Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[LFC]

Republicans continue to bow before the Altar of Trump(tm) as they continue honing their fascist attacks on democratic elections. For them that's a win-win.

The Arizona state senate’s haphazard, controversial audit of 2020 ballots has become a popular destination for Republican lawmakers looking to undermine the results in battleground states that Joe Biden won. And now, audit-mania has spread even to the states that Biden lost.

In the wake of the Arizona audit’s success at grabbing publicity across right-wing media, Republican lawmakers in states that Trump won are demanding Arizona-style audits or other election inspections of their own.

The Republican hunt for voter-fraud evidence even in states that voted for Trump reveals how far inside the party the idea has spread that the election was stolen.

Focusing on fraud claims allows Republican officials to raise money and attention from devoted Trump supporters, according to former Republican National Committee communications director Doug Heye. It also helps lawmakers align themselves with Trump’s claims of widespread fraud, ingratiating themselves with the energized Trump grassroots as they try to claim more power in the party.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 15, 2021 15:31:07 GMT LFC said:

Republicans continue to bow before the Altar of Trump(tm) as they continue honing their fascist attacks on democratic elections. For them that's a win-win.

The Arizona state senate’s haphazard, controversial audit of 2020 ballots has become a popular destination for Republican lawmakers looking to undermine the results in battleground states that Joe Biden won. And now, audit-mania has spread even to the states that Biden lost.

In the wake of the Arizona audit’s success at grabbing publicity across right-wing media, Republican lawmakers in states that Trump won are demanding Arizona-style audits or other election inspections of their own.

The Republican hunt for voter-fraud evidence even in states that voted for Trump reveals how far inside the party the idea has spread that the election was stolen.

Focusing on fraud claims allows Republican officials to raise money and attention from devoted Trump supporters, according to former Republican National Committee communications director Doug Heye. It also helps lawmakers align themselves with Trump’s claims of widespread fraud, ingratiating themselves with the energized Trump grassroots as they try to claim more power in the party.

Grift upon grift.  I'm sure some enterprising person or more is making money from arranging the journeys of these legislators to come look at conspiracy theory at work.  

[LFC]

How close we came to the collapse of our democracy. A more competent fascist leader coupled with more ruthless fascist minions and the election might very well have been stolen. I'm convinced they'll try just that in 2024 if they lose. (They "know" it's impossible for them to lose a fair election.)

New Justice Department emails released by the House Tuesday give a look into the behind-the-scenes machinations around the shady departure of a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in early January.

Byung “BJay” Pak was the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, which had become ground-zero in President Trump’s flailing attempts to overturn his defeat in the Peach State. On Jan. 4, Pak abruptly resigned from his role, despite previously telling colleagues he wouldn’t step down until the inauguration. Trump bypassed the career prosecutor who would have been in line for Pak’s job and installed another Georgia U.S. Attorney who had reputation for being a Trump loyalist.

It was later reported that the night before Pak announced his departure, he spoke to a top DOJ official, who reached out to Pak on behalf of the White House to express Trump’s displeasure with Pak’s refusal to gin up investigations into supposed voter fraud.

The new email dump hints at the conversation, and shows the DOJ official, Richard Donoghue, emailing Pak at around 10 p.m. on Jan. 3 with the request that Pak call him “ASAP.”

But the newly-released emails reveal that the Jan. 3 phone call wasn’t the only occasion DOJ leadership wanted to get in touch with Pak while Trump and his allies were on an unrelenting campaign to disrupt Biden’s win in Georgia.

On Jan. 1, Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen sent Pak’s phone number to another top DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark. Clark, then the acting head of the civil division, was at the time attempting get DOJ to do Trump’s election-reversal bidding and at one point, according to the New York Times, had plotted with Trump a potential overthrow of the DOJ leadership that was resisting Trump’s demands.

[LFC]

Over here I posted about threats to poll workers. It turns out the threat impact is vast.

