Republican Reality 69 , CD3 DFL

They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one.

Trump supporters who back his claim that the 2020 vote was rigged are running to become the top election officials in key states.

Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote.

The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election.

Now, they are running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024. Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud. Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be. Continue reading.

DOJ partially discloses memo on why Trump wasn’t charged with obstruction

Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the memo was actually meant to guide then-Attorney General William Barr on “getting a jump on public relations” in explaining why he was not pursuing obstruction charges.

A portion of a memo cited by former Attorney General William Barr as a reason not to pursue obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump was released Monday night, but the Justice Department said it is appealing a judge’s order to disclose the rest of it.

Barr cited the 2019 memo by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel as a reason for not pursuing the charges after he received special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any links to the Trump campaign.

Mueller’s report said his team was unable to reach a judgment on whether the president committed obstruction of justice, but the Office of Legal Counsel’s memo said the department should reach a conclusion anyway, and recommended that the evidence would not support prosecution. Continue reading.

QAnon Crowd Convinced UFOs Are a Diversion From Voter Fraud

“They want you talking about aliens because they don’t want you talking about Maricopa,” Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson tweeted.

It’s never been a better time to believe in UFOs. Barack Obama talked last week about inexplicable footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote about his trip to Area 51 in a recent op-ed. In June, American intelligence agencies are set to release an unclassified report on what the government knows about UFOs.

For “ufologists,” long mocked as tinfoil hat-wearers obsessed with little green men, some measure of vindication may finally be at hand. But for many UFO enthusiasts on the right, this new round of UFO disclosures is nothing to cheer about. Instead, they’re claiming the new videos of possible UFO sightings are meant to distract people from Donald Trump’s baseless voter fraud allegations and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.

“There’s no doubt that this mainstream UFO disclosure push is offering a convenient distraction for the Deep State to turn our attention away from important issues like the Scamdemic and the election fraud getting exposed,” Jordan Sather, a UFO and QAnon conspiracy theorist, complained on social media network Telegram on May 19. Continue reading.

CBN host gives a tortured defense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Holocaust remarks

Christian Broadcasting Network commentator David Brody, appearing on the far right streaming website Real America’s Voice Monday tried to defend Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s remarks made on his show Thursday by falsely claiming the embattled Georgia Republican Congresswoman was referring to “pre-Holocaust” Germany when she talked about Jews being “taken into gas chambers.”

Rep. Greene was comparing Speaker Pelosi’s policies on masks with Hitler’s genocide of millions of Jews and other minorities.

Her remarks sparked massive outrage, intensifying calls for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to remove her from Congress. McCarthy hasn’t bothered to even acknowledge Greene’s antisemitic remarks. Continue reading.

Man charged with bringing molotov cocktails to Capitol on Jan. 6 has Texas militia ties, contacted Ted Cruz’s office, court papers allege

An Alabama man charged with bringing five loaded firearms and 11 molotov cocktails with napalm-like properties to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 approached Sen. Ted Cruz’s Washington home and office weeks earlier to discuss “election fraud” and previously joined an armed-citizen camp at the Texas border, new court filings alleged Monday.

The new U.S. allegations came in a federal judge’s ruling ordering the continued detention of Lonnie Leroy Coffman, of Falkville, Ala., citing evidence that he had potential plans to coordinate with others and was prepared for political violence.

The 71-year-old Army veteran is awaiting trial on charges of possessing some of the deadliest unregistered weapons and explosives on the day of the riots that breached the Capitol, led to assaults on nearly 140 police officers and forced the evacuation of Congress. Continue reading.

Long After Trump’s Loss, a Push to Inspect Ballots Persists

Efforts to review 2020 ballots in Georgia and Arizona reflect the staying power of Donald Trump’s falsehoods, and Democrats fear that the findings could be twisted by Republicans.

Georgia has already counted its 2020 presidential vote three times, with the same result: President Biden defeated Donald J. Trumpnarrowly yet decisively. But now portions of the vote will be inspected for a fourth time, after a judge ruled late last week that a group of voters must be allowed to view copies of all 147,000 absentee ballots cast in the state’s largest county.

The move carries limited weight. The plaintiffs, led by a known conspiracy theorist, will have no access to the actual ballots, Georgia’s election results have already been certified after recounts and audits showed Mr. Biden as the winner with no evidence of fraud, and the review will have no bearing on the outcome.

But the order from Judge Brian Amero of Henry County Superior Court was a victory for a watchdog group of plaintiffs that has said it is in search of instances of ballot fraud, parroting Mr. Trump’s election lies. Election officials in Fulton County, which contains most of Atlanta, worry that if such a review does occur there, it could cast further doubt on the state’s results and give Republican lawmakers ammunition to seek greater power over the administration of elections. Continue reading.

Romney first GOP senator to say he would vote for Jan. 6 commission bill

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on Monday that he would support a House-passed bill to create a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Romney’s comments make him the first GOP senator to say he would vote for the bill, which needs the support of 10 Republicans to pass the Senate.

Asked how he would vote if Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) tried to start debate on the House bill, a move that requires 60 votes to defeat a filibuster, Romney told reporters, “I would support the bill.” Continue reading.

‘The disease within the Republican Party’: Analyst finds a 2012 report on GOP extremism that looks prophetic

When President Barack Obama was reelected in 2012 and defeated Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, pundits offered a variety of explanations for Romney’s loss. Some pundits on the far right insisted that Romney wasn’t conservative enough — that he lost because he was a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Others, however, argued that Romney’s campaign was doomed by wingnuts in his party. Two of the people who warned that extremists were taking over the Republican Party were Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, and according to CNN’s John Harwood, their warnings about the GOP of 2012 are still relevant in 2021.

On April 27, 2012 — when the presidential election was still over half a year away — the Washington Post published an op-ed by Mann and Ornstein headlined, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” Mann was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, while Ornstein was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mann and Ornstein wrote, “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges…. It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.” Continue reading.

50 years later, the culture wars debate over the child care crisis has barely budged

Conservative counterproposals to Biden’s families plan look to promote the traditional family at a time when marriages and birthrates are at record lows.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have laid the groundwork for a national child care system, saying it would have placed the government on “the side of communal approaches to child rearing [and] against the family-centered approach.”

Fifty years later, as President Joe Biden makes subsidized child care for low- and middle-income families a major plank of his legislative agenda, the socially conservative argument against his plan sounds much the same as the one Nixon aide Pat Buchanan was making when he wrote that veto message.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., argued that Biden’s prescription would “incentivize women to rely on the federal government to organize their lives” in an interview with the Fox Business Network soon after Biden announced his plan last month. In a tweet, she compared the proposal to Soviet-style child care. Continue reading.

Newly unredacted Mueller docs expose damning details of Manafort’s lies about meetings with Kremlin agents

Disgraced former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort infamously blew up his plea agreement with prosecutors by repeatedly lying to them even after pledging full cooperation in their probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

However, the details of Manafort’s lies to prosecutors have long remained a secret — until Monday, that is, when Judge Amy Berman Jackson unsealed more lightly redacted documents showing the exact nature of Manafort’s deceptions.

In short, Manafort repeatedly lied to investigators about his dealings with Ukrainian national Konstantin Kilimnik, who was sanctioned earlier this year for giving Manafort-provided internal Trump campaign polling data to Russian intelligence services. Continue reading.

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