Fogbow

A Pennsylvania court struck down the state’s expansive mail-in voting law as unconstitutional, delivering a temporary win to state Republicans who challenged the law after former president Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting resulted in election fraud.

While the two-year-old law was struck down by a majority of the five-judge panel of the Commonwealth Court, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and the state’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro (D), promised a swift appeal, criticizing the court’s opinion as being “based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning.”

“The administration will immediately appeal this decision to the state Supreme Court and today’s lower court ruling will have no immediate effect on mail-in voting pending a final decision on the appeal,” Wolf said Friday.

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019 with bipartisan support. Previously, Pennsylvania voters could cast absentee ballots if they met certain criteria.

Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’

The publicly available version of the Dominion report, which first surfaced in early December 2020 on the conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit, names on the cover and in metadata as its author Katherine Friess, a volunteer on the Trump post-election legal team.

But the Dominion report was in fact produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller, according to the original version of the document reviewed by the Guardian and a source familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The original version of the Dominion report named Miller - who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.

The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.

It was not clear why Miller’s name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aide’s involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version.

Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RTH10260 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 11:05 am That's some nice journalistic work to uncover the original author(s) of the work.

Washington
CNN
—
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Fox’s Sean Hannity exchanged more than 80 text messages between Election Day 2020 and Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration, communications that show Hannity’s evolution from staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump’s election lies to being “fed up” with the “lunatics” hurting Trump’s cause in the days before January 6.

CNN obtained Meadows’ 2,319 text messages, which he selectively provided in December to the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. While the logs show Meadows communicating with multiple Fox personalities, as well as a number of journalists from other organizations, Hannity stands out with 82 messages. The texts, including dozens of newly disclosed messages, offer a real-time window into how Hannity, a close friend of Trump, was reacting to the election and its aftermath.

In one noteworthy text, Bartiromo messaged Meadows on the morning of November 29, less than an hour before she was set to conduct Trump’s first interview since Election Day. The text included questions she planned to ask Trump.

“Hi the public wants to know he will fight this. They want to hear a path to victory. & he’s in control,” Bartiromo texted at 9:21 a.m. “1Q You’ve said MANY TIMES THIS ELECTION IS RIGGED… And the facts are on your side. Let’s start there. What are the facts? Characterize what took place here. Then I will drill down on the fraud including the statistical impossibilities of Biden magic (federalist). Pls make sure he doesn’t go off on tangents. We want to know he is strong he is a fighter & he will win. This is no longer about him. This is about ????. I will ask him about big tech & media influencing ejection as well Toward end I’ll get to GA runoffs & then vaccines.”

At 10:12 a.m., Trump called into Bartiromo’s show, “Sunday Morning Futures.” Her line of questions mirrored much of what she laid out in the text message.

“Thank you for talking with us in the first interview since Election Day,” Bartiromo said. “Mr President, you’ve said many times that this election was rigged, that there was much fraud. And the facts are on your side. Let’s start there. Please go through the facts. Characterize what took place.”

Behind closed doors in a civic center outside Atlanta, state officials were scouring thousands of mail-in ballots on Dec. 22, 2020, when an unexpected visitor showed up: Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.

Joe Biden had won the electoral college one week earlier, but Meadows’s boss was still baselessly claiming he’d been robbed — and pointing specifically at Georgia.

After Georgia’s deputy secretary of state blocked Meadows from entering the room where officials were matching voter signatures, Meadows struck up a conversation with her office’s chief investigator, Frances Watson, and got her phone number. To Watson’s shock, the next day Trump called.

“Mark asked me to do it, he thinks you’re great,” Trump said, while falsely claiming he had won Georgia “by hundreds of thousands of votes.” Trump, according to audio of the call, added, “Whatever you can do Frances, it’s a great thing, an important thing for the country.”

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 12:48 am It’s really quite amazing to hear convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza explain the theory. It involves hundreds (thousands?) of non-profits across five states, with thousands (tens of thousands?) of paid “mules.” So between the non-profits and the “mules,” we are talking about a hundred thousand people or more in on a multi-state scheme, organized by people “up the totem pole” and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has kept their mouth shut tight for over a year and half.

Really? This is plausible? Have you met humans?

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 12:48 am
Really? This is plausible? Have you met humans?

Frater I*I wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 7:28 pm

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 12:48 am
Really? This is plausible? Have you met humans?

Three people can keep a secret....



As long as two of them are dead....

