Category: 2020 Election

How Geraldo Rivera, the sensationalist showman of ’80s TV, became the voice of election reason on Fox News

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The investigative reporter-turned-freeform celebrity is now a seasoned pundit delivering a firm message to Trump fans about the 2020 race: “It’s over.”

Geraldo Rivera thought he “would never work again” after hosting one of the highest-watched busts of all time in 1986, when he cracked open a vault belonging to gangster Al Capone on live television and it turned out to be empty.

The famously mustachioed Rivera has had several other acts since then. He hosted a tabloid talk show in the late 1980s and 1990s, where he got decked in the face by a chair during a scuffle involving white supremacists. He attempted to resurrect his once-serious journalism career by joining Fox News in 2001 as a war correspondent but was essentially booted out of Iraq in 2003 for divulging troop positions. He bravely tried the cha-cha on ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” in 2016 — and was the first to be eliminated.

But now in 2020, at 77, Rivera might be playing the most important — and unexpected — role of his life, as a contrarian truth teller who has been pleading with President Trump, whom he considers a friend, and the president’s most passionate supporters to accept that their side lost the election. Continue reading.

President Trump’s use of the authoritarian playbook will have lasting consequence

Six weeks after the U.S. election, President Donald Trump had still not accepted defeat. This behavior is not typical in mature democracies. And it’s reminiscent of countries with what political scientists call “hybrid regimes” – nations that have elements of democracy but in practice are not democracies. 

For us – politics scholars studying Latin America and the former Soviet Union – Trump’s resistance to election results underscores the fragility of democratic institutions when confronted with authoritarian practices. These include deligitimizing election results, interfering with judicial independence and attacking independent media and opposition.

Trump is part of a global trend in authoritarianism. The United States can learn a great deal from other countries where democracies fell victim to the authoritarian playbook.  Continue reading.

Trump in denial: Report says he told aides he wouldn’t leave the White House on Inauguration Day

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An extensive CNN report Wednesday revealed that President Donald Trump has thought about staging a sit-in and refusing to leave the White House during President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

In most presidencies, the handoff is part of a peaceful transfer of power where the outgoing president attends the day’s festivities while a SWAT-team-like moving crew helps White House staff pack everything of the first families and brings in the incoming president’s things, so it feels like home.

Trump, who continues to maintain he won the 2020 election, has told aides that he will not leave the White House on January 20. Continue reading.

Turns out Trump is running a nice grift off the Georgia Senate runoffs

It shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise that President Trump’s post-election fundraising scheme is, shall we say, not entirely on the level. This is, after all, a man who has spent his entire public career both in and out of politics running various moneymaking grifts and enacting complicated financial maneuversdesigned to benefit himself, and no one else. 

For a time, that blatant enterprise of self-enrichment was tolerated — even encouraged — by conservatives eager to get in good with the president and his equally avaricious brood. But with his administration on its way out the door, and his political future uncertain, Trump’s post-election fundraising efforts have started rubbing some members of his party the wrong way. Because, as it turns out — surprise surprise! — even Trump’s calls for donations to Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the upcoming crucial Georgia runoff races are less about funding the candidates directly than they are about padding the coffers of his own personal political action committee.

According to multiple sources who spoke with Politico, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has officially queried both the White House and the Republican National Committee, after the fine print on the president’s fundraising pitches for the Georgia races revealed that 75% of the money donated through Trump’s solicitation would actually go to his newly launched Save America PAC. The remaining 25% would go to the RNC. None of the money goes to the candidates directly. Continue reading.

Texas Outfit Linked To Assault Over ‘Voter Fraud’ Promotes Conspiracies And Violence

A former police captain was arrested and charged with assaulting an air conditioner repairman whom he falsely suspected of carrying 750,000 fraudulent ballots in his truck. The organization allegedly paying the former cop to prove supposed election fraud is led by a QAnon conspiracy theorist, and its Facebook page is filled with conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office stated on December 15 that it had arrested and charged former Houston Police Capt. Mark Anthony Aguirre “with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon, a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.” The office stated:

According to Aguirre, he had been conducting surveillance on the victim for four days under a theory the victim was the mastermind of a giant fraud, and there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck he was driving. Instead, the victim turned out to be an innocent and ordinary air conditioner repairman.
Aguirre ran his SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out, according to the document. When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre, pointed a handgun at the technician, forced him to the ground and put his knee on the man’s back – an image captured on the body-worn camera of a police officer.
Aguirre directed police to a parking lot nearby where another suspect, who has not been identified, took the truck. There were no ballots in the truck. It was filled with air conditioning parts and tools.

