Tag: true the vote
Trump Gang Scrambling To File Suit Denying Kari Lake's Arizona Defeat

Trump Gang Scrambling To File Suit Denying Kari Lake's Arizona Defeat

Diehard Trump Republicans inside and outside of Arizona who cannot fathom that Kari Lake is projected to lose Arizona’s 2022 governor’s race are frantically trying to assemble a lawsuit to block the certification of the victory by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and Arizona’s current secretary of state.

“We need 3-5 Attorneys. Please call any you think might be interested and see if they are willing to support the cause without the retainers,” said the top item on a Tuesday email sent by the Gila County Election Integrity Team. “The suit will be prepared by experienced legal writers.”

“We need to reach and recruit voters or candidates in other counties to become plaintiffs and get them up to speed,” it continued. “Who can help? Please shake the trees.”

On Monday night, national media called the race for Hobbs, who won 50.4 percent — or 1,266,922 votes — compared to Lake’s 49.6 percent — 1,247,428 votes. Those results, based on counting 98 percent of the votes, is a bigger than the 0.5 percent margin in Arizona law that would trigger a recount.

“Arizonans know BS when they see it,” Lake texted on Monday evening.

Lake, a former Fox News broadcaster in Phoenix whose political rise was based on viewers’ familiarity with her and Lake’s mimicry of Trump’s stances, led by claims that his re-election bid was stolen, publicly had been criticizing the counting process in Maricopa County, its most populous county.

Officials in Maricopa County, which is run by non-Trump Republicans who spent much of 2021 fending off election conspiracy accusations, replied that Lake did not understand how election are run and were offensive – given that hundreds of thousands of mailed-out ballots had been returned on Election Day and election workers had been putting in 18-hour days to count votes.

Before Monday’s media projection of her loss, Lake had been telling nationally known 2020 election deniers – such as True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht – that she planned to fight any outcome but a gubernatorial victory.

In her podcast last Friday, Engelbrecht said that she had spoken to Lake and was inspired by Lake’s determination to keep fighting – unlike other Trump-endorsed candidates in Arizona who had conceded.

“It’s one of the reasons we came to Arizona because Kari Lake is not quitting in the face of such uncertainty,” said Engelbrecht, who, with Gregg Phillips, a fellow conspiracy theorist at True the Vote, had been jailed for contempt of court on Halloween in an unrelated defamation case where they had accused an election vendor of giving China access to voter data.

“Tuesday’s election… didn’t go quite like many felt that it would,” Engelbrecht said. “But I submit to you it was sort of the same song, second verse. The things that go wrong on Election Day, and went wrong in 2020, went wrong in 2022. Like [voting] machines going out, not enough paper [ballots], bad chain of custody [of ballots], the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, elections taking far too long to resolve… what we want to avoid is becoming the new normal.”

Phillips said that he and Engelbrecht, who voter fraud fabrications were featured in the misinformation-laced film about the 2020 presidential election by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, said the goal was stopping Maricopa County’s certification of the victories by Hobbs and other Democrats in top statewide races. (Phillips, Engelbrecht, and D’Souza have been sued for defamation by voters who were falsely accused onscreen of illegally casting absentee ballots.)

“Our view of it is that you always have to stop the certification,” Phillips said. “Once the certification happens, pretty much the cat’s out of the bag; it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle and everything goes wrong. But we have really learned some interesting things here because of this delay [in counting].”

Phillips said the county’s use of an Arizona-based ballot printing and election technology, Runbeck Election Services, to pre-process mailed out ballots – to vet the authenticity of voters’ signatures on the ballot return envelopes – opened up several avenues to argue that Maricopa County did not follow state law.

“We can now define them inside certain large buckets,” he said. “Like chain of custody issues [transporting ballots securely, and] issues that they have in compliance with the law relative to signature verification.”

On Monday’s edition of the J.D. Rucker Show on Rumble.com, a pro-Trump online platform, New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio outlined another line of legal attack. He focused on the response by Maricopa County to the intermittent breakdown of ballot printers in 30 percent of its 223 voting centers on Election Day.

Bill Gates, the Republican lawyer who chairs Maricopa County's board of supervisors, told voters that they could put their ballots in a secure box at the vote centers to be counted later, or they could go to another vote center.

That advice was no guarantee that these ballots had been counted, Donofrio said, and it put voters at risk for voting twice, which exposed them to criminal charges.

“There is no function [in voting systems] for a voter to check out of a polling location once they have checked in… That is a complete fiction,” he said. “It’s like [the 1977 song] Hotel California, J.D., ‘You can check in, but you can never leave.’”

