cleta mitchell 2

SEE MAIN

see bak ESQ

7 22 tag clta

SEE CNP GINNI (brandon, mike lee coup?)

amicus citizens united quid pro quo?

hired by CPI after resign foley

hired by meadowsfor big lie BS

see voter suppression

see election integrity

see bannon

Bradley bd

holzman vogel hvjt

===

what exactly her role in legal coup? how does her work relate to Ginni's actions? one place says she wrote coup memo, another says she commissioned (eastman?) to do it?

===

note TYPOS AND GUESSES?

i think this is typo

an 1 23 maya GUK

Former President Donald Trump made a “secret” $1 million donation to the election audit conducted in Arizona following his false claims that the election was stolen from him, the Guardian reports.

The audit was requested by Arizona GOP senators, and doubted by many of their colleagues due to the “wild conspiracy theories” it mirrored. An assertion “that bamboo fibers found in ballot sheets proved they had been printed in Asia” even caused some local GOP members to deem the probe a “grift disguised as an audit.”

But nevertheless, the audit persisted.

Although eventually proven baseless and unsuccessful, The Guardian reports that “one of the largest benefactors” behind this attempt to counter the 2020 election results remained a secret for nearly two years.

But watchdog group “Documented” was able to track funding for the failed assessment and eventually landed on Trump’s super PAC, Save America.

First, the group discovered that Cyber Ninjas, the Florida company that conducted the audit, was provided $5.7 million by far-right groups, and then given an additional $1 million from former Trump advisor and attorney Cleta Mitchell.

Still, questions around the origin of the $1 million remained unanswered.

TheNew York Timesreports that in September of 2021, “unnamed ‘officials,’” as well as Arizona GOP senators who requested the election audit, adamantly denied Trump’s contribution.

However, with its research on many corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as emails and text messages between Trump allies that were obtained by nonpartisan accountability group American Oversight, "Documented" managed to counter those claims.

The Guardian broke down the process of how the watchdog group traced the donation back to Trump.

Like many incidents surrounding Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020, tracing back Trump’s contribution to the audit starts with the Jan. 6 committee.

The committee’s final report mentioned that Trump super PAC, Save America, donated $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) — led by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows — but did not disclose the origin or the reason for the money.

Further research revealed that Trump’s contribution possibly began around June 2021, as accountability group American Oversighttracked text messages between retired Army officer and “arch election denier” Phil Waldron and Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that conducted the audit.

Waldron texted Logan, “Kurt is going to talk to 45 today, about $.”

According to the Guardian, “Kurt” likely referred toKurt Olden, an “election denying lawyer.” He continued, “Mike L talking to Corey L,” referring to CEO of MyPillow and devoted Trump supporter Mike Lindelland Trump campaign manager Corey Lewondowski.

A couple of weeks later, Waldron asked Logan if he had received a $1 million payment from Lewondowski. He texted, “Supposedly Kurt talked to Trump and they got 1 mil for you,” but he noted he “couldn’t verify who sent and received.”

According to The Guardian, the Federal Election Commission reported that less than two weeks later, on July 26, 2021, Save America transferred the $1 million to CPI. Two days later, a new group, American Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) “registered as a corporation in Delaware.”

CPI donated $1 million to AVRF — the group’s first and only donation — in 2021, and although the date of donation is unknown, the clear relationship between the groups, the “timing and amounts” of the transfers, as well as the revealed text messages between Trump allies all leads to one culprit: Trump.

Furthermore, on the day AVRF registered as a corporation, Trump attorney Mitchell emailed Cyber Ninjas CEo Loganand put him in touch with the audit spokesperson, Randy Pullen as well as AVRF treasurer Tom Datwyler.

The Arizona Republic recently confirmed that Trump was notified of the process the whole time

GOP vice-chair of Maricopa County board of supervisors Bill Gates told The Guardian he is “disappointed, but not surprised” by the revelation.

“At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,” Gates said.

Ultimately, even after the great lengths Trump and his cohort of election deniers went to assist in the audit, the goal to overturn Arizona's election was never met. The Guardian reports that in 2020, President Joe Biden won Maricopa County, the most populated in Arizona and where the audit took place, by 45,109 votes.

Regarding the morality of the audit, Gates added that Arizona law states, “electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have to be financed with taxpayer dollars.” And although the audit was “technically not a recount,” it’s clear the intent was the same.

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IMDB 3 26 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1733113/

Producer

Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump (2022)

4.9

Video

producer (as David N. Bossie)

2022

About

The 2020 presidential election left more questions than answers. Over 10 million more Americans voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 than in 2016, yet the president lost. Today, an overwhelming number of Americans say democracy is under attack.

Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump investigates Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s role in the election. Rigged looks at the nearly $400 million Zuckerberg spent nationally in voter operation efforts, particularly in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. 42,000 votes in those three states are the reason Joe Biden is president.

Featuring exclusive interviews with President Donald J. Trump, Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Ted Cruz, Attorney General Jeff Landry, Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, Congressman Jody Hice, Kellyanne Conway, Ken Blackwell, Ken Cuccinelli, Cleta Mitchell, Michael Gableman, Janel Brandtjen and Scott Walter, Rigged follows the money and uncovers the startling facts behind Election 2020 in order to answer the question once and for all: What happened. And ensure it never happens again.

Zuckerberg’s funding of thousands of grants to government election offices across the country was unprecedented and massive in scope. These grants - using the COVID-19 emergency as cover - were used to promote mail-in voting, ballot curing, and drop boxes, the controversial practices that experts say make our sacred elections process far less secure and raise serious questions. Was this a partisan voter turnout operation to assist Joe Biden?

Since 2004, Citizens United Productions has produced 26 hard-hitting and insightful documentary films, including the award-winning Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny and Nine Days That Changed The World, hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich. Other notable titles include Perfect Valor with the late Fred Thompson; The Gift Of Life with Mike Huckabee; Border War; Generation Zero; and Hillary The Movie, the catalyst for Citizens United’s landmark victory for free speech rights at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Runtime: 41 minutes.

---

===

no lnx?

Breaking

Giuliani Disbarred In D.C.: Here Are All The Other Ex-Trump Lawyers Now Facing Legal Consequences

Alison Durkee

Forbes Staff

Alison is a senior news reporter covering US politics and legal news.

Sep 26, 2024,12:38pm EDT

Updated Sep 27, 2024,

Topline Ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was formally disbarred in Washington, D.C., on Thursday—months after being disbarred in New York—as a string of lawyers are now facing consequences for their work with former President Donald Trump.

Rudy Giuliani

Key Facts

Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani, who led Trump’s post-election efforts, was formally disbarred in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ordering the penalty based on New York disbarring the attorney in July. The former New York City mayor has also been criminally charged in Arizona for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election—where he initially tried to evade being served—after already being charged in Georgia, and he’s also been sued for defamation by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. He was ordered to pay $148 million to Georgia election workers whom he defamed, which resulted in Giuliani declaring bankruptcy.

Jenna Ellis: Ellis was charged in Arizona after previously being indicted in Georgia and taking a plea deal in that case, and she took another deal in August that requires her to provide “truthful, honest, candid, and complete” testimonies after being suspended from practicing law for three years as a result of her Georgia guilty plea. She was also previously censured for violating rules that bar attorneys from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” with the attorney admitting in court she had made “misrepresentations” while representing Trump after the election that had a “selfish motive.”

Kenneth Chesebro: The attorney, who is described as the architect of the Trump campaign’s “fake electors” scheme—in which GOP officials in battleground states submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won—was criminally charged in Wisconsin on one count of forgery, after previously being indicted in Georgia, though he took a plea deal right before his case went to trial.

James Troupis: Troupis was also reportedly charged in Wisconsin in June; another Trump attorney who helped organize the false electors scheme, the lawyer had previously avoided criminal charges in other states and settled a civil lawsuit regarding the electors plot in Wisconsin in March.

John Eastman: Eastman was also charged in Arizona, after already being indicted in Georgia and having 11 charges filed against him by counsel for the California State Bar stemming from his efforts to challenge the election results with Trump. A judge recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred and sanctioned $10,000 for his post-election efforts, which the lawyer intends to appeal.

Christina Bobb: Bobb was charged in Arizona, the first charges the attorney and former One America News anchor—who now serves as an attorney for the Republican National Committee—has so far faced. The lawyer joined Trump’s legal team in November 2020, according to the Washington Post, and the indictment cites a text message that ties the lawyer to the “fake elector” scheme in which GOP officials submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won their states.

Jeffrey Clark: Former DOJ attorney Clark, who faced charges from the D.C. bar for aiding Trump’s post-election efforts from within the agency, broke at least one rule of professional conduct related to his actions after 2020 election, a D.C. ethics committee found in a preliminary ruling, with a disciplinary panel ruling in August he should be suspended from practicing law for two years—Clark was also criminally charged in Georgia.

Sidney Powell: A judge dismissed an attempt by the Texas State Bar to discipline Powell in February after the bar alleged Powell’s post-election efforts had violated rules for professional conduct, though she now faces a separate disciplinary investigation in Michigan after being sanctioned for her post-election lawsuit in that state. After advising Trump and bringing her own post-election lawsuits in four states, Powell also still faces defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, a reported federal investigation into her organization’s fundraising arm and was criminally charged in Georgia, though she later reached a plea deal.

Michael Cohen: Trump’s longtime attorney served a three-year sentence in prison and home confinement for tax evasion and campaign finance-related crimes, after he orchestrated a series of “hush money” payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal over allegations they had affairs with Trump.

Alina Habba: Habba, who’s representing Trump in many of his post-presidency legal battles, has been sanctioned multiple times in Trump’s failed lawsuit against Hillary Clinton; she was first ordered to pay with her co-counsel $50,000 in sanctions and $16,274 in attorneys’ fees to one defendant in the case, and she and Trump were then sanctioned in January for nearly $1 million payable to Clinton, her campaign and other Democratic operatives.

Cleta Mitchell: Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s phone call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, resigned from her law firm Foley & Lardner in January 2021, saying she left the firm due to a “massive pressure campaign” against her from the left to oust her over her associations with Trump.

Other Georgia Attorneys: Attorneys Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley were also indicted as part of the Georgia case against Trump and his allies, after Smith worked on behalf of the Trump campaign in Georgia and Cheeley pushed false claims of election fraud at a legislative hearing in the state.

Pending Complaints: Ethics complaints urging state bars and disciplinary boards to investigate attorneys have been filed and remain pending against multiple Trump lawyers who aided his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Mitchell and Boris Epshteyn, though court records show another complaint against Trump attorneys in New Mexico was dismissed.

Attorneys’ Fees: Trump and his campaign have been ordered to pay attorneys’ fees in a number of failed lawsuits—though it’s unclear if his attorneys have been forced to personally shoulder any part of those costs—including more than $20,000 to two Georgia counties over post-election litigation, $1.3 million to former White House advisor Omarosa Manigault and more than $54,000 to Daniels.

What To Watch For

Giuliani, Eastman and Bobb have all pleaded not guilty in Arizona, and their cases will still continue as Ellis’ charges are dropped. It’s unclear how long it will take for the criminal cases in Arizona and Wisconsin to play out. No trial date has yet been set for the defendants in Georgia who haven’t taken plea deals. (Giuliani, Eastman, Clark, Smith, Cheeley and other defendants have all pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.)

Crucial Quote

“The seriousness of [Giuliani’s] misconduct cannot be overstated,” a panel of New York appeals court judges wrote in their July ruling disbarring Giuliani—which formed the basis of the Washington, D.C. decision—arguing he “flagrantly misused his prominent position” as Trump’s personal attorney and “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements ... in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.” “In so doing, respondent not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 Presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”

Tangent

A number of lawyers who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but did not directly represent him in court or advise him, have also faced punishments. Powell’s co-counsel in the Michigan case—in which Trump was not a plaintiff—were all sanctioned and jointly forced to pay more than $175,000 in attorneys’ fees, as well as ordered to undergo legal education and referred to their respective state bars for potential discipline. Attorney Lin Wood, who was involved with the Michigan litigation along with other post-election lawsuits, has been under investigation by the State Bar of Georgia for his efforts since even before the Michigan order was issued. He ultimately retired before the State Bar could formally discipline him.

Chief Critic

Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman has not yet responded to a request for comment, but previously called the former mayor’s disbarment in New York a “politically and ideologically corrupted decision” in a statement, adding they “will be appealing this objectively flawed decision in hopes that the appellate process will restore integrity into our system of justice.” Giuliani has previously opposed his other punishments, with Goodman calling the Arizona case an effort to “eviscerate” the justice system and saying the former New York City mayor is “proud to stand up for the countless Americans who raised legitimate concerns surrounding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.”

Trump’s attorneys have largely denied wrongdoing and opposed the efforts to punish them, with the exception of Cohen, who pleaded guilty to his crimes, and the attorneys who have taken plea deals. In a statement after she pleaded guilty in Arizona, Ellis said she had agreed to cooperate with the investigation and was told she wasn’t a target before being indicted, but “neither the AG nor I control the grand jury.” “So both sides are just following through with our original agreements: I’m telling the truth and they’re not prosecuting me.”

Powell still denies the defamation allegations against her, and told Forbes the sanctions against her in Michigan set a “dangerous precedent to stand that puts at risk every lawyer who represents an unpopular cause or client.” In a statement after the ruling on his disbarment, Eastman’s lawyer said the attorney “maintains that his handling of the legal issues” over whether the 2020 election could be overturned was based on reasonable legal precedent and that Eastman was following “the same process taken by lawyers every day and everywhere.” He also opposed Eastman not being able to practice law to pay his legal fees while he faces the charges in Georgia, saying, “That is not justice and serves no legitimate purpose to protect the public.”

Surprising Fact

After the court ordered sanctions in the Clinton case against Trump and Habba, Trump and Habba went on to voluntarily withdraw two cases stemming from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud litigation against the Trump Organization, which courts had suggested could be viewed as frivolous and result in sanctions.

Key Background

Trump and his allies filed approximately 60 court cases in the aftermath of the 2020 election seeking to change its outcome, ultimately losing all but one case, which was a minor dispute in Pennsylvania that did not impact the overall results. Since leaving office, Trump has continued to be deeply ensnared in legal issues, as he’s faced numerous lawsuits over his alleged role in the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, four criminal cases, James’ civil fraud case against him and his company and two defamation lawsuits from writer E. Jean Carroll. The fraud and Carroll cases have resulted in Trump being ordered to pay a combined $540 million to James and Carroll, though the former president has maintained the cases against him are “witch hunts” designed to harm his presidential campaign, and has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against him.

she just popped up in something i did not put here? 3 22

thot it might be eastman search terms but no

===

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-two-men-very-close-to-ginni-thomasone

In early September of 2020, during the same several-week period that Ginni Thomas friend and Donald Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell was successfully recruiting Ginni Thomas friend and former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman to also become a Trump lawyer, Eastman was the head of the far-right Claremont Institute Center …...

no lnx

July 17

Proof, Investigative Commentary:Two Men Very Close to Ginni Thomas—One of Them One Step Removed From Trump’s Coup Plot—Come seth abramson graphicUnder New Scrutiny, Seth Abramson, left, July 16-17, 2022. New evidence strongly suggests that it’s more imperative than ever that the House January 6 Committee get sworn testimony from the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—and do so quickly.

Introduction: In early September of 2020, during the same several-week period that Ginni Thomas friend and Donald Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell was successfully recruiting Ginni Thomas friend and former Clarence Thomas law clerk John Eastman to also become a Trump lawyer, Eastman was the head of the far-right Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Around this time—September 9—a member of Trump’s National Security Council, Michael Anton, authored a truly stunning article entitled “The Coming Coup?” The document is profoundly unsettling in retrospect, given Anton’s high position within Trumpworld’s intelligence apparatus.

In “The Coming Coup?”, Anton imagined the following scenario:

Violence around the time of the 2020 election propagated by left-wing groups; requiring the invocation of the Insurrection Act by then-President Trump....

Note that this very same sequence of events could equally be triggered if Trump and his political team were to stage a televised act of violence and chaos and then blame it on left-wing agitators in a premeditated way—which, in the event, is exactly what Trump used the Rudy Giuliani-Steve Bannon-John Eastman “war room” at the Willard Hotel in Washington to do during Insurrection Week. [flynn called for matial law, seize machines, rerun election under mil?]

Despite no evidence whatsoever that either Black Lives Matter activists or participants in the loose antifa movement had been present at the United States Capitol on that dark day, Trumpist partisans insisted that they had been—and immediately after the Capitol was cleared began pushing Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on these (fraudulent) grounds.

[B]y September of 2020 it was Trump’s longtime friend, attorney, confidant, and fixer Michael Cohen who had told Congress and all America under oath that he knew for a fact that Donald Trump was not going to concede the 2020 presidential election no matter what happened in it.

Just days ago, a Mother Jones investigative report confirmed Cohen’s revelation with secretly recorded pre-election audio of Bannon—of Trump’s Insurrection Week Willard Hotel war room, which he shared with the Claremont Institute’s Eastman—confirming that in fact it was Trump who’d all along planned to execute the plot Anton wrote of for Eastman’s Claremont Institute back in September, just after Eastman came aboard Trump’s legal team at Ginni Thomas friend Cleta Mitchell’s invitation.

So Michael Cohen was right. And if you’re of the camp that believes—on significant evidence—that every accusation by Trumpworld is fact a confession, you can see in the coup plot outlined above by Trump adviser Anton precisely the sequence of events that would quite nearly be carried out by Bannon, Giulian, Eastman, Sidney Powell, Michael Lindell, Patrick Byrne, and Michael Flynn.

Within 90 days of Anton’s essay, Eastman would be working on making the seditious vision of Trump’s intel guru (which the Claremont Institute had eagerly published) a reality—though for Donald Trump, of course, rather than Joe Biden. Indeed, once Ginni Thomas friend Eastman joined Trump presidential adviser Ginni Thomas and the aforementioned Ginni Thomas friend and presidential adviser Cleta Mitchell as a Trump adviser, he appears to mostly have focused on executing Anton’s hypothetical.

Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, seth abramson resized4 proof of collusionlegal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is a best-selling author who has published eight books and edited five anthologies.

===

MMA 8 22

BANNON (HOST): [Steve] Cortes, and he and I didn’t talk, we talked about his segments and how we’re going to go through the economic data. We always talk beforehand about what's the best way to lay that out. But we didn’t talk about what he brought up, which was the Politico piece. I saw it I think at zero six hundred or seven, whenever it popped, and it was their lead story and they meant it as a hit piece. And I’m reading this thing, the RNC is working with these new groups, and it’s Cleta Mitchell, she’s been on the show many times talking about it, but the RNC, and they meant it as a hit piece and Cortes said, hey this thing was like a paid advertisement cause it shows you the quality of training they’re getting and now the RNC is getting involved. I said hey, I think they’re sending it out to the - to make sure the RNC donors see it, that they’re now working with the crazies.

Cleta Mitchell, tell us about the piece and particularly what you guys are doing now in conjunction with the RNC cause every time you have these summits, we send people, I get tremendous feedback of people that now are going to get engaged now and be part of it, it’s changed their lives. The comradery. But most importantly is the technical details, not war stories, you teach them technical details about how to be election officials, how to be poll workers, right? Not just poll watchers. So walk us through why did Politico try to take you out this morning ma’am?

CLETA MITCHELL (GUEST): Well, thank you for having me Steve, you’re always so great to help us tell our story. Politico got a tape, an audio tape, from our Arizona summit in which I was presenting to the group there about how the Biden administration is using our tax dollars to turn every federal agency into a Democratic political operation. And I used the language that they use, which is their new Democratic majority, that this is language of the left and I just traced their language showing that that’s what they're doing with our tax dollars.

Biden issued an executive order based on a plan that was put to him by a left-wing organization, Demos, if you want to find out about it just go to Demos dot org and you can look it up. They’re the ones who sold this to him. They’ve got Susan Rice in the White House running the program. And it’s an executive order that orders every federal agency to develop a voter registration and turnout program and then they’re going to give grants to approved groups. Guess who’s going to approve those groups? Susan Rice. Excuse me. And so I talked about this at the Arizona summit, I went through the language and so we’ve decided to put that out there. We’re putting it on our website today, the entire audio.[tucker perm dem maj?]

…

MITCHELL: So, they're going to do with our tax dollars what they did with Zuckerbucks in 2020. And that's what I was teaching. I was giving the presentation in Arizona –[how to gerry?]

BANNON: Yes.