According to the district attorney’s office, Aguirre was working for the Liberty Center for God and Country and “never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 … with $211,400 of that amount being deposited into his account the day after the incident.” Continue reading.

‘These are not crazy people’: GOP defends its voter-fraud push, ignoring obvious perils

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The electoral college this week officially voted to make Joe Biden the next president of the United States. Multiple GOP senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made statements recognizing Biden’s status as such. But on Wednesday, a GOP-led Senate committee pressed forward with a hearing on supposed irregularities in the election that multiple Republicans and witnesses attached to actual fraud.

And the message, repeatedly, was: Why not?

“This hearing is not dangerous,” Senate Homeland Security Committee and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in defending the proceedings. Johnson added: “I said its goal was to, quote, ‘resolve suspicions with full transparency and public awareness.’ What’s wrong with that?” Continue reading.

Senate GOP has accepted Biden’s win but continues to push Trump’s baseless fraud claims

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Senate Republicans may be acknowledging President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump, but the politically charged fight over Trump’s fallacious claims about voter fraud rages on — and threatens to overshadow legitimate efforts to safeguard future elections.

A Wednesday hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee became a forum for Republicans, led by its departing chairman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), to re-air Trump’s baseless case against the election results in swing states as the president cheered them on from a distance. Complaining that courts threw out Trump’s election lawsuits on mere “technicalities,” GOP senators and aligned witnesses warned that until their concerns were addressed, public trust in the security of the election process would not be restored.

There is no evidence of significant or widespread voter fraud, as the president and his allies continue to insist. Trump’s own attorney general has made that clear while the courts overwhelmingly have dismissed his campaign’s unprecedented effort to overturn Biden’s victory. Across more than 50 cases, at least 88 judges — including 39 appointed or nominated by Republicans — have turned down Trump’s legal challenges in procedural rulings or decisions on their merits. Continue reading.

‘We have to stop this!’: Ex-Trump official slams Republicans to their faces over election misinformation

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Republican Christopher Krebs, who formerly headed a cybersecurity agency at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was among the witnesses who testified on Wednesday during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing that addressed alleged “irregularities” in the 2020 election. During his testimony, Krebs only made it clear to Republican senators that he saw no evidence of the type of widespread voter fraud that President Donald Trump and his allies have been alleging — he also called out the extremists who have been threatening election officials.

Krebs discussed the voting equipment that was used in the election, emphasizing that there was no reason to believe that such equipment swung votes to President-elect Joe Biden as some Trump allies have been claiming.

“I’m seeing these reports that are factually inaccurate continue to be promoted,” Krebs told Sen. Ron Johnson and other members of the Homeland Security Committee. “That’s what rumor control is all about. That’s what I’m continuing to do today based on my experience and understanding in how these systems work. We have to stop this! It’s undermining confidence in democracy.” Continue reading.

Rand Paul gets hammered after making bogus claim that the election ‘was stolen’

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During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and fellow Republican Christopher Krebs — who formerly led a cybersecurity office at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — expressed very different views on the security of the 2020 presidential election. Krebs, during his testimony, emphasized that the election was quite secure, while Paul echoed the baseless claims of widespread voter fraud that President Donald Trump’s campaign and legal team have been promoting. And Paul’s comments are getting a lot of reactions on Twitter.

Paul told Krebs and senators on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “If you’re saying that it’s the safest election based on no dead people voted…. no people broke the absentee rules, I think that’s false. And I think that’s what’s upset a lot of people on our side — is that they’re taking your statement to mean, ‘Oh well, there was no problems in the elections.’ I don’t think that you’ve examined any of the problems that we’ve heard here.”

Paul insisted, “The fraud happened. The election, in many ways, was stolen.” Continue reading.