In 2021, DeSantis endorsed President Donald Trump’s fight to hold onto his job, floating the idea that GOP-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Democratic nominee Joe Biden could appoint Trump electors and override the popular vote.
In a playbook Republicans across the country are using after President Joe Biden’s decisive victory, DeSantis announced his support for new restrictions on voting by mail and on ballot drop boxes, needed, he claims, to clean up election nightmares that have plagued the state's reputation since the neck-and-neck George Bush vs. Al Gore fight in 2000.
As a state governor he has campaigned for election deniers, after bragging before the 2020 presidential election.that he had removed local election officials and even in the middle of the pandemic had not expanded mail-in voting.
More from mentor Trump's playbook? In 2022 DeSantis wrongly arrested Black voters . . . for voting.
And now this . . .
NYTimes: Today’s Top News: DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Loss, and More
CPI: "Breeding ground for the next generation of Trump loyalists," an engine of voter suppression
- Funded by? The Council for National Policy (CNP), also known as the “Secret Hub of the Radical Christian Right."
- Founded/directed by? Jim DeMint, CNP member & former president of The Heritage Foundation.
- Led by? Trump enabler & co-conspirator Mark Meadows, CNP member & former Trump chief of staff.
- Founder and funder of? Election Integrity Network (EIN), voter suppression masquerading as election integrity,
- EIN's leader? CNP/CPI member & Trump voter-suppression attorney, Cleta Mitchell.
- Opposed: "For the People" Act, the elections reform bill that would undo Voter ID laws, support mail-in ballots, enact automatic voter registration, and shine light on dark money.
- Partners with: Jan 6. enabler Turning Point USA, which played a major role in the January 6th Capitol riots.
- Funding: Mark Meadows' mission "to create more members [of Congress] like Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley," via CPI’s new State Freedom Caucus Network.
“There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy, Republican-California, said, according to a recording of the 15 June 2016, exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Representative Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia. Learn More
- Liddell on Twitter claimed Trump won by historic landslide and blamed loss on “one of the biggest foreign attacks in our country ever!”
- “MyPillow CEO sticks by Trump, baselessly blames Antifa for Capitol violence. Business Journal” bizjournals.com, Jan. 8 2021
- Dominion Voting Systems has brought a defamation action against Lindell for false claims that the company’s voting machines were manipulated to swing the election to Biden. washingtonpost.com, Feb. 22, 2021
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Mr. Lindell was also present at the Trump International Hotel on Jan. 5 for a meeting that included about 15 people, where the discussion centered on “how to put pressure on more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results,” according to one attendee, Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor of Nebraska.
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Among those in attendance, according to Mr. Herbster, were Mr. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr.; Mr. Giuliani; Mr. Flynn, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; the Trump advisers Peter Navarro, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.
The so-called "election integrity" committees of the RNC and its state counterpart (the RSLC) are filled with election deniers (members who backed the false conspiracies about the 2020 election) and who have publicly called for some of the most severe voting restrictions.
On the RNC committee, Drew McKissick, the Republican chair in South Carolina, tweeted false accusations by the Trump campaign in November about dead voters and vans full of Biden ballots.
Lenar Whitney, a RNC committee member from Louisiana, repeated conspiracies about Dominion voting machines at a party meeting.
Poor Ted - unmanned, unprincipled, unliked, yet drowning in ambition:
"The call was just one step in a collaboration [between Trump and Cruz] that for two months turned the once-bitter political enemies into close allies in the effort to keep Trump in the White House based on the president’s false claims about a stolen election. By Cruz’s own account, he was “leading the charge” to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president."
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On "The Beat" tonight, Ari Melber connected Trump Co-Conspirator John Eastman to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Just before midnight on January 6, 2021, after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Eastman wrote to Pence’s lawyer to beg him to get Pence to adjourn Congress “for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.” On the floor of the Senate at about the same time, Cruz, who voted against certification, used very similar language when he called for “a ten-day emergency audit.” Learn More
Mr. Clark, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Perry all played roles in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office, according to extensive evidence gathered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House select committee that is looking into the events of Jan. 6. The men also each had direct dealings with Mr. Trump, meaning the inquiry could ultimately lead to the former president.
Mr. Perry was instrumental in pushing Mr. Trump to appoint Mr. Clark as his acting attorney general over the objections of several other top officials at the Justice Department. At one of its presentations, the House committee released text messages in which Mr. Perry repeatedly pressured Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, to reach out to Mr. Clark.
Perry, a five-term congressman who last fall became chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, is known both for his vigorous support of Trump and for his history of promoting baseless conspiracies on issues that range from terrorism to the coronavirus to the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
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At Risk, Ivanka Eventually Comes Clean.
October 2016: Ivanka Trump: Too many Georgians ‘feel their vote has been canceled’: Donald Trump Jr, has leaned into his father’s lies and anti-Democratic conspiracy theories about the electoral process, as reports say his daughter, Ivanka Trump, has urged him to concede — while apparently considering her own political future.
Ms Trump, who quickly displayed her own political ambitions following her father’s 2016 election despite not having any government experience, has mostly stayed silent on the administration’s baseless allegations of mass voter fraud. She posted a single tweet about the issue after Election Day, as her father began ramping up his false claims surrounding mail-in voting and ballot counting: “Every legally cast vote should be counted. Every illegally cast vote should not.” June 2022: The report details how, in the final days of the Trump White House, Jared Kushner would tell anyone who'd listen that he and the wife essentially knew that Dad was a loser before it had been officially called. It's hardly a coincidence that this latest one, which could help shield the couple from any accusation that they played a role in fomenting violence at the Capitol, is emerging just as the January 6 committee is presenting them as the hearings' star attraction. Learn More
Louisiana Republican U.S. Sen. John Kennedy joined an effort to refuse certifying electors from six states, in hopes of denying the presidency to the election's winner, Joe Biden. Trump won those states in 2016, but voters there backed Biden in 2020.
Undisputed Senate king of the waffle, Oxford, England-educated Sen. Kennedy then characteristically waffled:
“You will never find where I ever said, anywhere, that the election was stolen or not stolen,” Kennedy told WWL-TV in his first extended interview about his votes Jan. 6 and the Capitol riot that attempted to derail the peaceful transfer of power.
“Now, having said that, I have never seen demonstrated evidence proven in a court of law that it made a difference. I'm not saying it did. I'm not saying that it didn't. I'm not sure anybody knows,” he said.
Kennedy acknowledged that “some people” say there were no significant voting irregularities at all, but said even if that were true, “people perceived that there were. And that's undermining our election integrity.”
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"It was Mr. Meadows’s critical failure to tell the president what he didn’t want to hear that helped lead to the country’s greatest political scandal, and his own precipitous fall."
- Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.
Mark Meadows Spills to Special Counsel About Trump’s Election Lies: Report
Mark Meadows has reportedly testified before a federal grand jury impaneled by Special Counsel Jack Smith in exchange for immunity from prosecution in the Justice Department’s election interference case against Donald Trump.
According to ABC News, the former White House chief of staff has testified under oath at least three times, twice before the special counsel’s office and once to a grand jury, regarding the investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Meadows reportedly testified that he had told the former president the election was lost and, according to sources, testified to the DOJ that “obviously we didn’t win.”
As previously reported by Politico, Meadows’ testimony to Georgia prosecutors has provided hints that he may be prepared to flip on Trump there, as well.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-meadows-flips-trump-spills-jack-smith Learn More