MITCHELL: – showing what they were doing. And they are saying, the Politico article says that I was complaining and I was engaged in voter suppression because I didn’t want these groups to be registered and mobilized. No! If those people are going to be registered and mobilized, let the Democratic Party pay for it. Let the candidates pay for it.Don’t use my tax money to register and turn out people to vote because they’re the most vulnerable in our society.[acorn-y?]

BANNON: K. We're going to have you on to go through actually the presentation.

...

We need the army of the awakened to get this information that Cleta and her team puts out all over the country.

...

BANNON: Democrats, if they can't steal, they can't win. Let me just be blunt.

MITCHELL: That's right.

BANNON: They can't steal, they can't win. They know it. That's why they're so upset aboutMAGA getting to the bottom of this.

...

MITCHELL: Let me tell you what, Steve. It is a real serious problem what's going on with this vote by mail. This avalanche of mail voting. I call it unsupervised voting.

It's happening in Florida, where in Florida they have sent the wrong ballots, they sent out tens of thousands of ballots that have been voted and come back into Broward county, Palm Beach county, Orange county – which is Orlando. And they have the wrong races or they don't have the school board races. And it's happening right now and it's all because of this bad voting.

===

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/02/rnc-stop-the-steal-advocates-poll-workers-00049109

heidi p

no lnx

Republican National Committee has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping “election integrity” operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states, according to new recordings of organizing summits held this spring in Florida and Pennsylvania obtained by POLITICO.

On the tapes, RNC National Election Integrity Director Josh Findlay repeatedly characterizes the committee’s role as supporting in-state coalitions — delivering staff, organization and “muscle” in key states to the person they identify as the quarterback of the effort to create a permanent workforce: Conservative elections attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a central figure in former President Donald Trump’s legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election.

“Cleta Mitchell, she’s like the best election and election law expert out there. We’re not going to tell her what to do,” Findlay told a March 31 Pennsylvania session organized by Mitchell.

Publicly, the RNC has insisted its goal is to ensure there are enough trained poll workers to protect the electoral process and ensure partisan parity at polling centers. The recordings, however, indicated that the RNC is relying heavily on people who have spread false or unproven claims of irregularities and conspiracies. The recordings feature Findlay speaking at a number of Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” summits, which her group has hosted in battleground states including Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The RNC is just “part of the team,” he told a Florida summit the same month.

While Republicans have said the aim of their “election integrity” effort is to ensure there are well-trained poll workers during the next election, the recordings also feature Mitchell speaking openly about the need to challenge efforts by nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color and unmarried women.

“It’s a place the left sees as a great target of opportunity, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said, referring to Democratic efforts to register voters from traditionally underrepresented voting blocs.

Mitchell was on Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state, and is she among those currently under subpoena in a criminal investigation by the Fulton County district attorney. Days after the 2020 election, she was exploring ways to keep Trump in power via a slate of fake electors from several battleground states. White House call logs show she is also among a handful of individuals with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, the day the Capitol was attacked, and she is suing to block the House Jan. 6 committee from obtaining her full phone records.

Mitchell, in a response to POLITICO, said her comments about the “new American majority” were referring to an executive order by the Biden administration directing federal agencies to help citizens register to vote and to educate them on how to do so. The effort amounts to turning “every federal agency into a Democratic turnout machine — using our tax dollars in the process,” said Mitchell.

[Cleta Mitchell testifies.

Cleta Mitchell was on former President Donald Trump’s post-election phone call directing a Georgia elections official to “find” him 11,700 votes after losing the state. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo]

The RNC says its poll watching and working program has been in place for recent primary elections in Georgia and Texas, where “turnout has risen, reported issues have been resolved and elections have run smoothly,” said RNC spokesperson Gates McGavick.

“The RNC works with other groups who have an interest in promoting election integrity, but the party’s efforts are independent from any outside organization,” said McGavick. “Fearmongering stories like this undermine confidence in elections and unfairly smear Americans who are simply getting involved in the civic process,” he said.

The RNC, in its email response, said Democrats also have a major Election Day operation through their national party and noted that the Democratic National Committee’s website features a webinar on how to become a poll worker. The RNC also disputes that it trains poll workers. It calls sessions in which statewide “election integrity” directors coach recruits on how to challenge votes and voting processes “workshops,” and all poll workers must attend separate trainings by county clerks.

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Yet the DNC’s “voter protection” program is different because it focuses on expanding voting access, including through more locations and through mail-in voting. The webinar does not train poll workers, rather informs them how to apply, and the DNC says it does not have a national initiative to train poll workers. [so projection]

‘Number one goal’

RNC chair Ronna McDaniel has walked a fine line in calling for robust election security measures in response to Trump’s unproven claims of voting irregularities in the 2020 election, while avoiding fully embracing more sensational allegations there was widespread fraud and the election was “stolen” from him.

The approach around placing partisan poll workers is similar: steering clear of any public statements expressly supporting the “Stop the Steal” wing of the party while collaborating with some of its leading advocates around what the RNC considers, according to minutes of a spring training meeting in Memphis provided by Documented, its “number one goal” of building a permanent army of 15,000 GOP poll workers.

In workshops hosted by the RNC, GOP activists behind the party’s “election integrity” drive have primarily emphasized rooting out voting fraud — including “ballot stuffing” through the mail for which no evidence exists — as their key goal.

The recordings suggest the goals are broader. At an April 5 Arizona summit, Mitchell spoke mostly about an emerging “new American majority” of people of color, young people and unmarried women that could make conservatives “obsolete.” Her private comments are significant because Democrats have long insisted it is these fears of displacement — and not legitimate election administration concerns — behind the GOP drive to tighten access to voting for certain groups, including through mail.

POLITICO obtained the recordings from Documented, a non-partisan investigative watchdog that says it believes “corporations and wealthy donors have far too much power and influence” and that “democracy itself is under attack.”Documented got the tapes from attendees.

Other major summit partners include conservative grassroots organizations Heritage Action for America and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, who became part of Trump’s legal team in Georgia, where there is a criminal investigation into Trump and his top legal advisers. Toni Shuppe, who led a far-right effort to “audit the vote” in search of fraud in Pennsylvania, is leading that state’s coalition. In Arizona, Gina Swoboda, a former Trump campaign official who runs the Voter Reference Foundation, is heading the effort. Her group has continued to spread claims about voting discrepancies and published millions of voters’ names, birthdates and addresses.

None of these coalition partners responded to requests for comment.

The recordings feature keynote speakers continuing to push Trump’s false election claims.

“They [Democrats] know they can’t win unless they cheat,” Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator who chairs the Conservative Partnership Institute, the activist group that houses Mitchell’s initiative, said at the Florida gathering.

POLITICO previously documented the RNC’s efforts to build “an army” of poll workers prepared to challenge elections clerks in primarily Democrat-dominated precincts in Michigan and keep them in constant contact with roving party attorneys. In its email response, the RNC also said its staff training and recruitment of volunteers focuses on the “need to comply with federal and state laws protecting voting rights” and any individual who “does not follow the law will be promptly dismissed.”

‘It’s going to be an army’: Tapes reveal GOP plan to contest elections

BY HEIDI PRZYBYLA

Shipping volunteers

Findlay, in his summit appearances, repeatedly makes clear Mitchell and in-state coalition leaders are the braintrust of that effort. “When we started this (election integrity) department, we said, ‘Well, what can we do? Cleta knows more about election integrity than anybody in the country … What can we do to participate,’” he said in Florida on March 25.

Findlay was referencing Mitchell’s activities around the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, which saw thousands of Trump loyalists enlist as poll watchers and which the RNC considers a model for upcoming elections. He’s made similar remarks in Pennsylvania and other states about the RNC taking its lead from Mitchell.

“We can recruit. We can train, we can ship volunteers,” he said in Florida.

In Pennsylvania, the statewide coalition director is Shuppe, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracies that the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling trafficked children on its website and Pizzagate, an unfounded theory that prominent Democrats were running a pedophile ring.

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Another speaker at a March 31 Pennsylvania summit was CPI’s Ned Jones, who during his remarks floated conspiracies about “rogue” postal service workers tampering with mail-in ballots. Kerri Toloczko, who is atop the Florida coalition, suggested during the same gathering that Wisconsin service union workers may have been involved in casting votes for nursing home residents with dementia.

Toloczko did not respond to a request for comment.

A growing force

The summits, organized by Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network,” are largely kick-off events. They are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts involving several grassroots conservative groups.

CPI is a conservative think tank funded in part by Trump’s political action committee and run by DeMint and Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. In its annual report, CPI states that it is aiming to create “permanent election integrity coalitions” in eight target states. “Cleta, her full time job at CPI is to do nothing but this,” Meadows told a Georgia summit in February.

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A former associate general counsel for the Trump campaign, Findlay has also been caught up in investigations around the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In late July, the Washington Post reported Findlay is among those for whom the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas seeking any communications regarding a scheme for GOP state lawmakers to overturn the will of the voters by submitting slates of alternate electors.

“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy. ... We live in a constitutional republic.”

Cleta Mitchell, conservative elections attorney

Texts the Jan. 6 committee obtained from Meadows show lawmakers referencing meetings at CPI in the post-2020 election period. Two days after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, it was Mitchell who contacted Trump lawyer John Eastman, the legal mastermind of Trump’s failed strategy, and encouraged him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral vote certification in Congress.

A transcript shows Mitchell played a major role in a conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him additional votes. Amid the controversy, Mitchell resigned from her position as a partner with the law firm Foley & Lardner and landed at CPI shortly thereafter.

CPI is a growing force: According to its annual report, the group raised $19.7 million in 2021, which includes a $1 million grant from Trump’s Save America PAC, which raised millions by fanning Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

Not ‘a democracy’

While training sessions previously published by POLITICO show Republican recruits overwhelmingly concerned about election fraud, Mitchell’s remarks in Arizona focused primarily on what many Democrats have long insisted is the real motive behind the entire GOP effort: targeting certain groups.

She made extended remarks about Democrats’ goal, since former Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Push” coalition of the 1980s, to register more people in minority communities to vote and create a new American majority of young people, people of color and unmarried women. “There was a book ‘Brown Is the New White’ talking about changing demographics in America was going to render conservatives obsolete,” she said.

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“That is their goal,” she said of Democrats and outside groups aligned with them like unions. “They believe you can expand access to democracy by underrepresented populations.” Mitchell said they “target the most vulnerable people of our society,” citing the story of an allegedly elderly woman with dementia who allegedly obtained a voter registration form at a health clinic.

“You see it all over,” she said, as she decried the availability of information on voter registration at public venues like health clinics and universities. “We see people who are in need, who are hurting, who need help,” she said, referring to elderly, disabled, low-income Americans and students in need of financial aid receiving “education” on how to vote from outside groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the availability of voter registration information on government websites or venues serving the needy.

In her response to POLITICO, Mitchell said: “I showed the attendees the language taken from left-wing sources,” adding that President Joe Biden and “left-wing” groups are conspiring to use federal resources to “register and turn out the vote of the most vulnerable people in our society and pressure them to vote for Democrats.”

“That sort of enterprise should be paid for by candidates or political parties,” Mitchell said, without offering evidence any agency is pressuring individuals to vote for a particular party by providing them with registration materials.

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In the tapes, Mitchell also disparaged the Democrats’ recent warnings about threats to democracy.

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“They bring democracy to your doorstep. I wanna pause right here. We don’t live in a democracy,” Mitchell said, to a round of applause from the crowd. “But to the left, everything is about democracy, the democracy fund, the democracy this, the democracy that.”

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“We live in a constitutional republic,” she said. [real am = wht xian?]

FILED UNDER: GOP, ELECTIONS, RNC, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE,

===

https://documented.net/investigations/recordings-reveal-whats-really-going-on-cleta-mitchell-election-integrity-network

a $19.7 million DC-based organization led by former Trump officials who worked to overturn the 2020 election is "recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections," according to the New York Times.

Documented has obtained hours of audio and other materials outlining this effort.

The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is working to build what it calls a “permanent election infrastructure” in eight swing states staffed with people fully committed to election conspiracies. The project is led by Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who played a key role in plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The goal is to build in-state coalitions focused on recruiting election conspiracy theorists to interrogate local election offices and to become poll workers and watchers. Ultimately, if CPI and its allies are successful, then those who falsely believe that the 2020 election was stolen could be in a position of real power and authority over future elections. The risk is that conspiracy theorists who see fraud around every corner are going to disrupt voting and the administration of elections.

CPI is working closely with the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the effort. As described by POLITICO, the collaboration means that the RNC "has been relying on a stable of the party’s most prolific spreaders of false stolen-election theories to pilot a sweeping 'election integrity' operation to recruit and coach thousands of poll workers in eight battleground states."

As Mark Meadows recently said of the project, "this fight is not just about what happened in 2020. This fight is about every future election, whether it is at a state level or a federal level or the highest office in the land."[aud]

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cPI’s Election Integrity Network

CPI, which raised $19.7 million in 2021, is led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and was seeded with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. CPI has launched a number of projects led by former Trump administration officials and allies, including Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation and Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America,and is staffed with individuals who played a key role in laying the groundwork for the January 6 insurrection.

CPI’s “Election Integrity Network” project is led by Cleta Mitchell,the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the then-President urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes. Mitchell was also responsible for contacting John Eastman and asking him to engineer a legal argument to challenge electoral certification in Congress. Amidst the controversy, in January 2021 Mitchell abruptly resigned from her longtime role as a partner with the law firm Foley and Lardner and joined CPI.

Mitchell played a key role in promoting false claims of election fraud, and is now channeling that misplaced anger into mobilizing conspiracy-minded MAGA activists to enter the election administration infrastructure.

“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state. They can't put them all out, folks.”

CAROL DAVIS, FREEDOMWORKS

“Permanent Election Integrity Coalitions”

In 2022, CPI held summits in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. These are not one-day summits to simply rile up the base and build email lists—these are kick-off events to launch in-state election integrity coalitions, and are followed by regular calls, meetings, and other organizing efforts. The summits and in-state coalitions include the participation of other election denialist groups like Tea Party Patriots, Heritage Action, and Turning Point USA.

“The goal of what we're trying to do at this meeting today is to build a permanent election integrity infrastructure here in the state of Pennsylvania, and that infrastructure includes a statewide coalition,” said Tea Party Patriots’ Jenny Beth Martin at the Pennsylvania summit.

“The vision I have for everyone is thousands of little brush fires all over the state,” said Carol Davis of FreedomWorks during the Pennsylvania summit. “They can't put them all out, folks.”

“Become a Presence in the Local Election Office"

Members of the CPI-led coalitions are encouraged “to become a presence in the local election office.”Activists are directed to regularly show up to elections offices in groups of two to ask questions, to attend election board meetings, to get involved with cleaning voter rolls, to file searching FOIA requests, and to scrutinize vote-by-mail procedures.

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These activities can contribute to an atmosphere of hostility that drives dedicated election workers out of public service.

A test drive of CPI’s strategy in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021 highlighted how these activities—carried out by people who believe in the myth of widespread fraud—led clerks to feel as if they were being accused of malfeasance simply for doing their job.

The CPI-led coalition in Virginia claims to have trained 4,500 poll watchers and election workers and organized 18 local task forces, and to have covered 85% of polling locations on Election Day 2021 and in the 45 days of early voting that led up to it.

At CPI summits, Mitchell holds up Virginia, and Fairfax County in particular, as a model for coalitions in other states. But as the New York Times reported:

"In Fairfax, a Democratic bastion outside Washington, about three dozen activists associated with the coalition and the local Republican Party rotated through election offices, combing through voter registration applications, undeliverable mail and other materials. Christine Brim, the task force’s leader, appeared in person or emailed staff nearly every day, according to Scott Konopasek, the registrar at the time. The operation ate up county workers’ time with dozens of information requests, as well as informal interrogations, Mr. Konopasek said.

'Everything they saw that they didn’t understand was fraud in their minds and that’s how they would frame the questions,' he said. 'It was always accusatory.'"

The Fairfax County election registrar resigned in large part because coalition members were making his job so difficult. In states like Arizona, where CPI has more recently created a coalition, accusations and harassment are also causing election professionals to leave their jobs.

Recruiting Poll Workers and Poll Watchers

A primary goal of the CPI-led coalitions is to recruit poll workers and watchers—with an emphasis on poll workers, because they have more authority. As a Heritage Action representative said at CPI’s Florida summit, poll workers can act as the “referee on the field” policing voters:

"We really do need poll workers. We need watchers, we need both. But the way I like to look at it is if you're a poll worker and you're the one handling, you know, the situation. I like to think of it as you know, you're the referee on the field rather than being someone sitting on the stands watching conservatives cry 'foul, foul.'"

A former Trump campaign lawyer, Linda Kerns, similarly emphasized at a CPI summit in Pennsylvania that “we do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place”:

"I’m going to repeat because its so important: election board workers they are, they're actually employees of the county for the day. They are more important, or they're higher value than poll watchers because election board workers actually sit at the election table. They're part of the process. And the poll watchers are in there, but they can only observe. So in Philadelphia, sometimes what most of the time, we can't find election board workers because we can't find Republicans in a lot of the precincts. We do have to put poll watchers in, but election board workers are the most important and high value person that we can have in the polling place."

Kerns also described how poll workers and poll watchers could support litigation:

"OK, so all we really have to say about poll watchers and election board workers is, and as a lawyer, I cannot do anything unless I have poll watchers and election workers in the polling place. If I'm an election court in Philadelphia and there are no Republicans in polling places or people in polling places telling me what's going on, I have nothing to bring to the judge."

FOIAs for Phantom Voters

CPI sessions have been a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories about “leftwing entities” allegedly colluding with election officials to facilitate fraud. In addition to conspiracies about “Zuckerbucks”—the theory that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg somehow corrupted the 2020 election by supporting groups that supported local election authorities during the pandemic—CPI officials have floated wild theories about a range of established nonpartisan groups that allegedly are involved with election fraud.

For example, CPI’s Ned Jones has posited that so-called “phantom voters” were somehow inserted into Pennsylvania’s voter record by a nonpartisan voter registration organization, the Center for Voter Information. At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, he said:

“Number one is the Center for Voter Information.What they do is they do mass mailings to what they claim are commercially available lists in the spring, trying to sign up new voters. And in the fall, during election time, they sent out absentee ballot applications that are partially filled out.Now we've learned they had a special arrangement with the Postal Service. And I'll talk more about them in the next panel. But when their mailings are undeliverable, that is no one's at the address address that it's sent to. They don't get that mail back. What they get is a list from the Postal Service of undeliverable mail, and that's mailed to a voter who is no longer at their address. And we believe that somehow they use that information to create the phantom voters that we're all very familiar with right now.”

Coalition members are encouraged to investigate these conspiracy theories in their state and local election offices. One CPI document obtained by Documented

instructs state coalition members to “Document the relationship between the state and local election offices and the leftwing entities that are intent upon skewing and manipulating the 2022 elections....from the INSIDE.... by obtaining and documenting where these leftist entities are, and what they are doing with local and state election offices and officials.”

CPI instructs coalition member to question elections officials, file open records requests, attend public meetings, and review meeting minutes in order “to learn if election offices in your state have had contact with and/or applied for participation with the leftist groups” identified by CPI, and to then share research findings with Jones and CPI.

“We need citizen eyes on every election office!,” the CPI document states.

RNC Election Integrity Program and CPI

CPI is working closely with the RNC in these efforts. RNC officials have been speakers at several CPI summits, and RNC state election integrity directors are taking part in state-wide election integrity efforts spearheaded by CPI.

The RNC created a permanent election integrity program in early 2021, following Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The RNC's national election integrity director is Josh Findlay, who was associate general counsel for the 2020 Trump campaign, and claims to have "run the President's national war room out of the White House." The RNC has hired state election integrity directors in 16 key states.

Findlay has addressed multiple CPI summits, where he characterizes the RNC's election integrity efforts as focused on supporting CPI, helping with organization and staffing, and deferring to Cleta Mitchell—which is notable, given Mitchell’s role in pushing the big lie and in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

At CPI’s Florida summit, Findlay described how the RNC engaged in the 2021 Virginia elections by taking its lead from Cleta Mitchell and others in the CPI-led coalition:

"When we got on the ground in Virginia, we said "Cleta, Lynn [Taylor, of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy], what can we do?" They were already doing trainings, they'd hit the ground running. Our state director's first day was the day of the summit in Virginia and they said, Well, look, we got a lot of materials done, but we've got to shift massive amounts of people for 45 days of early voting. We said, "well, your poll workers and poll watchers have gotta get credentials through the party. We're good at providing muscle. Let's contribute we'll help out with that." And we saw the great things that happened in Virginia, and we're just really excited to be part of that."

