Category Archives: fraudulent fraud squad
“GOP colleagues sneer at Rep. Good’s election complaints”
Rep. Bob Good‘s (R-Va.) efforts to sow doubts about the results of his too-close-to-call GOP primary are being met with eye rolls from many of his House Republican colleagues.
Why it matters: The House Freedom Caucus chair is tapping into a strain of election denialism common in Donald Trump’s Republican Party – but without the widespread GOP support Trump enjoyed.
- “No one is buying it, but all understand this is one of the several stages of electoral grief,” said one House Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
- The GOP lawmaker added that Good’s assertion of election irregularities is “the reflexive thing people who can’t accept loss say these days.”…
- Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican-turned-independent who lost to Good in 2020, noted that McGuire and Good have both echoed Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
- “I don’t find it surprising that an election between an election denier and an election denier would end with one of them denying the election was fair based on conspiracy theories,” he said.
“Trump, GOP urge early and mail voting while continuing to raise specter of voter fraud”
Calabresi “Misspeak[s]” on Whether the 2020 Election Was Stolen
Yesterday I linked to and questioned Steven Calabresi at Volokh, saying among other things: “As a result, many Republicans, myself included, thought that the 2020 presidential election was probably stolen, even though that fact could not be proved in a court of law.”
Today he says: “I do not think there was fraud in the counting of votes or vote machine error in the 2020 presidential election. I did therefore misspeak in writing that the results of mail in voting in 2020 were fraudulent.”
Misspeak? How does one “misspeak” that? Not a slip of the tongue.
“A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies”
NYT, with the subhed: “Cindy Elgan has overseen elections in rural Nevada without incident for 20 years, but now even her neighbors wonder if she’s part of ‘the deep state cabal.'”
“Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul charges former Trump associates in fake elector scheme”
Molly Beck for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul has filed felony forgery charges against an aide and two attorneys who worked for former President Donald Trump in 2020 for their part in designing and executing a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting false slates of electors for Trump.
The charges are filed in Dane County Circuit Court against Kenneth Chesebro, a Wisconsin native and lead architect of the 2020 fake elector plan; former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis, who represented Trump in Wisconsin during the 2020 election; and Mike Roman, a former Trump aide who allegedly delivered Wisconsin’s slate of false elector paperwork to a Pennsylvania congressman’s staffer in order to get them to Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021….
“D.C. ethics board recommends Rudy Giuliani be disbarred”
The D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility on Friday recommended that Rudy Giuliani be barred from practicing law in the nation’s capital.
In its report, the board cited Giuliani’s work in Pennsylvania following the 2020 presidential election in which he sought to have the state’s election results thrown out in favor of his former client Donald Trump.
“The Board agrees with the Hearing Committee that Disciplinary Counsel proved by clear and convincing evidence that Respondent violated Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct,” the report says. “With respect to sanction, we agree with the Hearing Committee that Respondent should be disbarred.”
This report follows one from last year in which a disciplinary board for the D.C. Bar also recommended disbarment for Giuliani. Now, the case heads to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which will decide whether Giuliani, who formerly served as the mayor of New York City, will be disbarred.
In a statement provided to NBC News, Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Giuliani, blamed the findings in the report on “partisan Democrats” and said the decision would discourage attorneys from taking on Trump as a client.
“This recommendation comes as no surprise as partisan Democrats continue to destroy the credibility of the American justice system all in an effort to beat President Trump and to hold onto power,” Goodman said.
Here is the report, via Democracy Docket.
“Marco Rubio spreads debunked election claims about 2020 ballots”
In the contest to join former president Donald Trump on the 2024 ticket as his running mate, aspirants have had to follow his path on questioning election integrity in the United States. Many refuse to say they would accept the election results if Trump doesn’t win. Some in contention have echoed Trump’s falsehoods, as Vivek Ramaswamy did when he declared in one of the GOP primary debates that “the 2020 election was indeed stolen by Big Tech.” (The theory, without evidence, is that more coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop would have changed the election results.)
In a recent television appearance, Rubio managed to achieve a trifecta.
He refused to say he would accept the results: “If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested.”
He suggested that more coverage of the laptop would have affected the results: “What undermines elections is when NBC News and every major news outlet in America in 2020 censored the Biden laptop story, which turned out to be true, not Russian misinformation, unprecedented.”
And he made three specific claims about 2020 — one misleading, two debunked. Let’s examine them in the order he made them. A Rubio spokesperson declined to address his statements in detail. She forwarded the office’s news release on his appearance, which cast his comments as addressing the “legacy media’s one-sided questioning on election denying.”
Publisher of “2000 Mules” Film Depicting Bogus Claims of Voter Fraud by Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote Apologizes to Voter Falsely Accused of Fraud, Won’t Distribute Film Any Longer
When will people learn not to trust the fraudulent fraud squad? Via Tom Dreisbach:
UPDATE: Here is the fuller NPR story.
