unappealing attributes and weaknesses, while assigning insulting nicknames to them, before concluding with Trumpian logic that none of them could win fair and square.
“So, what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna steal it,” Maras concluded.
Weaver also attended a press conference at the state Capitol in Frankfurt, and spread many of the same baseless allegations to her followers in a livestream on Periscope. Weaver could not be reached for comment for this story.
The Kentucky election in 2019 was a harbinger, but in a different sense than Maras likely intended.
Many of the same players who would later turn up in Washington, DC after the 2020 election and promote a battery of conspiracy theories falsely claiming the election was stolen were also involved in investigating election fraud claims in Kentucky, according to at least two people involved.
Joshua Merritt, a Dallas area information technology consultant, indicated in a Twitter thread last month that Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO “contracted” the Texas-based company Allied Security Operating Group to work on the Kentucky election.
In response to an account with the username @AmericanRE15 who asked him to confirm that he was saying “Byrne contracted you guys to work on the Bevins [sic] fraud in f***ing 2019,” Merritt replied, “Bingo….”
He added in a separate tweet: “And then there are all the people we briefed after 2018… We investigated Bevins case, Florida, Dallas, Maryland… And others.”
Josh Merritt responds to a question on a Twitter thread by @AmericanRE15 on April 30Screengrab]
Merritt could not be reached for this story, and he blocked this reporter on Twitter during the reporting of this story.
Russell Ramsland, the founder of Allied Security Operating Group, began pushing election fraud claims after Democrats made gains in Texas during the 2018 mid-term elections, and would go on to push specious claims about the 2020 election on Lou Dobbs’ show on Fox Business Network, and then file a declaration alongside Maras to support federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the election.
Weaver also confirmed Allied Security Operations Group’s involvement in the Kentucky election, which has not been previously reported.
“I went down to Kentucky to go hand-deliver an SD drive or a USB stick to Governor Bevin himself at his office,” Weaver recounted in a December 2020 livestream. “And I also met with a group called ASOG. So, there’s this group called Allied Security Operations Group, and they’re heading a lot of the election fraud efforts that have been happening.”
Weaver said in the same livestream that she had provided the documents to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and described working with Allied Security Operations Group.
“Yeah, we met with them,” she said. “We essentially went over the information. They already had seemed to have gotten it, which means they probably got it from Grassley or something.”
Messages to Grassley’s office seeking clarification on whether the senator received the documents or anyone from his office passed them on to Ramsland were not returned before press time.
In November 2020, Weaver, Maras and Weaver’s partner Gavin Wince came to Washington, DC as the nucleus of a conspiracy-happy group that would come to be known as “Team America.” Patrick Bergy, who was also part of the group, previously told Raw Story that Byrne paidfor their hotel rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in northern Virginia.
Merritt also indicated in the April 30 Twitter thread that Byrne and Maras together connected with Allied Security Operations Group during the efforts to uncover fraud in Kentucky. In response to a question from the @AmericanRE15 account on whether he had disclosed that he worked with Maras on the Kentucky fraud claim, Merritt replied, “She was brought in with Byrne when we were working with them through ASOG.”
Raw Story could not independently confirm Byrne’s involvement in the Kentucky 2019 election. Byrne and Maras have previously said in a podcast published two months ago that they did not formally meet until November 2020.
“The first time that I think of myself as meeting Tore, we were in a restaurant in Alexandria; it was a week or two after the election,” Byrne said in the podcast. “She was with some people. I was with some people. Somebody took me over to meet her people. Boom boom boom. When I shook hands with her, after looking at her or listening to her for a few seconds, I said, ‘Gee, I’ve met you somewhere, haven’t I?’ And she actually turned away, didn’t answer. I thought it was funny.”
Byrne went on to share a cryptic story about how a couple of nights later Maras made an admission to him that suggested she had spied on him eight years earlier. According to Maras, she had been Byrne’s “waitress” at a restaurant in London in 2012 and he was her “target.”
Neither Byrne nor Maras could be reached for comment about Merritt’s assertion that they worked together on the 2019 election in Kentucky.
As previously reported by Raw Story and ProPublica, Byrne has described tasking a group of intelligence professionals with interviewing Maras after she submitted a declaration to support lawsuits filed by Sidney Powel that sought to overturn the 2020 election. Byrne said the team that interviewed Maras concluded that “we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations.”
Despite Byrne’s determination in December 2020 that Maras was not credible, the two continue to appear together on podcasts, where they promote election fraud conspiracy theories and praise one another.
Maras and Weaver have both said they worked withPhill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general on examining alleged election fraud in Kentucky. In December 2020, Kline reportedly promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden, talking up the plan on far-right media outlets like One America News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Weaver mentioned Kline’s involvement in the Kentucky election in her December 2020 livestream, and Maras said she worked with Kline “in 2019 on the election fraud in Kentucky” in a podcast earlier this year. Kline could not be reached for comment for this story.
Warning signs in Kentucky
“I had said back then and have said all along that 2019 was a mini version of what potentially could happen in 2020, and did happen,” Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, told Raw Story. “I said then that we need to pay attention to what happened in Kentucky for fear of that happening on a larger scale with the presidential election.”
Douglas said he sees one critical difference in how Bevin’s baseless fraud claims played out in 2019, compared to the firehose of the spigot of falsehoods issued by President Trump that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After the 2019 election, Douglas said, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell issued an ultimatum to Bevin to present evidence of voting problems or concede. In contrast, McConnell waited for more than a month after the 2020 electionas Senate majority leader before congratulating Joe Biden on his win.
For conspiracy theorists, Kentucky in 2019 was a ripe target.
“Twenty-nineteen is an off-election year, so you could really focus on Kentucky,” said Roger Baird, the Harp Enterprises owner. “You get a lot of attention all of a sudden when you’re the only one having an election. We get more attention in an off-election year than we do in a big year like 2020.”
Similar to the feverish claims about election fraud in the 2020 election, Maras’ theory about the Harp Enterprises documents quickly expanded to include claims about official betrayal to explain why no one was being prosecuted.
“If you had asked me, I would tell you: Everyone in Kentucky government is guilty,” Maras said during the Nov. 9, 2019 podcast. “And maybe this is why the secretary of state is like, ‘Oh, just leave it alone.’ Yeah, leave it alone because everyone’s gonna be going to jail.”
Maras said she called the Kentucky State Police hoping that she could bring the documents to the attention of Governor Bevin. She said a detective called her back and tried to get her to explain how she obtained the documents. A spokesperson told Raw Story he couldn’t confirm that the agency received a complaint about the matter.
The Kentucky Attorney General’s office, which would typically investigate allegations of election fraud or other criminal misconduct, did not respond to inquiries.
Baird told Raw Story he asked Homeland Security to try to determine how his company’s internal documents were stolen, but they never reached any conclusions.
In the weeks following Bevin’s loss in Kentucky, Maras continued to refine a fanciful theory of electronic vote-swapping.
In 2019 and 2020, according to the Washington Post, Ramsland and Merritt from Allied Security Operations Group appeared on apodcast called “Economic War Room” and claimed that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location and manipulate it. During his media appearances, Ramsland also circulated baseless claims aboutScytl, a Spain-based company that provides election-night reporting services, asserting that “they’re housing all of our vote, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” the Post reported.
Maras appears to have been exposed to the same baseless claims about Scytl in November 2020, roughly the same period when Merritt and Weaver indicated Allied Security Operations Group was looking at the Kentucky election.
In a podcast two weeks after the 2019 election, Maras spent an hour offering a breezy discourse on how various election technology companies supposedly carry out electronic vote manipulation, asserting that “the Hart-Intercivic software” was “working together” with Scytl.
“So, this phase is shuffling ballots, mixing them,” Maras said, adopting the professorial air of an adept instructor breaking down a complex formula for undergrad students. “Picture a bag of Scrabble tiles, and you’re mixing them. That’s basically what they do to all your votes. And during this mixing phase is where you can swap a vote for some other vote.”
In a previous podcast, on Nov. 10, Maras had acknowledged that “elections aren’t my thing,” and admitted she knew little about how voting machines work. Now, on Nov. 19, Maras was saying that it had taken her a week to figure out what a highly compensated cybersecurity contractor in northern Virginia who was paid to safeguard US elections would have known for at least 10 years.
What Maras missed — and what election deniers in 2020 missed and continue to miss as they go around the country sewing doubt about the election system — is that vote data that is reported on election night is separate from the votes that are tallied up and certified by local and state elections officials.
In Kentucky, two poll workers — one Republican and one Democrat — hand-deliver a tape displaying a printout of the aggregate vote and a media card in a sealed bag to the county election office. A duplicate of the tape is displayed at the polling place as a record of the precinct tally. At the county office, the media card is inserted into a machine that tallies the votes from across the county. Like the voting machines, the machine that tallies the votes is not connected to the internet. To ensure that the votes remain secure, an election worker uses a clean thumb drive to pull the data off the tally machine and then walks it over to a networked computer to upload it to the election-night reporting site.
“Our job is to make sure nothing touches the computer that does the tally,” Baird said.
“Common sense tells you that if you hook up your voting machines to the internet, you’re plumb dumb,” he added.
References to Scytl and foreign servers purportedly housing votes would prove to be a ubiquitous feature in declarations sworn by Maras and Merritt for the lawsuits filed in November and December 2020, along with video documentaries and livestreams by Weaver during the same period. Maras’ 37-page declaration, executed on Nov. 29, 2020, alone contains 23 references to Scytl.
Ensconced in Washington, Weaver addressed her followers on Periscope around the same time, outlining her qualifications to be part of an elite team churning up dubious evidence to aid in the effort to overturn the election.
“I want to give you guys a little bit of background as to why I know what I know and I’m in the situation where right here where I’m even being invited to some of the groups that are heading these efforts, where you see people like Phill Kline, and you see people like Sidney Powell and these other people out here heading these movements,” Weaver said. “Why would they care what little Millie has to say?... So, I’ve been making these videos for over a year now, talking about the plan that the Democrats and really the establishment has had to throw Trump out of office, to get rid of him.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/trump-election-lie/
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By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.
After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”
“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”
“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.
“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”
That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.
Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela. He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed. Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.
When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, “I can show the similarity.” In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy. He claimed that the company’s software had been “purchased” by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.
Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to “a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community.” (He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.) From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.
Powell was on the hunt for just such information.
By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president’s legal team to challenge the results of the election. In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he “conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.” The day after the interview, Trump made Powell’s position official with an announcement on Twitter.
The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud. One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video “like the holy grail of evidence.” (In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen “a few minutes” of the video, in which he had “no interest beyond general curiosity.” Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)
There was just one problem. Salazar’s claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: “Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela,” “Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012” and “There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic’s Software In The 2020 Election Cycle.” Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions.
Dominion later released a statementcalling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: “There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple.” He added that “Salazar’s testimony is full of inaccuracies,” strongly denied that Smartmatic’s technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has “registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach.” (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)
Salazar’s story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.
ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.
Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.
Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they’d been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.
The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition’s chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.
Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden’s victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to “conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein.” The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Salazar’s declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show “the similarity” between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that “the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system” in the United States was potentially compromised.
Wood told ProPublica, “I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell,” though his name appears as “of counsel” in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that “while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct.”
All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn’t just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition’s failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.
This is the story of how little untruths added up to the “big lie.”
When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips. This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.
Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself:There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them. ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition’s efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.
In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media. None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.
One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election. Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann’s claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.
By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story. Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond. Powell soon referred to Oltmann’s allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and “his background,” she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator’s assessment.)
Within days of the investigator’s Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.
In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created “an entirely fake online persona.” (Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain “unproven” despite the legal finding and that “false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties,” which include being a “former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.”)
Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. The individual claimed that there was “unambiguous evidence” that “foreign interference is present in the 2020 election” and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. The Washington Post later identified the declaration’s author to be Maras.
In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.
In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators’ assessment: “Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours.’” (“I tried my best to deceive” the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. “I was scared.”)
Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras’ right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election. (“She’s a friend and an ally, and I know that she’s a little goofy,” Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. “I think she has relevant knowledge.”)
Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren’t just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon. In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden’s favor.
Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon’s voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)
One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon’s analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from “a long track record of baseball statistics.” In the end, his level of expertise didn’t matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon’s claims.
Byrne used Solomon’s analysis in his book, “The Deep Rig,” to make the case that the election was fraudulent. In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree. The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon’s analysis, especially that the “vote shares” he suggested were suspicious were “not at all surprising,” and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”
A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how “fishing for a finding” can “lead an argument astray.”
Byrne kept promoting Solomon’s work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a “Renowned Mathematician.”
Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a “Mr. Solomon.”
In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election. In the first, Burk claimed that she’d spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as “election mail ballots” passing through the facility. The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.
A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a “Jane Doe” witness who would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona.” Burk told ProPublica that she was the “Jane Doe.” The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of “a plane full of ballots that came in,” and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, “We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in.” The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.
Burk’s theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk’s claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it “had been looked into and there was nothing there.” This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)
In late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, called Burk and explained that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories. On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them. “When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane,” Penrose told Burk. “That created the rumor.” The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose’s investigators that in trying to impress Burk “he fabricated everything.”
“I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it’s true?” Burk asked. Penrose replied: “Yes. I’m saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It’s all bullshit.”
Penrose’s team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, “We’re not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines.”
Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)
Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. “I obviously made a mistake believing lies,” Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends. “As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece.”
Burk’s stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million. The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.
“You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there’s 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane,” said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman’s theories were false. Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia. “Our goal in the audit was to figure out what’s really true and deal with it,” Logan told ProPublica. “That’s why we did paper examination.”
No fibers were found.
Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden. It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.
...[quite long]
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no lnx twt
Conservative maps out the psychology of how Trump’s voter fraud claims became integral to his supporters’ 'tribal' identity
Alex Henderson April 19, 2022
Countless liberals, progressives, centrists, independents and Democrats — as well as some right-wing libertarians and Never Trump conservatives — have wondered why so many Donald Trump supporters are gullible enough to buy into the Big Lie when, in fact, there is zero evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In an article published by The Atlantic on April 18, Never Trumper and conservative strategist Sarah Longwell analyzes the psychology of MAGA voters who still buy into the Big Lie — and according to Longwell, identity politics are a big part of it.
“Some 35% of Americans — including 68% of Republicans — believe the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen,” Longwell explains. “They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today…. For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.”
Longwell adds that she has been holding focus groups in order to “find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.” And the types of comments she has heard include “I can’t really put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel right” and “something about it just didn’t seem right.”
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“The exact details of the story vary,” Longwell observes. “Was it Hugo Chávez who stole the election? Or the CIA? Or Italian defense contractors? Outlandish claims like these seem to have made this conspiracy theory more durable, not less. Regardless of plausibility, the more questions that are raised, the more mistrustful Trump voters are of the official results. Perhaps that’s because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.”
Longwell continues, “Remember that Trump began spreading the notion that America’s elections were ‘rigged’ in 2016 — when he thought he would lose. Many Republicans firmly believed that the Democrats would steal an election if given the chance. When the 2020 election came and Trump did lose, his voters were ready to doubt the outcome.”
Longwell laments that there is no shortage of MAGA politicians and right-wing media figures who are more than happy to keep promoting the Big Lie to Trump voters.
“The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life,” Longwell writes. “They hear from Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets — and from these sources they hear the same false claims repeated ad infinitum.”
Longwell adds, “Now, we are at the point where to be a Republican means to believe the Big Lie. And as long as Republicans leading the party keep promoting and indulging the Big Lie, that will continue to be the case. If I’ve learned anything from my focus groups, it’s that something doesn’t have to make sense for voters to believe it’s true.”
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raw story tom b an 4 16 22
According to former Republican National Committee spokesperson Tim Miller, nothing better demonstrates that even the “good Republicans” like Sen. Mike Lee (UT) engaged inhare-brained schemes to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 presidential election, than Lee’s text messages leading up to the Jan 6th insurrection.
As Miller notes in his Bulwark column, there has existed a narrative that there were “good” Republicans who were not involved in plotting to keep Trump in the Oval Office no matter what voters decided, and then there were the fanatics who saw no problem with running roughshod over the Constitution.
With CNN reporting that Lee and fellow Republican Rep. Chip Roy (TX) were frantically texting former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asking for help in disrupting the certification of the vote, Miller suggested that the “insane” wing of the party is deeper than people think.
With Lee and Roy’s texts demonstrating a swing from full-throated support for overturning to becoming appalled by the conspiracy theories and legal reasoning being put forth by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Miller wrote that the whole affair was a “clown show.”
“Among the self-appointed responsible Republicans, the story of Trump’s attempted election theft goes something like this: The former president had a few CRAZY people around him providing bad advice. Rudy and Lin Wood and Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell and their ilk were egging on a strategy that was never going to work and that nobody was actually on board with,” Miller began. “Meanwhile, the rest of the players were maybe not profiles in courage, but they were trying to do the right thing. Just, you know, behind the scenes. Some were encouraging Trump to be more presidential—to finally do that growing into the office they had promised he would do four years ago now that he had lost.”
“The real story is that the circus was in town and even the supposed ‘good Republicans”’were happy to put on their clown make-up,” he added.
Listing off a series of the texts Lee sent to Meadows, Miller wrote that they are evidence that, “The true story is that ‘good Republican’ Mike Lee and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows were forcing the crazy into the Oval Office at the most combustible time imaginable.”
Noting that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) were openly trying to derail the certification of the 2020 vote, the former RNC official said Lee was just as bad — but doing it covertly
“In the end, Lee might not have voted to overturn the election but he was every bit a part of the coup as Cruz and Hawley and the rest. As it turns out this wasn’t the case of ‘responsible’ people trying to nudge things in the right direction in private,” he wrote before concluding, “It was a case where one posse of clowns was so insane that they were giving away the game. While the ‘responsible’ clowns like Mike Lee did everything in their power to figure out how they could keep the madman in power, without getting Rudy’s hair dye on their face.”
You can read the whole piece here.
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4/22
I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.
Consider Brian Schatz.
The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.
Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.
:{:{:{:{:{:{“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”}:
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He added:
“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”
His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.
The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”
Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.
He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”
“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”
So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.
Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)
Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.
You read that right.
The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.
They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.
At gunpoint.
Everyone should see what Schatz sees.
So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.
Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”
:{:{:{:{:{Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?
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My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.
In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.
He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.
It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.
Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.
I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.
But not everybody can serve.
Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.
That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.
If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.
There are just not enough white dudes left.
When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.
Sounds like you’re angry?
I amangry.
The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.
Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.
That's the nature of it.
But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.
One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.
Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.
A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.
The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.
I do not say this lightly.
This is incredibly dangerous.
They attack the military leadership as “woke” because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.
I've never seen that in my lifetime.
You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?
No, I don't think so.
The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.
Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.
It's terrifying to think where this could go.
I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.
I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.
All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.
But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.
At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!
How horrifying that is.
Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.
Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.
Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.
Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.
That needs to be stomped out.
There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....
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an 4 22
Former Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was initially scheduled to appear on MSNBC’s The Beat on Tuesday, March 29. However, that appearance was abruptly canceled following the House Select Committee's vote on Monday in favor of holding Navarro in contempt of Congress for his failure to cooperate with the Jan. 6 investigation.
Sharing the news with viewers, MSNBC host Ari Melber said, “Late today, [Navarro] then indicated he could not do an interview tonight."
While the exact reason for Navarro's cancellation remains unclear, there is speculation that it may be due to the House's reference to a previous Navarro appearance on Melber's show. Back in February, Navarro became embroiled in a heated debate with Melber and made remarks that ultimately conflicted with his assertion of executive privilege.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) highlighted the discrepency.
“[Navarro] has so much knowledge to share with a journalist, but he refuses to share that knowledge in response to a lawful subpoena,” Murphy said. “Evidently, Mr. Navarro is only concerned with executive privilege with keeping certain matters confidential when it’s convenient to him.”
In addition to speaking out about his involvement during the last MSNBC appearance, Navarro also shared a pertinent piece of information with The Daily Beast. Back in December of last year, Navarro detailed the “Green Bay Sweep” strategy he and former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon had laid out in hopes of keeping Trump in office.
:{:{:{:{:{:{“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.}:
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The committee is now recommending charges for both Navarro and Dan Scavino, who served as former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for the Trump administration.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/ted-cruz-2657051447/
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overturn election role bigger
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/madison-cawthorn/
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1/6 mult weapons
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/trump-2656976697/
The report used by former President Donald Trump to push his big lie about the 2020 presidential election was reportedly written by one of his own White House staffers, new details reveal. GUK
The Guardian has reportedly reviewed the original version of the reference document. While the public version of Trump's reference is said to have been authored by Katherine Friess, who served as a volunteer member of the former president's post-election legal team, new developments have revealed the report "was, in fact, produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller."
Per The Guardian, the report on Dominion Voting Systems, which was titled, “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties” claimed the election technology company "corruptly ensured there could be 'technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count.'”
According to an inside source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "the original version of the Dominion report named Miller — who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro — as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly."
:{:{:{:{:{The report was supposed to be used as a tool to support Trump's efforts to have election results overturned in battleground states President Joe Biden won. However, Trump administration officials also began using the report to support other tactics they were reportedly considering to overturn the outcome of the election so the former president could remain in power.
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After the report was made public, Navarro, according to the inside source, began referencing the baseless claims in his own report which he compiled with help from Miller and, Garrett Ziegler, who also worked as a policy aide for the Trump White House.
“Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of former White House advisor Navarro's report.
The latest development comes as the House Select Committee continues its investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection and the circumstances surrounding it.
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an 3 22
Ginni Thomas confirmed she was present at Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told the Washington Free Beacon that she briefly attended the rally but got cold and left before Trump addressed his supporters, some of whom then descended on the U.S. Capitol and stormed inside as Congress certified Joe Biden's election win.
"I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6," Thomas said. "There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability."
Thomas said she did not help organize the rally at the White House Ellipse and insisted that her involvement in the event, which has fallen under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House select committee, had no bearing on her husband's service on the Supreme Court.
"Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America," Thomas said. "But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn't discuss his work with me, and I don't involve him in my work."
According to a pair of reports earlier this year in the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, Thomas reportedly acted as an intermediary between event organizers Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Amy Kremer of Women for America First, but she and both other women denied those claims.
"I played no role with those who were planning and leading the Jan. 6 events," Thomas said. "There are stories in the press suggesting I paid or arranged for buses. I did not. There are other stories saying I mediated feuding factions of leaders for that day. I did not."
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clarence clerk let guy off b/c did not touch papers?!
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an 3 22
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth today blasted Republican lawmakers who continue to spread the "delusion" that non-violent participants in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection are unfairly being held in jail before trial. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO) have been among those protesting the loudest on the issue.
Lamberth roundly dismissed that theory, according to a report by Politico as he rejected a bid for release by a Pennsylvania man accused of some of the most violent and offensive rhetoric in any Jan. 6 case. The man’s history was full of racist and anti-Semitic outbursts as well as stark threats to assassinate lawmakers.
The defendant is Marshall Neefe, who worked in construction and delivered bottled water. He was arrested in September and has been locked up ever since. He is accused of bringing to the riot a large wooden club he fashioned — dubbed “theCommie Knocker”— and slamming a large metal sign, along with other rioters, into a line of police officers guarding the Capitol.
In petitioning the court to keep him behind bars, prosecutors revealed a series of messages that Neefe had sent on Facebook using the “N-word” and discussing lynching people. Neefe also had made violent threats towards lawmakers, saying that Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell deserved “a bullet in the head.” He also talked openly of igniting a civil war and indicated that he was willing to return to Washington, D.C. with firearms to renew the attack on the Capitol.
