Hoffman rally forge
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this is main
see ginni
SEE PARDON TRUMP ED FUCKING MARTIN 11 25 mofo who me? vote video
fake elector indictment 4 24
kanye fuckery with spindell?
see also jake hoffman
open ltr usual suspect
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lifezette
Trump Grants Sweeping Pardons to Dozens Targeted After 2020 Election [WATCH]
By LifeZette News Staff
November 10, 2025
Image Credit: Brian Jason - Shutterstock.com
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President Donald Trump has issued a broad pardon proclamation extending clemency to dozens of allies who faced prosecution over efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The order, signed and released by the White House, declares the pardons part of an effort to correct what the president called a “grave national injustice” and move toward “national reconciliation.”
“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 presidential election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” the document reads.
MORE NEWS: British Artist Depicts Trump as Executed Prisoner in Swiss Display [WATCH]
The proclamation grants “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of presidential electors, whether or not recognized by any state or state official in connection with the 2020 presidential election, as well as for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 presidential election.”
Among those named are several high-profile figures who became central to post-election investigations, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal attorney and former mayor of New York; John Eastman, one of Trump’s lawyers involved in election-related legal strategies; and Tyler Bowyer, a senior member of Turning Point USA.
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In total, the list includes more than 70 individuals. The names listed in the document include Mark Amick, Kathy Berden, Christina Bobb, Joseph Brannan, Carol Brunner, Mary Buestrin, Darryl Carlson, James “Ken” Carroll, Brad Carver, Robert Cheeley, Kenneth Chesebro, Hank Choate, Jeffrey Clark, Vikki Consiglio, Nancy Cottle, James DeGraffenreid, John Downey, Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn, Amy Facchinello, Bill Feehan, Carolyn Fisher, Harrison Floyd, Clifford Frost, Kay Godwin, Edward Scott Grabins, Stanley Grot, John Haggard, Scott Hall, Misty Hampton, David G. Hanna, Mark Hennessy, Mari-Ann Henry, Durward James Hindle III, Andrew Hitt, Jake Hoffman, Burt Jones, Anthony T. Kern, Kathy Kiernen, Timothy King, Trevian Kutti, James Lamon, Cathleen Latham, Jesse Law, Stephen Lee, Michele Lundgren, Meshawn Maddock, Michael McDonald, Mark Meadows, Shawn Meehan, Robert Montgomery, Daryl Moody, Samuel I. Moorhead, Loraine Pellegrino, Sidney Powell, James Renner, Eileen Rice, Mayra Rodriguez, Mike Roman, Rose Rook, Kelly Ruh, Greg Safsten, David Shafer, Marian Sheridan, Ray Stallings Smith III, Robert F. Spindell Jr., Shawn Still, Ken Thompson, Pam Travis, James Troupis, Kent Vanderwood, Kelli Ward, Michael Ward, and C.B. Yadav.
The proclamation notes that the pardon applies only to those whose conduct was directly related to post-election challenges or alternate elector efforts, as well as activities tied to investigating or exposing alleged voting irregularities.
In a statement posted to X, Bowyer expressed gratitude toward President Trump and others who supported those charged in connection with the post-election cases.
“I am very grateful for the support of the President and his pardon attorney Ed Martin, and the many who have looked out for us since this expensive injustice has taken place in the swing states,” he wrote.
“We were targeted to sideline many of us politically. It has nearly bankrupted and caused severe trauma to many good people on this list—this is why it is important to get to the bottom of what was carried out against good faith and active citizens who took to the courts to ask questions about the 2020 election.”
MORE NEWS: Schumer Loses Grip as Eight Democrats Join GOP to Reopen Government [WATCH]
While the proclamation offers comprehensive relief for those prosecuted or investigated, it explicitly excludes President Trump himself.
00:22 / 00:46
“This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” the document states.
That clarification ensures that any ongoing or future legal proceedings involving the president personally are not affected by the order.
MORE NEWS: Billy Bob Thornton Tells Hollywood Elites to ‘Accept Your Little Award and Fk Off’ [WATCH]
The move, however, effectively brings to a close years of prosecutions, investigations, and civil actions targeting individuals tied to Trump’s post-election legal and political efforts.
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an vb 11 25
A video circulating on social media of Pima County election workers emptying an overfilled ballot drop box prompted threats against them that county officials have reported to law enforcement, county officials said.
Pima County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said she reported the threats this week to Tucson police and the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. Cázares-Kelly also said the workers followed all laws and required procedures.
“I’m surprised people didn’t quit on the spot,” she said in an interview with Votebeat Arizona Thursday.
The video was shot Tuesday as a bipartisan team of two workers and a supervisor began unloading the drop box, which has a capacity of 1,500 ballot envelopes but at the time had 3,000 stuffed into it, Cázares-Kelly said.
The 42-second video shows the workers pulling out ballot envelopes and placing them into a transfer bag. It also shows one of the workers telling a woman that the box is full, and she can instead place her ballot envelope directly into the transfer bag. The video was reposted by some social media accounts with large followings, though Votebeat couldn’t immediately determine the initial source of the video.
Cázares-Kelly said the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center — which says it is a joint effort between the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Arizona Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies — initially alerted her to the posts about the video late Tuesday.
Cázares-Kelly said she became aware Wednesday of threats posted on social media, some of which she said have since been removed. She read some to Votebeat, including one that said, “Shoot them, shoot them. Why are people just standing there and filming rather than stopping them?”
In a statement and a subsequent interview, Cázares-Kelly, a Democrat, stressed that the workers, who were making an emergency pickup because the box was overfilled, were following all laws and protocols. They wore lanyards with identification badges and were putting the ballot envelopes into transfer bags, which they subsequently sealed with zip ties and logged according to chain-of-custody procedures, she said. One of the workers is holding the zip ties as she moves envelopes from the box to the bag in the video.
In the statement, the Pima County Recorder’s Office said the team followed all necessary protocols, including taking the ballots to the ballot processing center “in a rental car clearly marked as an Official Election vehicle,” notifying the main office of arrival and departure times, and completing required transfer documentation.
The drop box was at a county recorder building, and in the video, a surveillance camera can be seen on the wall.
Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda, who is also a certified elections officer in Arizona, said she saw the video and also saw nothing wrong.
“What I see is three election workers doing their job,” Swoboda said. “They open the drop box and it’s full and that’s the sign of a good turnout.”
Swoboda said she tried calling the Pima County Recorder’s Office after seeing the video and the social media response, but the lines were jammed. Swoboda said the posts on the social media platform X mischaracterizing the video are part of a pattern in which innocent people are endangered by posts inaccurately suggesting they are doing something wrong. She said this trend is dangerous amid rising political violence.
Among those reposting the video Tuesday was state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican, who wrote, “Well this looks super duper secure,” adding a frowning emoji. Reached for comment about whether he had done due diligence before reposting the video and told of the threats, Hoffman, a Republican, said the questions show why people don’t trust the media.
“What did I say that would lead to them getting death threats?” he asked.
Hoffman and others, including state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, a Republican who is running for secretary of state, also posted on Election Day citing reports that Cázares-Kelly’s office was turning away political party observers at polling places. But there were no polling places, since the election in Pima County was a mail-only election. The observers were turned away from ballot-replacement centers.
The state Republican Party account, controlled by Swoboda, tweeted that there is no legal requirement to allow observers into a ballot replacement center, and that Pima County has never allowed them there.
Hoffman said Swoboda “sounds more like a Democrat these days.” Kolodin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cázares-Kelly said people should call her office for verification when they see social media posts accusing election workers of wrongdoing.
“I really hope that people can recognize the impact this is having on the security of our elections and our democracy,” Cázares-Kelly said. “Our elections are secure, they’re transparent, and I want to say that they’re safe, but right now I can’t say that with this type of activity.”
*Contact Votebeat at az.tips@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
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AN 11 25
Arizona Central reports high school teachers in Pima County are still reeling from online harassment and attacks after their Halloween costumes sparked outrage from Turning Point USA and Republican critics last week. But school officials say the educators wore the “bloody” shirts to advocate for math education, not to mock the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“These shirts were part of a math-themed Halloween costume meant to represent solving tough math problems,” Vail School District Superintendent John Carruth said in a letter to the school community. “The shirts were never intended to target any person, event, or political issue.”
AZ Central reports the firestorm erupted on Oct. 31, after teachers in the Cienega High School math department were photographed wearing bloodied white T-shirts with the phrase “Problem Solved” in black text. The school district shared a photo of the Halloween costumes on Facebook, which exploded over the internet thanks to lingering tension around Kirk’s murder seven weeks ago.
