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Posts tagged ‘2024 Election’

Exclusive: Hundreds Of Ballots Cast By More Than 100 Potential Noncitizens In Texas, AG Says

By: Beth Brelje | July 15, 2025

It is good officials are still digging into the 2020 election, but it is past time to repair the election process for future elections.

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Beth Brelje

Welcome to 2025, where we are still uncovering election fraud from the 2020 and 2022 elections. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating more than 100 possible noncitizens who may have voted in both the 2020 and 2022 elections, casting more than 200 ballots. In this case, most of the suspected illegal ballots were cast in Harris County. Paxton is also investigating in Guadalupe, Cameron, and Eastland counties, based on information from the Texas Secretary of State.

Add the possible 100 fraudulent voters announced this week to the 33 potential noncitizens who may have voted illegally in 2024. Paxton started investigating those 33 voters in June after the Texas secretary of state made a referral, based on information found in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s (USCIS) SAVE database, showing they voted in the 2024 general election.

Some 1,200 federal agencies use SAVE to verify U.S. citizenship or determine current immigration. For example, when an applicant applies for a Social Security Number, a drivers license, or for public housing assistance, the agency will check SAVE to see if they are a citizen. Legally, noncitizens are not allowed to vote in U.S. elections.

“Illegal aliens and foreign nationals must not be allowed to influence Texas elections by casting illegal ballots with impunity. I will not allow it to continue,” Paxton said in a statement. “Thanks to President Trump’s decisive action to help states safeguard the ballot box, this investigation will help Texas hold noncitizens accountable for unlawfully voting in American elections. If you’re a noncitizen who illegally cast a ballot, you will face the full force of the law.”

No one can realistically say fraudulent, noncitizen voting doesn’t happen. There are too many examples to ignore. Sometimes it is a single incident with one voter, like the Chinese student living in Michigan who was improperly registered to vote and is charged with voting the November election. Other times, it is a group of voters, like when Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson found 15 likely noncitizens across the state voted in November’s election, but she said illegal activity is “very rare.”

So rare, that an audits of voter registration rolls in Iowa found 277 noncitizens registered to vote or actually voted in the 2024 election. In Oregon, the elections director quit after officials discovered more than 300 noncitizens had been registered to vote, and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles processed more than 54,600 voter registrations, 2021-2024, with an unknown citizenship.

Just last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced it is investigating newly declassified FBI documents alleging that in 2020 the Chinese Communist Party was making thousands of fake U.S. driver’s licenses to use to validate fake mail-in ballots. The investigation is ongoing, but we can already see it is a huge scandal. And the list goes on, and on, and on. Not rare.

The remedy is so simple. Mandatory voter identification at voter registration and when voting. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would keep noncitizens from voting by requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote. It passed in the House in April and still has not moved in the Senate. It should be a bipartisan issue, but Democrats have claimed that providing identification is a burden that disenfranchises voters.

It is good officials are still digging into how the 2020 election went off the rails, so we understand the weak spots. But it is past time to shore up the election process with simple fixes like the SAVE Act, so in 2030 we are not still trying to figure out what happened in 2028.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.

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illegal Immigration, Law, Political

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Democrats Have Unleashed Donald Trump at His Best

By: Tristan Justice | November 08, 2024

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Tristan Justice

Visit on Twitter@JusticeTristan

Democrats are worried America elected former President Donald Trump at his worst. Republicans are celebrating that Trump is at his best.

Eight years after the Manhattan real estate mogul and reality television star shocked the world with a triumphant victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump will reclaim the White House as a veteran politician with a full term behind him.

“Figures who once hoped to act as stabilizing forces — including a string of chiefs of staff, defense secretaries, a national security adviser, a national intelligence adviser and an attorney general — have abandoned Trump, leaving behind recriminations about his character and abilities,” CNN reported. “They’ve been replaced by a cohort of advisers and officials uninterested in keeping Trump in check. Instead of acting as bulwarks against him, those working for Trump this time around share his views and are intent on upholding the extreme pledges he made as a candidate without concern for norms, traditions or law that past aides sought to maintain.”

In other words, to CNN, a second Trump term will feature a brash president without the guardrails of closet Democrats to protect them from his impulses that offend the left. But to Trump’s supporters, the presidents-elect past experience with opposition personnel is the guardrail to insulate the duly elected commander-in-chief from deep state interference. Not only will Trump be governing without “The Resistance” undermining him from within, but he’ll be governing with the right people carefully picked in the four years since he left office.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said Wednesday morning. “I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.”

He knows he can’t accomplish all he wants in his final term if things go anything like his first. Trump was hamstrung for half his previous Oval Office tenure with high staff turnover and fake scandals fabricated by the Democrats alongside a hostile media. Trump’s opposition was so desperate to destroy the president they exploited a new virus to rig election rules in 2020 and launched a cascade of lawfare afterward. His triumphant comeback re-election Tuesday, won in spite of impeachment, bankruptcy campaigns, criminal convictions, and even two attempted assassinations, now has those who initiated such efforts worried about accountability branded as “retribution.” Democrats might not have worried about a potential plot for revenge had they not weaponized the federal and state governments to punish Trump for the crime of winning the 2016 election.

“If you are a commie liberal and think Trump was ‘bad’ pre-2020, take a moment and consider what a post-landslide Trump will look like after you tried to murder him on live television,” wrote Federalist CEO Sean Davis on X. “You’re going to spend the next four years regretting every thing you’ve been up to for the last five.”

Had corrupt Democrats and regime media not used a pandemic to destroy the country and rig a presidential election in 2020, Trump would be on his way out the door today.

But they couldn’t help themselves. And Trump is going to have four more years with the full knowledge of…
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 6, 2024

Trump was voted back into the White House Tuesday in an electoral landslide, giving him a public mandate to tackle the burgeoning leviathan of the administrative state. This time, the incoming president knows better than to allow the deep state to undermine his agenda supported by the voters. The lessons from his first nine years as a politician fighting criminal and civil lawfare campaigns have, as Chuck Schumer might put it, “unleashed the whirlwind,” and delivered America a commander-in-chief who will be wiser in his second term and better able to avoid the pitfalls of his first.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Harris Campaign Recruits Foreign Volunteers, Tells Noncitizens How to Skirt Donation Rules

By: Reddit Lies | October 31, 2024

Reddit Lies

In the previous installments of this investigation into how the Harris-Walz presidential campaign is dishonestly manipulating online platforms, I noted the existence of a Discord server where campaign employees coordinate with a volunteer army to flood social media sites with campaign propaganda. The volunteers also vote en masse on social media to artificially boost Harris-Walz content or downvote content that is harmful to their campaign. Not only is this deceptive and misleading to voters, it’s a clear violation of these websites’ Terms of Service.

In part one and part two of the investigation, I noted this strategy had been successful at manipulating both Reddit and X. Over the past month, one out of every eight of the top stories in the eight-million-member Politics subreddit was planted by the campaign. On X, the campaign appears to have successfully voted down Community Notes accurately calling out the Harris campaign for tweeting out brazen lies.

But one activity I found on the Discord server was particularly concerning. After years of Democrats erroneously insisting that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and otherwise warning of foreign election manipulation, the Harris-Walz campaign is actively recruiting foreigners to work on the campaign and is even encouraging them to donate to American political causes.

There appears to be no vetting and given that the Harris-Walz campaign’s Discord community overtly engaged in disinformation campaigns, it was ripe for infiltration and abuse by foreign intelligence and other bad actors attempting to influence the election — although I saw no concrete proof of that.

However, my research found multiple foreign nationals actively volunteering for the Harris-Walz campaign. This activity, while permitted by the FEC, raises questions about whether foreigners should be allowed to volunteer for official U.S. political campaigns. Their comments ranged from showing excitement at how they could volunteer to “save democracy” …

… to Canadians sharing their plans to make road trips to Michigan, where they aim to go door-to-door canvassing …

…and asking how they, as foreigners, could donate money to “help fund the Harris-Walz campaign” using a legal donation loophole …

… which was praised by the server’s moderators, who went on to distribute the link to other channels (chats) in the Discord server.

The server’s moderators embraced the foreigners with open arms. Moderators are powerful users in Discord communities — they have the power to delete messages, ban users, and make announcements that reach the entire server’s user base (35,000 individual people at the time of writing). They were overjoyed to see non-American support, and eager to help foreigners learn how they could make a meaningful impact in the upcoming presidential election.

On Oct. 20, 2024, the campaign pinged the abroad group, desperately urging foreigners to spam call Wisconsin voters. Their goal was to reach 5 million telemarketing calls on Kamala’s birthday.

When one foreign user expressed concern about “meddling in US elections,” a moderator quickly assured him this was perfectly legal, and urged him to phone bank for Kamala.

While the Federal Election Commission does prohibit foreign nationals from making monetary donations and contributions to U.S. campaigns directly, it does explicitly allow foreign nationals to volunteer for campaigns as long as they are uncompensated. Unfortunately, the FEC does not account for donation loopholes, which are currently being propagated throughout the Harris-Walz Discord server.

The Harris-Walz staff are clearly teaching foreigners how to skirt FEC regulations. This may not be illegal, but it is enticing foreign nationals to influence American elections — something that Democrats have spent years warning is a serious threat to democracy.

Whether this directly violates election laws is also beside the point for many Americans, who believe foreign nationals should not be allowed to volunteer for U.S. presidential campaigns. American elections should be for Americans, and the Harris-Walz campaign is actively inviting foreign influences into their campaign.

The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.

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BUSTED: The Inside Story of How the Kamala Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit (And Breaks the Rules) To Control the Platform

By: Reddit Lies | October 29, 2024

Reddit Lies

For years, many have speculated that Democrat political candidates may be filling social media with fake posts to deceive the public and make their campaigns and causes seem more popular than they are. These claims have often been dismissed, citing that Democrat voters are already more likely to be on the internet compared to their not-as-tech-savvy Republican counterparts. This would suggest that the constant flood of left-leaning content on websites such as Reddit was merely a reflection of the userbase. However, many people simply couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just off, especially in the run up to major elections. Despite my fervent belief that something was amiss, I never had any direct proof that Democrats were actively manipulating social media.

That all changed two weeks ago, when X user @jessiprincey replied to one of my posts with a screenshot from a Discord server, seemingly related to the Harris-Walz campaign:

I immediately messaged Jess, and soon received a link to the Discord server where this operation was taking place. What I’d find there went far beyond algorithmic manipulation. I discovered massive “astroturfing” campaigns operating across multiple platforms. “Astroturfing” is a political and marketing term that describes creating swarms of coordinated and/or paid messages and posts to deceptively create the illusion of support from ordinary people. Essentially, “astroturfing” is the opposite of grassroots support.

In this case, there is a team of volunteers who spam social media with posts that specifically promote Kamala. They then have other users pretend to be random individuals who just happened across the post and decided to comment. It’s no different than a shady company paying a team to write a bunch of fake Amazon reviews about their product to make it appear to be a better and more popular product than it is.

On Amazon, that might result in a product getting more sales. In a U.S. election, it could mean that the falsely advertised candidate receives more votes. This behavior is not only incredibly dishonest, but in many cases, it directly violates the Terms of Service they’ve agreed to by operating on certain social media platforms.

In part one of a three-part series, we’re going to look at how the Harris-Walz campaign has manipulated the popular website Reddit, one of the top social media sites with 500 million users, to publish campaign propaganda.

Astroturfing on Reddit

Reddit is broken into thousands of message boards on discrete topics, known as “subreddits.” The Politics subreddit and several others are being actively targeted by the Harris-Walz campaign, with notable success. Since the Reddit astroturfing operation started, it has rapidly developed an organizational structure — complete with roles for team members, spreadsheets for tracking their analytics, and “Key Messaging” to stick to when making a social media post.

I found that 126 of the top 1,000 posts in the past month on r/Politics were posted by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. Owning one out of every eight of all top posts in r/Politics is not an easy feat, and it doesn’t just happen. Here’s how they achieved it.

Every weekday morning, Harris for President staffers like Gabrielle Lynn post the “Daily Messaging Guidance” to the server’s Reddit channel. It usually consists of articles and data that the Harris-Walz campaign wants to boost, as well as “key messaging” that their Reddit volunteers should stick to.

On Gabrielle Lynn’s profile, you’ll find a Staff icon (the blue D), which indicates that she is a paid Democrat staffer. In this case, Gabrielle is a Harris for President staffer.

The links compiled by official Harris-Walz staffers, along with other articles submitted by volunteers, are added to a Google Spreadsheet called “Reddit Organizing.”

Kamala’s “Lead Posters” (people who have demonstrated a “cultural” knowledge of Reddit) then choose which links will resonate best with different Reddit communities. For instance, a link about “how Project 2025 impacts reproductive health” will be directed towards communities with young women as their primary user base, whereas news about Kamala’s Fox News interview “winning over swing state voters” gets directed to Reddit’s Democrat communities, and possibly to people living in swing states.

Harris-Walz campaign volunteers have created a database of more than 100 subreddits — each containing detailed information on what kind of content they permit, what topics perform the best, and any specific notes about each community, such as how much “karma” or cumulative upvotes one needs to post in each subreddit.

After their links have been collected and categorized, volunteer “Posters” will take a handful of the links provided and post them to their assigned subreddits. Kamala’s posters, however, don’t simply spam links haphazardly. They use a calculated, sequential post timing metric to avoid Reddit’s built-in spam filters. Harris-Walz campaign volunteers often discuss their ban-avoidance tactics in their Discord server, while continuing to spam Reddit with their collected links.

Once the users make their Reddit posts, they return to the spreadsheet and update it with a link to their brand-new post.

And why do they collect their post links?

They collect their Reddit links so Kamala’s volunteers can flood the post with likes and comments, thus making them appear more active. This, in turn, triggers the algorithm to make the post appear in more user timelines. Reddit’s post activity algorithm is extremely simple, and can easily be abused, which is known on Reddit as “brigading.”

How Effective is This?

While the Harris-Walz Discord server was created many months ago, the spreadsheet to track their vote manipulation on Reddit was only implemented on Oct. 4.

Over the course of 15 days, this group of volunteers, directed by official Harris-Walz campaign staff, was able to make 2,551 posts to Reddit. So far, they have received more than 5.7 million upvotes and 418,000 comments on those posts, according to their own data:

Currently, they’re posting approximately 120 unique links to Reddit per day.

However, Kamala’s volunteer data wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know just how effective this campaign has been. So, I exported their spreadsheet and got to work.

Using their oh-so cleverly named “Please Upvote These!” spreadsheet, I filtered the information to find posts exclusively made by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. I found 1,728 posts created by 67 unique Harris-Walz campaign volunteers since Oct. 4, many of which received a LOT of traction in a very short time span.

I tagged each of their usernames with a “Kamala Harris Volunteer” label using a browser extension called Reddit Enhancement Suite, and went to their targeted subreddits to determine exactly how successful they’d been.

I found their primary target to be r/Politics, the largest community on Reddit for discussing U.S. politics with more than 8 million members. I sorted the top 1,000 posts of the past month, and what I discovered shocked me.

Of the top 1,000 posts on r/Politics, 126 were written by a user bearing the mark “Kamala Harris Volunteer.”

This means 12.5 percent of the most upvoted content on r/Politics came directly from volunteers of the Harris-Walz campaign.

Remember, this operation has only picked up steam in the last two weeks. On Oct. 17, eight of the 30 hottest posts on r/Politics were created by Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. That’s over 25 percent.

On Oct. 20, 13 of the 100 newest posts were created by Harris-Walz campaign volunteers.

Beyond r/Politics, they also target swing state subreddits, which tend to be a lot smaller in number and far less strictly moderated. They created a collection of swing state subreddits, including communities dedicated to their towns and cities, which streamlines the process of targeting them with Harris-Walz supplied messaging.

Because these communities are small, it’s a lot easier to get their posts to rank. In the week between Oct. 13 and the 20, 10 percent (39 of 400 posts) of top posts in their swing state collection were created by Harris-Walz volunteers, many of whom aren’t even from a swing state.

It’s safe to say that the Harris-Walz astroturfing operation has fundamentally compromised the authenticity of political discussions on Reddit. Kamala is actively ruining the internet by making her campaign look far more popular than it is in reality.

The actions, while seemingly not illegal, directly violate Reddit’s Terms of Service. The volunteers of the Harris-Walz campaign are using multiple accounts to manipulate votes …

and solicit votes from others …

in a group formed to coordinate voting:

These are all direct violations of Reddit’s content policy, which explicitly forbids the types of vote manipulation that is encouraged on the Harris-Walz volunteer Discord server.

Why is This So Effective?

For those unfamiliar with Reddit, the site tends to be very left-leaning, largely due to the biases of activist Reddit moderators. Here’s a recent example:

The following post was made by a Democrat redditor to r/Texas. The call for Democrats specifically to get out and vote was met with heaps of praise and showered with upvotes.

However, when the same text was posted but with “Democrat” and “Kamala” replaced with “Republican” and “Trump,” the post was deleted and the user banned from r/Texas.

It’s unknown if Reddit is aware of the policy violations being performed by the Harris-Walz campaign. While it’s possible that their accounts will be banned when their actions come to light, it is also entirely possible that Reddit is giving the Harris-Walz campaign free rein to violate the rules. In 2018, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman plainly stated in an interview with The New Yorker:

I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections. We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.

The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.

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Will The Corrupt News Media Accept Election Results If Trump Wins, Or Will They Start a War?

By: Eddie Scarry | October 28, 2024

It was such a fun time last week watching the perpetual drama queens that make up our national news media boil with rage over two newspapers declining to issue meaningless campaign endorsements. But it also revealed something unsettling about the unhealthy degree of emotional investment they have in this race.

Will the media accept the outcome of the election if Donald Trump wins? It’s far from a foregone conclusion that they will. There’s a strong argument they didn’t the last time Trump won. Why should anyone expect them to accept it this time around?

It’s a question these homely nerds are inclined to ask every elected Republican in the shallowest way possible — some variation of, “Will you accept the outcome of this election no matter what?” (I think every restaurant server from now on should ask Jake Tapper the moment he’s seated, “Will you accept the way your food comes out no matter what? It’s a yes or no question.”)

After the appalling behavior they displayed last week, now is a very crucial time to ask them the same thing. If they were this hysterical over management at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times deciding, there would be no endorsement of Kamala Harris this campaign cycle — the type of endorsement that hasn’t mattered for decades — how can they be expected to acknowledge a Trump victory? And if they won’t, what will it mean to the people who are still influenced by them? They will have essentially been told their elections and their government are invalid. These are the things civil wars are made of.

As silly as the media have made themselves look, they’re dead serious. That a major news publication wouldn’t throw its weight behind the non-Trump candidate means nothing to normal people, but reporters in Washington and New York aren’t normal people. Look how they talk. They say things like “Democracy dies in darkness,” and we laugh because it’s corny. But they believe in earnest it’s a sacred oath binding their entire life’s meaning to a cause: maintaining the Washington and corporate power structure to their financial benefit. To hell with everyone else.

If in 2016 the news media eagerly went along with an absurd hoax that Trump won that election in large part because he conspired with the Russian government, what won’t they say when he wins again? They just spent the past three months telling voters that up is down, black is white, and Kamala is popular. They moved on from the attempt on his life like it was a standard news cycle that had run its course.

How could we expect them to concede defeat after everything they’ve done? And yes, a Kamala defeat will be theirs, too. Her campaign is theirs.

It’s a question they’re not ready to answer because, for them, it’s unthinkable.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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Eddie Scarry

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The Federalist’s 2024 Battleground State Elections Guide

By: The Federalist Staff | October 10, 2024

The Federalist Staff

With Election Day less than a month away, election processes and early voting are kicking into gear in several swing states around the country. With different election laws and court rulings governing election administration in each state, it can be tough to keep up with the myriad guidelines and rules governing the electoral process. That’s why The Federalist’s 2024 Battleground State Elections Guide is here to help.

From ballot return deadlines to mail-in voting rules, here are all the key dates and information you’ll need to understand the election process in swing states throughout the country this cycle.

Arizona

In-Person Early Voting: Began on Oct. 9 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Ballots began to be mailed out Oct. 9.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Mail-in ballots must be returned by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day to be counted. These ballots can be returned via mail or delivered in person. Polling locations for in-person voting on Election Day also close at 7 p.m. local time.

Ballot Harvesting: Arizona law stipulates that only a “family member, household member or caregiver of the voter” may return the elector’s mail-in ballot.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All absentee voters are required to sign the affidavit on the ballot envelope in order for their vote to be tabulated. The envelope signature must match the signature on the voter’s registration form.

Voter ID: Arizona requires in-person voters to present one type of acceptable photo ID or two types of non-photo ID.

Citizenship Requirements: The U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed part of a state law to go into effect that requires eligible electors to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote via state registration form. Arizonans may still register as federal-only voters with no proof of citizenship. The Arizona Constitution further specifies only U.S. citizens can vote in elections.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Arizona law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are authorized to contact voters to correct signature issues on their mail ballots. Any issue must be corrected “not later than the fifth business day after a primary, general or special election that includes a federal office or the third business day after any other election.”

Major Ballot Initiatives: Arizona’s ballot is expected to be stacked with roughly a dozen ballot initiatives this November. Among the most notable are constitutional amendments to effectively legalize late-term abortion (Proposition 139), raise the threshold for citizen-initiated ballot measures (Proposition 134), give the state legislature power to limit the governor’s emergency powers (Proposition 135), and prohibit open primary elections (Proposition 133).

Also set to appear on the ballot is a constitutional amendment that would institute open primaries and allow for the adoption of ranked-choice voting for general elections (Proposition 140). Despite the discovery that roughly 38,000 pairs of signatures gathered in support of the measure were duplicates, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that votes cast for the measure may count.

For more information on the full list of Arizona ballot measures, see here.

Biggest Election Fights: In September, Arizona election officials discovered roughly 98,000 registered voters lacking documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) due to an error stemming from how the state’s Motor Vehicle Division shares driver’s license information with the voter registration system. As noted above, individuals who do not provide DPOC may still register as “federal-only” voters and can only cast ballots in federal races.