After laying out his rationale for detaining Neefe, Lamberth added this highly unusual addendum:
“Some members of the public and even a few members of Congress retain the impression that peaceful political protestors are being held in jail pending trial,” wrote Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan. “Neefe’s detention disproves that delusion. Neefe is detained not because of his beliefs, but because of his alleged violent actions and his expressed intent to engage in violent activity again.”
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an 3 22
Federal investigators obtained a search warrant for a Pennsylvania man allegedly designated by Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio as “upper tier leadership” in an encrypted message group set up for planning for the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by the far-right street-brawling group.
LNP/Lancaster Online reported on Saturday that the Pennsylvania man subject to the search warrant, who is also identified as “Person 3” in a conspiracy indictment against Tarrio and five other Proud Boys, is John Charles Stewart aka Johnny Blackbeard, of Carlisle, Pa. The government also obtained a warrant to search the home of Proud Boy Jeremy Bertino in Belmont, NC. Federal agents raided Bertino’s home on March 8, the same day that Tarrio was arrested in Miami.
The warrants were disclosed in a motion filed by the government on March 7 to temporarily seal the indictment against Tarrio and his five co-defendants. The government requested that the indictment remain under seal “so that Tarrio and his two co-conspirators are not alerted of the existence of this indictment until Tarrio has been arrested and the related search warrants have been executed.”
The government warned that premature disclosure of the indictment could “affect the integrity of the investigation by causing alleged conspirators and witnesses to destroy evidence and/or hinder the ability of the government to safely arrest Tarrio and locate his two co-conspirators — who reside in different states and who are alleged in the indictment to have advocated for the use of force to obstruct the certification of the electoral college vote.”
The motion was unsealed, along with the indictment, on March 8.
Although Stewart has not been arrested, the indictment describes him as playing an integral role in the Ministry of Self-Defense, a closely vetted chapter described by Tarrio as a “national rally planning committee” for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. According to the government, Stewart and Bertino were added to the original MOSD Leaders Group encrypted chat by Tarrio on Dec. 20, 2020, along with Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs, Zach Rehl and Charles Donohoe, who are charged with conspiracy alongside Tarrio. Later, Tarrio allegedly created an encrypted messaging group called the MOSD Prospect Group to vet Proud Boys for the Jan. 6 operation.
On Dec. 29, Tarrio posted a message to the MOSD Prospect Group to notify prospective members of a virtual meeting the following day to explain how the operation would work, according to the government.Tarrio’s message instructed prospects that the MOSD “will have a top-down structure,” adding that “if that’s something you’re not comfortable with” they should not bother attending the meeting.The government also alleges that Tarrio told prospects that the “upper-tier leadership” of the MOSD would consist of a three-person operations section led by Stewart, Rehl, who was the president of the Philadelphia chapter, and one other person not identified in the indictment.
As early as Jan. 3, Proud Boys discussed attacking the Capitol in the MOSD Members Group, according to the indictment. The government alleges that an unidentified member asked, “What would they do [if] 1 million patriots stormed and took the capital building. Shoot into the crowd? I think not.”
“They would do nothing because they can do nothing,” Stewart reportedly responded.
LNP/Lancaster Online reported that the newspaper reached Stewart’s wife on Saturday, but she said her husband was not available and hung up the phone.
The indictment indicates that Stewart played a critical role in developing the plan for the Proud Boys’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“I mean, the main operating theater should be out in front of the House of Representatives,” Stewart allegedly said in a voice note in the MOSD Leaders Group on Jan. 3, according to the indictment. “It should be out in front of the Capitol building. That’s where the vote is taking place and all of the objection.So, we can ignore the rest of these stages and sh*t and plan the operations based around the front entrance to the Capitol building. I strongly recommend you use the national mall and not Pennsylvania avenue though. It’s a wide-open space, you can see everything coming from all angles.”
The next morning, according to the government, Tarrio posted a voice note in the MOSD Leaders Group.
“I didn’t hear this voice note until now,” he said. “You want to storm the Capitol.”
Richard Schwetz, a former Proud Boy from Pennsylvania, and Asher Meza, a member of the Miami chapter, told LNP/Lancaster Online that Stewart was not in Washington, DC on Jan. 6 because he was in the hospital dealing with a medical issue. Bertino has also said he was not in DC during the storming of the Capitol because he was recuperating from a stab wound sustained during a previous rally on Dec. 12.
Even though Stewart was not present, the Proud Boys assault of the Capitol on Jan. 6 unfolded much the way Stewart had allegedly proposed.
The Proud Boys mustered at the Washington Monument on the National Mall at about 10 a.m. on Jan. 6, and 200 to 300 members marched to the Capitol before President Trump spoke at the Ellipse. At around 12:53 p.m., Nordean, Biggs and Rehl led the group to the First Street pedestrian entrance near Peace Monument. Ryan Samsel, another Pennsylvania man, spoke briefly to Biggs and then advanced on a line of Capitol police officers manning a barricade. The rioters quickly overwhelmed the police line, and the crowd with the Proud Boys at its core poured onto the Capitol lawn. At 2:13 p.m., Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy from upstate New York, used a stolen police riot shield to bash out a window, allowing the first members of the mob to enter the Capitol building.
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an 3 22
Although now-President Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the United States’ 2020 presidential election — winning 306 electoral votes and defeating then-President Donald Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote — it certainly wasn’t because of Idaho, a deep red state that Trump won by 30%. But far-right conspiracy theorist and MyPillowCEO Mike Lindell, a tireless promoter of the Big Lie, has claimed that Trump’s margin of victory was even higher than 30% in Idaho but that votes were stolen from Trump there through widespread voter fraud. And Lindell’s false claim, journalist Allan Smith reports for NBC News, has become a divisive issue among Idaho Republicans.
“Last summer, Idaho officials received demand after demand to investigate extraordinary claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election,” journalist Allan Smith reports in an article published by NBC News’ website on March 6. “In a state where former President Donald Trump won by more than 30 points, people claimed a vast conspiracy cheated the former president out of an even greater margin of victory. Almost all the e-mails referred to theories promoted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, DeputySecretary of State Chad Houcksaid. Lindell, people claimed, had proof of major malfeasance — if only someone would look into it.”
Houck and the office of Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney, according to Smith, investigated Lindell’s claims and “found them to be totally without merit.”
According to Smith, “Houck’s office decided to manually count the ballots in two of Idaho’s smallest counties — Camas and Butte — as well as manually recount the ballots in eight of the 32 precincts in Bonner County, a medium-size locale in the state. Between the three counties, it found an error rate of roughly 0.1 percent.”
But Lindell’s supporters in Idaho are not satisfied.
“Idaho’s work combating Lindell only seems to have made supporters of his fraud narrative angrier, Houck said, and has set the stage for midterm battles along fault lines Republicans are contending with nationwide,” Smith reports.
Houck told NBC News, “We’ve received two types of responses back to the office. One has been: ‘How dare you attack a patriot like Mike Lindell.’ On the flip side, (others) said: ‘Thank you for standing up to Lindell’s narratives’…. I’ve had counties that have had individuals come into county commissioner meetings and threatened the entire county commission that they were going to be unseated. And if they couldn’t do it through bureaucratic means, then they’re going to do it through physical means, to a point where I’ve had counties that have requested assistance in funding to put additional security measures into their county buildings, just to secure the election office from physical threat.”
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Self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone always portrays himself as the savviest, shrewdest, smartest operator in whatever room he's in. That's why it's curious that Stone, who years ago thought it was a good idea to have disgraced former president Richard Nixon's face tattooed on his back, would agree to allow a Danish documentary film crew follow and record him for two years leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
:{:{:{:{:{This article was authored by Tim Evans.
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A report in today's Washington Post details what that video crew saw and heard. It's not helpful to Stone's pronouncements that he had nothing to do with former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the legitimate election results.
From the report: "As a mob ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, hurried to pack a suitcase inside his elegant suite on the fifth floor of the Willard hotel. He wrapped his tailored suits in trash bags, reversed his black face mask so its “Free Roger Stone” logo was hidden, then slipped out of town for a hastily arranged private flight from Dulles International Airport.
“I really want to get out of here,” Stone told an aide, as they were filmed at the hotel by a Danish camera crew for a documentary on the veteran Republican operative. Stone said he feared prosecution by the incoming attorney general, Merrick Garland. “He is not a friend,” Stone said.
Washington Post reporters reviewed more than 20 hours of video filmed for the documentary, “A Storm Foretold,” which will be released later this year. The footage, along with other reporting by the Washington Post, provides the most comprehensive account to date of Stone’s involvement in the former president’s effort to overturn the election and in the rallies in Washington that spilled over into violence on Jan. 6.
Stone privately coordinated post-election protests with prominent figures, and in January he communicated by text message with leaders of far-right groups that had been involved in the attack on the Capitol, the footage shows. The filmmakers did not capture conversations between Stone and Trump, but on several occasions, Stone told them or his associates that he remained in contact with the president.
Stone has denied having any involvement in the Capitol riot. "Let me stay this as categorically as I can. Any claim, assertion, implication or otherwise any accusation that I either knew about or was involved in any of the illegal acts in Washington, D.C. on January 6 is categorically false. There is no evidence to the contrary and an honest investigation will prove that," he told Newsmax last year.
Stone steadfastly has refused to give testimony or provide evidence to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Last week, he sued members of the panel to try to block them from using a subpoena to obtain his telephone records. On the day of the attack, as he packed his bags, Stone told the filmmakers the riot was a mistake and would be “really bad” for the pro-Trump movement.
On the eve of the 2020 election, however, he seemed to welcome the prospect of clashes with left-wing activists. In a recorded conversation,as an aide spoke of driving trucks into crowds of racial justice protesters, Stone said: “Once there’s no more election, there’s no reason why we can’t mix it up. These people are going to get what they’ve been asking for.”
Stone declined the Washington Post's requests for an interview.
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John Eastman, who previously worked as a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, is facing pressure from the House Select Committee overseeing the investigation of the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol to surrender records that contain specific keywords in compliance with his subpoena.
According to The Guardian, GUK the keyword terms are said to shed light on Eastman's role in the alleged conspiracy lawmakers are investigating to uncover. "The keyword search list – which the select committee transmitted to Eastman – provides a glimpse of what House investigators suspect might be contained among the thousands of emails and documents that Eastman is being forced to review to comply with his subpoena."
An inside source with knowledge of the investigation has revealed "The list is intended to act as a dragnet to catch his records from 4 to 7 January about efforts to overturn the 2020 election results between Eastman and individuals in different 'centres of gravity.'”
In addition to the committee's investigation into Eastman's search terms, the lawmakers are also investigating several Republican congressional members. Those lawmakers include Sens. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.); and Reps. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Doug Mastriano (R-Penn.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Scott Perry (R-Calif.).
:{:{:{:{:{Another focus for the committee will be on Eastman's communications with members of the federal government. That list includes emails under the following domains: “'usdoj.gov' and 'justice.gov' for the justice department, 'senate.gov' for the Senate, and 'house.gov' for the House."
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The latest development follows House Select Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson's (D-Miss.) move to issue automatic subpoenas for specific documents and testimonies. As the investigation moves forward, the committee has expanded its scope. Following that move, Thompson said, “We keep adding to the list of people we need to talk to. That’s grown the body of work."
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voting machines a meme of sorts so recycled?
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A Michigan prosecutor revealed that Rudy Giuliani and other Donald Trump allies asked him to seize his county’s voting machinesand hand them over, and a Washington Post reporter explained how the new revelation fits into the final days of his presidency.
Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter told the newspaper that Giuliani and others called him around Nov. 20, 2020, and pressed him to hand over the voting machines so they could be examined for fraud, as part of an ongoing scheme to undo Trump’s loss in Michigan, and journalist Jackie Alemany explained the significance of her colleagues’ findings to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Well, it’s amazing, first of all, we are continuing to find so much new information that has yet to be uncovered, which is exactly what the Jan. 6 committee is doing,” Alemany said. “But this story especially is just fairly shocking because it shows them actually trying to implement some of their plans that we’ve seen sketched out in executive orders to seize voting machines. Here is a situation where they dialed in on a specific county and found a reason to do so despite it being obviously quite unconstitutional.”
