Tag: election deniers
Nominated For FBI Director, Patel Is Just A Standard Issue MAGA Con Man

Nominated For FBI Director, Patel Is Just A Standard Issue MAGA Con Man

For organized criminal gangs and foreign espionage agents operating in this country, their most cherished daydream would be to cripple the law enforcement agency dedicated to curtailing them – namely, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ranked among those enemies of the rule of law, of course, are many of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s closest associates -- who are, like him, convicted felons -- from Roger Stone and Mike Flynn to Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, always whining about the agency that arrested and arraigned them.

Now, with the announced appointment of Kashyap Patel as FBI director, Trump aims to realize their fantasy of ultimate vengeance against law enforcement. Like so many Trump appointees to top government posts, Patel has a resume devoid of any qualifcations for this position, one of the most sensitive and vital in the US government.

He has no comprehension of how to protect the nation from foreign adversaries or domestic threats and has scarcely even pretended that will be his purpose. Instead, he has repeatedly threatened to misdirect national security resources against “the enemies within” – anyone who has dared to hold Trump accountable.

Patel will be sent into the FBI headquarters to dismiss its key personnel, dismantle its infrastructure, and induce fear in its ranks – all of which can only impede its mission. The potential consequences for the United States are so dire as to raise once again the question of where Trump’s true allegiance lies – and who truly directs his actions.

The director-designate is a clownish figure who has made a business of prostrating himself to Trump every day in the most ostentatious style, often by concocting and advancing conspiracy claims that bolster the MAGA cause. He is also a former Justice Department attorney with an empty record, who has falsely asserted that he led the federal prosecution of a Benghazi terrorist – when the public record shows he had no role in the case at all.

He has associated himself with the most reprehensible cult propaganda campaigns, ranging beyond Trump’s fraudulent claims of 2020 election fraud and into the poisonous QAnon mythology that accuses prominent Democrats and Hollywood figures of such perversions as child sex trafficking and cannibalism.

In other words, Kash Patel is a standard-issue MAGA con man. He also appears to be a small-time grifter, again like so many around Trump. Two years ago he registered a tax-exempt nonprofit called the Kash Foundation, which outlined its grandiose mission on its website: “The foundation focuses on providing legal support for whistleblowers and media accountability; filling gaps in mainstream media coverage and educating the public on critical issues; providing assistance to veterans, active duty service members, and law enforcement; and providing scholarships and tuition grants for higher education.”

The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries. Looking over the website, the true purpose of the foundation seems obvious: to promote Kash Patel and his profile on the far right. Or as a spokeswoman put it, “The foundation turned the tables on the adversity faced by Kash due to disinformation and media targeting, transforming it into a force for good .The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries.

With annual receipts of around $1.2 million, the foundation claims to have given $5000 grants to nonprofits benefiting the homeless in Nevada, church women in Virginia, and Air Force special operations veterans, and another $157,000 in direct cash grants to 50 unnamed individuals. But the big winner is a director of the foundation who also runs a media consulting business – and glommed more than $275,000 for “marketing services” and merchandise.

In misusing a charitable foundation to promote himself, Patel is mimicking his idol, who created a template for that kind of avaricious abuse with the Trump Foundation – eventually shut down by New York state authorities, fined $2 million, and forced to disgorge its remaining assets to actual charities. As FBI director he would provide a sore example for the attorneys general in every state, whose duties usually include oversight of charities.

Patel’s appointment is a raised middle finger to every honest law enforcement official in this country, including every man or woman who ever served in the FBI or the Justice Department, and a looming menace to the nation’s security at home and abroad. As with the aborted appointment of Matt Gaetz, it’s an insult requires Senate Republicans overcome their usual cowardice to fulfill their constitutional oath.

Keep in mind that President Biden did precisely the opposite when he entered the White House in January 2021. Biden kept FBI Director Christopher Wray -- a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump -- as a sign that he intended to maintain the federal justice system's integrity. He didn't oust Wray to replace him with a Democrat, let alone a sycophantic stooge from his own political entourage.

No one should doubt Trump’s determination to install his lackey in this critical post. He already tried to place Patel in the FBI leadership during the final months of 2020 – but Bill Barr angrily rebuffed that outrage and Trump retreated. In his 2022 memoir, the former attorney general noted that "Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency.”