According to the secretary of state’s office, most of the affected voters are registered Republicans. The Arizona Supreme Court granted these electors the ability to vote full-ballot this November.

The secretary of state’s office revealed on Sept. 30 that election officials found an additional 120,000 voters affected by the issue who lack DPOC.

Georgia

In-Person Early Voting: Begins on Oct. 15 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots were sent to UOCAVA voters on Sept. 17. Registrars began sending out absentee ballots for the general public on Oct. 7. The last day to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 25.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Absentee ballots (excluding UOCAVA ballots) must be returned by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day to be counted. These ballots can be returned in person, through the mail, or at a drop box location. Polling locations for in-person voting on Election Day also close at 7 p.m. local time.

Ballot Harvesting: Georgia does not permit ballot harvesting, but only allows certain family members or a household member to return a voter’s ballot. (A caretaker may also return a disabled voter’s ballot.)

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Absentee ballot envelopes contain an “oath which must be signed by the voter.” Georgia also “requires the voter’s driver’s license number or state identification card number, which is compared with the voter’s registration record,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. If a voter is unable to sign his ballot, Georgia “law requires the voter make a mark,” according to Carroll County’s election website. Ballots lacking a signature or mark are rejected, according to Carroll County.

Voter ID: “Georgia law requires photo identification when voting, either in person or absentee,” according to the secretary of state’s website. Acceptable forms of identification include any state or federal government-issued photo ID (including a driver’s license or a valid passport), a student ID from a Georgia public college or university, or a military or tribal photo ID.

Citizenship Requirements: Since 2010, Georgians registering to vote have been required to provide evidence of their U.S. citizenship, including a driver’s license or driver’s license number as long as the registrant has previously provided proof of citizenship to the Department of Driver Services. For those who don’t possess any of the accepted citizenship documents, Georgia law tasks the State Election Board with establishing “other documents or methods” for proving a person’s citizenship. However, it appears certain voters may be able to evade some of the safeguards in place.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Georgia law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are authorized to contact voters to correct signature issues on their absentee ballots. The “last day for voters to cure timely submitted absentee ballots if they failed to sign the oath or information mismatch” is Nov. 8.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Georgia will have three initiatives on the November ballot. One would create a Georgia Tax Court “with judicial power and statewide jurisdiction,” the second would provide “for a local option homestead property tax exemption,” and the third “exempts property that is valued at less than $20,000 from the personal property tax,” according to Ballotpedia.

Biggest Election Fights: The conservative-led State Election Board has clashed with Democrats and Georgia’s Republican-led secretary of state’s office recently, especially on the topic of whether election officials should be forced to rubber-stamp election results even if they have concerns about the election’s administration.

Republican officials like Fulton County election board member Julie Adams argue they should be able to investigate concerns about the administration of an election before certifying the results, rather than rubber-stamping results they believe are legally dubious.

Democrats are also waging a series of legal challenges against the State Election Board, which has passed a series of rules aimed at ensuring the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who voted, among other election integrity measures.

Michigan

Voter Registration: Michiganders can register to vote at any time up to 8 p.m. on Election Day. They can register to vote online, by mail, or in person at the local clerk’s office.

In-Person Early Voting: The Michigan Department of State tells voters early voting will be available “for a minimum of nine consecutive days, ending on the Sunday before an election.” So early voting will start Oct. 26 at the latest, but communities can start the process earlier, allowing it to run for as many as 29 days.

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots are available beginning 40 days ahead of every election. Voters can request a ballot from the local clerk, and can opt-in to receive absentee ballots ahead of every federal, state, and local election. After Michigan voters approved no-excuse absentee voting in 2018, Proposal 2, which passed in 2022, further instituted mail-in voting practices and myriad other election policies supported by the left.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Voters must return absentee ballots to the local clerk’s office by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, but overseas voters simply need their ballots to be postmarked by Election Day and received by clerks within six days after the election.

Ballot Harvesting: Michigan law allows an immediate family member or “individual residing in your household” to return a voter’s ballot. A voter may also request the clerk who issued a ballot help return it.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Absentee voters must sign the envelope with a signature matching their state ID or voter registration application.

Voter ID: The state requires in-person voters to show a photo ID or sign an affidavit claiming they don’t have one. Acceptable documents include a current student ID or government ID such as (but not limited to) a U.S. passport or state driver’s license. Michigan does not require a copy of an ID to vote by mail.

Citizenship Requirements: It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and voter registration forms and ballot applications require a person to attest that he is a citizen, but Michigan does not require documentary proof of citizenship from would-be voters.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: If a signature does not match that in the local clerk’s records, Michigan law requires clerks to contact the voter to “cure” the signature and solve the issue. According to the secretary of state’s office, voters may cure their signatures until 5 p.m. the third day after the election.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Michigan will have no statewide ballot measures in November.

Biggest Election Fights: Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson fought to keep third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot and remove independent Cornel West from the ballot, both of which actions would likely help Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances.

The Republican National Committee has filed multiple lawsuits against Benson for her guidance to clerks on handling ballots and her alleged failure to clean the state’s voter rolls. The Public Interest Legal Foundation has also sued Benson for an alleged lack of voter roll maintenance.

Nevada

Voter Registration: The deadline to register online is Oct. 23. Mailed voter registration forms had to be postmarked by Oct. 8.

Nevada also offers same-day registration, in which eligible electors may register and vote in person during the early voting period or on Election Day. Those who choose this option must present a valid Nevada driver’s license or Nevada ID card. Voters will receive their ballots to vote after the registration process is completed.

In-Person Early Voting: Begins on Oct. 19 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Every registrant listed as “active” on Nevada’s voter rolls is automatically mailed a ballot every election. Voters can request to opt out of this mailing list.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Nevada law does not specify when election officials may start sending mail-in ballots to voters. State law does, however, require these officials to send electors their ballots “not later than the 14 days before the election.”

Ballot Return Deadlines: All ballots that are dropped off in person must be submitted by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day. According to the Nevada secretary of state’s office, “Mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before the day of the election AND received by the 4th day after election day by 5 p.m., will be accepted as received and processed according to Nevada State law.”

Ballot Harvesting: Nevada law permits any “person authorized by the voter [to] return the mail ballot on behalf of the voter by mail or personal delivery to the county clerk, or any ballot drop box established in the county.”

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All electors voting via mail must sign the ballot envelope for it to be counted. The envelope signature must match the signature on the voter’s registration form.

Voter ID: Nevada does not require a person to show ID to vote. As summarized by Ballotpedia, state law requires a Nevada in-person voter to “sign his or her name in the election board register at his or her polling place.” That signature is then “compared with the signature on the voter’s original application to vote or another form of identification, such as a driver’s license, a state identification card, military identification, or another government-issued ID.”

Citizenship Requirements: Nevada law requires all eligible residents to be U.S. citizens to vote, although the state constitution does not explicitly stipulate only U.S. citizens can vote. The state does not require documentary proof of citizenship from people voting or registering to vote.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Nevada law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are required to contact voters to allow them to correct signature issues on their mail-in ballots or otherwise confirm the signature affixed to the ballot belonged to them. The voter “must provide a signature or a confirmation, as applicable, not later than 5 p.m. on the sixth day following the election” for the ballot to be counted.

Major Ballot Initiatives: There will be seven measures appearing on Nevada’s 2024 ballot, six of which are constitutional amendment proposals. Among the most notable are initiatives instituting ranked-choice voting (Question 3), effectively legalizing late-term abortion (Question 6), and requiring electors to present a valid form of ID in order to vote (Question 7).

Biggest Election Fights: The top issue raising concerns among election integrity activists in the state is the accuracy of Nevada’s voter rolls. Organizations such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation have documented what appear to be alarming inaccuracies within the voter registration lists, such as finding some registrants’ addresses listed at bars and casinos. Efforts by the Citizen Outreach Foundation to file citizen-led challenges to have these allegedly ineligible registrants removed have been met with resistance by Democrat Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, whose office recently issued a memo instructing local officials to stop processing the group’s challenges.

North Carolina

Voter Registration: The standard deadline to register to vote is 5 p.m., Oct. 11. However, North Carolinians can register to vote after the Oct. 11 deadline in person at early voting locations.

In-Person Early Voting: Begins Oct. 17 and ends at 3 p.m. on Nov. 2.

Mail-In Voting: Any registered voter in North Carolina can vote by mail for any reason. Voters must request the ballot using an absentee ballot request form, either online or with a paper form. This year, voters must request absentee ballots by Oct. 29 at 5 p.m.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Ballots must be returned by Election Day, Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m. (with exceptions for UOCAVA voters).

Ballot Harvesting: North Carolina law permits a near relative or legal guardian to return a voter’s absentee ballot. It is otherwise a class I felony for anyone to deliver a ballot to a voter or return it for them.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Voters must sign their absentee ballot envelope.

Absentee ballots must be filled out in the presence of two adult witnesses who are not disqualified by other state statutes. Those two persons must print and sign their names on the application and certificate, as well as provide their addresses. Voters can also fulfill the requirement with the seal and signature of one notary public.

Voter ID: A photo ID is generally required to vote in North Carolina, but the address on the ID “does not have to match the voter registration records.”

If an in-person voter does not have a voter ID, he will be asked to either complete an ID exception form and vote provisionally, or vote provisionally and return to his county elections office with a valid ID “by the day before [the] county canvass.” North Carolinians voting by mail are required to provide a copy of a photo ID when returning their ballot, but they can also fill out an exception form. Counties are required to count provisional ballots as long as the ID exception forms are “properly completed.”

Exceptions for not showing an ID are expansive, and range from a disability to “work or school schedule” to a religious objection to being photographed. (Being the victim of a declared natural disaster occurring withing 100 days of Election Day also qualifies a voter for an ID exception.) Mail-in voters who are somehow unable to attach a copy of their ID must include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

North Carolina does not require photo ID for voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

Citizenship Requirements: North Carolina law requires U.S. citizenship to register to vote. However, citizenship documents are not required to register.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: North Carolina allows for ballot curing in certain circumstances, including if the voter “did not sign the voter certification,” “signed the application in the wrong place,” or failed to include a copy of a photo ID with an absentee ballot.

Major Ballot Initiatives: North Carolina only has one ballot initiative certified to appear on the ballot this November. The Citizenship Requirement for Voting Amendment was referred to voters by the state legislature and would amend the state constitution to provide that only eligible U.S. citizens can vote in the state. The amendment would prohibit local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote.

Biggest Election Fights: The RNC has filed several lawsuits against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The western part of the state was also significantly damaged by Hurricane Helene, which will make it more difficult to vote in the deep-red region of the state, though state officials are in the process of implementing emergency election procedures.

Pennsylvania

Voter Registration: The deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania is Oct. 21. The state implemented automatic voter registration in September 2023 through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Since then, anyone who gets a driver’s license and is eligible to vote is automatically registered unless they intentionally opted out of voter registration. Pennsylvanians may also register online, by mail, or in person at their county election office.

In-Person Early Voting: Pennsylvania treats early voting and mail-in voting the same. Voters can go to their county election office, receive a mail-in ballot, vote, and submit this ballot “all in the same visit.” In-person voting starts as soon as counties start mailing out ballots, but that date is different for each county. Voters may check online with the Pennsylvania Department of State to see when their counties’ ballots are ready.

Mail-In Voting: The deadline for requesting a mail-in ballot is Oct. 29. Any registered voter may request a mail-in ballot.

Ballot Return Deadlines: The county must receive a completed ballot by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5. Counties will not accept ballots with a postmark of Nov. 5 at 8 p.m.; the ballot must be in hand by then.

Ballot Harvesting: Voters must return their own ballots, although there are some exceptions for voters with a disability to designate someone, in writing, to deliver their ballot. Former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf created a stir in 2021 when he casually admitted in a radio interview that his wife violated this rule, by dropping off his ballot for him. It is not allowed in Pennsylvania, even between spouses.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Voters mail ballots in a two-envelope system. The inner, secrecy envelope is not marked, but the outer, mailing envelope must be signed and dated.

Voter ID: Voters must provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote, as required by federal law. Identification is also required the first time a voter casts a vote in a precinct where they will sign a voter roll book, though the ID does not have to include a photo (voters can use a utility bill or bank statement as long as it includes their name and address). After that, no identification is required as long as the voter continues in the same precinct because they sign the book each election. If a Pennsylvania voter moves to a new precinct, he will need to show identification again.

Voters who qualify for a ballot under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) or the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act do not need to show ID.

Citizenship Requirements: You must be a U.S. citizen and a resident of Pennsylvania at least 30 days before the next election to register to vote.

Military voters, and those who are registered in Pennsylvania but out of the country, may register to vote through UOCAVA. They may participate in federal and local elections. Pennsylvania also allows voters who once lived in the state but now live overseas and have no intention of returning to vote as “federal” UOCAVA voters. These voters may vote in federal-level elections such as president, vice president, U.S. senator, and congressional representative. They cannot vote in Pennsylvania’s local elections.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Some counties give voters notice and opportunity to “cure” mistakes, and some do not. State law tells counties not to count improperly marked ballots, but the Pennsylvania Department of State has issued guidance telling counties to flag ballots in need of curing so voters will receive an automatic notice informing voters they can cure their ballots. This has become a point of controversy.

Biggest Election Fights: Mail-in ballot curing has been under dispute, and in the courts for several years, and in multiple cases. Should counties toss out improperly marked ballots as the election code directs? Or does Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt have the authority to override the law and issue guidance to mail-in voters offering them a second chance to mark their outer envelope properly? Counties have been choosing to either follow the law or the guidance, giving voters different responses to the same problem, depending on where they live.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania challenged Schmidt and Pennsylvania’s 67 county boards of elections over this matter. The RNC believes voters should be held to the law as written by the elected General Assembly, which does have the authority to change the law, and so far, hasn’t. Last week, the state supreme court declined to rule on the issue before Election Day.

Wisconsin

Voter Registration: Wisconsin offers same-day voter registration, so eligible Wisconsinites can register to vote in person on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024 (Election Day). The deadline to register to vote by mail or online is Oct. 16.

In-Person Early Voting: Counties can offer early voting from Oct. 22 until Nov. 3, although the dates and office hours “vary by municipality.”

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots begin being mailed out 47 days before November’s general election.

Ballot Return Deadlines: All absentee ballots must be delivered no later than 8 p.m. local time on Election Day. The ballots may be returned via mail or hand-delivered to the polling place or clerk’s election office.

Ballot Harvesting: Wisconsin law implies that only the voter shall mail the ballot or deliver it in person to the municipal clerk’s office that issued the ballot.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All absentee voters must sign and seal the ballot certificate envelope. A witness also is required to sign the envelope and include his address. Ballots that fail to include the required information are rejected.

Voter ID: Wisconsin requires in-person voters to show the “original copy of their photo ID” to vote.

Citizenship Requirements: Wisconsin’s constitution states that “Every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state” is eligible to vote. “Citizenship is documented through a U.S. birth certificate or a Certificate of Naturalization, but proof of citizenship is not required to vote,” notes the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: This has been an on-again, off-again issue in the Badger State for several years. In February, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 on guidance advising clerks to accept ballots with incomplete ballot witness addresses following a Dane County Court ruling on the curing question. A Waukesha County judge in 2022 had ruled that clerks completing or fixing missing information on absentee ballot envelopes on behalf of the voter violated state law. Concerns over improperly “fixed” ballot envelopes were at issue in the 2020 election, and a subject of unsuccessful Trump campaign lawsuits challenging the results of the election in Wisconsin. A federal judge earlier this year tossed out a lawsuit by Democrat Party fixer Marc Elias’ lawfare group seeking to block Wisconsin election law requiring a witness to sign a voter’s absentee ballot.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Wisconsin voters will decide whether to amend Wisconsin’s constitution to provide that “only” U.S. citizens 18 or older may vote in national, state or local elections. Currently the constitution states that “every” U.S. citizen 18 or older may vote. Citizen Only Voting Amendment advocates argue the existing language leaves a loophole that would allow Wisconsin municipalities and the state to open elections to noncitizens, as has been done in other states and the District of Columbia.

Biggest Election Fights: Wisconsin’s four-year battle over the widespread use of absentee ballot drop boxes was decided by a new liberal-led court, just in time for the 2024 general election. In a 4-3 ruling in July, the court endorsed the return of absentee ballot drop boxes, opening the door to the same kind of election shenanigans that plagued the Badger State in 2020. The decision overturned the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling by the conservative majority in 2022 banning the widespread use of the drop boxes.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

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In Calling for Axing the Electoral College, Tim Walz Tells Swing State Voters to Get Lost

By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 09, 2024

As if supporting the chemical and surgical mutilation of children, murder of unborn babies until birth, and censorship of speech he dislikes wasn’t radical enough, Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz is now backing another extreme Democrat policy: abolishing the Electoral College.

Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Democrat-run California on Tuesday, the Minnesota governor endorsed getting rid of the system used to elect American presidents since the republic was created.

“All of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in,” Walz reportedly said before listing competitive areas in toss-up states he clearly would rather not campaign in.

It didn’t take long for the Harris-Walz campaign to tell their buddies at anti-truth CNN that this is just another time the governor “misspoke.” An anonymous campaign staffer claimed, the outlet says, that “Walz’s call for eliminating the Electoral College is not an official campaign position.”

OK, so who is running this campaign? The actual Democrat candidates whose names are on the 2024 ballot, or the unnamed staffers who keep claiming without evidence that neither of their top candidates backs the radical policies both have publicly endorsed.

While Walz is certainly known for lying his way through politics, one thing neither he nor Harris have been shy about is their support for the most extreme positions adopted by today’s Democrat Party. That brings us back to leftists’ war against the Electoral College. Walz is not alone in wishing to eliminate this presidential election system that protects minority rights and prevents the United States from becoming a straight mobocracy. During her 2020 presidential run, Harris also said she was “open to the discussion” about getting rid of the Electoral College. Many Democrat-led states have signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would “guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”

The purpose of the Electoral College is to stave off what James Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.” The system gives voters in rural, lesser-populated states a voice in presidential elections by limiting higher-populated states’ ability to solely determine their outcomes. That was also the original design of the U.S. Senate, and without such protections for smaller states, the U.S. Constitution would never have been ratified. That means without constitutional protections for lower-population states, there would be no United States at all.

As with many of America’s institutions, Democrats loathe the Electoral College because it deprives them of the unbridled power to silence all opposition. There’s no need to waste time campaigning to the rubes in “flyover country” if they can juice turnout in Democrat-heavy cities and states instead.

Walz’s fundraiser remarks are an outward display of this disdain. Democrats claim they’re fighting for the “forgotten” man and woman, all the while working to deprive millions of Americans of having a say in the policies that control their lives.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Shawn Fleetwood

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South Dakota Removes 273 Noncitizens from Its Voter Rolls Ahead Of 2024 Election

By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 08, 2024

South Dakota announced Monday it has removed 273 noncitizens from its voter rolls, dealing a major blow to Democrats’ narrative that foreign nationals aren’t interfering in U.S. elections. The announcement was revealed in a Department of Public Safety (DPS) press release, which noted that the “discovery was part of a review to ensure the integrity of South Dakota’s elections and safeguard against improper voter registration.” The agency said the efforts to remove these noncitizens from the rolls are being handled by the office of Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson.

“Ensuring the integrity of our elections is our highest priority,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are proud of the thorough work done to safeguard South Dakota’s voter rolls. We worked closely with DPS to resolve this issue, and we’re constantly working to make sure that only eligible citizens are participating in our elections.”

While regularly dismissed by Democrats and their media allies as a non-issue, foreign nationals inserting themselves into America’s electoral process is anything but. In recent months, numerous states have collectively removed thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in their respective jurisdictions.

On Monday, Oregon announced that state officials identified “an additional 302 people on the state’s voter rolls who didn’t provide proof of citizenship when they were registered to vote,” according to Fox News. That figure brings the total number of suspected noncitizens registering to vote since 2021 up from its previous estimate of 1,259 to 1,561.

In May, the office of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose discovered 137 voter registrations “assigned to Ohio residents who have twice confirmed their non-citizenship status” to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. State officials revealed in August they subsequently found an additional 499 noncitizens who were registered to vote.

In an August executive order, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disclosed that the commonwealth’s department of elections had removed 6,303 foreign nationals from the state’s voter rolls since he took office in January 2022. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen revealed that same month plans to clear 3,251 potential noncitizens from the Yellowhammer State’s voter registration lists.

Texas has similarly removed 6,500 suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls since 2021, according to an August announcement by Gov. Greg Abbott.

[READ: Federal Data: Thousands Of Illegals Are Registered To Vote, But In 21 Years DOJ Has Only Prosecuted 35]

Last month, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird brought charges against Jorge Oscar Sanchez-Vasquez, a noncitizen legally residing in the United States, for allegedly registering to vote and casting a ballot in a 2024 city council race.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Shawn Fleetwood

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Walz Tried to Clean Up Falsehoods in Fox News Interview, But He Got Clobbered by the Facts Instead

By: Tristan Justice | October 07, 2024

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Tristan Justice

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz did the interview with Fox News his running mate never will, but instead of moving on from his record of dishonesty, he had another brutal run-in with the truth. On Sunday, Walz joined Shannon Bream for the network’s flagship Sunday political program, where Bream grilled the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee on a range of issues from the serial falsehoods about his personal life to Iran. ABC News characterized the interview as a “cleanup” operation. It came days after the debate with Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, when Walz celebrated friendships with school shooters and struggled to explain his lie about where he was during the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. Walz has also previously exaggerated his military service and wrongly claimed his own children were conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF).

“What do you say to the American people who think, ‘I don’t know that I can trust this guy with all those modifications to be the potential commander-in-chief of this country?’” asked Bream.