“Even in the conversations I’ve had just in the past few months there are still a lot of people involved with this effort who believed that these voting machines needed to be seized to be protected so they could prove fraud,” she added. “These people are true believers.”
That revelation came the same day the New York Times revealed that some of the presidential records found stashed at Mar-A-Lago may have contained classified documents, in possible violations of the law, and Alemany said a series of remarks Trump made about Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material were particularly damning.
“That’s why those clips that were just played are so important for everyone to remember, especially when this investigation might potentially lead to whether or not this was negligence or actually intentional behavior,” Alemany said. “But it is clear that the former president knew exactly what was wrong with doing these things. He called up Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton on ripping up documents, taking classified information, accepting gifts, mischaracterizations because he knew it was politically damaging and gave the appearance of being corrupt. That’s what I think ultimately the DOJ is going to have to do if they decide ultimately to investigate the 15 boxes taken from Mar-A-Lago, which is what the archives has asked them to do according to our reporting yesterday.”
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no lnx twt
John Eastman wrote another 'election subversion memo' — this time for Wisconsin: report
Alex Henderson February 08, 2022
Throughout much of U.S. history, the types of things that Republican attorney and Donald Trump ally John C. Eastman did following the 2020 presidential election would have been unthinkable. Eastman wrote an infamous memo in which he laid out a plan for overturning the election results and keeping now-President Joe Biden, who legitimately won the election, out of the White House.
Now, according to Rolling Stone’s Washington, D.C bureau chief, Andy Kroll, Eastman is arguing for decertifying the election results in Wisconsin. And one of the far-right MAGA Republicans who is very much in favor of that is Wisconsin State Rep. Timothy Ramthun.
In an article published by Rolling Stone on February 6, Kroll reports, “Nowhere is this crusade to subvert the 2020 election result more on display than in Wisconsin. Even though Republicans there do not control all the levers of power — the governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat — they have launched a multi-front effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election, intimidate local officials, and, in Ramthun’s case, throw out the state’s presidential-election result.”
Kroll notes that Ramthun is not universally loved by Republicans in Wisconsin.
“In Wisconsin, as in other states, the energy in the conservative movement burns hottest among those voters who believe the Republican-controlled Legislature should empower people like Ramthun and throw out Biden’s 2020 victory,” Kroll explains. “Moderate Republicans have responded by ostracizing Ramthun or blasting their party’s descent into a post-fact cult of conspiracy theorists.”
But Ramthun, according to Kroll, has an ally in Eastman.
“Ramthun…. received an eight-page analysis from John Eastman, the same lawyer who wrote the infamous memos arguing for how (Vice President Mike) Pence could overturn the election result on January 6, 2021,” Kroll writes. “Eastman’s memo for Ramthun, dated December 30, 2021, argues that if there was ‘acknowledged illegality’ in an election, then the result of that election was rendered null and the State Legislature had the power to pick the electors ‘as it sees fit.’”
Kroll interviewed Evers for his article, and the Democratic Wisconsin governor lamented that MAGA Republicans in his state have been tireless in their assault on voting rights.
Evers told Kroll, “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment here. If I weren’t able to veto bills without the Republicans overriding my veto, we’d be Georgia right now. We’d be Texas. We’d be Arizona.”
Kroll warns that the MAGA campaign against voting rights in Wisconsin will only grow worse if Evers isn’t reelected in the 2022 midterms.
“The threat to democracy in Wisconsin isn’t coming from a lawless election commission, hacked voting machines, or illegal ballots coming out of nursing homes,” Kroll writes. “It comes from a political party that united around suspicions and lies, and sought to bend reality to its will. Wisconsin is more than a laboratory for new policies and bold ideas; it’s a trial for whether democracy can survive at all.”
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comm dr 2 22 an
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Progressives expressed outrage Friday after the Republican National Committee formally declared the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election "legitimate political discourse."
"Mark this day for future reference."
"January 6th was not "legitimate political discourse"—it was a violent insurrection on our Capitol," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted in response to the RNC declaration.
"I didn't know if I'd make it out alive," she added. "Some didn't. We cannot let the GOP whitewash what happened."
The New York Times reports the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted overwhelmingly Friday to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for their participation in the Democrat-led bipartisan commission investigating the January 6 attack.
The RNC censure resolution accuses Cheney and Kinzinger of "participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse," and of "utilizing their past professed affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes."
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—a member of the special House committee investigating the January 6 attack—told the Times that "The Republican Party is so off the deep end now that they are describing an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection as political expression."
"It is a scandal that historians will be aghast at, to think that a major political party would be denouncing Liz Cheney for standing up for the Constitution and not saying anything about Donald Trump's involvement in the insurrection."
Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the progressive advocacy group Common Cause, said in a statement that "January 6 was an insurrection that left people dead and scores of seriously injured in its wake. It was not legitimate political discourse no matter what the GOP says."
"It was a violent attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and ignore the will of the people," she continued. "It was a dangerous and irresponsible attempt to try to intimidate Congress with an angry racist mob assembled and then set loose by a man who had just lost the presidential election."
"With today's vote, the Republican Party has just endorsed violence as a legitimate form of political expression," Hobert Flynn added. "Their vote to legitimize violence is anti-democratic. There is no room for ambiguity when it comes to an attack on the peaceful transfer of power and our democratic system of government."
Cheney responded to the censure by posting a video showing supporters of Trump's "Big Lie"—the fallacious belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—savagely assaulting Capitol police officers and violently storming the U.S. Congress in a bid to stop lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and author of How Democracies Die, tweeted: "I have spent a lot of my career studying what happens when conservatives fully go off the rails. This is one of those moments."
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how MAGA Republicans are 'purging' Democrats from local election boards in a ruthless power grab: report
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January 31, 2022
The voter suppression bills that Republicans have been pushing in state legislatures all over the U.S. are dangerous not only because of the ways in which they make voting more difficult, but also, because they see...
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rudy kraken and boris subpoena
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/rudy-giuliani-subpoena/
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aha note QRF fits in with narrative of defensive; less benign interp is that they waited to see if there was an opening for force/guns
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no lnx
New report details Tucker Carlson's promotion of a man now facing Capitol riot sedition charges
Meaghan Ellis January 14, 2022
Fox News' Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted a man said to be a member of the Oath Keepers and who is now facing sedition conspiracy charges for his participation in the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
According to Media Matters, Carlson interviewed Thomas Caldwell, of Berryville, Virginia, on his Fox News primetime show and his Fox Nation podcast given him and his wife a platform to depict themselves as "victims of overzealous prosecution for the events of January 6."
During their multiple discussions, Carlson described Caldwell as simply being a “disabled veteran” and seemed to downplay the potential that he had serious criminal exposure.
However, the indictment offers details that paint a relatively different picture of Caldwell's involvement. Caldwell, who reportedly goes by the name "Commander Tom," was charged along with nine others for involvement in the far-right extremist, anti-government organization. The indictment alleges Caldwell marched to the Capitol and was "stationed" outside of the federal building on Jan. 6.
READ: Here's what it would really mean to prosecute Trump]
Per Media Matters:
"As noted in the indictment, Caldwell was stationed outside Washington, D.C., on January 5, standing ready to distribute weapons to his fellow militia members at the direction of Rhodes. He allegedly helped coordinate the Oath Keepers’ so-called “quick reaction force.” The indictment states that the militia had “amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among ‘quick reaction force’ (‘QRF’) teams, and planned to use the firearms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”
The indictment continued with more allegations against Caldwell and members of the organization. "The government’s case claims Caldwell sought boats to assist the QRF, saying he wrote in a message that they could have “heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms,'” Media Matters reports. "It also alleges that 'on January 5, 2021, Caldwell and others drove into Washington, D.C., around the Capitol, and back to their hotel in Virginia' where the Oath Keepers had stockpiled weapons. The indictment says that 'Caldwell described the trip as ‘recce,’ or a reconnaissance mission.'”
The indictment also contends, “The QRF teams were prepared to rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power. The QRF teams were coordinated, in part, by Thomas Caldwell and Edward Vallejo.”
READ: The radical right's takeover of the Supreme Court is complete]
The latest report comes amid charges filed against Caldwell on Thursday, January 13. If convicted on sedition charges, which are common in cases involving Caldwell could face a maximum of 20 years behind bars.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ken-paxton/
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DA says must give 1/6 docs
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/jan-6-media/
media fail will not admit
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mike rounds
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/republicans-big-lie/
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ny katko? voted ~ djt will not run, not 1st gop moc
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Colorado, a state that President Joe Biden won by 14% in 2020, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is among the far-right MAGA Republicans who has promoted the Big Lie and false claims that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Now, according to the Colorado Sun, a grand jury in Mesa County is investigating allegations that Peters tampered with election equipment.
The grand jury, according to Sun reporter Thy Vo, “accepted the case” on January 12.
“Peters, a Republican who was barred from overseeing the 2021 election by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, has been under criminal investigation by local, state and federal authorities for months,” Vo reports. “Peters has spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and has been facing scrutiny since she allegedly allowed an unauthorized person to attend a sensitive Dominion Voting Systems software update in May. Photos of passwords taken during the update were then posted online.”
Peters was among the speakers at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” event in South Dakota in August. Lindell, a leading promoter of the Big Lie, is being sued for defamation by Dominion for making the false claim that its equipment was used to help Biden and his Democratic allies steal the election.
On Thursday morning, January 13, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser issued an official statement on the case.
“Over the past few months,” Rubenstein and Weiser explained, “we have made progress in the multi-agency investigation. This investigation will be thorough and guided by the facts and the law. More information will be made available when the prosecutors are ethically and legally permitted to provide additional details. To maintain the impartiality of the investigation, we have no further comment at this time.”
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:{:{:{:{:{Slate on Wednesday published an interview with Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has spent the last year analyzing the demographic background of Capitol rioters.
Slate described his conclusions about the rioters as "sobering" and in particular pointed to his "research that tied rioters’ home counties to the areas that had lost the most white population in recent years."
While speaking with Slate, Pape said that he was surprised that so many of the rioters were doctors, lawyers, and other well paid professionals, and not the kind of people who usually fall in with extremist militas.
"When you look at this, it’s just one category after another after another that shouts out mainstream," he said. "The Jan. 6 insurrectionists really are best understood as a product of the mainstream."
Pape then explained how he and his team of researchers went about trying to learn just how mainstream MAGA rioters' beliefs are among the general population, and found them to be surprisingly widespread.
"21 million American adults agree with two radical beliefs: one, that the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency is justified, and two, that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and is an illegitimate president," he said. "That is, 21 million don’t hold just one of those beliefs—they hold both of those beliefs. It’s 8 percent of the body politic, but that’s really significant. That really can’t easily be characterized as just the 'fringe.' We normally would think the 'fringe' would be 1 percent or less."
Underlying these two beliefs, Pape said, was the "great replacement" conspiracy theory that claims the American government is systematically trying to replace native-born white Americans with people of color from other countries.
"When you ask questions about their belief in 'the great replacement,' you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference between being in the 21 million versus being in the rest of the body politic," he explained.
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/facebook-jan-6/
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pro pub
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Series: The Insurrection
The Effort to Overturn the Election
Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.
The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously— turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of then-President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.
“LOOKS LIKE CIVIL WAR is BECOMING INEVITABLE!!!”[RHODES OATHKEEPERS?] read a post a month before the Capitol assault. “WE CANNOT ALLOW FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS TO STAND ! SILENT NO MORE MAJORITY MUST RISE UP NOW AND DEMAND BATTLEGROUND STATES NOT TO CERTIFY FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS NOW !”
Another post, made 10 days after the election, bore the avatar of a smiling woman with her arms raised in apparent triumph and read, “WE ARE AMERICANS!!! WE FOUGHT AND DIED TO START OUR COUNTRY! WE ARE GOING TO FIGHT...FIGHT LIKE HELL. WE WILL SAVE HER❤ THEN WERE GOING TO SHOOT THE TRAITORS!!!!!!!!!!!”
