Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certification

Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Thu Jan 06, 2022 5:38 am

Merrick Garland vows to hold all January 6th perpetrators accountable under the law
by Merrick Garland
January 5, 2022



In a sweeping speech marking the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack, Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed back on criticism that the Justice Department's January 6 probe has not been aggressive enough, while signaling that no one would be off limits as prosecutors "followed the facts."

"The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last," Garland said. "The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law -- whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy."

**************************

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Delivers Remarks on the First Anniversary of the Attack on the Capitol
Remarks as Delivered
January 5, 2022

Good afternoon.

It’s nice to see some of you here in the Great Hall. And to be able to connect with all of you virtually today.

On my first day as Attorney General, I spoke with all of you — the more than 115,000 employees of the Department of Justice — for the first time.

Today, I have brought us all together again, for two reasons.

First and foremost, to thank you. Thank you for the work you have done, not just over the last 10 months, but over the past several years. Work that you have done in the face of unprecedented challenges — ranging from an unprecedented deadly pandemic to an unprecedented attack on our democracy.

Thank you for your service, for your sacrifice, and for your dedication. I am honored to serve alongside you.

And second, as we begin a new year — and as we prepare to mark a solemn anniversary tomorrow – it is a fitting time to reaffirm that we at the Department of Justice will do everything in our power to defend the American people and American democracy.

We will defend our democratic institutions from attack.

We will protect those who serve the public from violence and threats of violence.

We will protect the cornerstone of our democracy: the right to every eligible citizen to cast a vote that counts.

And we will do all of this in a manner that adheres to the rule of law and honors our obligation to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone in this country.

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of January 6th, 2021 — the day the United States Capitol was attacked while lawmakers met to affirm the results of a presidential election.

In the early afternoon of January 6th — as the United States Senate and House of Representatives were meeting to certify the vote count of the Electoral College — a large crowd gathered outside the Capitol building.

Shortly after 2 p.m., individuals in the crowd began to force entry into the Capitol, by smashing windows and assaulting U.S. Capitol police, who were stationed there to protect the members of Congress as they took part in one of the most solemn proceedings of our democracy. Others in the crowd encouraged and assisted those who attacked the police.

Over the course of several hours, outnumbered law enforcement officers sustained a barrage of repeated, violent attacks. About 80 Capitol Police and 60 D.C. Metropolitan Police were assaulted.

As our own court filings and thousands of public videos of the event attest,

• Perpetrators punched dozens of law enforcement officers, knocking some officers unconscious.

• Some perpetrators tackled and dragged law enforcement officers. Among the many examples of such violence: One officer was crushed in a door. Another was dragged down a set of stairs, face down, repeatedly tased and beaten, and suffered a heart attack.

• Some perpetrators attacked law enforcement officers with chemical agents that burned their eyes and skin.

• And some assaulted officers with pipes, poles, and other dangerous or deadly weapons.

• Perpetrators also targeted, assaulted, tackled and harassed journalists and destroyed their equipment.

With increasing numbers of individuals having breached the Capitol, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives — including the President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence — had to be evacuated.

As a consequence, proceedings in both chambers were disrupted for hours — interfering with a fundamental element of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.

Those involved must be held accountable, and there is no higher priority for us at the Department of Justice.

It is impossible to overstate the heroism of the Capitol Police officers, Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officers, and other law enforcement officers who defended and secured the Capitol that day. They demonstrated to all of us, and to our country, what true courage looks like.

Their resolve, their sacrifice, and their bravery protected thousands of people working inside the Capitol that day.

Five officers who responded selflessly to the attack on January 6th have since lost their lives.

I ask everyone to please join me in a moment of silence in recognition of the service and sacrifice of:

Officer Brian Sicknick.

Officer Howard Liebengood.

Officer Jeffrey Smith.

Officer Gunther Hashida.

And Officer Kyle DeFreytag.

I know I speak for all of us in saying that tomorrow, and in our work in the days ahead, we will not only remember them — we will do everything we can to honor them.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Justice Department began its work on what has become one of the largest, most complex, and most resource-intensive investigations in our history.

Only a small number of perpetrators were arrested in the tumult of January 6th itself. Every day since, we have worked to identify, investigate, and apprehend defendants from across the country. And we have done so at record speed and scale — in the midst of a pandemic during which some grand juries and courtrooms were not able to operate.

Led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the FBI’s Washington Field Office, DOJ personnel across the department — in nearly all 56 field offices, in nearly all 94 United States Attorneys’ Offices, and in many Main Justice components — have worked countless hours to investigate the attack. Approximately 70 prosecutors from the District of Columbia and another 70 from other U.S. Attorney’s Offices and DOJ divisions have participated in this investigation.

So far, we have issued over 5,000 subpoenas and search warrants, seized approximately 2,000 devices, pored through over 20,000 hours of video footage, and searched through an estimated 15 terabytes of data.

We have received over 300,000 tips from ordinary citizens, who have been our indispensable partners in this effort. The FBI’s website continues to post photos of persons in connection with the events of January 6th, and we continue to seek the public’s assistance in identifying those individuals.

As of today, we have arrested and charged more than 725 defendants, in nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia, for their roles in the January 6th attack.

In charging the perpetrators, we have followed well-worn prosecutorial practices.

Those who assaulted officers or damaged the Capitol face greater charges.

Those who conspired with others to obstruct the vote count also face greater charges.

Those who did not undertake such conduct have been charged with lesser offenses — particularly if they accepted their responsibility early and cooperated with the investigation.

In the first months of the investigation, approximately 145 defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors, mostly defendants who did not cause injury or damage. Such pleas reflect the facts of those cases and the defendants’ acceptance of responsibility. And they help conserve both judicial and prosecutorial resources, so that attention can properly focus on the more serious perpetrators.

In complex cases, initial charges are often less severe than later charged offenses. This is purposeful, as investigators methodically collect and sift through more evidence.

By now, though, we have charged over 325 defendants with felonies, many for assaulting officers and many for corruptly obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. Twenty defendants charged with felonies have already pled guilty.

Approximately 40 defendants have been charged with conspiracy to obstruct a congressional proceeding and/or to obstruct law enforcement. In the months ahead, 17 defendants are already scheduled to go to trial for their role in felony conspiracies.

A necessary consequence of the prosecutorial approach of charging less serious offenses first is that courts impose shorter sentences before they impose longer ones.

In recent weeks, however, as judges have sentenced the first defendants convicted of assaults and related violent conduct against officers, we have seen significant sentences that reflect the seriousness of those offenses — both in terms of the injuries they caused and the serious risk they posed to our democratic institutions.

The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last.

The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead.

Because January 6th was an unprecedented attack on the seat of our democracy, we understand that there is broad public interest in our investigation. We understand that there are questions about how long the investigation will take, and about what exactly we are doing.

Our answer is, and will continue to be, the same answer we would give with respect to any ongoing investigation: as long as it takes and whatever it takes for justice to be done — consistent with the facts and the law.

I understand that this may not be the answer some are looking for. But we will and we must speak through our work. Anything else jeopardizes the viability of our investigations and the civil liberties of our citizens.

Everyone in this room and on these screens is familiar with the way we conduct investigations, and particularly complex investigations.

We build investigations by laying a foundation. We resolve more straightforward cases first because they provide the evidentiary foundation for more complex cases.

Investigating the more overt crimes generates linkages to less overt ones. Overt actors and the evidence they provide can lead us to others who may also have been involved. And that evidence can serve as the foundation for further investigative leads and techniques.

In circumstances like those of January 6th, a full accounting does not suddenly materialize. To ensure that all those criminally responsible are held accountable, we must collect the evidence.

We follow the physical evidence. We follow the digital evidence. We follow the money.

But most important, we follow the facts — not an agenda or an assumption. The facts tell us where to go next.

Over 40 years ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Justice Department concluded that the best way to ensure the department’s independence, integrity, and fair application of our laws — and, therefore, the best way to ensure the health of our democracy — is to have a set of norms to govern our work.

The central norm is that, in our criminal investigations, there cannot be different rules depending on one’s political party or affiliation. There cannot be different rules for friends and foes. And there cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless.

There is only one rule: we follow the facts and enforce the law in a way that respects the Constitution and protects civil liberties.

We conduct every investigation guided by the same norms. And we adhere to those norms even when, and especially when, the circumstances we face are not normal.

Adhering to the department’s long-standing norms is essential to our work in defending our democracy, particularly at a time when we are confronting a rise in violence and unlawful threats of violence in our shared public spaces and directed at those who serve the public.

We have all seen that Americans who serve and interact with the public at every level — many of whom make our democracy work every day — have been unlawfully targeted with threats of violence and actual violence.

Across the country, election officials and election workers; airline flight crews; school personnel; journalists; local elected officials; U.S. Senators and Representatives; and judges, prosecutors, and police officers have been threatened and/or attacked.

These are our fellow citizens — who administer our elections, ensure our safe travel, teach our children, report the news, represent their constituents, and keep our communities safe.

Some have been told that their offices would be bombed. Some have been told that they would be murdered, and precisely how — that they would be hanged; that they would be beheaded.

Police officers, who put their lives on the line every day to serve our communities, have been targeted with extraordinary levels of violence.

Flight crews have been assaulted. Journalists have been targeted. School personnel and their families have been threatened.

A member of Congress was threatened in a gruesome voicemail that asked if she had ever seen what a 50-caliber shell does to a human head. Another member of Congress — an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient — received threats that left her “terrified for [her] family.”

And in 2020, a federal judge in New Jersey was targeted by someone who had appeared before her in court. That person compiled information about where the judge and her family lived and went to church. That person found the judge’s home, shot and killed her son, and injured her husband.

These acts and threats of violence are not associated with any one set of partisan or ideological views.

But they are permeating so many parts of our national life that they risk becoming normalized and routine if we do not stop them.

That is dangerous for people’s safety. And it is deeply dangerous for our democracy.

In a democracy, people vote, argue, and debate — often vociferously — in order to achieve the policy outcomes they desire. But in a democracy, people must not employ violence or unlawful threats of violence to affect that outcome. Citizens must not be intimidated from exercising their constitutional rights to free expression and association by such unlawful conduct.

The Justice Department will continue to investigate violence and illegal threats of violence, disrupt that violence before it occurs, and hold perpetrators accountable.

We have marshaled the resources of the department to address the rising violence and criminal threats of violence against election workers, against flight crews, against school personnel, against journalists, against members of Congress, and against federal agents, prosecutors, and judges.

In 2021, the department charged more defendants in criminal threat cases than in any year in at least the last five.

As we do this work, we are guided by our commitment to protect civil liberties, including the First Amendment rights of all citizens.

The department has been clear that expressing a political belief or ideology, no matter how vociferously, is not a crime. We do not investigate or prosecute people because of their views. Peacefully expressing a view or ideology — no matter how extreme — is protected by the First Amendment. But illegally threatening to harm or kill another person is not. There is no First Amendment right to unlawfully threaten to harm or kill someone.