The “Gila County Election Integrity Team” said they would be meeting on Wednesday and communicating via a group chat on Telegram, another social media site. It urged insiders to reach out to Andy Gould, a state appeals county judge, “to seek behind the scenes support,” and Mick McGuire, a retired general who ran unsuccessfully for the 2022 GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, to see “if he can help also with statewide supporters who would be plaintiffs, or perhaps he would, [as] he is high profile and well liked.”

Throughout the vote counting process and Lake’s attacks on election officials, Hobbs rejected the charges and urged Arizona to be patient.

“Despite what my election-denying opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected,” Hobbs said Friday. “In fact, they mirror what [political trends] our state has seen in recent elections. We must remain patient and let our election officials do their jobs.”

Accountability Looms For Media Outfits That Spread Lies About 2020 Election

Accountability Looms For Media Outfits That Spread Lies About 2020 Election

A wave of litigation seeking accountability from media purveyors of smears and lies that falsely depicted the 2020 presidential election as "stolen" is percolating in courts around the country -- and heading toward trials or settlements in the near future.

These lawsuits augment the most high-profile investigations and prosecutions seeking accountability from Donald Trump and his White House and campaign aides for seeking to overturn the election’s result.

Indictments are anticipated from the probe conducted by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, and possibly from the U.S. Department of Justice, whose investigation and prosecution of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is one of the largest in its history. (That said, some DOJ observers expect the first federal indictment of Trump to focus on his removal of government documents to his Florida home.)

While Trump faces 19 pending civil and criminal cases, according to JustSecurity.org, an online analytical forum, there are an additional 10 pending cases at various stages in state and federal courts that are targeting Trump allies in right-wing media and propaganda fronts.

The lawsuits allege the media-based provocateurs smeared election officials, local government workers, ordinary voters, and others by publishing false and defamatory claims about them, or additionally violated their civil rights by deploying illegal and violent tactics.

The suits stand apart from pending litigation by Dominion Voting Systems, one of the nation’s largest voting machinery makers, which is seeking $1.6 billion from Fox News for defaming its computer systems.

Many of these cases are being litigated with the help of ProtectDemocracy.org, “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization formed in late 2016 with an urgent and explicit mission: to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”

Protect Democracy’s ongoing lawsuits include:

• A lawsuit against filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, True the Vote, Salem Media, and others involved in the 2020 election conspiracy film, 2000 Mules, for defamation and voter intimidation, on behalf of a Georgia man who was falsely accused of breaking the law in the movie and its related promotional materials.

• A defamation lawsuit against Rudolph Giuliani in federal court brought by two former election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who testified before the House Select Committee on January 6. In late October, a judge denied Giuliani’s motion to dismiss the case.

• A lawsuit that led to a settlement with One America News Network, known as OAN, for the pro-Trump network’s publication of false reports about the 2020 election. A similar suit in a Missouri court against The Gateway Pundit, another pro-Trump right-wing website, is moving toward discovery and interviews of witnesses under oath.

• A defamation lawsuit against Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, and Richard Hopkins, for spreading the lie after the 2020 election that the postmaster in Erie, Pennsylvania, was illegally backdating ballots at postal facilities. A state court denied motions to dismiss the case.

• A voter intimidation lawsuit in Texas in response to an incident in 2020 where the “Texas Trump Train” – a caravan of Trump-supporting motor vehicles – tried to force a Joe Biden campaign bus off a highway at high speed. Discovery has been proceeding.

These suits are in addition to other litigation involving election denial. Last week in Arizona, in a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters, a federal judge barred “unlawful voter intimidation” by Trump backers who were staking out ballot drop boxes, carrying guns, wearing body armor, and taking photos and videos of voters, some of whom they followed.

The media-centered lawsuits are part of a spectrum of litigation that seeks to unearth evidence about the broad national conspiracy by Trump and his allies to overturn 2020’s popular and Electoral College votes.

Notably, AmericanOversight.org, has filed public records requests for communications (e-mails, texts, and phone logs, for example) that have revealed the misconduct of Trump-allied activists, including the discovery of plans by state GOP officials and activists to forge fake Electoral College documents.

While it remains to be seen what will ensue from these lawsuits, they not only suggest that long-awaited legal accountability is looming, but underscore that spreading disinformation is a strategy deeply connected to more direct attempts to undermine election results and seize illegitimate power.

