With more than 40 Trump lawyers singled out for ethics complaints and even more facing charges, legal experts joke MAGA now stands for 'Making Attorneys Get Attorneys' https://www.yahoo.com/news/more-40-trump-lawyers-singled-011206748.html The 65 Project has filed more than 40 ethics complaints against lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Other Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Christina Bobb face legal troubles and charges. The New York Times reported legal experts joke MAGA now stands for "Making Attorneys Get Attorneys." For lawyers working with former President Donald Trump, legal risk is considered an expected part of the job: More than 40 attorneys who worked to overturn the 2020 election on his behalf have been hit with ethics complaints. The New York Times reported legal experts joke MAGA now stands for "Making Attorneys Get Attorneys," based on the reputational risk of working with Trump. "There's no way to adhere to your ethical integrity and keep your job," Kimberly Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor who closely tracked investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, told The New York Times of the dilemma Mr. Trump's lawyers face: "There's just no way to not step into a mess." The 65 Project, a bipartisan effort to hold Trump-allied lawyers accountable for filing 65 lawsuits across swing states in an attempt to overturn legitimate 2020 election results, has filed more than 40 ethics complaints with their respective state bar associations against lawyers who participated in the scheme. Among the complaints, including 17 filed last month, are ethical concerns raised against former Trump lawyers John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, and Jenna Ellis. On Jan 6, 2021, Eastman asked former Vice President Mike Pence's legal counsel to break the law and halt proceedings to certify the 2020 election. He was still pitching ways to overturn the election by the time President Joe Biden took office. Mitchell is currently leading a group of GOP poll workers to challenge results in the midterms. Ellis has been ordered to testify before the Fulton County, Georgia special grand jury investigating whether Trump and his associates tried to interfere in the 2020 elections. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's one-time personal lawyer, has also been named as a target in the Georgia investigation and his licenses to practice law in the District of Columbia and New York have been suspended over his election fraud claims. Another former Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, is under investigation for overseeing an effort to copy sensitive election data and coordinating a breach in Georgia election files. Christina Bobb, a current Trump lawyer, is currently facing legal trouble after she signed a letter attesting that a "diligent search" had been conducted and all material that was in Mar-a-Lago at the time had been returned to the US government, per a court filing. Two months later, the FBI raided Trump's Florida golf club and found 20 boxes worth of new material, including 11 sets that were marked as classified. Michael Cohen, a former Trump lawyer sentenced to three years in prison in part over his role in arranging illegal hush-money payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to prevent her from speaking about her affair with Trump, has warned Trump's current legal team to "lawyer up," citing his own felony charges including tax evasion, campaign-finance violations, and bank fraud. "Ultimately, we want to demonstrate to all the lawyers that the next time that Sidney Powell or Rudy Giuliani calls and says, 'Hey, will you sign your name to this,' they'll say 'no,' because they'll realize that there are professional consequences," Michael Teter, director of the 65 Project, told The New York Times. Read the original article on Business Insider
Fraudulent Document Cited in Supreme Court Bid to Torch Election Law Supporters of the “independent state legislature theory” are quoting fake history. https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...ument-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810 Supporters of a legal challenge to completely upend our electoral system are citing a fraudulent document in their brief to the Supreme Court. It’s an embarrassing error — and it underscores how flimsy their case really is. This fall, the court will hear Moore v. Harper, an audacious bid by Republican legislators in North Carolina to free themselves from their own state constitution’s restrictions on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. The suit also serves as a vehicle for would-be election subverters promoting the so-called “independent state legislature theory” — the notion that state legislators have virtually absolute authority over federal elections — which was used as part of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The North Carolina legislators’ case relies in part on a piece of paper from 1818. But there’s a problem: The document they quote in their brief is a well-known fake. So as the Supreme Court considers whether to blow up our electoral system, it should know the real American history. The story starts at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when an ambitious young South