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The Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted former President Donald Trump ran a politically motivated investigation while allowing common criminals off the hook.
That was one of the conclusions of Republican lawmakers and witnesses at a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump.
Bragg has agreed to appear before the committee in July.
In his opening statement, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the committee’s chairman, said that Bragg ran for district attorney while “bragging” about suing Trump and vowing to prosecute the former president.
When Bragg took office in 2022, the first thing he did, Jordan said, was release a “Day One memo,” committing to “progressive, soft on crime, anti-victim policies.” That included reducing some violent crimes, such as armed robbery, to misdemeanors.
Despite his commitment to prosecuting Trump, Bragg told one of his prosecutors that the case was too weak, in large part because the lead witness, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, couldn’t be trusted, Jordan said.
Cohen had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and was disbarred.
Jordan said that Bragg received pressure from the Left to prosecute Trump, especially after the former president announced he would be running for president again in 2024.
Shortly after the Trump presidential announcement, Bragg hired Matthew Colangelo, a senior official in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice.
The Ohio congressman said that the pattern of Bragg’s actions demonstrates that the judicial system has been contorted to go after Trump.
“Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of President Trump was personal, was based on politics, and was wrong,” Jordan said.
One of the witnesses at the hearing, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, also said that the prosecution was “politically motivated” and “replete with legal error.”
Alvin Bragg's prosecution of President Trump was politically motivated and replete with legal error.
— House Judiciary GOP ?????? (@JudiciaryGOP) June 13, 2024
1. Prosecutors are explicitly forbidden from waging politically motivated prosecutions.
2. The charges’ reference to an unspecified and unidentifiable other crime constitutes a… pic.twitter.com/M24bJcJxzA
Bailey, a Republican, said that in the Trump case, the prosecutor “perverted the law to meet the facts, rather than objectively apply the facts to the law.”
He noted that the prosecution failed to correct the court’s instructions to jurors in the case.
“The prosecutor failed to correct the court’s error in instructing the jury that unanimity was not required as to the predicate offense that forms the basis for the fallacious charges,” Bailey said.
The Missouri attorney general said that trial by jury requires a unanimous decision of guilt for every offense, but the court didn’t instruct jurors to act in this way, which is why Trump was found guilty on all 34 charges.
Federal Election Commission member James E. “Trey” Trainor III, who was appointed by Trump, said that the legal theory the New York court convicted Trump on was absurd.
Trump was convicted of violations of campaign-finance law.
WATCH: FEC Commissioner Trey Trainor testifies about the absurd legal theory Alvin Bragg used to prosecute President Trump pic.twitter.com/jya5rdlJ1B
— House Judiciary GOP ?????? (@JudiciaryGOP) June 13, 2024
“District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to pursue charges against former President Trump for alleged violations of campaign-finance laws marks a significant deviation from this established legal framework,” Trainor said. “Doing so, Bragg has effectively usurped the jurisdiction that this Congress has explicitly reserved for federal authorities.”
Trainor said that the Trump case “sets a disturbing precedent for the politicization of legal proceedings at the state level.”
He said that the case opens a can of worms, wherein states can now use creative interpretations of campaign-finance laws against former presidents, presidential candidates, and other people running for federal office.
Trainor also condemned the Department of Justice for not intervening in this case, despite it being under federal jurisdiction. He said the campaign-finance laws are designed to allow the DOJ to ensure that the laws are not used to manipulate the political process, especially in an election year.
Democrats at the hearing supported the Bragg decision and said that Republicans were undermining the courts by questioning the Trump verdict.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., focused on Trump being a “convicted felon” in his remarks during the hearing.
“Just a show of hands for anyone in the room who hung out with a felon today?” Swalwell asked, rhetorically. “Hey, guys, you might want to get your hands up. You were hanging out with convicted felon Donald Trump. I don’t think anyone on our side did. That’s why we’re here.”
Swalwell said that Trump’s legal team had the chance to help choose the jury in New York. The California congressman also asserted that Fox News celebrated the recent conviction in the case of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, on charges related to the illegal purchase of a firearm.
Swalwell also questioned Republican support for the Supreme Court, which might ultimately decide the Trump cases.
“One judge is flying an insurrection flag in solidarity with the insurrection on Jan. 6, [2021] that tried to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election,” the California Democrat said, referring to the story about how an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—originally created by an aide to George Washington in the American Revolution—was seen flying at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home in 2021.
Swalwell said that Republicans on the committee chose to help a felon over families by focusing on the Trump trial.
The post At Judiciary Committee Hearing on Trump’s NYC Trial, House Republicans Decry Politicized Indictment appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Last week, 27 European nations voted for their representatives in the European Parliament.
If you were aware of this, did you happen to notice that there were no allegations of cheating in any European country? If you are on the Left, you might respond that there were no such allegations because the Right did better than the Left, and it’s the Right that makes these allegations.
But that response has little merit. For one thing, there were no such allegations, let alone demonstrations, during all the years left-wing parties won European parliamentary elections or national elections. For another, in America, it is not only the Right that has charged election fraud: Hillary Clinton, for example, still claims the 2016 election was stolen from her.
The fact is that, among democracies, America is essentially alone in having nearly half its population mistrust election results. So, either America is cursed with a paranoid population, or there are valid reasons for Americans to mistrust their elections’ results.
There is no question it is the latter. America is unique among democracies in having half its people mistrust election results because America is unique among democracies in the way it conducts its elections.
America is almost alone among democracies in not demanding that voters provide any identification when they vote. For some reason, the American Left vehemently opposes voter ID. It claims voter ID is racist and that those who favor it are engaged in “voter suppression.” This is prima facie absurd: Are airports racist for demanding passenger identification? Does passenger ID result in “passenger suppression”?
The most plausible reason the Left opposes voter ID is to enable some degree of voter fraud. If that is not the reason, isn’t it enormously irresponsible to cultivate doubts about election integrity among half its country’s citizens—for no valid reason? Moreover, in no other country does its Left oppose voter ID.
America is almost alone among democratic countries in not requiring paper ballots. As of 2023, only Brazil counts all its ballots in national elections through electronic voting. According to Pew Research Center, votes are cast by manually marking paper ballots in 209 of the 227 countries. In France, as reported by The Associated Press, voters “use the same system that’s been used for generations: paper ballots that are cast in person and counted by hand.” In 2009, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that voting machines could no longer be used. In 2017, the Dutch government announced that all ballots in the 2017 general election would be counted by hand.
Moreover, among those countries that use electronic voting, only in America are the source codes of the voting machines kept secret. Three companies—Dominion, Election Systems & Software, and Hart InterCivic—control about 90% of the U.S. voting technology market. Each is privately held, and each is committed to keeping its source code from becoming fully public. Wherever else in the world electronic voting is allowed, the source codes are available to all political parties.
America is almost alone among democratic countries in not confining voting to one day. All through American history, Americans voted on Election Day (unless they had previously requested an absentee ballot). The Left has obliterated Election Day; we now have Election Month.
Various American states are alone among democratic countries in mailing ballots to all their citizens—that is, even to those who never requested a ballot be sent to them.
America is almost alone among democratic countries in the length of time it takes to learn election results. In other countries, people continue to learn the results within hours. Throughout American history, Americans knew the outcome of virtually every election the night of Election Day. No longer.
All too often, tragically, there are valid reasons for Americans to mistrust election results. Add elections to the long list of institutions the Left has ruined.
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We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post Why Americans Mistrust Election Results More Than the Citizens of Any Other Democracy appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House committee with oversight of elections is subpoenaing 15 members of the Biden administration’s Cabinet regarding the implementation of the president’s executive order to use federal agencies to partner with left-leaning groups for get-out-the-vote purposes in 2024.
The House Administration Committee is investigating President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14919, signed in March 2021, that requires federal agencies to partner with private interests to boost voter participation. The committee previously advanced legislation to block funding of the order.
“Elections are partisan, but our election administration should never be partisan,” House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a public statement. “Allowing federal employees from the Biden administration to flood election administration sites threatens election integrity and reduces Americans’ confidence.”
The Biden administration has been secretive about the implementation of the plan. Critics of the order have called it “Bidenbucks.”
Records obtained by The Daily Signal and watchdog groups show the private actors partnering with agencies, or communicating with Biden White House officials, on the order have been left-leaning groups such as Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action.
Republicans objected, noting this could prompt federal employees to violate the Hatch Act, a law that prevents partisan political activity using federal time or resources, as well as violate the Antideficiency Act, wherein federal agencies cannot spend public money on matters not authorized by Congress.
“This Executive Order is another attempt by the Biden Administration to tilt the scales ahead of 2024,” Steil continued. “I will continue working to provide transparency and accountability on this administration’s latest scheme as Congress did not appropriate taxpayer funds for partisan activities.”
Biden administration officials have argued the executive order is about promoting voter accessibility and ensuring that voting is easier.
The House Committee on Small Business has been investigating the Small Business Administration’s efforts to register voters, and held a hearing on June 5.
“During a time when small businesses are struggling, the SBA has decided to focus efforts not on inflation or access to capital, but instead to register voters in a swing state,” House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams, R-Texas, said in a public statement. “This is completely unacceptable.”
In March, the SBA announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the Michigan Department of State, the chief election agency for the battleground state, to facilitate voter registration efforts ahead of the 2024 election cycle.
The Biden administration has shown a lack of transparency on the order, Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs for the conservative watchdog group Foundation for Government Accountability, told the House panel last week.
“If this was aboveboard, if it was everything the other side claims it is, wouldn’t you be shouting from the hills the details of this plan?” Whitson told the House Small Business Committee. “Wouldn’t you be proud to go on and say exactly what SBA is doing and where it’s doing [it] and how it’s doing it, if it were aboveboard? And so, the lack of transparency is a huge problem. It was a problem from Day One. The order came out in 2021.”
The post House Panel Subpoenas Biden Cabinet on Electioneering Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A group of House Democrats are launching a task force intended to stop a project by conservative leaders to restructure the federal bureaucracy under a future conservative president.
The “Stop Project 2025 Task Force,” announced by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., targets The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025.
Project 2025 takes aim at the federal bureaucracy and includes proposals to not only remove recalcitrant, unelected bureaucrats hostile to conservative policies, but to make the federal departments more responsive to the president.
Career civil servants often tussled with then-President Donald Trump’s administration with disagreements over policy. Trump often referred to the bureaucracy’s attempts to thwart him as the “deep state.”
Members of the anti-Project 2025 group include “Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu, D-Calif.; House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md.; and Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.,” Axios reported.
This task force will “help gather research, organize briefings, and coordinate messaging and legislative strategy among the Democratic Caucus,” Huffman’s office said, according to the Axios report.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts put out a statement saying that the Democrats’ task force is “unserious,” and that the recommendations in Project 2025 are all publicly available.
“Project 2025 will not be ‘stopped’ by an unserious, mistake-riddled press release or a task force of House Democrats lacking a basic understanding of federal governance,” Roberts said. “It’s amusing how those on the Left seem surprised that conservative policy organizations advocate for conservative policies.”
Roberts said that instead of fixing the problems caused by President Joe Biden’s administration, House Democrats are wasting taxpayer dollars on “a smear campaign against the united effort to restore self-governance to everyday Americans.”
The post House Democrats Create Task Force to Attack Conservative Plan to Defang Deep State appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Prosecutors in the gun case against Hunter Biden attested to the authenticity of a laptop he left at a repair shop in 2019, and a jury convicted Biden on Tuesday in part based on that evidence, even though at least two polls suggested that constant denials that the laptop was his from Democrats, social media, and legacy media helped President Joe Biden get elected in 2020.
“This is not a point the news media wanted to acknowledge during trial coverage,” Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, told The Daily Signal. “It was the shame of the liberal media since the FBI had the laptop all along.”
Graham was referring to the fact that the FBI was in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop and knew it was his when the story of its existence broke in 2020.
Had a sizable number of Joe Biden’s supporters been aware of the authenticity of the laptop that suggested the elder Biden financially benefited from foreign dealings that his son was involved in, a late 2020 Media Research Center/Polling Company survey shows that then-incumbent President Donald Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.
A TIPP Insights poll in 2022 also showed two-thirds of respondents believed the election would have turned out differently if the public had been more aware of the laptop contents. The survey was done after internal files from Twitter revealed the FBI’s efforts to block the story from getting out.
“We did the poll, and it does show that suppression of this story on Twitter and the suggestion that the New York Post wasn’t real news impacted the election based on people who might have voted for Trump or just not voted,” Graham said.
Prosecutors used the laptop, first reported on by the New York Post in 2020, in their case against Hunter Biden, who was found guilty Tuesday on three charges related to lying on a gun-purchase form about his drug addiction.
But during a 2020 presidential debate, then-candidate Joe Biden called the laptop—which documented Hunter Biden’s drug use and questionable foreign business deals and also implicated the elder Biden in those business deals—“Russian disinformation.”
Joe Biden’s claim was backed by 51 former intelligence officials who—at the behest of Biden campaign surrogate and now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken—signed an open letter alleging the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
The discovery of the laptop and its contents were largely suppressed on social media, and many large news organizations refused to cover the story.
“The irony to all of this is that liberals get upset when you say something is fake news or is biased. But that is precisely what they did with the New York Post story,” Graham said. “The liberal media says if you don’t believe us, you don’t believe in democracy.”
However, by mid-2022, most legacy media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, acknowledged the authenticity of the laptop. Yet before the Hunter Biden gun trial, the government had not formally acknowledged it.
