Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

BREAKING: More sham Georgia GOP electors face potential charges in Fulton probe

At least 12 Republicans have been sent ‘target’ letters

The scope of the Fulton County grand jury investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election came into clearer focus as court filings Tuesday indicate that at least a dozen phony Georgia Republican electors have been informed they could face criminal charges.

The filing was the latest signal that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation is circling the group of 16 GOP electors who gathered at the state Capitol in December 2020 as part of a sham ceremony to further Trump’s push to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden.

The records for the first time showed that 10 additional GOP electors have received letters from Fulton County prosecutors notifying them they’re targets of their criminal investigation of the 2020 elections and could be prosecuted.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported that two other high-ranking officials — state Sen. Burt Jones, the GOP nominee for lieutenant governor, and Georgia GOP chair David Shafer — have also received the “target” letters.

It’s not immediately clear if the remaining four “alternate” electors have received the notifications. Willis’ office didn’t immediately comment. Another official, state Sen. Brandon Beach, has also received a similar letter, as officials say he helped organize the process as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and Georgia electors.

The 10 additional electors facing prosecutorial scrutiny are: Mark Amick, Joseph Brannan, Brad Carver, Vicki Consiglio, John Downey, Carolyn Fisher, Kay Godwin, Cathy Latham, Shawn Still and C.B. Yadav.

Attorneys representing those 10 and Shafer filed a motion to block their grand jury subpoenas for appearances beginning next week as “unreasonable and oppressive.”

In the filing, the attorneys note that a prosecutor in late June “informed us for the first time that all of these eleven nominee electors were suddenly targets” as the “investigation has matured and new evidence has come to light.”

“The abrupt, unsupportable and public elevation of all eleven nominee electors’ status wrongfully converted them from witnesses who were cooperating voluntarily and prepared to testify in the Grand jury to persecuted targets of it,” wrote the attorneys, Holly Pierson and Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.

The filing said 11 of the electors “reluctantly” invoked their 5th Amendment rights after receiving the target letters. Jones was not included in the filing.

“The unavoidable conclusion is that the nominee electors’ change of status was not precipitated by new evidence or an honestly-held belief that they have criminal exposure, but instead an improper desire to force them to publicly invoke their rights as, at best, a publicity stunt.”

Last week Jones filed a motion in Fulton County Superior Court seeking to disqualify Willis, citing a recent fundraiser she hosted to boost Charlie Bailey, an ex-Fulton prosecutor who is Jones’ Democratic opponent.

“Burt is more than happy to perform his civic duty and answer questions — but not from a prosecutor with such blatant conflicts of interest,” spokesman Stephen Lawson has said.

Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who’s overseeing the special grand jury, will hold a hearing on Jones’ motion on Thursday.

The false slate of 16 electors have become a major point of interest of the Fulton County special grand jury examining whether Trump or his allies broke any state laws as they sought to reverse Biden’s win in Georgia. Some legal experts say those GOP electors may have violated election fraud and forgery statutes, among others.

Investigators in Washington, both for the select committee examining the Jan. 6 attack and at the Justice Department, have also taken notice. Federal prosecutors recently subpoenaed Shafer and others for information about the fake electors.

It’s just one facet of a growing probe. The grand jury has also recently subpoenaed members of Trump’s inner circle, including attorney Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Graham was scheduled to challenge his subpoena in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday. But the senator and Willis announced on Tuesday that they have struck an agreement allowing for arguments to instead take place in Atlanta, either in Fulton Superior Court or U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

A judge from the latter is scheduled to hear a separate subpoena challenge from another congressman, U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Greensboro, on Monday. Like Graham, Hice is citing the Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause to argue that he can’t be forced to testify about matters that directly relate to his legislative duties.

House Speaker David Ralston, meanwhile, recently testified before the grand jury amid questions about a special state legislative hearing that featured false claims of election fraud.

https://www.ajc.com/politics/breaking-more-sham-georgia-gop-electors-face-potential-charges-in-fulton-probe/HMHJV725ZVCXJD2BMEHGYEVLCI/

[Rick Plant]

Georgia Trump electors throw Giuliani and Eastman under the bus in legal filing

The legal interests of some of Donald Trump's most prominent supporters in Georgia appears to have diverged as Fulton County District Attorney's investigates the alleged scheme to have Mike Pence reject legitimate electors and install Trump for a second term despite the fact he lost the election.

GOP state Sen. Burt Jones, a Trump elector and the GOP nominee for Lt. Governor in the 2022 midterms, filed a motion seeking to quash his subpoena, which will play out in public on Thursday.