At CPI’s Pennsylvania summit, Findlay similarly described how the RNC supported the CPI-led Virginia coalition by helping to organize poll watcher shifts: “Cleta Mitchell, she's like the best election and election law expert out here. We're not going to tell her what to do.”

The RNC’s election integrity program is also playing a formal role in these CPI-led coalitions. In Pennsylvania, for example, the RNC election integrity state director, Andrea Raffel, worked directly with Cleta Mitchell to plan the summit, presented at the event, and is helping to lead the statewide coalition.

“Lying Is Their Native Language”

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CPI president Jim DeMintpresented the goals of the organization’s election effort in stark terms. “Everything we love and care about this country goes down the drain if the election system continues the way it is,” he said at a CPI election integrity summit in Arizona.

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DeMint also brushed off accusations that CPI was helping to promote the “big lie” about the 2020 election being stolen, declaring instead that "climate change was a lie" and that "much of what they told us about covid was a lie:”

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“And what we're doing today is what the left says is ‘the big lie.’ You're involved with the big lie. We know who lies. We know that Hunter's laptop was a lie. We know that climate change was a lie. We know much of what they told us about covid was a lie. We know telling us the borders are secure is a lie . . . Lying is their native language."

DeMint also declared that Democrats “want to cheat” and that “they know that they can’t win unless they cheat:”

"So we can't run a country, a free country, if people don't have any confidence in their elections, and that's where we are right now. And the only reason that they don't want you to ask questions is because they know they're lying. And they know that they can't win unless they cheat. I guarantee you.Anybody who doesn't want a photo I.D. is not worried about voter suppression. They want to cheat. We need to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

More recordings from the CPI-organized events are on file with Documented. If you are a reporter and would like to discuss, get in touch.

===

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/us/politics/cleta-mitchell-trump.html

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Trump Lawyer on Call Is a Conservative Firebrand Aiding His Push to Overturn Election

Cleta Mitchell had been quietly helping President Trump’s attempt to subvert the election results when the recording of him pressuring Georgia elections officials was revealed.

Although Cleta Mitchell is affiliated with an established law firm, she fits the mold of many lawyers who have advised Mr. Trump during his presidency.

Michael S. Schmidt Kenneth P. Vogel

Published Jan. 4, 2021UpdatedJan. 15, 2021

As President Trump has sought to overturn the election results, his personal lawyers paraded themselves before television hosts, state elections officials and anyone else willing to entertain their baseless claims of voter fraud.

But behind the scenes, a longtime conservative lawyer named Cleta Mitchell quietly helped. Her work for Mr. Trump drew widespread attention for the first time over the weekend, when a recording was released of an hourlong call in which Mr. Trump threatened Georgia elections officials with “a criminal offense” if they failed to “find” enough votes to change the state’s presidential results.

On the call, Ms. Mitchell repeatedly jumped in to help Mr. Trump, showing an intimate level of involvement in his efforts as they made baseless claims about the election and pressed Georgia officials to hand over election data.

Ms. Mitchell is a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner, which has over 1,000 lawyers and an office in nearly every major city in the United States and represents large corporations such as CVS Pharmacy. Her presence on the call stood out because Mr. Trump has struggled to attract high-profile lawyers to aid his attempts to overturn the election, instead relying on a group that has included Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has pushed outlandish claims in defense of Mr. Trump throughout his presidency, and Sidney Powell, who has espoused conspiracy theories.

Ms. Mitchell has been advising the president for weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Understand Georgia’s Trump Investigation

Card 1 of 5

An immediate legal threat to Trump. Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been investigating whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered with the 2020 election in Georgia. The case could be one of the most perilous legal problems for Mr. Trump. Here’s what to know:

Looking for votes. Prosecutors in Georgia opened their investigation in February 2021, just weeks after Mr. Trump made a phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and urged him to “find” enough votes to overturn the results of the election there.

Who is under scrutiny? With the help of a special grand jury, Ms. Willis has subpoenaed several of Mr. Trump’s allies, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has emerged as a central figure in the case. Mr. Giuliani spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power as his personal lawyer.

What are prosecutors looking at? In addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis has homed in on a plot by Trump allies to send fake Georgia electors to Washington and misstatements about the election results made by Mr. Giuliani before the state legislature in December 2020.

The potential charges. Experts say that Ms. Willis is building a case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud and racketeering. Prosecutors have warned some state officials and pro-Trump “alternate electors” that they could be indicted.

In the day after the audio emerged, Foley & Lardner sought to distance itself from Ms. Mitchell, saying in a statement on Monday that its lawyers were expected to refrain from representing or advising anyone in the election. The firm said it was examining Ms. Mitchell’s role on Mr. Trump’s legal team.

“We are aware of, and are concerned by, Ms. Mitchell’s participation in the Jan. 2 conference call and are working to understand her involvement more thoroughly,” the firm said.

Ms. Mitchell did not return an email seeking comment.

Although she is affiliated with an established law firm, Ms. Mitchell fits the mold of many lawyers who have advised Mr. Trump during his presidency as he faced a special counsel investigation and impeachment and has now taken on a specious effort to overturn the vote.

Ms. Mitchell has for years represented a range of conservatives such as Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s former head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and organizations like the National Rifle Association. In recent years, she represented conservative Tea Party groups that accused the I.R.S. of wrongly targeting them.

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During the Russia investigation, Ms. Mitchell publicly attacked the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in the news media, questioning why his team was not examining Hillary Clinton instead.

Ms. Mitchell, 70, started her political career as a Democrat, winning election to the Oklahoma House of Representatives in her mid-20s and serving for nearly a decade before unsuccessfully campaigning for lieutenant governor in 1986.

She came to Washington as an activist pushing for term limits and registered as a Republican in 1996. She established herself as one of the party’s leading election and nonprofit lawyers, representing its congressional campaign arms and several of its candidates, as well as groups that back Republicans, including the N.R.A., where she also served on the board.

But unlike most traditional political lawyers, Ms. Mitchell maintained a public profile supporting candidates and causes, earning a reputation as a firebrand. She was a leading critic of the I.R.S.’s treatment of nonprofit groups associated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration and of state and local coronavirus restrictions that religious groups opposed last year.

During the Trump administration, Ms. Mitchell has also represented the nonprofit of the president’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, which has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors in Manhattan as part of a broad investigation into whether Mr. Bannon defrauded donors.

At one point in the call over the weekend, Mr. Trump brought up a baseless claim about ballots from Atlanta that were for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

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“Does anybody know about it?” Mr. Trump asked.

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“I know about it, but —” Ms. Mitchell said before she was interrupted by the president.

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“OK, Cleta, I’m not asking you. Cleta, honestly. I’m asking Brad,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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https://documented.net/investigations/documented-obtains-list-of-2020-donors-to-ginni-thomas-group-that-supported-trumps-attempted-coup

donors, extensive

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INVESTIGATION

Documented Obtains List of 2020 Donors to Ginni Thomas Group That Supported Trump’s Attempted Coup

Documented is revealing a list of CNP Action's 2020 donors, and can confirm that Ginni Thomas remained on the board of the group as it laid the groundwork for January 6.

COUNCIL FOR NATIONAL POLICY

PUBLISHED ON

APR 12, 2022

COPY LINK

New documents reveal that Ginni Thomas remained on the board of Council for National Policy Action (“CNP Action”) in 2020 as it worked to support former President Donald Trump’s attempted election coup.

Documented has additionally obtained a list of funders to the organization that year, as well as recordings, documents, and other materials that provide further evidence of Thomas’ advocacy related to the 2020 election.

According to a tax filing obtained by Documented, Thomas remained on CNP Action's nine-member board of directors in 2020, as the group promoted baseless election fraud conspiracies, urged Republican legislatures in swing states to reject Biden's win, and pressed Congress to only count Trump electors from those states. Thomas’ 2020 role in CNP Action has not been confirmed until now.

Separate materials obtained by Documented describe the 2020 donors who bankrolled CNP Action's activities that year. Those donors include:

Leonard Leo, the longtime Federalist Society officer who shaped Trump’s judicial nominations, and who plays a key role in a network of interlinked dark money groups. Leo and Thomas have a long relationship: for example, in 2009, Leo helped Thomas create Liberty Central, a tea party themed nonprofit, with Leo serving as a founding board member, and Thomas as the group's President.

Michael Farris, who “played a critical behind-the-scenes role in the lawsuit that Republican state attorneys general filed in December [2020] in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election of President Biden,” according to the New York Times. Farris is CEO of the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which regularly litigates before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where Clarence Thomas was part of the 5-4 majority that backed a Colorado cake shop owner’s refusal to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple.

Floyd G. Brown,who produced the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad and founded the sensationalist right-wing website Western Journal, which published an op-ed in December 2020 from Trump ally Michael Flynn declaring “It’s time for god-fearing Americans to fight.”

Other CNP Action donors include Paige Patterson, the controversial former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and executives from groups like Susan B. Anthony List and Independent Women’s Voice, which regularly participate in litigation before the Supreme Court. The amount contributed by each donor is not known.

Screen Shot 2022 04 07 at 10 51 32 AM

DOCUMENT

CNP Action 2020 Donors

This document, a slide from a presentation at a CNP Action event, identifies 21 contributors to CNP Action in 2020.

PUBLISHED: APRIL 12, 2022

Additionally, as described in the timeline below, Documented has obtained several years of recordings and other materials that show Thomas’s long history with CNP Action and its sister organization, the Council for National Policy (“CNP”).

These CNP recordings and materials document the group's efforts both before and after the 2020 election to narrow access to the ballot and to lay the groundwork for Trump’s attempted coup. They show Thomas' close working relationship with CNP member Cleta Mitchell, the Trump legal advisor who was on the call where the president pressured the Georgia Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes.” They also show CNP’s attempts after January 6 to thwart the work of the bipartisan committee examining the attack on the Capitol.

Thomas has already faced scrutiny for dozens of texts that she had sent White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late 2020 urging him to overturn the election. Taken together, these materials provide further evidence of Thomas' ties to the attempted election coup, and may deepen pressure for her husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to recuse from cases relating to the election and the violence on January 6.

CNP, Ginni Thomas, and Election 2020

18 May 2019

Thomas and Cleta Mitchell Announce Project to “Protect President Trump”

In May of 2019, Thomas jointly addressed a CNP conference with Mitchell, who would later join President Trump’s legal team and peddle election fraud myths.“I’m so thankful that CNP put Charlie Kirk and Cleta and I all together—it really goes very well,” Thomas said. “Watch what happens.”

At the event, Thomas described a new project called Crowdsourcers, as well as a separate PAC and nonprofit to “protect President Trump,” both of which were to be set up by Mitchell. The PAC/nonprofit venture was slated to do business under the name “American D-Day.” There is no record of a PAC or nonprofit having been registered with the Federal Election Commission or IRS under that name, although it is not known whether the project advanced under a different name. Documented first reported on the details of this project in 2019, in partnership with The Intercept.

2020

28 Feb 2020

CNP Action Pre-Election Session Alleging Voter Fraud

On February 28, 2020, CNP Action sponsored a session at a CNP conference that described the upcoming election in nearly apocalyptic terms and—before a single ballot had even been cast—warned that Democrats were planning to engage in widespread fraud through practices like vote by mail.

One panelist, True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, warned that Democrats would use “mob rule” to siege the 2020 elections with fraudulent votes: “The swarming tactics of a radicalized socialist mindset is a dangerous thing to behold.” Another panelist, Save Our States’ Trent England, warned that the “inner city” is “where the fraud happens,” and stressed the need to find Republican poll watchers in urban and tribal precincts. This was another CNP story that Documented first reported on in partnership with The Intercept.

28 Feb 2020

ALEC CEO Discusses Steps State Legislatures "Can Take to Question the Validity of an Election"

During the question-and-answer portion of the February 2020 session, American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”) CEO Lisa Nelson stated that ALEC had been working on “action items that [state] legislators can take to question the validity of an election.” Nelson told the group, “obviously we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote. But it's very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that really what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.”

The idea that Republican-led state legislatures could overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint Trump electors would be a key part of Trump’s attempted coup strategy.

11 Nov 2020

CNP Action Post-Election Strategy Session

Cleta Mitchel Speaking at the May 2019 CNP Meeting Credit: CNP. Obtained By Documented.

In the days after the 2020 election, CNP Action sponsored a session at the CNP conference titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” According to the conference agenda, the panel included Cleta Mitchell, who at the time was advising the Trump campaign, and publicly making voter fraud claims too absurd even for Fox News hosts. The other panelists, Heritage Action’s Hans von Spakovsky and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF)’s J. Christian Adams, were also top purveyors of voter fraud myths.

CNP Action Steps Doc Published by the Center for Media and Democracy

Following the November 11, 2020 session, CNP Action circulated an “Action Steps” document urging the group’s powerful members to contact state lawmakers in three swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden—Arizona, Georgiaand Pennsylvania—and press them to reject the election results and appoint Trump electors. “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this,” the document advised. The “Action Steps” document additionally urged state legislators to contact lawmakers in other states to “amplify” that it is state legislators’ “duty to appoint electors to the Electoral College.”

Those “Action Steps” tracked efforts by Trump’s legal team to overturn the election.As Barton Gellman concluded at The Atlantic:

[T]he strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. Every other objective—in courtrooms, on state election panels, in the Justice Department, and in the office of the vice president—was instrumental to that end.

8 Dec 2020

CNP Action Distributes Memo Written by Cleta Mitchell on Overturning Election Results

Cleta Memo CNP Published by the Center for Media and Democracy

In December 2020, CNP Action circulated a newsletter that included a 21-page report titled “Five States and the Election Irregularities and Issues,” which also described steps that state legislatures or Congress could take to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Metadata shows that Cleta Mitchell—who was still advising the Trump campaign—created the report. The report focused on alleged “irregularities” in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where Trump and his allies were pressing litigation, but where time was running out for courts to “declare the elections null and void.”

As was the case with the “Action Steps” document, the December 8 report backed the Trump campaign’s effort to pressure state lawmakers to ignore vote counts and appoint Trump electors. The report asserted that, in light of the fraud that the Trump campaign (falsely) alleged in its lawsuits, in each of those five states, “the State Legislature must reclaim its constitutional authority and responsibility to do what the constitution requires: appoint the presidential electors.”

In addition to backing the Trump campaign’s unlawful call for state legislatures to ignore voters and appoint Trump electors, the report additionally declared that “Congress has the ultimate responsibility for receiving and counting the electoral college votes,” and that “[t]here is no constitutional obligation for Congress to accept fraudulent vote and electoral votes.”

This argument helped set the stage for members of Congress to make spurious objections to the electoral vote count. Additionally, during the same period that Thomas’ CNP Action was advocating for Congress to count false electors, Thomas was in contact with multiple Congressional offices about supporting Trump.

10 Dec 2020

CNP's Conservative Action Project Calls on "State Legislators to Appoint New Electors"

Screen Shot 2022 04 12 at 2 03 13 PM

CNP’s Conservative Action Project publicly called for state legislatures and Congress to overturn the results of the election in a letter signed by dozens of high-profile CNP members. The letter, which cited the December 8 “Five States and the Election Irregularities” report, asserted that “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.”

[L]egislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean Electoral College slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states."

Again, CNP was asking state and federal legislatures to ignore the law and the constitution. After voters have already cast ballots, state legislatures cannot simply ignore the will of voters and choose their own electors. And Congress cannot just count the “alternate electors” selected for Trump. Republicans in battleground states did try to appoint themselves as illegitimate “alternate electors,” as part of a scheme orchestrated by Trump campaign officials and Rudy Giuliani, but the plot ultimately failed.

CNP’s December 10 letter was signed by at least two individuals who would go on to organize the Jan. 6 rally: Tea Party Patriots Chair Jenny Beth Martin and conservative activist Ed Martin.

30 Dec 2020

CNP's Conservative Action Project Calls on U.S. Senate to "Rescue Our Republic"

Screen Shot 2022 04 15 at 4 43 17 PM

As the January 6 electoral count drew near, on December 30, 2020, CNP's Conservative Action Project sent the U.S. Senate a letter demanding "a public hearing prior to the counting of electoral votes on January 6," and that the Senate "review the evidence of the problems of the state elections, particularly in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. We ask you to study carefully and consider the Constitutional obligations and duties conferred upon you as Senators. Be willing to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and contest the electoral votes from these states."

The letter came the same day that Sen. Josh Hawley announced that he would be contesting election results in Pennsylvania.

2021

14 Jan 2021

CNP's Conservative Action Project: "Cruz, Hawley, Brooks and Colleagues Follow the Constitution"

Screen Shot 2022 04 15 at 4 55 36 PM

Just over a week after the January 6 attack, CNP's Conservative Action Project issued a statement condemning violence, but declaring that "the actions of 8 Senators and 139 House members, including Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz, and many others, who intended to or did debate the certification of certain states’ 2020 electors is not, and never will be, tantamount to violence. The right and ability to object to electoral certification is written into the Constitution and housed in the procedural rights of those who represent us."

15 Dec 2021

Thomas Signs CNP Conservative Action Project Letter Attacking Jan. 6 Committee

Screen Shot 2022 04 12 at 2 05 42 PM

On December 15, 2021, CNP’s Conservative Action Project distributed another letter—this one signed by Thomas—calling the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack an “overtly partisan political persecution,” and demanding that the two Republican lawmakers on the panel, Reps. Lynn Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, be stripped from their membership in the Republican conference.

2022

3 Jan 2022

CNP Conservative Action Project Opposes "the Gross Abuse of Authority by the January 6 Committee"

Screen Shot 2022 04 12 at 2 06 28 PM

Days before the anniversary of the January 6 attack, on January 3, 2022, CNP's Conservative Action Project sent another letter attacking the January 6 committee, calling its efforts to investigate the Capitol attack an “assault on the rule of law which is a bedrock principle of our form of government.”

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Newly Surfaced Recording Reveals ALEC and GOP Election Attorneys Working with State Legislators to Question Validity of Election

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BY JAMIE COREY

Previous Slide Next Slide

INVESTIGATING CORPORATE INFLUENCE

===

no cut pASTE OVERVIEW

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/13/politics/trump-mitchell-georgia-election/index.html

===

jud rept

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf

ummasks redactions?! ggl srch?

Meadows, Mark R. EOP/WHO

From: Meadows, Mark R. EOP/WHO

Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2020 9:31 AM

To: Jeff Rosen

Subject: Fwd: [EXTERNAL] Fwd: December 4, 2020 - Petition and Press Statement - R

Smith.docx

Attachments: December 4, 2020 - Press Statement - R Smith.docx; VERIFIED PETITION TO CONTEST

GEORGIA ELECTION.pdf

Can you have your team look into these allegations of wrongdoing. Only the alleged fraudulent activity.

Thanks Mark

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mark Meadows < >

Date: December 30, 2020 at 9:28:38 AM EST

To: "Meadows, Mark R. EOP/WHO" < >

Subject: [EXTERNAL] Fwd: December 4, 2020 - Petition and Press Statement - R Smith.docx

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Mitchell, Cleta" Mitchell@foley.com>

Date: December 30, 2020 at 9:07:45 AM EST

To: Mark Meadows < >(b) (6)

Subject: December 4, 2020 - Petition and Press Statement - R Smith.docx

This is the petition filed in GA state court and the press release issued about it.

I presume the DOJ would want all the exhibits - that’s 1800 pages total. I need to

get someone to forward that to a drop box.

Plus I don’t know what is happening re investigating the video issues in Fulton

County. And the equipment. We didn’t include the equipment in our lawsuit but

there are certainly many issues and questions that some resources need to be

devoted to reviewing. We had no way to conduct proper due diligence to include

the equipment / software.

===

https://documented.net/investigations/exclusive-documented-obtains-recording-of-3-hour-long-voter-suppression-strategy-session-hosted-by-alec

---

https://slate.com/news-and-politics**/2019/10/**alec-meeting-gerrymandering-audio-recording.html

slate no lnx audio

luxury cabanas atop Austin’s JW Marriott kept state legislators cool poolside as August-in-Texas temperatures soared above 103 degrees during each day of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2019 annual meeting. The gathered Republican officials could enjoy a $14 rooftop Peppered Paloma cocktail with Patrón silver, housemade grapefruit poblano soda, and Chilean salt, all while gazing over Lady Bird Lake and the nearby state Capitol, or catching a ballgame on the cabana’s 55-inch private TV.

Downstairs, meanwhile, five of the GOP’s most seasoned redistricting minds and über-lawyers would teach them the finer points of tilting maps and drawing districts that would allow them to retain such spoils for another decade.