In December 2022, TIPP Insights, a right-leaning polling outlet with a A+ rating from news and analysis website FiveThirtyEight, conducted a poll of 501 people and asked, “Would knowing the laptop contents were real and not ‘disinformation’ have changed your vote?”
Over one-quarter—or 28%—answered “Very likely.”
In late 2020, a Media Research Center/Polling Company survey of 1,750 self-described Biden voters showed that 45.1% did not know about Hunter Biden’s laptop and that 9.4% said had they known, they would have changed their votes from Biden to Trump, to a third-party candidate, or would not have voted at all.
The analysis of the survey results determined Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes. Both the Media Research Center and the Polling Company are right-leaning organizations,
In February 2023, the left-leaning Washington Post’s Fact Checker column by Glenn Kessler questioned the methodology and questions of the Media Research Center/Polling Company’s poll and gave “Two Pinocchios” to Republican lawmakers who cited the poll as evidence that the lack of media coverage influenced the election.
The emails on the laptop suggested that Joe Biden—despite his repeated denials—was personally involved in Hunter Biden’s business deals in China. There was also a reference to “10% for the big guy,” suggesting Joe Biden financially benefited from those business deals as well.
The post Hunter’s Laptop Helped Secure a Conviction. Its Suppression May Have Swung an Election. appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Popular conservative host Tucker Carlson is planning a nationwide speaking tour this September featuring a range of newsmakers and political leaders leading up to Election Day.
Carlson announced his plans Monday morning and shared the full schedule with The Daily Signal, which is partnering with Tucker Carlson Live to provide our subscribers with early access to tickets starting Tuesday (details below).
Since launching Tucker Carlson Network last year, the former Fox News host has amassed a huge audience for his video interviews, podcast episodes, and social media posts. He now plans to build on that success with a 15-city tour at some of America’s most recognizable sports arenas.
“I can’t wait to take our show on the road in cities across America,” Carlson said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “We’re going to be talking about real issues with real people. You’d better believe the Establishment will be losing their minds.”
The Sept. 4 kickoff of Carlson’s tour will afford him an opportunity to comment on the latest developments of the 2024 presidential election and interview a wide range of guests, many of whom are household names or recognizable personalities from Tucker Carlson Network.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., will join Carlson for the Sept. 26 stop at Bon Secours Arena in Greenville, S.C. Heritage previously sponsored Carlson’s live State of the Union special in March.
Carlson’s stops will feature actors Roseanne Barr and Russell Brand; musician Kid Rock; former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; media personalities Glenn Beck, Dan Bongino, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly; and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, will close the tour Sept. 28 in Jacksonville, Fla.
Tickets go on sale starting Friday, June 14, at 10 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster. Daily Signal subscribers will be able to purchase tickets tomorrow using a special code. Subscribe to our Morning Bell email newsletter or follow @DailySignal on X to receive the code Tuesday morning.
The complete list of tour stops is below.
| Wed, Sep 4, 2024 | Phoenix, AZ | Footprint Center Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Russell Brand |
| Thu, Sep 5, 2024 | Anaheim, CA | Honda Center Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Vivek Ramaswamy |
| Fri, Sep 6, 2024 | Colorado Springs, CO | Broadmoor World Arena Tucker Carlson Live with a special guest announced at a later date |
| Sat, Sep 7, 2024 | Salt Lake City, UT | Delta Center Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Glenn Beck |
| Wed, Sep 11, 2024 | Tulsa, OK | BOK Center Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Dan Bongino |
| Thu, Sep 12, 2024 | Kansas City, MO | T-Mobile Center Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Megyn Kelly |
| Fri, Sep 13, 2024 | Wichita, KS | INTRUST Bank Arena Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Charlie Kirk |
| Mon, Sep 16, 2024 | Milwaukee, WI | Fiserv Forum Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Alex Jones |
| Wed, Sep 18, 2024 | Fort Bend, TX | Ford Bend Epicenter Tucker Carlson Live with a special guest announced at a later date |
| Fri, Sep 20, 2024 | Grand Rapids, MI | Van Andel Arena Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Kid Rock |
| Sat, Sep 21, 2024 | Hershey, PA | Giant Center Tucker Carlson Live with a special guest announced at a later date |
| Tue, Sep 24, 2024 | Fort Worth, TX | Dickies Arena Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Roseanne Barr |
| Thu, Sep 26, 2024 | Greenville, SC | Bon Secours Arena Tucker Carlson Live with special guests Rep. Marjorie Taylore Greene and Dr. Kevin Roberts |
| Fri, Sep 27, 2024 | Sunrise, FL | Amerant Bank Arena Tucker Carlson Live with a special guest announced at a later date |
| Sat, Sep 28, 2024 | Jacksonville, FL | VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena Tucker Carlson Live with special guest Donald Trump Jr. |
The post Tucker Carlson’s 15-City Tour: Find Out Where He’s Going appeared first on The Daily Signal.
For months, Democrats have predicted that a guilty verdict in the controversial New York hush money trial would doom former President Donald Trump’s reelection hopes. Instead, new polling data from Scott Rasmussen suggests there is “no measurable impact.”
Rasmussen’s polling firm, RMG Research, had both Trump and President Joe Biden tied at 42% in its poll immediately preceding the May 30 verdict. Following the conviction, Trump gained a percentage point, leading 43% to Biden’s 42%.
“[T]he conviction of Donald Trump in a New York courtroom had no measurable impact on Election 2024,” Rasmussen wrote in a memo shared with The Daily Signal. “Survey results following the conviction are virtually identical to results preceding the conviction.”
Rasmussen first unveiled his findings Sunday on Merit Street Media’s “The Scott Rasmussen Show.”
Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who viewed Trump as less ethical than other politicians remained the same before and after the jury’s decision to convict him on 34 counts.
“This suggests any baggage carried by the president has long since been baked into the public’s assessment of him,” Rasmussen wrote in his memo. “In other words, the jury decision wasn’t news that surprised anyone.”
Also working in Trump’s favor: A majority of Americans, 52%, think his conviction will be overturned on appeal. Less than a third, 32%, disagree.
>>> Social Media Message Could Doom Trump NYC Verdict—If It’s True (And That’s a BIG IF)
Biden’s ethical lapses—and potential criminal behavior—are a factor contributing to the latest poll numbers, Rasmussen wrote. More than half, 51%, believe Biden committed crimes that could put him in court once he leaves office. Another 41% say Biden is less ethical than most politicians.
More than 6 in 10 voters, 62%, want the audio tapes from Robert Hur’s interview of Biden to be released to Congress, including 45% of Democrats. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, Judicial Watch, and CNN are suing the Justice Department for access to the recordings.
In a recent development, the Justice Department admitted to altering the Biden transcript by removing “filler words” such as “um” or “uh.” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that “the transcript is not accurate and was changed in a way to help Biden.”
>>> Amid New Cognitive Questions, Edits to Biden Transcript Color Lawsuit Over Recording
An overwhelming number of Americans agree: Upon being told of the edited transcript, 69% said Congress should have the opportunity to review Biden’s interview to confirm its accuracy.
Nearly two-thirds, 65%, think the Biden tapes contain embarrassing statements, while 59% believe the audio’s public release would harm Biden’s reelection bid.
The RMG Research polling data on Trump’s trial is from a June 3-4 survey of 1,000 registered voters; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The data on Biden’s audio tapes is from a June 5-6 survey of 1,000 registered voters; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
The post How Will Trump Verdict Affect His Election Prospects? New Poll Offers First Clue appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—North Carolina election officials were perplexed about how to follow President Joe Biden’s directive to expand voting among convicted felons, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which put the power of federal agencies behind mobilizing voters, calls for the Justice Department to ensure that convicted felons know how to restore their voting rights. Those rules vary by state.
State election officials were set to have a Zoom conference June 25, 2021, with White House officials on implementing the president’s order, including questions and suggestions.
A day before the conference, Karen Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, emailed staff about what points they wanted to address.
“The main one I can think of ideas for is about felons and voting,” Katelyn Love, general counsel for the Board of Elections replied via email, before citing the U.S. Department of Justice. “We don’t get notice from DOJ when a felon completes their sentence. This would be helpful information for us to have, so we know that the person is eligible to register again.”
Love continued: “If they don’t already, DOJ could provide information to NC felons when they start probation or when they are placed on supervised release (it’s not called parole anymore) that they are not eligible to register and vote until they complete their sentence.”
Kelly Tornow, associate counsel for North Carolina’s election board, responded: “Those are great felon ideas.”
Tornow said she was primarily concerned with enlisted U.S. service members and the Defense Department, and wrote that “the military should provide information to the service member about registering to vote.”
The Daily Signal obtained 159 pages of documents from the North Carolina State Board of Elections regarding Biden’s order on voter mobilization through a public records request.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial executive order, which they say is meant to use the force of government to tip the scales in elections.
Federal agencies have coordinated with transparently left-leaning advocacy groups to implement Biden’s order.
Further, several Republicans in Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress.
The lawmakers also express concern about federal agencies’ engaging in partisan political activity in violation of laws such as the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using work time or resources for partisan political activities.
Last year, on March 13, Sarah Bolton, former policy director for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, forwarded an email to Bell, the executive director of the state election board, who at the time was secretary-treasurer of the National Association of State Election Directors.
The email forwarded by Bolton was about paying college students to register voters. Students are viewed as a key constituency for Democrats.
Bolton told Bell to “let me know if this might be of interest. If it is, I can connect you directly.”
She forwarded a message from Michael Dannenberg, senior fellow for the College Promise and a consultant with the Foundation for Civic Leadership, in which he wrote:
We’re hoping Karen in her new role with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) might consider joining, maybe even leading, a non-partisan effort to get state and local officials to urge [U.S. Education Secretary Miguel] Cardona to make clear that government entities, notably offices that NASED members lead, and non party-affiliated, non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations like the League of Women Voters can pay work study students with Federal Work Study funds for non-partisan voter registration work just as colleges now can for identical work.
Mitchell D. Brown, equal justice work fellow for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, sent an email Aug. 17, 2021, to Damon Circosta, then chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, about the need to “target federal agencies and programs that we think would be good opportunities for voter registration.”
Copied on the email was Laura Williamson, then associate director of democracy at Demos, a liberal think tank that drafted Biden’s executive order. Demos also is working with several federal agencies to implement the order.
Brown’s email included an attachment with recommendations for using federal agencies to get out the vote. They included using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services through its naturalization ceremonies; signing up voters on Healthcare.gov; and registering voters through the interagency Transition Assistance Program and the Labor Department’s Pathways Home program.
The documents released to The Daily Signal include a May 24, 2023, email from Doug R. Hess, a political scientist and consultant with the Institute for Responsive Governing. That organization is fiscally sponsored by the liberal Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, which financially backs multiple left-leaning organizations.
Hess’ email, with a memo attached, isn’t addressed directly to North Carolina, but notes that targeting Medicaid recipients for voter registration could advance the goals of Biden’s executive order. Hess wrote:
Consider this concrete example: Six states and D.C. recently adopted automatic voter registration for Medicaid. Based on my exploratory analysis, I believe these reforms may result in an impressive number of voter registration applications, perhaps far more than social service agencies have produced in the past. Federal health and program participation surveys could advance our understanding of this reform in ways that state administrative data alone cannot. Data from these surveys would also substantially benefit the growing political science literature on policy feedback and health policy. Regarding the feasibility of this proposal, this expansion would further the goals of President Biden’s Executive Order 14019—Promoting Access to Voting.
The post ‘Great Felon Ideas’: Battleground State Struggles to Apply Biden’s Election Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Georgia Court of Appeals officially put the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump on hold.
The appeals court ordered Judge Scott McAfee to pause all proceedings pending its coming ruling on the defendants’ bid to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the case. McAfee previously allowed Willis to stay on the case despite finding “a significant appearance of impropriety” in her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who defendants allege she financially benefited from appointing.
The appeals court agreed to take up the matter in May. It will hear oral arguments on Oct. 4.
NEW: Georgia Court of Appeals pauses Trump's case pending its decision on the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis disqualification appeal. pic.twitter.com/0Qgs3XUdS2
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) June 5, 2024
As a condition of allowing Willis to remain on the case, McAfee required Wade to step down. His ruling found “reasonable questions” about whether the pair testified truthfully about the timing of their relationship, which they claimed began after Wade was appointed.
Defendants argued in their appeal that disqualifying Wade was “is insufficient to cure the appearance of impropriety the Court has determined exists.”
Wade paid for expenses on multiple vacations he and Willis took together, bank statements revealed.
Both claimed during a hearing on the defense’s motion that Willis reimbursed him using cash stored in her house. Wade pointed to cash reimbursements as a reason he had only one receipt for a flight demonstrating she paid for any aspect of their travel together, which they said was “roughly divided equally.”
Willis paid Wade more than the state’s top racketeering expert John Floyd, awarding Wade a $250 per hour contract while Floyd was earning $200 an hour, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.
The original motion to disqualify Willis was filed by co-defendant Michael Roman in January.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The post Appeals Court Pauses Trump’s Georgia Case Until Decision on Fani Willis appeared first on The Daily Signal.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place that is filled with anger, resentment, and hate,” President Joe Biden said May 29 in Philadelphia.
So, why did America’s self-styled uniter-in-chief decide to “stop the shouting and lower the temperature”—as he promised in his inaugural address—by recruiting Robert De Niro, one of Hollywood’s loudest hotheads?