As Justice Scalia noted in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, true “threats of violence are outside the First Amendment” because laws that punish such threats “protect[] individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.”

The latter point hits particularly close to home for those of us who have investigated tragedies ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The time to address threats is when they are made, not after the tragedy has struck.

As employees of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, each of us understands that we have an obligation to protect our citizens from violence and fear of violence. And we will continue to do our part to provide that protection.

But the Justice Department cannot do it alone. The responsibility to bring an end to violence and threats of violence against those who serve the public is one that all Americans share.

Such conduct disrupts the peace of our public spaces and undermines our democracy. We are all Americans. We must protect each other.

The obligation to keep Americans and American democracy safe is part of the historical inheritance of this department. As I have noted several times before, a founding purpose of the Justice Department was to battle violent extremist attacks on our democratic institutions.

In the midst of Reconstruction following the Civil War, the department’s first principal task was to secure the civil rights promised by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. This meant protecting Black Americans seeking to exercise their right to vote from acts and threats of violence by white supremacists.

The framers of the Civil War Amendments recognized that access to the ballot is a fundamental aspect of citizenship and self-government. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to make the promise of those amendments real. To do so, it gave the Justice Department valuable tools with which to protect the right to vote.

In recent years, however, the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been drastically weakened.

The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby County case effectively eliminated the preclearance protections of Section 5, which had been the department’s most effective tool for protecting voting rights over the past half-century. Subsequent decisions have substantially narrowed the reach of Section 2 as well.

Since those decisions, there has been a dramatic increase in legislative enactments that make it harder for millions of eligible voters to vote and to elect representatives of their own choosing.

Those enactments range from: practices and procedures that make voting more difficult; to redistricting maps drawn to disadvantage both minorities and citizens of opposing political parties; to abnormal post-election audits that put the integrity of the voting process at risk; to changes in voting administration meant to diminish the authority of locally elected or nonpartisan election administrators.

Some have even suggested permitting state legislators to set aside the choice of the voters themselves.

As I noted in an address to the Civil Rights Division last June, many of those enactments have been justified by unfounded claims of material vote fraud in the 2020 election.

Those claims, which have corroded people’s faith in the legitimacy of our elections, have been repeatedly refuted by the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both the last administration and this one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them.

The Department of Justice will continue to do all it can to protect voting rights with the enforcement powers we have. It is essential that Congress act to give the department the powers we need to ensure that every eligible voter can cast a vote that counts.

But as with violence and threats of violence, the Justice Department — even the Congress — cannot alone defend the right to vote. The responsibility to preserve democracy — and to maintain faith in the legitimacy of its essential processes — lies with every elected official and with every American.

All Americans are entitled to free, fair, and secure elections that ensure they can select the representatives of their choice.

All Americans are entitled to live in a country in which their public servants can go about their jobs of serving the public free from violence and unlawful threats of violence.

And all Americans are entitled to live in a country in which the transition from one elected administration to the next is accomplished peacefully.

The Justice Department will never stop working to defend the democracy to which all Americans are entitled.

As I recognized when I first spoke with you all last March, service in the Department of Justice is more than a job and more than an honor. It is a calling.

Each of us — you and I — came to work here because we are committed to the rule of law and to seeking equal justice under law. We came to work here because we are committed to ensuring the civil rights and civil liberties of our people. We came to work here because we are committed to protecting our country — as our oath says — from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Together, we will continue to show the American people, by word and by deed, that these are the principles that underlie our work.

The challenges that we have faced, and that we will continue to face, are extraordinary. But I am moved and humbled by the extraordinary work you do every single day to meet them.

I look forward to seeing more of you in person, soon, and to our continued work together.

Thank you all.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Thu Jan 06, 2022 10:30 pm

GOP Group Calls Out Trump’s Enablers In Congress By Name In Scathing Fox News Ad
by Ed Mazza
Wed, January 5, 2022, 5:03 AM

A conservative group is calling out GOP lawmakers for failing to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol carried out by his supporters.

The new ad from the Republican Accountability Project, set to air on Fox News on the first anniversary of the attack, focuses on five lawmakers who were sharply critical of Trump last year, but since either changed their tune or went silent.

“They told the truth then. Why won’t they now?” the text on the screen reads after clips featuring comments by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.):

The Republican Accountability Project
@AccountableGOP
@GOPLeader, @LeaderMcConnell, @tedcruz, @LindseyGrahamSC, @MikeforWI, this you?
Running on January 6 on Fox and Friends, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Hannity.

7:07 PM Jan 4, 2022


The spot is set to run during “Fox & Friends,” “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Thursday. The Republican Accountability Project has been running ads targeting members of the party who enabled Trump, complete with an online “Hall of Shame” of 13 lawmakers who “actively invented and disseminated lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

The group is also looking to support primary challengers to those lawmakers.

****************************

Cowardice: Some Republicans have made it clear that they cannot be trusted with power
by accountability.gop
Accessed: 1/6/22
https://accountability.gop/cowardice/

The balance has turned against the responsible, reasonable wing of the Republican Party. Most Republicans in Congress abetted the insurrection on January 6 and ignored, excused, or even participated in the dog whistles to QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories.

Most Republicans went along with the trend because it was politically safe, but a few of them drove the trend. They actively invented and disseminated lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories to rile up their base and advance their own careers at the expense of the country and the Constitution.

They have made it clear that they can never be trusted with power. To ensure that as few of them as possible return to Congress in 2022, we will recruit and support primary candidates against them through our political action committee where strategically viable.

CAMPAIGNS

“Resign” Billboards


We're holding irresponsible Republican lawmakers accountable.

We’re kicking off a $1 million billboard campaign across the country calling for prominent members of Congress to resign for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack.

This is a selection of the billboards that we’re running across the country, which are targeting GOP lawmakers who were the most irresponsible during the aftermath of the 2020 election.

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
SEN. CRUZ: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
SEN. HAWLEY: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
MCCARTHY: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
JORDAN: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
REP. GREENE: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
SEN. CRUZ: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
CAWTHORN: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
BROOKS: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
SEN. CRUZ: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
REP. NUNES: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
STEFANIK: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
REP. GAETZ: RESIGN

YOU LIED ABOUT THE ELECTION. THE CAPITOL WAS ATTACKED.
GOHMERT: RESIGN

"You Did This" Commercial

We're showing the direct line between the destructive rhetoric of Congressional Republicans and the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Airing in January.



REPUBLICAN HALL OF SHAME

Rep. Lauren Boebert
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Mo Brooks
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Madison Cawthorn
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Sen. Ted Cruz
SENATE

Rep. Matt Gaetz
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Louie Gohmert
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Paul Gosar
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Sen. Josh Hawley
SENATE

Rep. Jim Jordan
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Kevin McCarthy
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Devin Nunes
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Rep. Elise Stefanik
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:37 am

Watch Biden’s full Jan. 6 anniversary speech
by Pres. Joe Biden
an 6, 2022



Madam Vice President, my fellow Americans: to state the obvious, one year ago today, in this sacred place, Democracy was attacked. Simply attacked. The will of the people was under assault. The Constitution, our constitution faced the gravest of threats. Outnumbered in the face of a brutal attack, the Capitol Police, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the National Guard and other brave law enforcement officials saved the rule of law. Our democracy held. We the people endured. We the people prevail.

For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol. But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such attack never, never happens again.

I'm speaking to you today from Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. This is where the House of Representatives met for 50 years in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

This is – on this floor is where a young congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, sat at desk 191. Above him, above us over that door, leading into the rotunda is a sculpture depicting Clio, the muse of history. In her hands, an open book, in which she records the events taking place in this chamber below. Clio stood watch over this hall, one year ago today, as she has for more than 200 years. She recorded what took place: the real history, the real facts, the real truth, the facts and the truth that Vice President Harris just shared, and that you and I and the whole world saw with our own eyes.

The Bible tells us that we shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free. We shall know the truth. Well, here is the God's truth about January 6, 2021. Close your eyes. Go back to that day. What do you see?

Rioters rampaging, waving for the first time inside this Capitol, the confederate flag that symbolized the cause to destroy America, to rip us apart. Even during the Civil War, that never, ever happened. But it happened here in 2021.

What else do you see? A mob, breaking windows, kicking in doors, breaching the Capitol, American flags on poles being used as weapons as spears, fire extinguishers being thrown at the heads of police officers. A crowd that professes their love for law enforcement assaulted those police officers, dragged them, sprayed them, stomped on them.

Over 140 police officers were injured. We all heard the police officers who were there that day testified to what happened. One officer called it quote "a medieval battle" and that he was more afraid that day than he was fighting the war in Iraq.

They've repeatedly asked since that day, how dare anyone, anyone diminish belittle or deny the hell they were put through? We saw with our own eyes rioters menace these halls, threatening the life of the Speaker of the House, literally erecting gallows to hang the vice president of the United States of America.

What do we not see? We didn't see a former president who had just rallied the mob to attack, sitting in the private dining room off the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hour, as police were assaulted. Lives at risk. The nation's capital under siege.

This wasn't a group of tourists. This is an armed insurrection. They weren't looking to uphold the will of the people. They were looking to deny the will of the people. They were looking to uphold – they weren't looking to hold a free and fair election. They were looking to overturn one. They weren't looking to save the cause of America. They were looking to subvert the Constitution. This isn't about being bogged down in the past. This is about making sure the past isn't buried.

That's the only way forward. That's what great nations do. They don't bury the truth. They face up to it. It sounds like hyperbole, but that's the truth. They face up to it. We are a great nation.

My fellow Americans in life, there's truth. And tragically, there are lies. Lies conceived and spread for profit and power. We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here's the truth: the former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle.

Because he sees his own interest as more important than his country's interest and America's interest. And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution. He can't accept he lost. Even though that's what 93 United States senators, his own attorney general, his own vice president, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said: he lost.

That's what 81 million of you did as you voted for a new way forward. He has done what no president in American history, the history of this country has ever, ever done. He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the American people.

While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against it, trying to uphold the principle of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else. They seem no longer to want to be the party, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.

But whatever my other disagreements are with Republicans who support the rule of law and not the role of a single man, I will always seek to work together with them, to find shared solutions where it possible.

Because if we have a shared belief in democracy, that anything is possible. Anything.

And so at this moment, we must decide, what kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people?

Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but under the shadow of lies? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation. The way forward is to recognize the truth and to live by it.

The Big Lie being told by the former president and many Republicans who fear his wrath is that the insurrection in this country actually took place on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020.

Think about that. Is that what you thought? Is that what you thought when you voted that day? Taking part in an insurrection, is that what you thought you were doing, or did you think you were carrying out your highest duty as a citizen and voting?