Election officials are facing threatening behavior, crushing work hours and low pay, according to a new report that examined the work atmosphere around election administration amid President Trump’s 2020 fear-mongering.

The Bipartisan Policy Center teamed up with The Brennan Center, a non-partisan voting rights think tank connected to New York University Law School, to publish the findings of a survey of 43 election officials.

It found that one in three election officials felt unsafe in their jobs, and that about one in six had faced threats related to their work. Nearly 80 percent of the election officials called for their governments to provide security protection to election officials when needed.

“Election officials we spoke to saw a direct link between election disinformation and the violence and threats they experienced in conjunction with the 2020 election,” the report said. “Indeed, 54 percent said they believe that social media, where disinformation about elections took root and spread, has made their jobs more dangerous.”

Even more — 78 percent of the officials in the survey — said that social media has made their jobs more difficult, in part because of how it helps spread misinformation and disinformation.

Election officials described taking drastic steps to deal with the surge in calls, emails and other outreach they received during 2020 election, fueled by the disinformation and misinformation being spread by the internet.

[LFC]

Good opinion piece on the complete selling out of the GOP to corporate America.

Texas is showing us all how the corruption that has overwhelmed the GOP has reached a crisis point, and it's killing people.

President Dwight Eisenhower said, "If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."

Sadly, Eisenhower's Republican Party is now there: they haven't governed to protect or help the people at the federal or state level since the Reagan Revolution. Today, instead, they simply engage in a corrupt form of political performance art while stuffing their pockets with corporate money.

Today's example: Greg Abbott.

Corrupt Texas Governor Greg Abbott is the poster child for corrupt Republicans' sellout to the fossil fuel industry. And the consequence of that will almost certainly kill hundreds of Texans this summer. But Abbott really, really doesn't want you to be thinking about that.

His latest scam to divert Texans' attention away from this malfeasance is to proudly declare that Texas is asserting its rights under the 10th Amendment to reject oversight or even advice from the federal government.

Texas, like most red states, takes in more federal dollars then they send to Washington DC; instead of merely calling Governor Abbott "corrupt" it's probably also time to call him a "welfare queen," a phrase much beloved of Republicans, at least when they apply it to Black women.

But the real "welfare" that Abbott and the whole collection of corrupt Texas Republicans have been living off for decades is the cash the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created pour down their throats every year by way of campaign contributions and dark money support.

For example, back in 2014 the good citizens of Denton County Texas, sick of air and water pollution from fracking, passed a ballot initiative banning it in their county by over 60%.

Texas' sold-out Republicans immediately responded with House Bill 40, which Governor Abbott enthusiastically signed, that "gives the state exclusive jurisdiction over oil and gas operations and prohibits local municipalities from creating ordinances that ban, limit, or regulate oil and gas operations…"

That's the Texas Republicans' motto: "Screw the people; we just do what's necessary to help out the fossil fuel billionaires who own us."

Back in 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush, himself of fossil-fuel multimillionaire, separated almost all of the Texas power grid from those of neighboring states to avoid federal oversight. He put the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in charge of the largely then-privatized grid.

Bush called it, "The nation's most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation."

It turned out to be an extraordinary expensive and deadly experiment, one that burdens Texas to this day.

As The Wall Street Journal noted a few months ago: "Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state's traditional utilities, according to the Journal's analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration."

[LFC]

The GOP continues to no longer be a political party but rather a fascist force demanding total power. Compromise? That's for soy eating libtards.

Senate Republican Conference chair John Barrasso (R-WY), the third highest ranking GOPer in the chamber, has taken Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) infamous obstruction vow to another level.

During a GOP think tank event last week, Barrasso noted that McConnell was deeply criticized for declaring in 2010 that making then-President Barack Obama a “one-term president” was the “single most important thing” Republicans wanted to achieve. Then the Wyoming Republican promised to go even further than his colleague ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president,” Barrasso said. “And I want to do that by making sure they no longer have House, Senate, White House.”