“Trump wants revenge, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it,” the veteran actor said as narrator of a Biden campaign ad released May 24. De Niro’s overheated audio track continues: “Now, he’s running again, this time threatening to be a dictator. To terminate the Constitution.”
Biden could have tapped the suave and even-keeled George Clooney or the widely admired Julia Roberts, both talented supporters. Instead, Biden picked the boisterous, unhinged De Niro, whose comments about Trump slide from the vulgar to the violent.
On May 28, the Biden campaign staged a press conference outside the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building. Inside Room 1530 that morning, I was among those witnessing closing arguments in New York State vs. Donald J. Trump. Confirming suspicions that this bookkeeping-entry trial was a Democratic election-interference operation, like Trump’s other persecutions, De Niro and Biden-Harris 2024 Communications Director Michael Tyler stood before microphones and taunted Trump on one of the toughest days of his life.
“I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you,” De Niro said. “If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted … And elections. Forget about it. That’s over. That’s done. If he gets in. I can tell you right now. He will never leave.”
De Niro added, “Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country, and, eventually, he could destroy the world.” (Funny: After Trump left office in January 2021, Americans’ freedoms and elections remained, and the rest of the Earth is still there.)
This disastrously misconceived stunt then melted down as local Trump fans defended the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and swapped insults with the two-time Academy Award winner, whose screen credits include “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull.”
“You’re trash! You’re done!” one man yelled at De Niro. Another screamed: “You ruined Leo DiCaprio!”
“You are gangsters,” De Niro hollered back. “You are gangsters!”
This was not the first time that Biden’s new spokesman devolved into what the president decries as “anger, resentment, and hate.”
But De Niro and Biden are not so far apart.
The warm, lovable Grandpa Lunchbucket Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who Democrats showcased in 2020 was a mirage. Americans have learned the hard way that Biden is a nasty, vindictive man who lusts to imprison the leader of the opposition. Asked Friday at the White House about Trump’s charge that Biden had made him a political prisoner, Biden displayed an Arctic smile that seemed chilled by ice water in his arteries.
???Exclusive !!! The face of corruption. pic.twitter.com/IAvDv7X5ie
— Chris LaCivita (@LaCivitaC) May 31, 2024
Really?
Biden, 81, and De Niro, 80, deserve each other. They are a pair of mean, cranky, decaying leftists who gush anger, resentment, and hate at their political opponents.
In a word: Badfellas.
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Earlier this year, Joe Biden’s campaign manager said, “We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it.”
That’s a heady statement, but an intentional one. The president himself uses the term “our democracy” frequently, as do most progressive politicians and pundits as they wring their hands about the coming election.
Book titles such as “Reclaiming Our Democracy,” “The Future of Our Democracy,” and “Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy” are popping up increasingly as well.
A conspiracy? Doubtful. But neither is it merely coincidence.
According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, an online tool that searches historical sources to track word usage over time, only twice before has the term “our democracy” been in use more frequently than today: the late 1880s (around the time the Statue of Liberty was dedicated) and the late 1930s (during the height of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II).
Between 1950 and 1970, the term “our democracy” was rarely seen in print. But its usage has ratcheted up steadily since the Reagan Revolution began in 1981, and especially since 2000. It’s a development about which we all should be dubious.
I recall learning in 10th grade civics class (for readers born after 1980, that used to be a thing) that America is not a democracy, but a democratic republic. This is a distinction with a very clear difference, most notably the delegation by the people of various and vital public decisions to elected officials.
Although many will say that the term “our democracy” is an innocent shortcut, a catchall phrase for our nation specifically or rule by the people generally, the author of our Constitution would disagree. James Madison made clear in Federalist 14 that “under the confusion of names, it has been an easy task to transfer to a republic observations applicable to a democracy,” and that there are dangers in confounding the two.
Those dangers are manifest today. Progressives’ widespread and increasing use of this innocuous-sounding term is weakening our constitutional checks and balances and undermining the Bill of Rights, the only things standing in the way of what Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.”
Those who most traffic in the term wish to eliminate the Electoral College and reapportion the Senate by population rather than by state. They are working on multiple fronts to weaken First Amendment protections for speech and religion. They have long had the Second Amendment in their sights. And they consistently oppose individuals and organizations that push back against draconian federal restrictions such as public health lockdowns and climate change regulations.
If “our democracy” wants it, “our democracy” should get it, goes their reasoning, oblivious to Booker T. Washington’s admonition: “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”
During this election cycle, however, progressives are putting “our democracy” to work in an even more pointed way. Like a magician using sleight of hand to distract his audience, they’re using the phrase to present a false binary to American voters. In sports, this is called “hiding the ball.”
Donald Trump, according to the Left, is an authoritarian who not only will take away our rights but eliminate elections. The charge is, of course, ridiculous—Trump stepped down despite his objections to the 2020 election results, and last I checked it’s his opponents who are using authoritarian tactics to ensure he doesn’t win reelection. But the charge is useful, which to a Marxist mind is all the justification it needs.
Contrasting the potential “autocracy” of a second Trump administration with Biden’s ostensible defense of “our democracy” is meant to distract us from recognizing the real decision that confronts the voters and the actual threat to our republic: the creeping totalitarianism of the administrative state.
Totalitarianism is defined as “subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation, especially by coercive measures.” Ask anybody who lived through COVID-19 if that sounds familiar.
And if you visit Britannica.com—the modern iteration of the company whose encyclopedias we used in 10th grade civics class to learn about things like history and government—you’ll see a more expansive description:
Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. It is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of individual life through coercion and repression. It does not permit individual freedom. Traditional social institutions and organizations are discouraged and suppressed, making people more willing to be merged into a single unified movement.
I could have sworn I heard something like that last line in a video at the 2012 Democratic National Convention: “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.”
Britannica goes on to say that it was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who first used the term totalitario, meaning “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” It cites as examples of totalitarian states not only Mussolini’s Italy but Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China.
Given the growth of the federal government over the past century, totalitarianism certainly represents a greater threat to the United States than authoritarianism.
We’re not there yet, and thanks to America’s exceptional institutions perhaps we won’t get there. But as the recent violent increase in antisemitism shows, something we thought could “never again” happen very well might—all it takes is one generation of historical ignorance.
Those same institutions that have protected us from anything approaching authoritarianism increasingly are becoming our totalitarian masters. As William F. Buckley once observed, it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.”
Whenever you hear talking heads refer to “our democracy,” pay special attention to what comes next. Don’t assume they’re referring to the democratic republic handed down from our Founding Fathers or trying to preserve our Constitution and its safeguards.
More likely they’re taking advantage of our increasing historical ignorance resulting from the Left’s capture of our educational institutions (which was all part of the plan).
Let’s call our nation what it is: a republic. Whether out of ignorance or malevolence, saying “our democracy” is less likely to strengthen our heritage than seed our demise.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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Registered voters across the battleground state of Nevada registered in prison and at commercial addresses such as casinos, strip clubs, and fast-food restaurants—and an election watchdog group is pushing for action before mass mailing of ballots begins.
Logan Churchwell, research director for Public Interest Legal Foundation, wrote Monday to Clark County Registrar of Voters Lorena S. Portillo, who oversees voter registration in Nevada’s largest jurisdiction, including Las Vegas.
“In our analysis of Nevada’s statewide voter list dated April 9, 2024, we identified numerous addresses listed as residential that appeared to be commercial buildings where no one resides. Attached to this letter is a list of addresses from Clark County,” Churchwell wrote.
“We are including pictures that we have taken at each location along with additional information we collected,” he added in the letter to Portillo. “We request that you conduct your investigation and make any appropriate corrections to the voter roll by June 17, 2024.”
Public Interest Legal Foundation also posted a video on social media showing visits to numerous commercial locations where voters are listed as residing, only to find people unaware of the registered voter’s name.
YouTube oddly posted a disclaimer under the video that says: “Mail ballots submitted by voters who meet eligibility and validity requirements are counted in every election. Before they are counted, election officials vigorously verify the validity of every mail ballot submission.”
However, the point of the foundation’s video was to request that election officials verify the location of registered voters, then update voter lists accordingly.
“Ensuring the accuracy of the voter roll is especially critical given that Nevada has recently expanded voting by mail,” Churchwell’s letter to Portillo says.
As noted in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” jurisdictions across the United States have done a poor job of updating voter registration rolls in compliance with the federal National Voter Registration Act. This leads to the inclusion of dead voters or those who moved out of state remaining on voter lists in certain locations.
The Clark County Registrar of Voters office didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on this report by publication time.
Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Washoe County, Nevada—which includes Reno—to force election officials to investigate commercial addresses on the voter lists. Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit.
The document below includes evidence and a list of suspect addresses in Nevada compiled by Public Interest Legal Foundation.
The post Casinos, Strip Clubs, Fast Food: Addresses Listed for Battleground State Voters Prompt Concerns appeared first on The Daily Signal.
It’s been said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.
Most of us remember the national election of 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic, sudden changes to election procedures, mysterious mail-in ballots, allegedly hacked voting systems, and legions of lawyers filing scores of lawsuits.
I think we all remember the aftermath in 2021, as well. Thousands of angry conservative voters traveled to Washington, D.C., and entered the Capitol to protest the certification of the election after a surprise upset led to Joe Biden becoming the president.
Then came the speculation: Did the Chinese hack voting machines to flip the vote in favor of Biden? Were countless mail-in ballots shoved into voting machines in the dead of night?
Was Joseph R. Biden really the most popular presidential candidate in United States history even after running his entire campaign from a basement in Delaware?
I’ve prosecuted election fraud cases, but I do not know the answer to any of those questions. That’s not what this article is about. It is about why you should never be afraid to question the results of an election.
Having been in the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division, I have had more than a few conversations with people who almost seem to feel guilty about talking to me about election concerns. They usually start out with the other person saying, “Well, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but …”
That additional qualifier has never surprised me, considering how many risks there are associated with questioning the results of elections.
The moment anyone is in the vicinity of someone who claims an election was stolen, they risk becoming an “election denier.”
A few notable attorneys who filed election contests have been threatened with losing their license to practice law and even imprisonment. More than 500 of the 1,265 people who were arrested after marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are—more than three years later—still awaiting trial for what may ultimately amount to a misdemeanor conviction.
The rest of us are constantly told by “experts” that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election.
But what if those experts were wrong?
Recently, the Georgia State Elections Board voted 2-1 to reprimand Fulton County after finding significant issues with the vote tally in the 2020 presidential election. The board’s investigation concluded there had been over 140 separate violations of election laws and rules not only related to how Fulton County tallied the initial vote, but also how it conducted its recount.
It should be noted that the only vote against reprimanding Fulton County was from board member Janice Johnston and that was only because she felt the reprimand didn’t go far enough. She wanted a more comprehensive investigation conducted by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.
Out of a plethora of issues in how the election was conducted, the investigation also found that there were more than 3,000 duplicate ballots scanned during the recount. The Georgia Secretary of State’s general counsel declared that it’s inconclusive whether or how many of the 3,000 duplicates were included in the tabulated results.
There were also more than 17,000 ballot images that are allegedly missing from the recount.
Keep in mind that Fulton County’s initial hand recount shortly after the election awarded 1,300 additional votes to Trump, and while the current numbers would not change the outcome of the election, an open question of whether there are potentially more than 4,000 votes not properly accounted for in a swing state election that was decided by only 11,000 votes is—to say the least—problematic.
The Georgia secretary of state’s position appears to be that the initial count, the hand recount, and the machine recount are all relatively similar and therefore not a cause for alarm. When Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was asked directly about allegations of election fraud, he said, “No, the numbers are the numbers … . The numbers don’t lie.”
That seems like a difficult conclusion to reach when his organization seems to not be sure what the numbers are.
It also somehow seems worse to imply that more than 140 violations of election laws were committed by the election administrator’s office for the state’s most populated county by incompetence rather than malfeasance.
Compare Raffensperger’s lack of enthusiasm with the efforts to remove Sidney Powell’s law license, or the criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump currently pending in Fulton County, both of which stem from the actions they took (or are alleged to have taken) in response to issues arising out of the way Fulton County ran the 2020 presidential election.
In fact, the results of Georgia’s inquiry stand in contrast to the popular talking point that Trump’s allegations were so spurious that even individuals in his own administration refuted his claims of election irregularity.
For example, Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, who claimed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
Not only does it now seem that Krebs was wrong, but less than a month after making that statement, it was publicly reported that Krebs and his agency had been unaware of what could be one of the largest cyberattacks of our national infrastructure in history.
There was also then-Attorney General Bill Barr publicly declaring on Dec. 1, 2020, that the Department of Justice and the FBI had not uncovered evidence of “widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election”—after an investigation he had called for only three weeks prior.
In Texas, after we received an allegation of election fraud, our team of investigators and attorneys—who are already familiar with Texas election law—would seek to contact the election administrator for the county the allegation originated from to obtain their records of the election. Those records were often voluminous and would take time to review.
We would then make attempts to speak to witnesses, including the voters, to determine whether there had been fraud or irregularities in the voting process. We would investigate whether those who cast suspicious ballots were qualified to vote, whether they typically voted by mail or in person, whether their vote in that election came from their listed home address or somewhere else, whether they are even aware a vote was cast in their name, and sometimes even whether they are alive or deceased.
Consider that there were 81,139 votes—in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, combined—which separated Trump from Biden in the election. Among those four states, there were approximately 12,883,742 total ballots cast. Neither of those numbers would include instances where ballots had been destroyed.
