Category: 2020 Election

‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor

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President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate. Continue reading.

GOP Rep. Gohmert Openly Calls For Violence In The Streets After Losing In Court

At this point, Republicans might as well just open fire on Fort Sumter and be done with it. That’s the only way they could show more evidence of their “patriotism” and love for the Constitution. The only question is: Who’s going to be first? The whole right-of-center portion of the American political spectrum has fallen into a system where the selective pressure is all about being the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most willing to trample all the meaning of the American system into the mud while waving the symbols of that system overhead. It’s not a race to the bottom, because there is no bottom. But there is a point of no return, and Republicans have gone way, way past that point.

On Saturday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz set out to prove just that when he arranged a whole legion of Republican senators who intend to “reject the electors” from certain states. “Certain,” in this case, means those states that didn’t vote for Donald Trump. But Cruz’s play to regain some of that sweet Traitor Energy that’s been going to Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley isn’t even the slimiest play of the day.

Because after losing in court, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is flat out calling for people to commit violence to overthrow democracy. Continue reading.

George Conway only needed 11 words to sum up Pence’s embrace of GOP scheme to overturn the election

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More Republicans embraced the scheme by far-right supporters of Donald Trump to ignore the results of the 2020 election.

Trump lost the Electoral College and popular vote to President-elect Joe Biden, but some Republicans have joined the president in refusing to accept the fact that voter reject the GOP presidential ticket.

On Saturday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and ten additional GOP senators received harsh criticism after announcing they would go along with the effort to reject the will of the voters. Continue reading.

Judge dismisses Gohmert lawsuit seeking to stymie Biden electoral college count

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A federal judge in Texas has dismissed a long-shot lawsuit by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) that sought to overturn the presidential election, saying neither the congressman nor his allies have legal standing to pursue the case.

The judge’s Friday night ruling tosses out what many election law experts considered a far-fetched theory to challenge the formal mechanism by which President-elect Joe Biden will be affirmed as the winner of the race for president.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle issued an order dismissing the case because, he found, neither Gohmert nor his fellow plaintiffs have a sufficient legal stake in the process to justify the lawsuit. Kernodle was nominated to the federal bench by President Trump. Continue reading.

Trumpist Lawyer Lin Wood Accused Of Violent, Delusional Behavior — By His Ex-Partners

Far-right attorney L. Lin Wood has been in the headlines a great deal in recent weeks because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and his unhinged tweets, including a December 1 post in which he predicted that the United States is “headed to civil war” and called for President Donald Trump to “declare martial law.” But according to some former law partners, Wood’s behavior was unhinged long before the election.

The ex-partners are Nicole Wade, Jonathan Grunberg and Taylor Wilson, who left the firm L. Lin Wood, P.C. and formed their own firm, Wade, Grunberg & Wilson, LLC.

Law & Crime reporter Adam Klasfeld explains, “The former partners claimed that their relationship with Wood spanning roughly half a decade started deteriorating late last year as Wood began to exhibit ‘erratic, hostile, abusive and threatening’ behavior.” Continue reading.

Republican congressman claims Trump’s base is turning against him, calls fundraising from election a scam

Kinzinger accused politicians of raising money by giving Trump supporters false hope

A Republican member of Congress excoriated President Donald Trump’s fundraising in hopes of overturning the results of the election, and claimed that he’s heard from many in the Republican base that they’re turning against the president.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois spoke to Dana Bash on CNN on Tuesday and said that some Republican politicians are privately distancing themselves from the president.

“I think they’re starting to, I’ll tell you the base is starting to turn,” Kinzinger claimed. Continue reading.

Pence seeks rejection of lawsuit that aimed to expand his power to overturn the election

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Vice President Pence asked a judge late Thursday to reject a lawsuit that aims to expand his power to use a congressional ceremony to overturn the presidential election, arguing that he is not the right person to sue over the issue.

The filing will come as a disappointment to supporters of President Trump, who hoped that Pence would attempt to reject some of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college votes and recognize votes for Trump instead when Congress meets next week to certify the November election.

The filing came in response to a lawsuit from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and a number of Republicans in Arizona, who argued that an 1887 law that governs how Congress certifies presidential elections is unconstitutional. The suit argues that the Constitution gives the vice president, in his role as president of the Senate, sole discretion to determine whether electors put forward by the states are valid. Continue reading.

Poll: Striking Number Of Americans Believe Baseless Conspiracy Theories

A scary percentage of our neighbors believe in next-level crazy conspiracy theories.

According to a new NPR/Ipsos poll, forty percent of Americans believe the wild claim that Covid-19 was produced in a Chinese lab, despite science and evidence disproving this. One-third of people believe that election fraud is the reason that President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 election, again with no proof. 

Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos, told NPR that “increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact.” Continue reading.

Newsmax issues sweeping ‘clarification’ debunking its own coverage of election misinformation

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Online and on the air, the network said it ‘would like to clarify its news coverage and note it has not reported as true certain claims made about’ two election technology companies.

The conservative news channel Newsmax joined its much larger competitor, Fox News Media, in attempting to “clarify” inaccurate comments that have been made on the network about election technology company Smartmatic.

Newsmax, which is attempting to outflank Fox News from the political right, posted a notice on its website Sunday night and then had a host read the full two-minute statement on the air Monday. 

The clarification came after Smartmatic sent legal demand letters to Newsmax, Fox News Media and the much smaller One America News (OAN) demanding that they correct inaccuracies and innuendos in their coverage of the presidential election and any role Smartmatic may have played in the voting process. Continue reading.

The psychology of fairness: Why some Americans don’t believe the election results

The electoral votes have confirmed Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election. The presidential electors gave Biden 306 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 232 votes. Biden also recorded a solid lead of over 7 million in the popular vote.

Nonetheless, results from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist surveyfound that approximately three-quarters of Republicans did not trust the election results. Corroborating this finding, a separate study of 24,000 Americans found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans lacked confidence in the fairness of the election and over 80% feared fraud, inaccuracy, bias and illegality. In addition, nearly 60 lawsuits filed by Trump claiming various forms of election fraud have been dismissed, including two evaluated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course, doubting the fairness of a disappointing decision is not a Republican phenomenon – it’s a human one. Continue reading.