Slate has obtained an exclusive audio recording of the closed-door panel called “How to Survive Redistricting,” moderated by influential Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell. The panel’s four experts—Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, North Carolina election lawyer Thomas Farr, former Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, and Texas state Rep. Phil King—are among the architects and defenders of some of the most notorious gerrymanders and voter suppression plans of this decade.

During the session, the legislators were advised to treat redistricting as “political adult blood sport,” trash potential evidence before it can be discovered through litigation, avoid the word gerrymander, and make deals with black and Latino legislators that guarantee them easy reelections by packing as many minority voters as possible into their districts, thereby making the rest of the map whiter and more conservative.

“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that.” — Cleta Mitchell

Panelists offered complicated technical advice, such as adding a legal provision that would allow a legislature to defend its maps in court even if the state attorney general refuses. And then there was less-technical advice, like being sure to put “sharp” legislators on redistricting committees because they’ll spend a lot of time explaining the maps in court.

:{“You are going to be sued. Let’s start with that,” Mitchell told a packed room at the ALEC gathering, attended by more than 1,400 people, including Trump administration officials and top conservative lawmakers, thinkers, donors, and activists.Mitchell made light of ALEC’s reputation as a conveyor belt for cookie-cutter conservative legislation enacted by state after state. “Mindless state legislators, we’re just pouring in information and we’re indoctrinating you, pouring into your empty skulls!” she said, sarcastically. :{“We’re going to teach you how to gerrymander.”}::{}:

:{:{}:

And then she did. “Let us begin with the fact that, probably, your notes from this conference, and this workshop, will probably be part of a discovery demand,” Mitchell said on the recording, dropping the sarcasm. “My advice to you is: If you don’t want it turned over in discovery, you probably ought to get rid of it before you go home.”}:}:

View Transcript

Farr, the veteran North Carolina election lawyer whose nomination to the federal bench in North Carolina ended amid persistent allegations that he had defended efforts to suppress the black vote, compared lawsuits against GOP redistricting plans to a cancer diagnosis. “You better get some chemotherapy,” he said, “because if you don’t, things aren’t going to turn out real well for you.” He also told legislators that they needed to think about any trial as a play that he would direct as the counsel, and to be sure that they created a script that an attorney could work with before a judge.

Westmoreland, the former Georgia congressman who co-chaired a Republican 2010 redistricting initiative called REDMAP, told a story about giving black Democrats in his state mapmaking software and encouraging them to draw their “perfect district,” knowing that districts filled with minority voters would make surrounding districts whiter and more Republican.

:{:{“We ended up being very successful with it,” Westmoreland said.}:

Westmoreland recalled inviting the members of the “black caucus” to his office, “off campus,” to create their “perfect map.” One incumbent, he said, “finally fell into the trap and came over there and drew his perfect district.” To show the redistricting plan benefited black Democrats too, he “immediately got the local paper down there” to run an article on that lawmaker’s perfect district. Westmoreland then included a district as close as possible to that overwhelmingly black and Democratic one in the state’s official map. The legislator, he said, voted against the map and soon lost his seat.}:

“I promise you it’ll be beneficial to you,” he told the ALEC attendees. “They still want to be reelected. They still want to have the best district they can have.”

View Transcript

The speakers repeatedly insisted that there is no such thing as a nonpartisan redistricting process. Farr argued that maps can never be neutral. “Every time you draw a districting line, it benefits one party and hurts the other party,” he said.

:{:{}:

The idea that Republicans are simply fighting similarly skewed Democratic gerrymanders has been debunked. According to a University of Southern California study, 59 million Americans live in states where at least one chamber of the state legislature is controlled by the party that won fewer votes in 2018. In every case, Republicans drew the lines, and hold minority control. That the process is inherently political has been disproved as well: Several states, including California, Iowa, and New Jersey, use independent commissions or various neutral or bipartisan processes that have successfully created fairer and more competitive maps. Three-quarters of the seats that flipped during the 2018 U.S. House elections were drawn by commissions or courts. Studies show that maps become more representative and equitable when more parties have a seat at the table.}:

:{:{}:

Nevertheless, Farr urged these lawmakers to make their processes appear as open as possible, even though they are driven by partisanship behind closed doors.

The legislative record, he told them, must appear to be business as usual, following every statute, with every transcript and debate filed for the record.

Given that every map could end up in court, Farr advised extraordinary caution. “You never know what you might say, even if it’s unjust, that the left can take out of context and try to use to make the Republicans look like they’re evil.”

Then, in court, Farr could take it from there.}:

“It’s like I’m a director of a play,” he explained to the room. “I know what I want the play to look like for the judges when we actually have to go and defend what we’ve done in court, and so this is why you want to make it look like—I know most of you know this already—you’re very cordial, cooperative with the minority party or the opposing party. … The more you take the high road in the legislative process, the better it’s going to look in court when you have to defend what you’ve done.”

View Transcript

Republicans, Farr suggested, are outgunned by the litigation power and the expert witnesses on the side of fair maps. He complained that Republicans have only five or six expert witnesses, while Democrats have between 18 and 20 “really outstanding and smart people” able to explain “newfangled theories” about identifying gerrymanders.

Many of those expert witnesses create tens of thousands of neutral maps using nonpartisan, legal redistricting criteria. Courts in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were all persuaded to overturn maps as partisan gerrymanders by relying, in part, on simulated maps that demonstrate that the ones drawn by legislators are wild partisan outliers. This technological advancement offers the potential of using the same technology that partisans use to rig maps to strip their intent bare. For Farr, this is a great threat. He warned the legislators that computer-assisted maps would be the tactic deployed against their maps as partisan gerrymandering moves to state courts during the upcoming 2020 redistricting cycle—and that he would help them defeat those maps.

“Garbage in and garbage out,” he said. “You can read these things to get the results that you want.” Farr said that the professors working on these simulated maps were “very smart” and that the work is “very complex.” “You’ve got to get the right experts to look at their algorithm and all the backup that they have. But there’s a definite way to defeat the concept of computer-simulated maps.”

View Transcript

As Farr and Westmoreland taught lawmakers to conceal the true intent of their maps and appear to play by the rules, Von Spakovsky envisioned a longer game to change the rules of redistricting entirely.

Von Spakovsky, a member of the Trump-Kobach “election fraud” commission, urged GOP lawmakers to use citizenship data to redistrict state legislatures rather than count the total populations of districts, the latter being the constitutional standard for U.S. House districts and the longtime norm for states, as well. Most state legislatures, however, could redistrict state legislative lines based on citizen population, in most cases simply by passing a statute. (Recent revelations from the files of late GOP redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller demonstrated that Republicans attempted to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census to gather citizenship data for this purpose.)

“All of you need to seriously consider switching to using citizen population to do redistricting,” he said, asserting that the concept of “one person, one vote” was just something that liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court “created … out of whole cloth.”

Von Spakovsky also told lawmakers that census data is important for two reasons: the apportionment of U.S. House seats, and state and federal redistricting. Congressional apportionment based on total population, as the Constitution mandates, is “fundamentally unfair,” he said, because “states with large numbers of aliens, particularly illegal aliens, are getting more political power.”

“Liberals do not want you doing this,” he said, because “the higher the number of noncitizens in a district, the greater the chances they’re going to vote for a liberal.”

View Transcript

Von Spakovsky also praised Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority, 5–4 opinion earlier this year in Rucho v. Common Cause, which essentially closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims. But he warned that other legal avenues are still open to proponents of fair maps. “What you have to understand is this is not the end of this,” he said.

Gerrymandered maps could get challenged under state constitutions as a political question, he said, or in federal courts for unconstitutional use of race data and for diluting the votes of minorities contrary to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He called this “the Goldilocks principle of redistricting,” noting that “you can’t use too much race,” but if you don’t use race at all, “Hispanics, African Americans are going to claim you didn’t create a district in which they can elect a candidate of their choice.”

To withstand these inevitable legal challenges, the panelists said, it is important to control not only legislative majorities but also the judges approving or rejecting redistricting plans.

“Always know who’s going to end up ruling on your maps,” Westmoreland, the Georgia lawmaker, advised. “It’s important to work with the judges, the judicial system. You need to work for your attorney generals. … You need to work with as many organizations that you can to make sure that not only you win the majority, but that you elect people that are going to be able to supervise what these maps, or what you, come up with.”

Enticing more “dance partners” from minority groups to protect their own seats is another key part of that plan.

“It’s not rocket science,” Westmoreland said. “It’s politics.”

Read the full transcript of the ALEC meeting here.

This story is part of Slate’s Who Counts? project, which investigates who has decision-making power in America and what happens to those who don’t. Read more from Dahlia

===

https://newrepublic.com/article/166778/cleta-mitchell-trump-lawyer-2022-midterm-elections

no lnx many

Peter Stone/June 29, 2022

Ballot Boxer

This Former Trump Lawyer Wants You to Disrupt the 2022 Midterms

Cleta Mitchell desperately tried to undo Trump's loss in Georgia in 2020. Now she's using the Big Lie to recruit conservatives as poll workers for the November elections.

A spacious ballroom at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix was packed the weekend of March 11 with scores of Donald Trump loyalists still fuming about widely debunked claims that Joe Biden won the 2020 election thanks to rampant fraud. Dubbed an “election integrity summit,” the gathering was the handiwork of Trump’s former legal adviser, the veteran conservative activist Cleta Mitchell. And while Mitchell has garnered national attention for riling up Trumpists with false claims of election fraud in Georgia after the state was called for Biden, she’s now quietly channeling that anger into mobilizing activists to aggressively combat the specter of voting fraud in the next battle: the 2022 midterm elections.

Mitchell organized the Arizona summit on behalf of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit that raked in $1 million from Trump’s leadership PAC last year. Founded in 2017 by former South Carolina SenatorJim DeMint, CPI has become a hub for the Big Lie in exile, with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows signing up as senior partner shortly after leaving the White House last year, and Mitchell joining in March 2021 as senior legal fellow. CPI boasted revenue of $5.3 million in fiscal 2019, has arranged D.C. internships for young conservatives, and has worked with other right-wing groups to push conservative goals.

But central to the institute’s current mission is Mitchell, who leads its self-styled “election integrity network.”She has engineered a roaming series of summits this year in states Republicans hope to swing back in 2024: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, and Nevada—along with the perennial battleground Florida, which Trump won. Mitchell has sold the network as a way to create state and local election “infrastructure,” which includes advocating unorthodox surveillance tactics of election officials and operations to ferret out any hints of fraud—real, or more often hypothetical.

One notable speaker at the summit, whom Mitchell interviewed on a stage, was Karen Fann, the Arizona state Senate president and 2022 national chairwoman of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that promotes model laws for states to adopt, and that Mitchell has previously advised. Arizona has already passed one anti-voting law this year, imposing onerous restrictions to prove citizenship before registering to vote, and the state legislature is currently considering a raft of other measures that would empower state officials to conduct further reviews of elections.

One attendee of the Phoenix summit, who asked for anonymity, told me that “the event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” to spur more robust monitoring of polling sites. The attendee added: “There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”

To voting rights advocates, the campaign looks like a recipe for voter suppression and intimidation, especially of minorities, and could incite harassment against election officials. At these summits, the 71-year-old Mitchell, members of conservative groups such as Tea Party Patriots, GOP elected officials, and Republican National Committee staffers have delivered a blunt message: Conservatives ought to expand poll watching and “clean up” voter rolls—often by working as precinct and poll officials—in order to curb any voting fraud and bolster their electoral chances in 2022.

Mitchell hails from Oklahoma, where she began her career as a Democratic member of the state legislature before moving to D.C. and switching parties in the 1990s. Since then, she has amassed an extensive résumé of conservative clients: Mitchell has done legal stints advising the National Rifle Association (where she was once a board member), numerous GOP campaigns, and several dark-money nonprofit groups.

Some veteran conservatives who know Mitchell’s work say that her advice often pushed the legal envelope. “You tell Cleta where you want to end up, and she will come up with a way to get you there, whether it’s legal or not,” one former senior NRA official told me, quipping that she’s the “fringe of the fringe.” And a GOP election lawyer who has known Mitchell for years, and requested anonymity, added: “Cleta was sort of a classic lawyer for Donald Trump because she told Trump what he wanted to hear, as opposed to what he ought to hear from his lawyer.”

Mitchell started as a volunteer legal adviser to bolster Trump’s fraud claims in Georgia. She was recruited by Meadows the day after the 2020 election and eventually emerged as part of the core group of Trump lackeys attempting to subvert the results. She participated in Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, wherein the president attempted to coerce the state official to “find” the extra 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is currently conducting a wide-ranging probe into that call, examining whether Trump and the other participants broke state laws. A special grand jury was impaneled in early May.

Mitchell has also been subpoenaed by the House panel probing the January 6 insurrection, as she was in contact with Trump that day. In response, Mitchell filed a lawsuit to block the subpoena. When reports of her role on Trump’s call with Raffensperger quickly surfaced in 2021, Mitchell resigned from her two-decade career with the law firm Foley & Lardner—as it was conducting an internal review—and joined CPItwo months later. (Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Cleta Mitchell allied herself with Trump’s election conspiracy theories on the infamous Trump-Raffensperger call,” Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, said, adding acidly: “If that makes one an advocate for election integrity, Charles Ponzi was a champion of investment integrity.”

:{:{}:

In loose alliance with other conservative groups such as Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks—where she was tapped in March 2021 to lead a “National Election Protection Initiative” with a multimillion-dollar budget—Mitchell and CPI have worked with gusto to tighten voting laws: That campaign helped spur at least 19 states in 2021 to pass more stringent voting measures, including voter identification mandates and curbs on absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.}:

Mitchell’s cachet among the right’s big donors is considerable: She sits on the board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to conservative election integrity and legal groups, including the Public Interest Legal Foundation, where Mitchell chairs the board. To help Trump overturn his loss in Arizona, Mitchell raised about $1 million in funds for a partisan audit of the state’s largest county—which wound up backfiring when the audit confirmed Trump’s loss there.

The programming at the CPI summits this year has partly overlapped, and included participants from an RNC election integrity drive that has recruited directors in 18 states and thousands of poll watchers, as The New York Times revealed in late May. To tutor activists at the summits about how to create local and state task forces, Mitchell and CPI have distributed a 19-page manual dubbed “The Citizens Guide to Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure.” The manual suggests some traditional poll monitor methods, but takes an ominous tone, urging activists to follow “every step” of vote-by-mail operations and advising them to “be ever-present” inside election offices.

:{:{}:

AMAC Action, a conservative grassroots arm of the Association of Mature American Citizens that boasts over two million members, has co-sponsored several CPI summits. “We don’t want to see the kinds of shenanigans in 2020” again, Bob Carlstrom, AMAC Action’s president, told me. Carlstrom, a veteran D.C. lobbyist who expected to attend his first summit in North Carolina in June, added thatAMAC Action has encouraged its volunteers to be poll workers, election officials, and poll watchers. His group also has “been quite active in working on legislation” in Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, and other states where CPI and allied groups have spent millions promoting new laws that have curbed voting rights.}:

Such multifaceted conservative efforts by Mitchell and CPI have prompted concern from election watchdogs worried about the false narrative of major fraud leading to voter suppression and intimidation targeting Black and other minority voters. “These lies are then used to justify restrictive policies that make it harder for people to vote, particularly in communities of color,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. He added, “It is also important to remind voters that there are laws prohibiting the intimidation of voters and election officials. We cannot let the threat of intimidation alone prevent anyone from participating in our democracy.”

According to Mitchell’s blog and radio interviews she’s done this year—including an April one with Trump uber loyalist Steve Bannon—the CPI summits are building a state-based “movement.” Mitchell now hosts a podcast, dubbed Who’s Counting, where she speaks with like-minded conservative activists in states such as Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The podcasts tend to hype allegations of improper voting and election practices. Mitchell bluntly told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker last year that the goal of her post-2020 work has been “to make it harder to cheat,” without a nod to former Attorney General William Barr’s acknowledgment in late 2020 that there was no significant fraud in Biden’s win by over seven million votes nationally.

Since the first meeting in 2021, the summits have drawn several conservative and political bigwigs, including Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin and CPI chair DeMint.Meadows was a keynote speaker at a CPI summit in Georgia, but his public role has diminished following the disclosure in March that North Carolina was investigating whether he committed voter fraud. The inquiry was prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 Meadows registered to vote using an address where he’d never lived—a potential rare instance of actual voter fraud. Shortly before the probe became public, Meadows quietly dropped out of CPI’s Phoenix summit, where he was supposed to be a keynote speaker, and he does not appear to have been at any other public CPI events.

The “election integrity” agenda advanced by CPI and Mitchell has set off alarm bells for Democratic SenatorSheldon Whitehouse. “From Cleta Mitchell’s dark-money group to Heritage Action, we see dark money crawling everywhere behind voter suppression and election subversion,” Whitehouse told me.

Looking ahead, the Brennan Center’s Morales-Doyle is worried that the summits could “increase the risk that vigilante actors will engage in intimidation and harassment of voters and election workers. In short, the people promoting these lies about so-called election integrity are doing serious harm to our democracy.”

Peter Stone is a Washington-based investigative journalist who has covered a wide array of lobbying, legal, and campaign finance issues, working for National Journal, McClatchy newspapers, and Legal Times, among other publications. As a freelancer, his work has also appeared in The Guardian, The New York Review of Books Daily, Mother Jones, The Intercept, and many other news outlets. He is the author of Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington.

Read More: Magazine, July-August 2022, State Of The Nation, Politics, The Soapbox, Midterm Elections, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Arizona, Georgia

===

https://newrepublic.com/article/165984/10-people-destroying-democracy

Anne Nelson/April 18, 2022

10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.

Democracy in Peril

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10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

The Six States That Could Determine Whether Republicans Steal the 2024 Election

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In recent years, America’s democracy has faced countless challenges. Some seemed to materialize out of thin air, but many have been the fruit of secretive networks such as the 40-year-old Council for National Policy. Here are 10 individuals who have sown the seeds of disruption and disinformation—and who are setting their sights on the 2024 presidential election.

Larry Arnn

President, Hillsdale College

For decades, Michigan-based Hillsdale has served as an academic partner for the religious right. The college has had a close relationship to the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian right umbrella organization that directs so much right-wing activism, through Arnn and his predecessor, George Roche III (who left in a cloud of scandal). Hillsdale’s major donors have constituted a who’s who of the radical right, including the Koch network and leading figures from the CNP. Arnn has expanded Hillsdale’s role as a platform for the CNP’s network of megadonors, fundamentalist activists, and media outlets, providing their policy prescriptions with a thin veneer of academic respectability. The college enrolls around 1,500 students, but its leaves an outsize footprint in political messaging. Its highly politicized publication Imprimis is sent to more than six million recipients. Hillsdale operates the Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., where it has groomed young conservatives at the Capitol Hill Staff Training School, run by the Leadership Institute (see Morton Blackwell, below). Hillsdale is also playing a role in the current disruption of public education, which has been used for political leverage in Virginia and beyond. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed Arnn chair of the 1776 Commission, to promote a “patriotic” rebuttal to the 1619 Project’s racially inclusive approach to U.S. history. Hillsdale has led an ongoing campaign to politicize public schools, promoting anti–critical race theory campaigns and assisting in the launch of “affiliate” charter schools in 11 states.

Joe Seales

CEO, Right Side Broadcasting Network

RSBN serves as the equivalent of a Trump-specific C-SPAN that has carried nearly every Trump speech, rally, and town hall since July 2015, as well as full coverage of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It also broadcasts a show called The Right View, with Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump. On January 6, it livestreamed Trump’s speech inciting the march on the Capitol, and it gave live coverage to the Florida “Freedom Rally to Show Support for President Trump and January 6th Political Prisoners” a year later. In July 2021, RSBN was temporarily suspended by YouTube, but the network looked to its own app and the new pro-Trump platform Rumble to continue to carry Trump’s rallies. The radical right has been assiduously constructing a parallel media system in recent decades. RSBN, Rumble, and Trump’s new Truth Social platform complement other media initiatives, ranging from traditional fundamentalist broadcasters like American Family Radio to social sites like Gettr and Parler, in the ongoing construction of an alternate political reality for millions of followers. In March 2022, after the height of the Ottawa truckers’ protests, RSBN promoted a truckers’ convoy roundtable hosted by Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it has offered ongoing amplification of Trump’s false election fraud claims. We can be sure that whatever Trump fabricates for future news cycles, RSBN will be repeating it.

