Quote:Nobody stole Maricopa County’s election. Elections in Maricopa County aren’t rigged. Governor Doug Ducey agrees.2 Former Republican Governor Jan Brewer agrees.3 Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich agrees,4 and his office has an election integrity unit that presumably receives all evidence of widespread fraud. Former Republican Recorder Helen Purcell agrees.5 Election directors in every other Arizona county agree. Former President Trump's Department of Justice agrees, including former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr6 and former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. 7 Trump’s former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, Chris Krebs, agrees.8 

The attorney for the Trump campaign in 1 Arizona agrees; it was he who responsibly said in court, “we are not alleging fraud.”9 Even Sidney Powell herself—progenitor of so much of the Stop the Steal movement—now says that “no reasonable person” should believe the election was stolen.10 So too did the 14 courts who heard eight (8!) complaints against Maricopa County’s election.11 All of those complaints failed, some even after appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court. Six complaints lost on their merits, only two lost on standing. The famed “Kraken” case that appeared before the Arizona federal district court lost on a 12(b)(6) motion, meaning the suit didn’t even rise to the level of plausible. 12 The attorneys who filed that case are still under investigation by the State Bar of Arizona. 13 Those attorneys could meet a fate similar to Rudy Giuliani, who had his bar license suspended in New York and Washington D.C. for knowingly making “false and misleading” statements before court. 14 Or the Stop the Steal attorneys might get slapped with sanctions, as happened to attorneys in Colorado who filed a Stop the Steal lawsuit that was deemed by the federal judge to be “one enormous conspiracy theory.”15

• 38 page open letter by Republican Stephen Richer, the county recorder in Maricopa detailing all the election conspiracy nonsense in great detail. 
  
• Extremely comprehensive and very well substantiated, amazing stuff that takes considerable courage.
  

Quote:Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office.

Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote. Some state legislatures seek to impose criminal penalties on local election officials alleged to have committed “technical infractions,” including obstructing the view of poll watchers..

Quote:Michele Carew is the latest casualty in the Trumpist war on voting. The veteran elections administrator tendered her resignation to officials in Hood County, Texas, on Friday after a brutal campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. Trump won 81 percent of the vote there, but Carew still found herself in the crosshairs of those seeking to entrench the GOP's control over election administration.

They want to see Carew's duties reassigned to a county clerk, who is notorious for (what else?) sharing electoral conspiracy theories on social media. Carew is one of many local election officials across the country who have chosen to quit rather than absorb right-wing abuse. Among 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four of election officials has already called it quits. Pennsylvania is grappling with a similar exodus. "These conspiracy theorists are in it for the long haul," county clerk Barb Byrum told the Associated Press. "They're in it to completely crumble our republic, and they're looking at these election administrator positions. They're playing the long game."

Local elections officials are still bearing the brunt of Trumpist fury. A special investigation by Reuters documented 102 threats of death or violence against 40 local election officials. Those are a fraction of the true number of threats. Milwaukee election official Claire Woodall-Vogg estimated she'd received 150 threats since a Gateway Pundit, a massively popular conspiracy blog, published lies about her...

In Georgia, Republicans are using a new state law to purge Democrats of color from local elections boards. At least 10 board members have been removed under the new state law or by local ordinances. Of these, at least 5 of the ousted members are people of color.

Quote:As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.  Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence... 

And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests. “Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”  The organizer claims the pair received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar.

Quote:New damning developments pertaining to the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol have come to light. According to Washington Post, the latest investigative update involves former President Donald Trump's lawyer John Eastman.
The report, written by Washington Post reporters Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Jon Swaine, and Emma Brown, explains how Eastman attempted to build a case to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. It has been revealed that "even as rioters overran the Capitol and a recalcitrant Pence was forced into hiding, Eastman emailed a Pence aide to actually blame Pence for the scene."

Quote:Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol attack a PowerPoint recommending Donald Trump to declare a national security emergency in order to return himself to the presidency. The fact that Meadows was in possession of a PowerPoint the day before the Capitol attack that detailed ways to stage a coup suggests he was at least aware of efforts by Trump and his allies to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.

The PowerPoint, titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan”, made several recommendations for Trump to pursue in order to retain the presidency for a second term on the basis of lies and debunked conspiracies about widespread election fraud. Meadows turned over a version of the PowerPoint presentation that he received in an email and spanned 38 pages, according to a source familiar with the matter. The Guardian reviewed a second, 36-page version of the PowerPoint marked for dissemination with 5 January metadata, which had some differences with what the select committee received. But the title of the PowerPoint and its recommendations remained the same, the source said.