The former president's supporters are trying to rewrite history. They want you to see Election Day as the day of insurrection. And the riot that took place there on January 6th as a true expression of the will of the people.

Can you think of a more twisted way to look at this country, to look at America? I cannot.

Here's the truth. The election of 2020 was the greatest demonstration of democracy in the history of this country. More of you voted in that election than have ever voted in all of American history. Over 150 million Americans went to the polls and voted that day in a pandemic. Some at great risk to their lives. They should be applauded, not attacked.

Right now in state after state, new laws are being written. Not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it, not to strengthen or protect our democracy, but because the former president lost. Instead of looking at election results from 2020 and saying they need new ideas or better ideas to win more votes, the former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote and subvert our elections.

It's wrong. It's undemocratic, and frankly, it's un-American. The second Big Lie being told by the former president's supporters is that the results of the election 2020 can't be trusted. The truth is that no election, no election in American history has been more closely scrutinized or more carefully counted.

Every legal challenge questioning the results and every court in this country that could have been made was made and was rejected, often rejected by Republican-appointed judges, including judges appointed by the former president himself from state courts to the United States Supreme Court. Recounts were undertaken in state after state. Georgia – Georgia counted its results three times, with one recount by hand.

Phony partisan audits were undertaken long after the election in several states. None changed the results. And in some of them, the irony is the margin of victory actually grew slightly.

So let's speak plainly about what happened in 2020. Even before the first ballot was cast, the former president was preemptively sowing doubt about the election results. He built his lie over months. It wasn't based on any facts. He was just looking for an excuse, a pretext to cover for the truth. He's not just a former president. He's a defeated former president. Defeated by a margin of over seven million of your votes. In a full and free and fair election.

There is simply zero proof the election results are inaccurate. In fact, in every venue where evidence had to be produced and oath to tell the truth had to be taken, the former president failed to make his case.

Just think about this, the former president and his supporters have never been able to explain how they accept as accurate the other election results that took place on November 3rd. The elections for governor. United States Senate. House of Representatives. Elections, in which they closed the gap in the House. They challenged none of that. The president's name was first. Then we went down the line, governors, senators, House of Representatives.

Somehow, those results are accurate on the same ballot. But the presidential race was flawed? And on the same ballot, the same day, cast by the same voters? The only difference, the former president didn't lose those races. He just lost the one that was his own.

Finally, the third Big Lie being told by a former president and supporters is that the mob who sought to impose their will through violence are the nation's true patriots. Is that what you thought when you looked at the mob ransacking the Capitol, destroying property, literally defecating in the hallways? Rifling through the desks of senators and representatives? Hunting down members of congress. Patriots? Not my view.

To me, the true patriots for the more than 150 Americans who peacefully expressed their vote at the ballot box. The election workers who protected the integrity of the vote and the heroes who defended this Capitol. You can't love your country only when you win. You can't obey the law only when it's convenient. You can't be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.

Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so held a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy.

They didn't come here out of patriotism or principle. They came here in rage. Not in service of America but rather in service of one man. Those who incited the mob, the real plotters who are desperate to deny the certification of this election, and defy the will of the voters. But their plot was foiled; congressmen, Democrats, Republicans stayed. Senators, representatives, staff, they finished their work, the Constitution demanded. They honored their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Look folks, now it's up to all of us — to We the People — to stand for the rule of law, to preserve the flame of democracy, to keep the promise of America alive. The promise is at risk. Targeted by the forces that value brute strength. Over the sanctity of democracy. Fear over hope. Personal gain over public good.

Make no mistake about it, we're living at an inflection point in history, both at home and abroad. We're engaged anew in a struggle between democracy and autocracy, between the aspirations of the many and the greed of the few. Between the people's right of self-determination and self-seeking autocrat. From China to Russia and beyond, they're betting the democracies' days are numbered - they've actually told me democracy is too slow, too bogged down by division to succeed in today's rapidly changing, complicated world.

And they're betting, they're betting America will become more like them and less like like us. They're betting in America is a place for the autocrat, the dictator, the strongman. I do not believe that. That is not who we are. That is not who we have ever been. And that is not who we should ever, ever be.

Our founding fathers, as imperfect as they were, set in motion, an experiment that changed the world, literally changed the world. Here in America, the people would rule. Power would be transferred peacefully. Never the tip of a spear or the barrel of a gun. They committed paper and idea that couldn't live up to – they couldn't live up to, but an idea it couldn't be constrained.

Yes, in America, all people are created equal. Reject the view that if you, if you succeed, I fail. If you get ahead, I fall behind. If I hold you down, I somehow lift myself up.

The former president who lies about this election and the mob that attacked this Capitol could not be further away from the core American values. They want to rule or they will ruin. Ruin when our country fought for at Lexington and Concord at Gettysburg and Omaha Beach, Seneca Falls, Selma, Alabama. What – and what we were fighting for: The right to vote. The right to govern ourselves. The right to determine our own destiny.

With rights come responsibilities. The responsibility to see each other as neighbors. Maybe we disagree with that neighbor, but they're not an adversary. The responsibility to accept defeat, then get back in the arena and try again the next time to make your case. The responsibility to see that America is an idea. An idea that requires vigilant stewardship.

As we stand here today, one year since January 6, 2021, the lies that drove the anger and madness we saw on this place, they have not abated. So we have to be firm, resolute and unyielding in our defense of the right to vote and have that vote counted.

Some have already made the ultimate sacrifice in this sacred effort. Jill and I have mourned police officers in this Capitol rotunda not once, but twice in the wake of January 6th. Once to honor Officer Brian Sicknick, who lost his life the day after the attack. The second time to honor Officer Billy Evans, who lost his life defending the Capitol as well.

We think about the others who lost their lives and were injured and everyone living with the trauma of that day. From those defending this Capitol to members of Congress in both parties and their staffs to reporters, cafeteria workers, custodial workers and their families.

Don't kid yourself. The pain and scars from that day run deep. I've said it many times and it's no more true or real when we think about the events of January 6th. We are in a battle for the soul of America. A battle that by the grace of God and the goodness and greatness of this nation, we will win.

Believe me: I know how difficult democracy is. And I'm crystal clear about the threats America faces. But I also know that our darkest days can lead to light and hope. From the death and destruction as the vice president referenced in Pearl Harbor can the triumph over the forces of fascism. From the brutality of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge came a historic voting rights legislation.

So now let's step up. Write the next chapter in American history, where January six marks not the end of democracy but the beginning of a renaissance of liberty and fair play.

I did not seek this fight right to this Capitol year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation, and I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy. We will make sure the will of the people is heard. That the ballot prevails, not violence. That authority of this nation will always be peacefully transferred. I believe the power of the presidency and the purpose is to unite this nation, not divide it.

To lift us up. Not tear us apart. It's about us, not about me. Deep in the heart of America, burns a flame lit almost 250 years ago of liberty, freedom and equality. This is not the land of kings or dictators or autocrats.

We're a nation of laws of order, not chaos, of peace, not violence. Here in America, the people rule, through the ballot. And their will prevails. So let's remember together, we're one nation under God, indivisible, that today, tomorrow and forever, at our best, we are the United States of America.

God bless you all. May God protect our troops. My God bless those who stand watch over our democracy.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Fri Jan 07, 2022 3:14 am

Liz Cheney: We Won’t Let Trump Hide Behind ‘Phony Claims’ During Jan. 6 Investigation
by Savannah Guthrie
USA Today
January 6, 2022



Rep. Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the congressional committee investigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol, joins TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie to discuss how close the country came to a violent overthrow of a valid election and the ongoing threat to democracy. She also talks about what she has learned about former President Trump’s conduct in the moments around the attack.

[Savannah Guthrie] With us now exclusively is Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the top Republican on the Congressional Committee investigating the insurrection. Congresswoman Cheney, good morning to you.

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] Good morning, Savannah.

[Savannah Guthrie] I’ve never known you to be one for big emotions, but as you sit here today, one year later, and consider, how close did we come in this country, how close did we come to the violent overthrow of a valid election?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] We came very close. Our institutions held, but they only held because of the people who were willing to stand up against the pressure from former President Trump: people at his own Department of Justice who stood up to him, elected officials at the state level who stood up to him, and the law enforcement officers here at the Capitol. You just had Harry Dunn on. People like Harry, Mike Fanone, and 140 law enforcement officers who fought at the tunnel to prevent thousands more from breaching the Capitol that day. We came very close. And we need to recognize how important it is that the system depends upon individuals, and that we make sure that it never happens again.

[Savannah Guthrie] Your co-chair Benny Thompson has said we came critically close to the end of democracy as we know it. The President expected to address the nation, and portray our democracy as in a very fragile moment right now. Not a year ago, right now. Do you agree?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] I do. The threat continues. Former President Trump continues to make the same claims that he knows caused violence on January 6, and it’s very important, if you look at what’s happening today in my party, in the Republican party, rather than reject what happened on the 6th, reject the lies about the election, and make clear that a President who engaged in those activities can never be President again, unfortunately, too many in my own party are embracing that former President, are looking the other way, or minimizing the danger. That’s how democracies die. And we simply cannot let that happen.

[Savannah Guthrie] The Committee in Congress that is investigating this matter has already interviewed 300 plus witnesses, and looked at 35,000 pages of documents. The big picture first: for those who think maybe this was a protest that got emotional, out of control, how high does it go? Have you been surprised or alarmed by anything you have unearthed so far in the committee?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] You know, we have unearthed new things in every single aspect of our investigation, and I’m confident that we’ll continue to do so. We’ve had tremendous cooperation from many, many people, including people in the President’s inner circle, people who were in the West Wing that day, and people who have come forward to us with information about what they saw and what they know. And I’m confident that cooperation will continue. The Committee is absolutely determined to ensure that we understand the entire plot, the entire plan to overthrow the election, to really overturn the rule of law. You know, we had over 60 courts in this country that ruled against the claims the former president was making, and yet he rejected those rulings, and attempted to overturn the will of the people. That simply cannot happen in the United States.

[Savannah Guthrie] I know the Committee is zeroing in on a key time frame, a chunk of about three hours in the afternoon of January 6. At 1:10 p.m. or so the President tells his crowd, his protesters at a speech, to march on the Capitol, and it’s not until 187 minutes later that he releases a video statement telling them to go home. What have you learned about those 187 minutes? How would you characterize the President’s conduct, or lack thereof, in those moments?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] We know, Savannah, that the President was watching television in his private dining room off the oval office. We know from firsthand testimony that he was watching the violent assault on the Capitol. We also know that he could have, at any moment, walked the very few steps to the White House briefing room, could have gone on the air and told the people who were his supporters assaulting the Capitol to go home. He did not do that. And we are very focused on the minute by minute activities at the White House, what he was doing. And again, as I said, we now have firsthand testimony about the extent to which he was watching television, and was refusing to ask people to stop, ask them to go home.