“I think they heard me,” Walz said, “… and I got to be honest with you, Shannon. I don’t think people care whether I used IUI or IVF when we talk about this. What they understand is Donald Trump would resist those things.”

https://twitter.com/AlphaNewsMN/status/1843026524406210964?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1843026524406210964%7Ctwgr%5Eb299f985477bd020acd2f91ad0086bd3418f00a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2024%2F10%2F07%2Fwalz-tried-to-clean-up-falsehoods-in-fox-news-interview-but-he-got-clobbered-by-the-facts-instead%2F

Bream, however, corrected Walz on former President Donald Trump’s platform, which explicitly endorses IVF. “If we’re going to deal in truth,” Bream said, “both the president, the former president and his nominee have said they are very supportive of IVF.”

Earlier in the interview, Bream pressed Walz about the incumbent immigration crisis that is unfolding under Vice President Harris, the administration’s “border czar.”

“She has policies that make a difference,” Walz said. “Her border policies are the most strongest, the fairest we’ve seen.”

“Governor, you know a lot of people, including your own party, would not join that statement,” Bream said, in light of the fact that more than 10 million illegals having entered the United States under President Joe Biden.

Walz pivoted to complain about Republicans in Congress rejecting a bill, negotiated by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., that would have codified an open border. “This is a real bill that has bipartisan support. It has the experts on board, and it starts to tackle these issues,” Walz said. The bill, however, also grants asylum for all, with 5,000 crossings permitted on a daily basis.

https://twitter.com/GrageDustin/status/1842935798129442993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1842935798129442993%7Ctwgr%5Eb299f985477bd020acd2f91ad0086bd3418f00a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2024%2F10%2F07%2Fwalz-tried-to-clean-up-falsehoods-in-fox-news-interview-but-he-got-clobbered-by-the-facts-instead%2F

“That piece of legislation,” Bream said, “does … include the wall. … You’ve disparaged that. I mean, the vice president has as well. So, I don’t know if she really intends to move forward with that.”

In fact, here’s what Harris wrote about the border wall in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, when recounting the 2018 budget debate over the barrier:

A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built. … How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message “KEEP OUT”?

[LISTEN: Kamala Harris: The Machine Candidate]

Walz ran into another fact-check when he blamed the death of a Georgia woman on Republican abortion laws. “States like Georgia force women to cross the border and then we have a death of Amber Thurman,” Walz said. “Trying to cut hairs on an issue on this is not where the American public is at. They want the restoration of Roe versus Wade. Vice President Harris said she would sign it.”

https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1842933624133316685?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1842933624133316685%7Ctwgr%5Eb299f985477bd020acd2f91ad0086bd3418f00a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2024%2F10%2F07%2Fwalz-tried-to-clean-up-falsehoods-in-fox-news-interview-but-he-got-clobbered-by-the-facts-instead%2F

Bream clarified the Democrats’ support for on-demand abortion goes well beyond the precedent previously established in Roe v. Wade, and then corrected the record on Thurman’s death.

“What her family has said is it was a complication from an abortion pill that she received, and she didn’t get proper care when she went to a Georgia hospital, which had multiple opportunities to intervene there,” Bream said. “Her own attorney, the family’s attorney, says it wasn’t the Georgia law, it was the hospital.”

“I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said in last week’s CBS debate with a performance so disastrous, the writers of Saturday Night Live (SNL) mocked him this weekend.

https://twitter.com/floridanow1/status/1842885271303458873?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1842885271303458873%7Ctwgr%5Eb299f985477bd020acd2f91ad0086bd3418f00a0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2024%2F10%2F07%2Fwalz-tried-to-clean-up-falsehoods-in-fox-news-interview-but-he-got-clobbered-by-the-facts-instead%2F

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Democrat-Controlled States Refuse to Clean Voter Rolls and Fix Election Problems

By: Sen. Ron Johnson | September 03, 2024

Sen. Ron Johnson

President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which simply requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. His promise was made in reaction to congressional Republicans who want to include it with any continuing resolution required to fund the next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1. The president’s adamant opposition to what most Americans support demonstrates just how much Democrats are dedicated to making it easier to cheat in elections.

On Dec. 16, 2020, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, I held a hearing titled, “Examining the Irregularities in the 2020 election.” In spite of the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the election irregularity deniers, there were many indisputable irregularities.

In Wisconsin, 170,000 faulty absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane County were improperly counted by election clerks. Representatives of the far-left “Zuckerbucks” program — which is designed to pour left-wing dollars into local election offices, benefiting their Democrat candidates — imposed such heavy-handed direction in Green Bay that the local election clerk resigned from the stress and allowed Zuckerberg’s minions to run the election. “Democracy in the Park” was allowed in Madison, where activists unlawfully collected 17,300 ballots. Seniors in nursing homes voted without the required voting deputies present, bordering on elder abuse for political gain. As was the case in other states, election observers were not allowed to effectively observe the election process.

More recently, as one of many examples of states cleaning voter rolls, Virginia cancelled 6,303 noncitizens’ voter registrations.

Unfortunately, the election irregularity deniers have been so effective — aided and abetted by the corporate media — that these abuses have not only been ignored, but those who wish to cheat in the 2024 election have been able to devise new election fraud schemes. Absent media scrutiny, Republicans are undertaking efforts to stop them.

In one of the most closely contested states, Wisconsin’s governor vetoed nine election reforms passed by the Republican legislature and designed to restore confidence in our state election system. The Wisconsin Election Commission refuses to remove more than 4 million ineligible voters from our out-of-date voter roll (Wisconsin has approximately 3.5 million eligible voters). Election integrity starts with clean voter rolls, and by refusing to clean up Wisconsin’s, Democrats are clearly stating that they’d rather leave room for fraud than increase confidence in our election system.

Following a pressure campaign from Senate Republicans and the Republican National Committee (RNC), Nevada just removed 90,000 voters from its lists. If Nevada can do it, why can’t the Badger State?

Biden’s Executive Order to Register Voters

Nationally, the potential for election interference and voter fraud seems to be growing, with minimal attention being paid to it. Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to register voters. Does anyone seriously believe these registration drives will be done in a nonpartisan manner? How many taxpayer dollars will be spent registering individuals most likely to vote for the party of big government and more deficit spending?

The RNC and Trump campaign recently sued the Biden administration to stop this partisan activity. Will courts intervene in time?

States Cleaning Voter Rolls

The Democrats’ open border policy is guaranteed to result in widespread voter fraud. Democrat presidential nominee Harris’ vice-presidential pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, signed a law giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. That license, together with a utility bill, is all someone needs to register to vote in Minnesota. Democrats claim that because it is illegal for noncitizens to vote, illegal immigrants won’t register. We should be highly skeptical of that being an effective deterrent. Last week, the RNC sent a demand letter to Minnesota’s secretary of state following the revelation that a noncitizen in Minnesota received a ballot that he hadn’t even asked for. That is unlikely to be an isolated incident.

After all, Ohio just purged 499 illegal immigrants from its voter rolls following a multi-phase audit. But that’s in a state with Republican leadership that actually believes in election integrity and wants to make it difficult to cheat. Elsewhere, Boston officials disclosed that 70 illegal aliens contacted county election officials asking to be removed from voter registration lists. How did those Massachusetts noncitizens get registered, and how many remain on the registration lists? While it’s good to see officials in some states taking the lead to purge their voter rolls, there is much more work to be done.

Laundering Donations

In March 2023, journalist James O’Keefe first reported on a campaign financing violation dubbed “smurfing.” Unbeknownst to the “donors,” Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports show in some cases tens of thousands of small dollar donations being made in their names, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. One example in Wisconsin detailed five “smurfs” making a combined total of 28,471 donations, worth $401,326. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., was a recipient of 531 of those donations, worth $5,147. No wonder Democrats report a resounding lead in small dollar donations!

My Senate staff has been pressuring the FEC to investigate these violations, but the FEC won’t even acknowledge whether they are investigating. Republican attorneys general such as Jason Miyares in Virginia have thankfully launched concurrent investigations to demand answers and stop this unfair practice.

Presidential Election

For well over a year, I have publicly expressed my doubts that Biden would be the Democrat nominee. I would generally add that whoever replaced him would immediately be placed on a pedestal and declared the new messiah. But even I am astonished by the extent to which my prediction has come true. Former President Donald Trump is not running against Kamala Harris, he is running against the entire corporate media, who are coordinating their efforts to defeat him.

This is not a new phenomenon. Remember the Russia hoax, which the corporate media cheered on? How about Google manipulating search results to favor Democrats and suppress Republicans? Most “journalists” in corporate media today are merely advocates for the left. Honest, unbiased reporting has largely gone the way of the dinosaur.

As alarming as the reality described above is, I have not written this column to discourage, but as a call to action. The RNC and Trump campaign have recruited 157,000 poll workers and poll watchers across the country ahead of November. Join the effort at ProtectTheVote.com, and make sure to get out and vote as soon as your state allows. We can beat the forces arrayed against us if we turn out in numbers that are too big to rig.

Sen. Ron Johnson is a Republican from Wisconsin.

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The CNN Interview Reminded People of What Has Always Been True About Kamala

By: Eddie Scarry | August 30, 2024

Author Eddie Scarry profile

Eddie Scarry

Visit on Twitter@eScarry

News coverage following Thursday night’s CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris predictably recast the episode in ways that were unfamiliar to anyone who watched live and who has even just loosely followed her career in national politics.

New York Times reporter Reid Epstein said Kamala “parried questions from Dana Bash on Thursday without causing herself political harm or providing herself a significant boost.” Aaron Blake at The Washington Post said she “didn’t really stumble or seem to do anything that might hamper her momentum.” Politico’s popular morning “Playbook” newsletter gleaned that the interview “suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now …”

These are supposed to be the big “takeaways” from the event, but any fair-minded person who watched knows that the reality wasn’t so forgiving. What the taped interview with Nancy Pelosi’s favorite journalist did was reinforce the Kamala we all knew before we were told one day two months ago that she’s a beloved sex symbol — the Kamala who’s in over her head, has no vision for the country, and has no interest in governance.

There’s a reason that Democrats and the media have forced an amorphous, ever-shifting concept of “joy” to be the animating force of Kamala’s campaign. This interview, containing not a single unexpected question, illustrates perfectly why they’ve done so. (Here’s a link to the full CNN transcript for reference.)

Kamala can’t withstand scrutiny.

She implied that she’s never been in favor of banning fracking but when confronted with her position when she ran for president in 2020, she skated past the question to only say she has “made very clear” she’s not in favor of it. In that exchange alone, she used the word “clear” five times. Much like the constant hammering with messages about how average and dad-like Tim Walz is unpersuasive, if you have to repeatedly state how “clear” you’ve been, nobody is convinced.

Kamala can’t articulate an argument for herself.

Confronted with her on-record position to decriminalize unauthorized crossings at the southern border, she started talking about climate policy. “My values have not changed,” she said. “You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act.” (Yes, Kamala admitted the “inflation reduction” bill was actually about funding the electric cars scam.)

Kamala can’t even fake a fundamental grasp of critical foreign policy issues.

The war in Israel is just one of two violent global conflicts to break out under the Kamala-Biden administration, and in the almost year since it started, the closest she could come to explaining her depth of understanding about it or how to bring it to an end was to repeat in frustration, “We have to get a deal done.”

— “We have got to get a deal done.”

— “We — we were in Doha. We have to get a deal done.”

— “This war must end.”

— “And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out.”

— “Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

— “We have to get a deal done.”

— “Dana, we have to get a deal done.”

— “A deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”

Look at all that joy! Damn, that’s a lot of joy!

Kamala looked tired. Admittedly, she’s vice president and simultaneously running for president on a platform that ignores she’s currently in the White House. Oh, and joy. I’d be exhausted, too.

We’re finally getting to see again the Kamala we knew all along.

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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14 Lies Kamala Harris Told During Her DNC Speech

By: Shawn Fleetwood | August 23, 2024

Shawn Fleetwood

Visit on Twitter@ShawnFleetwood

Implementing destructive policies isn’t the only thing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have in common. Following the latter’s acceptance speech during Thursday’s Democratic National Convention, it’s clear America’s vice president has learned a thing or two about lying from her senile boss. From abortion to immigration, Harris parroted numerous falsehoods about her record and that of Donald Trump. In case you missed her lackluster screed, here’s a definitive list of the Democrat presidential nominee’s biggest whoppers.

1. Jan. 6

Vice President Kamala Harris falsely claimed that Donald Trump “sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6. 2021, and further accused the former president of “fann[ing] the flames” after “politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help.”

That is false. During his J6 speech, Trump specifically telegraphed to protestors to “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.” Trump also released a video calling for peace during the riot and had previously sought to deploy thousands of National Guard members to the Capitol ahead of the demonstrations.

2. Supreme Court ‘Presidential Immunity’ Decision

Kamala Harris distorted the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity by claiming the decision means Trump “would be immune from criminal prosecution.”

“His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy. His explicit intent to deploy our active duty military against our own citizens,” Harris contended in a hyperbolic fashion. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States.”

The vice president’s claim is misleading at best. While a majority of justices determined that presidents possess “absolute immunity” for “actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and “at least presumptive immunity” for “official acts,” they separately noted that “[t]here is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

The justices further remanded the Biden-Harris Justice Department’s get-Trump lawfare back to the lower courts to determine whether the actions alleged by Special Counsel Jack Smith constitute “official acts.”

3. Trump’s Record on Entitlements

Kamala Harris claimed Donald Trump “tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Even The Washington Post’s so-called “fact-checkers” rated a previous version of this claim from the Harris-Walz campaign as “misleading.”

4. School Funding Statistics

During her DNC speech, Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump for pledging to get rid of the Department of Education.

“We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools,” Harris said.

As the left-wing “fact-checkers” would say, this statement “needs context.” While the federal government does finance public school systems, those funds typically account for less than 10 percent of taxpayer monies given to schools in a given year. During the 2019-2020 school year, for example, “47.5% of funding came from state governments, 44.9% came from local governments, and the federal government provided about 7.6% of school funding,” according to USA Facts.

5. ‘Middle Class’ Roots

Kamala Harris falsely claimed that she came from the “middle class.” As previously noted by journalist Megyn Kelly, Harris’ father was a professor at Stanford University, while her mother was a biomedical scientist at UC Berkley.

6. Trump’s Tax Cuts

Kamala Harris falsely insinuated that the 2017 tax cuts approved by the Trump administration disproportionately benefited America’s wealthiest citizens.

“[Trump] fights for himself and his billionaire friends,” Harris claimed. “And he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

That is not true. Data produced by the IRS has shown that “on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent,” according to The Hill.

7. Trump’s Tariff Policies

Kamala Harris claimed Donald Trump intends to impose a “national sales tax” on Americans that she contended will “raise prices on middle-class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

This claim is misleading and needs context. It appears Harris is citing figures from the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund, which, according to The New York Times, estimated that a potential policy “floated” by Trump to raise tariffs to 10 percent on most imports and at least 60 percent on Chinese imports could cost American families $3,900 a year. Other economic groups cited by the Times predict such policies would cost less than the figures estimated by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

8. Nature of Abortion

The vice president falsely asserted that signing a federal law authorizing abortions nationwide would “restore reproductive freedom.” As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd accurately noted, however, the law would actually “subject thousands of babies and women, nearly 70 percent of whom felt their abortions were forced, unwanted, or contradicted their views, to harm.”

9. GOP Pro-Life Laws

Kamala Harris falsely claimed that Republican pro-life laws that protect thousands of unborn babies from elective abortions bar doctors from treating women dealing with a pregnancy-related health issue, such as a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy.

“I will tell you, over the past two years, I’ve traveled across our country, and women have told me their stories. Husbands and fathers have shared theirs. Stories of women miscarrying in a parking lot, developing sepsis, losing the ability to ever again have children, all because doctors are afraid they may go to jail for caring for their patients. Couples just trying to grow their family, cut off in the middle of IVF treatments,” Harris claimed.

As The Federalist previously reported, “[t]here is a clear legal distinction between an induced abortion, which deliberately intends to end the life of the baby, and the medically classified ‘spontaneous abortions’ such as an ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, or early delivery with the intent of saving the baby and mother.” Furthermore, every pro-life law currently in effect contains exceptions allowing abortions when necessary to save the pregnant mother’s life.

10. Trump’s Position on Abortion

Kamala Harris untruthfully accused Donald Trump of attempting to “enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress,” designate “a national anti-abortion coordinator,” “force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions,” “limit access to birth control,” and outlaw a popular and dangerous abortion drug regime.

As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd previously noted, Trump has regularly taken the position that laws limiting the murder of children in the womb should be left “up to the states.” He’s voiced opposition to signing a federal law curbing abortion and his vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance “similarly claimed the pill responsible for a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits should remain legal and ‘accessible.’”

11. IVF

Kamala Harris falsely insinuated that Donald Trump is to blame if couples are “cut off in the middle of IVF treatments.”

As The Federalist previously reported, “Trump has openly touted in vitro fertilization, even though it is marred with ethical and moral pitfalls, as a procedure that Republicans and pro-life conservatives should promote.”

“Trump has openly touted in vitro fertilization, even though it is marred with ethical and moral pitfalls, as a procedure that Republicans and pro-life conservatives should promote.”

12. Disastrous Border Bill

Kamala Harris lied when claiming that a congressional immigration bill proposed and defeated earlier this year is the “the strongest border bill in decades.”

That statement is categorically false. The bipartisan measure would have enshrined the existing invasion into federal law.

13. Trump’s NATO Comments

While falsely claiming that Donald Trump “encouraged [Vladimir] Putin to invade our allies,” Kamala Harris distorted the former president’s remarks by claiming he told Russia it could “do whatever the hell [it] want[s].” Harris’ characterization of Trump’s remarks is as inaccurate as when her boss said it during his State of the Union address earlier this year.

Trump’s remarks came during a South Carolina rally, during which he recounted a story from when he was president and speaking with a NATO member. Trump purportedly told this state that he would withhold U.S. support if they didn’t pay their minimum defense spending obligations.

“‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recalled telling the unidentified NATO member. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

14. America’s Enemies

Kamala Harris claimed “tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un” are “rooting” for Donald Trump to win this November.

While there is no definitive way for Harris to know this, the actions of America’s biggest adversaries in the years since she and Biden assumed the White House suggests the exact opposite. Thus far, Russia has invaded Ukraine, Iran-backed Hamas launched a deadly terrorist attack on Israel, North Korea disavowed potential peace with South Korea, and China has ramped up its threats toward Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Thousands Of Noncitizens on U.S. Voter Rolls Assure Americans the Next Election Will Be Unsafe and Unfair

By: Ben Weingarten | August 15, 2024

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Ben Weingarten

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More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats — including Washington, D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities — allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its elections commission.

Such developments, against a backdrop of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, bring new urgency to debates over election integrity. Many Republicans fear that a widespread effort is afoot to give noncitizens the full benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote in all elections, on top of benefits already available to illegal aliens in some places, notably driver’s licenses, food stamps, government health care, and work visas.

Although Democrats note that noncitizens may not participate in federal elections and claim there is little evidence noncitizens are voting unlawfully, critics are unmollified.

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of proposed and enacted state and federal laws, along with other reporting and research, suggests that the fight over noncitizen voting is only likely to intensify this year — both in the immediate wake of an expected closely contested presidential election and in its aftermath.

States across the country report that thousands of noncitizens have been discovered on voter rolls in the past decade, with unknown numbers already having voted:

Pennsylvania found 11,000 registrants suspected of being noncitizens after becoming aware of a decades-old “glitch” in the state’s “motor voter” registration system in 2017. It removed 2,500 individuals from the rolls, and it could not verify the citizenship status of the other 8,700 registrants.
Virginia has removed over 11,000 registrants from its rolls between 2014 and 2023 — and more than 6,300 from January 2022 to July 2024 alone — upon learning that they had declared themselves noncitizens in other interactions with government, typically in transactions with the state’s department of motor vehicles. House Republicans cited a study showing that of nearly 1,500 noncitizens the Commonwealth removed from rolls from May 2023 to February 2024, 23 percent had cast ballots since February 2019.
New Jersey had some 616 self-reported noncitizens in 11 counties “engaged on some level with the statewide registration system,” 9 percent of whom cast ballots, according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Boston, Massachusetts, officials revealed this year that the city had removed 70 noncitizens from the rolls, some 22 of whom had voted, the removals coming in response to disclosure requests from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Ohio recently ordered the removal of 499 noncitizens from its voter rolls after removing some 137 other registrants back in May.
North Carolina identified more than 1,400 registrants on state voter rolls who did not appear to be naturalized, in an audit conducted prior to the 2014 midterm election. Eighty-nine flagged individuals appeared at the polls to vote, and 24 had their registration challenged; 11 challenges were sustained or justified.
Arizona classifies some 42,000 people on its rolls as “federal-only” registrants as of July 1, 2024 — after they had failed to provide the proof of citizenship necessary to vote in state and local races. The state’s bifurcated voter rolls are the result of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in which a 7-2 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that federal voter registration requirements — of which documentary proof of citizenship is not one — preempted the state’s standards.

Other evidence of noncitizen voting has been found in states from California to Illinois.

Republicans argue that such examples expose weaknesses in the voter registration and administration process — including that registrants need not provide proof of citizenship to get on the voter rolls. These and other loopholes in state-run systems make elections vulnerable to ineligible noncitizen voters today.

Each side has its own research to support its claims. Democrats cite a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, finding that local election officials overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million ballots during the 2016 presidential election identified only 30 potential incidents of noncitizen voting.

Republicans highlight a recent study estimating that 10 percent to 27 percent of noncitizens are illegally registered to vote, and 5 percent to 13 percent will illegally vote in 2024 — a potentially massive number given the illegal alien portion of the noncitizen population alone numbers well over 10 million. Election integrity advocates argue that states have not found many incidents of noncitizen voting for the simple reason that authorities, including the Department of Justice, do not look for it.

“DOJ investigations of illegal voting are all but nonexistent,” Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, said in a recent floor debate concerning the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, a bill Lee and House colleague Chip Roy, R-Texas, introduced to combat noncitizen voting. After the House passed the measure in July, Democrats blocked the legislation in the upper chamber, where it remains stalled.