Elon Musk Prepares to Join the Fraudulent Fraud Squad
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the Tesla leader should the presumptive Republican nominee reclaim the White House, the latest sign that the once-frosty relationship between the two men has thawed.
The role hasn’t been fully hammered out and might not happen, people familiar with the talks said, but the two men discussed ways to give Musk formal input and influence over policies related to border security and the economy, both issues on which Musk has grown more vocal.
Musk, along with the billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, has also briefed Trump on a plan they’ve developed to invest in a data-driven project to prevent voter fraud, according to some of the people. Peltz and Musk also told Trump of an influence campaign in elite circles that is already under way, in which Musk and his political allies host gatherings of powerful business leaders across the country and try to convince them not to support President Biden’s re-election campaign….
Musk and Peltz have told acquaintances they are working on a massive data-driven project to ensure votes are fairly counted, echoing Trump’s accusations of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, has rejected those claims about the 2020 election. Trump’s campaign and its allies lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results.
Musk and Peltz described the initiative to Trump in the March meeting, according to a person familiar with that discussion. More details about the antifraud effort couldn’t be learned.
“The Republican Nominee to Lead Oregon Elections Wants to Stop All Mail Voting”
The moderator of an April candidate forum hosted by the City Club of Central Oregon wanted to know: Could the Republicans running for secretary of state confirm that, if elected, they’d certify the results of Oregon elections, even when their preferred candidates lose?
That would depend, candidate Dennis Linthicum responded. He’d first want to check with citizen activists.
“No detective will ever find a body in the backyard if he doesn’t look,” said Linthicum, who is currently a state senator representing a district in south central Oregon. “So, at some point, the public is the best lookers we have. They’re out there, they’re investigating. You’ve got people doing the math. You’ve got people chasing ballots and understanding how ballot harvesting has been harming the public.”
At no point in the forum did Linthicum provide evidence of widespread voter fraud in Oregon—there isn’t any—but that has never stopped him. He is part of a nationwide network of conservative officials and cultural influencers who have stoked election-related conspiracies for years now. Three years ago, he joined lawmakers from around the country in calling for an audit of the 2020 presidential election in all 50 states based on unspecified “fraud and irregularities.”
Linthicum last week easily captured the GOP nomination to be secretary of state, Oregon’s top elections official. The office oversees voter registration and voting procedures, and is also charged with certifying election results.
“Leading pollster spreads Dominion voting machine misinformation”
With almost a half million followers on X, the pollster Rasmussen has a wide reach. Former president Donald Trump repeatedly cited its polls when he was president as it consistently showed a higher approval rating for him than other pollsters.
Now Rasmussen’s social media account is fanning previously debunked claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines could somehow be manipulated via the internet.
Rasmussen’s source is a former Michigan state senator who traffics in election conspiracy theories and is president of a self-described election integrity group called the Michigan Grassroots Alliance. That former lawmaker cited emails released by a far-right sheriff, who obtained them from an attorney involved in a lawsuit filed by Dominion, despite a protective order agreed to by the parties in the case.
Confused? That’s part of the point. The idea is to create a lot of smoke to make people think there is a fire.
“Trump’s Pattern of Sowing Election Doubt Intensifies in 2024”
Former President Donald J. Trump has baselessly and publicly cast doubt about the fairness of the 2024 election about once a day, on average, since he announced his candidacy for president, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
Though the tactic is familiar — Mr. Trump raised the specter of a “rigged” election in the 2016 and 2020 cycles, too — his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest are a significant escalation.
Long before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to target him. But it took until March of last year for Mr. Trump to settle on a new accusation: that the multiple legal challenges related to Mr. Trump’s business and political activities constituted a “new way of cheating” in order to “interfere” in the 2024 election. He has made versions of that accusation more than 350 times.
“This is a rigged deal, just as the 2020 election was rigged, and we can’t let them get away with it,” Mr. Trump said on Nov. 18, 2022, three days after announcing his 2024 candidacy. His comments were in response to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s appointment of a special counsel to supervise the Justice Department’s criminal investigations related to the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot and Mr. Trump’s decision to keep classified documents at his Florida resort.
By last summer, Mr. Trump had honed the language and made it a staple of his stump speech: “They rigged the presidential election of 2020, and we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
The Times has documented more than 500 campaign events, social media posts and interviews during the 2024 cycle in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Democrats or others of trying to “rig,” “cheat,” “steal” or otherwise “influence” the next election — or of having done so in 2020.
von Spakovsky Lying Again About Noncitizen Voting
In testimony before a House committee, a Republican witness recently cited as credible claims by researcher James Agresti that “10% to 27% of non‐citizens are illegally registered to vote” and predicted that “about 5% to 13% of them will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.” Speaking to New York Times reporter Minho Kim for an article published today, I stated,“These numbers simply aren’t believable… They aren’t consistent with what we know from the various other sources.”
With von Spakovsky, lying about noncitizen voting is nothing new.