Resume18 wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 12:16 pm

raison de arizona wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 12:48 am It’s really quite amazing to hear convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza explain the theory. It involves hundreds (thousands?) of non-profits across five states, with thousands (tens of thousands?) of paid “mules.” So between the non-profits and the “mules,” we are talking about a hundred thousand people or more in on a multi-state scheme, organized by people “up the totem pole” and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has kept their mouth shut tight for over a year and half.

Really? This is plausible? Have you met humans?

The felonious campaign funding fraudster figures the consumers of this nonsense are as stupid as he . . . and he's correct.

pipistrelle wrote: ↑Fri May 20, 2022 10:37 pm

Three people can keep a secret....



As long as two of them are dead....

Major cinema chain brings the Big Lie to theaters nationwide
Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby

More than 18 months after the 2020 presidential election, the Big Lie — the discredited claim that Trump won but was the victim of voter fraud — lives on. The Big Lie has staying power because it has proven to be highly adaptable. As various theories, including hacked voting machines, trashed ballots, and widespread voting by dead people, were debunked, new theories emerged in their place.

The latest version of the Big Lie comes from Dinesh D'Souza, a far-right polemicist, in a 90-minute "documentary" called 2000 Mules. D'Souza has a lengthy history of promoting false information and was convicted in 2014 of violating federal election law by making illegal donations. D'Souza was pardoned in 2018 by Trump.

Over the weekend, D'Souza's film began being offered alongside Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in hundreds of theaters across the country. The bulk of the distribution was provided by Cinemark, one of the nation's largest movie theater chains.

Lee Roy Mitchell, who founded Cinemark in 1984, keeps a relatively low profile. But Mitchell is a major Republican donor and a key part of the political network established by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. In 2015, Mitchell co-authored a newspaper column defending Koch's influence on United States politics. More recently, Mitchell has emerged as a significant source of cash for Trump and other promoters of the Big Lie.

NEW: DOJ's investigation into a plan to use "alternate" electors to keep Trump in the White House in 2020 has homed in on lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
Grand jury subpoenas have started going out.
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/25/us/polit ... cheme.html
w/
@ktbenner

@lukebroadwater

Kendra wrote: ↑Wed May 25, 2022 4:15 pm https://twitter.com/alanfeuer/status/15 ... 6262627331

NEW: DOJ's investigation into a plan to use "alternate" electors to keep Trump in the White House in 2020 has homed in on lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
Grand jury subpoenas have started going out.
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/25/us/polit ... cheme.html
w/
@ktbenner

@lukebroadwater

Paywall, I'm out of free articles.

NYT wrote:Intensifying Inquiry Into Alternate Electors Focuses on Trump Lawyers
In recent subpoenas, federal prosecutors investigating alternate slates of pro-Trump electors sought information about Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman and others.

By Alan Feuer, Katie Benner and Luke Broadwater
May 25, 2022 Updated 1:39 p.m. ET

The Justice Department has stepped up its criminal investigation into the creation of alternate slates of pro-Trump electors seeking to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election, with a particular focus on a team of lawyers that worked on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

A federal grand jury in Washington has started issuing subpoenas in recent weeks to people linked to the alternate elector plan, requesting information about several lawyers including Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and one of his chief legal advisers, John Eastman, one of the people said.

The subpoenas also seek information on other pro-Trump lawyers like Jenna Ellis, who worked with Mr. Giuliani, and Kenneth Chesebro, who wrote memos supporting the elector scheme in the weeks after the election.

A top Justice Department official acknowledged in January that prosecutors were trying to determine whether any crimes were committed in the scheme.

It is a federal crime to knowingly submit false statements to a federal agency or agent for an undue end. The alternate elector slates were filed with a handful of government bodies, including the National Archives.

keith wrote: ↑Wed May 25, 2022 7:28 pm Somebody's going down for uttering i tells ya!

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Thu May 26, 2022 1:16 am

Off Topic

I signed up for a free NYT account the very day they went digital, years ago. I must be grandmothered in. I still have full access and have never paid for a subscription. Anyone else do that?

At the NY GOP Gov debate tonight, Rep. Lee Zeldin is asked what role Trump played in contributing to the insurrection: “President Trump told his supporters to go peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol.”

CNN President Chris Licht asked that it be changed to, ‘Trump’s Election Lies.’

Asked about his texts to Meadows & possible involvement in the Trump coup attempt, Mike Lee says "I knew how bad Joe Biden would be as president" but claims he didn't actually try to overturn the election, he just contacted federal & local officials to see if they were trying