The GOP leader asserted that Biden “will sign whatever” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) put on his desk and labeled the Democratic Party “the party of socialism.”

McConnell has made it clear that his plan to fully obstruct a Democratic president didn’t stop with Obama; last month the senator said that “one hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration.” He also hinted at a Merrick Garland repeat and blocking a potential Biden appointee to the Supreme Court earlier this week.

[goldenvalley]

And I want to do that by making sure they no longer have House, Senate, White House.

How can this statement from a Congress member not be a traitorous admission that he doesn't not intend to abide by his oath of office and in fact intends to end the office he holds?  Shouldn't there at least be a censure by House members?

[LFC]

Republican, you built this.

In a secretly recorded phone call last week, one Florida Republican congressional contender spoke openly about having another assassinated.

“My polling people are going to charge me $20,000 to do a poll right before the primary, and if the poll says Luna’s gonna win, she’s gonna be gone, she’s gonna disappear,” GOP congressional contender William Braddock told conservative activist Erin Olszewski in a phone call June 9. He was referring to a primary opponent in the race, Anna Paulina Luna, who’s since taken out a restraining order against him.

“And you cannot tell anybody that, but for the good of our country, we have to sacrifice the few,” Braddock added.

Olszewski handed the recording over to police. Politico published a video of her taking the call from Braddock on Thursday morning. Luna won Florida’s 13th Congressional District’s primary last year but ultimately lost the race to Rep. Charlie Crist (D), who has since announced a run for governor. Politico referred to Braddock as a “lower-tier candidate” in the GOP primary.

Braddock got more and more explicit as the call went on, after initially mentioning that he had access “to a hit squad” comprised of Russians and Ukrainians.

“How do we make her go, though?” Olszewski prompted Braddock at one point.

“I call up my Russian and Ukrainian hit squad and, within 24 hours, there’s going to be pictures of her disappearing,” Braddock responded, before saying that he wasn’t joking and “this is beyond my control at this point.” He later said that “Freemason brothers” were offering him access to Russian hit squads.

“I am in deep, I will admit that,” he said. “If I lose, I’m going to have to move out of the country. But if I win, I’m going to help make a difference for everyone in the country.”

Olszewski — who made a name for herself in conservative circles with the book “Undercover Epicenter Nurse,” about her time treating COVID patients at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York — pressed Braddock for more detail: “Is this squad that you’re talking about, are they, like snipers?” she asked.

“Russian mafia,” Braddock responded. “Close-battle combat, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, silencers kind of thing. No snipers. Up close and personal. So they know the target is gone.”

[LFC]

Vox has an excellent piece on the push by the Republican Party to make the U.S. a "competitive authoritarian" state, much like Hungary. Here are some excerpts but the whole thing is worth a read.

American democracy is in a bad way, and the Republican Party is the reason why.

Blocking an inquiry into the January 6 attack on the Capitol, embracing Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen, making it easier for partisans to tamper with the process of counting votes: These are not the actions of a party committed to the basic idea of open, representative government.

It’s common to call this GOP behavior “anti-democratic,” but the description can only go so far. It tells us what they’re moving America away from, but not where they want to take it. The term “minority rule” is closer, but euphemistic; it puts the Republican actions in the same category as a Supreme Court ruling, countermajoritarian moves inside a democratic framework rather than something fundamentally opposed to it.

It’s worth being clear about this: The GOP has become an authoritarian party pushing an authoritarian policy agenda.

There are many kinds of authoritarian systems, and many ways to become one of them. In the United States, the threat that looms is a slide into what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”: a system that still holds elections, but under profoundly unfair conditions that systematically favor one side. That process, of one party stacking the deck in its favor over the course of years, isn’t unique — we’ve seen it in countries across the world in recent years, in places as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela.

In competitive authoritarianism, the opposition does have some ability to win a bit of power through, well, competition — even if the scope of their possible victories are limited.