That is why the criminals and spies who surround Trump are applauding so loudly.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

After Promising To Defund Election Deniers, Corporate PACS Gave Them Millions

After Promising To Defund Election Deniers, Corporate PACS Gave Them Millions

A new report by the nonprofit government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, found many of America's blue-chip corporations have collectively given tens of millions of dollars to congressional Republicans who voted against certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election win, a group CREW dubbed the "Sedition Caucus."

At least 231 companies announced that they would either entirely suspend, temporarily halt, or meaningfully reassess their political giving in the days after a pro-Trump mob fueled by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

After Congress reconvened later that night, 147 Republicans — 139 in the House and 8 in the Senate — voted against certifying the 2020 election, in some cases citing claims of widespread voter fraud. Numerous national- and state-level recounts, election audits, and independent investigations have found no evidence that the outcome of the 2020 election was affected by fraud.

According to the CREW report, 166 of those companies have resumed donating to political campaigns and leadership PACs run by those election objectors. Several companies that condemned the attack are among that number, including Disney, Amazon, and Allstate.

In a statement, a Disney spokesman called the attack "an appalling siege" and criticized legislators who voted against certifying Biden's victory. Amazon said the insurrection was an "unacceptable attempt to undermine a legitimate democratic process," and a senior vice president at Allstate told CNN that the vote "did not align with the committee's commitment to bipartisanship, collaboration and compromise."

However, according to CREW's report, Amazon has since given $46,500 to election objectors, Disney $4,500, and Allstate $36,000.

An Amazon spokesman told the American Independent Foundation that the company's political action committee gives to Congress members who "share our views on issues that are important to our customers and our business in general." The spokesperson said the suspension of donations was not intended to be permanent.

The three companies are far from alone in doubling back on strong statements; Politico reported last week that Cigna, the multi-billion-dollar health insurance giant, gave more than $200,000 to election objectors ahead of the 2022 midterm elections after promising to cease contributing to "any elected official who encouraged or supported violence, or otherwise hindered the peaceful transition of power."

"Some issues are so foundational to our core fiber that they transcend all other matters of public policy," read a Cigna internal memo obtained by CNBC. "There is never any justification for violence or destruction of the kind we saw at the U.S. Capitol — the building that [is] such a powerful symbol of the very democracy that makes our nation strong."

Of the top five corporate donors to election objectors since Jan. 6, 2021 — Koch Industries, Boeing, Valero Energy, Home Depot, and AT&T — all but Koch Industries made some kind of promise to cease giving in the wake of the insurrection.

The report also notes corporate contributions to election deniers who won election to Congress in the 2022 midterms, including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican who spread false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, and Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), who the Daily Beast reported crossed police lines on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 during the insurrection.

Sixty-five of the companies CREW surveyed have remained committed to their public rejection of election objectors, including Meta, BlackRock, Target, and Nike. However, lobbyists working for some of the corporations that publicly pledged to refrain from supporting election objectors, including Microsoft, Meta, Nike, and Dow Chemical Company, have since made personal contributions to some of those lawmakers.

"None of the remaining members who fed lies about the election and voted not to certify have atoned for their actions," CREW research director Robert Maguire told the American Independent Foundation. "What is the point — other than good PR — of making a commitment to not give, if you're just going to start making donations to those same politicians in the same election cycle, only a little later than you normally would have?"

"You can't say you support voting rights or democracy while also making campaign contributions to members of Congress who in many cases tried to disenfranchise voters in entire states and attempted to overturn a free and fair election," Maguire added.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Trump Gang Scrambling To File Suit Denying Kari Lake's Arizona Defeat

Trump Gang Scrambling To File Suit Denying Kari Lake's Arizona Defeat

Diehard Trump Republicans inside and outside of Arizona who cannot fathom that Kari Lake is projected to lose Arizona’s 2022 governor’s race are frantically trying to assemble a lawsuit to block the certification of the victory by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and Arizona’s current secretary of state.

“We need 3-5 Attorneys. Please call any you think might be interested and see if they are willing to support the cause without the retainers,” said the top item on a Tuesday email sent by the Gila County Election Integrity Team. “The suit will be prepared by experienced legal writers.”