One post showed a Civil War-era picture of a gallows with more than two dozen nooses and hooded figures waiting to be hanged. Other posts called for arrests and executions of specific public figures — both Democrats and Republicans — depicted as betraying the nation by denying Trump a second term.
“BILL BARR WE WILL BE COMING FOR YOU,” wrote a group member after Barr announced the Justice Department had found little evidence to support Trump’s claims of widespread vote rigging. “WE WILL HAVECIVIL WAR IN THE STREETS BEFORE BIDEN WILL BE PRES.”
Facebook executives have downplayed the company’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and have resisted calls, including from its own Oversight Board, for a comprehensive internal investigation. The company also has yet to turn over all the information requested by the congressional committee studying the Jan. 6 attack. Facebook said it is continuing to negotiate with the committee.
The ProPublica/Post investigation, which analyzed millions of posts between Election Day and Jan. 6 and drew on internal company documents and interviews with former employees, provides the clearest evidence yet that Facebook played a critical role in the spread of false narratives that fomented the violence of Jan. 6.
Its efforts to police such content, the investigation also found, were ineffective and started too late to quell the surge of angry, hateful misinformation coursing through Facebook groups — some of it explicitly calling for violent confrontation with government officials, a theme that foreshadowed the storming of the Capitol that day amid clashes that left five people dead.
Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s newly renamed parent company, said that it was not responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. He pointed instead to Trump and others who voiced the lies that sparked the siege on the Capitol.
“The notion that the January 6 insurrection would not have happened but for Facebook is absurd,” Pusateri said. “The former President of the United States pushed a narrative that the election was stolen, including in-person a short distance from the Capitol building that day. The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.”
To determine the extent of posts attacking Biden’s victory, The Post and ProPublica obtained a unique dataset of 100,000 groups and their posts, along with metadata and images, compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation. The Post and ProPublica used machine learning to narrow that list to 27,000 public groups that showed clear markers of focusing on U.S. politics. Out of the more than 18 million posts in those groups between Election Day and Jan. 6, the analysis searched for words and phrases to identify attacks on the election’s integrity.
The more than 650,000 posts attacking the election — and the 10,000-per-day average — is almost certainly an undercount. The ProPublica/Washington Post analysis only examined posts in a portion of all public groups, and did not include comments, posts in private groups or posts on individuals’ profiles. Only Facebook has access to all the data to calculate the true total — and it hasn’t done so publicly.
Facebook has heavily promoted groups since CEO Mark Zuckerberg made them a strategic priority in 2017. But the ones focused on U.S. politics have become so toxic, say former Facebook employees, that the company established a task force, whose existence has not been previously reported, specifically to police them ahead of Election Day 2020.
The task force removed hundreds of groups with violent or hateful content in the months before Nov. 3, according to the ProPublica/Post investigation.
Yet shortly after the vote, Facebook dissolved the task force and rolled back other intensive enforcement measures. The results of that decision were clear in the data ProPublica and The Post examined: During the nine increasingly tense weeks that led up to Jan. 6, the groups were inundated with posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election while the pace of removals noticeably slowed. Removals did not pick up again until the week of Jan. 6, but even then many of the groups and their posts remained on the site for months after, as Trump supporters continued to falsely claim election fraud and press for states to conduct audits of the vote or to impose new voting restrictions.
“Facebook took its eye off the ball in the interim time between Election Day and Jan. 6,” said a former integrity team employee who worked on the groups task force and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. “There was a lot of violating content that did appear on the platform that wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Pusateri denied that the company had pulled back on efforts to combat violent and false postings about the election after the vote. He did not comment on the quantitative findings of the ProPublica/Post investigation.
“The idea that we deprioritized our Civic Integrity work in any way is simply not true,” he said. “We integrated it into a larger Central Integrity team to allow us to apply the work that this team pioneered for elections to other challenges like health-related issues for example. Their work continues to this day.”
The investigation also reveals a problem with the way Facebook polices its groups. Former employees say groups are essential to the company’s ability to keep a stagnant American user base as engaged as possible and boost its revenue, which reached nearly $86 billion in 2020.
But they say as groups have grown more central to Meta’s bottom line, the company’s enforcement efforts have been weak, inconsistent and heavily reliant on the work of unpaid group administrators to do the labor-intensive work of reviewing posts and removing the ones that violate company policies. Many groups have hundreds of thousands or even millions of members, dramatically escalating the challenges of policing posts.
With the administrators themselves steeped in conspiracy theories about the election or, for example, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, reliable enforcement rarely takes place, say former employees. They say automated tools — which search for particular terms indicating policy violations — are ineffective and easily evaded by users simply misspelling key words.
“Groups are a disaster,” said Frances Haugen, a former member of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team who filed a whistleblower complaint against the company and testified before Congress warning about the damaging effects of the company on democracy worldwide, as well as other problems.
Many of the group posts identified in the analysis fell into what a March internal Facebook report, first published by Politico, defined as “harmful non-violating narratives.” This refers to content that does not break Facebook’s rules, but whose prevalence can cause people to “act in ways which are harmful to themselves, others, or society at large.”
The report warned that such harmful narratives could have had “substantial negative impacts including contributing materially to the Capitol riot and potentially reducing collective civic engagement and social cohesion in the years to come.”
Pusateri declined to comment on specific posts but said the company does not have a policy forbidding posts or comments that attack the legitimacy of the election. He said the company has a dedicated groups integrity team and an ongoing initiative to protect people who use groups from harm.
Facebook officials have noted that more extreme content flowed through smaller social media platforms in the buildup to the Capitol attack, including detailed planning on bringing guns or building gallows that day. But Trump also used Facebook as a key platform for his lies about the election right up until he was banned on Jan. 6. And Facebook’s reliance on groups to drive engagement gave those lies unequaled reach. This combined with the sag in post-election enforcement to make Facebook a key vector for pushing the ideas that fueled violence on Jan. 6.
Critics and former employees say this also underscores a recurring issue with the platform since its founding in Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room in 2004: The company recognizes the need for enforcement only after a problem has caused serious damage, often in the form of real-world mayhem and violence.
Facebook didn’t discover the campaign by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency to spread hyperpartisan content and disinformation during the 2016 presidential election until months after Americans had voted. The company’s actions were late as well when Myanmar’s military leaders used Facebook to foment rapes, murders and forced migrations of minority Rohingya people. Facebook has apologized for failings in both cases.
The response to attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was similarly slow, as company officials debated among themselves whether and how to block the rapidly metastasizing lies about the election. The data shows they acted aggressively and comprehensively only after Trump supporters had battered their way into the Capitol, sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives.
The ProPublica/Post investigation “is a new and very important illustration of the company's unfortunate tendency to deal with safety problems on its platform in a reactive way,” said Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University's Stern School of Business. “And that almost by definition means that the company will be less effective, because it will not be looking out into the future and preventing problems before they happen.”
The Trouble With Policing Groups
Facebook’s newly vigorous enforcement actions the week of Jan. 6 — which resulted in Trump himself being banned from the platform — marked such a stark contrast from the company’s previous approach that some Trump supporters took to Facebook to complain about the reversal.
“Facebook is Getting Real Brave and Vicious Now,” Jerry Smith, a retired police officer from Missouri who created and ran a group called United Conservatives for America, wrote the day after the Capitol attack. “They Are Removing Tons of Posts From My Groups!”
In a recent interview at his home, Smith said he could not remember writing that message or which deletions prompted his response. He said he opposed political violence and posts that called for it. But he acknowledged it was difficult for him to remove such content as United Conservatives for America’s membership swelled to more than 11,000, with the number of posts surpassing what one person could monitor. The typical group in the ProPublica/Post analysis had more than 1,000 members.
Smith, who showed a reporter that his Facebook account had received 116 violations for breaking company rules, said he found some of Facebook’s policies reasonable but disagreed on how they should be enforced. He posted in United Conservatives for America and other groups at a frenetic pace long before Election Day. As early as the summer of 2020, he warned about alleged Democratic party plans to steal the election and also shared false information about the pandemic, including a video from a conspiracy theorist about the origins of the virus.
“And DEMS Are Pushing For Vote By Mail. Another Way For Them To Steal The Election,” he wrote in August 2020.
In the interview, Smith said he believes that American elections often are rigged and worries that COVID-19 vaccines may be tainted. He has used Facebook groups to share these beliefs with tens of thousands of people — and thinks Facebook’s enforcement of its policies is overly aggressive and a result of political bias against conservatives.
“Are you going to do away with their free speech?” said Smith. “If someone thinks it’s not a fair election … why can’t they have their opinion on whether it’s a fair election or not?”
Facebook Cracked Down Before the Election
Facebook’s problems with groups had long been obvious to company employees, who gathered on a remote video conference in early September 2020 to figure out how to stop groups from spreading hate, violent threats and misinformation as Election Day approached, according to former employees.
Known as the Group Task Force, the new unit they formed consisted of members of Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, the specialized unit charged with protecting elections on the platform, as well as employees from engineering and operations teams who help oversee the contract moderators who review posts flagged by users or by automated systems, former employees said. The goal of the task force was to identify political groups with large numbers of posts and comments that violated the social giant’s rules against hate speech and calls for violence. Former employees involved in the effort said they wanted to apply the platform’s rules while respecting political debate and dialogue.
At the same time, Facebook’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations team was identifying and removing QAnon groups ahead of the election. The results of the two teams’ actions were striking. All of the more than 300 QAnon groups identified by ProPublica and The Post had been removed by October 2020, when Facebook announced a total ban on the movement, the analysis found.
In the end, the Group Task Force removed nearly 400 groups whose posts had been seen nearly 1 billion times before Election Day,according to a post on Workplace, Facebook’s internal discussion tool. The document later was included in the Facebook Papers disclosed by Haugen to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Still, members of the task force told ProPublica and The Post that the existence of such a team was an indictment of Facebook’s failure to police groups as part of its normal operations.
“The whole thing of the civic team needing to come in and do the takedowns was not a good state of affairs,” said one employee involved in the task force. “You could make a good argument that this should have already been done.”
On Nov. 5, Facebook banned “Stop the Steal,” a hugely viral group created on Election Day itself that quickly attracted over 300,000 members around a message rooted in attacking the legitimacy of the election. The company cited the prevalence of posts calling for violence and using hate speech in banning the group and all other groups using a similar name.
The next day, Nov. 6, the Group Task Force gathered virtually to celebrate its efforts, former employees said. Days later, a task force member published a Workplace post titled “Some Reflections on US2020” to bring attention to its work.
“Along with heroic efforts from other teams across the company, I truly believe the Group Task Force made the election safer and prevented possible instances of real world violence,” said the post.
But the focus on U.S. political groups and content undermining the election wouldn't last.
A Noticeable Drop in Enforcement
On Dec. 2, Facebook executives disbanded the Civic Integrity team and scattered its members to other parts of Facebook’s overall integrity team, reducing their influence. That resulted in the demise of the Group Task Force. The company also rolled back several emergency measures that had been put in place leading up to Election Day to control misbehavior in Facebook groups.
The Post/ProPublica investigation reveals the result: During the lull in enforcement, hundreds of thousands of posts questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, spread lies about voter fraud and at times called for violence. Meanwhile, the company’s pace of group removals slowed to a crawl, the data analysis shows.
Among the content spreading in groups were videos in which former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn spread false claims of electoral fraud and called for martial law.(Through a spokesperson, Flynn declined to comment.) Another frequent post was a cartoon showing Trump chasing a masked Biden, who carried a bag labeled “election theft” with swing states depicted inside. It was posted more than 350 times in the political groups analyzed by ProPublica and the Post, attracting over 2,500 total likes.
One meme featured a photo of former Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who rose to fame in right-wing circles by leading a congressional committee’s investigation into the deadly 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, accompanied by the text “If you are ok with rigging an election to win, I am ok with martial law to stop you…” That was posted in groups at least 97 times, garnering over 3,500 total likes. Gowdy has denied saying the phrase.
