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The 01-06-21 Select Committee Thread


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the result set for "fake electors" is very telling when it comes to newspeak and airstrip one...... 

abcnews.com?  zip

bbc.co.uk? zilch

pbs.org? nada

we will find out sunday morning if the msm pivot is fetch because the paper of record dropped this 6 hours ago:
 

Spoiler

NYT

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Jan. 21, 2022

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.

In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.

And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.

“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.

The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.

“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.

The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.

Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”

“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”

The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.

Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.

As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”

It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”

At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.

At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.

Central in the effort was a group called the Amistad Project, a wing of the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative legal organization. In the wake of the election, the Amistad Project worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team to file lawsuits challenging the vote results in key swing states.

“We are excited to have the Amistad Project as a partner in the fight to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Mr. Giuliani told a Wisconsin political website at the time.

On Dec. 14, as the members of the Electoral College were set to meet and certify electors in all 50 states, Ian Northon, a lawyer for Amistad Project, tried to deliver a false slate of pro-Trump electors to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing, but was turned away by state troopers. That same day, the Amistad Project’s director, Phill Kline, fanned across right-wing media outlets promoting the fake elector plan.

On a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kline declared that only state lawmakers had the power to decide who should be electors, “not governors or local election officials or even the Congress of the United States.”

Mr. Kline also appeared on One America News, the conservative television network, saying that if dueling slates of electors cast doubt on the results of the election, then the House of Representatives would get to decide who won — and that would lead to a victory for Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s own aides were pushing this same gambit. As the Electoral College gathered to vote, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump at the time, announced on Fox News that state lawmakers in several “contested states” were sending “an alternate slate of electors” to Congress.

“This will ensure that all of our legal remedies will remain open,” Mr. Miller said.

Even after the Electoral College certified Mr. Biden’s victory, ignoring the fake slates, Mr. Kline and other allies of Mr. Trump did not give up the fight.

On Dec. 22, 2020, the Amistad Project filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the state lawmakers whose alternate slates were rejected had been “prohibited from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.”

The lawsuit — which was ultimately dismissed — sought a judicial order that would have essentially forced Mr. Pence to acknowledge the fake electors on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to issue the final count of the Electoral College results.

Mr. Kline could not be reached for comment, but he posted a message on Twitter on Tuesday condemning Ms. Nessel for what he called “trumped-up charges of ‘forgery’” with respect to the fake electors in Michigan.

“The timing of this attack — more than a year after the fact— shows that it’s purely political,” he wrote.

 

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12 minutes ago, Hagbard Celine said:

the result set for "fake electors" is very telling when it comes to newspeak and airstrip one...... 

abcnews.com?  zip

bbc.co.uk? zilch

pbs.org? nada

we will find out sunday morning if the msm pivot is fetch because the paper of record dropped this 6 hours ago:
 

  Hide contents

NYT

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Jan. 21, 2022

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.

In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.

And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.

“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.

The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.

“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.

The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.

Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”

“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”

The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.

Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.

As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”

It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”

At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.

At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.

Central in the effort was a group called the Amistad Project, a wing of the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative legal organization. In the wake of the election, the Amistad Project worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team to file lawsuits challenging the vote results in key swing states.

“We are excited to have the Amistad Project as a partner in the fight to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Mr. Giuliani told a Wisconsin political website at the time.

On Dec. 14, as the members of the Electoral College were set to meet and certify electors in all 50 states, Ian Northon, a lawyer for Amistad Project, tried to deliver a false slate of pro-Trump electors to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing, but was turned away by state troopers. That same day, the Amistad Project’s director, Phill Kline, fanned across right-wing media outlets promoting the fake elector plan.

On a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kline declared that only state lawmakers had the power to decide who should be electors, “not governors or local election officials or even the Congress of the United States.”

Mr. Kline also appeared on One America News, the conservative television network, saying that if dueling slates of electors cast doubt on the results of the election, then the House of Representatives would get to decide who won — and that would lead to a victory for Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s own aides were pushing this same gambit. As the Electoral College gathered to vote, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump at the time, announced on Fox News that state lawmakers in several “contested states” were sending “an alternate slate of electors” to Congress.