Arizona's GOP Attorney General Urges Federal Probe Of 'True the Vote'

Arizona's GOP Attorney General Urges Federal Probe Of 'True the Vote'

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, an election-denying Republican, has asked the IRS and FBI to look into the finances of the Texas-based non-profit behind election conspiracy movie 2000 Mules, True the Vote, for allegedly raising money off baseless allegations and outright lies about voter fraud in the 2020 elections.

Brnovich’s office had asked True the Vote, led by Catherine Engelbrecht, a longtime election fraud conspiracy theorist, for data about some of its claims in convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza’s election-denying film — particularly its unfounded allegations of fraudulent ballots and “stash houses” in Maricopa and Yuma counties — but never heard back from the group, according to the New York Times.

In the right-wing documentary, which multiple experts have thoroughly debunked, True the Vote touted geolocation data that showed hundreds of people around the country, called “mules,” coordinating in illegal ballot stuffing for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020.

In a letter, dated Friday and reported on byPolitico and even Fox News, a staffer with the Special Investigations Section of Brnovich’s office, Reginald Grigsby, assailed True the Vote for failing to report back to the attorney general’s office with information to back its allegations of rampant voter fraud while falsely suggesting it had — saying it had given the state a hard drive — in fundraising communications.

"They indicate they have provided the information to law enforcement agencies; in our case they have not after promising to do so. Another law enforcement agency has also stated they have not provided them the information, informing them they had given the information to us," Grigsby wrote in the letter.

Grigsby urged the federal agencies to look into multiple questionable interactions with the group’s leaders, Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, a former Texas official and 2000 Mules star, and suggested that an investigation might turn up evidence of financial wrongdoing, Politico noted in its report Friday.

"TTV has raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud and their efforts would train the public to protect election integrity at the polls and to help protect all voters' rights," the letter said. “Given TTV’s status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted,” it added.

Engelbrecht and Phillips had three meetings with representatives of the attorney general’s Special Investigations Section — on June 23, 2021, April 5, 2022, and June 1, 2022 — Grigsby noted, during which “Ms. Engelbrecht and Mr. Phillips stated they would provide us with the information to support their allegations."

“Not only is this patently false, TTV acknowledged via correspondence and during a meeting with them that they had not given us the information but that they would,” Grigsby wrote.

Top Republicans, including former President Trump, have presented the movie as hard evidence that an overarching Democrat-orchestrated effort to rig the elections in multiple battleground states had cost Trump the victory in 2020.

The former president hosted a screening of 2000 Mules at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and in attendance were a number of big names in the Republican sphere, including Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse and disgraced conservative provocateur Michael Flynn.

"There's no way they can discount what is in this movie," Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake told Newsmax in May. "It is in black and white."

True the Vote raised $7 million after Trump’s defeat, promising to investigate and provide evidence of fraud in Counties in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, but never did, incurring lawsuits and accusations of deceit from Republican-leaning donors.

Despite not turning up any evidence of fraud in the 2020 elections, Engelbrecht has moved on to propagating the possibility of electoral wrongdoing in the upcoming midterm elections.

Far-Right Sheriffs Group Promoting 2020 'Voter-Fraud' Myth

Far-Right Sheriffs Group Promoting 2020 'Voter-Fraud' Myth

By Peter Eisler and Nathan Layne

(Reuters) - A coalition of rightwing “constitutional sheriffs,” who claim legal power in their jurisdictions that exceeds U.S. federal and state authorities, has a new calling: investigating conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against former President Donald Trump.

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has teamed with True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit and purveyor of debunked voter-fraud claims, to recruit like-minded sheriffs nationwide to investigate 2020 stolen-election allegations and to more aggressively police future voting.

The partnership, detailed last week at the association’s annual gathering in Las Vegas, aims to intensify a movement already underway. At least four ideologically aligned county sheriffs in Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas and Arizona have launched election-fraud probes since the 2020 vote. None has established evidence of systemic fraud.

“This is our top priority. It’s our duty,” Richard Mack, founder of the constitutional sheriffs organization, told Reuters in an interview at the Las Vegas meeting. Mack also touted the True the Vote partnership later in the week at FreedomFest, a national gathering of libertarian-leaning thinkers and political figures, where he urged that sheriffs “join us in this holy cause.”

Election officials are raising concerns that partisan investigations by sheriffs into baseless voter-fraud claims could undermine public confidence in elections. In an interview, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, called such probes part of a "nationally coordinated effort to dismantle democracy through lies and misinformation, and through people misusing or abusing their authority."

False fraud claims have also sparked a wave of threats against election administrators, including more than 900 hostile messages documented by Reuters, along with at least 17 attempts to illegally access voting equipment in search of evidence to prove election-rigging.