It’s a tricky balance for the regime to pull off: rigging elections enough to maintain power indefinitely while still permitting enough democracy that citizens don’t rise up in outrage. Many competitive authoritarian regimes have collapsed under the stress, either transitioning to democracy (like Taiwan) or forcefully repressing the opposition and becoming a more traditional autocracy (like Belarus).

But many systems manage to survive. In a 2020 paper revisiting their work, Levitsky and Way found that 10 out of 35 competitive authoritarian regimes they identified in 2002 remained in place nearly two decades later. And new ones had emerged in countries that had previously been seen as solidly democratic — most notably Hungary, which is today one of the most effective competitive authoritarian systems in the world.

Hungary is, as it happens, one of the foreign countries most admired by American conservative intellectuals. In the 2020 paper, Levitsky and Way observe that features of its system are starting to show up in America.

“Competitive authoritarianism is not only thriving but inching westward. No democracy can be taken for granted,” they write. “Similar tendencies have even reached the United States, where the Trump administration borrowed the ‘deep state’ discourse that autocrats in Hungary and Turkey used to justify purges and the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“

After the events of January 6 and subsequent Republican pushes to steal the election, I reached out to Levitsky to see how his thinking had evolved.

“I’m terrified,” he told me in a phone call. “I think Republicans are going to steal the next election.”

In Hungary, one of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s key power-consolidating moves was stacking the country’s election administration agency with cronies from his Fidesz party, allowing the party to more easily rig the game in its favor.

In 2021, the GOP has started subverting election agencies in earnest; a new report from three pro-democracy groups found that 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration. Georgia’s SB 202 is perhaps the most egregious, allowing the Republican-dominated state legislature to take over the vote-counting process from county officials.

Another important Orbán tactic has been abusing regulatory policy to punish businesses that threaten the party’s hold on political power.

[LFC]

At least one House Dem is calling out the worst of the Fascist Caucus for what they are: traitors.

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) yesterday called for the removal of three of his colleagues — Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) — from Congress over their promotion of the far-right’s latest wild conspiracy theory surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Moulton told CNN Sunday the trio were “traitors” who are attempting to “whitewash history” by hyping the theory, which makes the case that the FBI was actually the entity responsible for the Jan. 6 attack.

“They are domestic terrorists, the people who attacked us in the Capitol, who attacked the seat of government all with the intention of undermining the election, undermining the will of the American people,” he said. “And frankly, if you’re aiding and abetting terrorists by your actions in the Capitol, whether it was back on Jan. 6 or with your votes today, you don’t deserve to be a member of Congress.”

Let’s rewind.

The conspiracy theory was first elevated last week, when Revolver News — a right-wing website that regularly publishes anti-Biden pieces and fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccine — first published a piece on it. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson then seized on the Revolver piece.

Revolver News had made the leap that unindicted co-conspirators referred to in indictments of alleged insurrectionists are actually FBI informants and/or undercover agents who worked with the groups in planning the attack and helped lead the mob to the Capitol. As CNN’s Marshall Cohen recently observed, the conspiracy theory relies on a “deeply flawed misunderstanding of how legal writing works and the definition of an unindicted co-conspirator.”

And yet, the right-wing media is a machine that thrives on speculation and has little use for facts. Carlson gave the conspiracy theory the Fox News prime time treatment, the big lie’s staunchest congressional defendants who have plenty of problems of their own (Gaetz, Greene and Gosar) scooped it up as fact, the usual hysteria ensued. Gaetz tweeted a clip of the Carlson show. Greene retweeted Gaetz, raising the “deep state” as the enemy once again. Gaetz sent the FBI director a letter asking for information on FBI agents being at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

By Tuesday, Gosar used a House Oversight Committee hearing to enter the Revolver News conspiracy theory into the congressional record.

Well it appears that they have no issues immortalizing their treason.

[LFC]

Georgia Elections Officials Recover Legal Fees In Trump Suit Over 2020 Results

Elections officials in two Georgia counties sued by former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election have recovered legal fees, which they say came from the plaintiffs in the case: Trump, his campaign and Georgia’s Republican Party chair.