[Savannah Guthrie] There’s been reporting that the Committee is looking for out-takes of that video, previous versions that the President recorded before the one that he ultimately released. Do you have information that he gave a different kind of message in some of those videos that never saw the light of day?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] Well, we are certainly focused on that, looking at it. We will, in fact, be ensuring that we have access to those videos. You know, one of the things the Committee is very engaged in right now is litigation. The former president is attempting to hide, to hide behind executive privilege claims. We’ve won now in the lower court. We’ve won now in the Appellate court. That case is now potentially in front of the Supreme Court. But we will not let the former president hide behind these phony claims of privilege, and we will get to the bottom of things like that video, the out-takes of that video, and everything else that was going on that day, both his action and his refusal to take action.

[Savannah Guthrie] Well, let me put a fine point on it. Have you seen, have you heard, about conduct from witnesses or otherwise, that suggests that there is a potential criminal case against the President?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] Certainly we will be looking at that. There are important questions in front of the Committee such as whether or not, through his action or inaction, President Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, attempted to delay the count of electoral votes. Those are questions the Committee is looking at. We also know, certainly, that it was a supreme dereliction of duty when the President of the United States refuses to take action to stop a violent assault on the Congress, to stop a violent assault on any of the co-equal branches of government. That’s clearly a dereliction of duty, and we will, I’m sure, be giving more information …

[Savannah Guthrie] Sorry to jump in, but I have a couple of more things to get to. How does Vice President, former Vice-President Pence, fit into this case? Are you willing to subpoena him to get his testimony? Do you think he’ll cooperate?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] You know, former vice president Pence was a hero on January 6. He refused the pressure of the former President. He did his duty, and the nation should be very grateful for the actions that he took that day. We look forward to continuing the cooperation that we’ve had with members of the former Vice President’s team, and look forward as well to his cooperation.

[Savannah Guthrie] You know, even as you investigate January 6, the current threat is still looming large. As mentioned, in 16 states there are pending laws that would change election rules to give more power to politicians in the state legislatures rather than election officials and governors. There are at least 18 Trump loyalist election deniers who are running for secretary of state. 71% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. About 1/3 think that political violence is justified in some circumstances. Is the former president, President Trump, in a better position today, legally, politically, rhetorically, than he was a year ago to subvert a U.S. election?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] We will not allow him to subvert a U.S. election. He is certainly continuing his efforts in that regard. I think it’s incumbent upon every one of us who is elected, it’s incumbent on every American out there, to ensure when they’re casting their vote, when they’re deciding who they’re going to support, that they are aware that there are candidates that this former president is attempting to support who, for example, would not have certified the election results last time around. That’s going to be a critical part of our upcoming elections. And we all have a duty to ensure that he cannot subvert this democracy.

[Savannah Guthrie] And finally, congresswoman, you know a year ago it was all there for us to see, this violent mob attacking police officers, attacking our Capitol, live on television. And it was unthinkable that anyone could deny it. And yet that is exactly what has happened. Take a look.

[Sean Hannity, Fox News, January 6, 2021] The vast majority in Washington D.C. today were peaceful.

[Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.] By and large it was a peaceful protest.

[Laura Ingraham] This is one of the big lies, that this was a coordinated insurrection.

[Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.)] If you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.


[Savannah Guthrie] If people are willing to believe voices like that, and spin like that, instead of their own eyes, what hope is there for your Committee, or for any investigation here?

[Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming] I have tremendous hope, Savannah. There are millions of Americans across this country who understand their responsibility with respect to defending the institutions, and defending the Constitution. And all of those people that you just played, all of my colleagues, anyone who attempts to minimize what happens, anyone who denies the truth of what happened, they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and history is watching, and history will judge them. But the American people have the ability to ensure that we protect our Constitution, and we protect our institutions with their votes, with their voices. And we certainly are not going to be part, on our Committee, of allowing those institutions to be unraveled.

[Savannah Guthrie] Congresswoman Liz Cheney, thank you very much for your time this morning.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Sat Jan 08, 2022 3:51 am

'Craven Cruz' Gets Owned On Live TV After MAGA Backlash On Riot
by Ari Melber
Jan 7, 2022



After MAGA Senator Ted Cruz referred to the January 6th insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack on the Capitol,” he immediately drew backlash from the proponents of the “big lie.” Cruz ultimately folded and rushed to recant his statement in an odd interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, whose show is known to spread misinformation about the January 6th riot. (This segment is from MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber," a news show covering politics, law, and culture airing nightly at 6pm ET on MSNBC bit.ly/thebeatwithari).

Ari Melber: Our top story right now draws on a new development involving one of the most strident Republican leaders in Congress: Ted Cruz, and it includes his odd apology interview with Tucker Carlson. This story reveals a picture of the current Republican party and a warning about the authoritarianism rising on the American right. To see how important this is, and how deep it runs, and why this isn't just some "DC skirmish", it's also necessary right now for us to see how Ted Cruz and the Republican party got here. Because as the Right rallies around the lies of The Loser of the last election, who President Biden admonished in that fiery speech last night, as a "defeated, lying, former President," it is also vital to understand that Republican leaders KNOW Trump is lying. They KNOW how dangerous he is. They KNOW his combination of lies, ego and emotional temperament can pose a real danger, as Cruz himself warned so heatedly in 2016.

Ted Cruz: This man is a pathological liar.

What Donald does when he loses is he blames everybody else. It's never Donald's fault.

Donald, you're a sniveling coward.

He engages in insults. I think the people are interested in substance and record.

We need a commander-in-chief, not a Twitter-in-Chief.

The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist.

The man is utterly amoral.

His reaction to everything is to throw a fit! Donald finds it very hard to lose. He finds that very difficult for him.


Ari Melber: That's where Cruz started, speaking there to largely Republican audiences, and expressing things that he did not find controversial in the least. Of course Trump was a liar. Of course his career and Twitter life showed narcissism rather than public service. Of course Trump was a sore loser. And that can get dangerous when The Sore Loser oversees a nuclear power. Everything I said is in reference to what Cruz asserted in public repeatedly to Republicans. Who knows also better than most that Trump does not honor democracy, and doesn't pretend to. The 2016 primaries first began with Trump losing to Cruz in Iowa prompting Trump to immediately impugn the result, and lie about them, and talk about fraud, because when he loses, it's a fraud problem. There, he was of course, accusing many Republicans of fraud. It didn't matter. Now he accuses different opponents in his mind, but Ted Cruz was on the other end of that. And then, when Trump won the nomination, Cruz was still dubious enough about Trump as a potential President that Ted Cruz, famously, went to the RNC, got up on the podium, and refused to endorse Trump in that ultimately bizarre scene where then Trump, as a candidate, disrupted it by coming out on the floor during Cruz's speech not endorsing Trump. This history matters, because that's what Ted Cruz first thought. that's what Ted Cruz apparently REALLY thought about Donald Trump. And then, as Trump solidified his grip on power, Cruz has publicly completely owned himself. He endorsed Trump, he campaigned with him, he defended every Trump action in office, and after Trump lost to Biden, and after Trump kept attacking the election, something Cruz knew all about from his own experience, it was then Ted Cruz who led the futile effort to challenge the certification of the Biden victory on the Senate floor.

Ted Cruz: And we've seen in the last two months unprecedented allegations of voter fraud.

And we have an obligation to the Constitution to ensure that this election was lawful.

What does it say to the nearly half the country that believes this election was rigged if we vote not even to consider the claims of illegality and fraud in this election?

Conduct a 10-day emergency audit to consider the evidence.


Ari Melber: Yes, 10 more days of all that. And what would ten more days of sham reviews achieve? It sounded strange at the time even to everyone covering it closely, but, well, when you gather up all the evidence from primary sources, it looks even worse, because we are hearing from Trump's own White House aides Cruz was leading a more complex authoritarian play. The idea was to use that time to somehow then decertify the results and steal the whole election. Here was Trump aide Peter Navarro on Cruz's role on The Beat this week:

Peter Navarro: The plan was simply this: We had over a hundred Congressmen and Senators on Capitol Hill ready to implement the Sweep... At 1 p.m. Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz and Gosar, Representative, started The Green Bay Sweep beautifully, challenging the results of Arizona.


Ari Melber: Listen closely -- they are telling on themselves! And it's the context for all of this threat to our future elections. Not a drill! As you heard Navarro say, Cruz spoke at 1 p.m., and within the hour a violent mob stormed the Capitol demanding assassinations, attacking police, beating people, committing what are now convicted crimes in the courts, and causing havoc that did result in deaths. A literal insurrection. A security meltdown. An act of domestic terrorism. And this week Cruz referred to that fact of a violent terrorist attack.

Ted Cruz: We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week, and as an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol where we saw the men and women in law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage.


Ari Melber: Fact Check: True!

Yet that very straightforward recent historical truth that you just heard him say in his own words on Wednesday drew huge backlash from the Right-Wing Big Lie Movement, attacking Cruz for accurately referring to the truth of those crimes, the domestic terror and the violence.

NPR: Republicans criticize Ted Cruz for calling Jan. 6 a violent terrorist attack.

KTLA5: Ted Cruz slammed for calling Jan. 6 'Violent Terrorist Attack'

WBAP: Ted Cruz under fire for calling January 6th rioters 'Terrorists'


Ari Melber: And Cruz immediately folded, rushing to recant everything in a very sad interview with Tucker Carlson, who by the way hosts a lot of misinformation about January 6th, so that's the place where you go when you have to prove to people that when you said something true about the violence, you didn't mean it. So Cruz went to publicly apologize and say he was "dumb" to call it terrorism, and "sloppy," in his words, and then he got his push-back in public, millions watching, from Carlson.

Ted Cruz: The way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and it was frankly dumb.

Tucker Carlson: I don't buy that! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! I don't buy that. Look, I've known you for a long time since before you went to the Senate; I do not believe that you used that accidentally. I just don't!

Ted Cruz: So Tucker, as a result of my sloppy phrasing, it's caused a lot of people to misunderstand what I meant...I wasn't saying that the thousands of peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists.


Ari Melber: It's a new low, after other recent new lows. Ted Cruz went from the Senator who would supposedly stand up to Trump and the threat that he said Trump posed, the lies, the amorality as Cruz called it, the attack on democracy, you know, those were the words he used to phrase the threat Trump posed. He went from that to a Trump supporter, then a Trump enabler, then a Trump accomplice in trying to end democracy, and then, NOW, with crimes on the table, he's Trump's chief lying propagandist, willing to lie about the very violence that Mr. Cruz claimed to condemn one day before.

He knew better five years ago, just as he knew better earlier this week. And that makes it all the more craven as a personalized reflection of the wider Republican party's dissent.

Ted Cruz: It would be ridiculous for me to be saying that the people standing up and protesting to follow the law were somehow terrorists.

If you assault a police officer, you should go to jail. That's who I was talking about.

