Trump Campaign Spent Months Pressing Georgia’s Top Election Official For Endorsement — And He Declined

Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection.

Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he believed that, because he was overseeing the election, it would be a conflict of interest for him to take sides. Around the country, most secretaries of state remain officially neutral in elections.

The attacks on his job performance are “clear retaliation,” Raffensperger said. “They thought Georgia was a layup shot Republican win. It is not the job of the secretary of state’s office to deliver a win — it is the sole responsibility of the Georgia Republican Party to get out the vote and get its voters to the polls. That is not the job of the secretary of state’s office.” Continue reading.

Pennsylvania judge has heard enough from Rudy Giuliani — cancels scheduled evidentiary hearing

AlterNet logo

A federal judge based in Pennsylvania has heard enough from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Judge Matthew Brann of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on Wednesday announced (PDF) that he was formally canceling an evidentiary hearing that had been scheduled to take place on Thursday.

“The evidentiary hearing previously scheduled for Thursday, November 19, 2020 is CANCELLED,” the judge wrote in his order, which also denied a motion by Trump attorney Linda Kerns to sanction opposing counsel for a supposedly “threatening” phone call. Continue reading.

The Trump campaign was not denied access to Philadelphia’s ballot count

Washington Post logo

“They didn’t even allow Republican Observers into the building to watch. A terrible insult to our Constitution!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 18, 2020

Trump is in overdrive, tweeting one absurd falsehood after another to delegitimize the election he lost.

One repeated theme is that Republican observers were not allowed inside the room as election workers counted mail ballots in Philadelphia. Fraud thrives under cover of darkness, Trump warns.

But, in fact, Trump’s own lawyers have attested in court that his campaign was granted access and observed the process, both in Philadelphia and in other cities, and has found no evidence of fraud. Continue reading.

Farm support holds for Trump, but Biden may find inroads

End to aid payments in 2021 could cut deeply into incomes

President Donald Trump tenaciously courted farmers and ranchers with an anti-regulatory agenda and a confrontational trade approach that opened some markets.

But he also relied on billions in federal aid to compensate them for retaliatory tariffs and a pandemic that took a deep gouge out of the economy.

Despite the mixed performance, Trump’s policies on trade, regulation and other areas maintained his popularity in rural and farm communities, winning their support in the Nov. 3 election. Continue reading.

Trump’s coup might not work. But he may pave the way for the next failed candidate.

Washington Post logo

PRESIDENT TRUMP has dropped the pretense of respecting democracy. Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump demonstrated Tuesday that he will retaliate against those who fail to read from his corrupt script by firing Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security election security boss who publicly refuted the president’s unfounded allegations that voting systems were manipulated. Continue reading.

Republicans seek to stymie Biden with final Trump nominees

The Senate GOP is working to stock the government with conservative appointments in the lame duck.

Two months before Joe Biden assumes the presidency, Senate Republicans are racing to install a series of conservative nominees that will outlast Donald Trump.

While Trump still refuses to concede the election, the Senate GOP is moving quickly to ensure that the president’s stamp sticks to the Federal Elections Commission, Federal Reserve Board, the federal judiciary and beyond.

The effort played out in dramatic fashion this week, as Senate Republicans tried to muscle Judy Shelton onto the Fed by the narrowest of margins but fell short amid senators’ absences from the coronavirus. They’re also plotting a confirmation vote for Christopher Waller, Trump’s less controversial Fed pick. Continue reading.

America’s 250,000 covid deaths: People die, but little changes

Washington Post logo

Most everybody in town knows that Gladys Maull has been battered this year: Her father, her sister, an aunt, a great-aunt, all dead from covid-19. Maull keeps a sign on her front door: “Please do not come in my house due to covid-19. Thank you.”

Some people just step on in, maskless.

They mean no harm, but masks never caught on in rural Lowndes County, which has Alabama’s highest rate of coronavirus infections. In a place that gave 73 percent of its vote to Joe Biden, the sheriff and the coroner agree that although cases are spiking and deaths are rising, most people share President Trump’s view that masks are a matter of personal choice and that the end of the pandemic is just around the corner. Continue reading.

John Bolton fears that Trump has an ‘enemies list’ that he is working through

AlterNet logo

White House National Security Advisor Ambassador John Bolton talks to reporters Wednesday, May 1, 2019, outside the West Wing entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour) Alex Henderson November 18, 2020

Critics of President Donald Trump predicted that after the presidential race, he would be firing some prominent officials he considered non-loyalists — even if he lost the election. Trump did lose the election, and just as those critics predicted, he has been firing non-loyalists — and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, during a C-SPAN appearance on Wednesday, told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa that he fears Trump has an “enemies list” of more people he plans to fire.

Trump’s post-election firings have included former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Christopher Krebs, who served as director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs’ unforgivable sin, in Trump’s mind, was arguing that the election was free and fair and that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud or errors as the president has been claiming. Continue reading.

‘Traitors to the president’: Conservatives fear public preparation for Biden term

Because Trump won’t concede, many conservatives have found they can’t be open about their plans to counter Biden’s agenda. Some have already faced blowback.

The conservative movement has become handicapped.

Organizations can’t sound the alarm about President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda. Conservative reporters won’t take pitches about Biden’s rumored Cabinet contenders, insistent on covering evidence-deficient claims of voter fraud instead. One conservative group involved in policy advocacy backed off from hiring two soon-to-depart Trump administration officials after growing concerned about the consequences.

And it’s all because of an unspoken rule set by President Donald Trump: Do not acknowledge Biden’s imminent White House takeover. Continue reading.

Trump and Tucker Carlson got caught falsely accusing a living woman of voting while dead

AlterNet logo

As decisive a victory as President-elect Joe Biden has enjoyed — 306 electoral votes and a nationwide lead of at least 5.8 million in the popular vote — President Donald Trump and his allies are still hoping to overturn the election results in key battleground states. One of them is Georgia, where Trump’s campaign and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson wrongly accused a voter named Deborah Jean Christiansen of voting fraudulently. But CNN interviewed Christiansen, ascertaining that her vote was perfectly legitimate.

Trump’s campaign and Carlson both accused Christiansen of voting in the name of a dead woman. However, CNN reporters Konstantin Toropin, Daniel Dale and Amara Walker explain that in Georgia, there were two different women named Deborah Jean Christiansen. One of them died in 2019, but the other is alive and well and had every right to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

The two Georgia-based women, according to CNN, were “born in the same year and month but on a different day.” And CNN interviewed the Deborah Jean Christiansen who is still living and voted for Biden. Continue reading.