Another meme showed a photo of Trump winking, with the text “Not Only Can Martial Law Guarantee a Trump Victory, It Also Allows Trump To Arrest Anyone He Wants!” It was posted at least 70 times, generating more than 2,400 total likes. The images and their spread in groups was identified using a CounterAction image analysis tool.
“Everyone needs to make a show of FORCE in DC on the 6th and any congress who doesnt follow the constitution or who doesnt stand up for our president (Pence included) needs to be ’corrected’ by WE the PEOPLE - on the front steps of the state house - for all the world to see!!! THIS IS HOW THE US DEALS WITH HER TRAITORS!!!” read one post from Dec. 27, 2020.
Ten days later, as rioters stormed the Capitol, the ProPublica/Post analysis shows, Facebook began taking down groups at a rate not seen since before the election. An internal Facebook spreadsheet from Jan. 6, which was included in Haugen’s disclosures, contains a section called “Action Items.” The top bullet point was a direction to conduct a “Sweep of Groups with V&I risk” — a term referring to violence and incitement. It had been 35 days since the Civic Integrity team, and with it the Group Task Force, had been disbanded.
Groups Still Active Long After Jan. 6
Months after the Capitol was breached, Facebook still was working to remove hundreds of political groups that violated company policies.
One of those was Smith’s United Conservatives for America, which continued to carry posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election until Facebook removed it in May.
When Smith met with a reporter in his home in early December, he’d just finished a 30-day posting ban on Facebook. In spite of his account’s history of violations, he was still managing at least one Facebook group — also called United Conservatives for America.
Like its predecessor, the new United Conservatives for America group was racking up strikes for violations of Facebook’s rules, according to a post Smith made to the group in September.
That post included a screenshot of an automated message from Facebook informing him that eight recent posts in the new United Conservatives for America group had been flagged by fact-checkers. As a result, the distribution of his group’s posts was being limited.
Smith remained defiant.
“I'm Not Blaming Our Members,” Smith wrote. “I’m Blaming FakeBook!”
In late December, after being asked about Smith’s account and group, Facebook said it banned his profile and removed United Conservatives for America, citing unspecified violations of its community standards.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/facebooks-failures-election-misinformation-contributed-deadly-capitol
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no lnx many twt vid?
Facebook’s failures with election misinformation contributed to the deadly Capitol insurrection. A year later, the platform has failed to fix its problems.
Media Matters’ latest analysis has identified hundreds of active posts and Facebook groups still pushing “Stop the Steal” lies
WRITTEN BY KAYLA GOGARTY & CLARA MARTINY
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CARLY EVANS, NENA BEECHAM & JEREMY TUTHILL
PUBLISHED 01/05/22
Following the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook vowed to reduce election misinformation and prevent further incitement of violence by removing harmful content and suspending former President Donald Trump. But Media Matters’ latest analysis found that in the year since the January 6 attack, Facebook has not only repeatedly failed to moderate “Stop the Steal” content, baseless claims of election fraud, and other election misinformation, but its algorithm and other features have enabled such content to flourish.
Key findings:
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Right-leaning pages earned a greater proportion of interactions on election-related posts in the year after the January 6 insurrection than in the year before. In fact, these pages earned over 2 billion interactions -- or 54% of total interactions on election-related content -- on nearly 570,000 posts between January 7 and December 31, 2021.
There are still at least 484 posts referencing “stop the steal” or “sts” still active on Facebook that were created by right-leaning Facebook pages in the year leading up to the insurrection, earning over 2.6 million interactions.
Since January 7, 2021, another 238 posts with “stop the steal” or “sts” were posted by right-leaning pages and remain on the platform. These posts have earned over 415,000 interactionscombined.
As of January 3, there were at least 203 groups spreading election misinformation and blatant conspiracy theories, with nearly 240,000 combined members; 18 of them specifically include “Stop the Steal” or mention a “stolen election” in their name.
Jump to section...
HOW FACEBOOK FAILED TO STOP ELECTION MISINFORMATION BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE 2020 ELECTION
FAILURE: RIGHT-LEANING PAGES EARNED MORE INTERACTIONS ON ELECTION-RELATED POSTS THAN OTHER POLITICAL PAGES -- INCLUDING BY SPREADING KNOWN ELECTION MISINFORMATION
FAILURE: FACEBOOK CONTINUES TO PLATFORM NUMEROUS POSTS FROM RIGHT-LEANING PAGES ABOUT “STOP THE STEAL”
FAILURE: THERE ARE STILL HUNDREDS OF GROUPS FILLED WITH ELECTION MISINFORMATION ON FACEBOOK
METHODOLOGY
How Facebook failed to stop election misinformation before, during, and after the 2020 election
On November 17, 2020, just weeks after the presidential election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted that Facebook’s “systems performed well” during the election cycle, ignoring the platform’s litany of failures related to election misinformation before and after Joe Biden was elected. In December 2020, Facebook removed the “break glass” measures it had implemented during the campaign to boost authoritative sources and reduce election misinformation -- a move which seemingly contributed to the insurrection on January 6.
While Facebook had claimed victory, the company failed to recognize what it later called “a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election.” Even more embarrassing for the platform, Facebook researchers clearly had access to troves of data evincing the danger these efforts posed -- even while Media Matters and other external researchers and journalists were sounding the alarm. But Facebook still claimed ignorance when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to stop the certification of the election.
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The deadly insurrection on January 6 was aided, in part, by Facebook’s litany of failures before, during, and after the election, which include:
Allowing Trump and other right-wing pages to push harmful election misinformation -- and other misinformation and extreme rhetoric -- with impunity. Notably, Trump posted 433 times with election-related keywords between November 3, 2020, and November 2, 2021, earning over 176 million interactions, even as 75% of them featured at least one of Facebook's 18 different labels related to the election. Additionally, roughly a quarter of Trump's 6,081 Facebook posts that were created between January 1, 2020, and January 6, 2021, contained COVID-19 misinformation, election lies, or extreme rhetoric about his critics.
Failing to enforce its political ad ban and allowing right-wing pages to continue to run political ads with misinformation. Between November 4 and December 8, 2020 -- while the ban was in place -- Facebook enabled right-wing outlet The Daily Wire to earn millions of impressions on 24 political ads before finally removing them. There were another 50 ads that appeared to address social issues, elections, or politics, but ran without a disclaimer to circumvent the platform’s ban.
Failing to moderate “Stop the Steal” content, even after January 6, when the platform announced it would remove content with the phrase. Between Election Day and January 13, “Sedition Caucus” members -- the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the election results after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol -- mentioned keywords related to “Stop the Steal” a total of 193 times on Facebook.
Earning revenue from ads with election misinformation even after January 6. On November 1 -- nearly 10 months after the January 6 insurrection -- Media Matters found at least 46 ads on Facebook and Instagram calling to “decertify” the 2020 election. The ads earned over 8 million impressions.
In 2021, Facebook failed to effectively tackle election misinformation and penalize bad actors pushing it. Instead, the company has seemingly prioritized profit and positive PR over addressing the problems that made its platform a hotbed for fomenting political violence. One year after the deadly Capitol riot, these failures continue.
FAILURE: Right-leaning pages earned more interactions on election-related posts than other political pages -- including by spreading known election misinformation
Media Matters and other researchers have demonstrated again and again that there is no bias or censorship against conservatives on Facebook, despite right-wing claims to the contrary. In fact,right-leaning pages actually benefit from Facebook’s algorithm, which rewards sensational, divisive, and false content-- and the platform continued to disproportionately benefit right-wing content about voting and elections even after the Capitol attack.
Between January 7 and December 31, 2021, right-leaning Facebook pages that cover U.S. news and politics posted about election-related topics more frequently than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages, making nearly 570,000 posts, or almost 44% of the total. Notably, right-leaning pages also earned the most interactions -- over 2 billion, or 54%. Left-leaning pages earned over 1.1 billion interactions (31%) on nearly 300,000 election-related posts, while ideologically nonaligned pages earned nearly 560 million interactions (15%) on over 430,000 such posts.
A similar pattern occurred in the year before the insurrection, as right-leaning pages earned over 3.2 billion interactions on over 750,000 election-related posts created between January 6, 2020, and January 6, 2021 -- earning roughly 50% of total interactions on just over 40% of such posts. Left-leaning pages earned nearly 32% of total interactions on over 25% of election-related posts during this time, and ideologically nonaligned pages earned almost 18% of total interactions on nearly 25% of such posts.
Interactions on election-related posts from Facebook pages posting about U.S. political news before and after the Capitol insurrection
FAILURE: Facebook continues to platform numerous posts from right-leaning pages about “Stop the Steal”
In response to the January 6 Capitol attack, Facebook vowed to remove posts with the phrase “stop the steal” under its Coordinating Harm policy, including retroactive removal. However, Facebook used a very narrow interpretation of its policy, allowing many posts and groups with similar language about a “stolen election” to remain active on the platform. On January 28, 2020, Media Matters reported that over 150 Facebook groups focused on election fraud had avoided removal, including 23 groups that mentioned “stop the steal” or used similar language about a “stolen election” in their name or within posts.
A year after the January 6 attack, there are still posts with the phrase circulating on Facebook. In fact, we found at least 484 posts with “stop the steal” or “sts” that were created by right-leaning pages in the year before the riot -- between January 6, 2020, and January 6, 2021 -- that Facebook has failed to remove. These posts earned over 2.6 million interactions. Notably, the top 10 “Stop the Steal” posts from this time frame with the most interactions were either posted by Trump, his campaign, or right-wing outlet Newsmax. Five of these posts were from Trump and his campaign.
Donald Trump_facebook post_20201212
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Team Trump_facebook post_20210106
Additionally, between January 7 and December 31, 2021, right-leaning pages made 238 posts mentioning “stop the steal” or “sts,” which earned over 415,000 interactions combined. These include at least 40 posts that push election misinformation, criticize Facebook for banning the phrase, or contain misinformation about the insurrection.
Nick Adams_facebook post_20210210
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LifeZette Faith_facebook post_20210112
Women for Trump_facebook post_20210111
FAILURE: There are still hundreds of groups filled with election misinformation on Facebook
Two days after Election Day 2020, it was clear that Facebook was already having problems. The platform took down one of the biggest “Stop the Steal” groups at approximately 300,000 members, and it added labels to posts discussing election results. However, like many of Facebook’s actions to stem misinformation, this was too little too late. By then, groups were proliferating on the platform, finding ways around Facebook’s moderation, and using the platform to organize and prepare for violence on January 6.
A year later, election misinformation continues to spread in private and public Facebook groups as administrators only gained more power to evade content moderation.
In October 2021, we identified 203 active groups dedicated to pushing election misinformation -- and that number has increased since then. As of January 3, there are still 203 groups spreading election misinformation and conspiracy theories, with nearly 240,000 members; 18 of them specifically use variations of “stop the steal” or mention a “stolen election” in their name. Another 15 groups spreading election misinformation during that time have since been archived -- meaning that members have access to posts in the groups but can no longer create new ones.
While some of these groups are still focused on the 2020 presidential election, others have pivoted to combat so-called “election fraud” in state-level elections. For example, “NJ Election Integrity Project” has spread misinformation about the 2021 gubernatorial race. It is perhaps Facebook's biggest failures that it has let misinformation about 2020 election seep into 2021 and beyond.
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As the nation approaches the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a disturbing trend has emerged in the right-wing media ecosystem: the open approval and valorization of the event.
Such thoughts first emerged that very day, when far-right commentators like former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka and right-wing site the Gateway Pundit cheered on the “patriots” who had “taken over Capitol Hill.” But after the coup attempt failed, right-wing media proceeded in the following days and months to come up with other explanations of what had happened. While they painted various conspiracy theories of left-wing infiltration or claimed there had been no insurrection at all, they also urged strongly against any attempts to investigate the event further — which did not exactly demonstrate much confidence in the alternative hypotheses.
But more and more, conservative media outlets are collectively ending up right back where they started, with a full embrace of the event, consistent with former President Donald Trump’s claims that “the insurrection took place on November 3rd,” and that January 6 was a “protest of the rigged election.” (This has also spread through official Republican circles, such as the local Republican Party in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, which is preparing to hold a “Candlelight Vigil for J6 Patriots.”)