The lawsuit, filed in December, falsely alleged that tens of thousands of illegal votes had been cast in Georgia in the 2020 election — a scale sufficient to change the election results in Trump’s favor, the suit argued. The suit was rejected by a Fulton County court due to paperwork errors, then rejected by the state’s Supreme Court because, the court found, Trump and Shafer had “not shown that this is one of those extremely rare cases that would invoke our original jurisdiction.”

Trump and Shafer dropped the suit in January, a day after the Capitol insurrection and the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Trump later endorsed Shafer’s bid for reelection as Georgia GOP chair.

In February, Cobb and DeKalb county election officials filed motions for attorneys fees, with the former party writing that “Given the number of failed lawsuits filed by the former president and his campaign, petitioners apparently believed that they could file their baseless and legally deficient actions with impunity, with no regard for the costs extracted from the taxpayers’ coffers or the consequences to the democratic foundations of our country.”

Now, the defendants have withdrawn their motions in separate filings, saying that the plaintiffs have paid them.

“Said motion is hereby withdrawn because Plaintiffs, through counsel, have provided payment for the full amount of attorneys’ fees requested in Ms. Hamilton’s motion,” read the Monday filing from county attorneys representing Erica Hamilton, director of voter registration and elections for DeKalb County.

“We told them if the fees were paid, then the motion would be withdrawn, and that’s what happened,” Daniel White, the attorney who represented the Cobb Board of Elections and Registration, told TPM.

[pnwguy]

Jun 22, 2021 18:36:33 GMT LFC said:

Georgia Elections Officials Recover Legal Fees In Trump Suit Over 2020 Results

Time to crank up the MAGAt email machine to reload the grift accounts.

With the small print at the bottom:

 "[x] make this a recurring contribution every week"

[goldenvalley]

They seemed like Democratic activists.  There were secretly conservative spies.

Using large campaign donations and cover stories, the operatives aimed to gather dirt that could sabotage the reputations of people and organizations considered threats to a hard-right agenda advanced by President Donald J. Trump.

At the center of the scheme was an unusual cast: a former British spy connected to the security contractor Erik Prince, a wealthy heiress to the Gore-Tex fortune and undercover operatives like Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca who used Wyoming as a base to insinuate themselves into the political fabric of this state and at least two others, Colorado and Arizona.

In more than two dozen interviews and a review of federal election records, The New York Times reconstructed many of the operatives’ interactions in Wyoming and other states — mapping out their associations and likely targets — and spoke to people with whom they discussed details of their spying operation. Publicly available documents in Wyoming also tied Mr. Maier and Ms. LaRocca to an address in Cody used by the former spy, Richard Seddon.

What the effort accomplished — and how much information Mr. Seddon’s operatives gathered — is unclear. Sometimes, their tactics were bumbling and amateurish. But the operation’s use of spycraft to manipulate the politics of several states over years greatly exceeds the tactics of more traditional political dirty tricks operations.

[LFC]

We had enough sane people ... barely ... to prevent a series of all-out assaults on Americans engaging in their constitutional right to peaceful protest. What if Trump had won reelection? Biden won decisively but not overwhelmingly. As the Republican Party has become ever more fascist what will happen the next time they get that much power? (Paywalled.)

The former president hid in his bunker when country-wide protests flared up in Washington, D.C. over the police killing of George Floyd last summer.

He was mocked with a variety of entertaining “bunker boy” related nicknames (not hard to get creative with that alliteration) and ultimately decided to show his strength by violently clearing out Lafayette Square and taking a picture in front of a historic church flinging around a Bible.

We knew Trump was hellbent on an aggressive display of military strength in cities around the U.S. to combat police brutality protesters. But behind the scenes his aggressive stance toward demonstrators reached concerning levels. According to excerpts of a new book written by Wall Street Journal reporters, advance copies of which were given to CNN, Trump wanted the military to behave more violently than it did to clamp down on protesters.