“[T]oo many prosecutors refuse to enforce the law even when such illegal behavior is discovered by election officials or others,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former Department of Justice official who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Congress in May.

Should election officials fail to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots on the front end, J. Christian Adams, a fellow former DOJ official and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told RCI, there is “almost nothing” the public or political parties can do on the back end to identify, challenge, and invalidate noncitizen votes prior to election certification.

Adams’ group has documented myriad electoral races decided by one vote or tied over the last two decades — something he and others argue indicates just how critical it is to combat illegal voting, given the potential impact to tight races up and down ballots.

States generally seem unfazed by the prospect of noncitizen voting. For this article, RealClearInvestigations contacted authorities in the seven states comprising RealClearPolitics’ top battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, did not respond to RCI’s inquiries. Election authorities in the five responsive states maintained that current law is a sufficient deterrent to noncitizen voting, emphasizing that casting a ballot as a foreigner would constitute a criminal offense with grave penalties.

“Someone would have to knowingly and intentionally commit a class 6 Felony if they did vote as a noncitizen, and it would result in the revocation of their legal status in the USA, and they would likely face deportation,” a spokesman for Arizona’s Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement. The spokesman said he hoped his statement, which pointed to the state’s voter challenge process and noted other procedures pertaining to citizenship, would “compel” RealClearInvestigations to “clear up [RCI’s] notions and erroneous assumptions.”

Georgia touted its 2022 citizenship audit in correspondence with RCI, the first such review of the voter rolls for citizenship in state history, in which it found that 1,634 people who attempted to register to vote were not verified by the SAVE program. All were in “pending citizenship” status within Georgia’s internal systems, and thus none had been allowed to vote. “Due to the effective processes Georgia has in place to verify U.S citizenship at the time of registration … we are confident noncitizens are not voting in Georgia, and if one ever does, they will be punished to the full extent of the law,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, told RCI.

North Carolina elections board Public Information Director Patrick Gannon told RCI: “We have little evidence of noncitizens voting in elections, and get very few complaints alleging voting by noncitizens.”

He pointed to a 2016 state audit report and the handful of cases alleging noncitizen voting that the bipartisan State Board of Elections has referred to prosecutors since 2017.

Similarly, Wisconsin Elections Commission Public Information Officer Riley Vetterkind told RCI, “There is no evidence to support the idea that noncitizens are voting in Wisconsin in significant numbers.” The spokesperson for the state’s bipartisan commission cited the few instances of suspected election fraud, irregularities, or violations referred to district attorneys by municipal clerks that the state’s elections commission “has been made aware of.”

These messages of reassurance, however, at times come with notes of caution that underpin election integrity advocates’ concerns.

States each have their own independent processes to maintain voter lists. Those processes vary widely in vigor, tempo, and transparency. They are often based on different degrees of access to sources of citizenship status with which to identify ineligible voters. “No state or federal law requires the WEC [Wisconsin Elections Commission] or clerks to verify a voter’s citizenship status beyond requiring the voter to certify that they are a U.S. citizen as a qualification for voter eligibility,” said Vetterkind.

Pennsylvania has asserted that “the Commonwealth has no systematic program to identify and remove non-citizens from the voting rolls.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has litigated against the Keystone State and other jurisdictions just to get a peek into their registration list maintenance processes. As for how states identify potential noncitizens, Gannon said of North Carolina’s audit that “relying on state databases was wildly inaccurate for determining citizenship status.”

The state passed a law in 2023 requiring that the election board regularly reconcile its registration list with lists provided by state courts of those excused from jury duty due to lack of citizenship — an ad hoc approach commonly used by other states.

Georgia emphasized its use of the Department of Homeland Security’s more robust SAVE tool, which provides “point in time immigration status” for those who have been issued a unique immigration identifier. (This Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool is distinct from the GOP-sponsored legislation with the same acronym.)

Most state officials who responded to RCI’s query emphasized that there are laws on the books permitting third-party challenges to voter eligibility. But this is a measure requiring time, money, and effort. The two former Justice Department officials — Spakovsky and Adams — recently took issue with the view that state audits and scrubs of voter rolls ought to inspire confidence, writing in the Daily Signal:

Because almost no state even attempts to verify that individuals registering to vote are U.S. citizens — and because the federal government, including both the courts and the executive branch, have put up significant barriers to such verification — we don’t really know how many aliens, whether here legally or illegally, are registering and voting.

Rougher Weather Ahead

Whatever the extent of noncitizen registration and voting today, Election Integrity Network leader Cleta Mitchell says conditions are building for a “perfect storm.” Two factors are about to produce it: “the invasion of our country by millions of illegals” and a series of largely Democrat Party-driven efforts to ease voter registration and participation.

Mitchell and others, including The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, have suggested that significant numbers of noncitizens could wind up on the voting rolls under Biden administration Executive Order 14019, which directs every federal agency to register and mobilize voters.

Officials in Alabama and Mississippi say that under the executive order, which RCI has previously examined, authorities are already attempting to register noncitizens to vote. The Biden administration initiative calls on federal agencies to coordinate with third-party groups in pursuit of its objectives as well. Adams, testifying alongside Spakovsky for the Republican majority before the House Administration Committee in May, said that “most often noncitizens are getting on the rolls through the motor voter registration process or third-party registration drives.”

Regarding motor-voter registration, the Only Citizens Vote Coalition warns that “many states are now automatically registering people to vote at the time of coming into contact with the DMV unless the person ‘opts out’ of registration.”

Advocates are also concerned that practices like same-day voter registration and allowing the use of student IDs to vote — IDs that can be issued to foreigners — could lead to noncitizens ending up on voter rolls and potentially voting.

These issues likely only exacerbate concerns election integrity advocates already have around practices like mail-in voting and ballot harvesting that have become widespread since the 2020 election. A more robust “level of citizenship tracking and verification would almost certainly require legislative change to accomplish,” Wisconsin’s Riley Vetterkind told RCI.

Congressional Republicans have sought to do just that with the SAVE Act, which passed the House on July 10 in a largely party-line vote. Under the existing registration system, applicants attest to their citizenship simply by checking a box, under penalty of perjury. House Speaker Mike Johnson calls this nothing more than an “honor system” that leaves “people who have already proven they have no regard or respect for our laws” undeterred.

The SAVE Act would close this loophole by requiring that applicants provide proof of citizenship in person when registering to vote in federal elections. Adams has argued that under the less stringent status quo, noncitizens often end up on the voter rolls through no fault of their own — subjecting aliens who often can’t speak English to severe legal liability.

Critics of the SAVE Act, echoing some states, believe those liabilities — including the threat of deportation, jail time, and other punishments — sufficiently curb noncitizen registration and voting.

New York University Brennan Center for Justice President Michael Waldman emphasized in the May congressional hearing, as the Democrat minority’s witness opposite Adams and Spakovsky, that “under current law, noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal four times over: it is both a state and federal crime to register to vote, and it is both a state and federal crime to vote in federal elections.”

The liberal think tank did not respond to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story. Democrat Party leaders from President Biden on down also dismiss evidence of noncitizen voting, claiming it is virtually non-existent.

“Even the conservative CATO Institute has said that ‘noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers,’” California Democrat Sen. Alex Padilla noted in a floor speech in response to Mike Lee, referencing a 2020 blog post from the libertarian think tank.

Democrats also claim the bill’s documentary proof of citizenship requirements disenfranchise potential voters. They point to past evidence indicating that similar state laws in places like Kansas ended up preventing eligible registrants from voting. They also highlight surveys showing millions of Americans lack commonly used documents to prove citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate — two of a number of forms one could present to satisfy the SAVE Act’s requirements.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries branded the SAVE Act an “extreme MAGA Republican voter suppression bill.”

DHS’s ‘Slow-Walking’

Registration requirements and voter ID laws, which vary by state, do not necessarily prevent ineligible individuals from voting since noncitizens — and, in some cases, illegal aliens — can obtain relevant forms of identification. As Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin highlighted in a recent executive order, only three states — his included — require even a full Social Security number to register to vote.

Thus, the SAVE Act would also mandate that states bolster their registration list maintenance practices explicitly to identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls — including through cross-referencing their lists with more comprehensive data sources.

Only five states currently have access to one resource referenced in the bill, the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE tool. A House Administration Committee report indicates that DHS is not granting the same level of access to all states and may be “slow-walking” requests to use it.

‘Significant Inaccuracies’ in the Federal Database

When asked about this allegation, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service told RCI, “There is an established process agencies must undergo and eligibility criteria agencies must meet to complete SAVE registration.”

“USCIS is committed to working with agencies seeking access to SAVE and processing registration requests as efficiently as possible,” the spokesman added while referring a reporter to several resources on the USCIS website.

Still, these databases are not seen by all as a panacea. “Even using the federal SAVE database, which can only be used to determine current citizenship status for one person at a time, and only when that person has been involved in the federal immigration system, our agency found significant inaccuracies in the data we received,” North Carolina’s Patrick Gannon told RCI in an email. “There is no comprehensive, accurate, or up-to-date database of U.S. citizens that election administrators could use for verification purposes.”

Democrats argue that the more robust voter registration list maintenance demanded by Republicans could leave eligible voters purged. Calling the SAVE Act “nothing other than a solution in search of a problem,” Sen. Padilla blocked the bill in the upper chamber.

With a September spending fight looming in Congress, the House Freedom Caucus is seeking to force the issue by calling on leadership to attach the SAVE Act to any stopgap spending solution — a plan Sen. Lee has also endorsed.

Meanwhile, election integrity advocates like the Only Citizens Vote Coalition are calling for state-level model legislation to combat noncitizen voting. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has been working to identify vulnerabilities in extant voter registration systems and potential legal violations, publicize them, and press lawmakers to enforce relevant laws to combat noncitizen voting.

The conservative public interest law organization America First Legal recently sent letters to all 50 states instructing them that under existing law, states can and should send requests to the DHS soliciting the citizenship status of registered voters.

America First Legal has also sent demand letters to all 15 Arizona county recorders, compelling them to verify the citizenship of all “federal-only” voters, including through making citizenship requests of DHS — or face legal action.

On Aug. 5, America First Legal filed suit against the Maricopa County Recorder for his alleged failure to act in response to the group’s demand letter. Three days later, the Republican National Committee filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court in a bid to compel Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 presidential election.

Warning: Extended Lawfare Ahead

These forces on the right are likely to find themselves locked in battle with the left for years to come.

House Democrats, today in the slim minority, have voted to continue apportioning congressional seats based on total population rather than total citizens in a given jurisdiction; to protect noncitizen voting rights in Washington, D.C.; and, in legislation aimed at providing certain aliens with a path to permanent resident status, to permit authorities to waive unlawful voting as grounds for deeming noncitizens inadmissible. Leftist witnesses were unable or unwilling to affirm that only citizens should be permitted to vote in federal elections during a March Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning elections.

As a presidential candidate in 2020, Vice President Kamala Harris signaled her support for providing government health care to illegal aliens. Her presumed running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, signed legislation providing benefits for illegal aliens, including state-funded health care, driver’s licenses, and free college tuition.

Those on the left see voting rights, like the expansion of other benefits to noncitizens, as a matter of fairness.

“Immigrants pay taxes, they use city services, their kids go to our public schools. They are part of our community. And they deserve a say in local government,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in defending a bill that has been ruled unconstitutional that would have allowed an estimated 800,000 noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The Trump-Vance campaign, by contrast, has called for mass deportation of the illegal alien population (to which Democrats increasingly wish to extend rights and benefits), among other immigration measures the Republicans say aim to protect and support Americans. In contrast to the growing coterie of blue-state jurisdictions embracing noncitizen voting, red states are increasingly passing amendments prohibiting local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote, with Louisiana and Ohio approving such constitutional changes in 2022. Eight more states have citizenship-related ballot measures in the 2024 election.

This article is republished from RealClearInvestigations, with permission.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

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Tracking Kamala Harris’ Biggest And Baddest Lies: 20 And Counting

By: The Federalist Staff | August 13, 2024

The Federalist Staff

Updated August 13, 2024.

Democrats traded one liar for another when they replaced their presumptive 2024 presidential nominee President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris may not quite live up to her counterpart’s long history of selling whoppers as truth, but there’s no doubt that she has fibbed far too often without consequence or accountability.

Democrats’ new darling likely wants voters to be “unburdened by what has been.” But not even her jumbled babble or unintelligible chattering can keep Harris’ radical track record and history of deception under wraps. Here’s a look back at some of Harris’ biggest lies to date.

20. Harris Claims It’s Trump, Not Her, Who Will Weaponize DOJ

One of Harris’ most repeated talking points since she’s become a presidential nominee states that if Trump wins the White House in November, he will use the Department of Justice to target his political opponents.

“[Trump] will weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies,” she said behind the vice presidential podium. “He will round up peaceful protestors and throw them out of our country. And even, quote, ‘terminate’ the United States Constitution.”

Kamala Harris is deranged. She says President Trump will "weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies" (exactly what she's doing), prosecute "peaceful protesters" (exactly what she's doing), and ignore the Constitution (exactly what she's doing).

These people are sick. pic.twitter.com/89POVPcdF9
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 1, 2024

It’s the Biden-Harris administration, not Trump, however, that has a track record of weaponizing the federal government against its ideological enemies and destroying the Constitution.

Under Harris’ rule, faith-filled pro-lifers, parents, opponents to child transing, election integrity supporters, and Trump have become the targets of unfair prosecutions; Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices were refused protection; and Republican states that want to protect born and unborn children were threatened with punishment.

19. Harris Lies About Trump, GOP Abortion Platform

In the leadup to the 2024 presidential election, Harris ramped up accusations that Trump and Republicans will “ban abortion nationwide.”

Donald Trump would ban abortion nationwide.

President @JoeBiden and I will do everything in our power to stop him and restore women's reproductive freedom.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 30, 2024

VP Harris gives shoutouts to pro-abortion groups endorsing her and Biden ahead of the anniversary of SCOTUS overturning Roe.

“Extremists in Congress plan to ban abortion nationwide. Nationwide. But I have news for these extremists … President Biden and I will not accept that.” pic.twitter.com/vNl7D6GmH6
— The Recount (@therecount) June 23, 2023

Trump’s 2024 abortion platform centers on leaving decisions about ending life in the womb “up to the states.” In fact, the GOP nominee stated he would not sign federal legislation curbing abortion.

Congressional Republicans also have repeatedly failed to make progress on passing a popular 15-week abortion limit, making them much less likely to embrace a national halt on abortions.

18. Harris’ Fracking Flip-Flop

Shortly after the vice president became the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee, Harris’ campaign went after former President Donald Trump for exposing her radical belief that the U.S. should ban fracking.

“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class,” Harris’ campaign said in a statement in July 2024.

“She would not ban fracking,” the campaign reaffirmed to Politico.

Harris, however, is on the record in 2019 during her first failed presidential run claiming that she is “in favor of banning fracking.”

Kamala Harris' campaign: Harris does not support a fracking ban.

Kamala Harris herself: "There's no question. I'm in favor of banning fracking."

Take the candidate at her word. pic.twitter.com/rBNPRmN1jt
— Daniel Turner (@DanielTurnerPTF) July 29, 2024

17. Harris’ Team Falsely Claims J.D. Vance Endorsed Project 2025

Harris’ rapid response team used a 2021 “Federalist Radio Hour” clip to assert in July 2024 that Trump’s vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance supports Project 2025.

JD Vance endorses Project 2025: “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power… I don't think there's a compromise that we're gonna come with… Unless we overthrow them in some way, we're gonna keep losing” pic.twitter.com/2sVHp4i1ek
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 27, 2024

The podcast, however, was published in 2021, nearly a year before The Heritage Foundation launched the project in 2022.

16. Harris Denies Biden’s Obvious Decline

Harris spent months ahead of Biden’s disastrous debate performance and resignation from the 2024 presidential race reassuring Americans that her counterpart’s age did not affect his ability to govern.

“I’ll tell you, the reality of it is, and I’ve spent a lot of time with Biden, be it in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room and other places — he is extraordinarily smart. He has the ability to see around the corner in terms of what might be the challenges we face as a nation or globally,” Harris told ABC News in January.

Yet, Democrats’ coup-like candidate-replacement operation hinged on Biden’s obvious decline. One poll found that, of the 70 percent of voters who believe there was a cover-up of Biden’s decline, 92 percent believe Harris was complicit in the cover-up.

15. Harris Accuses Trump Of Trying To Cut Medicare, Social Security

Harris incorrectly claimed at a July 2024 American Federation of Teachers conference that “Trump and his allies want to cut Medicare and Social Security.”

Even partisan Politifact was forced to admit that Trump’s 2024 platform explicitly states that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”

14. Harris Repeats ‘Book Ban’ Falsehoods

During her American Federation of Teachers address, Harris accused Republicans who want to keep sexually explicit content off of school and library shelves of attacking “the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history, including book bans.”

“Book bans in this year of our Lord 2024,” she remarked.

In the context of taxpayer-funded classrooms, there is no such thing as “banned books.” The inappropriate stories Democrats claim are prohibited from circulation are still widely available to readers via publishers and booksellers.

13. Harris Allies Lie About Her Border Czar Appointment

After years of acknowledging and even praising Biden for naming Harris “border czar,” Harris’ allies in the White House and corporate media claimed in statements and fake fact-checks that she was never charged with overseeing the logistics of the record-breaking invasion.

DEI Press Sec Karine Jean-Pierre denies that Kamala Harris was named Border Czar and says it’s a lie

Yet here is Joe Biden in 2021 personally appointing Kamala Harris as head authority tasked to handle the situation at the Southern Border and to personally speak on his behalf pic.twitter.com/LAqtd0T0Rv
— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) July 25, 2024

Biden’s statements and the propaganda press’s fawning coverage of Harris, even as she did little to fulfill the role, however, prove that she was the “border czar” in their eyes until it wasn’t politically convenient for them anymore.

12. Harris Wrongfully Asserts NCAA Women’s Brackets Were Banned Until 2022

During the 2024 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, Harris incorrectly claimed that female teams were excluded from brackets until 2022.

“OK, a bit of a history lesson — do you know that women were not, the women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022?” Harris told Spectrum News in April 2024. “Think about that, and … talk about progress, ya know, better late than never, but progress.”

Sports Fan Kamala Harris claims the NCAA women's basketball tournament was "not allowed to have brackets until 2022."

As usual, she is wrong. pic.twitter.com/QaRSsngSxP
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 5, 2024

While it’s true that the NCAA women’s tournament did not take on the March Madness branding until 2022, brackets for female competitors date back to the “early 1980s.”

Harris’ and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s social media accounts also directly contradict the VP’s claims by showing that the pair filled out women’s basketball brackets in 2021.

Here you go, @VP https://t.co/iAlrXZLOyi pic.twitter.com/bmLcSDLWnF
— Douglas Emhoff (@SecondGentleman) March 18, 2021

11. Harris Repeatedly Lies About Georgia Voting Law

During a March 2024 speech lamenting Republicans’ election integrity efforts, Harris inaccurately claimed that Georgia’s legislature passed a law banning water in poll lines.

“In Georgia, extremists passed a law to even make it illegal to give people food and water for standing in line to exercise their civic duty and right to vote,” Harris claimed.

Kamala Harris is still repeating the complete lie that it's "illegal to give people food and water for standing in line" to vote in Georgia pic.twitter.com/qyMNqm0ax3
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 3, 2024

Kamala Harris once again repeats the debunked LIE that it's "a crime" in Georgia "to give people food and water who are standing in line to vote." pic.twitter.com/e8TU8kb14i
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 23, 2024

Georgia’s election security law specifically bans political interest groups from using water to sway voters in line. Election workers are exempt from this restriction.

10. Harris Falsely Blames Republicans For Wisconsin Abortion Limit

“In this beautiful state of Wisconsin, after Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law from 1849 to stop abortion in this state,” Harris said at a Milwaukee rally in January 2024.

Vice President Kamala Harris: “These extremists want to roll back the clock to a time before women were treated as full citizens — Wisconsin to the 1800s. … After Roe was dismantled, extremists evoked a law from 1849 to stop abortion in this state.” pic.twitter.com/h1Geb4lXkU
— The Recount (@therecount) January 22, 2024

Even the fake fact-checkers at Politifact admitted that “Republican lawmakers didn’t have to lift a finger to put the 1849 provisions back into effect.” Instead, the overturn of Roe v. Wade sent the preexisting law through the court appeals system, in which the latest ruling claimed the 1849 law does not ban abortion.

9. Harris Fibs About Florida’s History Curriculum

“They want to replace history with lies,” Harris said at the Ritz Theatre and Museum in Jacksonville in July 2023. “Middle school students in Florida to be told that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” Harris had peddled the same lie the previous day in Indianapolis.

KAMALA HARRIS: "In the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught enslaved people benefited from slavery!"

That is, of course, a complete lie. pic.twitter.com/AoPDd9qu8b
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 20, 2023

The curriculum standards, however, acknowledge that some former slaves used skills they acquired during their enslavement in the free world.

8. Worst VP In History Claims ‘Great’ Approval Ratings

Harris told ABC News’ Linsey Davis in July 2023 that some polls “say I have great approval ratings.”

The Democrat not only received the worst vice presidential rating in the history of modern polling, but her job approval at the time of the interview sat at 40.7 percent. Harris’ abysmal ratings have only continued, often ranking worse than Biden’s, and do not suggest that she’s up to the task of taking over the presidency.

7. Harris Lies About Bailing Out Violent Criminals

Harris told WCCO 4 News in October 2022 that claims she helped bail out the 2020 rioters who led the months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis were “misinformation.”

“People are playing political games right now. We’re 18 days away from midterms. And we have sadly not seen a lack of misinformation and disinformation, and I think this is another one of those examples,” the VP said.

Kamala Harris says it's "misinformation" that she promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a far-left organization that has bailed violent criminals — including accused murderers and rapists — out of jail.

She's lying. pic.twitter.com/KIBR8v4twJ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 22, 2022

Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike, however, benefitted when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested during the 2020 summer of rage.

