Category: 2020 Election

Trump’s lie that the election was stolen has cost $519 million (and counting) as taxpayers fund enhanced security, legal fees, property repairs and more

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President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.

The total so far: $519 million.

The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence. Continue reading.

144 Constitutional Lawyers Call Trump’s First Amendment Defense ‘Legally Frivolous’

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Taking aim at a key plank of the former president’s impeachment defense, the lawyers argued that the constitutional protections did not apply to an impeachment proceeding.

WASHINGTON — Claims by former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that his conduct around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is shielded by the First Amendment are “legally frivolous” and should do nothing to stop the Senate from convicting him in his impeachment trial, 144 leading First Amendment lawyers and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum wrote in a letter circulated on Friday.

Taking aim at one of the key planks of Mr. Trump’s defense, the lawyers argued that the constitutional protections do not apply to an impeachment proceeding, were never meant to protect conduct like Mr. Trump’s anyway and would most likely fail to shield him even in a criminal court.

“Although we differ from one another in our politics, disagree on many questions of constitutional law, and take different approaches to understanding the Constitution’s text, history, and context, we all agree that any First Amendment defense raised by President Trump’s attorneys would be legally frivolous,” the group wrote. “In other words, we all agree that the First Amendment does not prevent the Senate from convicting President Trump and disqualifying him from holding future office.” Continue reading.

Trump supporters are still going after Arizona’s election results — here’s what we can learn from the fight

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Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo had heard enough. More than a half-hour into the board’s January 27consideration of a “forensic” audit where two outside firms would assess if its voting system used in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election had been infiltrated and the results altered, the former state senator said that his vote in favor of the audit “was a tough pill to swallow.”

“We had our presidential preference election, not one complaint,” Gallardo said. “We had our primary election in August. Not one complaint. Everyone was happy. We had our general election. No complaint, until a day or two after the general election, when some folks in our community and across this country started looking at the results.”

“They were not happy with the result,” he continued. “That’s quite normal in the world of elections. Folks that are not happy with the results generally do complain. This year, they took it a step further. They continue to spread lies and conspiracies about how our elections are conducted, and now our machines are the target.” Continue reading.

Dominion Voting tells Facebook, Parler and other social media sites to preserve posts for lawsuits

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SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems have asked Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler to preserve posts about the company, even if the material was already removed for spreading misinformation.

The posts need to be kept “because they are relevant to Dominion’s defamation claims relating to false accusations that Dominion rigged the 2020 election,” according to the demand letters from Dominion’s law firm Clare Locke. Dominion sued Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell for more than $1.3 billion each in January, alleging that the lawyers defamed Dominion by saying the machines were used to steal the election from President Donald Trump.

Dominion asked each company to keep posts from slightly differing lists of people. Those included right-wing pundit Dan Bongino, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Powell. It also included news organizations Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax and — in Twitter’s case — Trump. Continue reading.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell Releases Absurd Conspiracy Infomercial

Far-right network OAN aired the video on repeat.

Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and a prominent ally of former President Donald Trump, was suspended from Twitter for promoting election conspiracies. A host on the conservative channel Newsmax recently walked out of an interview as the pillow salesman spouted off lies. Major retailers have begun dropping his product, and lawyers have threatened him with “imminent” defamation suits over his baseless allegations.

But Lindell is still pushing the debunked and dangerous claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, most recently in a two-hour video that he paid far-right channel One America News Network to air for 12 hours straight on Friday. 

The video, called “Absolute Truth” (which was apparently mistakenly uploaded to YouTube as “Absolue Truth”), is a two-hour cavalcade of conspiracies about election fraud featuring delusional claims and discredited guests, such as Rudy Giuliani’s nationally mocked witness Melissa Carone. Lindell careens through baseless allegations with infomercial pitchman energy, interspersed with stock footage — including arms bearing a hammer and sickle to represent Communism. Continue reading.

Smartmatic files $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell

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Voting company Smartmatic on Thursday filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, some of the network’s top hosts, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell for starting a “disinformation campaign” against the company.

Why it matters: This is the second voting company to file a lawsuit against Giuliani and Powell, following Dominion Voting Systems’ two $1.3 billion defamation lawsuits against the pro-Trump lawyers.

  • Dominion warned Fox News last month that lawsuits were imminent. 
  • In comparison to Dominion, which was used in several states, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles County. Continue reading.

Schumer, McConnell reach deal on Senate organizing resolution

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Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have reached a deal on the organizing resolution for running a 50-50 Senate.

“I am happy to report … that the leadership of both parties have finalized the organizing resolution for the Senate,” Schumer announced from the Senate floor.

“We will pass the resolution through the Senate today, which means that committees can promptly set up and get to work with Democrats holding the gavels,” Schumer added. Continue reading.

Many of my fellow politicians won’t tell voters the truth. The result was Jan. 6.

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Telling the public only what it wants to hear is no way to keep democracy going

In the fall of 2013, in the middle of what was at the time the second-longest government shutdown in American history, Republican leaders in Congress kept asking each other one question: “How did we end up here?” That is also the question I have had in recent weeks, especially as I witnessed the violent attack on our Capitol and our democracy on Jan. 6.

The answer is the same in both cases: an unwillingness to speak truth to power. In businesses, employees speak truth to power when they deliver unwelcome facts to their bosses. In government, appointed officials do that when they tell elected leaders something they don’t want to hear. But in a democracy, the people are the ultimate source of power. Our elected officials work for us, and they fail us when they decline to tell us truths that we, the people, don’t want to hear. Even worse, they fail us when they set up false expectations we desperately want to believe.

Back in 2013, the expectation was that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives could force the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass — and compel President Barack Obama to sign — a repeal of his signature health-care initiative. This false narrative started with a few outside groups like Heritage Action and Tea Party Express arguing that the barrier to repealing Obamacare wasn’t the president; it was elected Republicans who were unwilling to fight hard enough. These groups purposely  ramped up expectations, overpromising, even knowing that the end result would under-deliver. Continue reading.

After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote

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The presidential election results are settled. But the battle over new voting rules, especially for mail-in ballots, has just begun.

WASHINGTON — In Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, some leading Republicans stood up in November to make what, in any other year, would be an unremarkable statement: The race is over. And we lost, fair and square.

But that was then. Now, in statehouses nationwide, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining them.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, state legislators have filed 106 bills to tighten election rules, generally making it harder to cast a ballot — triple the number at this time last year. In short, Republicans who for more than a decade have used wildly inflated allegations of voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote, are now doing so again, this time seizing on Mr. Trump’s thoroughly debunked charges of a stolen election to push back at Democratic-leaning voters who flocked to mail-in ballots last year. Continue reading.