“Trump Again Vows Mass Deportations and Won’t Rule Out Political Violence”

election subversion risk

NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump told Time magazine in an interview published Tuesday morning that if elected in November, he would deploy the U.S. military to detain and deport migrants and permit states to decide whether to prosecute those who violate abortion bans, while hedging on the possibility of political violence after the 2024 election….

Mr. Trump also brushed aside questions about political violence in November by suggesting that his victory was inevitable. But when pressed about what might happen should he again lose the election, he did not dismiss the possibility outright and did not proactively say anything to deter supporters from again resorting to it.

“I think we’re going to win,” he said. “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

A Biden campaign spokesman, James Singer, argued that Mr. Trump’s stated plans were unconstitutional and anti-democratic. “Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power,” Mr. Singer said in a statement.

Mr. Trump and his allies have already laid the groundwork to advance their ideological agenda, and many of their preparations have been reported by The New York Times and other outlets.

Still the Time interview, which includes transcripts, offered a rare chance to hear Mr. Trump describe his policy views in his own words….

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“Inside the far-right plan to use civil rights law to disrupt the 2024 election”

chicanery, fraudulent fraud squad

LAT:

At a diner just off the freeway north of Sacramento, a mostly white crowd listened intently as it learned how to “save America” by leaning on the same laws that enshrined the rights of Black voters 60 years ago.

Over mugs of coffee and plates of pot roast smothered in gravy, attendees in MAGA and tea party gear took notes about the landmark Voting Rights Act and studied the U.S. Constitution. They peppered self-proclaimed “election integrity” activist Marly Hornik with questions about how to become skilled citizen observers monitoring California poll workers.

The nearly 90 people gathered in the diner in February were there to understand how they can do their part in a plan to sue California to block certification of the 2024 election results unless the state can prove that ballots were cast only by people eligible to vote.

If any votes are found to be ineligible, Hornik explained, then all voters are being disenfranchised — just like those decades ago who couldn’t vote because of their race.

“If we think our right of suffrage … has been denied or diluted, we have to stop that immediately. We have to stop it right in its tracks,” said Hornik, co-founder of a group called United Sovereign Americans, which is led by a man who helped push former President Trump’s baseless challenges to Joe Biden’s election in 2020.

The two-hour meeting at the Northern California diner — one of several similar presentations that have taken place across the country in recent months — is part of the group’s plan to file lawsuits in multiple states alleging voters’ civil rights are violated by errors on the voter rolls. The goal is to prevent states from certifying federal elections in 2024 until substantial changes are made to election processes.

What United Sovereign Americans has planned is a legal long shot. But election experts worry that if even one sympathetic judge rules in their favor, it could sow doubts about the integrity of a presidential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump.

“Sometimes the whole point is to whip up enough smoke that it seems like a fire,” said Justin Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general who specializes in voting rights.

The group’s legal arguments rely on faulty interpretations of federal election law and are likely to fail in court, according to Levitt and other experts who believe the group’s evidence ofvoter registration fraud is overstated and inaccurate.

United Sovereign Americans is part of a cottage industry of far-right election deniers that has sown disinformation since Trump lost his reelection bid. The group aims to scrutinize elections with a legal strategy that can “throw massive amounts of sand in their gears,” Hornik said during a February presentation in Orange County.

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“Trump: ‘Marco has this residency problem.'”

ballot access

Marc Caputo for The Bulwark:

COULD IT WORK? Probably. Rubio would have to establish residency or “inhabitance” out of state if he wants a shot on Trump’s ticket. He’s willing to do that, according to those familiar with his thinking, just as Dick Cheney did in 2000 when he moved in July of that year from Texas to Wyoming so that he could join then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s ticket. A trio of Texas residents sued in federal court, but Bush-Cheney prevailed.

“It is very hard for anyone to be able to sue and challenge the electors’ votes before the fact, because the candidate could always establish inhabitancy before the electors vote. And after they vote, it is really a matter for Congress to determine,” said Derek T. Muller, a University of Notre Dame law professor and an expert in election law.