Carolinian named Charles Pinckney submitted a plan for a new government. We don’t know exactly what was in Pinckney’s plan, because his original document has been lost to history. The Convention records, however, reveal that the framers hardly discussed Pinckney’s plan and, at key moments, rejected his views during the debates. Those documents were sealed for decades following ratification. This created a vacuum in the historical record, into which Pinckney strode. In 1818, when the government was gathering records from the Convention for publication, Pinckney submitted a document that, he claimed, represented his original plan. It was uncannily similar to the U.S. Constitution. James Madison, one of the main authors of the Constitution, was “perplexed” when he saw Pinckney’s document. He was “perfectly confident” that it was “not the draft originally presented to the convention by Mr. Pinckney.” Some of Pinckney’s text, Madison observed, was impossibly similar to the final text of the U.S. Constitution, which was painstakingly debated over the course of months. There was no way Pinckney could have anticipated those passages verbatim. In addition, Madison was quick to point out, many provisions were diametrically opposed to Pinckney’s well-known views. Most telling, the draft proposed direct election of federal representatives, whereas Pinckney had loudly insisted that state legislatures choose them. Madison included a detailed refutation of Pinckney’s document along with the rest of his copious notes from the Convention. It was the genteel, 19th-century equivalent of calling BS. We’ll never know for certain why Pinckney concocted this fraud. Many scholars assume he was trying to sell himself to history as the true father of the Constitution. Whatever Pinckney’s motivation, though, nearly every serious historian agrees that the 1818 document is a fake. John Franklin Jameson, an early president of the American Historical Association, observed back in 1903, “The so-called draft has been so utterly discredited that no instructed person will use it as it stands as a basis for constitutional or historical reasoning.” Since then, the document has become, in the words of a modern-day researcher, “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history.” Pinckney’s fraud has, however, proved irresistible to the North Carolina legislators, who cited his 1818 document in their current bid for control over congressional elections. Here’s why. The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution dictates that the “times, places, and manner” of congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” (unless Congress chooses to “make or alter” the rules). The framers understood this authority to be subject to the ordinary checks and balances found in state constitutions — for example, the governor’s veto and state judicial review. We know this, in part, because some framers themselves voted to approve state constitutions circumscribing the legislature’s power over congressional elections. We also know that the framers — Madison chief among them — deeply distrusted state legislatures. The North Carolina legislators, however, would have the Supreme Court believe that, in assigning federal election administration to state legislatures, the framers intended to sweep aside the traditional checks and balances — preventing state courts, the governors and other authorities from policing partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression by the legislature. And they point to Pinckney’s fraudulent document as proof. The plan Pinckney released in 1818 assigned the administration of congressional elections to “each state.” Proponents of the independent state legislature theory argue that, if the framers deliberately changed the chosen election administrator from the “state” to “the legislature thereof,” they must have meant to eliminate other state actors from the process. That argument is premised on a 204-year-old lie. Whatever proposal Pinckney presented to the Convention almost certainly did not contain this provision. As mentioned, Pinckney emphatically opposed popular elections and, after he lost that debate, derided them as the “the greatest blot in the constitution.” His 1818 fraud tells us absolutely nothing about what the framers believed in 1787. Nevertheless, the North Carolina legislators claim they have discovered that our 200-year understanding of the meaning of the Constitution is wrong, that the framers actually intended to give state legislatures nearly unchecked power over congressional elections. They claim that the Supreme Court must throw out all our election rules and reorder our governing practice to effectuate that purpose. This interpretation of the Elections Clause is both unwise and patently ahistorical. It is, nevertheless, surprising that the legislators’ brief to the Supreme Court describes Pinckney’s version of the Elections Clause as the “earliest reference to the regulation of congressional elections,” even though it was clearly drafted 31 years after the curtains fell on the Constitutional Convention and is the product of a well-established falsehood. Debate in the Supreme Court is increasingly littered with bad history. But if you’re going to do originalism, at least use originals. Pinckney’s 1818 fraud simply isn’t one.