This right-wing media campaign to excuse the Capitol attack is seemingly reflected by views among the rank-and-file GOP: A recent CBS News/YouGov poll finds that Republican voters have become less disapproving of the events of January 6 than they once were. While the vast majority still say they disapprove, a deeper look finds that this opinion has become spread between those who “strongly disapprove” and a plurality who only “somewhat disapprove.” Moreover, only 21% of Republicans will describe the riot as an “insurrection,” while 47% describe the people who entered the Capitol as having been motivated by “patriotism,” and 56% say they had been “defending freedom.” Moreover, 38% of Republicans say that political violence could be justified over election results.
Indeed, much of the response to January 6 has depended on the source’s view about whether such an event could succeed — or only result in ignominious defeat. Far-right activist and talk show host Charlie Kirk, in the days following January 6, deleted a tweet in which he had boasted that his organizations were sending “80+ buses full of patriots” to Washington in order to “fight for this president.” A Turning Point Action spokesperson claimed that the organization had sent only seven buses, but it also later emerged that at least one suspect in the Capitol insurrection had traveled to D.C. on one of Turning Point Action’s buses.
It is also worth looking at what Kirk now has to say about political violence. When an audience member at one of Kirk’s events asked this past October, “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk responded that the questioner was “playing into all their plans,” because their opponents were “trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties.”(Others pointed out that Kirk’s supposed objection to violence was based on its high probability of failure instead of any moral qualms.)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has created a propaganda series claiming that the attack was a false flag operation mounted by government elements in order to persecute conservatives, has also for long time cultivated a parallel narrative in which the insurrectionists were just regular citizens who “talked about the Constitution, and something called their rights.” Moreover, Carlson has claimed, they “were correct” that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged against Trump — and “if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second,” and “maybe we should address their concerns." [vid]
CARLSON (HOST): What was January 6? Well, there was destruction of property, which we’re totally opposed to, but what motivated it? Why were all those people there?
Well, for the most part, a year later, it’s very clear, January 6 was essentially what it appeared to be. Thousands of ordinary American citizens, voters — people who believe in our democracy far more fervently than Liz Cheney ever has — came to Washington because they sincerely believed democracy had been thwarted.
They believed the presidential election was unfair, and they have a right to believe that and by the way, in many ways, they were correct. The presidential election was unfair and you don't have to get into anything about voting machines to believe that.
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OK, if someone broke the law, punish that person. That applies to BLM activists as much as it does to QAnon people. We're for enforcing the law, fairly, equitably. But we also think that as you do that, if a mass of people show up angry at the Capitol, you should at least pause for a second if you believe in democracy and ask, what are they angry about? Maybe we should address their concerns.
And on New Year’s Eve, right-wing site American Greatness— whose contributors have spread lies about the 2020 election and attacked Capitol Police officers — upped the ante with a piece titled “Of Reichstags and Bastilles.” Repeating a series of false claims that there was “overwhelming evidence of widespread voter fraud in multiple swing states,” contributor Eric Lendrum declared that “thus, the protesters were justified.”
The piece also claimed that Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was killed by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to climb through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby, was “an actual hero … who was willing to give her life for her country—and ultimately did just that, albeit in a far more tragic way.” (Babbitt had posted online the day before the Capitol attack that “Nothing will stop us,” further adding: “They can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours… dark to light!”)
Lendrum concluded his piece with a declaration that conservatives should “stop trying to qualify their stances on January 6 with an obligatory disavowal,” and instead openly celebrate the actions of that day as “a reaction to a long train of abuses and usurpations perpetrated against the American people by an entrenched elite class that has infected our institutions.”
The only course of action at this point is to be just as firm in our stance as the Left is. If they truly want to address January 6 by making dramatic historical comparisons, then so should we. If their aim is to make January 6 their Reichstag Fire, then we should go forward celebrating the events of that day as our Storming of the Bastille; a day where a symbol of the degeneration of our ruling class into total corruption and tyranny was challenged, and the elites were shown just what happens when millions of freedom-loving citizens finally grow sick and tired of a boot perpetually stomping on their necks.
Another peculiar set of visuals and commentary came Monday night on the far-right One America News.
OAN host Natalie Harp interviewed right-wing author Lee Smith about how the events of January 6 had supposedly been used to defame Trump supporters in general, with Harp calling the date a “plot against the people.” (This phrasing was in contrast to a book that Smith published in 2019, The Plot Against the President, denouncing the Trump-Russia investigations.)
While OAN aired B-roll photos and video of the January 6 attack itself,Smith claimed that the investigations were “effectively the demonization and in some cases the criminalization of opposition” to the Obama and Biden “faction” in American politics. “It’s despicable, but that's what we're up against. We're up against a very, a very ugly faction of the American public sphere."
at [vid] the end of the segment, Harp returned to the subject of the 2020 election itself as a supposed grievance that led to the Capitol attack: “But again, they want to talk January 6 — they don't want to talk November 3. I wish the Republican Party and even the conservative media would’ve spent a week talking about November 3 on the anniversary of that.”
And in an appearance Tuesday morning on Newsmax, far-right commentator Michael Savage praised a new wave of conservative activism, such as contentious appearances at school board meetings, as “mini January 6 rebellions.”
In short, the imagery of that day is no longer something to be shied away from — but to be held up as a banner going forward.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/msnbc-angelo-carusone-describes-how-fox-news-picking-crazy-things-fever-swamps-and-pushing
ALICIA MENDEZ (HOST): Time, again, to raise the alarm about the danger of selling lies as journalism. We know the 1/6 committee has revealed texts from Fox News hosts sent to members of the Trump administration as the riot unfolded. But now Fox is apparently so powerful that it now has a sitting senator backtracking, and apologizing for calling the Capitol a terrorist attack. Joining us now to discuss, the president of Media Matters, Angelo Carusone. Angelo, thank you so much for being with us. Listen, this is your bread and butter. This is what you do day in, day out. So when I saw this, I needed to know what you thought about why this unfolded the way it did, what it tells us about Fox News, and what it tells us about the state of the Republican Party.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT OF MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Well, there's a lot there. And I would just say there's one thing that's really important here, it's that one of Ted Cruz's penances wasn't just that he had to backtrack. During that same segment, he also endorsed and started to carry water for Tucker Carlson and Fox News’ conspiracy theory that the attack on January 6 was actually a FBI-orchestrated false flag operation. That happened in that exact interview as well, and that was Ted Cruz's way of trying to demonstrate that – to get Tucker and the audience to believe them.
And the reason I start with that example is because it illustrates a few things: One, that it is really here that Fox is really at the nexus of power. Because they weren’t just able to get him to apologize and to backtrack, but actually to start carrying water for Fox News' narrative. And that's where the power really comes from. And if I would describe it, I would say it's unrivaled agenda-setting power at this point. And that was always their purpose. Remember, they were born – I think the way you described it at the beginning was spot-on. They’re not a news operation, they were born as a political operation. That was the entire theory behind Fox News. Sure, they make a bunch of money on the side, but that isn't the goal. The goal really is political power, and the Ted Cruz thing is just an example of it.
MENDEZ: The reason I was so struck by this, and you know, is we always come back to this question of who is a trusted messenger, who could actually be the person to say the election was fair and true and we have to believe this vote count and we have to move on, and what happened on January 6 was an attack on American democracy and here's the path forward. When you see someone who attempts to do that even for a fleeting second, then taken down so quickly, it diminishes hope that there is even a possibility that there can be that messenger. Because the other side is clearly so powerful.
CARUSONE: Yes, it does. It actually does diminish that hope, because we actually need Fox's – I mean, just imagine COVID and the way that the country responded to a public health crisis, not a political question, but a public health crisis, if Fox News didn't begin by calling COVID a hoax. Then promotes – for two months promoting a fantasy treatment of hydroxychloroquine, and then the remaining summer downplaying the threat of the virus, and then now, of course, their antagonism toward vaccinations. It would be a different response, right? I mean, and that just illustrates to your point how depressing it can be sometimes. And that doesn't mean we're stuck with it. I think part of it is, and I think broadly themedia and the public has been slow to react, because, you know, we value free speech and they exploit that. They exploit one of the American values, is that we care about freedom of expression and free ideas. They exploit that, and that means they exploit that to get away with accountability.
And so many have said, well, they get to have their opinions, they get to have their take, but what the result of that is, is that we ignore their destructive influence. And then as a result of that, then the accountability and consequences needed to diminish and dilute what that destructive potential really is. I mean, they have hosted people who don’t – members of Congress that don’t support Joe Biden as president more than 947 times. Ted Cruz is an anomaly on Fox News, not the norm, when it comes to who they host and who they promote. And if you think about that in the context of his political aspirations -- and he's not the only one, he can't run for president if Fox News ices him out. It's a dealbreaker, forget about it. There's no chance.And that then portends the future and it gets to, I think, an important part of this discussion, which is that we're going to have to recognize the threat and then start to take more serious concerted efforts to hold them accountable and force some change.
MENDEZ: Angelo, I only have about 30 seconds left, but I want to loop back to something you said in that first answer, which is that what struck you wasn't just the fact that Ted Cruz came on and apologized, but then he was forced to carry water for this conspiracy theory. What does it tell you that a year out, they are feeling the need to complicate and heighten the lies that they have already put out there?
CARUSONE: Yeah. This is exactly how they're going to retain their power. And it says a lot about what this means for the future. Because I said they were unrivaled. And the reason they are unrivaled is because Limbaugh is not around anymore and the rest of the right-wing media is really fragmented. The way that Fox has responded is by picking up crazy things from the fever swamps, things that wouldn't have made Fox News five years ago, and now they're actively now promoting them on the channel. The FBI false flag thing is one of these examples. And so what does that mean? More stuff coming from what otherwise would have been the fringes that never would have seen the light of day. And so the fact that they're going to turn people like Ted Cruz into validators and messengers for it is quite bad.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/year-after-january-6-one-america-news-has-found-its-insurrectionist
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no lnx vid
A year after January 6, One America News has found its insurrectionist footing
OAN spent the last year promoting GOP voter suppression efforts, selling airtime to a demented pillow maven, and priming its audience for political violence -- perhaps even civil war
WRITTEN BY BOBBY LEWIS
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM BEATRICE MOUNT
PUBLISHED 01/06/22
The January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump was a watershed moment for conservative media. The “peaceful transition of power” that has long been a force in the mythologization of American democracy broke down that day, and rather than owning up to the gravity of a violent attack on that tradition, One America News Network stuck to its familiar playbook of lies and deceit – this time in service of increasing voter suppression.
A survey performed inSeptember 2021 found that 68% of Republicans wrongly believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Among Republicans who primarily trust far-right outlets like OAN, 97% believed the election was stolen. This correlation is no coincidence, and right-wing media’s continued lies about the 2020 election have provided fuel for nationwide voter suppression efforts by the GOP. In the wake of the Capitol attack, OAN became an important part of the conservative media campaign pushing a whopping 440 bills in state legislatures in 2021 that attempted to restrict voting access.
Voter suppression is nothing new for the conservative movement, but OAN used the aftermath of January 6 to double down on election lies and promote efforts to make voting more difficult for its fellow Americans – while priming its right-wing audience for a potential civil war.
OAN helped drive a frenzy for fraudulent election audits
OAN correspondent Christina Bobb disputed the 2020 election results before a winner was even declared, a moment which was a harbinger for her coverage in 2021. Fueled by a passionate embrace of the Big Lie that the election had been stolen, Bobb essentially became a salesperson for election audits in any state that would entertain the idea.
Bobb provided documents and testimony to get the Arizona audit in motion, and founded a nonprofit to raise money for the audit. Her group Voices & Votes raised $605,000 for the Arizona audit, or about 10% of its cost, undoubtedly in part because of Bobb’s frequent fundraising during her audit coverage on OAN.
