Ossoff, jon Sen

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an 12 24

grilled dejoy

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hits hard on corruption // --> crypto?

an 8 26

Trump communications director put on blast for profane attack on US senator

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AN 5 26

Kip Talley, chief of staff to Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia), has been caught trying to free a Holocaust denier from prison.

Collins is currently the frontrunner for the Georgia U.S. Senate Republican runoff to take on Sen. Jon Ossoff (D).

Talley popped up in group chats given to Slate with white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. He has been working to help Charles Johnson, a racist and Holocaust denier who was in prison from November 2025 to February 2026, the Dec. 2025 chats revealed.

The report cited some of Johnson's controversial statementson the Holocaust, such as: “I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explained in a fact-check that the number citing 6 million Jews who were killed comes from the reports and records from surviving Nazi Germans themselves. They also used "prewar and postwar demographic studies; records created by Jews during and after the war; documentation created by resistance groups and underground activists; as well as other available, extant archival sources."

In 2016, Johnson appeared on a white nationalist podcast where he discussed his belief in “race realism.” He also shared an article claiming Black Americans had a “violence gene," Slate cited.

The chats show that Talley was spinning a tale that he was conducting "oversight." He also begged for fellow extremists to donate money so Johnson could afford items in the prison commissary.

“I’m reaching out to my people at [the] FBI and DOJ. Trying to get him out,” Tally told the group.

Johnson has a history of writing "news stories" that have been debunked as untrue. He was also one of the first early users of Twitter, who was banned after urging his followers to assassinate Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson.

Johnson has gone MIA as the Trump administration enters its second year. He has been meeting with Cabinet officials and members of Congress, the report cited.

Johnson ended up in jail after he was "found civilly liable for $71 million in damages in acivil racketeering case." He was ultimately found in contempt of court.

The case surrounded his claim of being a U.S. intelligence agent and "running a fraud and extortion scheme." He refused to cooperate with investigators searching for his assets.

Collins scored 40 percent of the vote in the GOP primary and is set for a runoff on June 16 against Derek Dooley.

It's the second major Collins scandal in recent weeks after the congressman was forced to fire his top political aide, Brandon Phillips, who used the campaign's social media to mock the wife of a GOP strategist who is an alleged survivor of sexual assault.

Then there's Collins' congressional office's digital director, whorecently accosted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) with a slew of antisemitic slurs and insults. However, Lawler isn't Jewish

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AN 4 25

President Donald Trump's top loyalists are angling to climb the political ladder to help secure the future for his ultra-MAGA movement—and position themselves for greater influence. House members like far-right U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are looking at the U.S. Senate, and far-right U.S. senators like Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) reportedly see hope in governors' mansions.

Some critical U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle are retiring, like Republican former Majority and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the second-highest-ranking Democrat senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois.

"Democrats anxious to deny Donald Trump and his Republican Party a governing trifecta as soon as possible are feeling pretty good about their prospects for flipping the House in 2026, given the GOP’s fragile margin of control and the historical pattern of sizable midterm losses for the president’s party," New York magazine's "Intelligencer" reported last month.

"But the Senate, which has the power to confirm Trump’s executive branch and judicial nominations, is really going to be a reach. Democrats would need to flip four Senate seats to win control of the chamber. And an already difficult landscape is being made even tougher by the retirements of Democratic incumbents Gary Peters of Michigan, Tina Smith of Minnesota, and now Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. All three of these open seats could potentially trigger competitive races in 2026."

IFrame Content

Enter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who went from a freshman stripped of all of her committee assignments over incendiary language, to becoming chair of the Delivering on Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) subcommittee. She also sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Congresswoman Greene is now thinking about becoming Senator Greene. If successful, her controversial tactics could have a dramatic impact on what is supposed to be the "world's greatest deliberative body."

Rep. Greene is reportedly eyeing a run to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, and believes she would “crush” any GOP primary opponent—except Governor Brian Kemp, should he choose to enter the race—according to the right-wing website Daily Caller.

"Republicans are laser-focused on defeating Ossoff, whose narrow victory over former Republican Georgia Sen. David Perdue in a January 2021 runoff election was partly responsible for costing Senate Republicans their majority during the 2020 cycle," Daily Caller notes, adding, "Ossoff is the only Senate Democrat running for reelection in a state that Trump won last November."

Could Greene beat Ossoff?

"This would be a dream for Dems in Georgia," should Greene run, observed veteran journalist Lydia Polgreen.

"Somewhere at the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] some operative is frantically wondering if there is anything they can do to ensure this happens," wrote University of Pennsylvania political and media historian Brian Rosenwald.

A Daily Caller source also suggested Ossoff would retain his Senate seat, especially should the election move into a runoff. And Ossoff "has been taunting Greene to jump into the race."

Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville is reportedly mapping out a run for the Alabama Governor's mansion.

"Tuberville told a group of donors at a private event on Wednesday night that his mind is officially made up," the conservative website Yellowhammer News reported. "Rather than seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate, he is ready to run his next race in Alabama, and serve the people of the state in Montgomery instead of Washington.