If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020

6. Harris Claims Spending Sprees Won’t Raise Taxes

“As promised, we will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year,” Harris claimed in September 2022.

Kamala Harris says questions about how to pay for Biden's multi-trillion-dollar spending sprees and giveaways are "distractions."

She then repeats the repeatedly-debunked lie that Biden's plan "will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000/year." pic.twitter.com/KxADd3QURJ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 5, 2022

Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, however, found that Democrats’ misnomered Inflation Reduction Act will do “nothing to bring the economy out of stagnation and recession, but … will raise billions of dollars in taxes on Americans making less than $400,000.”

5. Harris Repeats Election Security Falsehood

When Georgia Republicans sought to pass an election integrity bill that would fortify the state’s elections, Harris lamented, “Across our nation, anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote,” Harris claimed in a January 2022 remarks at the Atlanta University Center Consortium. “That is one out of six people in our country.”

There is no evidence that election integrity laws like the one in Georgia discriminate against legitimate voters. In fact, experts say measures like voter ID make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat” via mass ballot harvesting.

4. Harris Knowingly Spread Border Patrol Whipping Lie

Harris claimed in 2021 that she saw “horrible” footage of Border Patrol agents whipping illegal border crossers.

“Human beings should never be treated that way, and I’m deeply troubled about it,” Harris said.

VP Kamala Harris calls videos of Border Patrol agents using reins on Haitian migrants “horrible” and says she supports a “thorough investigation.”

“I’m deeply troubled about it.” pic.twitter.com/P7OEEU72vm
— Poli Alert ⚖️ (@polialertcom) September 21, 2021

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigation, however, later found no evidence that the horseback unit used their reins to strike migrants.

3. Harris Says ‘Almost Impossible’ For Rural Americans To Photocopy

While arguing against voter ID laws in an interview with BET News in 2021, Harris claimed that it’s “almost impossible” for rural Americans to make a photocopy.

Kamala Harris absurdly says it’s “almost impossible” for rural Americans to photocopy their ID pic.twitter.com/J94IuGBFLv
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 10, 2021

Harris’ claim not only lacks evidence but is strongly contradicted by swaths of rural voters who found the comment insulting.

2. Harris Packages What Appears To Be A Popular MLK Story As Her Own

Harris loves to tell corporate media eager to boost her image a story about asking for “fweedom” from her stroller at a civil rights march.

Flashback to the time Kamala Harris claimed she told her mother that she wanted "fweedom" when she was a child at a civil rights march but the entire story was plagiarized from MLK. pic.twitter.com/IsUVwxVLrn
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 21, 2024

In June, @KamalaHarris tells Jimmy Fallon an apparently plagiarized story about demanding “freedom” while in a stroller at a civil rights march pic.twitter.com/bw7N1qXiz5
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 5, 2021

That supposed childhood memory, however, suspiciously resembles one Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told Playboy in 1965.

1. Harris Claims Jussie Smollett’s Race Hoax Was A ‘Lynching’

Despite serious doubts and a lack of evidence that actor Jussie Smollett was truly attacked in 2019 by a pair of racist, MAGA-loving men who tried to hang him by a noose, Harris called the alleged incident an “attempted modern-day lynching.”

.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery.

This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 29, 2019

The so-called hate crime was, in fact, later found to be staged by Smollett. Harris, however, did not retract her support or “lynching” statement even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.

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Kamala Harris Selects Radical Leftist Tim Walz As 2024 Running Mate

By: Shawn Fleetwood | August 06, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

Shawn Fleetwood

Visit on Twitter@ShawnFleetwood

Following weeks of speculation, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be her 2024 running mate, creating the most radically left presidential ticket in modern history.

“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked @Tim_Walz to be my running mate,” Harris wrote on X. “It’s great to have him on the team.”

Tuesday’s pick surprised many political analysts, who viewed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as the likely candidate to run alongside Harris. While governor of a key battleground state, Shapiro’s Jewish heritage and prior support for Israel prompted America’s corrupt media to speculate that his presence on the 2024 ticket would discourage the antisemitic wing of the Democrat Party from voting in the November contest.

Much like their bid to sanitize Harris’ extreme record, left-wing activists masquerading as journalists will undoubtedly work to whitewash Walz’s radical tenure as Minnesota’s governor.

In 2020, Walz reportedly delayed sending the National Guard to Minneapolis to stop riots that broke out in response to the death of George Floyd. According to the Star Tribune, “dozens of buildings had been looted and torched” by the time Walz’s government deployed the Guard to quell the violence.

Gov. Tim Walz's reaction the BLM riots:

"A society that does not put equity and inclusion first will come to this result"

This is who Kamala picked as her VP. pic.twitter.com/AOKkByahVg
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 6, 2024

Walz displayed his affinity for authoritarian policies that same year when instituting draconian Covid restrictions. In March 2020, he unliterally implemented a statewide stay-at-home order for all Minnesotans, closing schools, restaurants, and churches in the process.

During the state’s reopening phase a few months later, the Democrat governor allowed venues such as bars and tattoo parlors to open their doors for business, while still demanding places of worship remain closed. Residents who defied the state’s overreaching edicts were subsequently charged and jailed.

Walz also instituted statewide mask mandates, presided over a $250 million fraud scheme involving the misuse of Covid funds, and kept children — the least at-risk demographic for Covid mortality — out of school for months.

But the Democrat governor’s radical track record doesn’t stop there. Walz has signed virtually every piece of extreme legislation sent to his desk after state Democrats took unified control of the Minnesota Legislature during the 2022 midterms.

In recent years, he’s signed bills allowing abortions up until the moment of birth; banning “private conversations between therapists and patients struggling with their sex and sexuality;” making Minnesota “carbon-free” by 2040; permitting women from other states to travel to Minnesota to obtain abortions; granting 55,000 felons “voting rights;” allowing “trans” surgeries for minors; and allowing minors from other states to receive harmful “trans” procedures in Minnesota.

[READ: Court Halts Minnesota’s Attempt To Ban Christian Colleges From Offering Free Credits To Religious High Schoolers]

On immigration, Walz has been a major supporter of sanctuary cities and states. He also previously signed legislation allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and reportedly backed efforts to provide aliens in the state with taxpayer-funded health care and college tuition. During a previous CNN interview, he promoted the idea of investing in a “ladder factory” to help illegals scale President Trump’s border wall.

FLASHBACK: Kamala’s VP pick, Tim Walz, says he should invest in a "ladder factory" to help illegal aliens climb the border wall

pic.twitter.com/gdw4KGPk7V
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 6, 2024

To put the cherry on top, Walz previously downplayed the dangers of socialism — a state-run economic policy responsible for the deaths of millions worldwide.

“Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

Top Kamala VP contender Tim Walz: "One person's socialism is another person's neighborliness" 🤔 pic.twitter.com/DHVSo37jsZ
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 30, 2024

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Report: America Has Nearly 300,000 Double-Registered Voters

By: Logan Washburn | August 01, 2024

A ballot being dropped into a ballot drop box.

Author Logan Washburn profile

Logan Washburn

“Registrars aren’t doing their jobs,” Linda Szynkowicz, CEO of the nonprofit Fight Voter Fraud, told The Federalist. “Stop telling me the voter rolls are fine. They’re not.”

Fight Voter Fraud found 297,856 voters registered in two or more states, according to a report released last week. Nearly all of these voters only registered in two states, but 3,112 registered in three states and 24 registered in four or more.

The report also found 3,170 people who voted at least twice in elections from 2016 to 2022. While most only double voted once, 248 double voted twice, 194 double voted three times, and 180 double voted four times.

Fight Voter Fraud’s report included data for all 50 states, of which Florida had the most double registrations — more than 37,000 — along with 312 who voted multiple times in elections. California had similar numbers, with more than 36,000 double registered, and 732 who voted multiple times. States including Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, and Texas also had over 10,000 double registrations.

Fight Voter Fraud found one individual who voted twice in North Carolina and once in Florida in 2020, according to Szynkowicz.

“This is the lowest hanging fruit,” she said.

If someone was registered for an absentee ballot in one state, but moved and registered in a new state, officials might still send the absentee ballot and someone could potentially vote in their name, according to Szynkowicz.

Fight Voter Fraud announced July 30 that more than 500 dead voters were still registered in Connecticut.

“Even with the dead people voting, whether it’s someone impersonating or someone who gets the absentee ballot request form,” Szynkowicz said, “it’s all over the place.”

Voting more than once is a violation of federal law with a penalty of up to five years in prison or a fine of up to $10,000. Anyone who “knowingly or willfully” provides false information about “name, address or period of residence” in a voting district is subject to similar penalties.

The group compared the National Change of Address system with state voter rolls to find the dual registrations, then verified the results with “commercial data,” according to Szynkowicz.

“We don’t just take things and throw it against the wall to see what sticks. All of our stuff is going to stick,” she said, noting that election integrity advocates may have removed some dual registrants since the report first included them five months ago.

Because the data excludes those who did not file with the NCOA system, the report said, the “actual numbers could be significantly higher.”

“People don’t understand, you can’t be registered in more than one location,” Szynkowicz said. “They assume that if they register somewhere else — the ones who unknowingly are double registered — that they’ll automatically be removed. That’s not the case.”

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.

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Democrats Are Rigging Their Own Election. Does Anyone Still Think They Didn’t Rig 2020?

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 22, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

If you need further proof that Democrats will go to extreme lengths to rig elections in their favor, look no further than the silent coup that occurred Sunday, when it was announced that Joe Biden would not seek reelection this November.

One is the best ads ever!
pic.twitter.com/vfdO1SJYm5
— 🇺🇸ProudArmyBrat (@leslibless) July 4, 2024

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” read a letter posted by Biden’s X account. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

The whole episode resembles a storyline from a dystopian horror film. For years, Democrats and their legacy media allies pushed endless propaganda claiming a mentally declining Biden possessed the rigorous stamina required to be president. Just last month, media hacks were parroting debunked talking points put out by the White House claiming videos showcasing Biden’s frailty were “cheap fakes.”

And then the June 27 debate against Donald Trump happened. Realizing they could no longer hide Sleepy Joe’s mental decline and worrying that his cratering approval rating could cost them the 2024 election, the Democrat political machine jumped into action.

These political forces suddenly acknowledged what the general public has known since before the Delaware Democrat assumed the presidency. In a seemingly coordinated campaign, left-wing media acolytes, Democrat politicos, and Hollywood snobs spent the following weeks feigning a newfound concern about Biden’s ailing health and demanding he drop his reelection bid to “protect democracy.”

[READ: The Ousting Of Biden Was A Textbook Coup D’état]

While Biden initially resisted calls to step aside, the Democrat-led pressure campaign was too big to overcome. Biden — or whoever is running things in the White House — dropped his reelection bid, tossing the 2024 nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris (or whoever the leftist oligarchy controlling the nomination process ultimately decides is the candidate). Like clockwork, these same forces are now praising him for the decision. For the party of “democracy,” it doesn’t matter that millions of Democrat primary voters are now disenfranchised. The machine got what it wanted.

A Repeat of Democrat Election Rigging

Much like their concentrated bid to remove Biden from the 2024 ticket, Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2020 contest involved participation from a variety of left-wing actors, both public and private. Under the guise of Covid, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which then siphoned the funds into local election offices. These “Zuckbucks” — which were heavily directed toward “blue” municipalities — were used to advance Democrat-backed voting policies, amounting to what was effectively a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

Around the same time, leftist election officials in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin circumvented their states’ respective legislatures by unilaterally changing election procedures regarding unsupervised practices such as mail-in balloting and the use of ballot drop boxes. Several of these actions were later determined to be illegal by state courts.

Democrats’ election rigging got even worse leading up to the November 2020 election. The New York Post’s release of a bombshell report revealing potentially incriminating information about Joe Biden found on Hunter Biden’s laptop prompted one of the largest censorship campaigns in modern American history. Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story with encouragement from the FBI, which had authenticated the laptop a year before the Post published its story.

Equally alarming were the efforts by 51 former intel officials to squash the laptop story by baselessly claiming it bore all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” The CIA reportedly solicited signatures for the letter, which Biden used during a debate with Trump to dismiss criticisms about the laptop’s contents, which detailed the Biden family business. One of the letter’s signatories claimed under oath that a phone call he had with then-Biden campaign official Antony Blinken in the weeks before the election prompted the letter’s creation.

These actions don’t even include the Justice Department’s reported bid to delay an investigation into Hunter over concerns that it could impact the 2020 election.

Expect Nothing Less This November

Democrats’ 2020 and 2024 election-rigging schemes are two sides of the same coin. Both cases show that there is no task the party of “democracy” won’t undertake to ensure its hold on state power. (In fact, Democrat efforts to rig the 2024 general election have been underway since Biden took office.)

Leftists’ success in removing Biden from the 2024 ballot should serve as a wake-up call to normie America about the security of our elections. The Democrat Party is a political force seeking total control over every facet of our government and society. Hoping they’ll play fair this November is a fool’s errand.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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15 Lies Biden Told During His ‘Big Boy’ Press Conference

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 12, 2024

Biden taking questions during a presser.

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Seeking to assuage concerns among Democrats that he’s mentally incapable of taking on Donald Trump this November, Joe Biden held a “big boy” press conference during Thursday’s NATO summit — and did it not disappoint.

Not content to just step on his own tongue more than once, the president spewed some of the most outrageous mistruths of his presidency (so far). From claiming Trump is his vice president to rewriting history on Afghanistan, the lies were almost nonstop.

1. Rising Prices

Biden claimed that “overall prices fell last month.”

That statement is false. According to PBS News, “Wholesale prices in the United States rose by a larger-than-expected 2.6 percent last month from a year earlier.”

2. ‘Vice President Trump’

Biden falsely claimed that he picked Donald Trump as his vice president.

“I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president [if I didn’t] think she was not qualified to be president,” the Delaware Democrat said.

Biden picked Kamala Harris, not Trump, to be his vice president.

3. Zelensky or Putin?

When confronted by a reporter on a moment from earlier in the day when he mistakenly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Biden claimed, “I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, Zelensky.’ And then I added five other names.”

Even anti-truth CNN admitted this did not occur.

4. Debate Performance

Biden blamed his travel schedule as the cause for his poor debate performance against Trump.

“The next debate, I’m not going to be traveling 15 time zones a week before. Anyway. That’s what it was about,” the president said.

Contrary to his claim, Biden did not travel through 15 time zones a week before the debate. The president returned from his overseas Europe trip on June 15 and spent the week before the debate prepping at Camp David.

5. Trump’s NATO Comments

Biden distorted comments about NATO Trump issued at a recent rally in Florida.

“I think he said at one of his rallies, don’t hold me to this, recently, where, ‘NATO — I just learned about NATO,’ or something to that effect. Foreign policy’s never been his strong point,” the president claimed.

That characterization is false. When describing his mindset prior to his first NATO summit in 2017, Trump said, “I didn’t want to be obnoxious because I felt, you know, it was the first time I’d ever done this. I went; I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. Like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they weren’t paying.”

6. Hamas’ Popularity

While discussing the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, Biden contended “[t]here is a growing dissatisfaction in, on the West Bank, from the Palestinians, about Hamas,” and that the terrorist group “is not popular now.”

Polling has shown that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

7. Endorsements

Biden claimed that the United Auto Workers Union “just endorsed me.”

That statement is misleading. The group endorsed Biden for president nearly six months ago on January 24.

8. U.S. Presence in Afghanistan

Biden whitewashed his prior support for the United States having a military presence in Afghanistan.

“You may recall, I still get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan,” the president asserted. “Once we got bin Laden … we should’ve moved on, because it was not in our — no one’s ever going to unite that country.”

As noted by left-wing CNN, “In the early years of the war, Biden, then a U.S. senator for Delaware, was a vocal public supporter of the US having a sustained military presence in Afghanistan and engaging in extensive ‘nation-building’ there — and he explicitly rejected the idea of a narrow military mission targeting terrorists.”

9. Bad Poll Numbers

Biden claimed that “[t]here are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now later in the campaign.”

Even The Washington Post’s “fact-checkers” admitted this isn’t true.

“According to the presidential ratings tracked by FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s approval rating, 36.8 percent, at this point in his presidency is lower than any other presidents besides George H.W. Bush (36.7 percent) and Jimmy Carter (33.9 percent),” the Post reported. “Gerald Ford had an approval rating slightly higher. All three lost.”

10. Growing Economic Pains

Biden downplayed the notion that his policies are responsible for America’s ongoing economic pains.

“As you recall, understandably, many of you and many economists thought my initial initiatives that I put forward, ‘can’t do that, it’s going to cause inflation, things are going to skyrocket, debt’s going to go up,’” the president said.

Contrary to his insinuation, inflation skyrocketed after Biden took office and implemented far-left economic policies.

11. Illegal Border Crossings

Biden regurgitated the lie that “border encounters have gone down over 50 percent,” and the “current level is lower today than when Trump left office.”

That isn’t true, as illegal border crossings have exponentially risen to record highs under Biden’s presidency.

12. Trump’s Foreign Policy

The Democrat president contended that “[f]oreign policy has never been [Trump’s] strong point.”

That statement is inaccurate. During his presidency, Trump secured peace agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors, re-established a working coalition among like-minded nations in the Indo-Pacific region to counter Chinese aggression, and decimated ISIS, among other achievements.

13. Classified Documents

While speaking about his prior interactions with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, Biden suggested he turned over “all” of his notes to federal officials upon leaving office.

“I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping than any world leader … and by the way, I handed in all my notes,” the president claimed.

Biden did not, in fact, turn over all classified materials in his possession upon leaving office. Federal officials discovered boxes of classified documents in Biden’s Delaware beach home, including records that dated back to his time in the U.S. Senate.

14. Child Gun Deaths

Biden claimed, “More children are killed by the bullet than any other cause of death.”

That assertion is misleading. Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contends the leading cause of death among minors is firearm-related incidents but considers 18- and 19-year-olds as “children” in its analyses. When using the actual classification of minors (individuals under the age of 17), the leading cause of death among children is motor vehicle-related incidents.

15. Trump’s Russia Comments

Biden claimed Trump told Vladimir Putin, “Do whatever the hell you want,” regarding Russia’s invasion of Eastern Europe. But that’s not accurate.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Democrats Continue to Spew Lies About the Contents of Project 2025

BY: MONROE HARLESS | JULY 11, 2024

Author Monroe Harless profile

MONROE HARLESS

VISIT ON TWITTER@MONROEHARLESS

Democrat officials have launched a disinformation campaign about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, misattributing policies nowhere to be found in the project and falsely linking them to former President Donald Trump.

The project is a policy roadmap for a future Republican administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and outlined in a nearly 1,000-page document highlighting long-held conservative priorities. The left’s fearmongering campaign comes amidst panic in the Democratic Party, which has fractured over Biden’s cognitive decline and abysmal election polling.

“[Project 2025] is a dangerous takeover by Trump and his allies to pass his extreme MAGA agenda,” Biden recently said on X, including a video that claims the project “would allow employers to stop paying overtime for millions” and “enact a national abortion ban.”

The claims are massive distortions of the project’s actual policies. The outline, in reality, suggests “calculat[ing] the overtime period over a long number of weeks” with the goal of giving workers greater flexibility in their schedule.

A national abortion ban is nowhere to be found in the policy outline, which insists conservatives should “recogn[ize] the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations.”

The project encourages “complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion” and notes that “alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”

The Biden campaign has doubled down on efforts to attribute the project to Trump, even creating a webpage that calls the policy plan “Trump’s Project 2025.” Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the think tank’s policies.

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

The website, nevertheless, insists that Trump plans on “reinstating and expanding [the] racist Muslim ban,” “arming teachers,” and “raising the retirement age.” It also claims Project 2025 will put “families’ access to IVF treatments … in jeopardy” and “cut Social Security.” Not one of these policies is contained anywhere in Project 2025.

Other Democrats have participated in the fearmongering.

“They’re going after IVF,” Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed on MSNBC in February. “They also want to control … what they call recreational sex. … This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy.”

Project 2025 makes no mention of in vitro fertilization (IVF) or “recreational sex.” Mentions of “God” and “Christian” are limited to religious freedom, tax exemptions, work as “service to God,” and “God-given individual rights to live freely,” contrary to AOC’s claims of theocracy.

Celebrities on the left have joined in the misinformation campaign as well.

Hollywood actor Mark Hamill, a longtime Democrat fundraiser and Biden supporter, spoke out against Project 2025 in a recent post, writing, “With fear for our Democracy, I dissent.”

The actor included a graphic of Trump with a laundry list of goals supposedly outlined in the project, including ending no-fault divorce, banning African American studies, banning contraception, banning Muslim immigration, cutting social security, raising the retirement age, and court packing.

With fear for our Democracy, I dissent. pic.twitter.com/DOSMaBOZmf
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) July 6, 2024

Project 2025 responded with an enumerated list of 30 “myths vs. facts,” clarifying Hamill’s more misleading claims.

“Mandate for Leadership calls for LOWER taxes for ALL Americans. Individuals spend their money in more productive ways than the government does,” the post noted, debunking the assertion that Project 2025 calls for higher taxes for working-class people.

MYTHS VS. FACTS ABOUT PROJECT 2025

We are not affiliated with former President Trump. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations.

1. End no fault divorce: FALSE

Divorce is not mentioned in our policy handbook,… https://t.co/syj1HnCxhP
— Project 2025 (@Prjct2025) July 9, 2024

“Mandate for Leadership’s plan would not eliminate the FDA or the EPA, and NOAA’s functions would be transferred to other agencies, the private sector, and states and territories,” the post clarified about misleading claims on government agency policy.

But regardless of the facts about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Democrats and their supporters will continue to lie about the policy plan’s substance and inaccurately link the plan to Trump in an attempt to derail his presidential campaign.

Monroe Harless is a summer intern at The Federalist. She is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science.