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Neil Patel

Co-founder and publisher of The Daily Caller

The Caller website was launched in 2010 by Patel and Tucker Carlson, his college roommate, with a $3 million investment from Patel’s fellow CNP member Foster Friess. (Carlson served as editor in chief until 2016 and left the publication in 2019, when Patel bought him out.) The site claims more than 20 million monthly readers, and the Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to almost 300 outlets. Patel has used the site as a platform for voices of the radical right, including Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville rally, as well as climate denial and disinformation, such as a falsified “nude” photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The site favors members of the CNP, including Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a Caller “special correspondent”) and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The Daily Caller has recently launched a Facebook video platform called American Voices, with three million followers, that partners with media platforms of the religious right. It also boosts Carlson’s Fox News broadcasts. The Caller’s YouTube channel features additional Carlson content, comedy and sports programming, as well as regular attacks on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and CNN. It has given ample space to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and positive coverage of voter suppression legislation.

Jenny Beth Martin

Co-founder and CEO, Tea Party Patriots

Martin launched the Tea Party Patriots in March 2009 in collaboration with Amy Kremer and Mark Meckler, with funding from FreedomWorks, a “grassroots service center” founded with Koch backing. The Tea Party Patriots spent the Obama administration organizing various “spontaneous” anti-government, anti-tax rallies. Martin, Meckler, and Kremer also joined the CNP; by 2020, Martin had risen to the executive committee and Meckler to the status of Gold Circle member. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots became the meeting ground for the secular Koch brothers and the Christian nationalist CNP. She became the go-to woman for organizing campaigns, including political canvassing and public protests. Martin was a key point person for the CNP in Trump’s reelection campaign. In April 2020, she organized “100 Business Executives” in support of Trump, along with fellow CNP members Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Trump acknowledged Martin by name in his speech before the CNP on the eve of the 2020 GOP convention. On November 4, 2020, Martin announced that her organization was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in swing states. On December 30, she tweeted that she would be speaking at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally: “We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” (Martin was present at the rally, but didn’t end up speaking.) Most recently, Martin has spoken out in support of the Canadian truckers’ protest. “We are all truckers now,” she told The Hill in February.

Simone Gold

Founder, America’s Frontline Doctors

Gold was an emergency physician in Los Angeles who was tapped by the CNP leadership to serve as a point person for a massive Covid disinformation campaign. The plan was advanced on a conference call in May 2020, while the pandemic was first raging, and after Trump held his increasingly erratic press conferences that included CNP president William Walton and Trump aide Mercedes Schlapp. The goal was to use physicians to persuade the public that the economy could be opened up in time to benefit the Trump campaign. Gold began a series of appearances on media platforms run by CNP members, disparaging the idea that Covid was a “huge medical crisis,” pushing the false hydroxychloroquine “cure,” and attacking Anthony Fauci.

On July 27, 2020, Jenny Beth Martin introduced Gold and a dozen colleagues standing before the U.S. Supreme Court building, repeating a litany of falsehoods about the virus. Their statements, livestreamed by Breitbart News, quickly went viral, and the video was enthusiastically retweeted by Donald Trump. On January 6, Gold joined the mob that breached the Capitol. She was recorded in the Rotunda denouncing the Covid vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” She was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct (she pleaded guilty in March and will be sentenced in June). Over 2021, she appeared in a series of “Health and Freedom Conferences” across the country, sharing the bill with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. In 2020, she set up a profitable online prescription service for bogus Covid “cures.”

Morton Blackwell

Founder and president, the Leadership Institute

Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie were young Goldwater activists when they joined forces in the 1960s. Together, they helped to create a constellation of conservative groups, including the CNP umbrella organization and its partner CPAC. Blackwell took on the task of training future generations of right-wing political candidates and activists. His Leadership Institute, launched in 1979, claims that it has trained more than 200,000 people over its history, many of them in county- and state-level sessions in battleground districts. The courses include fundraising, speechwriting, social media, and candidate development. Graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. The institute’s training is ongoing, especially in contested states. In 2021, the GOP, noting that it needed to net only five congressional districts to take the House, targeted 47 districts, five of them in Texas. That year, the Leadership Institute blanketed Texas, scheduling around 40 training workshops between March and November 2021—many months before the midterm elections. The national Democrats, in contrast, have tended to enter the state campaign arenas a few months or even weeks before the elections, offering minimal training on the ground, limited digital campaign tools, and poorly coordinated data. The institute’s menu of courses reflects the right’s current initiatives, including School Board Campaign Training and a School Board Activist Workshop.

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Cleta Mitchell

Attorney}:

Mitchell is a longtime member of the CNP board of governors. More recently, she appeared on panels at 2020 CNP meetings speaking on “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Mitchell also serves on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. Following Biden’s victory, Mitchell tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!” She traveled to Georgia as a volunteer legal adviser for Trump’s campaign and helped to file a December 2020 lawsuit challenging the returns.

According to The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “On December 30, Mitchell wrote to [then–White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud.” On January 2, Mitchell took part in Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of whom Trump famously demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The call was leaked, and when Mitchell’s role was disclosed, she was obliged to resign from her position at the Foley & Lardner law firm. But Mitchell continues her work through her strategy sessions at the CNP, her board membership at the Bradley Foundation, her Apple podcast Who’s Counting?, and her November 2021 appointment to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems—including voting machines—and advises local officials on compliance with federal regulations.

Richard Graber

CEO, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

This Milwaukee foundation has assets of some $900 million. Graber is a member of the board of governors of the CNP, while CNP election strategist Cleta Mitchell is one of the foundation’s 11 board members. The Koch network and the DeVos family philanthropies may have received more attention, but the Bradley Foundation’s strategic, longtime focus on state-level politics has allowed it to make a major impact, using its home state of Wisconsin as a laboratory. In 2012 to 2013, the foundation spent more than $8 million on a network of groups promoting a right-to-work law also supported by then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a fellow CNP board member) and attacking Wisconsin trade unions. The resulting right-to-work law crippled the unions and contributed to Wisconsin’s shift from a Democratic to a swing state. In 2021, the Bradley Foundation earmarked $600,000 for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s voter management campaign software and other activities, bringing its ALEC contributions to $5.4 million over the previous decade. In 2020 and 2021, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont has played a critical role in the radical right’s promotion of false claims of fraud and the efforts to rewrite voting laws in advance of the 2024 elections; John Eastman, who drafted the infamous six-point memo used by Trump to challenge the Electoral College on January 6, is a Claremont senior fellow. The foundation also contributed $300,000 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (chaired by Cleta Mitchell) and $175,000 to the Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative, both of which promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Lisa Nelson

CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council

Nelson came to ALEC in 2014 after previous stints on Newt Gingrich’s staff and at GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization. ALEC was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, also a co-founder of the CNP. ALEC convenes corporate sponsors and Republican state legislators to “collaborate” on model bills—including legislation to oppose environmental regulation and gun control. In April 2020, The Washington Post reported that Nelson, Jenny Beth Martin, and Adam Brandon were leading an effort to organize a group of businesspeople to help Trump “jump-start” the economy in the depths of the Covid epidemic. Nelson continued her efforts over 2020 and doubled down after the Biden’s victory. From December 2 to 4, 2020, ALEC hosted a secret “process working group” for Republican state legislators, election commissioners, and attorneys to develop strategies on election oversight and redistricting. In July 2021, ALEC hosted and financed an “academy” under the rubric of the “Honest Elections Project” in conjunction with its annual meeting, with panels featuring Cleta Mitchell and other CNP strategists. Nelson offered a preview of their project to rewrite election laws at the CNP’s May 2021 meeting: “We’ve been targeting our efforts on those states that have had issues—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida to a certain degree.” Currently, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If successfully implemented, the independent state legislature initiative could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections, regardless of the popular vote.

Daniel J. Schultz

Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy

Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level. “We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country. Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?” He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures. The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing Schultz’s project.

Anne Nelson @anelsona

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She has taught at Columbia University for over 20 years and is currently a research scholar at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Read More: Magazine, May 2022, Politics, The Soapbox, Feature, Democracy, January 6, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Right Wing Extremism

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/10/25/god-trump-closed-door-world-council-national-policy/

wapo

in October 2015, Donald Trump was still a laugh line for right-wing Christian activists. By their lights he was a failed casino owner and thrice-married playboy. He had no apparent principles, no policy blueprint and no grasp of the Bible. He didn’t even understand free-market theory, something they consider to be a fountainhead of American liberty. Yet here he was in a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton in McLean, Va., soliciting support from a closed-door group of conservative leaders called the Council for National Policy.

Trump looked the part. He wore a blue suit, white shirt and shiny blue tie. But he seemed to lose his way during the pitch and began riffing about his hair. He turned his head to various angles for the crowd. “It looks pretty good back here,” Trump said, as CNP’s president, Bill Walton, would later recall during a confidential talk captured on video.

It was too much for Marjorie Dannenfelser, an antiabortion activist also in the crowd. “This is insulting,” Dannenfelser said, according to her recorded recollection. She pulled on Walton’s sleeve. “Can you believe what is happening here?” she asked.

For months after the event, Dannenfelser and some other CNP members were determined to stop Trump. While he solidified his lead as GOP front-runner, they denounced him as a “charlatan” in the conservative magazine National Review, blasted his prior support of abortion rights and implored Republican voters to choose another candidate.

“America will only be a great nation when we have leaders of strong character who will defend both unborn children and the dignity of women,” Dannenfelser and other women wrote in an open letter to Iowa voters in January 2016. “We cannot trust Donald Trump to do either.”

Then came a great swerve that would upend politics in America: Millions of conservatives — Dannenfelser and other CNP members among them — got firmly behind Trump. Today, the Republican Party has been transformed, and Trump or one of his ideological heirs is likely to be the GOP nominee in 2024.

[As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country]

Much has been written about this turn of conservatives toward Trump. But I wanted to learn more about the political and communications infrastructure that converted this support into votes and influence. How did these leaders and activists — once so critical of Trump — end up helping shape and advocate for his agenda? And now that he is almost a year removed from the White House, how are they continuing to serve him and his cause?

Working with fellow Washington Post reporter Shawn Boburg, I started gathering documents and cultivating sources. We zeroed in on key figures and groups, making charts of their ties and timelines of their actions. We identified networks of groupsthat served as a kind of nerve system for conservative influence campaigns.

The Council for National Policy provides a window into the conservative political and communications infrastructure that boosted Donald Trump. (Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images)

Enmeshed in these efforts was the Council for National Policy. CNP may be the most unusual, least understood conservative organization in the nation’s capital. A registered charity, it has served for 40 years as a social, planning and communications hub for conservative activists in Washington and nationwide. One of its defining features is its confidentiality. In a town where people and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars the press and uninvited outsiders from its events. All members — even such luminaries as former vice president Mike Pence, Ralph Reed and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — agree to remain silent about its activities.

Other bastions of conservative influence — from policy groups like the Heritage Foundation to media outlets like Breitbart News — generally have clear missions. By contrast, CNP’s executive director, Bob McEwen, told me that the organization itself does not “do anything.” He and other CNP leaders will tell you it is merely an educational venue aimed at uniting its conservative members.

Yet as I began to learn more, I came to see that it would be a mistake to underestimate the group’s significance. I also realized that researching CNP represented a rare opportunity: to get a behind-the-scenes look at the outlook, goals and methods of activists who have so successfully promoted Trumpism. “I just wanted to thank you and the Council for National Policy for your support and for consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump and our Administration,” Pence wrote to CNP last year. “I know our collaboration with CNP will only strengthen and deepen this year and beyond.”

The Council for National Policy began taking root on Jan. 22, 1981, when six religious and social conservatives gathered for dinner at a home in Dallas. Most American conservatives were still jubilant about the inauguration of Ronald Reagan two days earlier. They rejoiced at the prospect that Reagan might make good on one of his campaign slogans: “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Over dinner, they resolved to bring together Christian activists, business interests and wealthy donors under one umbrella to cajole and pressure the new administration.

Details about CNP’s history have emerged periodically over the decades, as journalists, authors and left-leaning activists pieced together leaked internal documents and other material. In early June this year, Nick Surgey, executive director of a progressive watchdog group called Documented, reached out to say he had obtained a speech from a CNP meeting in May that celebrated the group’s 40th anniversary. Did I want it?

The speech offered a wealth of new information and context. And it supplemented dozens of hours of confidential conference recordings and documents that I obtained from Surgey and other sources. “I’m not going to crystal-ball-gaze about the way ahead,” speaker Ed Feulner told the crowd gathered behind closed doors in Naples, Fla., on May 21. “Rather, I’m focusing on the early days of CNP. How we started, who did what and how the foundations were laid for us now, four decades later.”

One of the organizers of the initial dinner was Tim LaHaye, an evangelical minister, writer and political activist. LaHaye later wrote the popular Left Behind series, books about the end of times and the Antichrist, using themes derived from the Bible. He thought the Christian right would have greater force if its components banded more tightly together. “This new organization could help bring America back to moral sanity,” he told Feulner, according to the speech.

LaHaye knew the endeavor would need funding, so he reached out to Cullen Davis, a wealthy Texas oil scion. Davis — who told me recently that the original organizers thought that communists were going to take over the U.S. government and that Christianity in America needed staunch defenders — agreed to host the dinner. He called his pal Nelson Bunker Hunt, another wealthy oil figure known for trying to corner the global market in silver. They also tapped Richard Viguerie, a fundraising pioneer and master of far-right persuasion campaigns who once said he mailed out 1.5 billion letters for more than 100 public policy groups.

During the dinner they agreed to reach out to a long list of other influential evangelicals and social conservatives. Several weeks later, more than two dozen activists gathered around a conference table at a hotel near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to sketch out CNP’s ambitions. Together, they made up a formidable force: Paul Weyrich spoke about a group he was building to help elect conservatives to Congress. Phyllis Schlafly described her campaign to thwart the Equal Rights Amendment. For his part, Feulner, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, spoke about how religious conservatives needed an alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations.

On a rainy evening in May 1981, the group had a coming-out party in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, or, as Feulner put it in his speech, “the belly of the beast.” Some 160 activists and politicos ventured to tents set up in the backyard of Viguerie’s home in McLean. It was a rare exception to the fledgling group’s rules around confidentiality. Guests found a spread of Peking duck, lobster, sushi and piña coladas served in coconuts, according to Feulner’s account.

The special guest, David Stockman, Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget director, received a standing ovation for his efforts to scale back the government. Optimism and good cheer wafted through the tents. But even then, CNP members grumbled that the Reagan administration needed to change how it was selecting political appointees. “Appointments have been made on the basis of credentials rather than shared values,” one CNP member complained, according to Feulner’s speech. “The council hopes to identify people with these values and put them forward.”

In a town where people and groups constantly angle for publicity, CNP bars the press and uninvited outsiders from its events.

Feulner told me recently that CNP has always aimed at providing a forum where certain conservative elites could socialize and strategize — and raise money from wealthy donors. “You could let your hair down and just talk candidly about shared visions,” he said. “You also have a lot of people who can write significant checks.”

[The Post's Biden Political Appointee Tracker]

From the start, CNP members cultivated political power at the highest levels in Washington. In an early letter to the Reagan White House, a CNP leader wrote that the group included “some of the most influential business, political and religious leaders in America” who wanted to “plan together the future of our country.” Their goal was a “moral rebirth” for our society.

CNP’s leaders had much experience in political fundraising, organizing and communication. Among them was a political operative named Tom Ellis, who had played on White racial fears as he helped build the career of the late former senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. (Helms, who became a revered member of CNP, was once described by The Post’s David Broder as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”) Others included televangelist Pat Robertson; Ed Meese, the attorney general under Reagan; Sam Moore, the nation’s largest Bible publisher; and Rich DeVos, billionaire co-founder of Amway and funder of conservative causes.

CNP members showed they were willing to participate in behind-the-scenes activity in support of their values. Consider the covert campaign run by Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council staff from 1981 to 1986. In 1984 — apparently before he became a member — North spoke at a CNP meeting about the importance of supporting the contra rebels opposing a leftist regime in Nicaragua. At the time, Congress had imposed a prohibition on government financial support for the contras.

According to an audio recording of the session, North told CNP members that Nicaragua’s leaders and their Soviet supporters had more than Central America in their crosshairs. “The real target is the United States,” he said. “This country is in great, great jeopardy from these people, who are truly godless communists.”

North sought financial support from CNP members, including a wealthy elderly woman named Ellen Clayton Garwood, whom he met at a CNP meeting. “With tears in his eyes,” a Senate report later recounted, “North explained to her that the Contras were hungry, poorly clothed, and in need of lethal supplies.” Garwood eventually gave about $2.5 million to support North’s off-books effort, according to the Senate report. Using old CNP directories and other documents, I determined that four CNP founders, members or funders were cited in the Senate report as contributors to North’s mission. (I reached out to North, but a spokesman declined my requests for an interview.)

In internal videos, audio and documents, the conservatism of CNP members often seemed linked to fear — not just of the godless foreign communists that North invoked but of liberal Americans as well. In September 2017, a guest of CNP was invited to discuss his efforts to map leftist organizations. “I almost think we might want to call it tracking and defeating evil,” an unidentified CNP leader said during the speaker’s introduction, according to an internal CNP audio recording. “The activists on the left and the people who fund them are out to destroy everything you hold dear,” the leader explained. “Your families. Marriage. Your businesses. Your freedom of speech. Your freedom of religion. Everything.”

LEFT: An internal CNP directory for 2015 had about 400 members across the country. They includedKellyanne Conway, who would become a White House counselor. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) RIGHT: Steve Bannon, who was chief executive of Trump’s campaign, was also listed as a member. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP)

When candidate Trump arrived at the CNP meeting in the fall of 2015, many White conservative evangelicals were still aggrieved about Barack Obama’s presidency and his promotion of progressive policies, such as near-universal health care. The presence of a Black man in the White House served as a reminder of a new demographic reality: They constituted a diminishing proportion of the electorate and were losing their power to shape America’s culture and politics.

[‘We’re talking about a big, powerful phenomenon’: Multiracial Americans drive change]

Trump’s appearance was part of a weekend-long meeting in suburban Washington; CNP usually holds these meetings three times a year in posh hotel conference rooms around the country. All the candidates had been invited to speak, but only Republicans responded, a CNP official told me.

I obtained an internal CNP directory for 2015 and examined it for insights about the kinds of people Trump would be courting. There were about 400 members from across the country, many of them leaders of relatively small nonprofits focused on social and religious conservatism. But I also saw some now-familiar names: Leonard Leo, then of the Federalist Society; Steve Bannon, then leader of Breitbart News and later chief executive of Trump’s campaign; David Bossie, the head of the group Citizens United and later Trump’s deputy campaign manager; and Kellyanne Conway, who would become a White House counselor.

On hand for Trump’s presentation was Ralph Reed, an evangelical political leader and CNP member. By his own account, he had come to know and admire Trump. But Reed sensed intense skepticism from other CNP members, as he writes in his book “For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump.” Then, at the meeting, something unexpected happened. After his presentation, Trump, like the other Republican candidates, answered questions and offered to stand with any CNP member for a photo. The line went clear out of the ballroom.

Still, in early 2016, just months before the election, Hillary Clinton appeared to be ahead in the esteem of most Americans. It was increasingly clear Trump needed the conservative evangelical vote to win. “The Trump train kept rolling, and Evangelical leaders were either going to have to get on board or get out of the way,” Reed writes.

That March, Trump and Donald McGahn, who would become a White House lawyer, hosted a meeting with Leo, who was involved with a nonprofit network that was raising hundreds of millions to fund media campaigns and other initiatives in support of conservative judges and causes. The three men focused on the Supreme Court seat left open after the recent death of Justice Antonin Scalia. McGahn thought Trump could benefit by releasing a list of nominees to replace Scalia, an unusual move that would reassure religious and social conservatives who wanted an antiabortion jurist. Trump expressed support for one of Leo’s long-cherished goals: a federal court system dominated by judges who would interpret the Constitution in ways that favored business and conservative views.

As Leo later told members of CNP — where he served on the board of governors— that was only going to happen through a campaign by the conservative movement. “We’re going to have to understand that judicial confirmations these days are more like political campaigns,” Leo said, according to one of the videos I reviewed. “We’re going to have to be smart as a movement.”

[Trump’s conservative imprint on the federal judiciary gives Democrats a playbook]

On May 18, 2016, Trump greatly boosted his prospects when he released the list of judges.The next month, he convened a faith advisory board of conservative evangelicals at Trump Tower. Reed and James Dobson, a Christian activist who had been with CNP from the early days, were on the board, according to Reed’s book. The meeting was followed by an extraordinary closed-door conclave at a Times Square hotel for nearly a thousand conservative Christians.