The amateurish operation in Arizona appears to be the playbook for other so-called “audits” going forward, even though it confirmed both President Joe Biden’s victory in the state and the oft-asserted fact that there was no significant fraud. But that didn’t stop Bobb or other audit extremists.
Bobb has been concentrating her efforts to spread audits to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, counting on friendly GOP legislatures to indulge in the Big Lie. Some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are making moves toward their own audits. In Texas, which Trump won handily, preliminary results of an audit have once again confirmed earlier counts.
Besides its own correspondent, OAN has helped create a second star of the right-wing election fraud movement. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was already known before the 2020 election to be a prolific, unhinged Trump supporter, but Lindell’s delusions turned into an erratic fusillade of election lies, and -- unprecedented in television news -- the wealthy pillow CEO acquired vast swaths of OAN airtime in 2021 to zealously push his own false claims and conspiracy theories.
OAN repeatedly aired at least three different Lindell “documentaries” alleging to unravel the conspiratorial web behind the 2020 election. Additionally, OAN ran ads for Lindell’s three-day “cyber symposium” over 150 times in a single week, before devoting more than 30 hours of live coverage to his erratic event. Just before Lindell's symposium began, OAN was sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation over spreading other election lies; later the network was hit with another defamation suit from voting technology company Smartmatic.
OAN followed the symposium and defamation suit by letting Lindell take over its evening programming on at least three occasions. In his “The Lindell Report” the businessman aired even more potentially defamatory election lies.
OAN backed voter suppression attempts nationwide
Pursuant to its whole-of-network embrace of the Big Lie, OAN gave friendly coverage to or expressed outright support of several voter suppression efforts in states all over the country.
OAN’s prime-time shows became important stops for Texas state legislators to promote Senate Bill 7, which “includes provisions to limit early voting hours, curtail local voting options and further tighten voting by mail.” On June 1, OAN’s Natalie Harp hosted GOP state Rep. Kyle Biedermann to raise concerns about “a lot of things going on against the laws” in 2020, like “drive-thru voting” and “ballots that were mailed out that shouldn’t have been mailed out.” OAN’s Dan Ball hosted state Sen. Bob Hall, who claimed that SB 7 would guard against what he called “soft fraud” by “election officials taking advantage of rules to bend them as much as they could in their favor.” According to Media Matters’ data, since December 2020, eight Texas state legislators have made at least 23 appearances on OAN prime time, many of them clustered around the SB 7 debate.
The Georgia omnibus election bill was another focal point of OAN programming, particularly since the network is also interested in fomenting an election audit in Georgia. In ostensible news segments, OAN reports called Senate Bill 202 a “voting rights bill” that is “securing integrity for future elections,” and literally laughed at the notion that anyone would take issue with these “common-sense changes.” The Justice Department filed suit against Georgia over a long list of “racially discriminatory” provisions in the law, including “the prohibition on efforts by churches and civic groups to provide food or water to persons waiting in long lines to vote.”
OAN frequently turns to one guest in particular for Georgia political commentary: former state representative and current gubernatorial candidate Vernon Jones. According to Media Matters' data, Jones has made at least 26 appearances on OAN prime time since December 2020 -- often dedicated to promoting his campaign for governor while pushing election lies and audit attempts.
Video file
CitationFrom the October 5, 2021, edition of OAN's Real America with Dan Ball
OAN primed its audience for more political violence
On June 23, correspondent Pearson Sharp drew widespread condemnation for an OAN segment suggesting mass executions of Democrats for supposedly stealing the election from Trump.
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Declaring the 2020 election was actually “overthrown,” Sharp told his audience: “Any American involved in these efforts, from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government officials, is guilty of treason under U.S. Code. 2381, which carries with it the penalty of death.”
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Despite the unmistakable clarity of Sharp’s words, he told Talking Points Memo, “Neither I, nor OAN, are suggesting anyone should be executed,” but added, “That is for the appropriate law enforcement agencies to determine.”
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Sharp’s midsummer bloodlust wasn’t much of an aberration for One America News Network. OAN guests have casually gamed out civil war scenarios on-air, and the network has aired reports accusing “retired Democrat generals” of spreading civil war allegations against Republicans, while falsely claiming “evidence indicates that it is actually the left that is at war.”
Though she did not directly suggest violence, Bobb brought in the new year by strongly denouncing the Biden administration as “fascist” and “illegitimate,” in part for having “faked an insurrection on the Capitol” and stealing the 2020 election. For a conservative steeped in Second Amendment mythology about “the tree of liberty” and “the blood of tyrants,” the dots don’t need to be connected.
Wayne Allyn Root, a radio host and far-right conspiracy theorist, appeared on OAN in December and denounced Biden’s “communist dictatorship” for stealing both the 2020 election and Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, giving Democrats their current tie-breaking Senate majority “destroying this country.” Root accused Democrats of “looking for a civil war,” which he claimed conservatives like him do not want -- but later in the same rant, Root said that the oppression of conservatives by the Democratic Party “is a lot worse” than the conditions that merited the American Revolution.
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“The worst is yet to come,” Root warned.
Video file
Citation From the December 29, 2021, edition of OAN's The Real Story with Natalie Harp
OAN is headed into 2022 with more of the same lies, and little care for any negative consequences
From OAN’s perspective, 2021 was a good year for “election integrity.” OAN’s Bobb fought for and secured an Arizona election audit, and successfully spun the mundane results into enough fuel to keep pushing for more audits. OAN collected viewers and money from airing MyPillow’s Lindell, even if it did help get the network sued for defamation. Several of the voter suppression initiatives OAN supported became law. OAN’s suggestions of political violence have retained a veneer of plausible deniability while priming the audience with fury and fear to keep pushing for more voter suppression.
Reckless, false commentary about stolen elections and calls for punishing enemies are how we got Trump supporters invading the Capitol, menacing members of Congress, and chanting to execute Trump’s vice president one year ago. But it’s all just good business for OAN.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/dennis-prager-january-6-smokescreen-nazis-used-reichstag-fire-thats-all-it
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/maga-or-antifa-the-right-wing-war-for-control-of-the-insurrection-narrative/
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no lnx many vids
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MAGA or Antifa? The Right-Wing War for Control of the Insurrection Narrative
Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | January 4, 2022
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In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a battle broke out for control of the narrative regarding the events of that day. The battle was not between the left and the right, but rather between varying factions of the right-wing movement, as a variety of MAGA activists sought to shape the narrative about what had unfolded at the Capitol. Would they take pride in the Trump loyalists storming the Capitol, or would they baselessly blame the insurrection on left-wing insurgents?
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To objective outside observers, it was clear that supporters of former President Donald Trump had violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to intimidate members of Congress into refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Threats of violence had filled social media and calls for war and revolution were ubiquitous at right-wing rallies in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6. As such, it was no surprise when MAGA activists immediately began praising the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol in the days after Jan. 6.
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For example, just two days after the insurrection, radical right-wing anti-Islam activist John Guandolo praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress.
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A few days later, Guandolo asserted that those who condemned the insurrection were “enemies of the republic” and should be “swinging from a rope because these are traitors to the country.”
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QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine was equally proud of the “patriots” who ransacked the Capitol. Lorraine, who had been covering the Jan. 6 events for radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars network, filed a report on her way back to Texas in which she gushed that she had “never felt more pride in my heart and soul than yesterday.”
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Lorraine lashed out at those in the MAGA movement who were already trying to distance themselves from the insurrection by falsely blaming the attack on the Capitol on left-wing activists. “No one should be blaming antifa for what happened,” Lorraine said. “American patriots did this. And it’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.”
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Likewise, Brandon Straka, a speaker at the Jan. 5 so-called Stop the Steal rally who has since pleaded guilty to joining the mob storming the Capitol, took to Twitter on Jan. 6 to shame conservatives who weren’t supporting “freedom loving Patriots” storming the Capitol.
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“Be embarrassed & hide if you need to- but I was there. It was not Antifa at the Capitol. It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not,” Straka wrote on Twitter, according to a criminal complaint.
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Not everyone agreed with Lorraine and Straka’s assessment. Even as Trump loyalists fought Capitol police, right-wing conspiracy theorists like Lin Wood and Mark Burns took to various social media platforms to claim that “antifa”—conservatives’ shorthand for anti-fascist activists—was behind the attack. Fox News personality Laura Ingraham—whom the House select committee revealed to have pleaded with Trump’s chief of staff to get Trump to tell his supporters to go home on Jan. 6—went on her show in the hours following the attack to claim “antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed similar messages.
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Perhaps nobody better illustrates the “blame antifa” camp than former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Just hours after the insurrection, Bachmann was baselessly declaring those who breached security and ran loose through the Capitol were actually left-wing “rabble-rousers paid to put together a coup.”
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In the following weeks, Bachmann repeatedly insisted that the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by “the progressive left.”
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“It is my opinion that this was a theatrical event that the progressive left put on,” Bachmann said. “The individuals who were the instigators, who brought this about, these were agitators brought in to create this problem. I believe it was specifically done to rebrand Donald Trump as being an insurrectionist and a leader of a terrorist movement. I also believe that this was done to rebrand the Make America Great agenda—because remember, that was considered extremely popular by about 80 million Americans—so they wanted to rebrand Make America Great as an evil thing and those of us who supported Donald Trump and that agenda as evil and terrorists.”
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By July, Bachmann was claiming that MAGA activists had nothing to do with the events of Jan. 6 and that left-wing activists dressed in black clothing had been bused in to attack the Capitol.
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“There were some bad actors who had climbed up … and they actually were pounding on the glass,” Bachmann claimed. “Now, a normal person doesn’t do that. A normal person would never think to pound on the glass. I’ve seen the videotape of the first 14 people who went into the building. They were all dressed in black. They look like they’d been trained as warriors, the people who went in. This was clearly a planned event; that was not the Trump supporters who were around the building. What my conclusion was on-site is that this was nothing short of a coup.”
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Despite the initial elation experienced by many MAGA activists in the wake of the insurrection and the endless praise for the “patriots” who had carried it out, the right-wing narrative about the events of Jan. 6 eventually solidified once the reality of the situation began to set in. As hundreds of Trump-loving activists began to face arrest and conviction stemming from their actions on that day and the disgrace the insurrection began to stain the MAGA movement, parts of Trump’s base and the former president himself collectively embraced the baseless belief that the entire thing had been a “false flag” orchestrated by left-wing groups.
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So complete has the collective brainwashing been that even those who had initially celebrated the attack on the Capitol reversed course.
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John Guandolo, who initially praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress, now claims that he was outside the Capitol during the events on Jan. 6 and saw “several busloads” of “antifa people and non-patriot hostiles” mixing with the crowd and entering the Capitol.
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“It makes you wonder what is actually going on,” Guandolo said. “We know what’s going on. What happened on Jan. 6 was the surrender of the republic and the takeover of the republic.”
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John Guandolo | ReAwaken America Tour Dallas
Likewise, DeAnna Lorraine, who was on the ground at the Capitol during the insurrection and initially declared that she could not have been prouder about what happened, completely changed her tune and began insisting that the insurrection was a “false flag” operation set up to “trap” Trump supporters and provide justification for their persecution.
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Lorraine eventually so thoroughly repudiated her initial support for the “patriots” who carried out insurrection that she ultimately began spreading a conspiracy theory that police officers who had been in the Capitol that day—several of whom have since died from suicide—were being murdered by the “deep state” to cover up the truth about the events of Jan. 6.
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A new NPR/Ipsos poll released Monday shows how deeply this narrative has burrowed its way into the public’s beliefs.. According to the poll, nearly one-third of Republicans falsely say the attack on the Capitol was carried out by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents.”
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Of course, this entire narrative shift regarding the events of Jan. 6 raises the question of why MAGA and the GOP have been intractably opposed to the efforts by the House select committee to investigate the attack. After all, if Jan. 6 was nothing but a “false flag” operation carried out by left-wing operatives for the purpose of discrediting Trump and his supporters, wouldn’t Trump and his supporters want that truth to be exposed?
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Tags: Brandon Straka DeAnna Lorraine John Guandolo Michele Bachmann Capitol Insurrection
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