The time it took for Georgia to issue its findings on Fulton County alone took three years. At the time of Barr’s statement, the FBI only had a total of 13,245 special agents in the entire bureau, spread out across the United States and other parts of the world. Even if the Justice Department devoted all its resources and limited the scope of their investigations to the largest counties of those four states, it would have taken several weeks just to compile evidence, much less come to a definitive conclusion just for one of those states.
There is also the question whether Barr even wanted the Department of Justice to be involved. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William McSwain, claimed that Barr told him to stand down on investigating election fraud allegations, instead ordering him to refer any complaints to the state of Pennsylvania.
While Barr disputes McSwain’s account, other witnesses testified under oath to receiving the same guidance.
In December 2020 an “irate” Bill Barr called investigators looking into Jesse Morgan’s claim of hundreds of thousands of completed mail-in ballots hauled across state lines to “STAND DOWN”
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 4, 2024
“‘I told you you need to stand down on this.’
“[He was] agitated, to say the least.” pic.twitter.com/orzqQFL245
So, when Barr said he had not seen evidence sufficient to conclude that fraud would have changed the results of the election, it seems that is exactly what he meant. He hadn’t seen fraud that would change the outcome. That would be difficult to find for someone unfamiliar with election fraud—and not interested in looking for it.
Nevertheless, Barr’s statements are a common talking point for media “fact-checkers,” who are adamant that election fraud is a myth.
Take for example how fact-checkers handled allegations of Jesse Morgan. Morgan was a post office contractor who claimed that 288,000 pre-filled ballots had been shipped into the state of Pennsylvania in trailer that somehow mysteriously vanished after being delivered to a post office.
As a former prosecutor, the fact that the investigation by the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI only concluded that Morgan’s claims could not be corroborated, while Morgan himself was never charged with making a false statement to a federal agent seems to me to mean that the investigation was inconclusive. That is, neither confirming, nor denying his account.
If that’s the case, then we are left with the notion there is no security camera footage, records, manifests, receipts or explanation for a missing post-office trailer allegedly containing 288,000 ballots that was left inside a secured post-office motor pool, or that it was just a shoddy investigation.
That didn’t stop the Dispatch and PolitiFact from concluding that Morgan’s allegations were false in their entirety based on the aforementioned sound bite from Barr, and the Postal Service’s largely redacted report.
More dubious fact-checks come from The New York Times. It fact-checked 15 separate statements from Trump about the 2020 election. In the interest of brevity, I’d like to go summarize what I personally took from just a few:
Other popular rebuttals stem from the 2020 election contests. The 2020 general election was easily the most litigated in my lifetime. According to some news outlets, Trump and Republicans filed over 60 election challenges, losing almost all of them.
The results of the 2020 election cases always seem to be the easy way out of any debate over the election results. Why wouldn’t they be? The judges found there was no election fraud. Case closed.
Except they kind of didn’t.
For background, a large bulk of the work against the 2020 presidential election contests was done by the law firm of Marc Elias. Formerly of Perkins-Coie, Elias is notably famous (or infamous) for his involvement with the entirely debunked opposition research against Trump known as the Steele Dossier. Ironically, Elias also thinks Russians intervened in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In addition to being at the forefront of litigating election lawsuits on behalf of Democrats, Elias’ law firm also seeks “favorable advisory opinions” from the Federal Election Commission on behalf of Democratic candidates. They are unashamedly pro-Democrat, and to put it mildly, they are very committed to what they do.
Elias’ win record speaks for itself, and I’m not discounting his firm’s successes, but the 2020 general election was an easy playing field. In election contests, “the tie goes to the runner,” and all he and his team have to do to win is make sure that none of the allegations of fraud in any of the election contests are considered sufficient to warrant discounting the results.
This was made all the easier because judges have a hard time with any case involving an election.
Take for example Trump v. Biden, where the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Trump’s suit was barred by the legal doctrine of laches. That is to say that Trump’s allegations were reasonable, but the case had been brought too late for courts to act.
To quote the court, “the time to challenge election policies such as these is not after all ballots have been cast and the votes tallied.”
Essentially, a candidate shouldn’t wait to get cheated out of an election before they sue over it.
A similar result occurred in Kistner v. Simon in Minnesota. In that case, the petitioners filed their lawsuit within days of the postelection review, but the court concluded two claims were barred as they should have been brought before the election, and for the third claim, the court found the petitioners failed to provide service to the other county officials required by Minnesota election laws.
In Arizona’s Ward v. Jackson, the Arizona Supreme Court classified instances where a “duplicate ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected in the original ballot” as a mere error, and held that it did not believe there were enough of these “errors” to overturn the results of the election.
Also stated by the court: “Where an election is contested on the ground of illegal voting, the contestant has the burden of showing sufficient illegal votes were cast to change the result.” It is not enough to prove there was fraud, you must prove there was enough fraud to change the outcome.
In Donald J. Trump for President v. Way, the New Jersey federal district court declined to hear a challenge to the New Jersey governor’s executive order No. 177, which directed the state to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and extended ballot counting to all ballots received up to 48 hours after the polls closed on Election Day.
After the suit was filed, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a bill codifying the governor’s decree, thereby making it law. One of the bill’s co-sponsors allegedly claimed that the bill’s purpose was to “undermine the Trump campaign’s lawsuit.”
The court’s ruling in that case was that it would defer to the state on whether to suddenly change election rules in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sidney Powell’s suit in Wisconsin, Feehan v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, was dismissed after the court ruled a Wisconsin voter and potential elector lacked standing to contest the election process in Wisconsin. The federal District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania came to the same conclusion in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Boockvar. The result was the same in Nevada in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Cegavske.
Also from Nevada is my favorite postelection opinion by far, Law, et al. v. Whitmer, et. al. In that case, the judge stated that he considered witness declarations—typically statements submitted under the penalty of perjury—to be “hearsay of little or no evidentiary value,” citing that per Nevada’s election code, election contests “shall be tried and submitted so far as may be possible upon depositions … .”
At the time of this suit, America was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and many courts were not even permitting contested hearings out of fear that several people in an enclosed space listening to live testimony could spread the virus.
That prohibition often extended to requests to take someone’s deposition, which was a hurdle I ran into in some of my own cases. Before reading this opinion, I would have thought that “so far as may be possible” under those circumstances would be broad enough to increase the viability of sworn statements to be presented as evidence. I would have been wrong.
Considering the court’s order only gave the contestants from Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 to gather their evidence and granted only 15 depositions to both sides, it’s not clear what evidence the judge expected them to be able to marshal.
I’m not insinuating there was bias, but it feels that way, reading the 10 paragraphs devoted to just bolstering the credibility of the defense expert compared to the five paragraphs the judge spends on the why he felt the entirety of the evidence presented by the other side was inadequate.
The bottom line is, a significant number of the election challenges brought in 2020 appear to have been thrown out for procedural reasons, rather than evidentiary ones. In the few cases where election fraud was discussed, the courts seemed to consistently hold that those bringing the case hadn’t shown enough fraud. Just don’t tell the fact-checkers at Reuters that.
Going into the election of 2024, it’s not even clear who will be able to successfully contest a national election. Neither voters nor electors appear to have standing to contest an election in their own state, and at least a state attorney general and House Representatives do not have standing to challenge elections in other states.
Those who do make it past the standing requirement only have weeks to depose as many witnesses as it takes to prove that enough fraudulent ballots were counted to change the result of the election.
If you’re unfamiliar with an election case, that could potentially mean finding thousands of fraudulent ballots in less time than it would take to contest a speeding ticket. Good luck with that.
The silver lining in all of this is that a byproduct of the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential election is that we are at least talking about it. And the public outcry has been substantial.
Once a niche topic, election integrity is now at the forefront of public discourse, and several states—including Georgia—are engaged in massive undertakings to identify vulnerabilities in their electoral process and have already taken steps to pass new laws seeking to prevent election integrity issues.
When Texas ran into hurdles with its high criminal court declaring it was unconstitutional for Attorney General Ken Paxton to unilaterally prosecute election fraud, the voters responded by voting out three of the eight justices who signed on to the opinion, and they were the only three up for reelection.
I do not know what happened in 2020, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I do know election fraud exists, and it has been around for a long time. So long as there are ways to cheat the system to obtain power, there will be people seeking to take advantage of them.
I also know that behind every successful election challenge, investigation, prosecution, and legislation are individuals courageous enough to come forward and question the results when something seems off.
That courage is becoming less and less rare after 2020, and it will be a force to be reckoned with in 2024.
That’s why I encourage everyone to never be afraid to question the results of an election when they see something suspicious, and act on those suspicions.
Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but the only way it will change is if you’re not afraid to talk about it.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
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Shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a New York jury brought the country to an unprecedented brink by finding Donald Trump guilty of financial fraud, making the former president a convicted felon for now (unless or until the conviction is overturned on appeal) and making the upcoming election a referendum, he now hopes, not just on his record against Joe Biden’s but the entire political system.
Republicans call it a miscarriage of justice; for Democrats, it’s proof that no one is above the law.
History will remember it as a new chapter: Donald J. Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
“We didn’t do anything wrong. I am a very innocent man,” Trump told reporters after the verdict, dressed in his trademark blue suit and too-long tie at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York.
Then a familiar script as the former president embraced martyrdom, arguing that his conviction was part of a larger war for the soul of a nation.
“I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution,” he said. “Our whole country is being rigged right now.”
Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Each count carries a maximum prison term of four years.
Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, just four days before Trump is slated to accept the Republican presidential nomination for a third consecutive time.
Although questions abound about the fate of the former president and the nation, there is little to no chance Trump will end up behind bars before the end of the year. He is expected to remain free on bail pending appeal, a process that is not likely to be exhausted until well after Election Day.
The case now shifts to the appellate courts—as well as the proverbial court of public opinion.
Democrats have been desperate to cast the election as a rematch of Biden v. Trump with an emphasis on character, not a judgment on President Joe Biden’s first term in office. They may have gotten what they wanted.
“Donald Trump is a racist, a homophobe, a grifter, and a threat to this country,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. “He can now add one more title to his list—a felon.”
Sources close to the former president prefer a different description.
A senior Trump campaign official predicted weeks before the decision that a conviction would “make him the Nelson Mandela of America,” comparing Biden to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his imprisonment of political rival and late dissident Alexei Navalny.
The framework suits Trump, who blasted out an email fundraiser shortly after his conviction calling himself “a political prisoner,” arguing both that “justice is dead in America” and “our country has fallen.”
This kind of rhetoric, complete with comparisons of the U.S. to the Third World, is likely to accelerate in the weeks and months ahead. Both major presidential campaigns now argue that the other could end democracy.
“These people would do anything and everything to hold onto political power. They don’t care if they destroy our country in the process,” said the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Martyrdom has been a central theme of Trump’s return to politics. After his indictment in New York last year, the GOP nomination was practically a fait accompli and his campaign nearly told RealClearPolitics as much at the time. It is unclear whether that phenomenon will translate to a general election.
Court has not crippled Trump so far, however, and Biden has not surpassed his rival a single time this year in the RealClearPolitics Average of polls. Well aware of those numbers, the Biden campaign attempted to tamp down jubilation on the left over the bad legal news consuming the right. They warned that Trump still could win.
“There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box,” said Biden-Harris communications director Michael Tyler.
Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House counsel’s office reacted to the news by saying only, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” By remaining silent, however, he ceded the spotlight to Trump, allowing his rival to shape the first 24 hours of the narrative.
[Biden didn’t comment until early Friday afternoon, when he noted before turning to the Israel-Hamas war that, “just like everyone else,” Trump will have an opportunity to appeal the verdict. The president added: “That’s how the American system of justice works. And it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”]
Nothing bars Trump from running for president as a felon. It is unclear, however, if he will be able to cast a vote for himself while his case goes through the appeal process.
A more immediate consequence of the trial ending: Trump’s schedule just opened up, and Trump can return to the campaign trail in earnest.
Sources in regular contact with the former president report that the prospect of prison has not cast a shadow over Trump personally. One told RealClearPolitics that Trump “sincerely believes” that divine providence now guides his steps and “that he has been chosen for a time such as this.”
Trump has six months to convince the country to return him to the White House, and in the most extreme circumstance, to preserve his freedom. Republicans were as bullish over those odds as they were angry.
“Today’s verdict from this partisan, corrupt, and rigged trial just guaranteed Trump’s landslide victory on Nov. 5, 2024,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the pro-Trump Article III Project, told RealClearPolitics.
Former Rep. Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who voted to impeach Trump, echoed that sentiment, warning that a conviction would backfire on Democrats. “The chain reaction will cause infinitely more damage than whatever they think they are preventing,” he told RCP.
The conviction created a tidal wave of donations as Trump began fundraising almost immediately after leaving court. The Trump campaign buckled briefly at the surge. The fundraising website, WinRed, temporarily crashed under the strain of heavy traffic.
“I’ll lose friends for this,” wrote Shaun Maguire in a lengthy post on X announcing his $300,000 donation to Trump. A partner at Sequoia Capital and a former Democratic donor, Maguire said that “lawfare” in part inspired his donation:
“Fairness is one of my guiding principles in life,” he said, “and simply, these cases haven’t been fair for Trump.”
Following the conviction, there was a discernable shift on the right among conservatives who normally argue that the judicial system ought to remain apolitical. Some Trump allies described the guilty verdict as “the Rubicon.”