The Religion News Service accountasked in a headline: “Could conservative Christian leaders rescue a Republican presidential candidate whose personal lifestyle and religious bona fides have been punchlines more than a testimonial?” But something else in that story popped out at me: It said a chief organizer of the Times Square conclave was CNP member Bill Dallas.

Dallas was an unusual figure. He had been convicted two decades earlier on felony embezzlement charges. He was sent to San Quentin State Prison, where a newfound commitment to Christianity deepened, according to his book, “Lessons From San Quentin.”Now he was a data entrepreneur who headed a nonprofit called United in Purpose, which gathered and parsed information about Christian voters. Among the board members was CNP executive director Bob McEwen, who is also a former House member from Ohio.

United in Purpose’s network of allies and clients included other CNP members from groups such as the American Family Association, the Family Research Council and Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, according to Anne Nelson, a research scholar at Columbia University and author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” a book that examines CNP. Dallas’s operation seemed a perfect complement to other initiatives by groups affiliated with CNP members. “What the CNP has done is convene these forces in a highly strategic way and create an environment in which they can collaborate and leverage each other’s work off the radar,” Nelson told me. “It’s a well-oiled machine.”

In a chat with me, Dallas said he is no longer a member of CNP and is stepping back from political activism. He expressed pride about the 2016 Times Square event and recalled one remark there that he believes won over the Christian activists. It was when Trump told them not to be ashamed of their own religious culture and beliefs. “He said, ‘Christians should not be afraid to say Merry Christmas at Christmastime,’ ” Dallas told me. “I think that was a turning point.”

In the summer of 2016, Trump made another strategic move that would seal the deal with Dannenfelser, the antiabortion activist,and other CNP members. He pledged to oppose abortion and put the promises onto paper in September. “Dear Pro-Life Leader,” Trump’s letter began. “I am writing to invite you to join my campaign’s Pro-Life Coalition, which is being spearheaded by longtime leader Marjorie Dannenfelser.” Trump said he would nominate “pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court,” defund Planned Parenthood and take other measures that the antiabortion activists had demanded.

Dannenfelser was thrilled. “Before that we were still stomping our feet,” she said last year at a CNP meeting, according to one of the internal videos. “Little did we know that this man, who was a performer and can incite audiences in ways we never even thought could be, would galvanize audiences in battleground states all over the country and put life at the center of the project.” The CNP crowd whooped and hollered at her remarks. In Reed’s book, he writes that Dannenfelser told him: “Trump was my last choice until he was my first.” (A spokeswoman for Dannenfelser declined my request for an interview.)

In an early letter to the Reagan White House, a CNP leader wrote that the group’s goal was a “moral rebirth” for our society.

Pence acknowledged CNP’s support in his letter last year: “We are grateful for CNP’s timely counsel and unique capacity to rapidly garner support for the difficult decisions the President and I are making each day.” And CNP meetings reflected the group’s standing with the administration.In May 2017, for instance, Environmental Protection Agency AdministratorScott Pruittappeared at a CNP meeting and crowed about the rollback of regulations, with an emphasis on Obama administration measures aimed at climate change. “With respect to the EPA, the future ain’t what it used to be,” he said, drawing cheers.

Surgey, the director of Documented, who first obtained the internal CNP videos I reviewed for this story, said he “started studying CNP because it seemed like its members were becoming a power base, in terms of their public support of the Trump administration.” He added, “I was surprised by just how many leading Trump advocates appear on the videos.”

[Tracking Biden’s unwinding of Trump’s energy and environmental policies, and new ones of his own]

Activist David Horowitz spoke at a CNP meeting later in 2017. Horowitz, leader of a nonprofit group called the David Horowitz Freedom Center, captured the sense of desperation expressed by many on the right — a feeling that had drawn them to Trump. “For all of Donald’s faults, and everybody knows them, he stood on the right side. We are in a civil war,” he said. “This is the standard-bearer for us in this war.”

I met Bob McEwen at the small suite of offices CNP maintains in the Hall of the States building, just down the hill from the U.S. Capitol, a remarkably tiny space for a group with such a large reach. Joining us was lawyer Alan Dye, a CNP member and nonprofit specialist.

Meeting with someone like me was a departure for a group that has spent decades trying to avoid attention from the mainstream media. McEwen emphasized that CNP was not involved in political campaigns and exists only to educate its members, leaders of allied nonprofit groups across the country who are invited to join. Like all tax-exempt charities, CNP may not under Internal Revenue Service rules engage in political activity or support particular candidates for office.An affiliated group called CNP Action — another type of nonprofit — is permitted by the IRS to focus more on political activity.

McEwen, also president of CNP Action,told me he would not discuss the conservative movement in general or the activity or advocacy of CNP members. When I asked about his group’s efforts to operate in secret, he rejected the premise of the question. “It’s not secret,” McEwen said. “It’s just private. And anything that we want to elevate is going to be elevated by the members.”

He said CNP and its members have privacy rights, and confidentiality helps create an atmosphere where participants can freely exchange ideas without unwanted judgment. “Quite frankly, in a nonpolitical sense, this is like a Rotary Club,” McEwen said. “CNP is a convening organization of patriotic Americans that love their country and have increasingly been of the opinion that the information they receive is unreliable. And there’s not very many places they could get the truth. And CNP seeks to deliver the truth.”

I asked about the influence campaigns — the advertisements, social media and such — run by various networks of people and groups linked through CNP. As an example, I mentioned the concerted efforts of interlocking nonprofit groups allied with Leonard Leo.

“What you’re really talking about is a whole bunch of different networks. You could do a Venn diagram, I suppose,” Dye said. “So there’d be pro-life. There’d be this and that. All the various issues, and in every place they overlap would be a network. And clearly there’s a network of people supporting conservative judicial nominees. And Leonard, of course, would be in that network. It might not encompass the entire CNP membership, but it might encompass a fair number of them.”

Both men asserted the networks on the left are far larger and better funded than those on the right, and that some are financed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros. “They’re much bigger,” Dye told me. McEwen said, chuckling, “We’re a gnat.”

I learned about another dimension of CNP through a video featuring Jim DeMint, a former senator and tea party favorite. It was 2018, and he was telling CNP members about an initiative called the Conservative Action Project, which had been launched years earlier by CNP leaders.

CAP claims to include more than 100 groups “representing all major elements of the conservative movement — economic, social, and national security.” Its website publishes policy memos signed by the leaders of its member groups. It turns out that, according to documents, CAP shares an address with CNP, and many CAP activists are members of both groups. CAP also works hand-in-hand with yet another group that DeMint had started not long before called the Conservative Partnership Institute. (“The Conservative Partnership Institute arms, trains, and unites conservative leaders in Washington ready to fight,” itswebsite until recently stated.)

“The whole point was to support people on the inside,” explained DeMint, listed on the 2018 video as a CNP executive committee member. “But that doesn’t work unless we’ve got people like the folks here tonight with the Council of National Policy on the outside building public support for the right ideas to get things done. We’ve got an outside game. We’ve got an inside game. And it’s the only way to win.”

DeMint said CAP’s efforts were coming to fruition under the Trump administration. “Folks, there are more of us than there are of them. There is no reason for conservatives to be losing,” he said. “We got the power in our hands.”

At one point in the video, DeMint praised Trump. “We’ve got an amazing opportunity here,” DeMint told them. “And it’s incredible with this president, who is the last person I ever thought would promote religious freedom, pro-life. I mean, the Lord confuses things!” He grinned and paused while the CNP crowd broke into laughter and applause. “But this guy’s more genuine than anybody I’ve ever known,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know, I’m just really confused. But then, he seems willing to work for us because he’s confused, too.”

I recalled another internal CNP video where others described how a delegation of CNP and CAP officials met most every week with Trump administration officials, often at the White House. “It’s kind of thislittle secretive huddle that meets every Wednesday morning,” Paul Teller, director of strategic initiatives for Pence when he was vice president, said on the video.

Yet another video included Rachel Bovard, a conservative activist who works closely with DeMint at CPI. She said CAP people worked behind the scenes with the White House and allies in Congress to maintain public support for Trump during impeachmentproceedings. “We worked a lot to coordinate messaging,” Bovard said. Throughout the Trump administration, she explained, CAP leaders also collaborated with White House officials to select political appointees. “We work very closely — CAP does and then we at CPI also — with the Office of Presidential Personnel at the White House to try and get good conservatives in the positions, because we see what happens when we don’t vet these people,” she said, adding: “All these people that led the impeachment against President Trump shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Last year, in the months before the election, there was anew air of desperation in some of the rhetoric of CNP members. L. Brent Bozell III, a CNP executive committee member, claimed in a closed-door meeting that “evidence is pouring out of an attempt by the far left to steal the election,” an internal video shows.

“Today we’re as close to losing this nation as we ever have been,” Kay Coles James, then president of the Heritage Foundation, said at another CNP session, according to an internal video. “And make no mistake about it: This November is not about winning or losing an election. It’s about winning or losing our country.”

[Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election]

The integrity of elections has been a preoccupation on the right for years. In 2017, Trump announced a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which included two CNP members: Kenneth Blackwell, the former secretary of state in Ohio, and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. In August 2019,Lisa Nelson, a CNP member and chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council, launched an initiative called “ALEC Political Process Working Group,” according to an internal email. Among other things, the group was going to focus on “election law and ballot integrity.” (In a letter to funders defending that effort this year, Nelson said the group “connected legislators with each other as well as federal officials to discuss process and governance issues including the census, redistricting and other issues related to how state governments work.”)

Among those working with her was a CNP board of governors member named Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who often speaks in the closed-door meetings about issues around election integrity.Mitchell has described herself jokingly as “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy.” She was a driving force behind the allegations a decade ago that the IRS and Obama White House engaged in a political witch hunt against tea party groups — and later worked closely with Trump as he disputed the 2020 election results.

[“We’ve got an amazing opportunity here,” Jim DeMint told CNP members about Trump in one video. “This guy’s more genuine than anybody I’ve ever known.”

In February 2020, Nelson told a CNP Action session that ALEC, in collaboration with Mitchell and other CNP members, had begun prepping state lawmakers on rules they could invoke during an election dispute.“And I think we’ve identified a few,” she said in the meeting. “They can write a letter to the secretary of state questioning the validity of an election and saying, ‘What did happen that night?’ So we are drafting a lot of those things. If you have ideas in that area, let us know and we’ll get those to the state legislators, and they can start to kind of exercise their political muscle in that area.”

That spring, the election preparations coincided with efforts by CNP members to push back against pandemic restrictions.Working through newly formed coalitions, the members pumped out messages aimed at opposing face masks, business closures and other measures to contain the coronavirus.

The campaigns received attention in mainstream media. But the fact that CNP members played leading roles was not generally understood. One new push was called the Save Our Country Coalition. It was announced by FreedomWorks, whose leader is a CNP member. Other participants included Nelson from ALEC and Jenny Beth Martin, a CNP member and leader of Tea Party Patriots. Nearly two dozen participants in all were CNP members. The group called for a resumption of normal economic activity, an end to federal control of the nation’s pandemic response andprotection of “individual liberties of our citizens from unconstitutional power grabs by the federal, state and local governments.”

Weeks later, McEwen and other members hosted a confidential conference call for activists that included Trump campaign officials. Their goal was to make recommendations to the campaign and coordinate efforts to pressure state and federal officials to reopen the country. According to a recording of the call obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning group, McEwen opened with a prayer: “We would give you the praise in Christ’s name.” He described government efforts to contain the pandemic as “tyranny.”

[Analysis: The grim reality of a partisan pandemic]

CNP member Nancy Schulze told the campaign officials about “adoctors coalition who are extremely pro-Trump that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign, on health care.” A campaign official expressed enthusiasm. “Those are the type of guys that we should want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message,” the official said.

The next few months became a whirlwind for CNP members. At a CNP meeting in August, the organizers of the health-care initiatives offered more details on what they were up to, internal videos show: It was an advertising campaign crafted or promoted by several nonprofits and CNP allies, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Tom Price, former health and human services secretary under Trump.

In a video of the session, organizers showed examples of ads featuring doctors in white lab coats. “And so I remind people that what we’re trying to do is put on theater here,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president of a group calledJob Creators Networkand chief executive of its affiliated foundation. “It’s the stage. It’s the script and the actors.”

During another CNP session that August, various members also discussed the upcoming election in breathless terms. Some zeroed in on the proliferation of mail-in balloting as an ominous trend, claiming it made the system ripe for fraud. “We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” said Tom Fitton, CNP’s new president and the leader of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

J. Christian Adams, the former Justice Department official who served on Trump’s election integrity commission,described mail-in voting in the video as “the number one left-wing agenda.” He urged CNP members not to be cowed by criticism about efforts to stop such voting. “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth,” Adams said. (Fitton and Adams did not respond to requests for comment for this article. In a previous email, Adams stood by his remarks. In an interview last fall, Fitton told me: “The left has war-gamed this out. … And it could cause civil war.”)

As I watched the video of these men and other CNP members describing the election with such passion, I wondered: Were they trying to outdo one another in the zeal department in a play to wealthy donors? I knew from tax filings that donations to some groups led by CNP members had soared during the Trump years. Donations to Judicial Watch, for example, rose to $104 million last year from $44 million four years earlier, tax filings show.

In October 2020, I wrote a Post story about those and other election-related discussions at the group’s meetings. But of course, I learned later that much more was in play. Multiple people from far-right groups were promoting a movement to “Stop the Steal” that included specious claims that Trump won. One of the most prominent leaders was a former CNP fellow named Ali Alexander, formerly Ali Akbar. “We will not go quietly. We’ll shut down this country if we have to,” Alexander said at a Phoenix rally in December, later leading the crowd in a chant of “1776.”

[Timeline: Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election]

At least five other CNP members and their groups worked with other Trump supporters to amplify the Stop the Steal claims. On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud, according to an email included in a report this month by Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Three days later, Mitchell joined Trump on a call aimed at pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes,” the report said.

Why did Latino men shift toward Trump in 2020? I looked to my dad for answers.]

Several CNP members were involved in the organization or promotion of the rallies preceding the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Jenny Beth Martin was listed as a speaker in promotional materials (though she did not speak, in the end) and Tea Party Patriots was listed as a “coalition partner.” CNP member Charlie Kirk — the leader of Turning Point USA, a group oriented to conservative students, and Turning Point Action, its political advocacy arm — offered to transport and house student protesters. Months earlier, Turning Point Action was behind a secretive campaign that relied on teenagers to pump out social media postings in favor of Trump.

Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, then a CNP Action board member, praised rallygoers in tweets: “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” Ultimately, Stop the Steal organizers urged protesters to “take to” the Capitol steps “to make sure that Congress does not certify the botched Electoral College” on Jan. 6, according to webpages that have since been removed.

Thomas did not respond to a request for comment. She wrote a note on social media stressing that her encouragement came before the violence. Kirk, Martin and other CNP members who helped the rallies condemned the subsequent events at the Capitol. “We are shocked, outraged, and saddened,” Martin told me in an e-mail in January.

McEwen also condemned the insurrection, saying CNP had no role in the events or its members’ activity. “What they do on their own time — I won’t say I don’t care — we have no interest or capacity to monitor,” McEwen told me earlier this year.

[Rallies ahead of Capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders]

That reminded me of something he told me last year: CNP itself “doesn’t do ad campaigns. It doesn’t do brochures. It is a meeting of leaders,” he said. “Anything that’s done is done by the membership, not by the Council for National Policy.”

[LEFT: Former vice president Mike Pence recently became a “dues-paying CNP member,” according to one speaker at a CNP event. (Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images) RIGHT: Charlie Kirk, center, listens as President Donald Trump speaks at the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit in the East Room of the White House. Kirk, a member of the Council for National Policy, is leader of Turning Point USA, a group oriented to conservative students. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)]

After it was clear that Biden was the next president — and nothing was going to undo that — CNP members and their allies dove headlong into new initiatives. Much of their activism now seems focused on state legislatures and election rules. And once again, groups with ties to CNP appear to be closely coordinating with one another.

In March, two months after Biden’s inauguration, a CNP leader named Kelly Shackelfordhosted a private Zoom session organized by CNP Action. Shackelford is president of First Liberty Institute, a legal organization that promotes religious liberties. The call focused on H.R. 1, sweeping reform legislation that Democrats promised would, among other things, make it far easier for Americans to vote. Shackelford said the bill represented “the existential threat for our country.”

“The number one priority of the Nancy Pelosi Democrats was to change the rules for our elections to ensure that the Democrats would never, ever, ever lose again,” said Sen. Ted Cruz(R-Tex.), according to someone participating on the call. “This bill is a partisan power grab at an order of magnitude we have never seen.”

For nearly an hour, speakers urged CNP members and their allies to coordinate their efforts to pressure Congress and sway regular Americans. They recommended the use of billboards, websites, social media, Internet memes and “on the street” videos of people opposed to H.R. 1. They suggested organizing protests at the homes of certain Democratic lawmakers.

“Urban art is another really exceptional strategy, both for the media and for actually awakening the American people with a visceral campaign,” one official on the call said. Instead of a Stop the Steal movement, “we want to establish ‘Stop the Pigs’ or ‘Stop the Corrupt Politicians,’ ” as social media themes. It was vital, the official said, to “kill this bill” without getting “trapped in a voter suppression conversation.”

In an interview, Shackelford defended the call. “I’ve looked at that bill. It’s just crazy stuff,” he told me. He also defended the persuasion tactics. “I mean, I’m sure everybody on every side does that, right?”

At the same time, CNP members have expanded related campaigns regarding voter laws. An effort called the Election Transparency Initiative was started with the endorsement of Dannenfelser, who has continued to make dubious claims about the election. “The integrity of our electoral system was severely compromised in 2020 when pro-abortion Democrats — utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse — weakened state laws that ensure free and fair elections,” she said in a Feb. 23 news release.

Leonard Leoand a former Heritage Foundation official have ties to a group launched last year called the Honest Elections Project. Kenneth Blackwelltook the lead of a group called the Center for Election Integrity. He told me election-rule changes during the pandemic to encourage mail-in balloting created significant vulnerabilities in the electoral system. He said that allied groups would collaborate to become “force multipliers” on the issue.Cleta Mitchell and FreedomWorks, meanwhile, are teaming up for the National Election Protection Initiative. “What is urgently needed today is the involvement by conservative and patriotic Americans in the election process at the local and state levels, challenging the vast resources of the leftist groups who have dominated election activism for too long,” Mitchell told Newsmax. By early October, 19 statehouses had passed 33 laws curbing voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. (Mitchell declined to comment for this story.)

CNP members have also joined Advancing American Freedom, a new group co-founded by Mike Pence. About half of the 40-some people on the group’s advisory board and its board of directors have been CNP members or guests in recent years, a review of internal directories and videos shows. And Pence himself recently became a “dues-paying CNP member,” according to Feulner’s speech.

[In weighing 2024 run, Pence tests whether there is political life after Trump]

Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, told me that, for AAF, Pence wanted a combination of people who served in the Trump administration and those “who represent the more traditional elements of the conservative movement.” “I think we can marry them together to sort of build a winning coalition,” Short added.

That will be a tall order. Some conservatives I interviewed for this story said that Trump had effectively fractured the movement. Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center who was previously a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, said the conservative movement was in a long decline by the time Trump was elected. “The conservative movement, I think it was already sort of stuck in a time warp,” he said. “It was like every day was January 20th, 1981.”

That remark stuck with me. It captured a feeling I had about CNP throughout my efforts to understand the group. In their quest to remake our country — to purge it of the cultural and political decay they believe has sapped it of virtue — CNP members are looking backward to receding triumphs. But it’s clear they’re also looking forward — and they are as determined as ever to shape the nation’s future.

Late this month CNP leaders and the Conservative Action Project are slated to host a strategy summit in the nation’s capital for the leaders of more than 100 conservative groups. They want to seek ways “to slow the Administration’s left wing policies” and advance a conservative agenda in Congress and the states, according to an invitation obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning group in Washington. The title of the meeting? “Saving the Country: The Pathway Forward.”

Robert O’Harrow Jr. is an investigative reporter at The Post.