In a separate effort, attorneys representing 11 of the 16 Trump electors in Georgia sought to distance themselves from Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman by seeking to establish that the timeline shows they couldn't have been part of the effort to get Mike Pence to overturn Georgia's election results, Politico reported Tuesday.

In a footnote on page 12 of the filing, the lawyers argued, "It has also been reported in the media that certain high-level members of the Trump team (Mr. Eastman, Mr. Giuliani, et at.) developed a different plan in late December 2020 (after Christmas) to, among other things, attempt to convince Vice President Pence to count these contingent electoral slates as the valid elector slates despite the lack of any successful judicial ruling."

"To the extent these reports are accurate (which we have no way of knowing), the nominee electors did not and could not have had any involvement in or knowledge of any such plan, as it was not even conceived until several weeks after the GOP electors had completed their contingent electoral slates on Dec. 14, 2020, and, in any event, it was never disclosed to or discussed with the nominee electors at the time," the attorneys argued.

The briefing also claims the Trump electors have received "abuse and harassment."

All even have been told they are "targets" of the Fulton DA's investigation.

Read the full report:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/19/false-georgia-electors-da-probe-00046593

[Rick Plant]

Stop the Steal organizer tried to stop the certification of Barack Obama in 2009 too: report



The Stop the Steal rally at the White House on Jan. 6 was organized, in part, by Women for America First, a pro-Donald Trump group started by Amy Kremer. Her daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, was the main organizer and signed off on the documents for the event.

In a piece by the New York Times Tuesday, it was revealed that the elder Kremer has a history of trying to stop a president she didn't like from being certified as the president.

"Barack Obama had just won the election by a popular-vote margin of more than 9.5 million," the report recalled. "The lawsuits Kremer alluded to were not about these votes but about Obama’s eligibility to run for the presidency in the first place. Several legal complaints filed in state and federal court (all of them dismissed) asserted that Obama was not born in the United States and was thus barred from seeking the presidency — a false claim that, as late as the end of Obama’s presidency, 41 percent of Republicans said they believed."

Kremer then became a prominent organizer in the so-called "tea party" and then helped organize the women's group supporting Trump.

"I come from the Tea Party movement, and I’m asked all the time: What happened to the Tea Party?" Kremer told a rally crowd. "Well, we’re still here. We just grew and morphed into something bigger and better — the MAGA movement."

Kremer's daughter was the one who text messaged MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Jan. 4: "POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol... POTUS is going to just call for it 'unexpectedly.'" Phase 2 was for the group to them attack the Supreme Court because they refused to intervene and hand Trump the election.

One question that persists in the House Select Committee is how Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, and the Kremers all knew that Donald Trump was going to go off script and announce that the group was going to march to the Capitol if it was unexpected.

"Kremer’s 'Stop the Steal' Facebook group acquired 320,000 members in its first 22 hours," the Times reported. "Facebook banned the group almost immediately when its planning for demonstrations in swing states was quickly subsumed in threats to kill liberals and calls for civil war. Women for America First took its organizing offline, planning a bus tour called the March for Trump that would culminate in a rally in Washington. One of its organizers was Dustin Stockton, a veteran activist Kremer met a decade before when they were both working on the Tea Party Express, an organization that toured the country by bus, rallying crowds on behalf of Tea Party candidates."

Stockton said that he was using "a lot of the same people who organized our Tea Party rallies to organize the bus-tour rallies" for the Stop the Steal buses.

Their ranks were increased slightly by those who were furious over COVID-19 lockdowns and far-right evangelicals who promoted the conspiracy theory the lockdowns as anti-Christian efforts of secularists to kill Christians.

"Their rhetoric would carry over to Stop the Steal, which accused many of the same Democratic governors and state officials of rigging the election against Trump with the expansions of absentee voting during the pandemic," the Times explained.

The bus tours became known as a kind of foretold insurrection with local Republican politicians invoking violence and calling for the murder of liberals.

"I jokingly told some folks in the Tea Party, see, we’d solve every problem in this country if on the Fourth of July every conservative went and shot one liberal,” said Tea Party activist and county commissioner Bob Cavanaugh, who spoke to a crowd in December before the attack.

That violent rhetoric increased over the years with the encouragement of Trump. Former New Mexico county commissioner Couy Griffin, founder of Cowboys for Trump, warned at a Jan. 3 rally in Bowling Green, Kentucky.: “If we allow this election to be stolen from us, we will become a third-world country overnight. The elitist, gross, wicked, vile people that are in place will continue to wage war on America. Because there is a war, mind you. I promise you that."