“This will ensure that all of our legal remedies will remain open,” Mr. Miller said.

Even after the Electoral College certified Mr. Biden’s victory, ignoring the fake slates, Mr. Kline and other allies of Mr. Trump did not give up the fight.

On Dec. 22, 2020, the Amistad Project filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the state lawmakers whose alternate slates were rejected had been “prohibited from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.”

The lawsuit — which was ultimately dismissed — sought a judicial order that would have essentially forced Mr. Pence to acknowledge the fake electors on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to issue the final count of the Electoral College results.

Mr. Kline could not be reached for comment, but he posted a message on Twitter on Tuesday condemning Ms. Nessel for what he called “trumped-up charges of ‘forgery’” with respect to the fake electors in Michigan.

“The timing of this attack — more than a year after the fact— shows that it’s purely political,” he wrote.

 

That all seems bad. Is that bad?

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8 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

the result set for "fake electors" is very telling when it comes to newspeak and airstrip one...... 

abcnews.com?  zip

bbc.co.uk? zilch

pbs.org? nada

we will find out sunday morning if the msm pivot is fetch because the paper of record dropped this 6 hours ago:
 

  Reveal hidden contents

NYT

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Jan. 21, 2022

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.

In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.

And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.

“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.

The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.

“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.

The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.

Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”

“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”

The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.

Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.

As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”

It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”

At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.

At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.

Central in the effort was a group called the Amistad Project, a wing of the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative legal organization. In the wake of the election, the Amistad Project worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team to file lawsuits challenging the vote results in key swing states.

“We are excited to have the Amistad Project as a partner in the fight to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Mr. Giuliani told a Wisconsin political website at the time.

On Dec. 14, as the members of the Electoral College were set to meet and certify electors in all 50 states, Ian Northon, a lawyer for Amistad Project, tried to deliver a false slate of pro-Trump electors to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing, but was turned away by state troopers. That same day, the Amistad Project’s director, Phill Kline, fanned across right-wing media outlets promoting the fake elector plan.

On a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kline declared that only state lawmakers had the power to decide who should be electors, “not governors or local election officials or even the Congress of the United States.”

Mr. Kline also appeared on One America News, the conservative television network, saying that if dueling slates of electors cast doubt on the results of the election, then the House of Representatives would get to decide who won — and that would lead to a victory for Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s own aides were pushing this same gambit. As the Electoral College gathered to vote, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump at the time, announced on Fox News that state lawmakers in several “contested states” were sending “an alternate slate of electors” to Congress.

“This will ensure that all of our legal remedies will remain open,” Mr. Miller said.

Even after the Electoral College certified Mr. Biden’s victory, ignoring the fake slates, Mr. Kline and other allies of Mr. Trump did not give up the fight.

On Dec. 22, 2020, the Amistad Project filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the state lawmakers whose alternate slates were rejected had been “prohibited from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.”

The lawsuit — which was ultimately dismissed — sought a judicial order that would have essentially forced Mr. Pence to acknowledge the fake electors on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to issue the final count of the Electoral College results.

Mr. Kline could not be reached for comment, but he posted a message on Twitter on Tuesday condemning Ms. Nessel for what he called “trumped-up charges of ‘forgery’” with respect to the fake electors in Michigan.

“The timing of this attack — more than a year after the fact— shows that it’s purely political,” he wrote.

 

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

But seriously, the Huffington Post is all over it and Friday afternoon stories take a moment to get rolling sometimes.

Edited by Bullneck
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12 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


Did I tell you about the time I ran into Susanna Hoffs in Germany?

Not gonna lie, I had to google "Who the hell is Susanna Hoffs?".  My memory going back that far is shit and the only 80's female pop singers I can name off the top of my head are Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Cindy Lauper, and well that's about it. 

 

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8 hours ago, Hagbard Celine said:

the result set for "fake electors" is very telling when it comes to newspeak and airstrip one...... 

abcnews.com?  zip

bbc.co.uk? zilch

pbs.org? nada

we will find out sunday morning if the msm pivot is fetch because the paper of record dropped this 6 hours ago:
 

  Hide contents

NYT

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Jan. 21, 2022

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.