I used that word all in 2020 for the Antifa and BLM terrorists that assaulted cops.

I wasn't saying the millions of patriots across the country who were supporting President Trump are terrorists.

I agree with you -- it was a mistake to say that yesterday.

They want to paint us as Nazis. I'm the one leading the fight in the Senate against this garbage.


Ari Melber: We're joined by Washington Post write Eugene Robinson. Your thoughts, sir.

Eugene Robinson: Well, I think you used the operative word Ari. You used the word "craven." It was a craven performance that we saw last night from Ted Cruz. At the end of this long transformation, he was very clear, as you pointed out at the beginning, what he saw in Donald Trump, the danger he saw in Donald Trump, the fact that he was totally unsuited and unfit to ever be President of the United States, and now he is waving the Trump banner because of his own craven ambition. He still wants to be President. He still thinks he can be President some day. He still thinks, somehow, he can inherit the Trump base. And so it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. But it was just an embarrassing performance. It was hard to believe. It's difficult to watch, even happening to Ted Cruz.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Sat Jan 08, 2022 5:06 am

The Two Faces of Kevin McCarthy: Why He Must be Subpoenaed to Testify About Trump's Conduct on 1/6
by Glenn Kirschner
Jan 7, 2022



Just days after the 1/6 insurrection, Rep. Kevin McCarthy stated unequivocally that Donald Trump bears responsibility for the attack on Congress. But after a trip to Mar-a-Lago and (undoubtedly) some arm- twisting by Donald Trump, McCarthy makes contradictory statements.

Given the claims in his second statement about what Trump said about the insurrection, Kevin McCarthy must testify to the House select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol. Here's why . . .
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Sun Jan 09, 2022 2:59 am

Retired Generals warn segments of the military could support a future coup
by Mary Louise Kelly
NPR
December 29, 2021, 4:51 PM ET

Transcript

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with retired Major General Paul Eaton about the possibility of another insurrection after the 2024 election.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

As we approach the first anniversary of the January 6 Capital riot, three retired U.S. generals are warning that another insurrection could occur after the next presidential election in 2024. And they are sounding the alarm that next time, it could come from the military. They made their case in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

And joining us now is one of the authors - retired Army Major General Paul Eaton. General Eaton, welcome.

PAUL EATON: Mary Louise, thank you very much for having me.

KELLY: So the scenario that you imagine is that after 2024 election, a losing candidate could - what? - could contest the results, claim to be commander in chief and some members of the military might take orders from them?

EATON: Mary Louise, the real question is, does everybody understand who the duly elected president is? If that is not a clear-cut understanding, that can infect the rank and file or at any level in the U.S. military. So if you have that kind of confusion around the 2020 election, it is not outlandish to consider that you're going to have a little bit of confusion and that confusion could slip into the ranks of the U.S. military.

KELLY: And to understand exactly what you're concerned about, are you more worried about rank-and-file soldiers who might sympathize with anti-democratic views, are you more worried about officers giving their units orders that would be unconstitutional, what?

EATON: Frankly, it could be a little bit of all of the above because we saw it in 2020. And the concern is to ensure that we have a very clear understanding of the support and defend the Constitution of the United States part of our oath and that everybody in the U.S. military truly understands how that oath works and how to understand the civilian leadership of the U.S. military.

KELLY: You said it's not outlandish to contemplate a scenario like this, but I - it is outlandish. I mean, this is the United States of America. As you noted, we have civilian control of the military. It's required by law. On a scale of 1 to 10, how worried actually are you about the possibility of a military insurrection following a contested result in 2024?

EATON: I see it as a low probability, high impact. I hesitate to put a number on it, but it's an eventuality that we need to prepare for. In the military, we do a lot of war-gaming to ferret out what might happen. You may have heard of the Transition Integrity Project that occurred about six months before the last election. We played four scenarios. And what we did not play is a U.S. military compromised; not to the degree that the United States is compromised today as far as 39% of the Republican party refusing to accept President Biden as president, but a compromise nonetheless. So we advocate that that particular scenario needs to be addressed in a future war-game held well in advance of 2024.

KELLY: It sounds like you're sounding an alarm bell saying I hope this doesn't happen; I think it's low probability that this will happen, but if there's any chance, we need to work now to ensure that everything that could possibly be done to prevent things going so far off the rails gets done now. Is that right?

EATON: That's a good assessment.

KELLY: So what do you recommend the military do to ensure this scenario does not unfold?

EATON: I had a conversation with somebody about my age who - we were talking about civics and the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution. And I believe that bears a reteach to make sure that each and every 18-year-old American truly understands the Constitution of the United States, how we got there, how we developed it, what our forefathers wanted us to understand years down the road. That's an important bit of education that I think that we need to readdress. The fact that we were caught completely unprepared militarily and from a policing function on January 6 is incomprehensible.

KELLY: When you talk about civics classes, when you talk about war-gaming, that all sounds reasonable. It sounds smart. It also sounds like a very weak tea to stave off potential insurrection by the military.

EATON: A component is that beyond that, unsaid, is that we all know each other very well. And if there is any doubt in the loyalty and the willingness to follow the oath of the United States, the support and defend part of the U.S. Constitution, then those folks need to be identified and addressed in some capacity. But when you talk to a squad leader, a staff sergeant, a nine-man rifle squad, he knows his men and women very, very well.


KELLY: Paul Eaton, retired U.S. Army Major General, thank you.

EATON: Mary Louise, thank you very much for having me.

Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at http://www.npr.org for further information.

**************************************

Excerpt from Play Democracy!
by Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader Radio Hour
January 1, 2022
https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233. ... script.pdf

Steve Skrovan: So, Ralph, I started by talking about having an interview with John Larson just before he went to the Capitol where the insurrection happened. You wanna tell us about an op-ed that you read in the Washington Post by a couple of generals who are speaking to that and the possibility of insurrection in this country?

Ralph Nader: Indeed. Actually, three generals--Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson. This is an extraordinary op-ed titled “The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.” And it's not what you might think it is. It's basically an article showing that the Pentagon cannot wait. They have to prepare to educate their people about the Constitution, the oath of the Constitution, about their proper role. And the quote is, “All service members take an oath to protect the Constitution. But in a contested election, with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.” And what they say is that the Pentagon has got to be prepared for all of this to prevent a breakdown of discipline. And it's really quite a bold position.

The other quote in the article is, “But the military cannot wait for elected officials to act. The Pentagon should immediately order a civics review for all members--uniformed and civilian--on the Constitution and electoral integrity. There must also be a review of the laws of war and how to identify and deal with illegal orders. And it must reinforce “unity of command” to make perfectly clear to every member of the Defense Department to whom they answer that no service member should say they didn’t understand whom to take orders from during a worst-case scenario.” And then they go into how to head off the signs of an insurrection to overturn the 2024 election. This is quite remarkable. And I think people who are interested should just pull it down and read it [from the] December 21st, 2021, Washington Post. And the lead author is retired General Paul Eaton [that’s] EATON.


Steve Skrovan: Well, that really is scary because we have always depended on the ethic and the code of conduct of our military, which has historically been different than most other countries and regimes where there is that acceptance of civilian control. And you have these three generals now who are saying that is not a rock solid guarantee.

Ralph Nader: And to fortify what you just said, Steve, is another quote in the article. “The potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines--from the top of the chain to squad level--is significant should another insurrection occur. The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the “rightful” “commander in chief” cannot be dismissed.” So this is what's going on here. And it's quite clear that these three retired generals are not alarmists. They understand the potential. They're recently retired. So they know what's going on in the Pentagon all the way down to the squad level. So, this is a good sign that they are standing firm as they did in the 2020 election.

Imagine even having to discuss something like this, but then imagine having somebody like Trump coming back with his cohorts and his version of American fascism. Some people think, well, that's too strong a word. No. One of the first characteristics of fascism is that they automatically say ahead of time that if they lose the election, it's because it's stolen. Right there. That's the first indicia of a fascistic political system.


Steve Skrovan: The messaging here is really interesting because I was actually talking to president of Public Citizen, Robert Weissman, yesterday about the mail that they receive. And you can see it on Twitter. You can see it on all the social media, where especially in terms of vaccine mandates, and I get these Heritage Foundation emails. I somehow got on their mailing list, and I don't unsubscribe because I kind of wanna know what they're talking about. And they use the language of authoritarians. They’re fighting authoritarianism. In other words, a public health mandate is taking away your freedoms. It really is an Orwellian use of the language where these fascistic elements are saying, “No, we're the ones fighting fascism. It's these other people who want to take away your freedoms.” And if they can convince enough people of that; it's like both sides are fighting the same concept of authoritarian fascism, but one is fascist and one isn't.

Ralph Nader: Yeah. Which side is suppressing votes, purging voters, harassing voters in discriminatory manner, state after state? And which part of this equation is trying to defund the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and aid and abet tax evasion by the rich and the powerful? What's emerging here, Steve and David, is basically a new kind of fascistic oligarchy wanting to take over the political system and doing the bidding of an existing extraordinarily powerful corporate plutocracy. So, this is what Trump actually did when he was president. He spread suppression of regulation for health and safety and tried to turn the government into a profit center for his cronies. But at the same time that he was violating all kinds of criminal statutes-- the Hatch Act, the Antideficiency [Act] law, shoveling around money without congressional authority, defying over 120 congressional subpoenas, engaging in a dozen clear impeachable offenses day after day--he was open about it. He was a brazen unlike [Richard] Nixon hovering in a corner, saying he's not a crook. At that same time, he was making peace with his other interests, which is his corporate pocketbook and he was deregulating. Wall Street loved that. He was giving them huge tax cuts. Wall Street loved that. And he was getting rightwing corporatist judges throughout the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court and Wall Street liked that. So, what we're seeing here is a merging canopy over American democracy of the older corporate plutocracy, which is basically strategically planning about everything that we do in this country right down to the commercialization of childhood as well as planning our tax system, our healthcare system, our food processing system, our land planning system zoning, our control, our disposition of resources on the public lands. You just go on and on; there isn't anything they're not strategically planning.

And on the other side of the canopy is emerging this new authoritarian fascistic oligarchy. And what that spells, if it's not stopped, is a very deep-rooted corporate state. It’s the end of the democracy! In reality, it’s the end of our republic. And it's Wall Street merging with Washington under the influence of the new American fascists and basically taking over any kind of potential opposition and dissent and labeling them as communists, socialists, terrorists--all the language that Trump has already used.

Now, this all can be prevented because we still have our basic institutions and they gotta be taken over like Congress and state legislatures by the people who sent them there, by the people who they're supposed to vote for. And so, while we have to be very vigilant about worst-case scenarios, as this article in the Post pointed out, we know that the power constitutionally is still in the hands of the people--we, the people. And we also know that people have enormous assets in terms of the commons, the public lands, the public airways, all the money that built all these industries through research and development from various departments and agencies of Washington, from NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] to the Defense Department, National Institutes of Health. And of course, we've got the vote. The corporations don't have the vote.