An official campaign announcement is imminent in the coming weeks, but latest reports offer insight into a finalized decision by Tuberville, who has been privately discussing jumping into the 2026 gubernatorial race for quite some time."

Senator Tuberville reportedly is "furious" at the leak, according to an opinion column at Alabama Political Reporter.

"Tuberville melted down like a plastic lawn chair in July. By Thursday morning, the whispers had turned into headlines. Then Tuberville took to Facebook — and things got weird."

“While I appreciate all the interest,” Tuberville wrote, “Suzanne and I are still praying about how to best serve the people of Alabama. When I have an official announcement about my future, you’ll hear it directly from me.”

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, a top "Trump loyalist," is "strongly looking" at a run for the Tennessee governor's mansion.

The Tennessean reports that "early polling suggests she would likely be the Republican frontrunner. Some politicos across the state consider her success a foregone conclusion: at a Tennessee Chamber of Commerce event in January, attendees called her 'Gov. Blackburn.'"

And U.S. Rep. Jim Comer (R-KY), the chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, has also said he would be interested in running for governor.

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1020 truthout

2020 ELECTION

Georgia Does Not Have Enough Backup Paper Ballots Ready if Voting Machines Fail

an 820

David Perdue of Georgia, a Republican up for re-election this fall, recently introduced a bill called the ”Safely Creating Healthy Opening Options Locally Act” (the SCHOOL Act), which would give Education Secretary Betsy DeVos control over $50 billion in federal relief grants to local school districts. In the past, Perdue has repeatedly called for defunding and abolishing the Department of Education.

Under the bill

Perdue, who finds himself in a tight race against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a media executive and former congressional candidate, has pitched the bill as way to incentivize schools to reopen amid the coronavirus outbreak, which he once compared to car crashes....

Jon Ossoff announces Senate run against Georgia’s David Perdue

Laura Clawson / Daily Kos

code red jonathan simon update bk 5th ed

https://www.amazon.com/CODE-RED-Computerized-Election-American/dp/1500319856

ossoff recount sued for, not to contest b/c deadline passed, but to check; server degaussed, then moved to fed, next day 2 backups wiped;

election defnce alliance org

penn electronic; wi paper, in rect said he could not order manner of recount (with voting machine, just push same tab button again) so in wi 1/2? cty just did rescan?

...

https://www.alternet.org/activism/georgia-6th-house-district-special-election-case-gets-weirder-state-election-officials

fallout following a lawsuit filed in Georgia after its U.S. House Special Election last June get curiouser and curiouser, as we learned this week that the state attorney general's office has now quit its defense of the Secretary of State and the state's other top election official defendants in the case.

We've been covering this mess for months now (years, really), but particularly since the lawsuit [PDF] was filed in July, after the somewhat surprising results from June's U.S. House Special Election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, whereGA's former Republican Sec. of State Karen Handelreportedly defeated Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, but only on the state's 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems. (He defeated her nearly 2 to 1 on the only verifiable ballots in the race, the mail-in paper votes. Everything else regarding the results is unverifiable speculation.)

Late last week, we learned via Frank Bajak at the Associated Press, that technicians at Kennesaw State University's Center for Elections, which has been contracted to program all of Georgia's computer voting and tabulation systems systems for some 15 years, "wiped clean" the election server that was used to program the elections, ballots and tabulators, just days after the suit was filed in July. Its two backup servers were also subsequently wiped and "degaussed three times" in August, the day after the suit was moved from state to federal court.

GA's chief election official, Republican Sec. of State BrianKemp,who is running for governor in 2018, claims he knew nothing of the server deletions until AP's report last week. Previously, a huge fan of the Center for Elections at Kennesaw, Kemp cited the "gross incompetence" and "undeniable ineptitude" of the folks at KSU for whatever happened. Nobody has yet to take credit, however, for giving the instructions to delete the servers which held critical evidence that plaintiffs had hoped to have forensically investigated as part of the lawsuit. And then yesterday, in another flip-flop, Kemp called the entire matter "#fakenews."

All of that is disturbing on its own, but even more so in light of revelations earlier this year that the election server in question—which stored personal data for all of GA's 6.7 million voters and the electronic ballot programming and administrative passwords for the state's voting and tabulation systems—was left completely accessible online, no password necessary, for at least six months. Kennesaw was notified about the vulnerability by a data security researcher in August of 2016 (months before last year's Presidential election), but they failed to secure the server until after Politico's Kim Zetter revealed the vulnerability just prior to the GA-06 U.S. House race this year. (Samantha Bee's "Full Frontal" covered much of the story up to this point on her show last night.)

Then, on Wednesday evening, AP's Bajak offered another bombshell in reporting that the Republican state attorney general's office, which had been defending Kemp, Kennesaw and the state Elections Board in the matter, has now pulled out from defending them.The reasons offered by the state AG and Kemp's campaign for Governor (he's running in 2018) have conflicted with each other or with known evidence obtained during the multi-partisan lawsuit, which a Kemp campaign spokesperson describes to AP yesterday as "a tasteless nothingburger cooked up by liberal activists who know their lawsuit is nothing short of stupid."

