Tag: GOP now as corrupt as Trump

The GOP push to revisit 2020 has worrisome implications for future elections

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Donald Trump’s “big lie” has spawned a movement that under the guise of assuring election integrity threatens to do the opposite, potentially affecting the election process with questionable challenges that could block or delay the certification of results and undermine an essential pillar of democratic governance.

Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 results has kept alive the fiction that the election was stolen or the process was deeply corrupted. That fiction — fueled by conspiracy theories — has encouraged members of his party, elected officials and ordinary citizens, to take steps to address this; these actions could lead to worse outcomes in the future.

For some Americans, the 2020 election isn’t over, as unsubstantiated claims of fraud or widespread irregularities prompt continuing efforts to reexamine ballots and voting machines. Continue reading.

In echo of Arizona, Georgia state judge orders Fulton County to allow local voters to inspect mailed ballots cast last fall

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A Georgia state judge on Friday ordered Fulton County to allow a group of local voters to inspect all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 election in response to a lawsuit alleging that officials accepted thousands of counterfeit ballots.

The decision marks the latest instance of a local government being forced to undergo a third-party inspection of its election practices amid baseless accusations promoted by President Donald Trump that fraud flipped the 2020 contest for President Biden.

The inspection in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, is likely to proceed differently than an audit underway in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Republican state senators ordered county election officials to hand over equipment and ballots to a private company called Cyber Ninjas for examination. That process has come under widespread criticism for lacking security measures and failing to follow the rigorous practices of government recounts. On Thursday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) urged local officials to toss their machines after the audit is complete because their security is now in doubt. Continue reading.

Exclusive: GOP governor Kristi Noem, potential Trump successor, used state aircraft for tens of thousands of dollars in political travel

Newly unearthed flight logs show South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem used a state airplane to travel to right wing political events around the country, a revelation that has state lawmakers questioning whether she violated a state law forbidding political and personal use of the aircraft.

The flight logs, published for the first time in this report, raise questions about the propriety of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded flights to out-of-state events hosted by groups such as the National Rifle Association, Turning Point USA, and an organization affiliated with the late GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, South Dakota politicians and experts told Raw Story.

Also in question is whether Noem wasted taxpayer money by having the state airplane pick her up for official business when she was living at her family home in Castlewood, rather than in the governor’s residence in Pierre, the state’s capital where the airplane is kept. In one case, the airplane picked her up from her daughter’s wedding in the far west part of the state.

NOTE: Gov. Noem is the keynote speaker at the Minnesota Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner next month.

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.

Of course Republicans are doing this. It’s who they are.

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No. Not this time. Not again.

We knew that President Trump had no respect for democracy or the Constitution. So we’re not surprised that he’s lying, and lying, and lying again to claim he prevailed in the election that President-elect Joe Biden won decisively, fair and square.

What we did not know for certain was whether the Republican Party would once again bow before Trump’s corruption and his indifference to the fate of our republican institutions. Continue reading.

DHS awarded $6 million in contracts to firm where Acting Secretary Wolf’s wife is executive

A Homeland Security spokesperson said Wolf was unaware of the contracts until contacted by the media. Wolf’s Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — The consulting firm where the wife of acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf is an executive has been awarded more than $6 million in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security since September 2018, according to records on the federal government website USA Spending.

Wolf became chief of staff at the Transportation Security Administration, a DHS agency, in 2017 and chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in 2018. He took over as acting secretary in November and has been nominated to become secretary. His confirmation hearing before the Senate is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday,

Wolf’s wife, Hope Wolf, is vice president of professional staff operations at Berkeley Research Group, a consulting firm. Although the company has a long history of federal contracts, it did not do work for DHS until after Wolf became the TSA’s chief of staff in 2017. Continue reading.

How the G.O.P. Stretched Hard to Defend Trump on Race and Gender

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Never before has a convention by a major party felt compelled to call such a diverse array of speakers to defend the character of a sitting president.

The Republican convention this week marked an extraordinary effort to recast President Trump’s image on issues of race and gender, with the party stretching to find African-Americans who would testify that Mr. Trump is not racist, and lining up women to describe him as sensitive and empathetic — qualities he rarely displays in public.

This vouching for Mr. Trump, as he was nominated for a second term, was without precedent. Never before has a convention by either major party felt compelled to call such a diverse array of speakers to defend the character of a sitting president.

And it was done with a crucial political goal in mind: making a divisive leader appear more palatable to white moderate voters, who have turned against the Trump-led G.O.P. in recent elections, while also trying to peel away some nonwhite voters from Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee. Continue reading.

Trump desecrates a public monument in the finale to a convention of lies

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THE REALITY-SHOW president turned his party’s convention this week into a spectacle befitting his true expertise. The televised festival of exaggerations showed voters a warped version of this country, in which circumstances are both far worse and far better than the facts support — depending on what makes President Trump look best.

His acceptance speech Thursday night, a seemingly endless recital of by-now familiar falsehoods, was notable principally for when and how it took place: before a crowd of more than 1,000 mostly unmasked people on a White House lawn festooned with campaign insignia. Mr. Trump managed to merge contempt for public health with desecration of a public monument, the final and most jarring of the convention’s exploitations of the perks of public office for political purposes. Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke from Jerusalem, where he was traveling on government business, and the president granted a surprise pardon and staged an on-screen naturalization ceremony, two of whose participants-turned-props weren’t even aware they’d be starring on national TV.

The speech elevated the darkest themes of the convention. The Republican National Committee chose not even to adopt a platform this cycle. In other words, the party no longer stands for anything. So it was unsurprising that, relying on a mixture of hyperbole and lies, both Mr. Trump and the speakers preceding him highlighted what they’re against. Joe Biden, Mr. Trump said, is a “Trojan horse for socialism” in whose America “no one will be safe.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) summed it up earlier in the week: “The woke-topians will . . . disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” All this scaremongering was accompanied by outright slander of Mr. Biden, against whom Republicans leveled unsubstantiated corruption charges — and whose record and platform alike Mr. Trump distorted into almost a parody of radicalism. Continue reading.

The Hatch Act, the law Trump flouted at the RNC, explained

The Hatch Act is designed to protect the rule of law. Trump flouts it openly.

The United States prohibits most federal employees from engaging in certain political activity — especially if those employees are engaged in fundamentally nonpartisan activity such as diplomacy — in order to prevent abuse of power and corruption. On Tuesday night, however, the Trump administration flouted these limits by holding part of the Republican National Convention at the White House and broadcasting a partisan speech by the nation’s top diplomat.

The Hatch Act of 1939 imposes strict limits on most federal civilian workers who want to engage in political activity, and some Cabinet departments augment these statutory limits with additional policies intended to maintain a clear wall of separation between partisan politics and nonpartisan government functions.

These restrictions on government workers exist for two interlocking reasons. As the Supreme Court explained in United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers (1973), “it is in the best interest of the country, indeed essential, that federal service should depend upon meritorious performance rather than political service.” But if civil servants are free to engage in political activities, presidential appointees could reward loyal partisans and punish civil servants who favor the party that does not control the White House. Continue reading.