Turning Point’s online megaphone opened the gates to a blast of criticism and denunciation on X and other social media platforms, according to AZ Central. But the costumes had been used in reference to solving math problems at earlier events in 2024, long before Kirk’s assassination.
“But to leaders at Turning Point USA, Kirk’s political organization, the costumes resembled the white T-shirt Kirk wore when he was shot in the neck at an event in September. That shirt had also been emblazoned with black text, which read ‘FREEDOM.’ It became a symbol for his mourners after he died,” AZ Central reports.
“@vailschools, shut your school down, it's nothing more than a den of vile verminous scum. Shut this place down,” posted one commenter on X the day after Halloween, seemingly without knowing the full context of the image. “At the very least defund it entirely.”
Top elected leaders in the Republican Party also chimed in, with Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis accusing the teachers of “glorifying a murder just because they disagreed with the victim” in a post on X.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is himself known for incendiary comments regarding accident and death when victims are Democrats, amplified a post identifying each teacher with their name, phone number and email address.
Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R-Queen Creek) called the teachers “BLOODTHIRSTY” and “psychopaths” before deleting his post demanding they be fired.
“The fact that this photo was taken so out of context and spread so quickly without doing some simple fact-checking has been really harmful,” said Superintendent Carruth.
But Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet was unwilling to let go of his claim against the teachers despite the shirts also appearing last year.
“It's a very weird costume for teachers in general, but after what happened to Charlie, I'm absolutely floored they wore it again,” Kolvet said on X. “I do not believe for a second that all of them are innocent.”
Read the AZ Central report at this link.
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an sn 10 25
A Politico article about a leaked group chat of Young Republican leaders from across the country making racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments includes two people from Arizona, one of whom has documented ties to the white nationalist groyper movement.
The group chat of top officials in Young Republican Federation chapters from across the country, dubbed “RESTOREYR,” was leaked to Politico, which reported on a litany of comments made by participants. Offensive comments included making racist remarks about Black people, talking about putting Democrats in gas chambers, forcibly raping their enemies and more. The chat includes more than 250 slurs and one person saying “I love Hitler,” according to Politico.
One of the members of the chat was Arizona Young Republican Chairman Luke Mosiman, 25, who was alleged to have made racially charged comments about Black people and even floated an idea of linking their opponents in an election over control of the Young Republican National Federation to white supremacist groups — before saying it could backfire because it could result in the Young Republicans they needed to win the elections instead backing their opponent.
The Young Republican National Federation released a statement following the Politico report condemning the comments and calling for those involved to resign “from all positions within their state and local Young Republican organizations.”
In Kansas, the chairman of the state’s Republican Party announced that their Young Republicans chapter, which was involved in the chat leaks, was shut down. And he Arizona Republican Party came out strongly against the “disturbing language” used by Young Republican leaders in a statement released shortly after the story was published Tuesday
But Mosiman and the Arizona Young Republicans resisted the call that he and Rachel Hope, whose comments in the group chat were also mentioned in Politico’s story, resign. In a written statement released late Wednesday, the group instead cast Mosiman and Hope, who is the organization’s events chair, as victims, saying they “firmly reject any involvement in the ongoing political witch hunt targeting fellow Young Republican members.”
Their statement called it “disheartening” to “witness the double standard” displayed by their opponents within the conservative movement. They also lashed out at critics, saying some have failed to condemn violent texts by Virginia Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones or social media posts celebrating the death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, who was killed last month.
However, the group did condemn “Nazi ideology,” though its statement fell short of acknowledging what was said or apologizing for it.
“We express our sincere regret and unequivocally condemn any rhetoric that could be interpreted as sympathetic to Nazi ideology,” the statement says. The lengthy statement also says that the group has concerns over the way the messages were obtained and their validity.
Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has claimed online, posting a sworn affidavit, that the chats were leaked by Gavin Wax, a staffer in Trump’s State Department who formerly led the New York Young Republican club, whose own problematic chats were revealed in 2023.
Mosiman has been viewed by some as a rising star in Arizona conservative politics, but he also has close ties with the far-right and had courted controversy long before the group chat.
Hitler’s birthday
In April 2022, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar was listed as a “special guest” at an event in Tempe scheduled for April 20, a date that is revered by white supremacists and neo-Nazis because it is Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
The event had been organized by the American Populist Union, a white nationalist group that is closely aligned with groypers, the name for a group of young, male white nationalists who strive for their ideas to become a part of the Republican mainstream and are largely followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In 2021, Gosar was the first elected official to speak at Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference.
After the Mirror reported on Gosar’s promotion and anticipated attendance at the event and spurred national media coverage, Gosar pulled out. His office said he was never planning to attend, even though he promoted it on his social media accounts.
Mosiman attended, and was later featured in photos posted by APU and in
. Mosiman also follows a number of accounts connected to the groyper movement on his X account.
“Like it or not, Nick Fuentes is becoming a force in the GOP, you all need to understand that,” Mosiman said in a March 2021 tweet. “Stop acting like it’s a few nut cases, it’s not. Ignoring it isn’t working.”
Mosiman went on to say that he wasn’t a Fuentes supporter but he had watched his “Afpac speech” and it “was not bad.”
In that 2021 AFPAC speech, Fuentes called the Jan. 6 insurrection, where seven people died, “lighthearted mischief” and stressed white nationalist talking points. Mosiman was also photographed in September 2021 protesting U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly by the groyper-aligned Arizona College Republicans United. The photograph was posted in Instagram with the caption “CRU executed a protest with Groypers against Senator Mark Kelly.”
Far-right YouTuber John Doyle, one of the featured speakers at the April 2022 APU event, organized a “Stop the Steal” rally in Michigan with Fuentes and has posted highly misogynistic content, such as saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Doyle, along with other members of APU, were also in attendance at the first 76Fest, which one of its organizers dubbed “Hitler Youth, without the Hitler.”
Mosiman also promoted an event in December 2021 that he called “one of the most based events of the year” which was being put on by Republicans for National Renewal, which has ties to ethno-nationalism, and co-hosted by APU.
That event brought local politicians face to face with a host of far-right extremists, including a number of prominent groypers.
APU has denied ties to white nationalism or knowledge of the significance of the date of its 4/20 event.
TPUSA and Arizona lawmakers
But Mosiman’s involvement in Arizona politics goes beyond the groyper movement.
Online, Mosiman often interacted with many local politicians, and in recent years started coming to the defense of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA.
“I used to be not a huge fan of TPUSA, but after seeing hard working and effective conservatives like (Austin Smith) and (Tyler Bowyer), I changed my mind,” Mosiman wrote on X in 2022, referring to two of the Arizona-based group’s leaders.
Both Smith and Bowyer are listed as members of the advisory team for the Arizona Young Republicans chapter that Mosiman leads. TPUSA did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Neither did Nancy Cottle, Republican state Rep. Matt Gress and GOP state Sen. Jake Hoffman, who were also listed as advisory board members.
The website for the Arizona Young Republicans went offline on Wednesday, but archived snapshots were still online.
“Without a doubt, Turning Point Action had the most meaningful grassroots impact on Arizona,” Mosiman wrote on X on Nov. 11, 2024, shortly after last year’s election. “Hats off to (Tyler Bowyer) and his phenomenal staff.”
Bowyer is the Chief Operating Officer of Turning Point Action, the political action arm of Turning Point USA.
TPUSA has long been a target of the groyper movement ,but in recent years has seen itself move farther to the right and courting controversy for hiring racists.
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an 9 25
The Arizona Court of Appeals on Monday declined to take up Attorney General Kris Mayes’ appeal of a lower court’s decision to send the Arizona fake electors case back to a grand jury.
In the order, signed by Chief Judge Kent Cattani, the court said the decision was made based on the judges’ discretion.
In April 2024, an Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people for their involvement in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after Democrat Joe Biden won the state by around 10,000 votes.
All of the fake electors involved in the scheme were indicted, including Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, member of the Arizona Freedom Caucus and Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA CEO.
But in May, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers agreed with arguments from attorneys representing the fake electors that prosecutors had failed to disclose the full text of the Electoral Count Act to the members of the grand jury prior to the indictment. Myers ruled that Mayes would have to convene a new grand jury and share the text of the act in its entirety if she wanted to move forward with the case.
Instead, Mayes appealed the decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Now that the appellate court has declined the case, Mayes’ next steps are either to petition the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the trial court’s decision or to take the case back to a grand jury.