So, we've got to be levelheaded about this. We can't wallow on hopelessness and say, “Oh, what can we do? And I give up. I'm gonna play video games.” We need 1% of the people to get very serious, as we've said ad infinitum on this program, district by district, focusing on the Congress. That's the great fulcrum that we have available to turn our country into frontiers of justice, opportunity, renewability and protection of posterity. It's the Congress because of the way it's authorized by the Constitution to engage in the tax power, the spending power, the nomination power, the public information power, and above all, the war declaration power, which has been shoved over to the shelf, allowing presidents to start wars on their own say so.


David Feldman: Ralph, I’d like to ask you about framing all this. Because I remember earlier this year, Georgia passed some very restrictive voting rights laws. Delta [Air Lines], which is headquartered there and Coca-Cola spoke out against Georgia. It was a branding exercise. When we talk of fascism, we think of the military taking over. And shouldn't we be calling it a corporate takeover so that it hurts the corporations, that it hurts them in the pocketbook if they're perceived as being the ones behind this fascism? You can't have fascism without a corporate takeover. Is that correct?

Ralph Nader: Well, you point to an interesting opportunity here. There are some corporate executives who really are scared of American fascism. It's too unstable. Right now, corporations have it their way. I mean, they dominate Washington as if they're sitting on it. I mean, there isn't a single department in Washington, a single agency in Washington, that the outside force that's dominating it is not corporate. It's all corporate! Even the Department of Labor; the most powerful forces on the Department of Labor over the decades has not been the labor unions. It's been corporations. I mean, look how they froze the minimum wage, how they froze labor law reform, how they perpetuated anti-labor laws, how they violated with impunity fair labor standards in the workplace, how they disabled OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration]. So, they've never had it so good. It's the lowest tax on corporations in decades, for example; the weakest regulation in decades of corporations. The corporate crime laws are totally antiquated and they're not enforced. The budgets are not enforced. The corporations in the healthcare area are getting away with $350 billion in billing fraud this year, according to Malcolm Sparrow at Harvard and other studies. Very little prosecution. So, they've never had it so good. Massive profits. They can go to tax havens and escape. They can shift jobs to fascist communist dictatorships and get their will there. So, why would they want an additional fascist oligarchy to take charge?

Now, some are like the Koch brothers. They would like that kind of fascist oligarchy. They think they can benefit from it. But I think a majority of major CEOs, if they were asked privately, they would say, “We've never had it so good.” Whether it's Democrat or Republican, we don't even have to deal with the many congressional hearings anymore.” There are no corporate crime hearings. There may be some tough hearings where the members pound the table for the television cameras, but they never do anything about it. And we've seen those with the Facebook and Google hearings.

And so, they're basically – we've never had it so good. And we don't need this kind of destabilization, this kind of provocation of all kinds of demonstrations by people opposed to this kind of oligarchy. And that's what I think is in the minds of some of these generals is that this is the quest for continued stability under a corporate plutocratic system. That's their preferred approach. And that's why some of them don't like Trump at all. Never mind his own personal characteristics. They just don't like the prospects of fundamental destabilization of the political economy by going too far.


David Feldman: I think Corporate America is terrified that they don't think they have it good. I read somewhere that 75% of corporate CEOs say they expect to be fired in 2022. Corporate America has something like $18 trillion in debt that most of the companies, the S&P 500, are laggards; they’re not doing well; that the reason the stock market seems to be going up is the way they waited. And there were about 25 companies that are dragging the stock market up, but the rest of the corporations in America are suffering under debt. So, I could see corporate CEOs expressing the same anger that the insurrectionists had on January 6th and thinking a fascist takeover would help them.

Ralph Nader: Well, not as long as they have the Federal Reserve printing money backing them up at $150 billion a month. They're buying bonds and increasing liquidity and juicing up the stock market. Yeah. You know, I'm sure these CEOs sometimes look ahead and they get worried, but they’re never around very long, David. Four or five years, CEO at the best; then they get retired with huge benefits. And then they become the leisure class again. It's hard to exaggerate the narcissism that is built in at the top of these corporations. You have to go to some midsize companies that have done it right. I've got a manuscript about 12 CEOs, like the head of Patagonia[, Inc.], the head of Interface[, Inc.] corporation, and other companies who have met the bottom line, but have done great work dealing with the way they treat their employees, the way they treat the environment, the way they condition their suppliers. And these CEOs never get any publicity. They're doing it right. But they don't get anywhere near the publicity as someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk’s outbursts. And so, we've gotta get these new standards that we have already seen in these midsize companies and give them much more coverage because these standards are very consonant with an economic democracy; they're very consonant with a competitive economy. They're very consonant with a respect for the environment. They're very consonant with the proper role of workers in these companies and the rights of workers. But we don't get NPR [National Public Radio], PBS [Public Broadcasting Service], all these supposed public interest media to pay any attention to them, which is, I suppose, why we have this program, huh? [chuckle]

David Feldman: By the way, thanks to you, my new year's resolution is to read the business page. I've been focusing more on – I don't want to endorse any newspapers, but the magazines and newspapers that cover business primarily I've been reading. And they do cover capitalism; it's very critical. Thank you for that because the most critical reporting on capitalism comes from the business pages.

Ralph Nader: As I've said before, we're living in a golden age of muckraking books. Those of you who want a big list of recent books critical of corporations, I had a column a few days ago; go to nader.org. You can sign up for the column and get it automatically free. But it made the point. There are about 60 books that have come out recently-- tremendous on one company or one industry after another--very well documented critical books and nothing happens. And the same with all these documentaries. We have 10 times more critical documentaries of power structures in our country and the world than we had 30, 40 years ago and almost nothing happens. And that's because all these people back home who are very concerned about the future of their country are not organizing the way they should and getting a foothold by focusing on Congress, which is the purpose of the Congress Club. Otherwise, they'll be so overwhelmed due to their sensitivity to injustice that it will freeze them and turn it into a kind of hopelessness.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Tue Jan 11, 2022 9:12 am

Jan. 6 panel ramps up investigation into Trump's state-level pressure [Forged election documents in Michigan and Arizona]
by Nicholas Wu
Politico
01/10/2022 04:30 AM EST
Updated: 01/10/2022 12:28 PM EST

Highlights:

The select panel asked states for any scrap of evidence to justify allegations of election fraud that Trump baselessly promoted, focusing much of its efforts on officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those states found virtually no evidence of fraud, according to Thompson....

Just one day before Georgia was set to certify the 2020 election results and seal Trump’s defeat, records turned over to the Jan. 6 committee show a text message that arrived on the phone of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“Mr Secretary. Mark Meadows here. If you could give me a brief call at your convenience. Thank you,” the then-White House chief of staff texted Raffensperger in a Nov. 19, 2020, message obtained through a public records request.

It doesn’t appear that Raffensperger, a Republican, responded to Meadows....

Meadows texted Raffensperger a second time on the morning of Dec. 5, 2020, asking him to call the White House switchboard to set up a call. “Your voicemail is full,” Meadows told Raffensperger....

A previously unreported email from one of Raffensperger’s top aides, Jordan Fuchs, was also turned over to the committee. In it, Fuchs responded to Meadows' Dec. 22, 2020, trip to Georgia's Cobb County during the state’s signature match audit. She emailed Meadows to “clarify a few items” about the rejection rate of absentee ballots — something Trump and his allies had alleged was much lower than normal.

Fuchs’ note included the text of a press release sent out by the secretary of State’s office a month beforehand with a more thorough explanation of how the office evaluated absentee ballots....

Also included in the document dump are emails between Sen. Lindsey Graham’s and Raffensperger’s offices, which shows how a previously reported call between the two officials came about roughly two weeks after the 2020 election.

“Hope you are doing well. Senator Graham has requested a call w/ Sec. Raffensperger at his earliest convenience,” a Graham staffer told two of Raffensperger’s top aides on Nov. 12, 2020. The call between the two men ended with Graham indicating to Raffensperger some ballots should be tossed out, the Georgia official said later.[!!!]...

The state also turned over a previously reported audio recording of a Dec. 23, 2020, call between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and a brief call between Watson and an unidentified staffer. In the Dec. 23 call, Trump had urged Watson to find “dishonesty” in the state’s election results.[!!!]


-- Jan. 6 panel ramps up investigation into Trump's state-level pressure [Forged election documents in Michigan and Arizona], by Nicholas Wu


POLITICO has identified the information the committee has received from key swing states, as lawmakers prepare to take their findings public.

The public focus of Congress’ Jan. 6 investigation, so far, is what happened in Washington, D.C. Behind the scenes, the probe’s state-level work is kicking into overdrive.

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack has gathered thousands of records from state officials and interviewed a slate of witnesses as it attempts to retrace former President Donald Trump's attempts to subvert the 2020 election, particularly in four key states that swung the presidency to Joe Biden. They're getting ready to take their work public, possibly as soon as the spring.

“We want to let the public see and hear from those individuals who conducted elections in those states,” select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in an interview. He described those witnesses as particularly important given their mandates to keep elections “fair and impartial” while hailing from one political party.

The voluminous documents state election officials have sent the Jan. 6 committee, obtained by POLITICO through open records requests, underscore the depth of Trump's pressure campaign directed at the typically lower-level administrators of presidential balloting. The emails, texts and phone recordings also add consequential context to previously reported incidents, such as Trump’s call to Georgia's top elections investigator and Mark Meadows’ outreach to Georgia election officials.

The select panel asked states for any scrap of evidence to justify allegations of election fraud that Trump baselessly promoted, focusing much of its efforts on officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those states found virtually no evidence of fraud, according to Thompson.

Among the officials who spoke with the committee was Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's secretary of state during the 2020 election, according to a source familiar with the situation not authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania secretary of state declined to comment on whether the panel had been in touch with the state’s officials.

Mainly, the records show state officials trying to either mollify or ignore Trump and his allies without distorting election results or embracing debunked claims of vote tampering. A spokesperson for the select panel declined to comment on the documents.

Pressure in Georgia

Just one day before Georgia was set to certify the 2020 election results and seal Trump’s defeat, records turned over to the Jan. 6 committee show a text message that arrived on the phone of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“Mr Secretary. Mark Meadows here. If you could give me a brief call at your convenience. Thank you,” the then-White House chief of staff texted Raffensperger in a Nov. 19, 2020, message obtained through a public records request.

It doesn’t appear that Raffensperger, a Republican, responded to Meadows.
(His office sent no reply to one Meadows text because aides weren't sure if it was real, according to CNN.) But it was not the last time Raffensperger would hear from Trump’s allies as they sought to pressure state-level officials to overturn the president's loss.

A spokesperson for Georgia's secretary of state did not respond to a request for comment.