Voter Purges May Be Illegal 90 Days Before an Election — Republicans Are Trying Anyway Group backed by former Trump aides seeks to toss thousands 1993 law bars removing voters within 90 days of an election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...cratic-voter-rolls-could-be-illegal#xj4y7vzkg
With all the new laws red states are quietly pushing through , including all kinds of gerrymandering and voter suppression , this is how the 'new America' is going to be made great again.....again. Peter Navarro wants QAnon pusher who held 'rape Melania' sign to be Trump's national security adviser Former White House adviser Peter Navarro has recommended that former President Donald Trump's next national security adviser be a man who once held a "rape Melania" sign at a rally. In his book, titled, "Taking Back Trump's America," Navarro suggests Gov. Ron DeSantis or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for vice president. Under his plan, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro would be Attorney General and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo would take the job of press secretary. He asked Trump to consider right-wing activist Jack Posobiec for the position of National Security Adviser. In 2017, Posobiec reportedly tried to discredit liberal protesters by showing up to an event with a "rape Melania" sign, according to BuzzFeed News. He also pushed the false QAnon "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory that accused Hillary Clinton of running a sex trafficking ring from a restaurant.
Trump peddles conspiracies, stokes fear, as Republicans hope for election turnout boost Former President Donald Trump delivered a dark assessment of the country at a rally North Carolina Republicans hope will boost GOP enthusiasm ahead of key elections. https://www.wral.com/trump-peddles-...ans-hope-for-election-turnout-boost/20489215/
Dan Crenshaw calling out the Trump MAGA wing... Dan Crenshaw escalates his feud with the GOP's far right, calling them dishonest: 'It's just fire and brimstone all of the time' https://www.insider.com/dan-crenshaw-gop-far-right-rank-dishonesty-conspiracy-2022-9 Dan Crenshaw lashed out again at the GOP's far-right wing, saying he was "sick" of their rhetoric. "They don't write any actual legislation, they won't negotiate anything," said the Texas lawmaker. He also rebuked his far-right GOP colleagues for "engaging in rank dishonesty and conspiracy." Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw has escalated his long-standing feud with the far-right wing of his party, calling them out for their "rank dishonesty and conspiracy." During an interview at The Texas Tribune Festival on Friday, Crenshaw hit out at the "woke right" and the "alt-right" — highlighting, in particular, those who support conspiracy theory movements like QAnon. Crenshaw also criticized those who "wear a jersey and just scream at the other side." "They remind me of the far left more than anything," he said. Crenshaw stopped short of naming lawmakers but rebuked these far-right individuals for capitalizing on "manufactured divisions." "If the first words out of their mouths are 'RINO' and 'establishment,' and 'globalist,' you can rest assured they are not very thoughtful, and they are probably about to lie to you," he said. "I mean, really, I'm just sick of it." Crenshaw also rebuked these far-right lawmakers for being "incentivized by extra clicks" on social media and "engaging in rank dishonesty and conspiracy" to get attention. "They don't write any actual legislation, they won't negotiate anything," Crenshaw said. "It's just fire and brimstone all of the time." "We're so engrossed in 'The Jerry Springer Show' and the Kardashian drama that, like, we want it in our politics too, now," he quipped. Crenshaw has made his stance regarding the Freedom Caucus — the GOP's far-right wing, which includes Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert — clear. In December, he called its members "grifters" and "performance artists." "Performance artists are the ones who get all of the attention, the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well. They know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear," Crenshaw said at the time. The feud between Crenshaw and Greene has been especially heated. In January, he got into a spat with her over COVID-19 testing, saying she "might be a Democrat — or just an idiot." He also tangled with her on social media over his stance on the Ukraine war and accused Greene of being a Russian propagandist. In August, he ripped into Greene and his Republican colleagues for suggesting that the FBI should be defunded over its raid of former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. "I'm impressed Democrats finally got us to say, 'Defund the FBI,'" the Texas lawmaker told Axios. "That makes you look unserious, when you start talking like that."