In response to the Appeals Court’s decision, the Arizona Republican Party issued a statement reiterating a claim from many of the indicted that the case was politically motivated.
“Arizona families deserve an Attorney General who prosecutes criminals, not political opponents,” AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda said in the statement. “Five years later, Kris Mayes is still fixated on 2020 while violent crime, fentanyl trafficking, and border chaos threaten our communities every single day. This obsession is not justice — it’s politics.”
Also among the indicted were Kelli Ward, who led the AZGOP at the time, Gregory Safsten, who was the AZGOP’s executive director, and former Trump staffers and campaign members including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Christina Bobb.
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an 4 25
The Republican gatekeeper standing in the way of the Democratic governor’s nominees to head state departments said this week that those directors need to have a “neutral, fair” approach to regulation.
But Sen. Jake Hoffman is using the committee to exact political vengeance on Gov. Katie Hobbs by unfairly targeting her nominees, said Christian Slater, the governor’s chief spokesman. He called Hoffman a “liar and a clown” who is “engaged in a partisan witch hunt.”
And while Hoffman may demand neutrality and fairness from Hobbs’ picks to head state agencies, the same can’t be said of the people who he summoned to testify on April 10 when the Senate Director Nominations Committee met to consider Hobbs’ nominee to lead the Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions.
A long line of far-right local Republican Party leaders blasted Barbara Richardson for a supposed anti-business stance and for participating in National Association of Insurance Commissioners special committees on diversity, equity and inclusion and climate resiliency.
In a March 27 press statement, Hoffman said that “qualified candidates should be free from any partisan political agenda” and accused Richardson of having a history of “radical leftist ideologies.”
Nearly all of the more than a dozen people who asked the committee not to recommend Richardson be confirmed as director were Republican Party activists or their associates. Some of the speakers disclosed their political affiliations, but several did not.
“We need a regulator who maintains a neutral, fair approach to regulation,” Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, said. “I don’t believe that Miss Richardson is that regulator.”
Richardson previously led insurance regulation departments in multiple states under both Democratic and Republican governors. The committee split along party lines to not recommend her confirmation.
State law requires the state Senate confirm a governor’s picks to lead agencies. Without a recommendation from the committee, the full Senate is unlikely to confirm Richardson’s appointment to head the Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions.
So far this year, the committee has recommended confirmation of eight of Hobbs’ department director nominees, and six of them have been confirmed by the Senate.
But in February, Joan Serviss, Hobbs’ nominee to head the Department of Housing, was dismissed from her position due to pressure from Republicans in the Senate.
When Serviss went before the committee after Hobbs nominated her as director in 2023, Hoffman accused her of plagiarism for copying language in press statements during a previous job. Later, he blamed her for a $2 million wire transfer the department made to scammers who impersonated a nonprofit.
The Director Nominations Committee, which was created in 2023 specifically to vet Hobbs’ director nominees, held several contentious and combative nomination hearings that year and refused to confirm most of the governor’s nominees.
Prior to the creation of that committee, Senate confirmations occurred with little fanfare following brief interviews with relevant legislative committees.
Hobbs attempted to sidestep the Senate approval process by appointing her director nominees as deputy directors, positions that don’t require Senate approval. But following a lawsuit from Senate Republicans, a judge ruled that Hobbs had broken the law in circumventing the approval process and ordered her to make new director nominations to be submitted to the Senate.
Richardson originally went before the committee on March 27, but was invited back on April 10 to explain some of her actions that Hoffman said caused him concern. Those included the way that she communicated rules to businesses that the department regulates, which Hoffman claimed went against state statute, as well as longer wait times for licensing.
Richardson explained that longer wait times were due to staff turnover and a significant increase in licensing renewal applications from around 81,000 in 2019 to nearly 122,000 in 2024.
Former Arizona Republican Party Treasurer Elijah Norton, who owns several businesses regulated by the Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions, told the committee that his testimony against Richardson came at great risk to his own business. Norton claimed that many other business owners were scared to speak to the committee because they feared retaliation from Richardson.
He accused her of being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” or a leftist disguising herself as a moderate. Norton said he didn’t believe her claims that her involvement in the DEI committee was only for learning purposes and that she did not implement any DEI practices in the department.
Joe Steenbergen, who also harshly criticized Richardson, did not tell the committee members that he works for Veritas Global Protection Services, one of the companies that Norton owns.
“I can say unequivocally that, since Miss Richardson assumed her role as acting director of the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions, or DIFI, the department has taken a complete nosedive,” he said.
Steenbergen added that the workers there have become apathetic and “less business friendly,” and he claimed that, if the Senate approved Richardson’s nomination, he would likely recommend that his employer leave Arizona for a state that’s more business friendly.
Other speakers who recommended against Richardson’s confirmation included Shelby Busch, the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee; Debbie Cheatham, an advisory board member for Arizona Right to Life; and Ron Smith, who ran the unsuccessful 2024 campaign for Congress for former Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern, who was one of the state’s most far-right lawmakers.
Slater said in a written statement that the Republican Party activists who testified had one job: beat up Richardson.
“Jake brought Republican precinct committeemen who don’t even know what DIFI stands for, let alone what it does, to engage in a hit job on a career nonpartisan public servant,” Slater said. “The only people who are harmed because of these political games are the people of Arizona.”
Kelsey Lundy, a lobbyist for Compass Strategies, spoke in support of Richardson, saying she’s been representing businesses regulated by DIFI for around 20 years and feels Richardson has treated her clients fairly and with no bias.
Chad Heinrich, CEO of Arizonans for Affordable Healthcare, also recommended that the committee approve Richardson’s nomination, saying that he’d witnessed her deference to state law and lawmakers.
Democratic Sen. Analise Ortiz, of Phoenix, apologized to Richardson for “the political hit job we saw today,” adding that she was disheartened to hear untrue claims that Richardson is a DEI activist.
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an 6 24
Chesebro among Trump allies hit with new fake elector indictments in Wisconsin
a number of fake electors promoted to RNC? or are delegates rally forge?
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arizona state senator indicted in fake electors scheme and ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2024/04/29 › politics › jake-hof...
jake hoffman arizona gop from www.cnn.com
Apr 29, 2024 — A state senator who was charged in Arizona's 2020 election subversion case and a former state representative who was expelled from office ...
Jake Hoffman (Arizona politician)
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jake_Hoffman_(Arizo...
jake hoffman arizona gop from en.wikipedia.org
Jake Hoffman is an Arizona state senator in Arizona's 15th district. He was previously a state representative in Arizona's 12th district.
Arizona GOP taps 'fake elector' for RNC post
NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com › politics › 2024-election › a...
jake hoffman arizona gop from www.nbcnews.com
Apr 28, 2024 — A grand jury in Arizona indicted state Sen. Jake Hoffman, among others, as a “fake elector” for his alleged efforts to overturn Joe Biden's win ...
Jake Hoffman (@jakehoffman561)
Instagram · jakehoffman561
16.7K+ followers
17K Followers, 1354 Following, 227 Posts - Jake Hoffman (@jakehoffman561) on Instagram: " CEO Invasion Digital Media Executive Director @tbyrs ...
Jake Hoffman
CFG Foundation
https://clubforgrowthfoundation.org › Fellow
jake hoffman arizona gop from clubforgrowthfoundation.org
Queen Creek, Arizona. Jake Hoffman is a Christian, husband, father of 5, businessman, contributing columnist at Townhall.com, public servant, conservative, ...
Missing: gop | Show results with: gop
Just when you think the Arizona Republican Party couldn't ...
The Arizona Republic
https://www.azcentral.com › laurieroberts › 2024/04/28
jake hoffman arizona gop from www.azcentral.com
Apr 28, 2024 — Opinion: The Arizona GOP elected indicted Sen. Jake Hoffman and expelled Rep. Liz Harris to the RNC. Could this party get any more nutty?
Jake Hofman | LD 15 | Arizona Senate Republicans
Arizona Senate Republicans (.gov)
https://www.azsenaterepublicans.gov › jake-hoffman
jake hoffman arizona gop from www.azsenaterepublicans.gov
Legislative District 15. . Home City: Occupation: Member Since: 2023 Committees. Chairman Government. Vice Chair Appropriations.
Arizona GOP picks indicted 'fake elector,' expelled ... - | KJZZ
| KJZZ
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jake hoffman arizona gop from kjzz.org
Apr 29, 2024 — The Arizona Republican Party this weekend elected a recently indicted state senator and an expelled former lawmaker as their new national ...