“We need to reach and recruit voters or candidates in other counties to become plaintiffs and get them up to speed,” it continued. “Who can help? Please shake the trees.”

On Monday night, national media called the race for Hobbs, who won 50.4 percent — or 1,266,922 votes — compared to Lake’s 49.6 percent — 1,247,428 votes. Those results, based on counting 98 percent of the votes, is a bigger than the 0.5 percent margin in Arizona law that would trigger a recount.

“Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake texted on Monday evening.

Lake, a former Fox News broadcaster in Phoenix whose political rise was based on viewers’ familiarity with her and Lake’s mimicry of Trump’s stances, led by claims that his re-election bid was stolen, publicly had been criticizing the counting process in Maricopa County, its most populous county.

Officials in Maricopa County, which is run by non-Trump Republicans who spent much of 2021 fending off election conspiracy accusations, replied that Lake did not understand how election are run and were offensive – given that hundreds of thousands of mailed-out ballots had been returned on Election Day and election workers had been putting in 18-hour days to count votes.

Before Monday’s media projection of her loss, Lake had been telling nationally known 2020 election deniers – such as True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht – that she planned to fight any outcome but a gubernatorial victory.

In her podcast last Friday, Engelbrecht said that she had spoken to Lake and was inspired by Lake’s determination to keep fighting – unlike other Trump-endorsed candidates in Arizona who had conceded.

“It’s one of the reasons we came to Arizona because Kari Lake is not quitting in the face of such uncertainty,” said Engelbrecht, who, with Gregg Phillips, a fellow conspiracy theorist at True the Vote, had been jailed for contempt of court on Halloween in an unrelated defamation case where they had accused an election vendor of giving China access to voter data.

“Tuesday’s election… didn’t go quite like many felt that it would,” Engelbrecht said. “But I submit to you it was sort of the same song, second verse. The things that go wrong on Election Day, and went wrong in 2020, went wrong in 2022. Like [voting] machines going out, not enough paper [ballots], bad chain of custody [of ballots], the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, elections taking far too long to resolve… what we want to avoid is becoming the new normal.”

Phillips said that he and Engelbrecht, who voter fraud fabrications were featured in the misinformation-laced film about the 2020 presidential election by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, said the goal was stopping Maricopa County’s certification of the victories by Hobbs and other Democrats in top statewide races. (Phillips, Engelbrecht, and D’Souza have been sued for defamation by voters who were falsely accused onscreen of illegally casting absentee ballots.)

“Our view of it is that you always have to stop the certification,” Phillips said. “Once the certification happens, pretty much the cat’s out of the bag; it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle and everything goes wrong. But we have really learned some interesting things here because of this delay [in counting].”

Phillips said the county’s use of an Arizona-based ballot printing and election technology, Runbeck Election Services, to pre-process mailed out ballots – to vet the authenticity of voters’ signatures on the ballot return envelopes – opened up several avenues to argue that Maricopa County did not follow state law.

“We can now define them inside certain large buckets,” he said. “Like chain of custody issues [transporting ballots securely, and] issues that they have in compliance with the law relative to signature verification.”

On Monday’s edition of the J.D. Rucker Show on Rumble.com, a pro-Trump online platform, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio outlined another line of legal attack. He focused on the response by Maricopa County to the intermittent breakdown of ballot printers in 30 percent of its 223 voting centers on Election Day.

Bill Gates, the Republican lawyer who chairs Maricopa County's board of supervisors, told voters that they could put their ballots in a secure box at the vote centers to be counted later, or they could go to another vote center.

That advice was no guarantee that these ballots had been counted, Donofrio said, and it put voters at risk for voting twice, which exposed them to criminal charges.

“There is no function [in voting systems] for a voter to check out of a polling location once they have checked in… That is a complete fiction,” he said. “It’s like [the 1977 song] Hotel California, J.D., ‘You can check in, but you can never leave.’”

The “Gila County Election Integrity Team” said they would be meeting on Wednesday and communicating via a group chat on Telegram, another social media site. It urged insiders to reach out to Andy Gould, a state appeals county judge, “to seek behind the scenes support,” and Mick McGuire, a retired general who ran unsuccessfully for the 2022 GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, to see “if he can help also with statewide supporters who would be plaintiffs, or perhaps he would, [as] he is high profile and well liked.”