===

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/20/ginni-thomas-arizona-election-emails/

wapo no lnx

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice, pressed Ariz. lawmakers to help reverse Trump’s loss, emails showBy Emma Brown

Updated May 20, 2022 at 2:36 p.m. EDT|Published May 20, 2022

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attends the swearing-in ceremony for Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the White House on Oct. 26, 2020. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Arizona lawmakers after the 2020 election to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory and choose “a clean slate of Electors,” according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The emails, sent by Ginni Thomas to a pair of lawmakers on Nov. 9, 2020, argued that legislators needed to intervene because the vote had been marred by fraud. Though she did not mention either candidate by name, the context was clear.

Just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, Thomas urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” She told the lawmakers that the responsibility to choose electors was “yours and yours alone” and said they had “power to fight back against fraud.”

Thomas sent the messages via an online platform designed to make it easy to send prewritten form emails to multiple elected officials,according to a review of the emails, obtained under the state’s public-records law.

The messages show that Thomas, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, was more deeply involved in the effort to overturn Biden’s win than has been previously reported. In sending the emails, Thomas played a role in the extraordinary scheme to keep Trump in office by substituting the will of legislatures for the will of voters.

Thomas’s actions also underline concerns about potential conflicts of interest that her husband has already faced — and may face in the future — in deciding cases related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Those questions intensified in March, when The Post and CBS News obtained text messages that Thomas sent in late 2020 to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, pressing him to help reverse the election.

The emails were sent to Russell “Rusty” Bowers, a veteran legislator and speaker of the Arizona House, and Shawnna Bolick, who was first elected to the chamber in 2018 and served on the House Elections Committee during the 2020 session.

“Article II of the United States Constitution gives you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” read the Nov. 9 email. “… [P]lease take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”

Thomas’s name also appears on an email to the two representatives on Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college met to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory. “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead,” the email said.

It included a link to a video of a man delivering a message meant for swing-state lawmakers, urging them to “put things right” and “not give in to cowardice.”

“You have only hours to act,” said thespeaker, who is not identified in the video.

By December, the claim that legislators should override the popular vote in key states and appoint Trump’s electors was also being pushed publicly by John C. Eastman, a former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

Trump allies argued that pandemic-era changes in election administration and supposedly widespread fraud meant that elections had not been conducted in accordance with state legislatures’ directions and that, under the U.S. Constitution, the results therefore could be cast aside. Many legal experts have called those arguments unpersuasive and anti-democratic, and no state legislature complied. Efforts to persuade state lawmakers to name new electors are among the issues under examination by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Courts turned back dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies in an attempt to challenge the 2020 election outcome, and there is no evidence of voting machine manipulation or other widespread fraud.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not respond to messages seeking comment from Clarence Thomas.

Ginni Thomas has insisted that she and her husband have kept their work separate, but her political activism has set her apart from other Supreme Court spouses. About a decade ago, she and Stephen K. Bannon — who later became chief strategist in the Trump White House — were among the organizers ofGroundswell,a group formed to battle liberals and establishment Republicans. Groundswell dedicated itself to “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to emails uncovered by Mother Jones at the time. “Election integrity” was among the topics discussed in the group’s first months, the emails show.

Thomas’s influence in Washington grew during the Trump presidency as her views moved into the GOP mainstream. Clarence and Ginni Thomas had lunch with Trump at the White House in 2018, then attended a state dinner the following year. Also in 2019, she and fellow right-wing activists attended a White House luncheon, where the New York Times reported that they told Trump his aides were blocking their preferred candidates for administration appointments.

Over those same years, at annual luncheons, Thomas handed out “Impact Awards” to right-wing figures. Recipients have included Meadows, then a congressman chairing the hard-right Freedom Caucus; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe; and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Thomas is a member of the Council for National Policy, a network of prominent conservative activists, some of whom helped press claims of election fraud. She recently said she attended the pro-Trump rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thomas sent the emails via freeroots.com, a website meant to give political organizers an efficient means of conducting email campaigns. The email address of the sender in Thomas’s emails is displayed as “Ginni Thomas@freeroots.com>.”

A representative of FreeRoots did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The Nov. 9 email carried the subject line, “Please do your Constitutional duty!” In addition to pushing the lawmakers to appoint electors, the email asked for a meeting to discuss pursuing an “audit” of the vote.

Under the U.S. Constitution, states appoint presidential electors “in such manner” as the legislatures direct. Historically, some state legislatures appointed electors directly, but in the modern era states have delegated that responsibility to voters. In urging Arizona lawmakers to “choose” electors after Biden had already prevailed, Thomas’s messages claimed lawmakers could intervene in that process.

The records obtained by The Post do not show any response from Bowers, whose refusal to help overturn Biden’s victory in Arizona made him the target of a recall campaign. When Trump’s legal team pressed to replace Biden electors with Trump electors, Bowers released a public statement explaining that they were asking legislators to do something forbidden by state law.

“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election. I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” it said. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

A spokesman for Bowers told The Post that hundreds of thousands of messages were sent to the speaker’s office in the post-election period. “Speaker Bowers did not see, much less read, the vast majority of those messages, including the form email sent by Mrs. Thomas,” said the spokesman, Andrew Wilder.

:{:{Bolick is married to Clint Bolick, an associate justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, who worked with Clarence Thomas early in his career and has said he considers the justice a mentor.}:

Shawnna Bolick wrote back to Ginni Thomas on Nov. 10, 2020, “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” She gave Thomas guidance on how to submit complaints about any of her experiences with voter fraud in Arizona.}:

:{:{Bolick, who is now seeking the Republican nomination to be Arizona’s secretary of state, told The Post that she received tens of thousands of emails in the months after the election and responded to Thomas in the same way she responded to everyone else.}:

Thomas replied: “Fun that this came to you! Just part of our campaign to help states feel America’s eyes!!!”}:

In the reply, Thomas’s personal email address is visible, and it matches an address she has used previously, The Post confirmed. Under her message is an unusual tag line that has appeared in other emails that are confirmed to have been sent by Thomas, including in 2021 to the staff of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “Sent from Ginni’s iPhone, a by-product of entrepreneurial free market capitalism. Competition, hard work, innovations and lack of government interference make great things possible! God bless America!”

Thomas was then serving on the board ofCNP Action, the political advocacy arm of the Council for National Policy. CNP Action was using its influence in Republican circles at the time to try to keep Trump in office. On Nov. 13, 2020, CNP Action held a workshop titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” featuring, among other speakers, Cleta Mitchell, according to an agenda that researcher Brent Allpress provided to the left-leaning watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, which published it that same month. Mitchell, a lawyer, assisted Trump in his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia.

After that workshop, the group circulated guidance to focus efforts on legislators in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities at a time such as this,” read the guidance, which was also obtained by Allpress and first published by the Center for Media and Democracy. It said to push for new electors “in states where constitutional rights have been violated and evidence of substantial fraud has been established.”

The guidance advised visiting the website everylegalvote.com “to report fraud and take action.”

Visitors to the site could click a button and be taken to freeroots.com, according to webpages preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That landing page urged visitors to press the “take action” button to “email every swing House and Senate leader in one easy click.”

Because that landing page is no longer online, it is no longer possible to click through on the link. But language in Thomas’s first email aligns closely with language that appears in a preview when a FreeRoots link that was archived several days after that email is shared on messaging platforms.

The site everylegalvote.com initially said that it was produced in partnership with United in Purpose,a nonprofit group known for gathering and deploying data to galvanize conservative Christian voters. That organization has hosted the luncheons where Thomas presents her “Impact Awards.”

But the reference to United in Purpose was deleted within days. It was replaced with language identifying three “Founding Sponsors”: the Texas security firm Allied Security Operations Group, the Texas nonprofit group Liberty Center for God and Country, and the online talk show “Economic War Room.”

Representatives of United in Purpose and the three sponsors of everylegalvote.com did not respond to messages seeking comment. All three sponsors have promoted election-fraud claims, according to previous Post reports.

In the month after the election, the Trump campaign and other Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the outcome. By early December, Eastman and Giuliani were telling lawmakers in key swing states won by Biden that they had the authority and even the obligation to disregard the vote and select their own electors.

“Your argument is that essentially we have a failed election that would require the legislature to step in and assign electors. Am I correct?” a Georgia senator asked Eastman during a Dec. 3 hearing.

“Yes,” Eastman said.

The Dec. 13 emails repeated the claim that legislators could “choose” electors.

“As state lawmakers, you have the Constitutional power and authority to protect the integrity of our elections — and we need you to exercise that power now!” the email said. “Never before in our nation’s history have our elections been so threatened by fraud and unconstitutional procedures.”

:{:{}:

The two-minute video it linked to, titled “A Word To Heroic Legislators,” has since been removed from YouTube for violating community guidelines. The video’s Web address, which is visible in the email, was included in a December 2020 newsletter written by activistGeoffrey Botkin, who appears to be the person featured in the video.

Botkin, who has published numerous podcasts and videos about the election and other matters, wrote in the newsletter that he had uploaded “A Word To Heroic Legislators” to another video hosting service. The video remains visible there.

“I’m asking you to stand up and lead heroically,” Botkin says in the video, urging lawmakers to appoint electors.

“We have to admit, legally and politically it’s way too late for other people to do it. Clever lawyers or the Supreme Court, they cannot now come to the rescue,” he continues. “This is a moment, a unique moment in American history, demanding that state legislators set America back on her foundations by using a power that you may never have known that you had — but you do have it.”

Botkin did not respond to a message seeking comment.}:

The video link and some of the language in the email match language that appears in an archived version of the landing page for a freeroots.com email campaign organized by Act for America, a group that has accused U.S. Muslim organizations of supporting terrorism and of trying to impose Islamic law across the country.

A representative of Act for Americadid not respond to requests for comment.

On Dec. 14, 2020, Biden electors in Arizona cast their votes, after the election results were certified by Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.On that same day, Bolick was among dozens of Arizona lawmakers who signed on to a letter to Congress calling for the state’s electoral votes to go to Trump or “be nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”

:{:{}:

Bolick told The Post she signed on to that effort because she backed the idea of an audit, not because of any communication she received from Thomas.}:

Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries

the FBI has asked the public for help in collecting evidence surrounding the siege at the Capitol on January 6 — an insurrection that left five people dead, dozens injured, and Congressional members’ offices ransacked and laptops stolen. The violent scenes at the Capitol played out live on TV, humiliating the United States around the world. The world will watch President-Elect Joe Biden’s inauguration today, surrounded by 25,000 National Guard Troops in Washington, D.C. These images will further undermine the standing of the United States among world leaders.

Because the FBI seems to have ignored for decades the serial warning signs regarding Charles Koch, Koch Industries and their intrusions into elections, we’re providing the FBI a simple and clear roadmap today.

Charles Koch is the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. Koch Industries is a conglomerate with interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations. For the past forty years, Charles Koch has been involved in a stealthy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory functions and kill off popular federal programs like the U.S. Post Office, Social Security and Medicare.

To understand the full scope of Koch’s involvement in the events of January 6, let’s first remember what actually fomented the attack on the Capitol. It was based on the Big Lie that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump through voter fraud — something that Trump’s own cyber security chief, Chris Krebs, and Attorney General, William Barr, dismissed as lacking a factual basis. The playbook for the Capitol attack on January 6 was to intimidate Republican members of the Senate and House into refusing to certify the election results, thus withholding the Presidency from Joe Biden.

These are the red flags that lead to the doorstep of Charles Koch and Koch Industries and should play a significant role in any serious investigation conducted by Congress, the FBI, or U.S. intelligence agencies.

Red Flag # 1: There were only eight Republican Senators who refused to certify the votes for the challenged states of Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. (All Democrats voted to certify all states.) Those Republican Senators are: Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Rick Scott of Florida; Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; Roger Marshall of Kansas; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.

Every Republican Senator who refused to certify the election results on January 6 received funding from Koch Industries PAC.

On January 2, ten Senators joined with Senator Ted Cruz to announce that they planned to “vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ ” until an emergency audit was commissioned. Six of those Senators backed down from challenging the certification after the attack on the Capitol occurred. Those six Senators were: Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; James Lankford of Oklahoma; Steve Daines of Montana; Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Mike Braud of Indiana; and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee. All six of these Senators have also been on the receiving end of campaign largesse from the Koch Industries PAC and/or Koch family members.

The money to these 14 Senators from Koch-related entities has been documented by Alex Kotch and David Armiak in a January 5 report at the Center for Media and Democracy. Kotch and Armiak also note that Koch-funded Super PACs boosted the election chances for Blackburn, Daines, Hawley and Marshall, writing that Americans for Prosperity Action has “spent $11.9 million” to promote those candidates.

The authors also note that the Koch-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund, “dropped nearly $3 million into the Wisconsin Senate race to support Johnson and attack his liberal opponent, Russ Feingold.”

Wall Street On Parade also looked at data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics based on Federal Election Commission records. We found that since 2012 Koch Industries has ranked between the second to six largest donor to Ron Johnson in every fundraising cycle. The Center’s data also shows that Koch Industries was the number one donor to Senator Lankford in the current 2019-2020 cycle. (The money comes from the Koch PAC, employees or family members of employees of Koch Industries, not the corporation itself.)

Red Flag # 2:At least three of the “nonprofit” groups that fomented the Big Lie that the election had been stolen and actively solicited thousands of people to turn out for the January 6 event were funded by Koch Industries or its front groups.

According to the TrumpMarch.com website, which was sponsored by Women for America First, its “Coalition Partners” for the January 6 event at the Capitol included the Rule of Law Defense Fund; the Tea Party Patriots; and Turning Point Action, among others. The TrumpMarch.com website has since been taken down but it was captured on January 2, 2021 (give it a little time to load) by the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.

Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money arm of Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that is raising millions of dollars from corporate felons in order to elect the highest law enforcement officers at the state level. (See our in-depth report of January 14, 2021.) According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014.

A division of Koch Industries, i360, has a massive voter database that some suggest is far more sophisticated than that of the Republican National Committee.The database includes phone numbers of people likely to turn out for an event of this nature. Its program, Predictive Dialer, says it can “scale call volume quickly so you aren’t let down as you ramp up your campaigns, from hundreds of outbound calls per hour to more than 100,000.” The Congressional Committees that are investigating the attack at the Capitol need to ascertain if Koch’s i360 services were used to make robo calls for the event.

As originally reported by Jamie Corey at the watchdog group, Documented, the dark money arm of RAGA made robo calls to boost turnout for the January 6 event at the Capitol. The message was as follows:

“I’m calling for the Rule of Law Defense Fund with an important message. The ‘March to Save America’ is tomorrow in Washington D.C. at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com. This call is paid for and authorized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, 202-796-5838.”

Another of the Coalition Partners, Turning Point Action, Tweeted that it was “honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The Tweet was first reported by DailyDot.com.

Turning Point Action is a dark money group that does not report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. However, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, its sister group, Turning Point USA, has received $610,000 from Donors Trust since 2017. (We should note that the IRS has not posted the 990 tax filings as yet for Donors Trust’s tax years of 2019 and 2020 so it is quite possible that the cash haul is far greater than $610,000.)

Charles Koch’s footprints are all over Donors Trust, another dark money group, as we exclusively reported in 2010. (See Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.) We wrote at the time:

“There are shades of Charles Koch all over Donors Capital and Donors Trust. Two grantees receiving repeat and sizeable grants from Donors Capital are favorites of the Koch foundations: George Mason University Foundation and Institute for Humane Studies. Another tie is Claire Kittle. A project of Donor’s Trust isTalent Market.org, a headhunter for staffing nonprofits with the ‘right’ people. Ms. Kittle serves as Talent Market’s Executive Director and was the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Then there is Whitney Ball, President of both Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Ms. Ball [now deceased] was one of the elite guests at the invitation-only secret Aspen bash thrown by Charles Koch in June of this year,as reported by ThinkProgress.org. Also on the guest list for the Koch bash was Stephen Moore, a member of the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Moore is a Director at Donors Capital Fund. Rounding out the ties that bind is Lauren Vander Heyden, who serves as Client Services Coordinator at Donors Trust. Ms. Vander Heyden previously worked as grants coordinator and policy analyst at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.”

According to the April 1, 2020 report at the Center for Media and Democracy, “In 2014-15, the Koch’s Knowledge and Progress Fund gave $5.3 million to Donors Trust, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given $980,000 to it since 2014. The connected Donors Capital Fund, to which Koch family foundations have also contributed large sums, donated $100,000 to TPUSA [Turning Point USA] in 2016.”

Another Coalition Partner for the January 6 event, Tea Party Patriots, has received at least $200,000 from Freedom Partners, a Koch front group. Tea Party Patriots has also received donations from Donors Trust.

We are unable to report if Women for America First, which obtained the permit for the speeches and rally that preceded the march on the Capitol, has ties to Koch funding because it is such a new group that it has yet to file an IRS 990 form. However, its Chair, Amy Kremer, held previous positions in two tea party groups. The tea party movement was a Koch Industries and Big Tobacco creation, as insider Jeff Nesbit explains in his book, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP.

Red Flag # 3: Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in wanting to ensure that Donald Trump had another four-years as President.

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election was Freedom Partners, which closed up shop in 2019. It was hard to tell where Freedom Partners begins and Koch Industries ends. When the group was still active in 2018, we took a look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.

Freedom Partners Action Fund,a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.

Freedom Partners laid down their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo and their handmaidens in the Trump administration delivered: from the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord to the massive tax cut for corporations and one percenters to the gutting of federal regulations and putting industry lobbyists in charge of federal agencies.

But that was just the beginning. Koch Industries law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal. Wall Street On Parade also reported on it at the time, finding it unusual that the Trump transition team would give so many key slots to Jones Day when its partners had supported Hillary Clinton for President. This is another matter worthy of Congressional and FBI investigation.

Red Flag # 4: Koch Industries, through its ownership of i360, was deeply entangled in the campaigns of members of Congress who voted against certifying the votes for Joe Biden. (What kind of intelligence agencies and FBI would allow a private fossil fuels conglomerate like Koch Industries to directly run campaign activities for federal candidates for Congress?) We broke the news in 2018 that Koch Industries had purchased i360. We obtained that information from an internal newsletter at Koch that was available online and from the fact that help-wanted ads for i360 sent applicants to apply at Koch Industries. (The company hasn’t denied our reporting over the past two years.)

We reported this at the time:

“The i360 website says that its database now has information on 199 million voters from all 50 states; information on 290 million consumers with 700+ data points; information on precinct election returns as well as data from the Census, NOAA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and geo-spatial data; individual sentiment information on candidates and issues from its social media operations; and information from its grassroots groups (read Americans for Prosperity) and paid door-to-door knockers who are using a sophisticated hand-held device to update the database in real time in the pivotal weeks before an election.

“But i360 is far more than just a voter database. It has social media targeting operations and really scary data collection that reaches into people’s homes. Consider this from their website:

‘Through an exclusive partnership with D2 Media Sales, the strategic relationship between DirectTV and Dish, i360 is able to identify households that meet your target criteria and serve ads uniquely to those households – no matter which stations or programs they are watching. With dozens of i360 custom segments pre-matched to more than 20 million DIRECTV and DISH homes, campaigns can now reach the largest addressable TV advertising platform in the nation. One-to-one television targeting combines the emotional impact of TV advertising with the precision and accuracy of direct mail marketing – resulting in the most cost-effective and high impact buying solutions.”

According to Federal Election Commission records, a number of Republican House Reps who objected to the certification of Biden’s win utilized the services of i360. For example, Mike Johnson of Louisiana paid i360 $15,580 for what he called “electronic media expense.” Elise Stefanik of New York paid i360 more than $128,000 which she tagged as telephone service, web service, equipment rental, or simply “subscription.” Barry Moore of Alabama paid i360 $12,815 in 2020 for fundraising mailouts and ad buys.

Senator Tommy Tuberville, who objected to the certification of Biden’s win, also engaged the services of i360 in 2020. Tuberville paid i360 $50,875 for data subscriptions and making phone calls. As the Capitol was under siege and Trump was watching these scenes on TV, he spoke with the newly-sworn in Senator Tuberville by phone, urging Tuberville to make more objections to the certification of the vote, according to reporting at CNN.At around 7 p.m., Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made a second call to Tuberville. The call went to voice mail. Giuliani left this message for Tuberville, according to CNN, based on a report from The Dispatch:

“Sen. Tuberville? Or I should say Coach Tuberville. This is Rudy Giuliani, the President’s lawyer. I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you. I know they’re reconvening at 8 tonight, but it … the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow — ideally until the end of tomorrow…”

The nagging question, of course, is what Trump and Giuliani had planned for “tomorrow.”

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from chis adams pilf:

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 withserious 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 evidenceof 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 ofCharlie 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.

===

1/6 hearing 6/21 tuescleta said she commissioned Eastman coup memo a day or 2 after (or before) election loss?