Officials with True the Vote said at the constitutional sheriffs’ meeting that they plan to raise money to provide grants and equipment to help sheriffs investigate 2020 voter-fraud claims and expand surveillance of ballot drop boxes in future elections. Trump supporters have alleged, without evidence, that drop boxes enabled the mass collection of fraudulent votes in the presidential election.

While election fraud is exceedingly rare, some states with Republican-controlled legislatures have passed new laws in response to the false rigged-election claims. Nine states have banned drop boxes or restricted their distribution since the 2020 vote, according to a recent report by the Voting Rights Lab, which monitors state election policies. Other states have enacted more stringent voter-registration requirements. In Florida and Georgia, lawmakers expanded the powers of law enforcement to police election-law violations.

The constitutional sheriffs’ new focus on probing elections illustrates how Trump’s voter-fraud falsehoods have found a receptive audience in some corners of law enforcement.

Leaders of the movement touted the recent documentary “2000 Mules” as they gathered in Las Vegas. The movie, based on cell-phone tracking data and surveillance video obtained by True the Vote, alleges that Democratic operatives stuffed drop boxes with fraudulent ballots in key counties to deliver the presidency to Democrat Joe Biden.

"2000 Mules has presented overwhelming evidence," said Mack, urging sheriffs to investigate its fraud claims. “It cannot not be dismissed.”

Many Democratic and Republican officials, along with independent fact-checkers, have in fact dismissed the movie as misleading and its evidence as flimsy.

Power Play

The constitutional sheriffs’ association promotes an extreme view of sheriffs’ legal authority, asserting on its website that their power in their jurisdictions exceeds that of any other official and “even supersedes the powers of the President.”

It’s rare for sheriffs to investigate voting irregularities, especially without a request from election officials. They generally handle criminal law enforcement in jurisdictions that lack a police force and manage local jails, among other duties.

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht said at the Las Vegas meeting that sheriffs are the best hope for pursuing rigged-election claims because other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have dismissed its allegations.

“It's like the lights went on,” she said. “It's the sheriffs: that's who can do these investigations; that’s who we can trust; that's who we can turn over information to.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Mack, who founded the constitutional sheriffs association in 2011, is a former county sheriff in Arizona. He served until 2016 as a board member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia that includes several members charged with helping to organize the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack. Mack told Reuters that he left the Oath Keepers when the organization became too militant, but extremism researchers have documented ongoing ties between his association and the militia group.

True the Vote’s coalition also includes another right-leaning sheriffs’ group, Protect America Now, led by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona. That group describes its mission as “standing for our constitution” by guarding against government overreach, protecting gun-owner rights and stopping illegal immigration.

True the Vote officials described the coalition as a multi-faceted effort to encourage sheriffs to pursue election-fraud claims. In addition to grants meant to help sheriffs conduct surveillance of drop boxes, the group said it aims to provide sheriffs with “artificial intelligence” software to assist in analyzing the video they collect. True the Vote also plans to set up hotlines to alert sheriffs to suspicious activity at polling stations and ballot drop boxes.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s sheriffs will join the effort. The constitutional sheriffs association does not disclose membership numbers; Protect America Now says it includes about 70 sheriffs from more than 30 states.

Political Research Associates, a left-leaning think tank that studies political extremism, has identified 136 sheriffs who align with the so-called patriot movement, which includes constitutional sheriffs and others embracing anti-government or far-right conspiracy theories.

The National Sheriffs Association, the nation’s leading professional organization for sheriffs, did not respond to requests for comment on the effort to pursue election-fraud allegations.

Calvin Hayden, sheriff of Johnson County, Kansas, told the Las Vegas gathering that he plans to employ technology to expand his investigation.

"We’re going to start doing our geodata," Hayden said. "I have no question that we’re going to get to the bottom of this."

Hayden launched the probe last year despite repeated assurances from county and state election officials that the vote had been conducted fairly. Asked what evidence justified the probe, a spokesperson for Hayden’s office, Shelby Colburn, said the investigation was based on more than 200 tips from voters and that the sheriff would soon provide more details.

Hayden’s efforts were praised by Mack, who told meeting attendees that election fraud had become the constitutional sheriff’s association’s “biggest concern.” He said his members are uniquely positioned to pursue the matter because sheriffs “don’t have to ask permission from anybody to start an investigation.”

(Reporting by Peter Eisler and Nathan Layne. Editing by Jason Szep and Brian Thevenot.)