Another expert in election law, Ohio State University’s Edward B. Foley, agreed that Congress would ultimately decide the issue of Rubio’s inhabitancy under the Electoral Count Reform Act, which made it harder to successfully object to electoral votes.

“It’s up to Congress to sustain the objection and it takes a majority vote in both chambers to sustain one,” Foley said. “So you tell me the political likelihood that the Senate would disqualify Rubio from being vice president when he was a senator before he ran for vice president. I don’t think this is really enforceable in court. I think this is enforceable only in Congress.”

Foley said he could nevertheless see officials in states like Colorado, which unsuccessfully attempted to block Trump from the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause, try to challenge a Trump-Rubio ticket under the Twelfth Amendment….

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“A Mysterious Flier, a Tiny Charity and a Disinformation Campaign at the Border”

fraudulent fraud squad

NYT:

The two men rang the bell at the Resource Center Matamoros, a migrant aid group in the Mexican border city, and, speaking in broken Spanish, said they were looking for volunteer work.

Security footage shared with The New York Times shows the pair standing on the sidewalk in shorts and flip flops as they talked via speakerphone with Gaby Zavala, the center’s founder. After about half an hour, they left.

Ms. Zavala didn’t know it yet, but the men were not volunteers. They were provocateurs building an online following with hidden camera exposés and ambushes that claim to uncover abuse and election fraud in the American immigration system.

Ms. Zavala realized something was off a few hours later, when the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, uploaded images of a flier with her group’s logo to social media, thrusting her organization into the center of a political firestorm.

The flier, written in Spanish and purportedly found hanging in portable toilets in the migrant camp across the street from the center, carried an explosive message to would-be immigrants: “reminder to vote for president Biden when you are in the united states. We need four more years of his administration in order to remain open.”

For many on the right, it was a smoking gun, confirming debunked theories about the left’s schemes to urge immigrants to vote illegally for Democrats. The post, uploaded on April 15, quickly racked up more than nine million views on X and was shared by multiple elected officials, including Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina and former presidential candidate.

The next morning, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, held up an oversized printout of the flier in a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing. “I would call it treason,” Ms. Greene said to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was sitting before the committee.

Ms. Zavala calls the document a crude fake, and part of a plot to propel false, anti-immigration narratives in an election year. The phone number listed on the flier is out of date, she noted. Some of the language is lifted directly from her group’s English language website, but appears to be translated by software.

But perhaps the strongest evidence, she said, was the presence of Anthony and Joshua Rubin, brothers from Long Island known online as the Muckrakers, at the building earlier that same day, trying to gain access under false pretenses.

Mr. Secretary, the oversight project released a bombshell report last night on your connection to the dark money NGO industrial complex of illegal immigration. I know you saw this from one of my colleagues just earlier. They found flyers throughout the Resource Center Matamoros refugee camp in Mexico telling illegal aliens, “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” Eyewitnesses saw the flyers also being handed out to migrants who were using R.C.M. for assistance in coming to the United States. This is corruption at the deepest level. As a matter of fact, I would call it treason.

“I would never encourage immigrants to vote, because they can’t,” said Ms. Zavala, 41, who started the organization in 2019 and manages it from Texas. No one contacted her to verify the document before it was posted, she said, and she has since received some 50 death threats and racist emails. “I feel violated.”

In an interview with The Times, Anthony Rubin acknowledged that he and his brother falsely identified themselves as volunteers that day. But he said they did not plant the flier. Mike Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation that first posted the document on X, said he stood behind their claims.

“Nothing that we put online has been proven in the least bit inaccurate,” he said.

The Oversight Project is something of a departure for the once-wonkish think tank. The project’s website describes its mission as “innovative investigations utilizing cutting-edge resources and contacts” in order to drive “accountability of the destructive work of the radical, progressive Left.” Mr. Howell, who calls himself a “deportation scientist” on X, said his group had worked closely with the Rubin brothers before….

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