In May of 2020, he told a rally crowd, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. I say that in the political sense."

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and attempt to overthrow the election hasn't delved into the details about who funded the trips to Washington and organized the attack on Congress to stop the election certification.

The FEC has referred several cases involving Amy Kremer to the Treasury Department for non-filing and other issues.

Read the full report on how the tea party became the MAGA party at the New York Times.

Read More Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/magazine/stop-the-steal.html

[Rick Plant]

'Y’all need to go get yourself a good criminal defense attorney': Former Trump admin aide tells his colleagues



During a discussion about the Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) being subpoenaed by the Fulton County District Attorney, former Homeland Security Department chief of staff Miles Taylor suggested that allies of Donald Trump should consider getting lawyers if they haven't already.

Hice, a firm "states rights" advocate, is begging that the grand jury be moved from the state to the federal court system. The case, however, involves the violation of state election laws.

"The first thing you pointed out has to be underscored, is the massive conflicts of interest here that we didn't necessarily know about when congress was trying to create first a version of the 9/11 commission -- to model something around Jan. 6 that was like the 9/11 commission and then subsequently trying to get Republicans to agree to the select committee," said Taylor. "At that time a lot of folks thought it was just partisan politics, but we're starting to find out that there's a whole array of targets of potential criminal investigations, sitting members of Congress who were very involved in this saying, 'No, no, no, we don't want this scrutiny.' That's what's really very terrifying about this. They're trying to use their official power to put their thumb on the scales to prevent themselves from getting in trouble."

He noted that the law that has been broken isn't an "arcane" or "obscure" one, it's the U.S. Constitution that members are sworn to uphold.

"These members of Congress aren't people who can say, well, I didn't know the law and didn't know how it worked," Taylor explained. "Not that that's a good defense, as the lawyers will tell me, but these are people who lived that cycle. They lived that process. They go through the electoral process. They absolutely knew better. Nicolle, if we were making jokes about this, somewhere in here it would be a public service announcement for people who are around Donald Trump. The PSA would be: 'Y'all need to go get yourself a good criminal defense attorney because they're starting to go into the network.' These prosecutors are starting to go around the people around Donald Trump and it will have big implications. Allies like Jody Hice, they're getting dragged into courtrooms and in front of prosecutors. It's an indicator not that they potentially were involved in bad things, but that the ex-president is going to be dealing with a much-diminished set of loyalists if he decides to make a comeback in this political system."

Watch: 

[Rick Plant]

Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25

Just had another focus group of Trump voters where ZERO wanted Trump to run again in 2024. Really a striking departure from dozens and dozens of focus groups pre-Jan 6 hearings when at least half of any Trump-voting group wanted him to run again. His support is noticeably softer.

https://twitter.com/SarahLongwell25/status/1549156542259363842

[Rick Plant]

Georgia prosecutors say all 16 fake Trump electors are targets in criminal probe
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/georgia-grand-jury-trump-electors/index.html

[Rick Plant]

9/11 families to protest Trump's Saudi golf tournament on his own turf with Bedminster press event

Families of 9/11 victims are taking their fight against the government of Saudi Arabia directly to the home turf of former President Donald Trump.

In a new press release, the organization 9/11 Families United said it will be denouncing Trump's decision to host a Saudi-backed golf tournament next Tuesday with a press conference in Bedminster, New Jersey.

"While members of the Saudi-funded LIV golf tour prepare to continue 'sportswashing' the Kingdom's reputation by playing in another tournament on U.S. soil, 9/11 Families United and members of the 9/11 community will remind them next week yet again that Saudi Arabia provided support for al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers."

The group then argued that it was particularly wrong to have a Saudi-hosted golf tournament just "50 miles from Ground Zero" and they also pledged to "discuss the recently declassified documents that demonstrate direct Saudi support for 9/11 hijackers."

The group has repeatedly called upon Trump to call off the tournament, although at the moment it appears he has no plans to do so.

Juliette Scauso, whose father was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks more than 20 years ago, told CNN this week that Trump's decision to host the Saudi tournament was "disgusting."

"Now he's taking money from them and profiting from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia," she said. "Meanwhile, the kingdom is currently awaiting trial in federal court against the 9/11 families over these attacks. You know, of course, we are awaiting that justice, but yeah, it's hard to find the words."



https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1549796695839592450