Asked about the new Republican appetite to use the courts to go after political opponents, Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller told RCP that “the good guys must be as tough as the villains or freedom is doomed.”
The field of potential vice presidential candidates snapped to attention in their immediate condemnation of the conviction.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the verdict was “a complete travesty that makes a mockery of our system of justice.” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, called it “election interference.” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said it was an “absolute injustice” that “erodes our justice system.”
“From the start, the weaponized scales of justice were stacked against President Trump. Joe Biden, far left Democrats, and their stenographers in the mainstream media have made it clear they will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in a lengthy statement to reporters.
“This lawfare should scare every American,” said a more succinct North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican. “The American people will have their say in November.”
The safest thing for any Republican elected official anywhere Thursday night was to attack the judicial system. Defending that institution, meanwhile, was verboten.
Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a frequent Trump critic now running for Senate, appeared to miss the memo when he shared a statement calling for GOP leaders to “reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
Replied Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump adviser dispatched to oversee the Republican National Conventio: “You just ended your campaign.”
The most common sentiment among Trump’s close circle of advisers and friends was that something had changed permanently, not in the former president personally but in the country.
“Today marks a turning point,” said Brooke Rollins, who led Trump’s Domestic Policy Council before launching the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank often described as a Trump White House in waiting. “I see it as a fire that has been lit. I see the sleeping giant of the American people awakened.”
On the second day of jury deliberations, Trump had kept up appearances with a smile. A verdict was not expected Thursday, and by the afternoon, Judge Juan Merchan was preparing to dismiss the jury for the day.
The foreman replied instead that the jury had reached a verdict. He read each of the 34 charges and followed by a one-word pronouncement: “guilty.”
A smile turned to a grimace, and Trump, surrounded by his defense team, stared forward stone-faced as he listened to the verdict and American history. He vowed in brief remarks to reporters afterward that he would “fight till the end and we’ll win because our country’s gone to hell.”
It was like so many of the pronouncements he has made after so many of the other controversies that have defined his political life. It was also different. A loss, if the conviction stands, could mean prison.
Rollins predicted that Trump would persevere, as he has before.
“From my perspective,” she said, “it is almost biblical to see this sort of courage and leadership and unwillingness to back down even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.”
The post Trump Vows to Fight On Despite Conviction appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The story of America is scrappy, daring, and revolutionary. Our Founding Fathers took an idea—democracy—that had been dead for centuries and revived it with little more than an amateur militia and a dream for a better world.
The great American experiment has been led by consequential presidents. They were warriors, leaders, and titans. Some of them, like Abraham Lincoln, literally stood above the crowds with imposing height. Military heroes such as Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt had the kind of courage you only read about today.
Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Ronald Reagan, an actor before entering the political sphere, pioneered conservative policies and paved the way for the modern conservative movement.
From innovators, thinkers and writers to generals, orators, and businessmen, the presidency of the United States used to be a job that attracted the best of the best.
Fast-forward to 2024. America’s president is the butt of jokes around the world. President Joe Biden gets lost on stage, forgets what he’s saying in the middle of a sentence, and bears little resemblance to the charming “Uncle Joe” that many Americans admired during the Obama administration.
Adding insult to injury, the Biden administration makes wrong decision after disastrously wrong decision. It’s been four years of failure and intentionally destructive policies.
To put it plainly, Biden does not measure up to the legendary presidents of American history.
Just this week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted from the podium that the Biden administration could take executive action to fix the border crisis, but it won’t. In fact, she bragged about the executive actions Biden took early in his presidency to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump‘s administration.
Biden stumbled through nine errors in a recent speech that White House staff had to clean up afterward.
Biden’s White House issued condolences for the death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi—a man nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his human rights abuses and whose leadership led to a rise in terrorism and instability in the Middle East.
In another gaffe, Biden claimed to have been vice president during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also gave some bizarre marital advice: Marry a woman with a lot of sisters. He incorrectly announced that a person being held hostage by Hamas terrorists since Oct. 7 was in the crowd at an event.
He repeatedly stumbles up the stairs of Air Force One. He slips and falls on stage. He crashed his bike while riding at a slow pace. He reads aloud, with squinting eyes, the speech cues on his teleprompter.
He tells strange, inconsistent, and false stories about vague family members and friends.
Rather than cause alarm, Biden’s gaffes have become a punch line for late-night television. Hollywood brushes it off. Mainstream media happily provides him cover.
Unlike the media elites, the American people are horrified. They don’t think that Biden is truly capable of running the country. The chaos erupting around the world—in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, and Taiwan, to name a few—doesn’t calm any of those fears.
Biden is a liability on the campaign trail—and his team knows it. That’s why they’re trying so hard to keep Trump tied up in court, because when you put these two side by side, there’s no comparison.
The president shouldn’t be a punch line. He’s the most powerful person on the planet and leader of the free world. Presidents are supposed to inspire hope; they don’t hide in a basement.
The upcoming debates between Biden and Trump will make the choice explicitly clear.
When Americans head to the polls on Nov. 5, they will be reminded of the American presidents who have changed the course of history, some for better and others for worse.
Our great American revival can only happen when we embrace true leadership and put America first. Our next president must bring us closer to the promise of “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Many Ways Biden Doesn’t Measure Up appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign donation page crashed Thursday within minutes of the jury returning a guilty verdict.
Shortly after the verdict, the page displayed a 500 error stating “something went wrong.” Trump also received massive influxes of cash from major donors after the verdict, including $300,000 from Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire.
“The timing isn’t a coincidence,” Maguire wrote on X. In the past, Sequoia Capital employees have donated to both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee, as well as the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, according to Open Secrets.
Trump’s campaign wrote on X that “the American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial.”
“So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down,” the campaign said.
I just donated $300k to President Trump
— Shaun Maguire (@shaunmmaguire) May 30, 2024
The timing isn't a coincidence https://t.co/LDU4nJ8FBx
The jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records charged in the indictment brought by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11.
WEBSITE IS BACK ONLINE!https://t.co/KojPKxsxaD https://t.co/LylEZV7zJb
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 30, 2024
New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin also wrote on X after the verdict that he just “secured a $800k donation from someone for President Trump’s Joint Fundraising Committee.”
“Never experienced a massive ask that easy,” he wrote.
The Trump campaign and WinRed did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The post Trump Campaign Gets Immediate Avalanche of Cash After Guilty Verdict appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump has put the issue of world government at the forefront of the 2024 presidential race, vowing to “protect American sovereignty” and the U.S. Constitution from the designs of unelected global bureaucrats.
Trump took aim at global governance institutions in general, and the World Health Organization specifically, on Saturday, promising to shred and annul the WHO Pandemic Agreement unless President Joe Biden submits the document to the U.S. Senate for ratification, as required for treaties.
“As we speak, Joe Biden’s minions are in Geneva, secretly negotiating to surrender more of our liberty to the World Health Organization,” Trump told the Libertarian National Convention, eliciting a fulsome chorus of boos. “Drafts of the agreement show that they want to subjugate America to foreign nations, attack free speech, [and] empower the World Health Organization to redistribute American resources.”
Multiple drafts of the proposed accord show the WHO limiting national sovereignty by demanding nations follow its regulations on “routine immunization” and “social measures,” turn over 20% of all vaccines for global redistribution, and abide by the agreement’s terms even after they withdraw.
“They’re going to take our money and send it all over the world to other countries that we need for our own citizens,” in the event of a pandemic, Trump told the crowd in Washington on Saturday, warning that a pandemic “could happen again” in the United States.
His comments came just days after the Department of Health and Human Services took the first steps to deny future federal grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I will protect American sovereignty from the creeping hands of global government,” promised Trump.
By contrast, the Biden administration has signaled its desire to sign the agreement, which WHO downgraded from a “legally-binding treaty” after Biden realized the U.S. Senate would never ratify the controversial document.
“I am hereby demanding that Joe Biden submit these monstrosities to the Senate as treaties,” declared Trump on Saturday. “If he does not, I will rip them up and throw them out on Day One of the Trump administration.”
Opposition to the WHO pandemic treaty-turned-agreement has spread throughout America, including all 49 Republican U.S. senators, two dozen Republican governors, and 22 state attorneys general.
“The globalists are making a run over American sovereignty,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., on the most recent episode of “This Week on the Hill,” hosted by Tony Perkins. “We can’t allow these global organizations to dictate to us what our policy is going to be.”
Although the body tasked with drawing up the agreement, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, failed to finalize its text before the World Health Assembly commenced its annual meeting in Geneva on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus insisted the globalists would eventually prevail. “I remain confident that you still will” complete the global power transfer and have it adopted, he told delegates Monday. “Where there is a will, there is a way.”
But the internationalists compiling the sovereignty-destroying agreement will proceed from a radically government-centered philosophy alien to the American founding, experts say.
“Some of these nations come from a very different governance perspective than the United States,” one which “says it’s normal to look to the federal government to deal with these problems,” Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at Family Research Council—who is currently in Geneva monitoring the World Health Assembly proceedings—told guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Tuesday.
“Constitutionally, there are areas enumerated to the federal government under our Constitution. If they’re not, the issue in theory should be left to the states,” Weber told Hice. “We have a philosophy of government going back to our founding which depends on a self-governing, moral, and religious people. So, this really sets the stage for people in the United States to say, ‘Why should the federal government be tackling [this] issue in the first place?’”
Trump also cited constitutionalist themes in his pitch for libertarians to endorse his candidacy at Saturday’s convention.
“I unbound the United States from globalist agreements that surrendered our sovereignty. I withdrew from the Paris accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun U.N. arms treaty. And I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization,” said Trump, emphasizing that any institution of global governance is “not a good thing, not a good thing.”
Trump delivered a message precision-targeted to libertarian concerns. “Marxism is an evil doctrine straight from the ashes of hell,” said Trump. “We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe.”
“We will shut down our out-of-control federal Department of Education and give it back to the states and local governments. I will return power to the states, local governments, and to the American people. I am a believer in the 10th Amendment,” said Trump. “I will always defend religious liberty and the right to keep and bear arms. And I will secure our elections.”
Trump also pledged to put a libertarian in his Cabinet and in senior posts of his administration.
“What you’re witnessing under Biden is a toxic fusion of the Marxist Left, the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the government security and surveillance service, and their partners all merging together into a hideous perversion of the American system,” he said.
Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle also invited Biden and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to address the convention. RFK Jr., who has said the WHO Pandemic Agreement “should be dead in the water,” delivered extended remarks to the delegates Friday afternoon. Biden demurred. Former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, former Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also spoke at the convention.
Trump vied for the party’s backing, quoting at length a Deroy Murdock article, “The Libertarian Case for Donald J. Trump,” and encouraging delegates to nominate him—but only “if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”
The 3.3% of the 2016 vote, won by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican, actually represented an outlier for the Libertarian Party, which typically claims to 0.5%-1% of the presidential electorate.
Ultimately, the collected Libertarian Party delegates nominated Chase Oliver, an Atlanta-based activist who describes himself as “pro-police reform, pro-choice,” as well as “armed and gay.”
Oliver supported COVID-19 lockdowns and mask mandates, opposed bills protecting minors from transgender injections and surgeries, and posed with a drag queen. The Georgian, who forced a runoff in the 2022 Senate race that saw Democrat Raphael Warnock defeat Republican Herschel Walker, plans to gear his campaign toward young people, “in particular those who are upset with the war going on in Gaza.”
Some hope liberty-minded voters will ignore the Libertarian Party’s official endorsement and support Trump out of prudence. Walter Block, an economics professor and prolific libertarian author, urged libertarians in swing states to vote for the 45th president this November. “In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we could make the difference,” wrote Block in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday.
He reminded readers that “Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen received roughly 50,000 votes in Arizona in 2020, when Mr. Trump lost the state by about 10,000 ballots.”
Absent a more conservative government, America may be yoked to the WHO Pandemic Agreement without Senate ratification, circumventing the democratic process.
“It only breeds more public distrust when people are not able to fully share their concerns and air their grievances,” Weber told Hice. “The people of the United States need to be heard in terms of their concerns about the WHO, about the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, about the way their health information might be distributed or shared, or given over to some government program.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
The post Trump Vows: I Will Rip Up, Throw Away WHO Pandemic Agreement appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A new study has revealed that roughly 10% to 27% of noncitizens living in the U.S. are illicitly registered to vote, which could result in up to 2.7 million illegal votes being cast in the November elections.
Experts say the significant amount of potential illegal votes could be enough to alter election results.
The study, released last week by the research institute Just Facts, notes that the 2022 U.S. census recorded approximately 19 million adult noncitizens living in the country. “Given their voter registration rates, this means that about 2 million to 5 million of them are illegally registered to vote,” the report observes. “These figures are potentially high enough to overturn the will of the American people in major elections, including congressional seats and the presidency.”
On Tuesday, James Agresti, president of Just Facts, joined “Washington Watch” to discuss the scope of noncitizens casting ballots and the implications of the study’s findings.
“[T]here are very broad openings for noncitizens to vote,” he explained, adding:
In no state in the nation are they required to provide proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote. Now, a couple of states like Arizona tried to enact that requirement, but they were blocked by a court ruling supported by the Obama administration.
And if you look at the federal voter-registration form, it says you can submit all different forms of ID to register. That could be a Social Security number; it could be a driver’s license number; or it could just be a utility bill.
