Must-Read and Must-Watch AP Dive Compiling the Evidence of What Happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and Trump and His Allies’ Efforts to Deny It

chicanery, election subversion risk

This is well worth your time:

Inside Washington’s federal courthouse, there’s no denying the reality of Jan. 6, 2021. Day after day, judges and jurors silently absorb the chilling sights and sounds from television screens of rioters beating police, shattering windows and hunting for lawmakers as democracy lay under siege.

But as he seeks to reclaim the White House, Donald Trump continues to portray the defendants as patriots worthy of admiration, an assertion that has been undercut by the adjudicated truth in hundreds of criminal cases where judges and juries have reached the opposite conclusion about what history will remember as one of America’s darkest days.

The cases have systematically put on record — through testimony, documents and video — the crimes committed, weapons wielded, and lives altered by physical and emotional damage. Trump is espousing a starkly different story, portraying the rioters as hostages and political prisoners whom he says he might pardon if he wins in November.

There are no broadcast television cameras inside the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue. But the real story of Jan. 6 is found in the mounds of evidence and testimony judges and juries have seen and heard behind the doors of the courthouse where hundreds of Trump’s supporters have been convicted in the attack….

In Trump’s telling, the mob on Jan. 6 assembled peacefully to preserve democracy, not upend it, and the rioters were agitated but not armed. They were not insurrectionists but rather 1776-style “patriots.” And now they are being persecuted by the Justice Department, juries and judges for their political beliefs.

His relentless attempts to rewrite history have become foundational to the Republican’s bid for another term, with campaign rallies honoring the rioters as heroes while an anthem plays in their name.

He was an invited guest for a “J6 Awards Gala” fundraiser at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for those charged with crimes connected to the riot. His campaign later said he wouldn’t attend the fundraiser, which was then postponed. Organizers did not respond to requests for comment.

When pressed during a recent event, Trump said he “absolutely” would pardon rioters who assaulted police — if they were “innocent.” When the interviewer noted she was talking about convicted rioters, Trump replied that they were convicted “by a very tough system.”

It’s part of an effort to undermine faith in the nation’s justice system that has escalated since Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in his New York hush money trial. Even more than that, it’s fuel for a campaign of vengeance Trump says will come if he wins. 

“Those J6 warriors, they were warriors, but they were really more than anything else — they’re victims of what happened,” Trump said in a rally after his conviction. Falsely claiming the rioters were “set up” by police, he appeared to threaten revenge: “That blows two ways, that blows two ways, believe me.”

In response to several questions from the AP about Trump’s support of the Jan. 6 defendants and pledge to pardon the rioters, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an email: “Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has spent more time prosecuting President Trump and targeting Americans for peacefully protesting on January 6th than criminals, illegal immigrants, and terrorists who are committing violent crimes in Democrat-run cities every day.”…

Many Republicans have lined up behind Trump to minimize the violence and push these lies: Police welcomed the mob into the building. Undercover FBI operatives and left-wing antifa activists instigated the attack….

The disinformation campaign has taken root in a vast swath of the country. About a year after the attack, only about 4 in 10 Republicans recalled it as very violent or extremely violent, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Three years after the riot, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found about 7 in 10 Republicans said too much is being made of it.

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“Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media”

cheap speech, chicanery, social media and social protests

NYT:

In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media.

By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine — that were then promoted across the spectrum of social media, from YouTube to TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram and Rumble.

It was all, federal prosecutors now say, a covert Russian influence operation. On Wednesday, the Justice Department accused two Russians of helping orchestrate $10 million in payments to Tenet in a scheme to use those stars to spread Kremlin-friendly messages.

The disclosures reflect the growing sophistication of the Kremlin’s longstanding efforts to shape American public opinion and advance Russia’s geopolitical goals, which include, according to American intelligence assessments, the election of former President Donald J. Trump in November.

In 2016 and 2020, Russia employed armies of internet trolls, fake accounts and bot farms to try to reach American audiences, with debatable success. The operation that prosecutors described this week shows a pivot to exploiting already established social media influencers, who, in this case, generated as many as 16 million views on Tenet’s YouTube channel alone.

Most viewers were presumably unaware, as the influencers themselves said they were, that Russia was paying for it all.

“Influencers already have a level of trust with their audience,” said Jo Lukito, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s journalism school who studies Russian disinformation. “So, if a piece of information can come through the mouth of an existing influencer, it comes across as more authentic.”

The indictment — which landed like a bombshell in the country’s conservative media ecosystem — also underscored the growing ideological convergence between President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and a significant portion of the Republican Party since Mr. Trump’s rise to political power….

Martin J. Riedl, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies the spread of misinformation on social media, said the case of Tenet spotlighted gaping regulatory holes when it came to the American political system.

While the Federal Election Commission has strict disclosure rules for television and radio advertisements, it has no such restrictions for paid social media influencers.

The result is an enormous loophole — one that the Russians appeared to exploit.

“Influencers have been around for a while,” Mr. Riedl said, “but there are few rules around their communication, and political speech is not regulated at all.”

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“North Carolina court ruling on RFK Jr. threatens to disrupt mail voting”

ballot access

WaPo:

A state appeals panel upended election preparations in North Carolina on Friday, ordering a halt to the distribution of mail ballots in the battleground state after granting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request that his name be removed from contention for the presidency.

Friday was the deadline for local election officials to mail ballots to the roughly 130,000 North Carolinians who had requested them so far. County offices had been preparing for weeks with ballot design, printing orders and envelope preparation.

That effort immediately stopped under instructions from the State Board of Elections following the court ruling, and officials estimated it will take a minimum of two weeks and more than $1 million — borne by cash-strapped county offices — to design, print and prepare new ballots.

An anonymous three-judge panel of the North Carolina State Court of Appeals offered no explanation for its decision but appeared to side with Kennedy’s argument, on First Amendment grounds, that he should not be forced to appear on the ballot….


Officials said they plan to appeal in Michigan and North Carolina. In Michigan, the decision could affect what is expected to be a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Friday was the deadline for making ballot changes, but they were not yet being mailed out, so the effect on ballot production is not expected to be as disruptive as in North Carolina.

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“Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About Noncitizen Voters”

fraudulent fraud squad

NYT:

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.”

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

At the center of that effort is the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage that conducts what it describes as investigations into immigration policy, among other topics. Borrowing from covert tactics used by the group Project Veritas, the Oversight Project has published videos about the supposed threat of migrant voting in shelters on the Texas border, in New York City and in North Carolina.

The project says it is preparing to release investigations of other states, including what its executive director, Mike Howell, recently described in a livestream on X as “a pretty big thing” targeting voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We view our role in this cause as breaking the bombshell news,” said Mr. Howell. The recording of the livestream appears to have been deleted after The New York Times contacted Heritage for this article, and the Oversight Project has so far not posted any videos about alleged noncitizen voting in Virginia.

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“National Religious Broadcasters Association Files Johnson Amendment Challenge”

tax law and election law
Release:  The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) association—a nonpartisan, international association of Christian communicators whose member organizations represent hundreds of millions of listeners, viewers, and readers—has joined with First Baptist Church Waskom (Waskom, Texas), Intercessors for America (Purcellville, Va.), and… Continue reading