Maggie Haberman SCOOP: Trump Tried to Bully Officials Into Seizing Her Phone Records – And Out Her Sources https://www.mediaite.com/news/maggi...eizing-her-phone-records-and-out-her-sources/ Former President Donald Trump tried to get officials in his administration to seize the phone records of New York Times correspondent and author Maggie Haberman in order to reveal her sources. In yet another scoop from Haberman’s controversial but much-buzzed-about upcoming book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Haberman reveals that Trump targeted Haberman in his tantrums over White House leaks. N.Y. Times reporter Maggie Haberman reports in her book — “Confidence Man,” out Tuesday — that former President Trump had threatened internally to go after her phone records to expose leakers. “Trump, angry about my published stories, would bellow that he wanted administration officials to obtain my phone records and identify my sources,” Haberman writes. “It did not appear that anyone ever acted on it.” Why it matters: News organizations go to great lengths to prevent the government from seeing their communications, in part to protect the identity of sources who help expose what’s really going on. Former Trump official Stephanie Grisham provided some corroboration in a new Politico profile: “If we weren’t trying to track down who wrote the ‘Anonymous’ book,” former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told me, referring to the book titled A Warning by an administration official, “you were trying to track down who talks to Maggie Haberman.” A Trump spokesperson gave Axios a boilerplate statement: “While coastal elites obsess over boring books chock-full of anonymously-sourced mistruths, America is a nation in decline. President Trump is focused on Saving America, and there’s nothing the Fake News can do about it.” Haberman’s book has become a lightning rod, with critics questioning her for holding back damaging and potentially criminal details for the tome instead of reporting them out immediately — or, in the case of Trumpworld, trying to wish it out of relevance. In the political media world, the book has become the source of daily bombshells and bombshellettes of varying intensity. They include the fact that Trump disclosed to Haberman that he had taken sensitive documents from the White House long before that issue became the subject of a Justice Department investigation. Haberman’s book comes out October 4 for those who are too tired to print out and tape together the dozens of excerpts that have been published thus far.
It appears that the Trumpy "poll watchers" are planning on causing complete chaos in the general election. In order to preserve your right as an American citizen to vote, you may need to punch a few of these idiots out to cast your ballot at your local precinct as they physically try to stop you from voting. Election officials brace for confrontational poll watchers https://apnews.com/article/2022-mid...iden-cabinet-c3d31b3b3c8957a51a2cc32e009d59be The situation with the poll watcher had gotten so bad that Anne Risku, the election director in North Carolina’s Wayne County, had to intervene via speakerphone. “You need to back off!” Risku recalled hollering after the woman wedged herself between a voter and the machine where the voter was trying to cast his ballot at a precinct about 60 miles southeast of Raleigh. The man eventually was able to vote, but the incident was one of several Risku cited from the May primary that made her worry about a wave of newly aggressive poll watchers. Many have spent the past two years steeped in lies about the accuracy of the 2020 election. Those fears led the North Carolina State Board of Elections in August to tighten rules governing poll watchers. But the state’s rules review board, appointed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, blocked the new poll watcher regulations in late September, leaving election officials such as Risku without additional tools to control behavior on Election Day, Nov. 8. “It becomes complete babysitting,” Risku said in an interview. “The back and forth for the precinct officials, having somebody constantly on you for every little thing that you do — not because you’re doing it wrong, but because they don’t agree with what you’re doing.” Poll watchers have traditionally been an essential element of electoral transparency, the eyes and ears for the two major political parties who help ensure that the actual mechanics of voting are administered fairly and accurately. But election officials fear that a surge of conspiracy believers are signing up for those positions this year and are being trained by others who have propagated the lie spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was riddled with fraud. In Michigan, groups that have spread falsehoods about that race are recruiting poll watchers. In Nevada, the Republican Party’s nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, denies President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and was a featured speaker at a party poll watcher training. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent conservative lawyer and North Carolina resident, is running a group recruiting poll watchers and workers in eight swing states. Mitchell was on the phone with Trump when the then-president called Georgia’s secretary of state in January 2021 and asked that official to “find” enough votes for Trump to be declared the state’s winner. Chris Harvey, who was Georgia’s election director in 2020 when Trump claimed the election was being stolen from him, recalled how swarms of Trump backers came as self-appointed poll watchers to observe the state’s manual recounts, harassing election workers and disrupting the process. Harvey fears a repeat this year. “The whole tension that we’re expecting to see at polling places is something we’re talking to election officials about, something we’re talking to law enforcement about,” said Harvey, who is advising a group of election officials and law enforcement before November. The laws governing poll watchers vary from state to state. Their role is generally to observe, question any deviations from required procedure and, in some states, lodge formal complaints or provide testimony for objections filed in court. The worries this year are similar to those during the 2020 election, when Trump began railing against mail voting and the Republican National Committee launched its first national operation in decades. It had recently been freed from a consent decree that limited its poll watching operation after it previously was found to have targeted Black and Latino voters. But voting went smoothly that November. Mitchell said her organization, the Election Integrity Network, is just trying to ensure that everyone follows the law. “We are not a threat,” she told The Associated Press during a text message exchange. “Unless you think elections that are conducted according to the rule of law are a threat. We train people to follow the law.” Risku said there were issues with poll watchers from both parties during the primary in May. But of the 13 incidents she reported to the North Carolina board from Wayne County, all involved Republicans. In addition to the poll watcher who had to be ejected, Risku said another Republican poll watcher in her district waited after hours in the parking lot of the Mount Olive Train Depot early voting site until Chief Judge Susan Wiley began carrying boxes of marked ballots to her car. On two occasions, the man tried to follow her back to the elections office in Goldsboro, about a 20-minute drive. Recognizing that the job has become “a scary ordeal” in the last year, Risku said she has stepped up security before November and offered raises to entice precinct officials to stay. She expects many won’t return after this year. The North Carolina GOP chairman, Michael Whatley, said that’s not what the party is teaching its poll watchers. “What we saw in terms of some of the activities that were at play may have been coming from Republicans but were not things that we have been teaching people in our training sessions,” Whatley said. “What we want to do is make sure that we have people that are in the room that are going to be very respectful of the election officials at all times, be very respectful of the voters at all times and, if they see issues, then report them in.” He has declined to allow reporters to attend the training sessions, which he said have trained 7,000 potential poll watchers so far this year. As in many states, poll watchers are only permitted in North Carolina if they have been designated by the major parties. But in Michigan, organizations that register with local election offices also can provide poll watchers. A coalition of groups that have questioned the 2020 election are scrambling to get as many of their members in place as possible in the politically critical state. “The best I can do is put a whole bunch of eyeballs on it to make sure that anything that doesn’t look right gets a further look,” said Sandy Kiesel, executive director of the Michigan Election Integrity Fund and Force, part of a coalition that recruited 5,000 poll watchers for the state’s August primary. Kiesel said several of her coalition’s poll watchers and poll challengers — Michigan law allows one person to observe and another person to formally lodge challenges at precincts — were prevented from observing or escorted out of polling places in August. Michigan election officials are bracing for more confrontations in November. Patrick Colbeck, a former Republican state senator and prominent election conspiracy theorist who is part of Kiesel’s coalition, announced this past week that a comprehensive fall push to scrutinize every aspect of voting would be called “Operation Overwatch.” “They are talking about intimidating people who have the right to vote,” said Barb Byrum, clerk of Michigan’s Ingham County, which includes Lansing, the state capital. In a sign of the importance the state’s Republicans place on poll watchers, the GOP-controlled Legislature last week agreed to let election offices throughout Michigan start processing mailed ballots two days before Election Day — something most states with mail voting allow long before then — but only if they allow poll watchers to observe. The ballots are not actually counted until Election Day. In Texas, a new law allows every candidate to assign up to two poll watchers, raising the potential that observers could pack polling locations, particularly around big cities such as Dallas and Houston where ballots are the longest. According to records from the secretary of state’s office, more than 900 people in Texas already had received poll watching certification in the three weeks after the state opened required training on Sept. 1.