Jake Hoffman (@JakeHoffmanAZ) ...
X · JakeHoffmanAZ
2.8K+ followers
Christian | Husband | Dad of 5 | Tech CEO | Creative Agency CEO | AZ Senator | Founding Chair of @AZFreedomCaucus | RNC National Committeeman-elect for AZ.
Arizona Republicans Select Indicted Fake Elector to ...
Truthout
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jake hoffman arizona gop from truthout.org
Apr 29, 2024 — State Sen. Jake Hoffman was one of 18 individuals indicted for trying to subvert Arizona's election results in 2020.
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Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and several others were indicted in an election interference case in Arizona. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
Danny HakimMaggie Haberman
By Danny Hakim and Maggie Haberman
Published April 24, 2024
Updated April 25, 2024, 9:33 a.m. ET
Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election were indicted in Arizona on Wednesday, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf there to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state.
Boris Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s top legal strategists, was also among those indicted, a complication for Mr. Trump’s defense in the criminal trial that began this week in Manhattan over hush money payments made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.
The indictment includes conspiracy, fraud and forgery charges, related to alleged attempts by the defendants to change the 2020 election results. Arizona is the fourth swing state to bring an elections case involving the activities of the Trump campaign in 2020, but only the second after Georgia to go beyond the fake electors whom the campaign deployed in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.
The former president, who is seeking another term, was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Arizona case.
“I understand for some of you today didn’t come fast enough, and I know I’ll be criticized by others for conducting this investigation at all,” Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Democratic attorney general, said in a recorded statement. “But as I have stated before and will say here again today, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined. It’s too important.”
Thumbnail of page 1
Read the Arizona Election Indictment
Arizona on Wednesday indicted Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mark Meadows and a number of others who advised Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election, as well as the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf to try to keep him in power despite his loss in the state. Here is the indictment.
READ DOCUMENT 58 PAGES
Mr. Giuliani is Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer; Mr. Meadows was the White House chief of staff at the time of the 2020 election. They were among a number of defendants whose names were redacted from the indictment, though it was clear from the context and the descriptions who they were. For example, the passage referencing Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said among other things that he was known as “the mayor.”
A Guide to the Various Trump Investigations
Confused about the inquiries and legal cases involving former President Donald Trump? We’re here to help.
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Some parts of the indictment did not refer to Mr. Trump by name, instead referring to the “defendants’ attempts to declare Unindicted Coconspirator 1 and Pence the winners of the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Also indicted were Mike Roman, a Trump campaign operative in 2020, John Eastman, an architect of the fake electors plan, and two other lawyers who advised Mr. Trump and his 2020 campaign: Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb.
The indictment lays out a series of alleged efforts by the defendants to overturn Arizona’s election results. They are accused of pressuring “officials responsible for certifying election results to encourage them to change the election results,” including the governor, the legislature and the Maricopa Board of Supervisors.
In all, 35 people who acted as fake electors in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and now Arizona face criminal charges for signing certificates in 2020 falsely stating that Mr. Trump had won their state’s electoral votes.
Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Roman and Mr. Eastman now face charges in two states, Georgia and Arizona. Ms. Ellis has already pleaded guilty to a felony in Georgia.
Among those charged in Arizona are some who served as top Republican Party officials there during the 2020 election, including Kelli Ward, a former state party chairwoman, and Greg Safsten, who at the time was executive director of the state party. Two state senators, Anthony Kern and Jake Hoffman, now also face charges.
Some of the people who held themselves out to be Trump electors in states that he lost in 2020 have adamantly insisted that they were acting legally. After Dr. Ward and other fake electors gathered in Phoenix that December, she wrote in a social media post that “we are the electors who represent the legal voters of Arizona!” As recently as late last year, Mr. Kern said that “there’s no such thing as fake electors.”
Late Wednesday, Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said: “The phenomenon of partisan lawfare grows more troubling by the day. Professor Eastman is innocent of criminal conduct in Arizona or any other place and will fight these charges as he has all the other unjust accusations leveled against him.”
Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, said: “The continued weaponization of our justice system should concern every American as it does permanent, irrevocable harm to the country.”
Mr. Hoffman said in a social media post that he was “innocent of any crime,” adding that “I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution.”
Mr. Epshteyn was a constant presence during Mr. Trump’s civil trial in January on charges that he had defamed the New York writer E. Jean Carroll. He joined Mr. Trump at the defense table when Mr. Trump’s lawyer in the case went to the bench for sidebars.
But Mr. Epshteyn has not been in New York for the current criminal case. He has described himself as an “in-house counsel” to Mr. Trump and has been something of a quarterback for the various legal teams working on the former president’s defenses in four criminal cases. He usually speaks with Mr. Trump several times a day.
Mr. Epshteyn has been arrested twice in Arizona over the last 10 years, once in 2014 for assault after a bar fight, in which he pleaded guilty and the conviction was set aside, and again in 2021, after he was accused of inappropriately touching two women. In that case, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, received probation and a fine, and the conviction again was set aside.
Mr. Epshteyn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Election deniers have not fared well at the polls in Arizona, but they maintain a grip on the state’s Republican Party. In January, the party installed a hard-right Trump supporter, Gina Swoboda, as its new leader; Ms. Swoboda runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states. Kari Lake, a fervent backer of Mr. Trump and his false election claims, was the party’s candidate for governor in 2022 (she lost) and is the leading Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat this year.
The Arizona Republican Party, in a statement, called the indictment “a blatant and unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial power, aimed solely at distracting the public” ahead of the 2024 election.
The United States Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Monday that challenged the state’s electronic voting machines. The case was brought by Ms. Lake and Mark Finchem, who lost a 2022 race for Arizona secretary of state.
Having slates of people claiming to be electors for Mr. Trump was an integral part of the effort to keep him in office after his loss at the polls in 2020. Mr. Trump and his allies sought to block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, hoping that Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and Senate might then consider a challenge to the validity of the results in a number of battleground states like Arizona and Michigan — and then accept the pro-Trump electors from those states as valid.
In addition to the state cases, Mr. Trump is facing election interference charges himself in the Georgia case and in a federal case brought by Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice.
Mr. Trump has long made a strategy of falsely claiming election fraud. After he was defeated in the 2016 Iowa caucus, he said that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the winner of that contest, “illegally stole it.” And after Mr. Trump received fewer votes nationwide in 2016 than Hillary Clinton did, he said that he had actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Faced with criminal charges in the state elections inquiries, some of Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers have backtracked from his 2020 claims.
“Biden was elected, the process was followed,” Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the fake elector plan, told investigators in Michigan last year. Mr. Chesebro has emerged as a key witness in the state prosecutions.
James Renner, a former Michigan state trooper who was a last-minute substitution as a fake elector in that state, expressed regret last year to investigators, saying that he “had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.” Charges against him were dropped as part of a cooperation agreement with the office of Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, a Democrat.
Richard Fausset, Alan Feuer, Jonathan Swan and Benjamin Protess contributed reporting.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics. More about Danny Hakim
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
A version of this article appears in print on April 25, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition
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raw 3 24
arizona lawmakers may be on the brink of slapping multiple people linked to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign with criminal charges, according to a new report.
Grand jury subpoenas sent out in recent weeks suggest Attorney General Kris Mayes could soon decide whether to pursue a criminal case against Trump's fake electors in Arizona, Politico reported Wednesday.
The subpoenas constitute "a sharp acceleration of their criminal investigation into efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state," according to the report, based on six anonymous sources.
The Attorney General's office declined to comment.
READ MORE:Fresh scrutiny for Marjorie Taylor Greene after election violation
"It was not clear whether Mayes is considering charges against people close to Trump’s national campaign," wrote reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney, "or whether her investigation remains focused on the Arizona GOP officials and activists who aided Trump’s bid to overturn the state’s presidential results."
Prominent Arizona Republicans tied to Trump’s post-election efforts include former state GOP chairwoman Kelli Ward as well as state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, both of whom served as fake electors, Politico notes.
News broke in August that Mayes' office would investigate the Trump campaign's post-election actions in Arizona, one of seven lost states Trump tried to reclaim with slates of electors told to submit his name.
Similar efforts in Georgia spurred Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to charge Trump and more than a dozen others with election racketeering.
Trump pleaded not guilty.
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ginni j6 depo:
ould you look at exhibit 18? This looks like a text message from Jake
18 Hoffman to Kylie Kremer.
Right.
And he mentions in the first line, "Hi, ladies. Ginni Thomas and Stephanie
Coleman gave me your number and suggested I reach out." And he goes on to mention
that:{ he's one of the official Trump Presidential electors in Arizona. And it looks like he's
}:
asking to speak at the events on January 6th.