I mean, these are things that anyone can get by living here. They do not prove you’re a U.S. citizen.
And more than that, a lot of noncitizens have faked Social Security numbers, especially illegal immigrants. That’s what they do to work. A recent estimate by the Social Security Administration tallied 2.5 million noncitizens who had Social Security numbers gained by using fake birth certificates or stealing those numbers from somebody else.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation and board member of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, concurred. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
“[T]he problem is, states aren’t doing very much to verify citizenship, so it’s extremely easy for someone who’s not a citizen to register to vote and to vote in elections,” he remarked during Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch.”
“And when that is discovered, oftentimes nothing is done about it.”
Agresti went on to point out the effect that lax enforcement of citizen verification could have in November. “[B]ased on the latest available data, approximately 1 million to 2.7 million noncitizens are going to vote in the upcoming presidential election unless something changes. And that is more than enough to tip the results of congressional races, Senate races, and yes, the U.S. presidency.”
Von Spakovsky echoed Agresti’s concerns. “[I]t doesn’t matter whether they’re black or white, Asian or Hispanic. It doesn’t matter which political party they support. Every time an alien illegally votes, that alien is voiding, negating the vote of a citizen, no matter which political party they support,” he contended. “And the Democrats just don’t seem to want to understand that or to basically ignore it.”
Agresti further reflected on the motivations behind the Democrats’ opposition to efforts to improve election integrity.
“[I]t’s always hard to read people’s minds, but I can tell you this: The vast bulk of these noncitizens are voting for Democrats. According to the best data we have, about 80% of them will vote for Democrats when they vote illegally. And Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kind of checking of people’s citizenship. It does benefit them. Is that their reasoning? It’s an obvious incentive, but I can’t read their minds.”
Earlier this month, House Republicans attempted to address the issue by introducing a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls. But Agresti expressed doubt about the bill’s chances of passage. “My guess is it will move in the House and die in the Senate, but that’s just an educated guess. And again, even if somehow it got through the Senate, there’s no way [President] Joe Biden’s signing that bill.”
“However,” he added, “I do think in the aftermath of the election, and we hate to have a repeat of 2020, that there should be some accountability, some lawsuits that demand proof that people are who they say they are in tight races. None of that was secured in the last round of election lawsuits, and it needs to be there.”
Agresti concluded by urging candidates involved in tight elections to demand verification that only citizens voted. “A candidate has to make a plea and say, ‘Hey, I want this data to prove that these people who are registered and voted actually are citizens.’”
Originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The post Up to 2.7 Million Noncitizens Could Vote Illegally in November, Study Warns appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are scheduled to debate on June 27, but the debate will be unlike those held between presidential candidates in the recent past.
Trump told Biden he would debate him “Anytime. Anywhere. Anyplace,” and Biden accepted, but with stipulations. The Biden campaign said it would only agree to a debate if there was no live audience, hearkening back to the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, which was telecast live from a TV studio without a studio audience.
Fox News reports that the Biden campaign also stipulated that the debate should be hosted by a “broadcast organization that hosted a Republican primary debate in 2016 in which Donald Trump participated, and a Democratic primary debate in 2020 in which President Biden participated—so neither campaign can assert that the sponsoring organization is obviously unacceptable: if both candidates have previously debated on their airwaves, then neither could object to such venue.”
Those stipulations limited the hosting networks to a handful of outlets, including CNN. The outlet’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will co-host the debate at CNN’s studios in Atlanta. The debate gives CNN the opportunity, amid low ratings, to appeal to Americans who have come to view CNN as little more than a mouthpiece for the Left.
During prime time in March, Deadline reports, CNN averaged 601,000 views, falling far behind MSNBC’s 1.31 million-viewer average during the same time of day, and Fox News’ 2.14 million. CNN’s prime-time viewership is up 5% for the first quarter of 2024, compared with the previous year.
With additional Biden campaign stipulations requiring that a “candidate’s microphone should only be active when it is his turn to speak,” viewers will be watching whether CNN adheres to this rule equally between both candidates.
Perhaps most importantly, CNN’s Tapper and Bash will be judged by the questions they do or don’t ask.
Apart from questions related to the economy, which are bound to be asked, given Republican and Democratic voters’ shared concerns over inflation, CNN should take the opportunity to show U.S. voters it will hold Biden’s feet to the fire on the president’s border and immigration policies and his handling of foreign policy, with regard to China, Russia, and Iran, and support for Israel.
If CNN fails to conduct a substantive debate between the two candidates, ABC News will have the opportunity to do so on Sept. 10, but CNN will have missed a golden opportunity to show Americans it can do more than pander to the Biden administration.
On this week’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we discuss what to expect during the upcoming presidential debates.
Also on today’s show: A Target store’s tough anti-shoplifting measures in California show how far blue cities have fallen. Plus, ahead of Memorial Day, we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. And as always, we’ll be crowning our “Problematic Woman of the Week.”
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Trump, Biden, and CNN: What to Know About the First Presidential Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—After President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to work with private organizations to mobilize voters, senior White House officials asked agencies for “bold ideas” and explained plans to coordinate with “stakeholders.”
One message from the White House, obtained by The Daily Signal, said: “We look forward to working with you to”—but the rest of the content is blacked out by a redaction.
The specifics of those “bold ideas” and “stakeholders” isn’t knowable right now because “upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office, the information is being withheld under the presidential communications privilege,” according to a cover letter to The Daily Signal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The letter accompanied 99 pages that The Daily Signal obtained from USDA through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Since Biden signed his executive order on elections in March 2021, members of Congress, the press, and watchdog groups have struggled to get basic information on how the administration is implementing the order. Some details have trickled out through FOIA law, which requires that basic information from the government be available to the public.
Earlier this month, two House committees intensified their investigations of Biden’s order on turning out voters.
Although records obtained previously by The Daily Signal under FOIA requests contained redactions and cited exemptions, the responses didn’t refer to “presidential communication privilege.”
“The presidential communications privilege protects communications among the president and his advisors,” the cover letter to the released but redacted documents says.
“The records being withheld here consist of email communications concerning President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 and attached records that were solicited and received by the president or his immediate White House advisers who have broad and significant responsibility for investigating and formulating the advice to be given to the president,” says the letter signed by Alexis R. Graves, director of the USDA’s Office of Information Affairs.
Other exemptions to disclosure cited in Graves’ cover letter include the deliberative process privilege and attorney-client privilege.
Critics of Biden’s executive order, some of whom refer to it as “Bidenbucks,” argue that its implementation could cause bureaucrats to violate the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits political activity using resources of the federal government. Critics also say the order may violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits agencies from spending taxpayers’ money for reasons not approved by Congress.
Separately, the Justice Department has invoked presidential privilege to shield documents about Biden’s order in a public records lawsuit brought by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a watchdog group.
“In recent years, the presidential communications privilege has become an increasingly common excuse used by federal agencies to sidestep their disclosure obligations under federal law,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal.
“During the current administration, federal agencies have shown an increasing willingness to stretch the presidential communications privilege well beyond what is allowed under current law—documents or other materials that reflect presidential decision making and deliberations that the president believes should remain confidential—to any and all documents received by White House advisers and their staff,” Whitson said.
“If allowed to persist, federal agencies and the politically appointed bureaucrats leading these agencies will gradually render the FOIA law meaningless. Government transparency and our very democracy are under threat,” he said.
Stephonn O. Alcorn, then the associate director of racial justice and equity at the White House, sent an April 1, 2021, email to all federal agencies that is heavily redacted in the released version.
Alcorn’s email was about an interagency meeting to be convened eight days later, on April 9, by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Domestic Policy Counsel. The agenda is completely redacted.
Alcorn notified agencies that taking the White House lead on Biden’s election executive order would be Justin Vail, special assistant to the president for democracy and civic participation with the Domestic Policy Council, and Larry Schwartztol, an associate White House counsel.
In September 2021, Kumar Chandran, senior adviser for nutrition to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, notified Vail of a change of plans for how the USDA wanted to implement Biden’s order. In the released record, however, the change is blacked out from public view.
“After input from Sec. Vilsack this week, we are considering a change to one of our proposed actions, which would result in [redacted],” Chandran wrote.
“We need to do some further diligence to determine if it is viable, but if it is, we think it might be more meaningful,” he added.
A White House press release that month gave a broad overview of how the USDA would implement Biden’s order on mobilizing voters.
“The Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service will encourage the provision of nonpartisan voter information through its borrowers and guaranteed lenders, who interface with thousands of residents in the process of changing their voting address every year,” the White House press release said. “In addition, Rural Development agencies—which are spread throughout field offices across the country where rural Americans can apply for housing, facilities, or business assistance—will take steps to promote access to voter registration forms and other pertinent nonpartisan election information among their patrons.”
Getting to the point of how the USDA would push Americans to vote appears to be a tedious process, based on what’s discernible from the released records.
Some messages were more heavily redacted than others. For example, a September 2021 message from USDA Deputy Undersecretary for Rural Development Farah Ahmad says only “This is” before the text is blacked out.
A June 2021 email from Vail to Chandran was about the “interim report template.”
“At this point,” Vail’s message began, followed by several lines of redacted information. He continued: “We just want to ensure that all agencies are taking steps to generate bold ideas and begin to flesh out those ideas; it will also allow the opportunity for us to provide feedback.”
This statement is followed by more heavy redactions.
White House official Devontae Freeland, special assistant to the racial justice and equity team, notified agencies on July 2, 2021, about an upcoming conference with “stakeholders” on Biden’s executive order.
Separate document releases show that a Zoom conference the following July 12 involved Biden administration officials and numerous far-left political organizations, among them unions. The groups included the Southern Poverty Law Center, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, and the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network.
“As you know, we’re coordinating some input from stakeholders, including what we hope you found to be an informative session yesterday afternoon with state and local election officials,” Freeland wrote.
“We’ve also planned a session for nonpartisan nonprofit organizations engaged in voting rights advocacy to provide their recommendations and thoughts on best practices; we will follow up shortly with an additional session from nonprofit organizations with substantial expertise in reaching out to and engaging particular populations of voters who may be more difficult to reach. We hope that each of these sessions will provide helpful feedback,” he wrote, before more redactions blacked out the text.
In another heavily redacted message, Vail wrote USDA officials in late September 2021 with the subject line “Voting EO/Follow up items.”
On Oct. 6, 2021, Vail wrote to agencies about meeting on Biden’s executive order in coming days.
“We look forward to working with you to [redacted],” he wrote.
The next interagency meeting would be Oct. 20, Vail wrote.
Spokespersons for the White House and the Agriculture Department didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries about this report before publication.
The post ‘PRIVILEGE’: What the White House Doesn’t Think You Should Know About Biden’s Order on Mobilizing Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Aides to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra routinely inquired about how at least one agency under his control was putting President Joe Biden’s executive order on elections into action.
At least one message suggested that Becerra’s office and the agency within HHS wanted to know whether private organizations that received government grants were working to get out the vote through public service announcements or other means.
On Nov. 30, 2021, two months after the White House announced a vague description of how federal agencies would implement Biden’s executive order on turning out the vote, Anna Perng, a special assistant in HHS’ Administration for Community Living, emailed colleagues to say that the department’s Immediate Office of the Secretary wanted monthly updates.
“IOS [Immediate Office of the Secretary] gently reminded me to update EO 14019 Promoting Voting Access milestones this Friday, 12/3. I had thought tha[t] [REDACTED].”
The Administration for Community Living focuses on issues important to senior citizens and disabled Americans. The White House previously announced that the agency would be a “voting access hub.”
On Dec. 15, 2021, Perng sent another email to ACL staff.
“It is our favorite time of the month: IOS is looking for updates on these milestones by this Friday. Are there any changes to the following?” Perng wrote in part.
Perng emailed ACL colleagues on March 3, 2022, with another reminder.
“IOS is requesting a status update on the EO Promoting Voting Access milestones by tomorrow COB,” Perng wrote. She continued: “For example, I know that there are primaries underway. ACL had said we would share/retweet/repost promote grantees’ voting resources. Have grantees created any voting materials, PSAs, etc.?”
The Daily Signal obtained 159 pages of heavily redacted documents from the Administration for Community Living through a request submitted under the Freedom of Information Act, shedding some light on how the HHS agency is implementing Biden’s election order.
About three dozen pages of the records are from ACL’s “Administrative Priority Overview” and are almost entirely blacked out.
Because of the excessive redactions to the released documents, it’s not clear how “milestones” may be defined or whether any were accomplished.
Biden issued Executive Order 14019 in March 2021, requiring federal agencies to work on voter turnout.
Since that time, public records trickling out through requests under the Freedom of Information Act show that federal agencies partnered or met with numerous left-leaning nonprofit advocacy groups on the subject of getting out the vote. The groups include Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network, and the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center.
In September 2021, the White House issued a press release explaining how federal agencies would boost voting.
“The Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Community Living will launch a new voting access hub to connect older adults and people with disabilities to information, tools and resources to help them understand and exercise their right to vote,” the press release says.
The only other HHS agency specified by the White House as implementing Biden’s order is the Indian Health Service, which The Daily Signal first reported is partnering with Demos and the ACLU.
It’s not clear from the unredacted information whether the Administration for Community Living is teaming with any overtly political groups.
The newly obtained records include correspondence dated March 11, 2022, from Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager for the National Disability Rights Network, which advocates on behalf of the disabled.
Bishop’s email was to Ophelia McLain, program manager with ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, who was active in implementing the president’s order.
