Colorado is asking a federal judge in Denver to reject the U.S. Justice Department’s statement of interest in the case of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. In its filing, the state writes that the DOJ intervention has no legitimate basis and is a “grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser submitted the filing Tuesday in response to the DOJ’s statement of interest.
“The United States cites not a single fact to support its baseless allegations that there are any reasonable concerns about Ms. Peters’ prosecution or sentence, or that the prosecution was politically motivated,” writes Weiser.
In October Peters was sentenced to nine years incarceration tied to her efforts to help a man gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s Dominion voting machines in 2021. She and others were hunting for evidence that the machines had manipulated votes, something their efforts failed to find.
The Justice Department said it plans to evaluate the state prosecution of Peters, citing an executive order from President Trump titled “Ending the Weaponization of The Federal Government.” It will focus on whether the case was “oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.”
Peters, who is currently incarcerated at the Larimer County jail, is asking the federal court to release her on bond while she appeals her state case. In the Tuesday filing, Weiser said Peters was denied bail because at trial she “demonstrated repeatedly that she believed she was above the law.”…
Category Archives: election subversion risk
“Can We Save American Democracy?”
March 26 online event at the Ash Center (Harvard):
In a recent article, Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, predicts that “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.” In this online event, two leaders of national pro-democracy organizations will explain what they are doing to prove him wrong. Maya Wiley, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Virginia Kase Solomón, President and CEO of Common Cause, will join Levitsky in a discussion about what the strategies of pro-democracy movements are in this moment, whether they will be enough, and what else can be done. Archon Fung, Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, will moderate.
“U.S. agency has stopped supporting states on election security, official confirms”
The federal government has halted election security activities and ended funding for the system that alerts state officials of election security threats across state lines, a representative of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told state election officials last week.
The March 3 email, obtained exclusively by Votebeat, confirmed for secretaries of state and state election directors what they had read in news reports and noticed happening in practice: that President Donald Trump’s administration has suspended or dismantled federal support for election security, at least for now.
The administration stopped funding the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or EI-ISAC, which alerts state officials of active election threats in other states, because it “no longer supports Department priorities,” CISA’s acting chief external affairs officer, Erin Buechel Wieczorek, wrote in the email. CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
CISA has also taken “appropriate actions” against employees who under the Biden administration had helped states monitor false information about elections posted on social media, Wieczorek wrote, adding that those actions were “ongoing.”
The message went to leaders at the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State.
A spokesperson for CISA declined to comment further, or to confirm the number of employees fired. In initial cuts, in line with the administration’s goal of reducing the size of the federal government, about 130 CISA employees were terminated, according to press reports.
“Lawyers Plan to Sue Federal Government on Behalf of Jan. 6 Rioters”
A team of lawyers is preparing to sue the federal government on behalf of hundreds of people pardoned by President Trump for their role in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, claiming that the rioters were mistreated by agencies like the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons.
The lawyers leading the effort include Mark McCloskey, who rose to prominence five years ago after he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at social justice protesters outside his home in St. Louis, and Peter Ticktin, a former classmate and longtime ally of Mr. Trump.
Even before Mr. Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people prosecuted in connection with Jan. 6, many defendants had been itching to seek damages from the federal government. The president’s sweeping reprieves have only emboldened them in their efforts to claim they are the victims, not the perpetrators, of the attack.
Any attempt to sue the federal government over Jan. 6 could face an uphill climb in court, although in this instance the lawyers could be aided by the government itself.
“The November Election That Still Hasn’t Been Certified; North Carolinians voted in a state-supreme-court election four months ago. What’s going on?”
David Graham for The Atlantic:
Yesterday marked four months since Election Day, but North Carolinians somehow still don’t know who will fill a key seat on the state supreme court.
The problem is not that no one knows who won. Justice Allison Riggs, an incumbent Democrat, won by a tiny margin—just 734 votes out of 5,723,987. That tally has been confirmed by two recounts. But certification is paused while Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin, a judge on the state court of appeals, asks courts to throw out roughly 60,000 votes and put him on the state’s highest court.
The votes that Griffin has challenged fall into three groups. Most are from North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license or Social Security numbers. Although this is now required by law, these voters registered using old forms that did not require either; the state never asked these voters to reregister. The second set belongs to overseas residents who have never lived in the state, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad; state law entitles them to vote in-state. A third consists of overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn’t submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required.
Griffin doesn’t allege that these voters did anything wrong; in fact, as ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, Griffin himself twice voted under the overseas-voting law while deployed in the National Guard. But now he argues that their votes should be junked for administrative and clerical discrepancies that were not their fault, and he did not express any concerns about these votes until after he appeared to have lost the race.