Reporter Michael Bender’s new book “‘Frankly, We Did Win This Election’: The Inside Story Of How Trump Lost” reveals that Trump told his advisers he wanted the military to “beat the fuck” out of the largely peaceful racial justice demonstrators who took the streets for months in the summer of 2020.

“Just shoot them,” Trump reportedly told his advisers. He also reportedly wanted soldiers to “crack their skulls.”

He toned down his order after receiving pushback: “Well, shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot, but be hard on them.”

The Trump administration also reportedly got some pushback from top military officials over the aggressive demands for law-and-order. According to the new book, at one point, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley told Stephen Miller to “shut the fuck up” when Miller, then-senior policy adviser to Trump, tried to equate the mass demonstrations in U.S. cities to war zones.

The new reporting comes on a particularly pointed day for George Floyd activists: This morning the judge in Hennepin County District Court denied Derek Chauvin’s post-verdict request for a new trial. The former Minneapolis police officer, who was convicted of murder on three counts in April for killing Floyd, will be sentenced later this afternoon.

"Wokeness" is the big problem in this country? We had a president who was literally advocating state sanctioned murder and violent assault on thousands and his party hasn't said a peep about it. Oh, yeah. And Stephen Miller needs to be locked away in a cell for the rest of his unnatural life.

[pnwguy]

Jun 25, 2021 19:29:36 GMT LFC said:

 And Stephen Miller needs to be locked away in a cell for the rest of his unnatural life.

I might be fine with his life becoming shorter than natural, if he is incarcerated.  Let the prison supply him with all the rope he wants.

[LFC]

Jun 25, 2021 21:10:11 GMT pnwguy said:

I might be fine with his life becoming shorter than natural, if he is incarcerated.  Let the prison supply him with all the rope he wants.

Miller: "What's my time behind bars going to be like?"

Us: "Are you familiar with Jeffrey Epstein?"

[pnwguy]

Jun 25, 2021 21:22:05 GMT LFC said:

Miller: "What's my time behind bars going to be like?"

Us: "Are you familiar with Jeffrey Epstein?"

It's one way to get your sentence commuted...

[LFC]

Jun 25, 2021 21:27:12 GMT pnwguy said:

It's one way to get your sentence commuted...

What one might call a short (rope) commute.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 25, 2021 19:29:36 GMT LFC said:

"Wokeness" is the big problem in this country? We had a president who was literally advocating state sanctioned murder and violent assault on thousands and his party hasn't said a peep about it. Oh, yeah. 

What do you speak of?  A tourist's visit to the Capitol ruined by Antifa activity in early January? Pshaw! CRT is ruining the country so stop trying to distract us from that!

[LFC]

Toyota decided supporting fascism wasn't their concern, even after it was revealed that they are a large corporate donor to dozens of the worst Republican fascism supporters in Congress.

According to CREW, Toyota donated $55,000 to 37 Republican lawmakers who objected to the election results on Jan. 6. That meant that Toyota had donated more than twice as much — and to nearly five times as many candidates — as the next leading corporation, defense contractor Cubic Corp.
[snip]
But Toyota, in its statement, shrugged off the insurrection, standing by its donations to lawmakers.

“Toyota supports candidates based on their position on issues that are important to the auto industry and the company. We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” a Toyota spokesperson told Axios.

Then word got out to their customers. They are ... reevaluating.

Toyota added that after a “thorough review,” the corporation decided against donating to “some members who, through their statements and actions, undermine the legitimacy of our elections and institutions.”

Axios reported that the Toyota spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions asking the company to specify the type of statements nor actions that halted their donations. A Toyota spokesperson also did not immediately reply to TPM’s request for clarification.

Shortly after Axios reported on CREW’s findings on Sunday, owners of Toyota cars took to social media and signaled their intention to boycott the company.

