Category: Trump Administration

Biden calls passing voting legislation ‘a national imperative’ and castigates voting restrictions based on ‘a big lie’

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PHILADELPHIA — President Biden on Tuesday delivered his most forceful condemnation yet of the wave of voting restrictions proposed in Republican-led states nationwide — efforts the president argued are the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

Biden’s speech was an attempt to inject new life into flagging efforts to pass federal legislation addressing the issue. But while he intensified his explanation of the stakes, his speech did not include a call for the Senate to change the filibuster, which is seen by advocates as the best, and perhaps only, way to usher in the kinds of changes Biden is seeking.

At the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, in a room filled with images of Benjamin Franklin and quotes from Daniel Webster and Theodore Roosevelt, Biden compared the new laws to voter suppression by the Ku Klux Klan and to the Jim Crow-era laws that disenfranchised nearly all voters who were not White and male. He railed against laws that restrict access — calling them “raw and sustained election subversion” — and said that the 2022 midterm elections could highlight the damaging effects of the new laws. Continue reading.

‘I was there’: Reporters sharply rebuke Megyn Kelly for claiming the media exaggerated the insurrection

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Megyn Kelly is under fire after telling a Trump-voting comedian on her podcast that the “media represented” the January 6 attack on the Capitol “as so much worse than it actually was.”

Kelly, who also claimed on Monday it “wasn’t an insurrection,” was not in the Capitol that day. Her guest, who was at the Capitol January 6 described it as, “like, mostly the, the most chill thing ever, just like people have blankets and picnics and families.”

But an actual reporter who was at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection made sure to correct the record. Continue reading.

Biden rips Trump’s ‘big lie’ in voting rights address

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President Biden on Tuesday decried inflammatory and false claims from former President Trump and his allies about the 2020 election and broader efforts to restrict access to the ballot in a major speech on voting rights.

Biden blasted efforts from Trump and others to sow doubt about the election months after it concluded, which have spurred action from GOP-led state legislatures to push new elections laws that would limit absentee voting and make it more difficult for certain groups to vote.

“It’s clear, for those who challenge the results or question the integrity of the election, no other election has ever been held under such scrutiny or such high standards. ‘The big lie’ is just that, a big lie,” Biden said at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Continue reading.

‘Stop lying!’ After quitting GOP, Jenna Ellis throws a fit at Ronna McDaniel by leaking election email

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Jenna Ellis, who fought to overturn the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump, leaked an email on Tuesday to show that the Republican National Committee (RNC) did not take the former president’s election fraud claims seriously.

Earlier this week, Ellis said that she was quitting the Republican Party after GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel blocked her on Twitter. 

During a Tuesday morning appearance on Newsmax, McDaniel was asked about claims that the Republican Party misused $220 million that it had raised in the wake of Trump’s November election loss. Continue reading.

Furious Trump demanded leaker who revealed he fled to his bunker during protests be executed: report

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According to Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender’s bombshell book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, a furious Donald Trump demanded that officials in his government find out who leaked the story that he fled to his bunker during the George Floyd protests in D.C. and wanted them tried for treason and then executed.

As the report notes, Trump, his wife Melania and son Barron were escorted to the bunker — news of which quickly made it to the press, which caused the president to blow up.

Bender reports the former president, “held a tense meeting with top military, law enforcement and West Wing advisers, in which he aired grievances over the leak.” Continue reading.

In a surreal moment, Trump told the truth about his lies at CPAC

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During a speech filled with lies, boasts, and bullying attacks that observers have come to expect, former President Donald Trump offered a rare moment of self-effacing honesty over the weekend to the audience at CPAC.

He brought up the conservative conference’s practice of holding a straw poll to see who attendees favor to be the Republican Party’s next presidential nominee — a contest which other polls suggest he still dominates. But while he was speaking, the poll hadn’t been finished yet, so he telegraphed exactly how he will react no matter the results.

“You have a poll coming out, unfortunately — I want to know what it is,” he said. “Now if it’s bad, I disown — I say it’s fake. If it’s good, I say that’s the most accurate poll perhaps ever.” Continue reading.

Trump getting tougher for Senate GOP to ignore

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Senate Republican leaders have tried to put former President Trump in the rearview mirror, rarely mentioning his name and keeping focused instead on the Democratic agenda, but Trump’s iron grip on the party’s grassroots is making it tougher and tougher to keep ignoring him.

Mainstream Republicans are getting increasingly caught up in the party’s internal battle over Trump’s legacy, with even stalwart conservatives such as Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) getting called out as insufficiently loyal to Trump or “Republicans in name only.”

Trump again showed his lock on the party’s activist base over the weekend by winning the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) straw poll with 70 percent of the vote, crushing the second-place winner, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who came in a distant second with 21 percent. Continue reading.

The Republican Party’s top lawyer called election fraud arguments by Trump’s lawyers a ‘joke’ that could mislead millions

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The Republican Party’s top lawyer warned in November against continuing to push false claims that the presidential election was stolen, calling efforts by some of the former president’s lawyers a “joke” that could mislead millions of people, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel, sought to discourage a Republican Party staffer from posting claims about ballot fraud on RNC accounts, the email shows, as attempts by Donald Trump and his associates to challenge results in a number of states, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, intensified.

“What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” Riemer, a longtime Republican lawyer, wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, on Nov. 28, referring to Trump attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.” Continue reading.

‘Tremendously ill advised’: Legal expert shocked by Sidney Powell’s closing tantrum at sanctions hearing

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Trump-backing attorney Sidney Powell on Monday refused to back down from pushing bogus conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, and said she would file all of her election-related lawsuits over again if given the opportunity.

At the close of a Michigan sanctions hearing that also featured fellow Trump-loving lawyer Lin Wood, Powell issued a defiant defense of her past false claims about the 2020 election, including allegations that Dominion Voting Systems conspired with dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to rig American elections.

“It is the duty of lawyers of the highest tradition of the practice law to raise difficult and even unpopular issues,” Powell said. “The fact that there may have been adverse precedent against us does not change that fact. Were that true, there would not have been a decision called Brown v. Board of Education. We have practiced law with the highest standards. We would file the same complaints again.” Continue reading.

‘I Alone Can Fix It’ book excerpt: Inside Trump’s Election Day and the birth of the ‘big lie’

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At the end of a tumultuous day, the defiant president refused to accept the signs that he was losing the White House contest to Joe Biden. “I won in a landslide and they’re taking it back,” Trump told advisers.

Part one of an excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.” Leonnig and Rucker will discuss this book during a Washington Post Live event on July 20.

Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f—— guy,” Trump told aides.

Around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where campaign manager Bill Stepien and the senior leadership briefed Trump in the conference room. Stepien outlined what to expect that night — when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied and which states would probably have the first projected winners. He explained that because of the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.

Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins. Continue reading.