:{
}:
24 :{Do you recall having a conversation with Jake Hoffman?
25 A Not about this. I mean, I don't remember}: -- until I got this from th...
124
1 committee, I didn't know that this happened. I didn't remember that I was connecting
him to Kylie Kremerabout his desire to be a speaker.
3 Q Okay.
:{4 And can you tell us a little bit about what role, if any, you had in relation to the
5 rally on the 6th at the ElIipse?
6 A I'm glad you asked. I had no role in organizing, coordinating, speaking.
just went as an ordinary citizen that day.}:
Q Okay.
A And so the media has gotten that one wrong too.[mark earlier tried to get her to not say?]
Q And did you have any role in organizing any events or rallies on January 5th,
11 the day before...
1 Stephanie Coleman. I'm just wondering about your prior connection to Kylie Kremer.
2 A I:{ knew Amy Kremer from back in 2011 or 2012, but -- and Kylie, no, I
3 didn't -- I don't know how I had her number. I do have a lot of numbers of people.}:
I understand.
But she's not a close friend. I don't remember how I would've even
connected them. But I clearly did.
7 Q Yeah. Okay. And no specific communication with either Kremer about
the events on the 5th or 6th?
A Right.
Q Okay. Thanks.
BYMR.-:
Q And it sounds like -- did you know Jake Hoffman before this event?
A Yes. He's a friend.
Q:{ Okay. And did you, during the November/December of 2020 timeframe
have discussions with him about his role as an elector at all in the State of Arizona?
16 A No. I forgot that he was an elector. He's a State delegate. He's
17 oftentimes a speaker for us at Groundswell. And, no, he's just a great guy.}:
18 Q Okay.
===
1/ 23
CAP open ltr ~ kevin
...
he Honorable Steve King Member, U.S. Congress (Ret.) | The Honorable Jake Hoffman President & CEO 1TEN | A Creative Agency |
|---|---|---|
The Honorable Laurin Hendrix Representative Elect AZ Legislature | The Honorable Anthony Kern Member Arizona State Senate | The Honorable Anthony Kern Member Arizona State Senate |
Brigitte Gabriel CEO, ACT For America ACT For America | The Honorable Jacqueline Parker Member AZ State House of Representatives | The Honorable Jacqueline Parker Member AZ State House of Representatives |
Jessie Jane Duff Gunnery Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps (ret) 2020 Campaign Co-Chair Veterans for Trump | Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. Founders and CEO Corstet LLC | Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. Founders and CEO Corstet LLC |
All organizations listed for IDENTIFICATION purposes only.
---
===
===
no lnx
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/04/arizona-gop-turning-point-usa/
Democracy Dies in Darkness
EXCLUSIVE
How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network worked to purge officials who affirmed the 2020 election results
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker
November 4, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Tuesday in Chandler, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
PHOENIX — The young conservative activist had a plan, and he wanted the veteran Arizona House speaker to push it.
The two men huddled at a barbecue joint in January as the activist — Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA — unspooled his demands: Republican legislators, he insisted, should carve up booming and fast-diversifying Maricopa County, diluting the power of Democrats in a state that had helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency.
:{
}:
But the Republican House speaker, Rusty Bowers, ultimately balked at redrawing the state’s map to seize partisan advantage. As the pair’s political differences grew, the activist, who was half the speaker’s age, vowed revenge.
:{
}:
“Rusty, I will be working toward ensuring you do not win your election in 2022,” Bowyer warned in a March text message obtained by The Washington Post. “I appreciate your service, I will do whatever it takes to ensure you are retired.”
Soon, the state legislator faced a rush of ridicule on social media and in negative ads as Turning Point’s political arm launched a campaign to “Replace RINO Rusty.” The speaker lost his primary for an open state Senate seat in August to a Turning Point-backed Republican who called the 2020 election a “conspiracy headed up by the Devil himself.”
The takedown of one of the most powerful Republicans in the state illustrates the rise of Turning Point USA and its network of affiliates, which have pushed beyond their core mission of energizing college conservatives to turn Arizona into a laboratory for a new brand of Republican organizing. The decade-old nonprofit organization has helped transform the state GOP, seeking to elevate acolytes of former president Donald Trump and purge old-guard centrists who led in the tradition of the late Republican Sen. John McCain.
The group’s success is reflected in the Republican midterm election slate — nearly every statewide candidate and many of those farther down the ballot have embraced Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. The political career of Kari Lake, the state’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, took off at a Turning Point event last year, and she has filled her campaign staff with former Turning Point employees. Lake has promised, if elected, to overhaul how votes are cast and counted in this pivotal swing state.
“They have a bigger impact than any other Republican group I know,” said Jeff DeWit, a former state treasurer in Arizona who served as chief operating officer for both of Trump’s presidential campaigns. “They’re more powerful than the RNC,” he said, referring to the Republican National Committee.
Tyler Bowyer, a longtime Turning Point leader, speaks in the ear of Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee and Republican candidate for the Arizona House, at an October canvassing event in Mesa, Ariz. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
Volunteers at a Turning Point Action get-out-the-vote event in October in Mesa. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)
Kathy Pearce, a Republican candidate for Arizona House, speaks at the Mesa event. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)]
This account of Turning Point’s quest to remake the Arizona Republican Party is based on audio recordings of private meetings, personal messages and interviews with more than 80 people, including current and former Turning Point employees, public officials and their staffers, political consultants, and state and local party activists who have interacted with the nonprofit’s leaders. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details or avoid professional reprisal.
The Post review found that Turning Point, which forged an early alliance with the pro-Trump movement in 2016, devised an aggressive strategy to enforce discipline and purity in a divided GOP that was struggling to overcome Democratic gains in the state. The group recruited like-minded activists into the party ranks and often used provocative rhetoric online to pressure old-guard Republicans and “barrage the left,” as one internal document put it, while creating a new political action committee to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into statewide and legislative campaigns.
Nationally, Turning Point solidified its identity in the MAGA era. Like Trump, Turning Point’s leaders gravitate toward messages primed to go viral on social media, including a recent call for a “hero” to bail out of jail the man accused of assaulting the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Founder Charlie Kirk, now 29, was the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of researchers. Kirk encouraged his followers to attend the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and a website promoting the rally listed Turning Point Action, the group’s political arm, as a backer.
The Attack: The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event
With more than $65 million in annual revenue, more than 400 employees and a massive network of conservative influencers, Turning Point’s vast network exerts its influence through a dizzying array of mediums, from podcasts to social media to concert-like rallies, funded by GOP megadonors and aimed at younger generations.
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Kirk is a prolific fundraiser, using his connections in Trump’s inner circle to fete donors at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. But it’s Bowyer, 37, who translates that influence and those resources into raw political power in Arizona, a state increasingly setting the tone for the national GOP.
Tyler Bowyer describes his role at Turning Point.
Kirk and Bowyer declined to comment for this report. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA and its affiliates, said that both men effectively channel conservative interests and that the group’s years-long work in Arizona is “bearing significant fruit in 2022.” Kolvet sought to distance Turning Point from some of Bowyer’s political advocacy, which he said was undertaken in Bowyer’s “capacity as a Republican Party leader.”
In a private meeting with conservative activists this year, Bowyer remarked on his role at Turning Point by calling himself “the guy that basically runs everything,” according to an audio recording obtained by The Post. At another point in the conversation, he boasted of his enthusiasm for political confrontation: “I have giant balls.”
Tyler Bowyer boasts of his political mettle.
An attendee picks up a poster at the Turning Point Action event at Pioneer Park in Mesa in October. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
Forged in the MAGA movement
It was January 2015, and a pivotal presidential election loomed.
Bowyer had just started to work for Turning Point as part of its expansion in Arizona and other parts of the West. He was also elected chair of the Maricopa County GOP, promising to revolutionize the party by recruiting a new generation of volunteers at the lowest levels of the party — a strategy now at the center of pro-Trump organizing.
Bowyer, who touts that his family has lived in Arizona for seven generations, had long chafed at the conventional party apparatus and longed for one more willing to push boundaries. As a student at Arizona State University, he earned the adoration of tea party activists when he ridiculed Gov. Jan Brewer (R) for expanding the state’s Medicaid program.
In the summer of 2015, Bowyer received a call from Trump’s campaign manager, who was trying to schedule a small gathering in Phoenix but was facing pushback from Republican state leaders who had recoiled at Trump’s style and uncompromising approach to immigration, according to a person familiar with the call.