In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.

And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.

“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.

The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.

“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”

Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.

The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.

Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”

“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”

The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.

Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.

As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”

It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”

At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.

But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.

At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.

Central in the effort was a group called the Amistad Project, a wing of the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based conservative legal organization. In the wake of the election, the Amistad Project worked closely with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team to file lawsuits challenging the vote results in key swing states.

“We are excited to have the Amistad Project as a partner in the fight to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Mr. Giuliani told a Wisconsin political website at the time.

On Dec. 14, as the members of the Electoral College were set to meet and certify electors in all 50 states, Ian Northon, a lawyer for Amistad Project, tried to deliver a false slate of pro-Trump electors to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing, but was turned away by state troopers. That same day, the Amistad Project’s director, Phill Kline, fanned across right-wing media outlets promoting the fake elector plan.

On a podcast run by Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kline declared that only state lawmakers had the power to decide who should be electors, “not governors or local election officials or even the Congress of the United States.”

Mr. Kline also appeared on One America News, the conservative television network, saying that if dueling slates of electors cast doubt on the results of the election, then the House of Representatives would get to decide who won — and that would lead to a victory for Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s own aides were pushing this same gambit. As the Electoral College gathered to vote, Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump at the time, announced on Fox News that state lawmakers in several “contested states” were sending “an alternate slate of electors” to Congress.

“This will ensure that all of our legal remedies will remain open,” Mr. Miller said.

Even after the Electoral College certified Mr. Biden’s victory, ignoring the fake slates, Mr. Kline and other allies of Mr. Trump did not give up the fight.

On Dec. 22, 2020, the Amistad Project filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the state lawmakers whose alternate slates were rejected had been “prohibited from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities.”

The lawsuit — which was ultimately dismissed — sought a judicial order that would have essentially forced Mr. Pence to acknowledge the fake electors on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to issue the final count of the Electoral College results.

Mr. Kline could not be reached for comment, but he posted a message on Twitter on Tuesday condemning Ms. Nessel for what he called “trumped-up charges of ‘forgery’” with respect to the fake electors in Michigan.

“The timing of this attack — more than a year after the fact— shows that it’s purely political,” he wrote.

 

The Tucker Carlson defense fits here. 

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3 hours ago, Bullneck said:

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

But seriously, the Huffington Post is all over it and Friday afternoon stories take a moment to get rolling sometimes.

but that's the point, fetch = not happening.  the sheeple media pivot to actually cover this story as of this moment remains fetch.

the fake-electors-slate documents in all 7 states are the same thing as nixon's tapes.

it should have been the lead story blasted worldwide on every newscast starting last night with the big network evening news.

 

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2 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Not gonna lie, I had to google "Who the hell is Susanna Hoffs?".  My memory going back that far is shit and the only 80's female pop singers I can name off the top of my head are Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Cindy Lauper, and well that's about it.

DEBBIE GIBSON WANTS MY BODY

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treason

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Definition

The offense of betraying one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies. Also termed high treason; alta proditio.

According to the United States Constitution, Article III, § 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Under federal statute, a person guilty of treason against the United States “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 2381

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Trump sent a mob to attack the capitol in order to prevent the counting of electoral votes. If he had succeeded in killing Mike pence he would have argued there was no electoral vote since the Vice President hadn’t counted them and therefore no succession that made Biden the president. He would have seized voting machines, declared martial law and announced that he had discovered fraud in the election and declared himself to still be the president. If he had succeeded in killing Pence we would all be turbofucked. 

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3 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

Trump sent a mob to attack the capitol in order to prevent the counting of electoral votes. If he had succeeded in killing Mike pence he would have argued there was no electoral vote since the Vice President hadn’t counted them and therefore no succession that made Biden the president. He would have seized voting machines, declared martial law and announced that he had discovered fraud in the election and declared himself to still be the president. If he had succeeded in killing Pence we would all be turbofucked. 