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Americans Worked Too Hard for Equal Voting Rights for Noncitizens to Disenfranchise Us

BY: KERRI TOLOCZKO | JULY 09, 2024

KERRI TOLOCZKO

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) states it is unlawful for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It is also unlawful to steal a car. That is what locks are for. Until the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) of 2024 was proposed, the NVRA had no locks — no way to ensure that only American citizens vote in U.S. elections.

The glaring loophole in current voting law is that it does not require documentary proof of citizenship for registration. There is also no specific authority provided to state secretaries of state or local elections officials to access federal databases to confirm that there are no noncitizens on state voter rolls. The SAVE Act is designed to cure these deficiencies.

A House Floor vote on the Congressional SAVE Act (H.R. 8281) is scheduled for Wednesday, July 10. Sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the legislation closes the loophole in federal law that enables foreign nationals — noncitizen resident aliens and illegal immigrants — to register to vote.

The U.S. is experiencing a massive wave of illegal immigrants due to the Biden administration’s seemingly deliberate abandonment of any reasonable form of border protection. We have nearly 22 million noncitizens (legal and illegal) living in our country, and that number is climbing. Public debate about noncitizen voting is rightly focused on illegal immigrants and the willingness of state agencies (particularly DMVs) to register anyone to vote as long as they are breathing.

But this story has another angle yet undiscussed — what does history tell us about who noncitizen voting disrespects and insults the most?

In the first U.S. presidential election in 1789, only white male landowners were able to cast a vote. African Americans, women, and naturalized citizens did not enjoy that same automatic and safe path to the ballot box. And now, in 2024, noncitizen voting threatens to steal the political voices of citizen voters who had to fight to get to the ballot box.

The right to vote for African American men did not come until 1868 and 1870 under the 14th and 15th Amendments, but casting those votes was not just fraught with danger and blatant racism for former slaves, but for future generations of black Americans. Disgraceful Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, beatings, and even mass killings are a shameful part of our history that was not fully addressed until the passage and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Women in America also had to fight for the right to vote. The American suffragist movement was led predominantly by fearless Republican-associated women – black and white. Many of their names remain an honored part of our history – Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They were the subject of ridicule, mockery, and even beatings before earning the right to vote in 1919 under the 19th Amendment after a nearly century-long fight, and to the chagrin of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson who thought their efforts “obnoxious.”

Today’s new voters find the path to naturalization expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating. Our country has approximately 24 million naturalized citizens, and in 2023, just over 878,000 new citizens took their Oath of Allegiance. Many are from war-torn or despotic countries offering no chance for prosperity and liberty, and they worked hard to get here through legal channels. They hold their citizenship responsibilities dear and take them seriously.

Total government fees alone to become a citizen approach $4,000 a person. On top of that, there is no government answer to how long the process takes other than at least five years of residency before application. Ask any recently naturalized citizen about the process and they would note it can take over a decade, thousands of dollars (often including immigration attorney fees), and endless frustrating calls to the government’s “we can’t be bothered to answer” line.

It is indisputable that foreign nationals are being unlawfully added to the voter rolls through Motor Voter at state DMVs and other registration drives. President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 demands that agencies amp up their voter registration efforts for anyone seeking federal government assistance — with no carve out for illegal immigrants.

Based on Census information and current noncitizen statistics, some researchers estimate that “roughly 1.0 million to 2.7 million non-citizens will illegally vote in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections unless stronger election integrity measures are implemented.”

Could unlawful foreign citizens’ ballots skew election results? Maybe. Placed in strategically important voting jurisdictions, yes. But in the current national debate about noncitizen voting, we cannot forget the critical role the past holds.

Hard-earned votes should not be negated by unlawful ones. It’s not a question of math. It’s a question of integrity, national sovereignty, common sense, and civil rights.

America doesn’t always get it right at the start gate. Full voting rights for all Americans took centuries. But eventually, we course corrected. Full, unfettered access to the ballot box for all citizen voters is now available.

Noncitizens’ unlawful votes would stomp on that progress and the suffering that went with it. Even one citizen’s political voice silenced by a fraudulent vote is one too many. The SAVE Act is what is needed to guarantee that the government takes an active role in ensuring only citizens vote.

Kerri Toloczko is Executive Director of Election Integrity Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting all ballots of all American voters through citizen action and adherence to law.

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Meet The Shadowy Left-Wing Nonprofit Harvesting Voter Data to Juice Democrat Turnout

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 08, 2024

Screenshot of VPC voter registration form.

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

In an era of U.S. elections where ballots — not voters — are the favored currency, nonprofit voter registration has become instrumental in determining which candidate comes out on top at the ballot box.

While conservatives have largely failed to recognize the necessity of such operations in driving Republican voter turnout, leftists haven’t. Unlike their opponents, Democrats have amassed a well-funded machine that’s accumulated their party massive electoral wins in recent cycles, even as the head of their party remains widely unpopular among the American electorate.

Central to Democrats’ efforts is the Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left-wing nonprofit that, despite claiming to be “nonpartisan,” aims to create a “New American Majority” by facilitating “registration of numerous Democratic-leaning voting populations” such as “unmarried women, [racial] minorities and millennials,” according to InfluenceWatch.

Originally known as Women’s Voices Women Vote prior to 2011, VPC was founded by Page Gardner, a prominent Democrat political operative connected to the Kennedy family, with help from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Today, the group is run by Tom Lopach, a Democrat operative and head of the Center for Voter Information (CVI), VPC’s “sister” organization that helps it conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations.

A 2023 Restoration of America report shows just how influential VPC and CVI’s voter outreach has been in recent elections. During the 2020 contest, for example, the groups’ registration-by-mail campaign purportedly produced an additional 272,443 votes, most of which came from battleground states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Those figures are higher than the vote totals VPC claimed it netted during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

But VPC isn’t your typical GOTV nonprofit. A closer look at the group’s operations reveals how it uses voter data harvested through its registration efforts to enhance the left’s election machine.

How VPC Operates

VPC’s primary method of registering its “New American Majority” is through the use of mailers it sends to prospective electors.

After accumulating “commercial and public data to identify people who are eligible to vote but who need to register,” the group sends registration forms to households it believes are occupied by these eligible voters. A Tennessee registration form sent to a state resident and provided to The Federalist shows how VPC pre-populates information about the individual on these forms, such as their address.

The form also comes with a pre-paid postage envelope that includes the recipient’s return address already filled out. The envelope is addressed to the local county election office.

Communication records obtained by The Federalist show how VPC notifies state election offices about its plans to disburse these materials to prospective voters prior to doing so.

On Dec. 15, 2023, for example, VPC Deputy Director of Partnerships and Outreach Sarah Mitchell sent an email notifying Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals and members of the commonwealth’s elections department of VPC’s plans to mail voter registration forms to prospective voters on March 21. Mitchell claimed the March mailings would be the “first of three large scale voter registration mailings” the group plans to send to Virginians in 2024 and sent to “people who are turning 18 and newly eligible to register to vote, people who have moved between counties or into your state and according to our records need to update their registration, and addresses where our records show unregistered voters likely live.”

Mitchell sent a follow-up email on March 7, notifying the aforementioned officials that VPC’s second batch of voter registration mailers would be distributed to residents around June 28.

Speaking with The Federalist, Ned Jones, director of the Citizens Election Research Center of the Election Integrity Network, explained that sending multiple mailings to potential voters appears to be a strategy that allows VPC to narrow down its list of which voters it should direct its GOTV efforts toward as Election Day nears.

It seems to be their attempt to “get a feel for who’s going to vote and who might not,” Jones said. “It’s really complex.”

VPC’s multiple mailings in Virginia match a strategy the group has deployed in other states, according to Jones.

Voter Data Collection

Encouraging voters to mail their voter registration applications to their local election office is just one aspect of VPC’s strategy, however. The group also provides prospective electors with an option to register through its online portal.

Included in VPC’s mailings is a paper with a QR code that individuals can scan with their phones. After clicking on the link, users are taken to an online registration portal operated by VPC and Rock the Vote (RTV), “a left-progressive-aligned organization … whose stated mission is to engage and ‘build the political power of young people,’” according to InfluenceWatch.

Users are required to enter their email address and zip code before proceeding. Upon continuing through the process, these users are required to provide personal information, such as their full name, address, and date of birth. They’re also asked to answer a series of questions, such as “Is this your first time registering to vote?” and “Why are you registering to vote?”

In a March 5 email to Beals and Virginia’s election officials, Mitchell claimed that including a QR code on its mailings has “resulted in a roughly 20% shift from recipients returning [VPC’s] mail applications to instead filling out online voter registration applications.” She separately contended in an email sent to these same officials two days later that “close to 50% of the young people who received [VPC’s] mail chose to register [online].”

What’s most alarming, however, is that registering through the VPC-RTV portal allows these groups to acquire voters’ personal data and share it with other third parties. Located at the bottom of the registration page is RTV’s privacy policy, which stipulates that it may share an individual’s “personal information” with “partners and organizations with principles and missions that overlap with those of RTV,” “affiliates and companies with whom [RTV] share[s] common ownership,” and other listed third parties.

Data classified as “personal” by RTV includes an individual’s identifiers (name, address, Social Security number), demographic information (race, sex, marital status), professional information (employer), internet activity information (IP address, language preferences, device ID), and non-precise geolocation information (“geolocation derived from [a user’s] IP address”).

The amount of information collected by RTV is dependent on how a user interacts with its online services, according to the privacy policy.

RTV does, however, allow users to “opt out” of “supporter list exchanges.” (That’s when RTV shares users’ identifier information with “named partners and other organizations with principles and/or missions that overlap with those of RTV”).

Neither VPC nor RTV responded to The Federalist’s request for comment on what specific third parties they share personal voter data acquired through the voter registration portal with. Nor did either group respond when pressed on how long they have been collaborating on voter registration activities.

Growing Concerns

VPC’s antics have drawn attention from prominent GOP election officials.

Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi’s secretaries of state have issued press releases in recent months warning voters that VPC’s mailers are not official correspondence from their respective offices. Alabama Secretary of State Allen West went a step further by “officially discourag[ing]” the “targeted” mailings, which he said represents “partisan interference by out-of-state, third-party organizations [that] is unnecessary, confusing, and counterproductive.”

Concerns about VPC’s partisanship are not new. Last week, the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer shared a photo of what appears to be a VPC mailing with former First Lady Michelle Obama on the cover.

VPC did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on how it can claim to be a “nonpartisan” organization while using Obama’s likeness on its mailers.

“Putting Michelle Obama on the front of a voter registration form is obviously a tactic to filter out Republicans, who will be more likely to throw it out after assuming it’s a Democrat fundraiser,” Thayer wrote.

Legal Remedies

Legislative efforts aimed at stymying third-party groups from flooding states with election mailers have largely failed to materialize, according to Jones. Even in states where such legislation passed, left-wing groups immediately sued to stop its implementation.

That’s what happened three years ago in Georgia, when state Republicans passed SB 202, a benign election integrity measure that included a provision prohibiting third parties from mailing pre-filled absentee ballot applications to voters. Shortly after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the measure into law, Democrat-aligned groups launched a barrage of lawsuits baselessly alleging the statute suppressed voters, particularly racial minorities.

A federal judge shot down Democrat groups’ request that a preliminary injunction be placed on the law in October, ruling plaintiffs failed to show evidence SB 202 “intentionally discriminate[s] against black voters.”

While legislative fixes to VPC’s shenanigans are lacking, some conservative legal groups are taking action against the Democrat-aligned organization ahead of the 2024 election. On June 24, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) filed a complaint with the North Carolina State Board of Elections against VPC, CVI, and Rock the Vote “for unlawfully collecting and retaining personally identifiable information (‘PII’) from voter registration applications.”

RITE alleged that the aforementioned groups violated North Carolina law, which prohibits “any person who is not an elections official or who is not otherwise authorized by law to retain a registrant’s signature, full or partial Social Security number, date of birth, or the identity of the public agency at which the registrant registered.” The legal group additionally asked the board to investigate the groups based upon these allegations.

“The board of elections must investigate and, if necessary, put a stop to this outrageous betrayal of voter trust,” RITE President Derek Lyons said in a statement. “Retaining personally identifiable information demonstrates that groups like this may be more interested in their own agendas than in merely registering voters.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Can Democrats Just Dump Biden And Move On? It’s Not That Simple

BY: SEAN DAVIS | JUNE 28, 2024

Will Democrats replace Joe Biden as their presidential nominee?

It’s not that simple, logistically or politically, as long he’s still alive. States have pretty strict rules on last-second ballot changes, but Democrats have always found ways to get courts to rewrite laws for them at the last second. Just look at what they did for Frank Lautenberg and Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. It would be a heavy lift but not an impossible one.

The real problem for Democrats is political: Removing Biden as nominee requires them to deny and reject the election results of their voters in all 50 states after they spent four years accusing everyone else of being “election deniers.” They also will have a very hard time removing Biden as nominee but leaving him in as president. If he’s not mentally fit to be on the campaign trail or debate stage, how on Earth can he be fit enough to remain as president? The downsides of that strategy are immense, with little upside.

And that brings us to the real problem for Democrats: Kamala Harris. They know she’s political kryptonite because she’s both incredibly stupid and extremely unlikeable. Democrat voters can’t even stand her. So, if they manage to get rid of Biden both as nominee and as president, they end up stuck with her, which might even be worse than doing nothing. Do they really want to be in the position of preventing the first female president from running as an incumbent? And can they sideline her while promoting another white dude like Gavin Newsom when their entire party is built around identity politics?

Four minutes of Kamala. I defy you to listen to it without cracking a molar… pic.twitter.com/ylqmEDcxsu
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 28, 2024

So, the predicament for Democrats right now is they have to somehow find out how to get rid of Biden as the nominee, keep him as president, and prevent the black woman who is currently vice president from being the nominee. I don’t think it’s a needle they’ll be able to thread without resorting to violence and republic-destroying tactics.

Now, they could just reap what they’ve sown, accept the consequences of their choices, and accept losing an election for once — but I’m not holding my breath.

Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.

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SEAN DAVIS

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Without The SAVE Act, The Only Thing Keeping Foreigners from Voting Is the Honor System

BY: MIKE LEE | MAY 13, 2024

Someone holding an 'election integrity' sign.

MIKE LEE

Congressional Democrats insist that the SAVE Act — which requires proof of citizenship to establish eligibility to vote in federal elections — is unnecessary because federal law (18 USC § 611) already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Those making this argument ignore a glaring problem: the government officials who register voters and conduct federal elections aren’t allowed to require proof of citizenship.

The Demands From Illegal Immigrants In Denver Colorado Get More & More Insane

People who have broke our laws and are already being supported by American Tax Payers need even more. Here are their demands:

Number 1: (Illegal) Migrants will cook their own food with fresh… pic.twitter.com/bRdtq2pq9a
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) May 11, 2024

It’s therefore shockingly easy for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, leaving our elections dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference. Anyone — even an illegal alien or other noncitizen — can register to vote in federal elections, just by checking a box and signing a form. This is all on the honor system. No proof of citizenship is required.

It’s not just that state officials — who are responsible for federal voter registration and elections in our country — don’t verify citizenship in this context; it’s that the Supreme Court has told them that they’re not allowed to do so. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., 570 U.S. 1 (2013), the Court held that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, also known as the “Motor Voter” law) prohibits states from requiring proof of citizenship when processing federal voter registration forms.

You need to watch. This is how the Democrats are planning to steal the election.

pic.twitter.com/F6ZOZnglEo
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) May 13, 2024

The SAVE Act would fix this gaping loophole by requiring anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide proof of citizenship. It would also require states to review existing federal voter registration files and remove all noncitizens.

Remember: every state issues driver’s licenses to noncitizens, and 19 states issue them to illegal aliens. This, coupled with the Motor Voter law and the Supreme Court’s ruling, makes it shockingly easy for aliens — legal and illegal — to vote in federal elections, even though they’re prohibited from doing so. Considering that there are now nearly 30 million noncitizens in the U.S., including about 12 million who have entered illegally since the last presidential election, we desperately need the SAVE Act.

While Democrats are already mocking the SAVE Act, they don’t dispute that noncitizens shouldn’t vote in federal elections. Rather, they insist that there’s no need for the bill because noncitizens — being prohibited by law from voting in federal elections — categorically do not vote in such elections. That argument fails for one simple reason: it implausibly assumes universal compliance with a law that has become breathtakingly easy (and correspondingly tempting) to violate.

Some say that noncitizens wouldn’t dare register to vote in federal elections, as doing so is illegal and could adversely affect their present or future immigration status. Even if this assumption were correct with regard to many (or even most) noncitizens in the U.S., that still wouldn’t disprove the need for the SAVE Act.

If even a tiny percentage of America’s 30 million noncitizens were to vote, they could change the outcome of a close federal election. And, as noted by the Immigration Accountability Project, it’s odd for the left to insist so vehemently that illegal aliens don’t vote, given that congressional Democrats have inserted language “to waive inadmissibility for illegal voting in all [their] amnesty bills.”

Democrats can’t have it both ways; they can’t (1) credibly say that illegal aliens don’t vote in federal elections, and then (2) expect us to forget their own proposals, which assume the opposite is true. In any event, and regardless of how many (or few) noncitizens may have voted in the past, why not take steps to prevent it from happening in the future?

The sanctity of your vote is at stake. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that our elections are fair, lawfully conducted, and free of foreign influence. To do that, it’s imperative that Congress pass the SAVE Act.

All of the democrats’ arguments are just as ridiculous. This guy has something to say about them.

This guy is a savage. pic.twitter.com/rTK5zl1JN6
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) May 13, 2024

Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

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Filings: Jack Smith Tampered with Evidence In Get-Trump Classified Documents Case

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | MAY 06, 2024

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

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Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted federal prosecutors tampered with evidence in his criminal case alleging former President Donald Trump mishandled classified documents.

According to a Friday court filin g, prosecutors said documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are no longer in the same order in which they found them, and some are mislabeled and may even be misplaced. A government “filter team” that dealt with the boxes once the FBI took them “was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” the special counsel’s office wrote in the filing.

Later the filing says, of early inventories and scanned records of the seized document boxes, “Because these inventories and scans were created close in time to the seizure of the documents, they are the best evidence available of the order the documents were in when seized. That said, there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” A footnote on this last sentence says: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”

The filing also suggests the Department of Justice and FBI may have lost and mislabeled some of the documents. When the agencies first took the documents at Mar-a-Lago, government employees used many blank sheets of paper as substitutes and cover papers for what they decided might be classified documents.

After the FBI brought the document boxes to Washington DC, federal employees and contractors began replacing these “handwritten sheets” with proper classified document covers. At that point, the filing says, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.” This indicates the special counsel’s office disclosed it isn’t sure whether some it lost or mislabeled some of the allegedly classified documents it seized in the Trump raid.

In response, Trump’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case over prosecutorial misconduct.

Evidence spoliation https://t.co/CVv3yRMldb
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) May 5, 2024

This is even more stunning by Smith.

Setting aside the FBI high-tailed it out of southern FLA to conduct the investigation within the confines of the corrupt Washington FBI field office, Smith admits DOJ cannot be sure every place holder corresponds with the correct document. pic.twitter.com/Fxy8MZp2qs
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 4, 2024

Smith charged Trump last June with 37 criminal counts related to the former president’s handling of classified documents. In July, Smith added three more counts against Trump as Democrats strategize to retain the presidency by imprisoning their chief political opponent in an unprecedented lawfare campaign. New evidence shows the Democrat White House worked closely with the DOJ and National Archives and Records Administration in crafting the documents case against Trump.

The classified documents case is Trump’s largest election-year court battle, as nearly half of the 88 total charges against him currently are related to the records. Federal prosecutors confiscated 33 boxes of documents from the hostile raid on Trump’s home in August 2022, according to Fox News. The Department of Justice has spent more than $23 million in taxpayer dollars for Smith to investigate Trump.

In April, Federalist Elections Correspondent Brianna Lyman outlined three major revelations to emerge from the classified documents case to date, including deep state pressure to move forward with Trump’s prosecution and White House involvement.

“President Biden also retained classified documents after leaving the vice presidency,” Lyman reported. “Yet he was not charged because prosecutors say they believed he would ‘present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”

The Department of Energy allegedly revoked the former president’s security clearance retroactively once Trump was indicted.

In February, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported the FBI raid may have been orchestrated to cover up the intelligence state’s role in the Russia hoax. The article posted on Shellenberger’s news website, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was careful to protect for years.

“Transgressions [the feds might have wanted to cover up] range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian ‘influence activities,’” Public reported.

The binder was “Trump’s insurance policy,” according to an unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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New York’s Fraud Judgment Against Trump Is So Bad, Even His Biggest Critics Aren’t Defending It

BY: MARK HEMINGWAY | MARCH 26, 2024

Author Mark Hemingway profile

MARK HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@HEMINATOR

It’s pretty clear at this point that Democrats’ main election strategy against Donald Trump has nothing to do with Joe Biden running a savvy political campaign. Instead, they’re attempting to defeat Trump with a series of obviously politically coordinated lawsuits and criminal charges, hoping this will both drain Trump’s resources and any resulting convictions would tarnish him in the eyes of voters. Suffice it to say, this strategy is not working out well for them — Biden hasn’t led in the polls in six months.

And while there’s a lot to be said about the dubious nature of the charges being brought against him, the point has been driven home by the recent decision by a New York appeals court to reduce Trump’s bond in his civil fraud trial from $454 million to $175 million. Or rather, the issue is what no one is saying about this case: It’s such complete bunk that no one among the legion of Trump’s critics in and out of the corporate media is even trying to defend this case on the merits.

To recap: Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.

However, the state of New York, where the current Attorney General Letitia James campaigned for office on the insane premise of convicting Trump without even saying what he was guilty of, combed through the paperwork of these loans and charged Trump with fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to get favorable loan terms. They did this in spite of the fact that no bank has accused Trump of wrongdoing.

