In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting but lost when late mail ballots came in. Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting in the 2018 midterms. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters’ personal information. The commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. Kobach’s plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish: The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. This wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016.Įpitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal votes. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our system for finalizing presidential election results, the danger could recur in future elections - perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.Ī full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. In the year and a half since the Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021, the House select committee investigation and various media reports on what Donald Trump and his allies were doing during the attack have cast new light on an important threat to American democracy. Yates and some of the lawmakers participated in the hearing virtually.President Donald Trump arrives to address the Stop the Steal rally near the White House on January 6, 2021. Yates was asked about the actions of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, her role in the FISA application process, and allegations of political bias with the Department of Justice and the FBI. The committee was reviewing the origins of the investigation and the role of the FBI. T03:52:02-04:00 Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general at the start of the Trump administration, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing on the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
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