===

raw story tom b, an 5 22

wow not much hunker?

with the midterm election just months away and Donald Trump still eyeing a third presidential run in 2024, the New York Times is reporting that one of the architects of the former president's attempt to throw out the results of his 2020 loss is currently working on recruiting conspiracy-minded poll workers and watchers that have state election officials fearful of future chaos and disruption.

According to the report, attorney Cleta Mitchell who rose to fame as a participant on Trump's infamous phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where the former president demanded the Georgia Republican "find" 11,780 votes, is working with the Election Integrity Network which has financial ties to Trump's still-thriving political operation.

As the Times' Alexandra Berzon writes, Mitchell has been busy traveling the country and meeting with far-right activists, instructing them on how to get deeply involved with the election process in their states, putting them in a position to challenge election results and disrupt certification of the votes.

According to Berzon, no position at the state level is considered too small by Mitchell, who recently told over 150 conservatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, "We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again.”

Pointing out that Mitchell was a participant in multiple lawsuits by Trump to challenge election results at the state level -- none of which succeeded -- Berzon writes that she is undeterred as her conspiracy theories are debunked and that she has the financial backing of several conservative groups.

"In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work," the Times report states, adding that an examination of her efforts reveals " a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures."

Her supporters "include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as theHeritage Foundation’s political affiliate [action? ], Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation."

With the Times reporting, "Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot," Philadelphia Republican and former election board member Al Schmidt expressed concern about what is to come next.

“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” he admitted.

Notably, the report adds that attorney Mitchell "has worked closely with Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, on organizing through the Council for National Policy, a national coordinating group for conservative leaders." Virginia Thomas is currently being scrutinized by the Jan 6th House select committeeafter it was revealed that she had been texting former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows with advice on how to overturn the 2020 election results.

You can read more here.

===

https://www.azmirror.com/2022/05/20/emails-show-ginni-thomas-asked-gop-lawmaker-shawnna-bolick-for-help-overturning-bidens-arizona-win/

dillon

the prominent wives of a U.S. Supreme Court justice and an Arizona Supreme Court justice were involved in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, tried in the days after the election to convince two Republican state legislators to help her overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona and instead award the state’s presidential electors to Donald Trump.

One of the legislators Thomas emailed was state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, a Phoenix Republican who is now running for Arizona Secretary of State. The Bolicks and Thomases are close:Bolick’s husband, Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick,is a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas, and the U.S. Supreme Court Justice isgodfather to Bolick’s son.

Thomas also emailed House Speaker Rusty Bowers,who repeatedly told Trump and others in his orbit in the weeks after the 2020 election that he would not help in their efforts to overturn the results. Bolick, on the other hand, sponsored a bill just a few weeks later that would...

“Article II of the United States Constitution gives you an awesome responsibility: to choose our state’s Electors,” Thomas wrote in a Nov. 9 email to Bolick, the Post reported. “Please take action to ensure that a clean slate of Electors is chosen.”

Records show Bolick responded by directing Thomas to refer any complaints of fraud to the attorney general. Less than two months later, Bolick sponsored House Bill 2720, a wide-ranging election bill that included a provision giving the state legislature sweeping authority to disregard voters’ choice for president. In a key provision, the measure would have given lawmakers the power to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a majority vote at any point before the president is inaugurated.

Bolick at the time protested that critics were twisting her bill’s intent, which she said was an effort to make the process more bipartisan and call the legislature into a special session.

Bolick declined to comment for this story, but pointed the Arizona Mirror to a statement she posted to Twitter that attacks the media.

“The dishonest media wants to distract attention from election fraud & our efforts to secure elections. Let’s cut through the conjecture & put this to bed,” she wrote. Bolick also singled out local journalists for sharing the Washington Post story or other stories on the emails.

If Bolick wins her four-way Republican primary in August and then defeats her Democratic opponent, as the state’s chief elections official she would be tasked with certifying all election results for both the 2024 and 2026 elections.

Bolick also was named as a chair for a working group created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that crafts model legislation for state legislatures to pass similar laws. The working group –– where Bolick served as chair leading up to the 2020 election –– partnered with GOP election attorneys, including Cleta Mitchell, one of the most prominent figures involved in Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results.

Their objective, according to reporting by Documented, was to start a letter campaign, emailing secretaries of state “questioning the validity of an election.” The effort sought to engage state legislators nationwide and allow them “to kind of exercise their political muscle” by raising unfounded questions about the election.

ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson told the group during one of its meetings, “obviously we all want President Trump to win and win the national vote. But it’s very clear from all the comments and all the suggestions up front that really when it comes down to is the states and the state legislators.”

Bolick told the ArizonaMirror she did not attend that meeting in question.

In addition to Mitchell, the group worked alongside Hans Von Spakovsky, an attorney for the Heritage Foundation, which crafts election legislation for states and has bragged about its voter suppression efforts in the past. Trump named Von Spakovsky, who has for decades falsely claimed there is widespread voter fraud among Democrats, to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

===

REF SEP complaint

CLIMATE LAWSUIT PROMOTERS DINGED FOR FLOUTING STATE LAWS

AUGUST 22, 2019 | SPENCER WALRATH

THE ORGANIZATION BEHIND CLIMATE LIABILITY NEWS (CLN), A DARK MONEY ANTI-OIL AND GAS ACTIVIST WEBSITE SET UP TO PROMOTE CLIMATE LAWSUITS, MAY BE VIOLATING MARYLAND STATE LAW, ACCORDING TO THE DAILY CALLER. A COMPLAINT FILED BY ATTORNEY CLETA MITCHELL ALLEGES THAT CLN’S PARENT ORGANIZATION FAILED TO REGISTER WITH ITS HOME STATE AND ASKS STATE OFFICIALS TO INVESTIGATE THE ORGANIZATION AND CONSIDER FINING THE GROUP AND ITS DIRECTORS FOR VIOLATING STATE LAW.

Climate Liability News is a project of Climate Communications and Law (CCL), a non-profit incorporated in Washington, D.C., onApril 26, 2017. The complaint provides evidence that CCL’s corporate status was revoked by D.C. as of May 19, 2019, but says CCL filed to have its status reinstated earlier this month after the revocation was brought to its attention.

Though CCL is incorporated in D.C., its business address is located in Frederick, Maryland, and a November 2018 filing with the IRS states that it conducts business in Maryland. Mitchell notes in her complaint:

“Maryland law requires all business entities, including non-stock corporations, doing business in the state of Maryland to register with the Department of Assessments and Taxation…Any corporation formed under the laws of a jurisdiction other than Maryland must register as a foreign business in the state of Maryland prior to doing any interstate or foreign business in Maryland…No such registration has been filed by Climate Communications & Law.” (emphasis added)

The complaint calls on the Maryland Secretary of State and the Director of the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation tofine CCL for failing to register and to “initiate proceedings for misdemeanor violations of Maryland law against the individual directors of the organization, Kert Davies, Richard Wiles, and Alyssa Johl,” which could result in individual fines.

Davies, Wiles, and Johl are all central figures of the climate liability campaign against energy companies through CCL and affiliated groups. Davies, for instance, runs the shadowyClimate Investigations Center and has spent over 20 years digging through energy company files in hopes of finding evidence of something that could lead to legal action. Davies also participated in the infamous January 2016 strategy session hosted by the Rockefellers where activists laid out their plans to expand the #ExxonKnew controversy into legal action against the broader oil and gas sector.

Wiles and Johl are the leaders of the Center for Climate Integrity, another shadowy group that has engaged in a massive PR campaign to promote climate liability litigation. The Rockefeller-funded group has hosted panels promoting the lawsuits, released a report designed to pressure coastal cities into suing energy companies, purchased billboards advocating for climate litigation, and produced a podcast to amplify activists (including Kert Davies).

Wiles also hired a lobbyist in Florida to arrange meetings between public officials and the lawyers seeking additional plaintiffs for their climate lawsuits. The lobbyist told Ft. Lauderdale city officials that his client, Wiles, “was trying to collaborate with” the lawyers representing other cities in their climate liability lawsuits, according to emails obtained by the Florida Record. Neither Wiles nor any representatives of his organizations are recorded attending any of the meetings arranged by the lobbyist. The lobbyist did not reply to the Florida Record’s multiple requests for comment on the discrepancy of being hired by one group to lobby for another.

The complaint against CCL is not the first evidence that has surfaced of climate litigation activists appearing to sidestep state laws. The Washington Free Beacon reported last year that a representative ofSher Edling,a law firm representing multiple plaintiffs in climate liability lawsuits against energy producers, asked Miami Beach officials to move their conversations offline, specifically to prevent their communications from being made public.

Emails obtained [FOIA? FEES?] by the Free Beacon show Sher Edling’s Charles Savitt emailing two Miami Beach officials to schedule an appointment, adding, “Given state law, let’s talk rather than me send you anything.” That email was followed by an even more explicit message: “Given public records laws it is much better for us to talk on the phone.”

===

omfg

wtf? an 11 21 no lnx

https://www.eac.gov/

Chairman

Donald Palmer

donald Palmer was nominated by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed by unanimous consent [that is NO VOTE?]of the United States Senate on January 2, 2019 to serve as an United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Commissioner.

Mr. Palmer currently serves as the Chairman of the (EAC) and he also serves as the Designated Federal Officer (DFO) of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC).

Mr. Palmer is a former Bipartisan Policy Center Fellow where he advanced the recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Mr. Palmer is a former Secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections and served as the Commonwealth’s Chief Election Official from 2011 to 2014. During his tenure, he implemented an online voter registration system and joined Virginia as a founding member of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonprofit organization with the sole mission of assisting states to improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens. He also served as Florida’s Director of Elections where he successfully transitioned the state from electronic voting machines to paper-based digital voting machines prior to the 2008 presidential election and expanded the Florida voting system state certification program. Prior to his work in election administration, he served as a trial attorney with the Voting Section in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he enforced the nation’s federal voting laws. Palmer is a military veteran, retiring from the U.S. Navy after two decades as an intelligence officer and judge advocate general.

Mr. Palmer earned his J.D. at the Stetson University College of Law and his master’s degree at George Washington University.

Vice Chair

Thomas Hicks

Commissioner

Christy McCormick BO

impressive resume DOJ ...Prior to joining the Department of Justice, Ms. McCormick served as a Judicial Clerk to the Honorable Elizabeth A. McClanahan in the Court of Appeals of Virginia from 2003 to 2006. Ms. McCormick was an Assistant Attorney General and Assistant to the Solicitor General in the Office of the Attorney General of Virginia from 2001 to 2003. She was a member of the U.S. Supreme Court legal teams for Black v. Virginia (defending the Commonwealth’s criminal statute against cross-burning) and Hicks v. Virginia (defending a 1st amendment challenge to a state trespassing policy), as well as in cases on appeal to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. She was a Judicial Law Clerk in Virginia’s Seventh Judicial Circuit Court from 1999 to 2001.

Ms. McCormick received her B.A. from the University of Buffalo, a J.D. with honors from the George Mason University School of Law (now Antonin Scalia Law School), and also attended the William & Mary School of Law.

Commissioner

Ben Hovland

Benjamin Hovland was nominated by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed by unanimous consent of the United States Senate on January 2, 2019, to serve on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Commissioner Hovland serves as the Designated Federal Officer for the Standards Board.

Mr. Hovland's 20-year career in elections has been shaped by his commitment to improving election administration and removing barriers to voting. Most recently, he served as Acting Chief Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, where he was a driving force behind Congress appropriating $380 million in Help America Vote Act funds to enhance election security to the states in 2018. While at the Senate, he focused on the federal government's role in election administration and campaign finance regulation. He organized several hearings on election security preparations and improving election administration. He was integral to restoring a quorum at the EAC in 2015.

Earlier in his career, as the Deputy General Counsel for the Missouri Secretary of State's office, he focused on legal issues related to the administration of state and federal elections, including recounts, poll worker training, voter registration list maintenance, statewide database matching, voter education resources, and ballot initiative litigation. Hovland was part of the team that developed a new voter-friendly web portal to help Missourians get registered, update their registration, and find their polling place. He also oversaw the development and implementation of a new voter education program, which alerted Missourians who appeared on the U.S. Postal Services' national change of address list that they may need to update their voter registration. The program resulted in hundreds of thousands of Missourians registering to vote or updating their registration. He also engaged with Pew Charitable Trust to explore ways to improve voter registration lists, resulting in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which is now utilized by over 20 states to make their voter rolls more accurate and reach out to millions of unregistered Americans.

As an attorney for the Fair Elections Legal Network, Hovland's energies were focused on protecting Americans' access to the ballot box. Thanks to his efforts, the court struck down a misleading ballot title that may have led to additional barriers to voter participation in Missouri, keeping it off the ballot. In Florida, he litigated to stop efforts to purge voters from the rolls based on inaccurate data matching in the lead-up to the election.

Commissioner Hovland received his B.A. from the University of Central Arkansas and his J.D. from the University of Oregon.

U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) announced Thursday that it has named Brianna Schletz as its next Inspector General. Brianna replaces former Inspector General Patricia Layfield, who retired from the post in March 2021, and will officially start at the EAC’s Office of Inspector General in November.

mayer https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

cleta Mitchell, who helped then-President Donald Trump try to overturn the election results in Georgia and later helped funnel funds to the pro-Trump "fraudit" in Arizona, has been named to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission.

:{:{}:

The Election Assistance Commission (not to be confused with the Federal Election Commission, or FEC,) works with states on voting system guidelines, redistricting, cybersecurity, state voter files, voting by mail, and recounts and audits.

:{:{}:

Mitchell, a "fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer" whose work in years past included anti-LGBTQ efforts, was on the infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when Trump asked him to "find 11,780 votes," recorded audio revealed in January. The release of that tape led to Mitchell's resignation from her law firm, Foley & Lardner.

The news of Mitchell's appointment was reported by the editorial director of Votebeat:

:{:{}:

The Guardian's Sam Levine adds that Mitchell was also "involved in efforts to coordinate new voting restrictions in states this year," pointing to this damning Guardian article from April.

As Huseman notes, Mitchell told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer in August, "I don't think we can say with certainty who won" the 2020 presidential election, which is false.

Mitchell is a member of the secretive and "shadowy" far right wing Christian nationalist and plutocratic Council for National Policy. Among the group's alleged other members are Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, Liberty Counsel's Mat Stavers, and American Family Association's Tim Wildmon.

===

https://twitter.com/JessicaHuseman/status/1460647869904474114

apparently

@EACgov

Chairman Don Palmer and Cleta Mitchell spoke on a panel together at right wing elections conference this summer. https://exposedbycmd.org/2021/11/16/alec-academy-featured-a-whos-who-of-voter-suppression-leaders/...

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/11/16/alec-academy-featured-a-whos-who-of-voter-suppression-leaders/

The EAC does not have any direct control over who is on this board. The Help America Vote Act allows specific groups the ability to appoint them without review.

Quote Tweet

Election Asst. Comm.

@EACgov

Nov 15

The @EACgov issued the following statement regarding the Board of Advisors. https://eac.gov/news/2021/11/15/eac-statement-regarding-board-advisors

7:52 PM · Nov 15, 2021·Twitter Web App

Nov 15

Replying to

@JessicaHuseman

That said, it's not clear why this agency waited until 12 days after the appointment was official to tell anyone about it. United States Commission on Civil Rights didn't bother to announce it either.

Quote Tweet

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

2/ She was appointed effective November 3, but the EAC just announced her nomination today — 12 days later — in an email to stakeholders. Her term lasts until 2023.

The EAC does not have any direct control over who is on this board. The Help America Vote Act allows specific groups the ability to appoint them without review.

Quote Tweet

Election Asst. Comm.

@EACgov

Nov 15

The @EACgov issued the following statement regarding the Board of Advisors. https://eac.gov/news/2021/11/15/eac-statement-regarding-board-advisors

7:52 PM · Nov 15, 2021·Twitter Web Ap

Nov 15

Replying to

@JessicaHuseman

Quote Tweet

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

2/ She was appointed effective November 3, but the EAC just announced her nomination today — 12 days later — in an email to stakeholders. Her term lasts until 2023.

... The EAC does not have any direct control over who is on this board. The Help America Vote Act allows specific groups the ability to appoint them without review.

Election Asst. Comm.

@EACgov

Nov 15

The @EACgov issued the following statement regarding the Board of Advisors. https://eac.gov/news/2021/11/15/eac-statement-regarding-board-advisors

7:52 PM · Nov 15, 2021·Twitter Web App

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

Replying to

@JessicaHuseman

Quote Tweet

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

2/ She was appointed effective November 3, but the EAC just announced her nomination today — 12 days later — in an email to stakeholders. Her term lasts until 2023.

The EAC does not have any direct control over who is on this board. The Help America Vote Act allows specific groups the ability to appoint them without review.

Quote Tweet

Election Asst. Comm.

@EACgov

Nov 15

The @EACgov issued the following statement regarding the Board of Advisors. https://eac.gov/news/2021/11/15/eac-statement-regarding-board-advisors

7:52 PM · Nov 15, 2021·Twitter Web App

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

Replying to

@JessicaHuseman

Quote Tweet

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

2/ She was appointed effective November 3, but the EAC just announced her nomination today — 12 days later — in an email to stakeholders. Her term lasts until 2023.

---

david a no doc

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

Also

@EACgov

appears to have put this out in a bit of a hurry. These are the Voluntary *Voting System Guidelines.

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

It is honestly *quite* striking that this statement does not name Cleta Mitchell nor the organization who appointed her, and instead dances around her name entirely. The statement appears to be about nothing, read out of context of ... this obvious thing.

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Nov 15

Two democrats sit on the EAC commission and have the cover of a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President and they still have not said a *thing* about this.

It's a bit baffling?

Jessica Huseman

@JessicaHuseman

Apparently

@EACgov

8:36 AM · Nov 16, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

@satirehat

@JessicaHuseman

and

@EACgov

@arapaho415

@clearing_fog

Arapaho415

Links to Nov 16, 2021:

1/ "While the July 26-28 [2021] session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson...

exposedbycmd.org

ALEC “Academy” Featured a Who’s Who of Voter Suppression Leaders - EXPOSEDbyCMD

While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson,...

Show replies

David Armiak

@duboo

https://t.co/rl8UDI7vpj?amp=1

@JessicaHuseman

and

@EACgov

Christy McCormick is another EAC Commissioner who floats around these voter suppression circles. She is often attending Republican Secretaries of State Committee meetings. See these minutes that I published for the piece cited above.

documentcloud.org

---

https://www.eac.gov/news/2021/11/15/eac-statement-regarding-board-advisors

for Immediate Release

November 15, 2021

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued the following statement:

The 2002 Help America Vote Act, which established the U.S Election Assistance Commission (EAC), also created a Board of Advisors to the EAC serving a variety of discretionary functions, including review of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines and other advisory duties. The EAC does not make or approve appointments to the 35-member Board of Advisors. Board members are directly appointed by a wide variety of organizations, including but not limited to the National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, United States Conference of Mayors, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

For questions surrounding the appointment of a member to the EAC Board of Advisors, please contact the appointing organization directly.

===

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/25/cleta-mitchell-lawyer-us-voter-suppression

:{:{}:

no lnx

republican lawyer is key player in voter suppression drive across US

Cleta Mitchell has emerged in a series of roles that many see as a Republican push on limiting voting rights

:{:{}:

Cleta Mitchcell testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington on 6 February 2014. ]

Peter Stone in Washington

Sun 25 Apr 2021 0

It was an abrupt end to two decades as a partner at legal giant Foley & Lardner for the influential and conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell.

Days after Mitchell participated in Donald Trump’s controversial 2 January phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state where the then president pressured him to “find” him more votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win, Mitchell resigned her post in the midst of an internal firm review and mounting criticism.

[The Reverend Kenneth Pierce speaks on 13 April at a rally to end voter suppression at the capitol building in Lansing, Michigan. Texas has introduced more bills restricting voter access than any other state.

‘Shameless’: Texas Republicans lead the charge on voting clampdown

Agenda Focused on Election Legislation

Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.

By the timeALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.

The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.

Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.

Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.

Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.

Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.

Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Instituteled another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”

Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.

Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrity recently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.

Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”

Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.

Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.

“On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazinereported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.

All three are active in the R**epublican Secretaries of State Committee(RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.

The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.

ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation

ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.

Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.

Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”

As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.

Training Sessions on “the Left”

Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress.

Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his ill-fated Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, has been a major mouthpiece of the voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.

President of the Capital Research Center Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation to develop an “Online Encyclopedia of the Left,” inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.

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