“As requested, I am sending an updated summary of trainings and resources planned for 2022,” Bishop told McClain.
Bishop wrote that the National Disability Rights Network was partnering with other groups—including Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, the National Association of the Deaf, and the National Federation for the Blind—on activities such as making videos and “providing plain language explanations of complicated election topics” such as primaries, the differences between open and closed primaries, and how ranked choice voting works.
Spokespersons for neither the HHS nor the ACL responded to The Daily Signal by publication.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the Department of Health and Human Services was contacted for comment before publication.
The post EXCLUSIVE: HHS Chief Routinely Checked Progress of Biden Election-Meddling Directive, Records Show appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Biden administration officials circulated and discussed a memo authored by a coalition of liberal groups aimed at getting more college students to participate in elections as part of the Education Department’s presidentially ordered voter-registration efforts, newly surfaced emails show.
Groups that donated millions to elect Democrats and are funded by major liberal donors submitted a list of recommendations to the Education Department in 2021 outlining ways the department could get college students, a historically liberal demographic, to vote more, according to emails obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. [Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.]
The memo recommended that the Education Department include a voter registration option on its college financial aid application, use resources to make students aware of vote-by-mail opportunities, and allow universities to use federal work-study to pay students for nonpartisan election work.
The coalition of groups sent its memo in response to President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order directing federal agencies to promote voter registration, education, and participation, offering recommendations on how to implement it.
Nick Lee, deputy assistant secretary for higher education, shared the memo with Annmarie Weisman, another deputy assistant secretary, and Gregory Martin, another department official, emails show. Lee explained to Weisman and Martin that he had been discussing ways to implement Biden’s executive order with an Education Department policy director and that he was willing to speak further on the topic.
Lee also shared the memo with members of the Education Department’s Office of the General Counsel, again explaining that the department was in the process of finalizing responses to Biden’s voting executive order, emails show.
The Biden administration may have been receptive to at least one of the recommendations the coalition of left-of-center groups offered.
In April 2022, the Education Department clarified that universities could pay students with federal work-study funds to engage in election-related work. Although students may be compensated for voter registration work, they cannot be paid using federal funds “for work involving partisan or nonpartisan political activity, including party-affiliated voter registration activities, as this is expressly prohibited,” the department said.
In February, the Education Department expanded on the specific work that federal funds could cover, stating that “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline or serving as a poll worker” were all acceptable.
Although Biden’s executive order stresses that agencies should tap “nonpartisan third-party organizations” to aid with voter registration efforts, the effects of registering more college students to vote could be a boon for the Democratic Party.
A September 2020 poll found that 70% of college students said they would vote for Biden in that year’s election, compared to just 18% who said they would vote for then-President Donald Trump. Strong turnout among college students in 2022 helped Democrats pull off a better-than-expected midterm election performance, NPR reported.
Heading into the November presidential election, Biden’s reelection campaign is seeking to mobilize college students.
The president held a 23-point lead over Trump among college students heading into the election, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics poll conducted in March.
The groups that sought to push the Education Department to mobilize more college voters themselves have ties to the Democratic Party.
The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, for instance, are both signatories of the memo and have spent millions of dollars to help elect Democrats through their political action committees, Federal Election Commission records show. Both groups endorsed Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary season and historically have supported the Democratic Party.
New America Foundation, which signed on to the memo through its education program, has received extensive support from the Soros family’s philanthropic network, pulling in millions since 2016, according to a grant database. George Soros himself has donated massive sums to Democrats and is one of the largest figures in the left-of-center philanthropic world.
The Voter Participation Center, another group that signed on to the memo, has received over $1 million from nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors, tax filings show.
Arabella Advisors is a consultancy firm that manages a network of nonprofits that spend millions every year on efforts to help liberal groups and Democrats.
The Voter Participation Center on its website claims to work diligently to mobilize members of the “New American Majority,” which includes people of color and unmarried women, to register to vote and cast ballots.
Republicans have taken issue with the Biden administration’s approach to using federal resources to juice voter participation.
“We have concerns about the lack of constitutional and statutory authority for federal agencies to engage in any activity outside the agency’s authorized mission, including federal voting access and registration activities,” a May 13 letter from the House Oversight Committee sent to Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young reads.
The Education Department, New America, the Voter Participation Center, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Biden Education Department Shared Activists’ Memo on Mobilizing Dem-Leaning Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Will we see a repeat this summer of the infamous 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention that devolved into chaos and anarchy? This year’s convention is, like 1968, set to take place in Chicago and social unrest is percolating on the Left, to say the least.
In a recent interview on Fox News, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn.—who challenged President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party presidential primary—said that given our current course of events, history is likely to repeat itself.
“I’m afraid this is looking awfully like 1968 with a lot of anger and angst and disenfranchisement that I think are going to play out on TV this summer, and it’s going to be awfully contentious,” Phillips said on Wednesday.
In 1968, anti-Vietnam War and various other far-left protesters descended on the Windy City to protest the party’s presidential nominating convention.
Illinois delegates hold a banner touting Chicago Mayor Richard Daley on the convention floor on Aug. 29, 1968, the final day of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago. (Photo: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
The situation escalated when then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, a Democrat, had enough and unleashed the Chicago Police Department on the protesters.
The media at the time strongly criticized the Chicago Police Department, but many Americans strongly sympathized with the authorities, who desperately sought to restore order. The events of the convention likely swayed a lot of voters concerned about violent radicals taking over their cities. Many in the media sided with the protesters, while the American people largely sided with the police.
Democratic Party delegates hold placards at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in August of that year. (Photo: Archive Photos/Getty Images)
The chaos was likely one of the reasons Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in November 1968. Preelection chaos created by the Left led to the “silent majority” delivering Nixon a resounding victory.
Given the protests we’ve seen across the country in recent months and the pressure the Left is putting on Democrats over Israel’s war in Gaza, it’s hard not to think that this year’s Democratic convention could see similar protests.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said that safety is a “top priority” for the convention, but he’s hardly the law-and-order mayor that Daley was. In fact, Johnson has supported defunding the police, has openly sympathized with the anti-Israel protesters, and even made it clear that he’s nothing like Daley.
As my colleague Tony Kinnett noted, Johnson has said he’s a different kind of Democrat. In a certain sense, Johnson’s attitude is a sign that in the long-term, the New Left factions that protested in Chicago in 1968 “won.” (More on that later.)
While prominent Democrats and members of the media insist that 2024 won’t be like 1968, it’s difficult not to see that a storm is potentially brewing.
There have already been significant protests at Chicago universities, pro-Palestine groups have sprung up around the city (some spouting chants like “Death to America!”), and a large group of anti-Israel protesters raised a Palestinian flag near where the Democratic convention is set to take place Aug. 19-22.
There’s no question that Democrats are already getting nervous about what might happen.
The 1968 convention was a seminal moment in both the history of the Democratic Party and the United States. It signaled a long-term takeover of the party and various other institutions by the New Left.
Given that the comparisons will continue to be made, it’s worth looking back at what happened 56 years ago.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson had elected not to seek a second term despite winning a landslide in 1964. Even though the Vietnam War had been conducted by Democratic presidents, the party had turned in an antiwar direction. This became a flashpoint for a party that had become increasingly divided.
The common narrative of the Chicago Democratic National Convention in the years that followed was that it was a “mostly peaceful” protest of the Vietnam War, broken up by a brutish and out-of-control Chicago police force.
That’s not exactly accurate.
The reality is that the well-organized protesters were looking to pick a fight to bolster their cause, as historian Stephen F. Hayward described in his book, “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980.”
“The Chicago police reacted to a calculated provocation,” Hayward wrote. “And, like the case of fighting schoolchildren, where the second child to strike a blow is the one usually caught by the teacher, the media caught the police reaction and attributed it as the cause of the violence.”
Hayward explained how plans to disrupt the convention began as early as December 1967 and were the product of three main groups.
Those groups were the Youth International Party, or the “Yippies”; the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, or “Mobe”; and the Students for a Democratic Society, the SDS. The factions had slightly different agendas for what they wanted to pull off in Chicago.
The Mobe generally wanted a peaceful protest to take place, though it wasn’t exactly averse to causing mayhem—and potentially, violence.
“It would be a mistake to think that the fight against the war can be won in the ballot box,” said Mobe leader David Dellinger. “It still has to be won on the streets.”
The Yippies wanted something more like a giant street festival. They announced a plan to put LSD in the Chicago water supply. Chlorine treatment of the water would have neutralized any threat to the Chicago population, but the Chicago police took the threat seriously enough to put officers in front of the city’s filtration plants.
The Students for a Democratic Society were looking for a fight. Hayward noted that the reasons the SDS was looking to ratchet up violence is that they saw liberal antiwar presidential candidates like Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy as a threat.
For leaders of this movement and others on the far Left, the entire American system needed to be overthrown. They weren’t looking for peace in Vietnam; they were looking to overturn the American way of life and government.
While the three factions plotted different tactics to achieve their goals, they were nevertheless united behind a larger agenda.
They wanted to sow chaos as much as possible so that they could eventually shove their more moderate cohorts on the Left aside and take the reins of power. They wanted to agitate, disrupt, and put the most pressure possible on Democrats to bend to their will.
Humphrey frequently mentioned on the campaign trail that he wanted to bring the “politics of joy” to the country. The activists were having none of it.
“We are coming to Chicago to vomit on the ‘politics of joy,’” SDS leader Tom Hayden wrote before the convention, “to expose the secret decisions, upset the nightclub orgies, and face the Democratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.”
Given the other events of 1968, it isn’t hard to see why the Democratic convention became a mess in hindsight.
Two riots had already taken place in Chicago earlier in the year. Civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot in April and Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June.
Many college campuses had been in turmoil in the spring. Student protesters had practically shut down Columbia University and occupied Hamilton Hall before being cleared out by the New York Police Department in late April. Yes, I’m still talking about 1968 here, not 2024.
By August, the mood was still deeply unsettled. The Democratic race came down to Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine. While the party had conceded a great deal to the antiwar wing, it wasn’t nearly enough to appease the activists.
There were late attempts to move the convention to Miami, but they didn’t come to fruition. Johnson, who remained a powerful influence in the party, was alleged to have said that “Miami is not an American city.” The show went on.
The 1968 convention was set to take place for four days in Chicago’s International Amphitheater, starting on Aug. 26. Before the events kicked off, protesters began gathering in the city.
Daley was hesitant to issue permits to the protesters, but consented to let them gather miles from the convention in Lincoln Park. He then changed his mind and ordered Chicago police to implement an 11 p.m. curfew.
Again, while many of the about 12,000 protesters who showed up in the city likely wanted to conduct a peaceful protest, the organizers knew that it would be easy to manipulate the situation to initiate violence.
More from Hayward:
[H]ard-core leaders of the Left knew it would be easy to manipulate the situation into a violent confrontation with police—and be able to blame the police.
Chicago’s police were notoriously aggressive toward protesters and rioters. [Daley] had famously ordered his police to “shoot to kill” arsonists and looters during the riots that followed King’s assassination in April. (It should be noted, however, that no one was shot during the convention riots.)
Once the protesters had been pushed out of Lincoln Park, all hell began to break loose as the protesters violently clashed with police, who used tear gas and billy clubs to disperse the crowd.
It wasn’t just police clashing with the protesters. Daley brought thousands of National Guardsmen into the city, too, with the governor’s consent.
Violence continued to ramp up around the city as the protesters continued to clash with police, and members of the media got caught up in the melee.
Aug. 28 saw the most significant day of violence at the so-called “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” which was televised live. That night, Humphrey secured the nomination as police clashed with protesters who had attempted to march on the convention.
Authorities put up barricades around the convention site and tightened up security even further for the final day of the convention, where protesters twice tried to get into the convention hall, but were rebuffed.
Hundreds of protesters and police officers suffered injuries during the scrums and authorities arrested more than 650 people.
Though many prominent Democrats blamed Daley for the violence that took place, Daley naturally disagreed.
He argued that calling on the police and National Guard was necessary to suppress people who were intentionally creating violence and disorder.
Daley gave a speech addressing what had happened.
“In the heat of emotion and riot, some policemen may have overreacted,” he said. “But to judge the entire police department by the alleged action of a few would be just as unfair as to judge our entire young generation by the action of this mob.”
Daley further said that while he didn’t condone any violent actions, he also would not permit a “group of violent terrorists to menace the lives of millions of people, destroy the purpose of this national convention, or take over the streets of Chicago.”
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley confers with President John F. Kennedy, a fellow Democrat, in the Oval Office of the White House on July 11, 1962. Daley was still mayor six years later during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (Photo: Arnie Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)
SDS leader Hayden said that the result of the Chicago protests was “100% victory in propaganda” and said he hoped that what happened in Chicago would be repeated around the country whenever Humphrey showed up at a campaign stop.
From the perspective of the New Left activists, the chaos was seen as a victory. The fact that several prominent members of the media were injured in the events was a bonus that would lead to sympathy and positive coverage for their cause, or so they said.
But attitudes around the country were hardly universal. Most Americans sided with Daley and the police over the activists, and many thought the police should have been even more proactive.
“A poll taken shortly after the riots found that 71 percent of Americans thought Chicago’s security measures were justified; 57 percent thought the police had not used excessive force, while 25 percent thought the police had not used enough force,” Hayward wrote.
In a sense, both the activists and their most stalwart opponents benefited politically from the Chicago convention.