The case was decided by a judge who is personally bizarre and professionally incompetent and adversarial. In a case where Trump was accused of inflating the value of his assets, in Judge Engoron’s ruling he concluded that Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s historic estate on 17 oceanfront acres in the heart of the most exclusive neighborhood in America, was worth between “$18 million and $27.6 million.” Even CNN was incredulous about Engoron’s low valuation of Trump’s assets: “Real estate insiders question how Trump fraud judge valued Mar-a-Lago.” For those who believe that Trump inflated the value of his assets to get a loan — this would not exactly make him a unique figure in the business world — Engoron’s judgment is still unreliable.

The ruling against Trump is, in the words of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, “a fraud case in which there are no fraud victims.” McCarthy’s National Review colleague Dan McLaughlin, who has decades of experience litigating business fraud in New York, notes, “The idea that Trump caused half a billion in damages to his lenders doesn’t pass the straight face test. A tenuous-at-best theory of illegality should not be a springboard for draconian punishment.” (It should also be noted that though McCarthy and McLaughlin are on the right, neither man has much affinity for Trump.)

This case is so obviously politically motivated, and even America’s corrupt media are at a loss to defend this: “An Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of similar cases showed Trump’s case stands apart: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.”

For months now, I have been on the lookout for any notable journalist or pundit who is willing to write an actual defense of Engeron’s judgment against Trump. Outside of a handful of ill-considered tweets from the #resistance crowd, I haven’t seen anything substantive at all. While I pay attention to this stuff much more closely than most, I’m obviously not omniscient. So, I went on X and asked if anyone had written anything substantive defending Engeron’s decision on the merits. (My question was almost immediately retweeted by Dilbert cartoonist and unorthodox political commentator Scott Adams, who has more than a million followers, giving it wide exposure.)

So far, the closest thing I’ve found was this column at the libertarian-ish legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy. Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr defends the ruling, taking a strict read on what the state was allowed to do here. However, even he is conflicted about whether the case should have been brought, admirably and transparently states his opinion is contingent on the fact he’s not an expert in New York law, and concludes, “So if the opinion is wrong, and gets reversed, I certainly don’t mind that.”

Well, Monday a New York appeals court did conclude that Engeron’s opinion was substantially wrong and reduced the bond Trump has to present from $454 million to $175 million. (Incredibly, New York law dictates Trump has to post this still obscene amount before he can further appeal the decision.)

In addition to reducing the size of Trump’s bond, the appeals court also threw out Engeron’s ruling barring Trump from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years and the order barring Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump from serving as officers and directors of New York companies for two years. The plan was clearly to slap Trump with an egregious fine while simultaneously hamstringing Trump’s business in ways that would make it harder to raise money to pay the penalty.

Even by the very low standards set by the other Trump charges, what’s happening here is appalling. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado may not bar Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s provision against insurrectionists. The fact that there was a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, does not mean we automatically get to presume it was a serious insurrection attempt, much less that Trump has been convicted in a court of law for any crime related to it.

From the beginning, this was a desperate and quixotic attempt to stop Trump from participating in a free election, as well as disenfranchise millions of voters. It was so bad it prompted a unanimous SCOTUS ruling. And yet, in the weeks and months leading up to SCOTUS’s ruling there were dozens of op-eds from ostensibly serious and high-profile commentators assuring us that the unilateral decision by Colorado’s secretary of state was sound constitutional law. Anti-Trump pundits such as David French and many others eagerly staked out a position on this case to the left of avowedly progressive Supreme Court Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.

As crazy as the Colorado case was, the reaction to it is an instructive comparison. In the Trump civil fraud case, we have an overtly partisan attorney general bringing charges and a solitary judge handing down a verdict so insane that even the regrettably prominent segment of America’s commentariat willing to abase itself at the drop of a hat to stop Cheeto Mussolini is looking at the facts of this case and deciding to steer clear of the blast zone.

While the appeals court’s rebuke of Engeron’s decision is strong confirmation the case is as bad as it seems, it was hardly Solomonic in its wisdom. The reality is that the man leading in the polls to be the next president is still being rung up by the opposition party with an outrageous fine that reeks of an Eighth Amendment violation on a case that never should have been brought. And we should probably throw in a Fifth Amendment due process violation while we’re at it, because the idea that Trump has to pay the state $175 million for the privilege of continuing to appeal in court is something I’m confident the reanimated corpse of James Madison would tell us is exactly the kind of injustice the Bill of Rights was trying to prevent, right before he dies a second time upon finding out about the existence of a federal income tax.

In the end, what’s really telling is that while the “country over party” crowd won’t defend this decision on the merits, they’re also not speaking out about the perversion of justice here. They’re content to let it happen to Trump even if it erodes the very norms and concerns about “rule of law” they insist Trump threatens as president.

Well, people are noticing that this isn’t a very principled position. And based on the polls, voters are coming to the entirely rational conclusion that Trump, for all his considerable flaws, is less of a threat than an establishment that will eagerly distort the law to subvert an election they’re afraid they can’t win on the merits.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – RNC 2024 Kickoff

A.F. BRANCO | on March 20, 2024 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-rnc-2024-kickoff/

Trumps’s RNC 2024 — A Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco 2024

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In with the new and out with the old. The Trump people have taken over the RNC with Lara Trump at the helm, so apparent changes are in store, such as removing the RINOs and guiding the party more closely aligned with the conservative base voter as opposed to the elites.

Lara Trump’s Leadership has instant instant effect on GOP’s digital fundraising

Posted by Guest Contributor March 19, 2024

Lara Trump, the newly appointed co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), declared on Wednesday that the GOP had experienced its “largest digital fundraising weekend since 2020.” The announcement was made via a post on X, where she expressed her pride in the achievement and hinted at more to come, stating, “we are just getting started!”

Although the exact amount raised was not disclosed, the news comes as a welcome relief for the financially beleaguered GOP. The party’s former chair, Ronna McDaniel, had previously been criticized for extravagant spending while achieving limited electoral success. READ MORE…

DONATE to A.F. Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.

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Democrats, Not Trump or His Supporters, Are the Real Extremists

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MARCH 05, 2024

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

Hot on the heels of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states have “no power” to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, Democrats and their lackeys in the corporate press denounced the court for supposedly meddling or interfering in the election.

“Not since Bush v. Gore have we seen a court that’s had this many opportunities to interfere in the election,” said former Rep. Donna Edwards on MSNBC. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian mused that the 9-0 ruling would “be seen by many people as the court essentially interfering in some sense in the election.”

Got that? When Democrats interfere in a presidential election and launch what amounts to an insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court steps in and unanimously puts a stop to it, it’s the court, not Democrat activists, who are interfering in the election.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking but not unexpected. Democrats engage in this kind of projection constantly, taking an extreme position and then decrying any dissent or resistance to it as extremist.

In the Colorado case, two well-funded leftist groups with anodyne names — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Free Speech for People — waged a lawfare campaign with a far-fetched reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause,” managing to get Colorado’s Democrat-dominated Supreme Court to rule in December that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot. The plan was to do this in numerous states, foreclosing the possibility of Trump’s reelection.

From the outset, it should have been obvious that the legal argument was bogus, a cynical and clumsy ploy to prop up President Biden’s reelection bid by robbing voters of the chance to cast ballots for Trump. It’s hard to imagine anything getting a unanimous ruling on our deeply divided Supreme Court, but these bozos managed to do it — and in the process embarrassed the many corporate media commentators who twisted themselves into pretzels arguing that the Colorado case was strong.

But if we step back a bit and consider all this in the context of nearly every other scheme Democrats have hatched in recent years, it’s possible to see why they thought it was worth a shot. Time and again, Democrats take unprecedented steps and trample every conceivable norm to advance their agenda, and when anyone objects, they label them an extremist or insurrectionist or Christian nationalist (whatever that means). They project onto their opponents, and especially onto Trump, the very things they are actively engaged in doing.

An obvious example of this is when Democrats warn that if Trump is reelected, he’ll use the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his political rivals. Oh really? This is exactly what the Biden administration has been doing for the past three years to Trump, his lawyers, and his supporters. The criminal cases against Trump are nothing if not the weaponization of the DOJ to crush an unpopular sitting president’s chief political rival. This weaponization began even before Trump won the White House in 2016. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Democrats used the FBI and the intelligence community to go after the Trump campaign — and continued going after Trump after he won the presidency, perpetuating the Russia-collusion hoax for years with the assistance of a complicit corporate press. If anyone is using the levers of government power to go after their enemies, it’s Democrats, not Trump.

Other examples of Democrat projection abound. After months of letting our cities burn in Black Lives Matter riots, excusing them as “mostly peaceful,” Democrats threw the book at anyone who wandered into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, arresting, jailing, and prosecuting more than a thousand Americans to date, often on flimsy charges that otherwise would hardly merit a fine. Just last week, the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker for his coverage of Jan. 6, marching him out of Blaze’s Dallas office in handcuffs. Democrats feign outrage at the arrest of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia, but they gloat, as NBC News did, when the Biden administration does the same to right-of-center journalists here in America.

Pick almost any controversial issue, and you’ll find the same pattern at work. Democrats flood the internet with disinformation and propaganda about Covid, and then decry dissenting voices (and accompanying data) as agents of disinformation who must be censored and banned by Big Tech. Same thing for what they call “election disinformation,” which merely refers to opinions and data that run counter to their preferred narrative.

Democrats do this with everything.

On abortion, they take the extreme position that it should be allowed up until the moment of birth, then denounce Republican-led states that impose restrictions that are the norm across the Western world.
On transgenderism, they insist children can consent to genital mutilation and sterilization, then condemn modest efforts to ban or limit these practices as child abuse.
On immigration, they throw open the southern border and let 10 million illegal immigrants flood into the country, then attack anyone who suggests we have a crisis at the border and need to secure it.
On crime, they defund the police and decriminalize a host of antisocial, destructive behavior in our cities, precipitating a crime wave of robbery and assault, then denounce as racist any arguments for law and order.
On racism itself, they tar everyone on the right with the label but look the other way when the racists on their side call for the genocide of the Jews and defend (even celebrate) Hamas terrorist attacks on civilians.

On nearly every major issue today, Democrats are the extremists. Their denunciations of Trump and his supporters rise in direct proportion to their own extremist agenda. The projection is a tactic, a crude rhetorical ruse. Don’t fall for it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Dark Money Group Peddles Viral Disinformation to Frame GOP Senate Candidate as Clueless Elite

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | FEBRUARY 21, 2024

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

A left-wing dark money group masquerading as a Midwestern newspaper selectively clipped the announcement speech for a Wisconsin Senate candidate to frame the businessman as a heartless, clueless elite.

Eric Hovde launched his campaign to unseat Democrat incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin Tuesday. Heartland Signal, a political newspaper based in Chicago, published a 44-second segment from Hovde’s speech when he addressed the crisis on the U.S. southern border.

“It’s not just a humanitarian crisis for our country,” Hovde said. “But do you know how many lives are lost on that journey to get here? How many people’s life savings have been wiped out by the human trafficking cartels? And they’ve lost 100,000 children that they can’t account for.”

“Let me assure you,” Hovde added, “more than a few of them have ended up being sexually trafficked. I know this all too well. My brother and I have homes all over the world, and we have three in Central America that deal with issues like this.”

Heartland Signal, a leftist digital website backed by Democrat donors, posted the clip on X with the caption, “Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there.”

Announcing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there. pic.twitter.com/LsQhPWvpAc
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) February 20, 2024

The post received more than 383,000 views before a community note was attached to offer accurate context.

“‘Hovde Homes’ are shelters the Hovde Foundation has built around the world to support children – including those who have been trafficked,” the note reads. “They are not residential homes as this post suggests.”

The Midwestern news group published a follow-up post offering the right context. That post, however, received a fraction of the views of its misleading post.

Misleading tweet: 383,000 views
Devastating correction: 4,800 views
They do it on purpose. pic.twitter.com/1noKDDLksr
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 21, 2024

Heartland Signal was recently purchased by Future Now Action, a left-wing activist group. Hovde faces four GOP opponents in the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary that concludes Aug. 13 to challenge the two-term Democrat incumbent elected in 2012. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the state’s other U.S. senator, narrowly captured a third term two years ago by roughly 27,000 votes in the hotly contested swing state that dramatically expanded mail-in voting in 2020.

Immigration is a top issue going into the 2024 election, with Democrats on defense after spending four years turning control of the U.S. border over to international criminal cartels. Last week, House Republicans formally impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of his constitutional duties.

On Tuesday, more than a dozen conservatives in the upper chamber penned a letter to demand that GOP Senate chief Mitch McConnell prepare for the Mayorkas impeachment trial.

“It is imperative that the Senate Republican conference prepare to fully engage our Constitutional duty and hold a trial,” they wrote.

The Republican Senate leader faced humiliation this month following the defeat of a border amnesty and mass migration bill.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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If Democrats Love ‘Democracy,’ Why Do They Attack Election Security Measures Voters Want?

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 02, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

“We are the party of democracy!”

That’s the asinine campaign message Democrats are using heading into the 2024 election to convince voters that Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republican” supporters are an existential threat to the republic. Because as everyone knows, the political party that attempts to throw its primary political opponent off the ballot and into prison; prosecutes praying pro-lifers; targets practicing Catholics; interferes in elections to its candidates’ benefit; and coordinates with Big Tech to silence dissent online is the standard-bearer of “democracy.”

For all their disingenuous rhetoric about upholding the will of the people, Democrats are actively fighting against Americans’ wishes — especially when it comes to the integrity of U.S. elections.

Last week, the Honest Elections Project (HEP) released a report recommending 14 policies for states to implement to ensure an electoral process that’s fair and accountable to the people. Democrats are actively fighting against many of the commonsense practices outlined in the analysis despite their popularity amongst the American electorate.

Take, for instance, voter ID requirements. In July, the HEP released survey data showing that a whopping 88 percent of U.S. voters back laws requiring eligible citizens to show a form of identification in order to cast their ballot. Polling by Gallup in 2022 produced similar results, with 79 percent of respondents in favor of a photo ID requirement. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Democrats, whose acolytes have spent years ignoring voters’ wishes and engaging in dishonest lawfare to dismantle states’ existing voter ID requirements.

From Ohio to New Hampshire, leftist lawyers and groups have filed frivolous lawsuits aimed at gutting voter ID statutes. Many of these suits are based on unsubstantiated claims that such laws “disenfranchise” nonwhite voters.

While courts across the country have repeatedly determined their “voter suppression” arguments to be bogus, Democrats’ continuous use of nonwhite voters as a crutch to smear popular voter ID laws shows how little respect they have for “democracy.” The aforementioned HEP poll also showed the vast majority of black (82 percent) and Hispanic (83 percent) voters support such requirements in order to vote. Gallup found that 77 percent of nonwhite respondents supported photo ID laws. If Democrats truly respected the will of the American voter, as they regularly claim to do, why are they trying to undercut a policy most of them support?

But it’s not just voter ID requirements. Democrats are actively waging a nationwide campaign to demolish numerous policies recommended by the HEP that ensure secure elections and are supported by the majority of U.S. voters.

While most of the electorate (89 percent) believes “American elections should only be for American citizens,” that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to authorize noncitizen voting throughout the country. Last year, for example, Rhode Island Democrats introduced legislation to authorize localities to allow illegal aliens to vote in their municipal elections. Some cities, such San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C, have already passed measures permitting certain noncitizen voting.

In response to left-wing nonprofits dumping hundreds of millions of “Zuckbucks” into local election offices during the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden, elected officials and voters in 27 states enacted measures restricting election offices’ ability to accept and use private monies to administer elections. In response, several of those same Democrat-aligned groups formalized the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence as a way of circumventing these “Zuckbucks” bans and therefore violating the will of the people in the aforementioned states.

The same dynamic can also be seen regarding mail-in voting. Most voters (66 percent) support terminating no-excuse mail voting “as long as states offer two weeks of early in-person voting, including weekends.” Meanwhile, Democrats — who used the Covid lockdowns as a pretext for expanding the use of vote-by-mail and other insecure election practices — have continued to push unsupervised mail balloting across the country. Some states, such as Nevada, automatically mail individuals listed on the state’s voter rolls a ballot ahead of elections.

Whether it’s banning foreign money in elections, ensuring transparency in the elections process, or backing election audits, the story remains the same: Democrats actively oppose policies supported by voters that bring accountability and security to the U.S. elections system. Their screeds about being the party of “democracy” are a dishonest talking point designed to obfuscate their contradictory actions and smear their political opponents as extremists.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Censorship-Industrial Complex Enlists U.K. ‘Misinformation’ Group Logically.AI To Meddle In 2024 Election

BY: LEE FANG | JANUARY 29, 2024

LEE FANG

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”

Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.

More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.

Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.

The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.

In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.

Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.

Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.

The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.

Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.

In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”

Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”

Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.

The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.

Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.

But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.

Pandemic Policing

In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”

The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.

That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.

Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.

The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.

Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.

Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.

Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.

Questionable Fact-Checking

In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.

The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vice similarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.

Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.

Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”

But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”

Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.

“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”

In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.

Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.

But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.

“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”

Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”

Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”

The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.

Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.

Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.

“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.

“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.com.

Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.

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Why Trump Is Winning by Double Digits Heading into Iowa

BY: EMILY JASHINSKY | JANUARY 15, 2024

Rallygoers lined up to enter the Target Center arena for a Donald J. Trump for President rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Nobody did it. Probably, at least.

It’s the morning of the Iowa caucus and, in the words of the Des Moines Register, “Donald Trump retains a commanding lead.” This comes according to the outlet’s latest poll, which shows Trump with a staggering 28-point advantage going into the “coldest caucus” in years.

This should chill the Beltway most of all. The Des Moines Register now puts Ron DeSantis in third place at 16 percent, down four points to Nikki Haley, a number just outside the margin of error. This is a shocking failure on the part of DeSantis, a successful populist who tapped an army of Beltway pundits to put nearly all the campaign’s eggs in the Iowa basket. But add DeSantis’ 16 points together with Haley’s 20, and Trump is still up by double digits. Consider also that many millions more ad dollars were spent touting DeSantis and Haley.

Republican voters just prefer Trump. In RealClearPolitics’ polling average, Trump is at 52.5 percent in Iowa and 61.4 percent nationally. He leads by double digits in New Hampshire. Sure, Haley and even DeSantis could over-perform the polls in Iowa, head into New Hampshire and South Carolina with momentum, over-perform there, and cruise into Super Tuesday on March 5 with an influx of cash and confidence.

The odds are low but not impossible. There’s a path if you squint. Yet it requires convincing an enormous swath of the Republican electorate — which has moved further and further into Trump’s corner over the last year — to suddenly pivot.

In 2016, Trump led Iowa by about five points in RCP’s final average. He lost by about three points to Ted Cruz. Trump was polling just under 30 percent. Nationally, he hovered around 35 percent. Well over half of the Republican primary electorate preferred a candidate other than Trump as the caucus kicked off.

DeSantis, according to RCP, was at one point about 13 points behind Trump. He’s now almost 40 points behind the former president nationally.

Democrats’ lawfare coincided with a rise in the polls for Trump. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the indictments were always going to make it difficult for another GOP candidate to poll more competitively. To her credit, Nikki Haley has been steadily eating away at DeSantis’ comfortable second-place position since the fall. (DeSantis led in New Hampshire until Haley started gaining on him in mid-September.) In Iowa, nearly half of Haley’s voters say they would vote for President Biden over Trump. She likely has a ceiling in most states that’ll make it tough to compete down the line.

Ultimately, if Iowa shakes out anywhere near the polling, it will mark the beginning of the end for DeSantis’ much-anticipated political experiment: Can Trump be defeated by a candidate with all the benefits and none of the baggage?

Perhaps the most frustrating takeaway from DeSantis’ slump is that we still don’t know the answer to that question because he allowed Beltway vest aficionados and their friends in the donor class to steer his career off course. When Trump finally attacked Vivek Ramaswamy two days before Iowa, the long-shot candidate’s response was a vision of what could have been for DeSantis.

“Yes, I saw President Trump’s Truth Social post,” Ramaswamy posted on X. “It’s an unfortunate move by his campaign advisors, I don’t think friendly fire is helpful. Donald Trump was the greatest President of the 21st century, and I’m not going to criticize him in response to this late attack.”

He added, “I’m worried for Trump. I’m worried for our country. I’ve stood up against the persecutions against Trump, and I’ve defended him at every step,” later concluding, “I want to save Trump & to save this country. Let’s do it together. You won’t hear any friendly fire from me.”

Back in September, The New York Times reported on a memo from an anti-Trump PAC helmed by Club for Growth President David McIntosh. The memo, McIntosh wrote, “shares findings from our attempts to identify an effective approach to lower President Trump’s support among Republican primary voters so we can maximize an alternative candidate’s ballot share when the field begins to consolidate.”

The takeaway from their research was perhaps the most important observation of the primary cycle, though should have been obvious from the moment every candidate entered the race.

“Broadly acceptable messages against President Trump with Republican primary voters that do not produce a meaningful backlash include sharing concerns about his ability to beat President Biden, expressions of Trump fatigue due to the distractions he creates and the polarization of the country, as well as his pattern of attacking conservative leaders for self-interested reasons,” McIntosh wrote. “It is essential to disarm the viewer at the opening of the ad by establishing that the person being interviewed on camera is a Republican who previously supported President Trump, otherwise, the viewer will automatically put their guard up, assuming the messenger is just another Trump-hater whose opinion should be summarily dismissed.”

Whatever you think of Ramaswamy (he previewed a potential Iowa surprise in an interview with The Federalist here), his response to Trump captured the lesson of that memo almost effortlessly. He’s been doing it for months.

On DeSantis, a popular and successful governor with a healthy war chest, that approach to Trump would almost certainly have improved his odds. It’s why Florida voters loved him. Politically, at least, running against Trump didn’t need to mean attacking him. The governor’s approach didn’t need to change. (I say this as someone endlessly sympathetic to the merits of DeSantis’ arguments on this particular question.)

The McIntosh memo should have been understood by DeSantis’ campaign before it ever launched. Republican voters who see Democrats relentlessly trying to put Trump in prison don’t trust GOP politicians who proactively attack him, often echoing the same critiques made by the same people who pushed the Russia-collusion hoax.

