Tag: 2020 election litigation
Despite Fox's $787 Million Lawsuit Payout, Bartiromo Is Still Lying About 2020 Election

Despite Fox's $787 Million Lawsuit Payout, Bartiromo Is Still Lying About 2020 Election

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who was arguably the network’s most high-profile promoter of election conspiracies that cost Fox millions in payouts, was back promoting those debunked conspiracies on her Monday broadcast.

The incident occurred during Bartiromo’s show Mornings with Maria, broadcast on Fox Business. Bartiromo and her panel were discussing President Donald Trump’s decision to pardon a group of 77 people who tried to help him steal the 2020 election that he lost to former President Joe Biden. The most prominent pardon recipient was disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with right-wing lawyer John Eastman.

- YouTube youtu.be

Conservative columnist Liz Peek said she supported the pardons (which are symbolic because no federal charges are pending) but that Giuliani and company were “wrong” in attempting to subvert the election.

“Well, we don’t know if they were wrong, by the way, with all of those mail-in ballots. There is more investigation to be done here and I suspect President Trump has his DOJ doing it,” Bartiromo responded.

The right’s conspiracies about mail-in ballots have been endlessly promoted from Trump on down and have been discredited and debunked. Conservatives have sought to cast doubt on ballots delivered via mail in elections where they lose but have not voiced similar concerns in elections they win.

Following Trump’s loss to Biden, Bartiromo took the lead on Fox’s airwaves in promoting baseless conspiracy theories arguing that Trump had actually won the election. Many of her statements helped form the basis of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, pushing back on claims from Bartiromo and others that the voting services company had helped Biden steal the election.Internal communications at Fox disclosed during the suit showed that Fox staffers knew that Bartiromo’s claims were false. One message from “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier admitted that allegations Bartiromo pushed out to her social media accounts were “crap.” Internal messages also showed that Fox hosts were aware that promoting these conspiracies increased their ratings with conservative viewers.

Ultimately Fox paid out a $787 million settlement to Dominion.

Bartiromo’s decision to rehash the conspiracies that caused so much damage to Fox’s bottom line makes it clear that the network cares more about pushing out right-wing lies than anything else, even the bottom line.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Giuliani Testifies In Georgia Grand Jury On Illegal ​​2020 Election Meddling

Giuliani Testifies In Georgia Grand Jury On Illegal ​​2020 Election Meddling

(Reuters) - Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's onetime personal lawyer, arrived at an Atlanta courthouse on Wednesday to testify in a Georgia criminal probe examining attempts by the former U.S. president and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results.

Giuliani, who helped lead Trump's election challenges, was due to testify before a special grand jury in Fulton County after a judge ordered him to comply with a subpoena. His lawyers say he will refuse to answer questions that violate attorney-client privilege.

The former New York City mayor, 78, appeared before Georgia state lawmakers in December 2020, echoing Trump's false conspiracy theories about stolen ballots and urging them not to certify Democratic President Joe Biden's victory over the Republican Trump.

"It's a grand jury and grand juries, as I recall, are secret," Giuliani told CNN on his arrival at the courthouse, when asked to comment on his testimony. "They ask the questions and we'll see."

The Fulton County probe began after a January 2021 recorded phone call in which Trump urged the state's top election official to "find" enough votes to alter the outcome. The former president has asserted falsely that he won Georgia, as well as the 2020 presidential contest.

The special grand jury was convened in May at the request of county District Attorney Fani Willis.

Giuliani, a former crime-fighting U.S. Attorney, was among several Trump advisers and lawyers who received subpoenas from the grand jury last month, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub, editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)


Wisconsin's Biden Electors Sue Fakers Over Attempt To Deceive Congress

Wisconsin's Biden Electors Sue Fakers Over Attempt To Deceive Congress

On Monday morning, two of Wisconsin’s presidential electors and a voter sued a group of “fake electors” who sought to deceive Congress in an attempt to help then-President Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

The lawsuit, a first of its kind, was filed in state circuit court in Madison, the state’s capital, and named as defendants 10 Republicans and two others "who conspired with, aided, and abetted them," according to CBS News.

The two, according to the New York Times, are James R. Troupis, a Trump campaign lawyer, and Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney from Massachusetts who authored a memo in 2020 that proposed the fake elector scheme to Troupis.

Law Forward and Georgetown Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) sued the sham electors on behalf of the legitimate electors.

The plaintiffs are asking a Dane County judge to ban the Republicans from serving as electors in the future and order each of them to pay a $2,000 fine and up to $200,000 in damages to the Democratic electors.

“I don’t know that you can put a price on trying to steal democracy,” said Khary Penebaker, one of the plaintiffs and a Wisconsin Democratic National Committee member. “There has to be some kind of penalty. It has to be something. There has to be pure accountability for this. We cannot have this happen again.”

Wisconsin is one of seven states Trump lost in the last election where allies brought fought a slate of fake electors to cast electoral votes for him, anyway, to subvert the 2020 elections.

In the lawsuit, the defendants were accused of helping to “lay the foundation for a nationwide scheme to override the results of the 2020 election” and “the groundwork for the events of January 6, 2021.”

"They did so even though they knew that Biden and Harris had won the election in Wisconsin; even though those results had been recounted and certified; and even though Trump and Pence had exhausted all available legal mechanisms for challenging the outcome," the lawsuit alleged, according to CBS News.

“Although Defendants were unsuccessful in having their fake ballots counted, they caused significant harm simply by trying, and there is every reason to believe that they will try again if given the opportunity,” the lawsuit read, according to the Guardian. “Defendants’ actions also violated a host of state and federal laws. Thus far, however, none of the fraudulent electors has been held accountable. This lawsuit seeks to change that.”

None of the defendants in the lawsuit face criminal charges for their attempt to overturn the last election. Still, of the 84 sham GOP electors in the seven states that Trump lost to face civic penalties, the Wisconsin group is the first to face civic penalties.

In January, Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General, Dana Nessel, announced she had asked federal prosecutors to launch an investigation into 16 Republicans in the state who presented themselves as lawful electors and sought to cast electoral votes for Trump in a state Joe Biden won.

A week later, U.S. Deputy Attorney General, Lisa O. Monaco, told CNN that the Department of Justice was looking into the battleground states’ fake electors who falsely declared Trump victorious, despite Biden winning all states by a narrow margin.

Many of the fake electors have been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee, the congressional panel investigating the Capitol riot. Among the list is Robert F. Spindell Jr., a Republican and member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, who tried to get Trump elected in Wisconsin, a state he lost by over 20,000 votes.

Louie Gohmert

GOP Rep. Gohmert Openly Calls For Violence In The Streets After Losing In Court

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

At this point, Republicans might as well just open fire on Fort Sumter and be done with it. That's the only way they could show more evidence of their "patriotism" and love for the Constitution. The only question is: Who's going to be first? The whole right-of-center portion of the American political spectrum has fallen into a system where the selective pressure is all about being the most outrageous, the most extreme, the most willing to trample all the meaning of the American system into the mud while waving the symbols of that system overhead. It's not a race to the bottom, because there is no bottom. But there is a point of no return, and Republicans have gone way, way past that point.

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