“What Judge Griffin is asking is for the courts to change the rules of the election after the election has already happened, and for the courts to allow him to hand-select the votes that shouldn’t count, so that he can be declared the winner,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel who works on voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “That is absolutely unprecedented.”…
The decision is now essentially up to Republican jurists. The appeals court has a 12–3 GOP majority, though Griffin is recused from the case. Riggs has also asked that Judge Tom Murry be recused, because Murry contributed $5,000 to Griffin’s legal fund in this case, but Griffin has indicated that he’ll oppose the request. Once the appeals court rules, the case may go to the supreme court, where the GOP has a 5–2 majority (and a recent history of intense partisan acrimony); Riggs, too, is recused from this case. Griffin appears to be asking his own party members to hand him a seat—an impression not helped if Murry stays on the case. (Griffin has declined to comment while the case is in court.)
All of this may be an affront to North Carolinians, but voting experts told me that the outcome matters for America as a whole as well. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA who has contributed to The Atlantic, told me it could end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. “Many of us were worried about subverted election outcomes at the presidential level starting in 2020,” he wrote in an email. “But this is the first serious risk at a lower level. Raising these kinds of issues after the election to disenfranchise voters and flip election outcomes risks actual stolen elections potentially blessed by a state supreme court.”…
“Trump Dismantles Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations”
The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite ongoing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said.
The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said.
The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year’s election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.
Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.
Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, warned in a letter to President Trump that the cuts were comparable to shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ahead of hurricane season.
“This decision undermines Arizona’s election security,” he wrote, “at a time when our enemies around the world are using online tools to push their agendas and ideologies into our very homes.”
Mr. Trump and other officials have said that in the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the government had infringed on free speech rights of Americans. Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at D.H.S., said that the cybersecurity agency “is undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” and that while that is continuing, personnel who had worked on those issues “have been placed on administrative leave.”
Acting on one of Mr. Trump’s first executive orders, Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 5 shut down a Federal Bureau of Investigation task force that had been formed after Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election and reassigned several dozen officials and agents who had been involved, the officials said.
CISA has also forced out more than a dozen officials who had been monitoring foreign influence operations targeting the nation’s elections. They were among the more than 130 positions eliminated in total at the agency, according to a department statement…..
“US Homeland Security says election security personnel placed on leave”
The Department of Homeland Security, as part of an evaluation of its election security mission, said on Tuesday that personnel focused on misinformation, disinformation and foreign influence operations aimed at U.S. elections have been placed on administrative leave.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is “undertaking an evaluation of how it has executed its election security mission with a particular focus on any work related to mis, dis and malinformation,” agency spokesperson Rhonda Lawson said in a statement in response to a Reuters query….
MORE from NPR.
“Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters Now Runs Office That Investigated Them”
NYT:
Ed Martin was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posting on social media that the violent riot that day was marked by “faith and joy.”
He has often echoed President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, declaring on the night before the Capitol was stormed that “true Americans” should work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.”
He has spent the past four years raising money for — and in some cases defending — people charged with joining the mob. And when the House committee that investigated Jan. 6 sent him a subpoena, he never complied, risking criminal charges.
Now, Mr. Martin, 54, has been tapped by Mr. Trump to oversee the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington where he has been put in charge of dismantling the office’s signature project: the sprawling investigation of Jan. 6 that he has energetically opposed.
While his role, for now, is temporary — Mr. Trump has not yet chosen a full-time candidate — Mr. Martin is unlike anyone else who has run the agency that has taken the lead in charging more than 1,500 people in connection with the Capitol attack.
In his long legal career, he has never been a prosecutor, spending more time as a political operative and radio host. Moreover, he is saddled by an array of potential conflicts arising from his efforts to exonerate Jan. 6 defendants — including serving on the board of an organization that helped to pay their legal fees.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington is one of the most important field divisions in the Justice Department, which for decades has aimed to insulate itself from partisan politics. It often takes on cases of significance in the realms of national security, espionage and public corruption. In many instances, it is led by someone who has worked there.
Mr. Martin holds an obvious appeal for Mr. Trump. He is a loyal soldier and a savvy political player who has often spun untruths in a way that has favored the president. And because he oversees criminal cases in Washington, his office was just asked to join the Justice Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group,” which will turn the investigative powers of the government on several of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies….
Eric Holder: “The Courts Must Stop This Judge From Stealing an Election”
Eric Holder NYT oped:
But there is no suggestion that any of these 60,000-plus voters acted improperly, deliberately cast illegal ballots or failed to produce required identification when voting. And when the State Board of Elections reviewed his claim, it concluded, in a meticulous written decision, that Judge Griffin’s allegations lacked substance. The issue that is now before the courts is whether a court can simply cast aside tens of thousands of appropriately cast ballots after an election is over. This shouldn’t be a question: The United States Constitution and other federal laws protect against such ballots from being retroactively discarded.
Ordinarily, a request like this one would be a nonstarter. That a sitting judge filed this lawsuit in the first place is, frankly, disturbing. As an officer of the court who has sworn an oath, Judge Griffin has an obligation to protect the electoral process, not undermine it with a shameless attempt to disenfranchise voters. What’s even more distressing, though, is that the North Carolina Supreme Court’s Republican majority has allowed such a lawsuit to proceed and, in doing so, has stopped the certification of the election results.