Throughout the vote counting process and Lake’s attacks on election officials, Hobbs rejected the charges and urged Arizona to be patient.

“Despite what my election-denying opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected,” Hobbs said Friday. “In fact, they mirror what [political trends] our state has seen in recent elections. We must remain patient and let our election officials do their jobs.”

Polls Miss Again As Voters Mobilize To Protect Elections and Abortion Rights

Polls Miss Again As Voters Mobilize To Protect Elections and Abortion Rights

In 2022’s general election, the most consequential results were not just the defeat of Trump Republicans and continuing reaffirmation of abortion rights. It was what those choices by majorities of voters said about their expectations for American democracy. The electoral system did not sabotage the clear will of voters, but, instead, aided turnout by offering many options to vote, including mail ballots.

There is no single explanation for the still-emerging outcomes in blue and red states. Indeed, some red states saw Trump Republicans whose 2022 candidacies were launched by the U.S. Capitol insurrection win – or at least stay ahead as votes were being counted at the weekend.

But the rejection of Trump-backed candidates, support for core freedoms like abortion rights, record turnouts in key states – lifted by convenient mailed-out ballots, and civil servants’ ability to handle turnout and run an orderly process -- was not what many polls and pundits were forecasting before Election Day.

Indeed, the same outlets that on Veterans Day were reporting that “vote integrity and abortion” shaped the midterms were, for weeks, citing polls that said 2022’s voters mostly cared about the price of gas, food, and inflation. Democracy and freedom were not on the ballot, apparently, until it was discovered they were.

“The polls were telling us that people didn’t care about democracy or abortion. In fact, that’s what they cared about,” said one analyst in a Thursday briefing. “Our interest [is not] in who won this election, but that this country continued to have free and fair elections and that our freedoms continued to be protected… Any other narrative about what happened is going to leave us vulnerable again.”

Election Deniers Rejected

It’s easy to overlook that these outcomes were possible because the nation’s election infrastructure – the multitude of election officials and poll workers, and the technologies they use to verify voters and count ballots – did the job that most Americans have expected over the years. That assumption changed, of course, during the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, when Trump started attacking the accuracy of the system before he was elected, and especially after he was defeated in 2020. Millions of Republicans believed him and still do.

For the past two years, Trump and his allies hoped to create a path for a 2024 comeback by pushing national and state GOP organizations to back candidates for state constitutional offices that had varying degrees of authority to alter the rules surrounding access to a ballot, how votes are counted, and winners are certified. Many of those same candidates also embraced Trump’s belligerent attitude and vowed to revive culture wars – led by banning abortion.

That unofficial Republican Party platform, where many current GOP candidates claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, expressed little reluctance to tilting voting rules for the GOP’s benefit, and assailed many civil rights, became known as “election denialism” in the press and political circles.

The earliest returns on Tuesday night showed election deniers losing key state and federal races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. By midday Thursday, only five new election-denying candidates out of 94 seeking statewide office had been elected, according to the States United Democracy Center, a bipartisan pro-democracy organization that has been monitoring these candidates.

“Election Denial as a platform was a new tactic we saw this year, and the results show that it didn’t work,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action, its advocacy arm. “So far, most of the Election Deniers who have won statewide office were already sitting elected officials in states that voted for Trump.”

“We’re still waiting on results from Arizona, Nevada, and a few other states,” she said. “But Americans have already sent a clear message: They believe in our free and fair elections. And they don’t want Election Deniers to have power over their vote.”

The rebuke was even wider than States United’s tally. In Michigan, voters passed a ballot measure with a slate of election reforms to make voting more accessible and transparent. Nevada voters passed an expansive equal rights clause to their state constitution. Voters in Michigan, like California and Vermont, opted to add abortion rights to their state constitutions. Voters in red Kentucky, like Kansas this past summer, rejected proposed constitutional limits on abortion.

Many pre-election polls missed these pro-democracy and freedom sentiments. That conventional wisdom began to crack on Election Day, when the Associated Press’ Election Day poll of 94,000 voters – a much bigger sample than most pre-election polls – reported “about half of voters say inflation factored significantly in their vote,” but “slightly fewer voters — 44% — say the future of democracy was their primary consideration.”