Meadows texted Raffensperger a second time on the morning of Dec. 5, 2020, asking him to call the White House switchboard to set up a call. “Your voicemail is full,” Meadows told Raffensperger.

Raffensperger has already interviewed with the panel, according to Thompson, who praised him as “very straightforward” in his testimony.

A previously unreported email from one of Raffensperger’s top aides, Jordan Fuchs, was also turned over to the committee. In it, Fuchs responded to Meadows' Dec. 22, 2020, trip to Georgia's Cobb County during the state’s signature match audit. She emailed Meadows to “clarify a few items” about the rejection rate of absentee ballots — something Trump and his allies had alleged was much lower than normal.

Fuchs’ note included the text of a press release sent out by the secretary of State’s office a month beforehand with a more thorough explanation of how the office evaluated absentee ballots.


Meadows' attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Also included in the document dump are emails between Sen. Lindsey Graham’s and Raffensperger’s offices, which shows how a previously reported call between the two officials came about roughly two weeks after the 2020 election.

“Hope you are doing well. Senator Graham has requested a call w/ Sec. Raffensperger at his earliest convenience,” a Graham staffer told two of Raffensperger’s top aides on Nov. 12, 2020. The call between the two men ended with Graham indicating to Raffensperger some ballots should be tossed out, the Georgia official said later.[!!!]

Graham’s office declined to comment.

The state also turned over a previously reported audio recording of a Dec. 23, 2020, call between Trump and Frances Watson, the chief investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, and a brief call between Watson and an unidentified staffer. In the Dec. 23 call, Trump had urged Watson to find “dishonesty” in the state’s election results.[!!!]

Forged election documents in Michigan and Arizona

As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.

Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.

“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs' spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.

Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.

The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.

Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump "sovereign citizen" group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.

“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.

That group’s leader, Lori Osiecki, had told the Arizona Republic in December 2020 that she decided to send in the certificates after taking part in post-election rallies and after attending a daylong meeting in Phoenix that had included Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.


The group that forged the Michigan certification had not used the state seal, and it appears state officials there took no further action after the Archives rejected it.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

*****************
Hobbs asks AG to investigate fake Trump electors for employing Arizona's state seal
Dylan Smith
TucsonSentinel.com
Posted Dec 24, 2020, 3:06 pm

A group of people who sent a slate of fake electoral votes for President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., may be facing legal trouble for using the state seal without authorization.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mesa resident Lori Osiecki, one of the 11 fake electors, demanding that her group no longer use Arizona's state seal. The state requires people to get the secretary of state's permission to "use, display or otherwise employ any facsimile, copy, likeness, imitation or other resemblance" to the state seal, which Hobbs said the group didn't do.

Hobbs also referred the matter to the Attorney General's Office for investigation. Using the state seal without authorization is a class 3 misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Osiecki and 10 others, who identified themselves as "The Sovereign Citizens of the Great State of Arizona," sent signed, notarized certificates to the National Archives purporting to be electoral votes for Trump, despite the fact that former Vice President Joe Biden won Arizona by about 10,500 votes. They also sent a copy of their faux electoral votes to the Secretary of State's Office. The state seal was on the cover sheet of the documents, as well as at the top of each subsequent page.

"By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona's November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions," Hobbs wrote in her letter, dated Dec. 22.


Osiecki could not be reached for comment.

The group cast its fake electoral votes as Trump supporters across the country rejected the results of the presidential election. Many Trump supporters, as well as the president himself, have falsely claimed the election was swayed by fraud and have spread baseless conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims, particularly about Biden's win in Arizona and five other swing states.

Osiecki and her cohorts were not the official Republican electors who were pledged to vote for Trump if the president had won Arizona in the 2020 general election.

Arizona's official Republican electors, which includes several prominent GOP officials, submitted fake electoral votes of their own on Dec. 14, the date when electors across the nation cast their votes. The Arizona Republican Party said the votes would be sent to Congress, where it hopes they will be counted as Arizona's official electoral votes on Jan. 6, when Congress will count and certify the votes of the Electoral College.


Some Republicans believe that Congress can reject Biden electors and instead certify Trump as the winner of the election. The notion is widely rejected because both the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate would have to vote to reject a slate of electors.

Were the votes of Arizona's Republican electors to somehow be counted, they would be deemed invalid under state law. Arizona is one of 33 states prohibiting "faithless electors," a term for electors who cast their votes for a candidate other than their state's winner. If an Arizona elector casts a vote for someone besides the winner, his or her position would be immediately deemed vacant, and the chair of the political party representing the winner would choose a replacement.

This report was first published by the Arizona Mirror

*********************

'Sovereign citizens' try to undermine Arizona electoral vote
by Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
Pinal Central
Dec 14, 2020 Updated Jan 23, 2021 0

PHOENIX — Arizona’s 11 Democrat electors cast their votes Monday for Joe Biden even as the chairman of a Senate panel said he will issue subpoenas to check the accuracy of hardware and software that gave the Democrat the edge over President Trump.

Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, R-Gilbert, said there are enough questions raised about whether the Dominion Voting Systems used in Maricopa County produced reliable results.

The announcement followed more than six hours of testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee which led to a series of questions about whether the results can be trusted. And as Farnsworth said, that doesn’t even address other allegations that ballots were not properly handled and that observers from political parties did not have sufficient access to oversee what was going on.

It’s unlikely that anything that an audit turns up would affect the results of the election.

That would require either a court ruling overturning the results — something multiple judges have so far refused to do — or the full legislature trying to pick its own slate of electors. But both Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers have said there does not appear to be a legal way to do that, even assuming lawmakers could call themselves into special session before Jan. 6 when Congress counts the electoral votes.

Even Farnsworth, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, suggested that this was simply a matter of addressing the various claims and doubts “and try and see if we can reinsert some confidence in our election process.’’

“We hold and audit and we see what the outcome is,’’ he said. “And then we can put this to rest.’’

Farnsworth said the subpoenas could be issued as early as Tuesday.

All this comes as the official slate of electors — the ones pledged to Biden — cast their votes and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent off the results to both Congress and the National Archives.

That, however, did not stop two other groups from filing reports that their “electors’’ had met and were supporting Trump.

One group consists of the 11 Republicans whose names were on the ballot as pledged to Trump, who lost the popular vote according to the certified results.

That vote was organized by the state GOP on the premise that those outstanding legal challenges to the Arizona tally could end up changing the final vote total. In essence, Kelli Ward, the party chair who is a litigant in both pending cases, believes that having the Trump-pledged electors voting on Monday — the date set in federal law — sends a slate of GOP electors to Congress should the cases go their way or Congress decides that their votes are the ones that should be counted and not those pledged to Biden.


But Hobbs aide Murphy Hebert said that’s meaningless.

“It’s clearly a political gesture,’’ she said. Hebert said Congress can acknowledge only those electors whose votes are accompanied by “letters of ascertainment’’ signed by Hobbs and Gov. Doug Ducey.

Separately, a group of self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens’’ filed their own slate of electors with the National Archives claiming they represent the state’s 11 electoral votes for Trump.

Documents obtained by Capitol Media Services show that Mesa resident Lori Osiecki submitted sworn statements for the 11 people “by authority & direction of the sovereign citizens of the great state of Arizona.’’ That comes complete with the use of the official state seal which in and of itself Hebert said is itself a violation of the law.

“We absolutely anticipated there would be efforts to disrupt the system like this,’’ Hebert said. But she said the actual “votes’’ sent to Washington amount to little more than political theater.

“The statute is very, very clear: The slate of electors for the candidate with the most number of votes in the popular vote are the ones who represent the state in the Electoral College vote,’’ she said. And these were the 11 Democrats who took the official oath of office Monday morning and signed the certificate of votes.

And what of the “votes’’ sent off by on behalf of either slate of 11 Republicans?

“Anybody can send a letter to the National Archives,’’ Hobbs said.


One thing different this year is that the process, normally a routine action with little public attention, was moved to the Phoenix Convention Center. And the location was not made public ahead of the event amid security concerns, including threats of violence against Hobbs and other staffers in her office and fears protesters might seek to disrupt the voting.

At the same time members of the Senate Judiciary were focused on Dominion Voting Systems used in the state’s largest county.

There have been a series of charges leveled against the company both here and nationally that the equipment and software were deliberately programmed to deliver more votes for Biden.

None of those complaints have been found valid by any court anywhere in the nation. But that didn’t stop lawmakers from asking and saying that there needs to be an independent audit and even a full hand count of all the ballots.

Sen. Vince Leach, R-Tucson, one of those who wants that 100% hand count, got Maricopa County Elections Director Scott Jarrett to acknowledge that Dominion workers had 24/7 access to his office and even, in certain circumstances, access to the equipment.

But Jarrett said there is no way to alter the codes in a way that would change the outcome.

He said it starts with “logic and accuracy’’ test of the equipment, both before and after the election. Jarrett said that would not only capture any change made in the software but that the program is built in a way so that any change would render the results “not readable.’’

The equipment itself, he said, is also subject to independent certification by the Secretary of State’s Office.

More to the point, Jarrett pointed out that state law requires an actual hand count of a random sample of ballots, both those mailed in early and those cast on Election Day.

He said the batches to be sampled and the elections to be reviewed are chosen by officials from both political parties. And of the more than 47,000 ballots checked by hand there was not a single vote difference from what was recorded by the equipment.

“These hand counts are an independent audit,’’ Jarrett told lawmakers. And he said they showed the equipment worked as expected.


Farnsworth was not convinced.

“I do have a concern that the county is taking the position that it just can’t happen,’’ he said.

“There is a litany of white-collar crimes, digital crimes in the history of this country and this world of some very sophisticated people and the victims didn’t recognize it until some future time,’’ Farnsworth said. “I think it’s really, really dangerous for us to say, ‘It can’t happen.’ ‘’

That sentiment was echoed by Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City. He said even the operating manual for Dominion software suggests “data can be changed and votes switched around.’’

“Nothing’s 100% secure,’’ he said. “If people want to cheat they’re going to cheat.’’

Farnsworth also complained that it’s possible for people who are not U.S. citizens to have voted in the presidential race.

Arizona does require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

But a federal law spells out that people without such proof can use a registration form prepared by the Election Assistance Commission, one that has no such requirement. And those who do not provide citizenship proof can vote in federal elections, including for president and members of Congress.

Jarrett acknowledged that more than 3,000 such “federal-only’’ ballots were cast in Maricopa County, people who he acknowledged might not be U.S. citizens. That angered Farnsworth.

“That is harmful, detrimental, undercuts,’’ he said.

“And it is outrageous that we have that kind of a mandate from Congress,’’ Farnsworth said. “It challenges the very sovereignty of this country, in my opinion.’’

Jarrett also defended against claims that observers from political parties could not get close enough to really monitor what was going on in both the process to check signatures on early ballot envelopes and in the actual counting. He acknowledged, though, that there were efforts to keep observers at least six feet from election workers amid fears of COVID-19.