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The young activist and others helped organize and promote a rally that attracted thousands on a sweltering July day. Bowyer warmed up the crowd ahead of Trump’s 90-minute speech.
In the final months of the campaign, Kirk, then 22, took a leave from Turning Point to travel the country with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., 38 at the time. They focused on events tailored to students and appeared at a Fox News town hall aimed at millennials.
President Donald Trump with Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, in Washington in 2018. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
As they campaigned in the Phoenix area, Bowyer recorded a video of Trump Jr. helping a stranded motorist and pushing a car in triple-digit heat. He posted it on Twitter, writing, “This is why I’m voting Trump!” The message, which has been viewed more than half a million times, made clear to Turning Point leaders the online appetite for pro-Trump content.
Trump went on to win Arizona in 2016, and Republicans swept other races. Turning Point and the Make America Great Again movement fell into a well-defined symbiosis: Kirk and his associates helped amplify Trump’s messages on social media, and the group’s fundraising exploded.
In 2018, Kirk relocated his enterprise from the Chicago suburbs, where he was raised, to a two-story headquarters in a Phoenix office park. The sprawling facility includes a television studio where several live-stream shows are filmed, near a wall decorated with a huge American flag and pennants from dozens of college campuses.
An opening ceremony drew big names from across the Republican Party’s ideological divide, including Gov. Doug Ducey. Bowyer, who recently had been promoted to chief operating officer, addressed the crowd.
“One thing I hope that you take away from today,” he said, “is that you see all of the wonderful things that are happening across the country in the name of conservatism.”
A rival to the GOP mainstream
Within months, Arizona Republicans were in crisis. Democrats had swept the 2018 midterm election, flipping a U.S. Senate seat, the secretary of state’s office and races down the ballot. Arizona had quickly gone from a conservative stronghold to a true swing state. Turning Point leaders and other conservatives saw it as confirmation that the state party needed a dramatically different strategy.
Bowyer viewed the results as affirmation of his long-standing philosophy: “If the Republican Party doesn’t do its job, you know, then the Republican Party has to go,” he said in the private meeting with activists this year, according to audio obtained by The Post.
Bowyer talks to activists about the Republican Party.
Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, declined to elaborate on Bowyer’s comments but said, “Turning Point is confident Mr. Bowyer had the best interest of the conservative movement and the organization in mind.”
Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer at Turning Point Action, speaks at the canvassing event in Mesa. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
In January 2019, party members gathered in a Phoenix church to pick their next leader.
Bowyer threw his support behind Kelli Ward,a former state senator who had unsuccessfully run for U.S. Senate twice and had publicized her disdain for the establishment wing of the party. She pledged to recruit MAGA Republicans as foot soldiers and oversee a transformation of the state party.
Bowyer worked the room that day with help from Jake Hoffman, a Turning Point consultant. Hoffman ran a marketing firm that worked for a PAC that had supported Ward’s failed Senate bids.
Ward prevailed over a McCain ally, and Hoffman helped her transition into the role of party chair. When Republicans wanted to reach Ward, they started with Hoffman, whose businesses have remained key vendors for the state party, according to campaign finance records.
As the state’s top Republicans kept their distance from Ward, Turning Point saw an opportunity. Her title gave Turning Point credibility.
Ward, in a statement, called Hoffman and Bowyer “friends and allies” and “two of the most righteous people I know.”
Hoffman, a former school board member and town councilman, was listed on Turning Point’s staff directory through at least early 2019. In 2020, The Post revealed that he was running a deceptive online operation for Turning Point’s political arm in which teenagers peppered the internet with pro-Trump messaging, some using fake accounts. Hoffman defended the practice at the time.
Over the years, Hoffman has been an administrator for the Facebook pages of Turning Point, Kirk and Trump Jr., according to a person familiar with the setup. Hoffman did not dispute the details of his social media work for Trump Jr. or Turning Point, saying that he was “happy to consult with the organization.”
That fall, Hoffman won a race for the Arizona House, giving Turning Point an ally in the statehouse.
Turning Point was no longer on the GOP’s fringes. It was at the party’s center.
Voters arrive for a Kari Lake event at the Rancho de Tia Rosa restaurant in Mesa in early October. (Caitlin O'Hara for The Washington Post)
Attendees at the Rancho de Tia Rosa event, including Bowyer, center, watch a video before Lake's appearance. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
Attendees at the GOP gubernatorial nominee's event at the Mesa restaurant. (Caitlin O’Hara for The Washington Post)
‘Repercussions could be big’
In 2020, Turning Point told donors its task was activating young voters, registering thousands to vote and delivering Arizona and other swing states to Trump, according to documents obtained by The Post.
The group aimed to capitalize on the electorate’s intensifying distrust of government, media and political parties, the documents show. Opportunities to do so expanded with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Kirk argued that the “China Virus” proved the need for Trump’s promised wall on the southern border,and text messages sent by Turning Point Action falsely claimed that the government was “sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a covid-19 vaccine.”
When Trump resumed holding large campaign events, Turning Point Action’s Students for Trump helped pack Phoenix’s Dream City Church for a June 2020 rally. Outside, police in riot gear clashed with protesters. Inside, the megachurch’s cavernous auditorium offered refuge from mask mandates.
Kirk prays at a "Freedom Night in America" event last month at Dream City Church in Phoenix.(Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Attendees at the Turning Point event at the Phoenix church last month. The group hosted a major Trump rally at the church in June 2020. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Ahead of the election, Turning Point Action touted its “round-the-clock Digital War-Room to promote content we create and constantly barrage the left online,” according to a slide deck obtained by The Post. It seized on culture war issues such as how race is taught in public schools, the rights of transgender individuals and illegal immigration.
But Trump lost Arizona — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had ceded the state since 1996. Quickly, Turning Point became a linchpin of Trump’s efforts to deny his defeat and reverse his loss.
Bowyer, elected that year to the Republican National Committee, gathered with Hoffman and Ward at the state party’s headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, the day the state’s presidential electors met to cast their votes for Biden, according to state party tweets. As part of a seven-state plan, the trio signed paperwork falsely declaring themselves the state’s electors. That plan is now a focus of congressional investigators and prosecutors probing Trump’s quest to stay in power.
On Twitter, the state party asked followers whether they would be willing to die to keep Trump in the White House. Another post proposed “contempt & jail time” for county officials who affirmed Biden’s win.
The posts alarmed Trey Terry, 35, a conservative who lives near a Republican county official who had helped oversee the election and was facing death threats as a result. Terry urged Bowyer to help tone down the messaging in a private exchange over Twitter that was obtained by The Post.
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“His kids and wife can’t go anywhere without being harassed as they go in and out of their house,” Terry wrote, describing the county official’s experience. “That s--- is out of line. So it’s hard for me to ignore.”
Bowyer responded that while he had sympathy for the county official, elected leaders must adhere to the party’s platform and “repercussions could be big for those who aren’t on the same page with the party.”
Terry accused party leaders of “whipping” up activists “based on zero evidence” of widespread fraud. Bowyer did not disagree but suggested that his approach is the reason for Turning Point’s success.
“I didn’t build a 45 million dollar a year organization,” he wrote, by “misunderstanding the base.”
Kirk speaks during at the Dream City Church event last month. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)]
Meanwhile, Turning Point Action arranged for seven buses to take 350 activists from several states to D.C. for the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House, according to three people familiar with the rally planning. Bowyer and Kirk have been interviewed by the House committee investigating the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that followed the rally, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Austin Smith, a Turning Point Action employee, tweeted a photo of himself speaking to “thousands of patriots” at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5.
“Don’t get comfortable,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Fight like hell.”
Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesman, said the group’s involvement that day was “isolated to the president’s speech at the Ellipse.”
In the months that followed, Maricopa County became a hotbed of unsupported claims about the election, and Trump allies launched a haphazard review of the results, over the objection of county officials and election experts.
The purge
The next year, Bowyer tried to convince Bowers, the Arizona House speaker, that the party needed to intensify its efforts to maintain power, Bowers said.
With a map in hand, the activist zeroed in on sprawling Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60 percent of the state’s voters, and called for breaking it into four counties, one that would concentrate most Democrats and three that would favor Republicans.
Hoffman, the marketing consultant close to Turning Point who was elected to the state House in 2020, introduced legislation to make it happen — but the opposition of legislative leadership ensured its demise.
A few months later, the speaker testified before the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Bowers detailed Trump’s attempts to overturn the election and his own decision to resist, intensifying the attacks from Turning Point influencers.