The economy, of course, always matters. But democracy was on the ballot.

Still, The Election Isn’t Over

Meanwhile, anti-democratic threats from Trump Republicans remain.

While Democrats have preserved their U.S. Senate majority, the U.S. House, which President Joe Biden said on Wednesday may have a slim GOP majority, will have a GOP caucus filled with election deniers, including scores of representatives who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College after the insurrection.

In other battlegrounds, such as Nevada and Arizona, by Saturday evening it appeared that Democrats had defeated or were positioned to defeat most Trump Republicans. Nevada’s incumbent Democratic Senator, Catherine Cortez Masto, was projected by the Associated Press to win her contest, preserving the body’s Democrat’s majority. Another Democrat, Cisco Aguilar, was projected to win the race for secretary of state. In Arizona, Democrat Adrian Fontes was projected to win the secretary of state race.

Masto, Aguilar and Fontes all defeated Trump Republicans who were among their state’s most vocal election deniers. However, some election deniers were winning high office. In Nevada, Joe Lombardo, a Las Vegas area sheriff endorsed by Trump, was elected governor. In Florida, Gov. Rick DeSantis, an authoritarian Republican, was returned to office. In deep red Wyoming, an election denier was elected as secretary of state.

As 2022’s election continues toward the process of officially certifying winners, it will be intriguing to see how the pro-democracy messages sent by voters will play out. In Arizona and Nevada, where the GOP ticket is led by candidates who not only rejected Biden’s victory, but also colluded with rogue county boards to take over counting ballots and declaring winners, some chaos is stewing.

These frays may be sideshows when compared to state and nationwide trends. But Trump and his allies have used local fights over election results and voting technology in a handful of counties to perpetuate his stolen election narrative and to sustain doubts about 2020, and to fundraise.

On Thursday, the Trump Republican-led board of supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona, announced it will meet next week to start a hand count that was blocked by a state court on Monday. The supervisors did not want to use a state-approved voting system, which reflects their distrust of computers that tally votes.

Initially, they wanted to hand count ballots and use those figures as the results – which a non-Trump Republican lawyer told me would let them create whatever totals they wanted. The hand count, which is likely to be stopped by the Arizona Supreme Court, is led by the former lawyer for the Cyber Ninjas, the Florida firm that oversaw the discredited post-2020 review sanctioned by state senators.

Voting rights lawyers are following these antics. In 2020’s post-election period, Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits filled with false claims but lacking in factual evidence – the basis of judicial rulings. He lost every suit except one. But they were a bonanza for creating stolen election propaganda in right-wing media.

In 2022, Trump Republicans claim they are better organized. They have recruited volunteers to gather evidence of malfeasance. If and how those reports are cited in future court filings, or surface in pro-Trump media, remains to be seen.

Most Conspiracists Sidelined

But what hovers over these ongoing developments in the 2022 general election is wide rejection of Trump Republican candidates and other signs that voters were moved by democracy issues and voted to protect elections and abortion rights.

The list of election deniers and rightwing culture warriors who lost bids for state office keeps growing, as tracked by States United Action.

Nationally, at least 42 million voters, a third of the electorate, cast mailed-out ballots, according to The National Vote at Home Institute, a non-profit that assists officials with this option. That usage will set a record for a midterm election and affirms that voters welcome flexible voting options and want to be heard.

Moreover, Election Day voting did not see widespread incidents of threats to election officials, or disputes among election workers and partisan observers, as many election insiders had feared. Nationally, officials administered an orderly process, even though some locales experienced glitches that delayed voters.

What stood out in the final Election Day briefing by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, were singular incidents where individuals with right-wing sympathies bullied or hurled “racial slurs” at voters waiting in line, and problems with voting sites near universities that were impeding students (which isn’t new). Such intolerance, which predates Trump, still lingers in his base.

But mostly, voters opted for candidates that did not want to subvert elections and to protect personal freedom. And today’s voting rules and infrastructure allowed record numbers of voters cast ballots and accurately recorded their choices.

“So far, new Election Denier candidates have only won around five percent of all races for statewide office,” said Thania Sanchez, State United Action’s senior vice president of research and policy development. “And there aren’t enough uncalled races left for that trend to shift much.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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