Senators and members of Congress should first be briefed about foreign interference, the PowerPoint said, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy. The PowerPoint also outlined three options for then vice-president Mike Pence to abuse his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress on 6 January, when Biden was to be certified president, and unilaterally return Trump to the White House. Pence could pursue one of three options, the PowerPoint said: seat Trump slates of electors over the objections of Democrats in key states, reject the Biden slates of electors, or delay the certification to allow for a “vetting” and counting of only “legal paper ballots”.

The final option for Pence is similar to an option that was simultaneously being advanced on 4 and 5 January by Trump lieutenants – led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, as well as Trump strategist Steve Bannon – working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC. The Guardian revealed last week that sometime between the late evening of 5 January and the early hours of 6 January, after Pence declined to go ahead with such plans, Trump then pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place entirely.

The recommendations in the PowerPoint for both Trump and Pence were based on wild and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, including that “the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system” in eight key battleground states. The then acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen, and his predecessor, Bill Barr, who had both been appointed by Trump, by 5 January had already determined that there was no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Quote:As rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, several leading Fox News pundits and Donald Trump’s eldest son all voiced desperate concerns that the former president was doing nothing to quell the violence and protect those in the building, according to damning text messages unveiled Monday night by the select committee investigating the attack.  

The stunning messages, submitted to the panel by Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, revealed that Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade and Laura Ingraham — all superstar Fox personalities with enormous conservative followings — and Donald Trump, Jr. were all pressing Meadows to convince the president to intervene during the early hours of the siege. “He's got to condemn this shit ASAP,” Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows as the attack was underway. “I'm pushing it hard. I agree,” Meadows replied. 

But when the president still did not act, his eldest son reached out again to Trump’s chief of staff, according to Jan. 6 Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who read the series of texts during a hearing Monday night. “We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand,” Trump Jr. texted. Around the same time, a trio of Fox News hosts were also bombarding Meadows with text messages, trying to get Trump to call off the attack. “Mark, president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham texted.  “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” added Kilmeade.  “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol,” texted Hannity. Meadows also received dozens of texts from GOP lawmakers, staffers and members of the press trapped inside the Capitol during the assault, Cheney said. “We are under siege here at the Capitol,” read one text. “They have breached the Capitol,” read another.

“The violence was evident to all; it was covered in real time by almost every news channel. But for 187 minutes, President Trump refused to act when action by our president was required, essential and indeed compelled by his oath to our Constitution …” Cheney said during the hearing.  “Hours passed without necessary action by the president. These non privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump's supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes.”

• Most of his surroundings were not and tried to get him to call it off, but Trump was enjoying the attack and didn't do anything for 3 hours, despite the pleas from multiple of his allies.
  
• It shows what hypocrites these Fox people and Don Jr are, they were telling in private something quite different what they were (and are) telling in public.
  
  

Quote:Hours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January. The former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term. But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

Quote:A former Trump White House advisor has revealed he collaborated with a right-wing agitator to execute a behind-the-scenes effort to halt the certification of President Joe Biden's election victory.
Speaking to The Daily Beast last week, Peter Navarro —ex-adviser to former President Donald Trump— touched on his role in the plans and how he and former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon corroborated with Republican lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) to halt the certification of the election results.

“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”

The commitment Navarro discussed came as lawmakers were affirming the presidential election certification highlighting Biden's victory over Trump. Although they failed to successfully overturn the election, their goal was to stall as much as possible in hopes of pressuring Vice President Mike Pence ® to send election results back to the six states Trump and his allies fought to overturn.

As reputable news outlets refused to circulate Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud, The Daily Beast noted that Navarro and Bannon "hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process."

“The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” he said. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.” Navarro went on to highlight what his exact role was in the plot. He was responsible for providing what has been described as "raw materials" such as the report he created with subtitles like “The Immaculate Deception” and “The Art of the Steal.””

Quote:Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Sunday that the House committee investigating Jan. 6 has received testimony that former President Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump repeatedly asked her father to intervene to stop the attack on the Capitol. 
"We know his daughter — we have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in at least twice to ask him to 'please stop this violence,'" Cheney said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
"The committee has firsthand testimony now that he was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office watching the attack on television as the assault on the Capitol occurred," Cheney, who voted to impeach the former president last year, also told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. 
"We know, as you know well, that the briefing room at the White House is just a mere few steps from the Oval Office. The president could have at any moment walked those very few steps into the briefing room, gone on live television and told his supporters who were assaulting the Capitol to stop," she added.
Some of Ivanka Trump's efforts to urge her father to intervene in the Jan. 6 violence were previously reported in "Peril," by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, which said she spoke to her father three times, telling him, "Let this thing go," according to CNN. .

• But he didn't, for over three hours. And where was the National Guard??