This action is a departure from the way courts on the whole acted in 2020. That year, federal and state judges across the country — including those affiliated with the Republican Party, all the way up to the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court — refused Mr. Trump’s demands to throw out legal ballots. They refuted baseless claims that the presidential race was stolen. None of the courts ultimately stopped any states from certifying election results by their required deadlines — not one.
What’s happening in North Carolina, by contrast, should concern all Americans. Any judge operating in an independent and fair manner would maximize the chance that all of North Carolinians’ ballots are counted and ensure that the electoral result reflects the decision of the state’s citizens. But so far, the North Carolina Supreme Court has done the opposite, opening the door to mass disqualifications of legitimate voters — after the fact — to try to install a losing candidate from the court majority’s political party.
“Trump administration cuts teams that fight foreign election interference”
The Trump administration this week eliminated much of the federal government’s front line of defense against foreign interference in U.S. elections.
The move, which follows years of Trump and his allies disputing the role that Russian influence campaigns played in his first successful bid for president, alarmed state election officials and election security experts, who warned that safeguarding Americans from foreign disinformation campaigns will be difficult if no one at the federal level is doing that work.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved an FBI task force formed in response to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections that worked to uncover covert efforts by Russia, China, Iran and other foreign adversaries to manipulate U.S. voters.
Separately, the Department of Homeland Security sent a letterWednesdayplacing at least seven federal employees who work on teams combating foreign disinformation within the election security arm of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, on administrative leave, according to a recipient who shared a copy of the letter with The Washington Post….
“Trump continues federal purge, gutting cyber workers who combat disinformation”
The Trump administration has moved to push out a swathe of federal workers previously involved in combating election-related disinformation, according to three people familiar with the matter, amid allegations from congressional Republicans that their work unfairly targeted conservative speech online.
Roughly half a dozen employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who once worked in its Election Security and Resilience division were notified Thursday night they were being put on administrative leave, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
The move comes shortly after the installment of new DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, a close Trump ally. The former South Dakota governor told congressional Republicans in her confirmation hearing last month she shared their view that CISA should no longer be involved in efforts to combat the scores of online hoaxes peddled by the likes of Russia, China and Iran.
“As Secretary Noem stated during her confirmation hearing, CISA needs to refocus on its mission, and we are starting with election security,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for Public Affairs at CISA, said in a statement.
McLaughlin added that the agency is “undertaking an evaluation” of how it handles election security, and “personnel who worked on mis-, dis-, and malinformation, as well as foreign influence operations and disinformation, have been placed on administrative leave.”
The ousters are the latest example of how the administration is targeting career government officials with prior connections, however tenuous, to efforts it disagrees with or that interfere with Trump’s agenda….
“Trump’s Justice Department shutters specialized FBI team combatting foreign election interference threats”
CNN:
The FBI is preparing to disband a team of specialists charged with combatting foreign threats to US elections, a source familiar tells CNN.
The shuttering of the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force and planned reassigning of team members follows a directive from incoming US Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolving the team.
“To free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion, the Foreign Influence Task Force shall be disbanded,” Bondi wrote in a memo issued Wednesday.
The special task force was established by former FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2017 following a wave of foreign influence operations targeting the US electoral process, including Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election that Trump won….
“Key Trump Cabinet members refuse to acknowledge Trump lost in 2020”
Two of President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement nominees have been taking a new tack when talking about the 2020 presidential election: They’re not claiming Trump won that year, but they’re not saying he lost either.
Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” after the 2020 election, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, told senators at her confirmation hearing.
“President Joe Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in and he served as the president of the United States,” Kash Patel, who has been tapped to lead the FBI, said at his confirmation hearing.
Neither would say Biden defeated Trump despite dozens of court rulings that upheld the results.
For years, Republicans have toyed with competing rhetorical approaches when discussing an election that Trump falsely insists he won. Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for White House budget director, has taken a strident approach, telling the Senate in a written answer to questions that he believes the 2020 election was “rigged.” Bondi and Patel used their hearings to test a different strategy common among Republicans — one that avoids embracing lies about the election but doesn’t explicitly rule them out….
“Coups and Punishment in the Constitutional Order”
Anthony Kreis has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Wisconsin Law Review). Here is the abstract:
This article examines the historical and constitutional foundations of an anti-coup principle in the United States, emphasizing how state-level prosecutions deter and can appropriately punish election subversion. Tracing its roots to English constitutional history and the Glorious Revolution, the anti-coup principle rejects arbitrary executive power. It underscores the need for accountability to sustain democratic norms against presidential self-coup conspiracies. Highlighting how presidential systems are vulnerable to autocoups, the article argues that the decentralized nature of American presidential elections and constitutional provisions, such as the Guarantee Clause, empower states to act as guardians against authoritarian threats. It further explores the historical evolution of voting rights through state constitutions. The article illustrates states’ foundational role in protecting free and fair elections alongside the federal government, which supports using state prosecutorial power to punish wrongdoers who conspire to overturn lawful presidential elections. The article concludes that preserving democratic institutions requires cultural safeguards and the active enforcement of accountability mechanisms at the state level, ensuring that no individual or group undermines the rule of law and citizens’ right to vote with impunity.