The moderate wing of the Democratic Party continued to lose power and influence. The party was forever changed by what had transpired, and popular narratives took hold that the activists were on the right side of history, while the authorities were simply reactionaries.
On the flip side, a rising coalition on the Right—fed up with the urban chaos and intentional agitation—would deliver the White House in a landslide to Nixon.
The post The Truth About the 1968 Democrat Convention appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden, who wears bespoke sneakers to prevent embarrassing collapses and whose command of the English language rivals that of most kindergartners, is in bad political shape.
It is unsurprising that Democrats have resorted to some of the slimiest tactics imaginable to derail President Donald Trump’s comeback bid and push their senile octogenarian across the November finish line. Properly skeptical of their chances to topple Trump in a fair mano-a-mano, the Democrat-lawfare complex in 2023 conjured up four separate criminal prosecutions—two federal probes and two state probes—targeting the 45th president. After all, if you can’t beat him, then … prosecute and incarcerate him! All in the name of “our democracy,” naturally.
Suffice it to say that the Democrat-lawfare complex’s brazen, cynical attempt to subvert our constitutional order in the name of saving it has not gone according to plan.
In Washington, D.C., Special Counsel Jack Smith’s crown-jewel case against Trump, pertaining to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 jamboree at the U.S. Capitol, has been interrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices stepped in to assess the thorny constitutional question of the scope of immunity from criminal prosecution for former presidents, and a decision is not expected until late June.
The most likely result is a mixed opinion that holds some “core” Article II presidential functions are immune from post-presidency prosecution, but other acts are not. This would require a remand to the trial court for fact-finding to determine which legal category the acts in Smith’s indictment fall into. That trial court finding could then be appealed, too. There is virtually no chance Smith can wrap this all up before November.
In Florida, Smith’s other federal case has not been more successful. The Florida prosecution, pertaining to Trump’s post-presidency handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, had at least some potential on the legal merits. But Smith wildly overplayed his hand by charging Trump with violating the controversial World War I-era Espionage Act, and the proceedings have frequently been set back due to the strenuous demands of the Classified Information Procedures Act—a 1980 statute first introduced in the Senate, ironically, by then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
Recently, Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial start date, which had initially been scheduled for May 20. There is again little to no chance Smith can reach a jury before November.
The case in Fulton County, Georgia, which once seemed the most perilous of them all due to Georgia’s sprawling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the far-left Atlanta jury pool, and the potential for high-profile prosecution witnesses, has gone totally off the rails. Ever since January, the only questions in the case have not been substantive legal issues such as whether Trump oversaw a grand conspiracy to “overturn an election,” but tabloid fodder such as whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her illicit extramarital lover and appointed special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, are too compromised to bring the case.
The trial court’s finding that only one of them must recuse is now pending before a Georgia appellate court, and it is likely the Supreme Court of Georgia will weigh in, too. This case isn’t reaching a jury before November, either.
That leaves the ongoing drama in New York City, where a literal porn “star” (Stormy Daniels) and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen) are aiding the George Soros-funded prosecutor’s case of … well, he hasn’t exactly told us what it is. We surmise the case entails alleged New York State fraudulent bookkeeping charges in furtherance of a federal campaign finance law violation—which doesn’t even fall into the local district attorney’s jurisdiction.
The prosecution is about to rest its case, and we don’t even know for sure what the actual black-letter legal case is. On Thursday, the “star witness” convicted felon’s testimony was so bad that far-left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper remarked: “I think if I was a juror in this case watching that, I would think this guy is making it up as he’s going along.”
Brutal.
The Democrats’ strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
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The post Will Democrats Pay a Price for Their Crumbling Lawfare Strategy Against Trump? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is probing a controversial Biden administration executive order tasking the federal government with mobilizing voting groups it says are underrepresented.
In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has requested that Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young produce a slew of documents and information concerning the development and implementation of President Joe Biden’s sweeping “Executive Order on Promoting Accessing to Voting” no later than May 28 and a staff-level briefing by May 20.
The demand by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee signals an escalation in Republican lawmakers’ efforts to combat an effort they say may be unlawful, if not unconstitutional.
The administration characterizes its efforts as a remedy to “discriminatory policies and other obstacles … disproportionally affect[ing]” black, non-English-speaking, handicapped, and other minority voters. Executive Order 14019 calls on all federal agencies to develop and execute corrective plans to “promote voter registration and voter participation.”
It instructs officials government-wide to consider “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations … to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
Seeing the order as potentially enabling “the executive branch to circumvent the legislative process,” Comer is asking Young to clarify the “constitutional or statutory authority the President relied on,” as well as all “White House and OMB documents and communications” pertaining to the drafting of it.
In past oversight letters, including ones delivered in June 2022 by then-ranking Republicans on various committees, including Comer, members have also raised concerns that officials could violate the Hatch Act prohibiting their engagement in political activities in carrying out the order.
Senate Republicans have also questioned whether the act violates the Antideficiency Act, which precludes federal agencies from using funds “for a purpose that Congress did not explicitly authorize,” namely “voter mobilization.”
“Overreach by the federal government often leads to confusion and inconsistencies,” Comer also stated. He cites a recent letter from Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson to Attorney General Merrick Garland to illustrate this issue.
The order mandates that relevant agencies seek to ensure “access to voter registration for eligible individuals in federal custody.”
To satisfy that charge, the Magnolia State official notes that the U.S. Marshals Service is modifying contracts and/or intergovernmental agreements with jails “to provide voter registration materials and facilitate voting by mail,” and likewise that the Justice Department is working to “facilitate voter registration and mail voting for individuals in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons.”
He says these efforts create “numerous opportunities for ineligible prisoners to be registered to vote in Mississippi.” Illegal aliens, Watson warns, may be among those receiving information on how to register to vote.
The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14019 in March 2021. Despite a raft of oversight requests from House Republicans of agencies within their respective committee jurisdictions, those agencies have largely withheld the strategic plans they were tasked with crafting and implementing, and information regarding the putatively nonpartisan groups with which they have coordinated.
The White House has rebuffed RealClearInvestigations in its efforts to solicit details about an order that Republicans characterize as little more than a taxpayer-funded Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the Biden administration has sought to drive voter registration through agencies as diverse as the departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development via job training centers, public housing authorities, and child nutrition programs. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
The Department of Education has blessed the use of “federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities.
In January, over two dozen Pennsylvania legislators filed a federal lawsuit challenging the executive order. The Foundation for Government Accountability—which has litigated with the Biden administration to pry loose documents concerning the order—submitted an amicus brief supportive of the suit, asserting that the agencies’ efforts have one thing in common: “They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
Republicans’ concerns over the order extend to the involvement of the third-party groups with which agencies were to consider coordinating. The order itself was built on a blueprint from progressive think-tank Democrats. In a since-deleted but still archived analysis, the outfit estimates that if fully implemented, the order could generate 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually—a significant figure given that recent presidential elections have been determined by thousands of votes across a few states.
Democrats as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have reportedly worked to implement the directive. Documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and released earlier this month show that at a July 2021 listening session convened by the Biden administration, left-leaning activist groups encouraged some of the practices federal agencies would ultimately implement to carry out the directive, for example, in targeting prospective voters in prisons and at naturalization ceremonies. (The Daily Signal was foundation by The Heritage Foundation in 2014.)
“Every participant whose party affiliation or political donation history could be identified by the Oversight Project was identified as a Democrat except for one Green Party member,” the report noted.
While the participants suggested efforts to target constituencies—including criminals, immigrants, low-income families, including those in public housing, and Native Americans—the Oversight Project observed that “There is no corresponding evidence of efforts [to] increase voter access and education in likely Republican constituencies.”
As RealClearInvestigations has also recently reported, Democrats have made purportedly nonpartisan voter registration targeting groups that vote disproportionately Democrat a linchpin of their plans to prevail in recent election cycles.
“If the Biden Administration wants to use taxpayer-funded buildings to allow ‘nonpartisan third-party organizations’ to engage in voter registration,” Comer writes, “then the American people deserve to know who these organizations are.”
The Oversight Committee’s pursuit of information regarding the order comes in the wake of the House Small Business Committee’s recent escalation of its own probe of the order.
It recently subpoenaed two members of the Small Business Administration who refused to sit for transcribed interviews regarding an unprecedented partnership the agency inked with the Michigan Department of State. Under the relevant memorandum of understanding, among other things, state officials may conduct in-person voter registration at administration small business outreach events.
Fox News reported that the Small Business Committee found that nearly all, “22 out of 25 such outreach events, have taken place in counties with the highest population of Democratic National Committee target demographics.”
In March, a federal judge dismissed the Pennsylvania legislators’ case challenging the executive order on grounds of standing.
In late April, the legislators took their case to the Supreme Court, filing a petition for writ of certiorari and motioning for expedited consideration of their request in hopes the nation’s highest court will rule favorably on the matter of standing prior to the 2024 election.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
The post House Oversight Committee Probing Biden Voter Mobilization Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.
Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.
Biden’s controversial Executive Order 14019 requires federal agencies to participate in voter registration activities and help third-party organizations perform those activities on agency premises.
Potentially, this could involve spending government funds, contracting with third parties for the payment of those funds, or accepting voluntary services by these “approved” third-party organizations such as Demos.
Biden’s order appears to violate at least two provisions of the Antidefieicncy Act, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
But, Whitson added, to determine whether the Biden administration is violating that law, it’s necessary to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and what it’s being used for.
Existing pots of money, for example, could be distributed by the Department of Agriculture to state agencies to help carry out voter registration activities, he suggested.
“Even if the Biden administration were to claim that no public funds are spent to carry out EO 14019—a dubious and laughable claim—this effort would still violate the Antideficiency Act because it would mean federal agencies were accepting voluntary services from these third-party organizations to help carry out EO 14019, who also happen to be politically aligned with the current administration,” Whitson said.
Neither the Agriculture Department nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
OMB “created a template for budget requests for the Voting EO [executive order] within their equity template in case any funding is needed for implementation,” says a Sept. 23, 2021, email among Department of Agriculture officials.
Biden’s executive order also directed agencies to team with private organizations to boost voting. Chief among those groups is the liberal think tank Demos, which drafted the executive action before Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Akhil Rajan, then an assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, sent the September 2021 email message about the OMB’s template to USDA senior adviser Kumar Chandran, now the department’s acting undersecretary. Rajan is now a senior policy adviser to the White House’s deputy chief of staff.
Rajan’s email to Chandran noted, “Contact K. Sabeel Rahman,” apparently meaning he was the one to contact with any questions.
By that fall, Rahman, who was president of Demos when the liberal think tank drafted the executive order on voting, had joined the Biden administration’s OMB as part of its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Rahman is now a professor at Cornell Law School.)
The Daily Signal obtained 73 pages of emails from the Department of Agriculture through a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents were USDA’s second interim response to a request from The Daily Signal regarding Biden’s executive order on encouraging voter registration and voting. Some pages are heavily redacted.
The documents also prominently mention meetings and guidance from Demos, which is based in New York. The left-wing think tank drafted Biden’s executive order to agencies about voter registration in December 2020, the month after Biden defeated Donald Trump before he took office.
Although describing it as “minimal,” USDA acknowledges some budgetary impact from Biden’s order. Any amount, however, could mean obligating tax dollars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Antideficiency Act.
In an email dated Sept. 21, 2021, Anne DeCesaro, chief of staff for the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, wrote to Chandran about several issues, including “assessment of budgetary impact.”
“For all actions, we expect minimal budgetary impact as providing memos and letters and regular interactions with states are part of our normal business practices,” DeCesaro wrote.
In that same email, DeCesaro explained to Chandran how other agencies within USDA could participate: The National School Lunch Program could promote voter registration in high schools, for example, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, could register its beneficiaries to vote.
Ten days earlier, on Sept. 10, 2021, Chandran emailed several senior USDA staff about Biden’s executive order on increasing voter participation.
“Thank you for your past work to complete our interim strategic plan for the voting rights executive order,” Chandran wrote in the email. “We are now being asked to submit a final strategic plan, based on what we provided in our interim plan.”
He later added: “The WH [White House] team leading this effort has put together a template for the final strategic plan. This template largely follows the same format as that for the interim [plan], except it also includes instructions for how to flesh out each proposed action.”
The second interim response from the USDA to The Daily Signal’s FOIA requests didn’t include the department’s strategic plan or the template provided by the White House or its Office of Management and Budget.
An email dated Aug. 3, 2021, refers to a meeting between USDA officials and Demos executives to discuss Biden’s order on voting.
The Agriculture Department and Demos communicated again about the president’s executive order in November 2021.
“We’d love to reconnect soon to learn about your plans and see how Demos and the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union] may be able to support you in their continued development and implementation,” Demos senior policy analyst Lauren Williamson wrote Nov. 5 to senior USDA officials.
“When we met last, we talked about wanting to explore additional programs in more detail to ensure maximal impact of the EO for the communities the USDA serves and we’re eager to continue that conversation,” Williamson said.
Four days later, Rajan, assistant to the secretary of agriculture, wrote to Chandan, saying: “[D]emos has been extremely helpful in thinking about ways to expand opportunities for voting, and the coalition they assembled for our last call was rich in the types of groups that have assembled rigorously-tested best practices. So from that perspective it may be helpful to hear from them but understand that REDACTED.”
Because USDA redacted Rajan’s next words, it is impossible to know what Vilsak’s assistant wanted Chandran to understand.
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