Alone in Washington, Rusty Bowers tells world what happened in Arizona
Turning Point expanded its political operation this year with a new PAC under Bowyer’s direction. The group has unleashed more than $415,000 in Arizona since July, according to state records, and has reported more than $600,000 in spending to the Federal Election Commission. About half of its spending in Arizona has boosted Lake after a bitter primary that pitted her against the party establishment, including the governor. But the money has also extended to legislative races in which spending is traditionally restrained. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went to Hoffman’s firm, records show.
The PAC helped a crew of far-right candidates win primary contests in state races, including Steve Montenegro, who helped coordinate bombastic election-denying messaging during the review of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots; Liz Harris, who routinely spreads election falsehoods; and Smith, the Turning Point Action enterprise director who spoke at a D.C. rally the day before the insurrection.
Turning Point has played a wide-ranging role in Lake’s campaign, and former Turning Point staffers have filled key positions on her campaign, including a top adviser and a former press secretary. This summer, Lake said on Twitter that her daughter was involved with the group. In fact, she’s a full-time Turning Point employee, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“Turning Point has been essential in turning … enthusiasm into a tsunami of activists that naturally flock to candidates like Kari Lake,” Caroline Wren, a senior adviser on the Lake campaign, said in a statement.
Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds
Lake’s rise also created new opportunities for Hoffman, whose firm was paid about $2.3 million by a pro-Lake super PAC,according to state records. A complaint about the source of the PAC’s funding is under review by the Maricopa County elections department. Hoffman said his company is “routinely contracted” for such work because it is “one of the leading creative agencies in Arizona.”
Lake, a former television anchor, gained MAGA stardom at a Turning Point Action candidate forum in the summer of 2021, when she urged the crowd not to forget about the 2020 election. When Trump spoke on the same stage and name-checked Lake, the room erupted in applause. He cocked his head and clapped. “This could be a big night for you,” he said.
One year later, Lake won the Republican primary and celebrated at a victory party at a Scottsdale resort. On the lush lawn, young women in semiformal dresses and strappy heels lined up for photos. Music blared from inside a ballroom as partygoers snapped selfies. The scene, reminiscent of a graduation party or school dance, highlighted how Turning Point has thrust young people to the center of the state party’s transformation.
One is Carrera Horan, 18, who attended the Turning Point summit that elevated Lake and watches Kirk’s videos on Instagram. “He tells you what you need to be hearing rather than just what you would want to hear,” she said.
Daniel Fuentes, 25, joined his Christian university’s Turning Point chapter, which offered a ready-made friend group. He tunes in to Kirk’s radio show every day on Spotify.
Fuentes is volunteering for Lake’s campaign, and he attended a recent Turning Point canvassing event at a Mesa park, one of 200 that the group says it has hosted nationally this cycle. With the smell of chicken roasting in barbecue pits wafting through the air, he listened intently as Bowyer spoke of the need to “rebrand the conservative movement and the Republican Party as a hope for a future generation.”
Fuentes argued that “Democrat clubs on college campuses are not doing this. Liberal, woke, feminist clubs, they’re not out there telling people: ‘Let’s go out and knock doors. Let’s go out and, you know, sign up to be a precinct [committeeman].’ ”
Looking to 2024
The midterms will test whether Turning Point can win races or just disrupt them.
After winning the primary, Lake quickly made overtures to the state’s GOP establishment.
When Bowyer learned that Lake was meeting with a former state GOP chairman who had been close to McCain, he erupted at her during a phone call as she traveled on a donor’s plane, warning that the base would turn against her, according to three people who heard about his comments.
Lake was unfazed, these people said. Kolvet said Lake and Bowyer “maintain a great relationship.”
With a growing number of well-placed allies, Turning Point is poised to again push election-related legislation favorable to Republicans ahead of 2024. A preview of that came last week when Lake promoted a legislative proposal from Hoffman to punish media outlets that mistakenly report election results.
The Turning Point strategy, said Kirk Adams, a top Republican operative in the state and Gov. Ducey’s former chief of staff, is “all geared toward 2024,” aimed at elevating GOP officials at every level who could thwart an election outcome unfavorable to the party. “Get a compliant governor,” Adams said, describing the strategy. “Get a compliant secretary of state. Get compliant legislative leadership.”
Turning Point’s leaders are looking ahead to 2024. The group’s political arm has hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), widely seen as a possible presidential contender, at rallies aimed at high-stakes races in Arizona and beyond.
Lake has embraced the title of “DeSantis of the West.”Others view her as a potential vice-presidential contender. For the moment, she wants to be governor — and if she wins, it will be with Turning Point’s help.
One week before the election, a Kirk aide — who also works as Lake’s deputy field director — kicked off a rally outside a steakhouse in suburban Chandler by praising both of her bosses. Once onstage, Kirk and Lake embraced.
“Kari’s really special,” Kirk said.
“Thank you for the compliment. I’ll take it,” the candidate said. “… We have to tune in to people like Charlie.”
Jacqueline Alemany, Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey and Beth Reinhard contributed to this report.
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1 22 an no lnx
arizona Republican State Representative Jake Hoffman made news this week when it was revealed he signed a forged “certification” falsely stating Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won his state’s Electoral College electors.
Video that’s gone viral of Hoffman shows him defending signing the forged documents in which he falsely identifies himself as a duly elected elector for Trump.
His defense: “in unprecedented times, unprecedented action does occur.” He goes on to claim, “there is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing.”
He called the forged electoral documents “dueling opinions” in this video:
NEW In Arizona, journalism can be a team sport. GOP State Rep. Jake Hoffman refused to answer 12News photojournalist's question (which I provided) re why he signed phony declaration in 2020 that Arizona electors voted for Trump. Watch as AZRepublic's @ruelaswritings folos up...pic.twitter.com/Qp3YOLyBl9
— Brahm Resnik (@Brahm Resnik) 1642034260
The video has been viewed over 800,000 times in just 14 hours.
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Hoffman, it turns out, was banned from Twitter after his company, Rally Forge, worked with Charlie Kirk’s far right wing political activist group, Turning Point USA during the 2020 election, establishing “a domestic ‘troll farm’ in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed,” according to The Guardian.
The Washington Post also reported that “the posts are the product of a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.”
Some of those teens, The Post noted, were minors.
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https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2020/12/08/spindell-conspiracies-political-violence/
no lnx many pix
Elections official stands by at rally as speakers spread conspiracies, promote political violence
BY: HENRY REDMAN - DECEMBER 8, 2020
Wisconsin Trump election rally
Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell is seen speaking between two people draped in the flags of right wing movements, the Tea Party and Trumpism. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
One of the six officials charged with administering and protecting Wisconsin’s elections system stood on the steps of the State Capitol Monday afternoon as a group of President Donald Trump’s supporters chanted “stop the steal.”
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Robert Spindell, one of three Republicans on the Wisconsin Elections Commission stood by as speakers spread conspiracy theories about election fraud and COVID-19, compared the 2020 presidential election to Pearl Harbor and advocated for the violent overthrow of the government.
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Spindell, in his short speech to the flag-waving and MAGA hat wearing crowd of Trump voters, said he was attending the rally as a private citizen, not in his capacity as a government official. He said the election fraud committed in the 1950s and 60s by former Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley shows election fraud could have been committed this year.
Wisconsin Trump election rally
Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell speaks at the rally. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
While he did not give any specific examples of voter fraud in Wisconsin, Spindell implied, falsely, that it had happened.
“There’s no evidence vote fraud did not occur,” Spindell said, calling for election officials to prove a negative.
Spindell also went through a laundry list of grievances about elections this year.
He complained about pre-election lawsuits filed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and Democratic National Committee that attempted to change some election rules to make voting easier during a pandemic. Ultimately these changes were struck down by a federal appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
He complained that the Democrats on the elections commission and the body’s non-partisan staff refused to remove from the voter rolls hundreds of thousands of people who may have moved or died — a decision that was made to avoid mistakenly disenfranchising people. The status of Wisconsin’s so-called voter purge is still pending an order from the Wisconsin Supreme Court but there’s no evidence dead people voted and people who have moved can update their registration at the polls on Election Day.
Wisconsin Trump election rally]
Evidence of Wisconsin’s year of political protest with pro-Trump protesters stand near anti-police graffiti from Black Lives Matter protests. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)]
Spindell complained that municipal clerks filled in missing addresses on absentee ballots, a practice allowed under guidance provided by the Wisconsin Elections Commission and which has been in place for previous elections.