[Traveler]

That is going to hurt sales for sure. This needs to be further publicized. Doxing of a different nature...

[LFC]

The Trumpies installed an utterly corrupted partisan IG because of course they did. It's what fascist regimes do.

The inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security allegedly stonewalled until after the election an investigation into the demotion of a senior intelligence official who had criticized then-President Donald Trump, the New York Times reports.

• Brian Murphy, a former intel chief at the department, reportedly filed a complaint in September, alleging that he had been demoted out of retaliation when he raised concerns about Trump distorting intelligence reports for political purposes.

• Inspector General Joseph Cuffari allegedly put off investigating the allegations for weeks until after the election.

• Cuffari’s alleged slow-walking continued even after the election, with limits allegedly imposed on how much time investigators could interview people.

• The inspector general’s office demurred when asked for comment by the New York Times.

[LFC]

Remember when people like us were accused of hyperbole for using the word "fascist?" Now it feels like an understatement. The MAGAts really do just want to overthrow the government and set up their own right-wing fascist dictatorship that will punish all of "those people."

A new Facebook meme making the rounds among Trump supporters is falsely claiming that the American military is "ready to act" to put him back in the White House at the conclusion of the widely panned Arizona "audit" of the 2020 election.

According to PolitiFact, the meme featured a video about the Arizona audit that claimed that the "deep state" would soon be panicking after it exposed purported fraud that cost Trump the election.

"This stuff is coming out and showing what actually happened with the 2020 election," the video states. "The storm is on its way."

A caption accompanying the video reads, "Military ready to act on audit results."

[LFC]

The rot of fascism burrows ever deeper into the GOP. Incumbents and newcomers are embracing The Big Lie. We can expect the outcome of the 2022 elections to be massively corrupt. Why? They're pretty much telling us they will be.

And many are current Republican officeholders, lining up to seek reelection, who have backed Trump’s efforts over the past eight months by questioning the validity of the 2020 result, taking legislative votes or signing on to official efforts to overturn it.

Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat.

Many of them — 136 — are sitting members of Congress who voted against Joe Biden’s electoral college victory on Jan. 6.

Similarly, of the nearly 600 state lawmakers who publicly embraced Trump’s false claims, about 500 face reelection this year or next. Most of them signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory. At least 16 of them attended the Jan. 6 protest in Washington.

“What’s really frightening right now is the extent of the effort to steal power over future elections,” said Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado. “That’s what we’re seeing across the nation. Literally in almost every swing state, we have someone running for secretary of state who has been fearmongering about the 2020 election or was at the insurrection. Democracy will be on the ballot in 2022.”

The growing roster of such candidates amounts to merely the latest step in that progression, which includes the ouster of Cheney from a House leadership position after she denied Trump’s stolen election claims, as well as the censure of state officials, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), after he refused to contest Trump’s defeat there.

Legislatures in Arizona and Georgia have also passed laws shifting power over elections to themselves.

The dynamic threatens to upend Republican primaries — and in some cases, already has. Last month, Williams defeated a 14-year incumbent in a Virginia House of Delegates primary after claiming he had seen evidence of fraud while working as a lawyer for the Trump campaign on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Wisconsin election result. The incumbent, Charles Poindexter, boasts top ratings from the NRA as well as the socially conservative Family Foundation. Williams is widely expected to win easily in the fall in a safely Republican district in Virginia’s rural Southside.

“He said that he had not seen any evidence of voter fraud,” Williams said of his opponent, who did not return calls seeking comment. “And I said that I had seen evidence, because obviously I had played the role of lawyer for Trump in Wisconsin.”

In fact, no evidence of widespread fraud emerged in Wisconsin, where the lawsuit Williams worked on was dismissed and where a recount in the state’s two largest and most heavily Democratic counties affirmed Biden’s victory.

[goldenvalley]

Mind boggling. All those elected officials won their seats in this compromised elections and not one of them resigns or suggests that special elections should be held to have a valid election.