Never fear, the FBI on its own had decided to post special forces within the Capitol, so it's all good. /s

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I’m surprised they didn’t have a plan to get/keep pence away from the chambers, then claim the next day that since they weren’t counted as prescribed it goes to the leg for voting. 
 

the extent seems to have been use the breach to push him to leave by SS but they didn’t force him once he declined.  They stopped short of kidnapping him-probably didn’t have a bough of his security detail on board. 

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8 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I’m surprised they didn’t have a plan to get/keep pence away from the chambers, then claim the next day that since they weren’t counted as prescribed it goes to the leg for voting. 
 

the extent seems to have been use the breach to push him to leave by SS but they didn’t force him once he declined.  They stopped short of kidnapping him-probably didn’t have a bough of his security detail on board. 

Trump wanted the mob to kill him. 

Just because the plan was both crazy and didn’t work doesn’t mean it still wasn’t treason anyway. 

Crazy shit happens sometimes. Trump knows that. Once he knew it hadn’t worked he’s been backtracking ever since. 

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The only reason that treasonous executive order wasn’t signed and issued was because the attack on the capitol ultimately failed. If it had been successful, that treasonous executive order would have been signed and instead of us learning that Biden had been inaugurated we would have all learned a year ago that we were now in a trump dictatorship. 

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Also for those of you with wondering  why this isn’t bigger national news there is a couple reasons for that. One is that it is brand new information and the government and 1/6 committee doesn’t know exactly what it means yet so it is prudent and correct to proceed with caution. 

The other reason is that one of the undisclosed purposes of the national media is to attempt to maintain order and prevent any spark of revolution. It is in the interests of the ultra wealthy to keep that up.  They do that constantly. The editors of the New York Times know where their bread is buttered.

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https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21183521/jan-6-draft.pdf
 
This was the plan. This document from the national archives show just how close we came to no longer having a country. 

It’s not even in doubt.

Stop the counting by any means necessary so Pence can’t certify. Killing him was absolutely on the table to accomplish that.

When the vote isn’t certified as and when required by the constitution, declare a botched election and throw it to the House.

GQP House declares Trump the winner.

They came literally a few yards away from pulling it off. And yes, that Capitol cop absolutely saved the country. That’s not hyperbole. Someday…..if we are still a country, of course….he should have his own monument. One man in the right place doing the right thing can literally change history.
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12 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


It’s not even in doubt.

Stop the counting by any means necessary so Pence can’t certify. Killing him was absolutely on the table to accomplish that.

When the vote isn’t certified as and when required by the constitution, declare a botched election and throw it to the House.

GQP House declares Trump the winner.

They came literally a few yards away from pulling it off. And yes, that Capitol cop absolutely saved the country. That’s not hyperbole. Someday…..if we are still a country, of course….he should have his own monument. One man in the right place doing the right thing can literally change history.

It actually breaks my heart that the ones who truly now want to make America into the ideal it initially it claimed it wanted to be, the African Americans, are the ones the white Americans are currently opposing. Preventing their vote. 

America was founded on an at the time revolutionary ideal. That all men are created equal. 
 

After the British were defeated, the actual internal obstacle to that was internal racism, slavery, and genocide. Which of course happened.

The torch bearers of that ideal since then have been the African Americans. Who, despite all obstacles, have continued to carry that torch and have tried to realize the ideal of America that all men and women are created equal. 
 

That fight continues on. 

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6 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Not gonna lie, I had to google "Who the hell is Susanna Hoffs?".  My memory going back that far is shit and the only 80's female pop singers I can name off the top of my head are Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Cindy Lauper, and well that's about it. 

 

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3 hours ago, JimmyJames said:

treason

Primary tabs

 

Definition

The offense of betraying one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies. Also termed high treason; alta proditio.

According to the United States Constitution, Article III, § 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Under federal statute, a person guilty of treason against the United States “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 2381

That last bit seems like it was just tacked on at the end.  Sort of a no-brainer.  But these days, thank goodness.

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8 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Not gonna lie, I had to google "Who the hell is Susanna Hoffs?".  My memory going back that far is shit and the only 80's female pop singers I can name off the top of my head are Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Cindy Lauper, and well that's about it. 

Bananarama?

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