Finally, he complained that candidates from the Green Party and Kanye West were not allowed on the presidential ballot because of issues with their paperwork. Emails showed Spindell attempted to assist the Green Party in its efforts to get on the ballot despite failing to properly file nomination papers. Spindell has repeatedly complained that not allowing West on the ballot, even though his campaign missed the deadline to file, was disenfranchisement of Black voters.
Wisconsin Trump election rally
A QAnon flag flies in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol at the Dec. 7 pro-Trump election rally. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
“How about Kenyon (sic.) West?” Spindell said.
At the start of the rally, the largely un-masked crowd gathered closely together to sing “God Bless America,” “The Star Spangled Banner” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The group was outside; still, singing is considered by the CDC to be an especially effective vector of COVID-19 spread.
Near the singers, a group of 15 people carrying Trump flags did laps of the Capitol while praying the rosary.
Appearing alongside Spindell was the rally’s headliner, Minnesota native, MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Michael Lindell. Lindell also recently donated to the bail fund of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with killing two people at a racial justice protest in Kenosha in August.
Wisconsin Trump election rally
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell speaks to the crowd. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)]
Even though other Republicans on the elections commission have definitively announced there were no issues with the state’s election machines, Spindell stood by as Lindell claimed Trump lost Wisconsin because of issues with Dominion voting machines — a disproven conspiracy theory.
“I would like to stay officially on the record that I have complete confidence in the voting equipment in use in Wisconsin, that I think there is no evidence of systemic problems of software problems programming problems hacking, there’s no evidence of switched votes,” Republican commissioner Dean Knudson said last week.
Lindell, as he argued for the Electoral College to be bypassed so the selection of the president could go to state congressional delegations, stated that Trump had actually won in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Lindell’s proof that Trump won these states was that on election night, the odds at the sportsbooks said Trump was the 3-1 favorite to win. Betting odds on presidential elections aren’t an adequate predictor of outcome. For example, PredictIt, a popular political prediction site, gave Hillary Clinton a chance at being elected president for most of 2020.
[Wisconsin Trump election rally
A rally attendee sits draped in a “Thin Blue Line” pro-police blanket. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)]
The most prominent speaker was Lindell, but the rally featured a number of other right-wing speakers who spread conspiracy theories and railed against the threats of communism, socialism and Marxism that they believe President-elect Joe Biden represents.
The rally, which was part of a “March for Trump” bus tour, is stopping in 27 cities across the country in an attempt to somehow overturn the results of the election.
“We’re trying to go through all the corrupt states with all the corruption,” one speaker said.
[Wisconsin Trump election rally
Release the Kraken is catchphrase for right wing conspiracies signifying the dubious legal strategy of conservative lawyer Sidney Powell. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)]
But short of any legal remedies, which appear to be dwindling as the president continues to lose in court, the rally speakers said there are other options to fight the election results.
“The Electoral College is going to fear We the People,” said another speaker. “Learn our 2nd Amendment, we need to know how to fire those handguns, fire those rifles.”
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omg
no lnx
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie
The New Yorker
A Reporter at Large
August 9, 2021 Issue
The Big Money Behind the Big Lie
Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.
By Jane Mayer
August 2, 2021
It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.
But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.
Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.
As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”
In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.
As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.
I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”
Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fannwhen she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”
Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.
Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”
Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”
Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.
One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.
Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.
Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.
These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.
It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Societyfounding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.
Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”
An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell,who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.
In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”
Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”
On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”
In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”
Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”
Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”
What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”
Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.
Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”
Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in thestate had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.
A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act,eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.
Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values.By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.
The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis,who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.
Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.
Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.
One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based groupthat, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.
Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.
It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.
One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.
Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.
Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.
At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.
Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”
The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”
More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy,a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”
One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.
In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.
Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”
Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.
Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.
Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”
By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”
A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”
Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.
Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud.Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor. In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.
In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.
Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme,along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.
In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.
This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise.As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases,we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”
Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters.
Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation.Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.
Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”
Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”
The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district. The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.
Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”
A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”
Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.
At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”
In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.
On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”
Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.
Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”
Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.”At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.
A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”
Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”
Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”
Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”
“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.
By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless.
But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network [fitton cnp] —a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.
While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”
It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”
Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.
For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.
It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiativehas set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”
Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/facebook-pro-trump-groups/
salon no twt
Reporting on Friday revealed that Facebook knowingly allowed a digital marketing firm tied to a pro-Trump group to release a series of ads purporting to be from a fake left-wing organization ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, while election officials failed to investigate the group at the time.
As The Guardian reported, a right-wing marketing firm called Rally Forge ran a $5,000 ad campaign beginning just days before the2018 election, showing ads promoting Green Party candidates in an effort to split the Democratic vote and help Republicans in several close races. The ads were purported to be placed by a group called America Progress Now and expressed support for democratic socialism.
Facebook launched an investigation into the ads just after the election and quickly determined that America Progress Now's official page on the platform was run by the same three men—Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan—who were administrators for Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump college organization.
To the alarm of a number of Facebook employees, The Guardian reported, the company did not find Rally Forge or Turning Point USA to be in violation of any of its policies.
One product manager at the time said a case could be made for Rally Forge and Turning Point USA having engaged in voter suppression through the ads, and asked, "Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?"
After the election, Facebook deactivated several other right-wing accounts run by the administrators, but the move did not stop Rally Forge from establishing a "troll farm" out of Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. Working for Turning Point Action, a group linked to Turning Point USA, the firm hired teenagers to post pro-Trump messages on social media, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the election system.
Sophie Zhang, aformer Facebook employee who participated in the investigation of the fake Green Party ads, wrote on Twitter Friday, "One wonders if [Rally Forge] would have escalated to troll farms, had FB deterred them in 2018." twt]
"This is egregious," tweeted the women's rights group UltraViolet on Friday.
Beyond Facebook's decision to allow the firm to remain on Facebook after determining the ads were fraudulent, the ads "appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and include proper disclosures on advertisements," The Guardian reported.
"This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw 'America Progress Now' ads promoting Green party candidates would've had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, told The Guardian.
The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC in 2019 over America Progress Now and the administrators' failure to disclose the true source of the Facebook ads, only to have the case dismissed before the FEC could conduct an investigation.
The election commissioners declined to look further into the complaint after a man named Evan Muhlstein contacted them to take full responsibility to the ads, claiming he alone had failed to file the ad expenditures with the FEC and saying his "inexperience" was to blame.
"The FEC's job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters' right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation," Fischer said.
According to former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017, Muhlstein's admission to the FEC appeared to amount to "clear fraud," as he never disclosed to the officials that the ads had been the work of Rally Forge.
At the time, though, Muhlstein's claim was enough to convince at least one FEC commissioner, James "Trey" Trainor, that the CLC had engaged in "wild speculation" by filing a complaint.
"This case wasn't about a 'fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,'" Trainor wrote. "In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech."
Zhang denounced the FEC for failing to contact Facebook regarding Muhlstein's claim to verify that he'd administered the America Progress Now page—a cursory investigation which would have immediately revealed the true owners of the page.
"It's quite possible that FB would have blown the FEC off," Zhang said. "But many employees were upset over this case, and may have come forward if asked. I would likely have if I'd known."
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===
https://yyy.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/11/facebook-ads-turning-point-usa-rally-forge
no lnx many
Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats
FEC investigation failed to uncover link to Rally Forge, a firm with close ties to Turning Point USA
Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew
Fri 11 Jun 2021 06.00 EDT
A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.
In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.
Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.
Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020,earning a permanent ban from Facebook.
“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.
She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”
ads show AOC and Drake meme pix]
Some of the Facebook ads from America Progress Now. Composite: Facebook]
Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”
The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws.APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.
The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.
It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.
The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.
“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”
Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”
‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’
On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.
Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted“coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.
The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, left, with Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at a summit in 2019.]
“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.”Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.
A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.
Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.
Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.
In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.
One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.
The intention here is clearly to mislead users
Facebook civic integrity staffer]
Hoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”
Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”
Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.
Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.
The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.
“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.
One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”
‘The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity,’ said a Facebook civic integrity staffer. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”
“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.
A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.
Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.
Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.
A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.
Facebook did not take any enforcement action against Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action or Kirk with regard to the Phoenix operation. Facebook also did not disclose Rally Forge’s connection to America Progress Now and the deceptive Green Party ads.
A forestalled investigation
In September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.
“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.
In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.
On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”,writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.
Donald Trump speaks at a Turning Point USA summit in 2019.]
“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”
Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.
“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.
Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.
The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.
In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.
In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.
Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”
Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.
It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.
The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”
Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting
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