One of those "liberal activist" plaintiffs, Republican Marilyn Mark, a longtime election integrity advocate and executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, confirms that nobody still knows who ordered the server deletion, nor why the state AG has dropped out of the case. "It's an enormous mystery, and the mysteries continue to increase every day," she says.

"I think that Brian Kemp is, and rightfully so, getting a black eye here," Marks tells me. "What he has done is shameful. There's no way to explain it. So I'm sure his defenders and campaign managers are doing everything they can to go on the offensive and try to make other people look like they are to blame, and that their candidate is innocent. But I think when people step back and say, wait a minute, if they erased the servers—and they did it twice—they did it for some reason. And it wasn't because our lawsuit was stupid."

She goes on to explain the "number of conflicting stories that Brian Kemp's people are telling" about when and why the compromised servers were deleted and why the AG's office is no longer willing to defend the case. She also details whether any of the information plaintiffs had hoped to examine from the servers might still be available in what is believed to be a partial copy of the servers obtained by the FBI when they came in to examine the reported data breach that occurred earlier this year, when the servers were discovered to have been left vulnerable online.

Georgia voters head to the polls for municipal elections being held next Tuesday, which will also be overseen by Kemp, programmed by Kennesaw, and run on the same wildly hackable, 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting and tabulation systems that lead to this entire mess in the first place.

She recently wrote [PDF] to Kemp and other election officials to ask them to make paper ballots available to voters since, as she tells me today, if the system was contaminated during the months it had been left vulnerable on the Internet, "They wouldn't have had time, even within the last year, to have cleaned up everything. Because, as you know, that malware can travel down to the memory cards, the voting machines, the optical scanners, and the jump servers down in the counties. Things could have traveled there in the last six months, year, two years—there's been no effort to try to disinfect all of the various components. I mean, there are 27,000 of these touch-screen voting machines in Georgia. There's no way that they should be in use when we know that this system was subject to a high degree of risk."

ref

https://apnews.com/0b9004bc3828468d9dc636054140a047

TheGeorgia attorney general’s office will no longer represent the state’s top elections official in an elections integrity lawsuit filed three days before a crucial computer server was quietly wiped clean.

The lawsuit aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily questioned touchscreen election technology, which does not provide an auditable paper trail.

The server in question was a statewide staging location for key election-related data. It made headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed for six months after he first reported it to election authorities. Personal data was exposed for Georgia’s 6.7 million voters, as were passwords used by county officials to access files.

The assistant state attorney general handling the case, Cristina Correia, notified the court and participating attorneys Wednesday that her office was withdrawing from the case, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press. Spokeswoman Katelyn McCreary offered no explanation and said she couldn’t comment “on pending matters.”

Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the main defendant, is running for governor in 2018 and his campaign said in a statement emailed to the AP that the attorney general’s office has a conflict of interest and cannot represent either Kemp’s office or the state elections board. Campaign spokesman Ryan Mahoney said in a text message that the conflict stems from “too many co defendants with potential differences in strategy, approach, etc.”

The secretary of state’s office had said in an earlier statement that the law firm of former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes [DEM]would represent Kemp and other state election officials. It made no mention of a conflict of interest.

The campaign statement quoted Mahoney as saying: “There is no scandal or vast conspiracy. This is a tasteless nothingburger cooked up by liberal activists who know their lawsuit is nothing short of stupid.”

Both Kemp andstate Attorney General Chris Carr are Republicans. Barnes is a Democrat.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system, Correia informed attorneys in the case in an Oct. 18 email. Twelve days earlier, she had informed the same group of attorneys that the data on the server was wiped on March 17, the same day it was returned to the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University by the FBI after a probe into the security incident. No one at the state attorney general’s office has explained Correia’s source for the apparently erroneous information on timing. The AP obtained both emails.

KSU email records obtained by the AP last week in an open records request say the server data was destroyed July 7.

The erased hard drives are central to the lawsuit because they could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by hackers. Russian interference in U.S. politics, including attempts to penetrate voting systems, has been an acute national preoccupation since last year.

It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased.

Kemp has denied ordering the data destruction or knowing about it in advance.His office’s general counsel issued a two-page report Monday claiming Kennesaw State officials followed “standard IT practices” in wiping the server that “were not undertaken to delete evidence.” It said it first learned of the wiping of the main election server on Oct. 24, when the AP first asked about it.

In a public statement on the server wiping two days later, Kemp’s office decried the KSU’s wiping of the server as reckless, inexcusable and inept.

The report released Tuesday says “current indications are” that the FBI retains an image of the server that it made in March when it investigated the security hole. The FBI has not responded to AP inquiries on whether it still has that image or has performed a forensic examination to determine whether data on the server might have been altered by hackers.

Executive Director Marilyn Marks of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in the case, called the attorney general’s office’s withdrawal from the legal defense shocking but not unexpected.

She accused Kemp of hiding the facts of the case — perhaps even from the state attorney general’s office.

“There have been multiple conflicting stories of how and when the evidence on the servers was destroyed.”

Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

Submit a confidential tip: https://www.ap.org/tips/