Tag: Trump has to cheat to win

Trump demands Barr investigate Hunter Biden

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President Trump early Tuesday pressured Attorney General William Barr to investigate the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and demanded that information be released before Election Day.

“We have got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act and he’s got to act fast,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends,” citing a New York Post report about Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Trump called on Barr to “appoint somebody” to handle the matter.

“This is major corruption and this has to be known about before the election,” Trump said. Continue reading.

Federal judge denies GOP challenge to Minnesota’s extended absentee ballot deadline

Judge turns back GOP challenge, says ballots postmarked Nov. 3 are valid if received by Nov. 10. 

Minnesota absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be counted even if they’re received up to a week after Election Day, under a federal judge’s order turning back a Republican challenge to the extended balloting deadline.

The ruling Sunday by U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel upholds a Minnesota state court agreement spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic that allows counting of absentee ballots received up to Nov. 10. State officials are seeing a record number of mail-in ballots this year.

Attorneys for state Rep. Eric Lucero, R-Dayton, and GOP activist James Carson, who challenged the agreement, appealed the order on Monday. Brasel ruled that the two men lacked legal standing to challenge the deal. Continue reading.

Trump campaign twists Fauci comment to suggest praise of the president

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“I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.” 

— Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, misleadingly quoted in a Trump campaign ad released Oct. 10

Throughout 2020, the Trump campaign has offered a master class in how to snip and cut video in misleading ways. This new Trump ad is no exception.

The ad highlights the president’s bout with covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The deaths of more than 200,000 Americans from the disease have been a huge setback to the president’s election campaign. This ad tries to argue that he took forceful action against the coronavirus, despite his constant efforts to play down the pandemic in public.

After the ad asserts, “President Trump tackled the virus head on as leaders should,” it follows with a clip of Fauci appearing to endorse that claim: “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.” Continue reading.

Bill Barr’s Vote Suppression Follows An Old Script

With one national poll after another showing President Donald Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in November, the president and Attorney General William Barr continue to obsess over “voter fraud.” They baselessly claim the crime is promoted by mail-in voting, despite its history as a reliable practice. Journalist Pema Levy pointed out that Barr’s actions are part of a long a seedy history in an article published in Mother Jones, describing them as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression.

“A pattern has emerged in recent years that’s easy to spot,” Levy explains. “Right before an election, Republican officials in battleground states announce voter fraud investigations. The goal is obvious: suppressing turnout. But what’s new this year is that this underhanded tactic is being employed by the president and the Justice Department.”

Levy cites Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as an example of a Republican who has used bogus voter fraud claims to suppress turnout, recalling that only two days before the 2018 midterms, Kemp — who was Georgia’s secretary of state before becoming governor — “came out with an explosive announcement: he was investigating the state Democratic Party for attempting to hack into the state’s voter registration system.” Continue reading.

Facebook bans marketing firm running ‘troll farm’ for pro-Trump youth group

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A Washington Post investigation found that teenagers had been recruited to pepper social media with conservative messages.

Facebook said Thursday that it will permanently ban from its platform an Arizona-based marketing firm running what experts described as a domestic “troll farm” following an investigation of the deceptive behavior prompted by a Washington Post article last month.

The firm, Rally Forge, was “working on behalf” of Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, Facebook concluded. The inquiry led to the removal of 200 accounts and 55 pages on Facebook, as well as 76 Instagram accounts — many of them operated by teenagers in the Phoenix area.

The fake accounts, some with either cartoonlike Bitmoji profiles or images generated by artificial intelligence, complemented the real accounts of users involved in the effort, which largely entailed leaving comments sympathetic to President Trump and other conservative causes across social media. Continue reading.

Trump’s suggestion of deploying law enforcement officials to monitor polls raises specter of voting intimidation

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More than 30 years ago, a Republican Party program that dispatched off-duty police officers to patrol polling places in heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods in New Jersey triggered accusations of voter intimidation, resulting in a federal agreement that restricted for decades how the national GOP could observe voting.

Now, two years after those limits were lifted, President Trump has revived the idea of using law enforcement officers to patrol polling places, invoking tactics historically used to scare voters of color.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump described law enforcement officers as part of a phalanx of authorities he hopes will monitor voting in November. Continue reading.

DFL Party Statement on GOP Attempt to Get Kanye West on the Ballot in Minnesota

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement on the obvious Republican attempt to get Kanye West on the ballot in Minnesota:

“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: Donald Trump doesn’t think he can win this election fair and square after his failure to contain COVID-19 brought about mass deaths across America and crashed our economy, so his cronies are trying to get Kanye West on the ballot in a pathetic attempt to pull votes from Joe Biden and steal this election for Trump. 

“The DFL Party is reviewing all available options for defending the integrity of our elections.”

Numerous outlets have reported on clear connections between the Republican Party, the Trump campaign, and those seeking to place West on the ballot in various swing states:

Continue reading “DFL Party Statement on GOP Attempt to Get Kanye West on the Ballot in Minnesota”

Mark Meadows claims lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud is somehow the ‘definition of fraud’

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On CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper talked to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the Trump administration’s latest favorite talking point: voter fraud. Specifically, voter fraud via voting by mail. In this case, Meadows came out swinging against the notion that states should send ballots to all registered voters. In perhaps the most mind-blowing exchange, Tapper (accurately) pointed out that there is no proof of “widespread voter fraud,” and Meadows said, “there’s no evidence that there’s not, either.” Then, Meadows added: “That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”

How did we get there? Let’s check out the now-viral clip below.

While already talking about voter fraud, Tapper asked Meadows to get specific, using voting by mail in Florida versus Pennsylvania as examples, as Trump, as well as First Lady Melania Trump, requested their absentee ballots to vote in Florida just last week. In fact, Trump even voted absentee for Florida’s March primary. Continue reading.

Supreme Court denies GOP request, allows R.I. pandemic-related relief on mail-in ballots

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The Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed the Republican Party and allowed a consent decree to go forward so that Rhode Island voters during the coronaviruspandemic could cast mail-in ballots without in-person witness verification.

It was the first time the justices had agreed to a pandemic-related voter relief effort. But they explained in a short, unsigned order that state officials had agreed to relax the rules and that the change already had been implemented during the June primary.

Unlike “similar cases where a state defends its own law, here the state election officials support the challenged decree, and no state official has expressed opposition,” the order said. “Under these circumstances, the applicants lack a cognizable interest in the state’s ability to enforce its duly enacted laws.” Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Spending Millions In Attempt To Suppress Free Speech

This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.

The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen.

Dozens of stations ran the ad. But the Trump campaign chose to sue just NBC-affiliate WJFW, which is owned by a relatively small company that only has two other local TV stations, both in Bangor, Maine. The campaign did not initially sue the political organization that produced the ad. That group later joined the case as a defendant. Continue reading.