He also said that, despite rumors to the contrary, there were not late “spikes’’ of votes for Biden. In fact, Jarrett said, the reverse was in some ways true, with Biden having a big lead among the first ballots counted and the later-counted ballots swinging for Trump.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Wed Jan 12, 2022 10:23 am

Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis Seems Poised to be the First to Indict Donald Trump
by Glenn Kirschner
Jan 11, 2022



On December 17, 2021, Donald Trump issued an unhinged statement about how "district attorneys", "attorneys general" and "Dem enforcement" agencies are out to ruin his life. Knowing that prosecutors often meet with defense attorneys right before making a final decision to seek an indictment, Trump's statement strongly signaled that some prosecutor somewhere had let his defense team know that he was about to be indicted.

Based on new reporting, we now know that just days before Trump issued that unhinged rant, his defense team met with prosecutors from the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney's Office.

All signs are now pointing to Georgia being the first jurisdiction that may be on the verge of criminally inciting Donald Trump.

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Trump Lawyers Met With Georgia Prosecutors; Days Later, Trump Rants About Law Enforcement
by Rachel Maddow
Jan 10, 2022



Gwen Keyes Fleming, former district attorney for DeKalb Count, Georgia, talks with Rachel Maddow about new details in the criminal investigation of Donald Trump's alleged actions to pressure election officials in that state.
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Re: Trump lashes out at Gov. Doug Ducey following certificat

Postby admin » Wed Jan 12, 2022 10:54 am

Similarities Suggest Coordination In Fake Elector Letters From Republicans In Five (5) States
by Rachel Maddow
Jan 12, 2022



Rachel Maddow updates reporting on Republicans submitting forged elector letters as if Donald Trump had won their states instead of Joe Biden, with the number of states involved up to at least five, and a pattern of coordination becoming more evident.

[Rachel Maddow] Now, I picked these five states to show you what the real electoral vote ascertainment documents look like. I picked these five, because thanks to the watchdog group, “American Oversight”, we now know that in all five of these states, Republicans also prepared forged fake documents that were sent to the government, proclaiming that actually these other electors were the real electors from these states, and they were casting the state’s electoral college votes not for Biden, but for Trump.

Just watch this. Tell me if you notice something as I show you these.

So, this is the documents from Georgia. In Georgia, that’s the real electoral vote document on the left; that’s the forgery that was created by Republicans on the right.

Now, let’s do Nevada.

In Nevada, that’s the real one on the left, and that’s the fake one on the right.

Here also is Wisconsin, where we reported on their forgery last month. That’s the real one on the left, and the fake one on the right.

Here’s Michigan, where we reported their forgery last night. It’s the real one on the left, and the forgery on the right.

And lastly, here’s Arizona: the real electoral vote document on the left, and the fake one on the right.

It wasn’t one state, it wasn’t three states where they did this, it was at least five states where we have now obtained forged documents created by Republicans.

And it’s not like they sent them in saying, “Hey, we know we’re not the real electors because Biden won here, but here’s our names for posterity, here’s our names for your records.” No, they actually created these fake documents purporting to be the real certifications of them as electors.

I mean, here it is in the forged document from Georgia. Look at the language: “We, the undersigned, being the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President in the United States of America from the State of Georgia, do hereby certify the following.” You’re NOT the duly elected and qualified electors for the State of Georgia. YOU ARE NOT! But that language, or language just like that, is in all of these. THEY ALL MATCH, EXACTLY! Same formatting, same font, same spacing, almost the exact same wording – all of them!

Now, you might remember on last night’s show we noted that the forged documents from Michigan and Wisconsin looked really similar, look really alike, but the Arizona one actually looked a little bit different. Here’s the amazing thing we discovered today about Arizona. It looks like there are actually two sets of forged electoral college documents sent in by Arizona Republicans. There was the sort of hoopty-different-looking-one that we showed you last night, which has notary stamps all over it and stuff. That was the one that was obtained by Politico.com that we showed on the air here last night. But now, as of today, thanks to “American Oversight,” we have obtained another one, also from Arizona, also a forgery – a whole different set of Republican imposters sent in this one in Arizona, and that one matches exactly all of the other forged electoral votes from the four other states that we have found.

In these five states, one of the two forgeries from Arizona, and those four other states, the forged documents all match. This would therefore appear to be some kind of a coordinated effort, or at least someone gave Republicans in all these states the same template for creating these false records, because they all have the exact same language, they all have the same font, they all have the spacing, they all have the same formatting. That doesn’t happen by accident. Who organized this?

Now, at the time this was happening, Pennsylvania Republicans -- Pennsylvania is not one of the states we’ve been talking about here – they actually put out a statement saying the Trump campaign had asked them to create and certify like within the Republican party, a Republican set of electors for Pennsylvania. As they explained in their press release at the time, though, the Pennsylvania Republicans didn’t forge a document to make it look like they were the real electors, they created a new document that said they would become the electors if a court ever ordered that the Republican side had actually won the election in Pennsylvania. They didn’t forge a document saying they believed they were, they were purporting to be the official electors from Pennsylvania. They created a document that said, “if a court ever says that Republicans won in Pennsylvania, then we’ll be the electors.”

Now, they say the Trump campaign advised them to create that alternate slate. We’re trying to track down the claims in that statement. If, in fact, the Trump campaign was commissioning Republicans not just to create “contingent” slates of electors in case the results were ever reversed by courts, but if the Trump campaign was commissioning Republicans to forge official-looking documents in multiple states where the wrong electors actually purported to be the real electors, well, we will do our best to get to the bottom of that.

Now, one of the Trump officials who has plead the Fifth, who has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, in order to avoid testifying to the January 6 investigation, his name is Jeffrey Clark, former Trump Justice Department official named Jeff Clark. Clark, you might remember,, he’s the one Trump reportedly tried to install as Attorney General right at the end. The best we can tell from public reporting, Trump seemed to like the cut of his jib after Jeff Clark drafted a letter that he insisted must go out on Justice Department letterhead to some of the states that Trump lost, including Georgia. This letter that was reportedly drafted by Jeff Clark, was addressed to the state government in Georgia, it was reportedly going to be sent to multiple other states as well, and the letter falsely stated that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating “serious, credible claims of fraud” in the election in that state, and that the state legislature there should therefore consider holding back the state’s electoral college votes.

Jeff Clark drafted this letter from the U.S. Justice Department to go to Georgia, and other states. And because the rest of the Justice Department wouldn’t sign off on it and do it, Trump tried to install Jeff Clark as Attorney General so Jeff Clark could send that letter and sign it, “Attorney General.”

I mean, had that happened, think about had the U.S. Justice Department jumped in the way Trump wanted to, the way Jeff Clark proposed, had the U.S. Justice Department told Republican-led states in formal letters, “don’t send in Biden electors on advice from the U.S. Justice Department; you better not do that,” how do you think Republican legislators in those states would have acted? It’s one thing to get a, you know, off-the-wall call from Trump berating you, right? It’s another thing for the U.S. Justice Department to formally advise you over the signature of the United States Attorney General, that you must not send in your electors, because there’s real problems with the vote in your state. How would Republican legislatures have dealt with that? How would they have responded?

We would be living in a very different country right now had that U.S. Justice Department letter actually gone out to the states. I’m not even sure all of us would be living in the same country as each other anymore had that letter actually gone out. That was just insanity! That would have been as radical as Trump’s other reported idea to send the National Guard out to seize the voting machines, and re-run the election. It would have been just that radical had the U.S. Justice Department intervened to stop the administration of the election in that way.

But here’s the thing. That insane draft letter, that letter explicitly describes these forged slates of electors from multiple states. It says in the middle of the letter, “The Department believes (meaning the Department of Justice believes) that in Georgia and several other States, both a slate of electors supporting Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump, gathered on [December 14, 2020] at the proper location to cast their ballots, and that both sets of those ballots have been transmitted to Washington, D.C., to be opened by Vice President Pence.”

In fact, I don’t know why the Justice Department “believed” that to be true, but that was correct we now know.

That draft letter was dated December 28th. How did that guy, that Trump guy at the Justice Department, know that two weeks earlier Republicans in at least five states had in fact created these forged elector documents? Did the Trump Justice Department know about it because they helped Republicans in those states do it? We don’t know. But somebody helped them do it because they all filed the exact same document, in the same font, in the same spacing, with the exact same language. So somebody helped them do it.

We are working on figuring it out.

I will also just tell you one other thing about this. In a lot of these states, for whatever reason, in addition to the assertion that these were “the duly elected electors from these states,” which was a lie, a lot of them also included a bunch of substitutions, meaning that the people who were originally supposed to be Trump electors from those states had Trump won, the original would-be Trump electors, had their names dropped and they were replaced with other names, with other Republicans who did sign these documents. In almost every state that did this, people who were originally supposed to be Trump electors got replaced with these other Republicans before the forged documents were sent in. Why is that?

We’re trying to get to the bottom of that, too, but I can tell you at first pass that in at least one state, at least one of the Republicans who was substituted for, whose name was dropped as an elector, one Republican who was replaced by somebody else before that forged document was signed and sent in, that Republican told us this evening, that that substitution was deliberate, that person had their name taken off the list and replaced because that person did not want to be part of that effort to forge a slate of electors that was not the real electors from that state. It was one of the Republican electors who was replaced in Georgia. That person told us this tonight: “I knew (the meeting) was taking place, but I did not wish to attend. I did not wish to give my electoral vote knowing that President Biden had already been certified by the state.” Which you’d hope would be the reaction from every Republican approached to sign their name as if they were a real elector in a state that was not won by their candidate, but that in fact was won by the other guy, so they weren’t going to be electors at all.

As we reported here in December, there is an open question in Wisconsin as to whether the forgery there is going to be pursued by the state election board or indeed by state prosecutors. Those people in Wisconsin said they were the state’s electors, and they were not, and they tried to pass themselves off that way. That would appear to be against the law in Wisconsin. It is an open question as to whether or not that is going to be pursued as a criminal matter by the state election board.

This is new. In Michigan the Detroit News has just reported that the matter is part of an ongoing investigation by the state Attorney General’s office. Here’s the Detroit News: “New reporting. A spokeswoman for the Michigan Attorney General declined to discuss the legality of the Republican certificate in detail saying it was part of a “ongoing” probe. That matter is part of an investigation into election-related matters; however, we’re not currently in a position to share specifics as the review remains ongoing,” Mukomel said.

Lynsey Mukomel, spokeswoman for the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, declined Monday to discuss the legality of the GOP certificate in detail, saying it was part of a “ongoing” probe. That matter is part of an investigation into election-related matters; however, we’re not currently in a position to share specifics as the review remains ongoing,” Mukomel said.


So, in terms of whether or not the people who did this are individually going to get in trouble, open question in at least two states. I don’t know about the others.
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