It looks like DeSantis will lose Iowa and New Hampshire. As of now, at least, it looks like Nikki Haley will too. Easily. If that’s the case, it’s remarkable how much money and effort was invested in campaigns that got the biggest question wrong from the beginning, especially the one campaign that should have known better.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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The DNC Is Engaged In ‘Unlawful Voter Suppression’ Ahead Of Primaries, New Hampshire AG Says

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 10, 2024

The office of New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella issued a cease-and-desist order to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Monday after the committee purportedly violated the state’s voter suppression laws.

On Jan. 5, the co-chairs of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee submitted a letter to the New Hampshire Democratic Party (NHDP) demanding the state party comply with DNC guidance to “take steps to educate the public that January 23rd” — the date set for the jurisdiction’s Democrat presidential primary — “is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless and the NHDP and presidential candidates should take all steps possible not to participate.”

The memo came nearly a year after the DNC passed a new early presidential primary calendar for 2024. The updated calendar, supported by President Biden, sought to make South Carolina the first state on the Democrat presidential primary schedule. While Iowa and New Hampshire, respectively, have historically marked the first electoral contests in the presidential primary process for both major political parties, the DNC’s decision to schedule South Carolina first was, as NBC News described, due to Iowa’s caucuses being viewed as “too white and too undemocratic.”

Someone needs to press the DNC for some definitions, like their definition of “democracy.” They through around the term so much, and the context of what they’re saying does not match the 200 plus years definition of democracy. And while you’re at it, what in the world does, “too white and too undemocratic” mean?

Despite state law mandating New Hampshire host a presidential primary “7 days or more immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election,” the DNC told the NHDP that the Jan. 23 primary scheduled by the New Hampshire secretary of state “cannot be used as the first determining stage of the state’s delegate selection process and is considered detrimental.” The guidance further informed the state party that no “delegates or alternates shall be apportioned” and no “scheduling of events related to the selection of delegates or alternates in New Hampshire may be” based on the Jan. 23 election.

In his cease-and-desist order to the DNC, Assistant Attorney General Brendan O’Donnell underscored how “[f]alsely telling New Hampshire voters that a New Hampshire election is ‘meaningless’ violates New Hampshire voter suppression laws,” and further ordered the organization to stop engaging in such “unlawful” conduct.

“Regardless of whether the DNC refuses to award delegates to the party’s national convention based on the results of the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire [D]emocratic Presidential Primary Election, that election is not ‘meaningless.’ Your statements to the contrary are false, deceptive, and misleading,” O’Donnell wrote. “Telling the public or any person qualified to register to vote or vote in New Hampshire that the [aforementioned election] is ‘meaningless,’ or soliciting NHDP or any other party to make such statements, constitutes an attempt to prevent or deter another person from voting or registering to vote based on fraudulent, deceptive, misleading, or spurious grounds or information.”

O’Donnell further warned the DNC that he reserved the right to pursue further legal action.

It’s worth mentioning that the DNC’s decision to hold South Carolina’s primary before the party’s Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary is designed to benefit Biden. During the 2020 Democrat presidential primary cycle, the Delaware Democrat lost both Iowa and New Hampshire, finishing fourth and fifth, respectively. It was his dominating victory in South Carolina’s primary that put Biden on track to become Democrats’ 2020 presidential nominee.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Why SCOTUS Will Likely Smack Down Two Of Jack Smith’s Get-Trump Charges As Non-Crimes

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 02, 2024

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Last week, the Supreme Court rejected Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request that the high court fast-track an appeal by former President Donald Trump claiming immunity from the charges related to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While the immunity questions will likely return to the Supreme Court after the D.C. Circuit weighs in on the issues, before then the justices will consider the validity of two of the four charges levied against the former president — and it is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the “crimes” the special counsel charged are not crimes at all. Here’s your laws plainer.

Smith charged Trump in a four-count indictment in a federal court in D.C., seeking to hold the former president and 2024 GOP front-runner criminally responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Specifically, the indictment charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

While all four theories of criminal liability are weak, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the events of Jan. 6 qualify as criminal obstruction of an official proceeding under Section 1512 of the federal criminal code in United States v. Fischer.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Joseph Fischer’s appeal that presents the question of whether 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) criminalizes acts unrelated to investigations and evidence that obstructs an “official proceeding.” Fischer, like Trump, was charged with violating § 1512(c) by engaging in conduct on Jan. 6 that obstructed the certification of the electoral vote.

The question for the Supreme Court in the Fischer case is one of statutory interpretation. Thus, to understand the issue requires a detailed study of the specific language of § 1512(c). That section, titled “Witness, Victim, or Informant Tampering,” provides:

(c) Whoever corruptly —

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Fischer and Trump, as well as scores of other Jan. 6 defendants, were charged with violating subsection 2 of § 1512(c) by “otherwise” obstructing or impeding the certification of the electoral vote. In Fischer’s case, he asked the trial court to dismiss the § 1512(c) charge, arguing the statute only criminalized conduct that rendered evidence unavailable to an “official proceeding.” The district court agreed and dismissed the § 1512(c) count against Fischer. The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in a 2-1 decision reversed the lower court, with the two-judge majority holding that § 1512(c) criminalized any conduct that obstructed or impeded an official proceeding, whether that conduct impaired the availability of evidence or not, leading the Supreme Court to grant certiorari.

While forecasting the outcome of an appeal from the Supreme Court always leaves room for error, for several reasons the high court seems likely to hold that § 1512(c) does not reach the conduct of Fischer, Trump, or other Jan. 6 defendants. Most predictive is the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in the case Begay v. United States, which interpreted another statute that, like § 1512(c), used an “otherwise” catchall clause.

In Begay, the question before the court was the meaning of a section of the Armed Career Criminal Act that imposed a heightened punishment for individuals with three or more prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses. The act defined a “violent felony” as “any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another,” or “is burglary, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another” (emphasis added).

The majority in Begay held the defendant’s prior felony DUI conviction did not constitute a “violent felony” under the “otherwise” language of the statute because “the provision’s listed examples — burglary, arson, extortion, or crimes involving the use of explosives — illustrate the kinds of crimes that fall within the statute’s scope,” and “their presence indicates that the statute covers only similar crimes, rather than every crime that ‘presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.’”

In reaching this conclusion, the Begay court stressed that in interpreting statutes, courts must seek “to give effect … to every clause and word” of the statute. The majority further reasoned that if the “otherwise” language meant to cover all crimes that present a “serious potential risk of physical injury,” there would have been no reason for Congress to have included the examples.

The holding and reasoning underlying the Begay decision should compel a similar conclusion in the Fischer case, namely that subsection 2 of § 1512(c) only criminalizes conduct that “otherwise” obstructs an “official proceeding” if the conduct charged is similar to the conduct covered by subsection 1. After all, if Congress sought to criminalize any conduct impairing an official proceeding, why then would subsection 1 be needed?

The conduct prohibited by subsection 1 of § 1512(c) all concerns the impairment of evidence for an official proceeding, by criminalizing the alteration, destruction, mutilation, or concealment of “a record, document, or other object…” Thus, under Begay’s reasoning, to constitute a crime under subsection 2 of § 1512(c), the indictment must charge that Fischer (or the other defendants) “otherwise” impaired evidence for use in an official proceeding.

Nowhere in the indictment returned against Fischer is there an allegation that he somehow impaired evidence relevant to an official proceeding. So, if the Supreme Court follows the reasoning of Begay, as a matter of law, then Fischer did not violate § 1512(c), and that charge against him should be dismissed. Likewise, the § 1512(c) charge against Trump, which also did not allege an impairment of evidence, would fail, as would the second count alleging Trump conspired to violate that statute.

With the Supreme Court deciding the Fischer appeal this term, the reasonable response would be for Smith to put the brakes on the criminal trial against Trump to await a ruling from the high court. The special counsel and the district court, however, have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than one year away.

But as the Fischer case may soon prove, the convictions Smith seeks may be for crimes that don’t exist. Sadly, half the country doesn’t seem to care.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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How A Left-Wing Appeals Panel Is Rigging Trump’s J6 Case Through Bogus Fast-Track Process

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 19, 2023

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For Democrats to succeed with their 2024 presidential campaign strategy of imprisoning the current front-runner in the race, they need a massive assist from key judges.

District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has done everything in her power to speed up the process for one of the complicated cases Democrats have filed against former President Donald Trump. Whereas the standard federal fraud and conspiracy case takes about two years to get to trial, controversial Special Counsel Jack Smith and Chutkan have worked in concert to get the trial started in March, a breathtaking seven months after Trump’s indictment.

Likewise, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Florence Pan is doing her part to assist the effort to give Trump far less time than other defendants to prepare for a trial against him. Last week, she led a panel to fast-track an appeal in order to facilitate Smith’s goal of securing a quick conviction before one of Washington, D.C.’s notoriously partisan juries.

“Any fair-minded observer has to agree” that Smith and Chutkan are acting based on the election schedule, conceded former federal prosecutor and left-wing pundit Elie Honig. “Just look at Jack Smith’s conduct in this case. The motivating principle behind every procedural request he’s made has been speed, has been getting this trial in before the election.”

Election interference isn’t incidental to this prosecution, then, it’s the entire point.

While hundreds of defendants in the relatively simple Jan. 6 cases brought by the Department of Justice have had a few years to prepare for trial, Trump and his attorneys have to prepare for one of the most complicated and unprecedented cases in American history in just a matter of months. “Donald Trump is being given far less time to prepare than other defendants,” Honig said.

In September, Trump’s legal team asked Chutkan to recuse herself due to her personal bias against the former president and his supporters. Chutkan, the foreign-born “scion of Marxist revolutionaries,” has received attention for her partisan and incendiary commentary against Trump and his supporters. She denied the request. In October, Trump’s attorneys asked for the suit to be dismissed on multiple grounds, including presidential immunity, violation of the freedom of speech clause, violation of the double jeopardy clause and due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, and several other issues. By Dec. 1, Chutkan ruled against Trump in each case.

A week later, Trump announced his plan to appeal Chutkan’s ruling. The next court to hear the case would be the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Dec. 11, Smith did two things. He asked the D.C. Circuit to expedite Trump’s appeal, and he asked the Supreme Court to expedite an appeal as well. He explained to the lower court that while the Supreme Court is considering the petition, the D.C. Circuit has jurisdiction. The singular goal of rushing the process is to make sure that one way or another, Democrats can ram through the trial and conviction of their main political opponent to control the outcome of the election.

In the D.C. Circuit Court, Smith asked that Trump’s attorneys be forced to prepare and file their opening brief within 10 days, that the government get an additional week to respond, and that Trump’s attorneys have three days to respond to that government brief.

Trump’s team was given two days to prepare an argument against Smith’s request for this shockingly abbreviated schedule. In its 16-page response, Trump’s legal team noted that the case was among the most complex and unprecedented in history, that it presented serious constitutional questions, and that rushing the process would violate Trump’s due process and Sixth Amendment rights. Trump’s lawyers also noted how the issues in this trial would affect every president, not just the one Democrats are consumed with hatred toward.

“Could President George W. Bush face criminal charges of defrauding the United States and obstructing official proceedings for allegedly giving Congress false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to induce war on false premises? Could President Obama be charged with murder for allegedly authorizing the drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, both U.S. citizens?” Trump’s attorneys asked.

The team noted how rarely the circuit court expedites such legal procedures, and never in cases even close to the sensitivity of this one. Trump’s attorneys said Chutkan’s speed contributed to her making sloppy mistakes and failing to give thoughtful consideration to arguments.

Citing the court’s own “handbook of practice and internal procedures,” Trump’s attorneys said the court should set a reasonable schedule of providing Trump 40 days to serve and file his initial brief, 21 days to file a reply brief, and 45 days to prepare for oral argument.

“Anything less would result in a heedless rush to judgment on some of the most sensitive and important issues that this Court may ever decide,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

Instead, the three judges on the D.C. Circuit did precisely what Smith asked them to. They gave Trump until Saturday, Dec. 23 to file his initial brief.

Liberal Panel Lassos the Case for Itself

Each month, the D.C. Circuit has a panel of three judges who consider motions that come before the court. The panel changes each month. While many of the motions that come before the court are simple and administrative, others relate to complicated cases that will require hearings and other court actions. The panel of judges that begins hearing appeals usually keeps the case as it progresses.

This is important because the December panel is particularly left-wing, even for the left-leaning D.C. Circuit. Karen Henderson, the 79-year-old appointee of George H.W. Bush, is on the panel. More importantly, two relatively young Biden appointees named J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan are also on the panel.

Panels in the coming months will reportedly not be as left-wing as the December panel. The scheduling question, then, becomes one of how hostile the panel of judges will be to Trump’s appeal. By setting an aggressive schedule, the December panel can keep with the case and help ensure Democrats can get their conviction in time for it to affect the election.

Judge Florence Pan has shown a particular interest in lassoing the case for herself. Appointed in 2022, Pan is the wife of Max Stier, a longtime associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stier is also known for being one of the Democrats eager to join the smear campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Stier and Kavanaugh had been on opposite sides of the Whitewater investigation in the late 1990s. When Democrats ran their unseemly attack on Kavanaugh, Stier told the FBI and two anti-Kavanaugh reporters at The New York Times a weird story about how freshmen at Yale might have done something to an inebriated Kavanaugh and a young woman that was inappropriate. The woman, for her part, told friends she has no recollection of what Stier claimed.

“Stier has always held himself out as a consummate civil servant and above politics, but he provided information wildly irrelevant but calculated to inflame the situation. He’s a malign actor,” said one attorney about the stunt.

Pan is also the judge who wrote the D.C. Circuit’s opinion upholding the reinterpretation of an obscure financial crimes statute to imprison Republican protesters for years. The Supreme Court announced it would be hearing an appeal of her decision in the current term. Many constitutional scholars agree with the dissent, which stated the government’s use of the statute to go after protesters is “implausibly broad and unconstitutional.”

On December 18, the D.C. Circuit announced it was scheduling oral argument for January 9, another example of the way Democrats are rushing to give Trump less time to prepare for argument than other defendants receive. Judge Henderson, the lone Republican appointee on the panel, took the rare step of publicly noting she disagrees with the extreme path chosen by her Democrat-appointed colleagues on the panel.

“Judge Henderson would stay any further action by this court until the United States Supreme Court has taken final action on the Government’s Petition for Certiorari before Judgment now pending before it in this case,” noted the Court order.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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Why Joe Biden’s Poll Numbers Are Even Worse for Democrats Than They Think

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 16, 2023

Author Kylee Griswold profile

KYLEE GRISWOLD

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

Democrats have one huge, unavoidable problem. And his name is Joe Biden.

According to recent polls, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump would beat Biden if the 2024 election were held today. A Quinnipiac poll out Wednesday shows Biden with 46 percent and Trump with 48 percent among registered voters, still within the margin of error and too close to call. However, a new Fox News poll, also out Wednesday, shows that in a head-to-head, the former president would prevail with 50 percent to Biden’s 46 — a number Trump has never garnered in a Fox poll going back to October 2015.

Do these numbers and thin margins mean anything? Maybe not. We are still a year from the election. And if 2016 taught us anything, it’s that polls are traditionally garbage and are used far more often as tools to shape public opinion than to reflect it. But there are deeper and far more meaningful insights to mine from the survey, and they don’t spell good things for the Democrat Party.

For instance, it’s worth noting that not only does Biden appear to be losing generally to Trump, but the incumbent is losing his own dependable voters to his rival. Polls show Biden is hemorrhaging black, Hispanic, suburban, and young voters — all demographics that reliably vote Democrat. It could have something to do with how Biden has handled major crises he’s either caused or exacerbated. According to Quinnipiac, voters disapprove of his response to the Hamas attack and subsequent fallout (54 percent disapproval to 37 percent approval), his economy (59 to 37 percent), his foreign policy (61 to 34 percent), his border crisis (65 to 26 percent), and his response to the Russia-Ukraine war (49 to 47 percent).

The implications are simple. Voters are confronting a rare moment in U.S. history in which they can actually compare what it’s like to live under the leadership, or lack thereof, of the two major presidential candidates. Do they want Bidenomics or the affordable grocery and gas prices of the Trump era? Do they want war in the Middle East — or Eastern Europe or the South China Sea — or peace? Do they want an open border or national security? The Trump-Biden decision is an increasingly easy calculation for voters to make.

So, Democrats are stuck. And they did this to themselves, largely by closing off the possibility of a primary and instead committing to dragging Joe’s corpse across the finish line.

And yes, that really is the strategy. It’s not that Biden is a strong candidate by any measure, save for maybe his incumbency, but again, even that’s in doubt after his disastrous first term. He’s a demonstrably weak candidate, especially compared to Trump — another reality easily extrapolated from the polls.

On the Republican side — which, in contrast to Democrats, is still choosing to slog through primary election theatrics — the second-tier candidates are a notable governor and former governor, both beloved by their states and beyond. And Trump is still leading them by some 50 points. He’s got 48 points on Ron DeSantis and 51 on Nikki Haley. If prominent leftist governors such as Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer were to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, there’s no way he’d have that kind of lead.

This week there have been murmurs of a potential challenger — just maybe not who you would have expected. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on Capitol Hill hobnobbing with Sen. Chuck Schumer on Wednesday and refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether he’ll run for president. This after he divulged last week that the parties did approach him last year. And you can see the twinkle in Democrats’ eyes at the thought of dumping weak, old Biden for his antithesis. Here’s Schumer flirting with The Rock on X after their meeting, posting cutesy little lyrics from one of the actor’s Disney roles.

But while Democrats might view The Rock as an exit strategy, they still have a monumental problem to overcome: Voters aren’t just fed up with Biden, they’re fed up with Democrat policies both foreign and domestic.

There’s no denying Democrats have become the party of mass illegal immigration. Every town is a border town, and even urbanites are done with the Democrat policies overrunning their cities with aliens who suck resources dry. Speaking of cities, left-wing policies have destroyed them, from Portland and Seattle to Washington, D.C. Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies have caused violence in these places to skyrocket, with carjackings up more than 100 percent since last year and violent crime up 40 percent in our nation’s capitol. In fact, just this week D.C.’s disaster of a mayor declared a state of emergency because youth violent crime has gotten so bad. Meanwhile, Democrats have also become the party of inflation, war, no-limits abortion, transing kids, weaponizing the federal government, terrorist sympathizing, and every other anti-America policy position you can imagine.

That takes a strong leader to overcome. Sure, The Rock does a magnificent job at the role he plays in every movie, but he’s not that leader. And besides, would today’s Democrat Party really vote for a candidate who’s a Joe Rogan bro and friends with Trump supporters?

So, Democrats are left to lie with sleepy Joe in the bed they made for themselves. It’s hard to feel sorry for them.

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Operation Deplorable: A Who’s Who Of The ‘Get Trump’ Crusade

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | NOVEMBER 03, 2023

Author Tristan Justice profile

TRISTAN JUSTICE

VISIT ON TWITTER@JUSTICETRISTAN

The 2024 Republican presidential front-runner is faced with 91 state and federal charges one year from Election Day. After a series of failed attempts to capture the criminal conviction of Donald Trump, Democrats have charged their primary political opponent with nearly 100 crimes to thwart the former president’s triumphant return to the Oval Office. Here’s a “who’s who” of the key players in the Democrats’ latest crusade to achieve the top item on their policy agenda.

Alvin Bragg

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was the first prosecutor to land the coveted indictment of Democrats’ Public Enemy No. 1. In April, the New York prosecutor unveiled a 34-count indictment against Trump, carrying a maximum 136-year prison sentence. The charges stem from 2016 hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels in a case prosecutors previously declined to pursue.

The Manhattan charges, however, marked the fulfillment of a campaign promise Bragg made two years ago to prosecute the former president. Prosecuting Trump was apparently the top issue of his platform in 2021.

“Bragg often reminded voters on the campaign trail that he helped sue the Trump administration ‘more than a hundred times’ as a deputy in the New York state attorney general’s office,” Reuters reported that year.

The 50-year-old prosecutor’s own supporters pointed to his ability to pursue Trump in court as a reason to back him. The New York Times reported on Bragg’s endorsement from a former U.S. attorney in July 2021.

“Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump,” the Times read.

Bragg was also promoted to his current office with financial support from left-wing billionaire financier George Soros. The super PAC backed by Soros, Color of Change, pledged to bankroll Bragg’s campaign with a seven-figure sum in the spring of 2021. Soon after the cash infusion, the committee pulled back $500,000 of the donation when Bragg faced allegations of sexual misconduct of his own.

Bragg’s record in New York, meanwhile, has been one of unleashed crime while prosecutors pursue politicized investigations against the most popular Republican in the country. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Soros admitted to backing candidates who promised to be soft on crime, branded as “reform prosecutors.” Bragg has held up to the pledge by prioritizing Trump instead of dangerous criminals. According to The New York Times, major crime spiked 22 percent during Bragg’s first year in office.

Letitia James

While Bragg pursues criminal charges against the former president, New York Attorney General Letitia James has Trump in civil court on allegations of fraud. In September last year, the attorney general filed a $250 million fraud suit with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing the former president of inflating corporate assets to obtain financial benefits.

“We found that Mr. Trump, his children, and the corporation used more than 200 false asset valuations over a 10-year period,” said James at a press conference.

James, 65, won in a partial summary judgment a year later, and in October, the trial began after the judge found the Trump family, including Trump himself, liable for fraud. The judge in the case ordered the termination of Trump’s New York business license and will now examine charges by James to determine additional penalties. In October, an appeals court put a hold on the judge’s mandate to dissolve Trump’s business in the state.

The aggressive effort against the Trump family’s New York business empire marks another campaign promise fulfilled by the state attorney general. Similar to Bragg, James ran for office in 2018 on a platform to prosecute the president. When first campaigning for the statewide job five years ago, James railed against the Republican president as “illegitimate” and an “embarrassment.”

“NY Attorney General Letitia James has a long history of fighting Trump and other powerful targets,” headlined an Associated Press profile of James in September.

“Letitia James fixated on Donald Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, branding the then-president a ‘con man’ and ‘carnival barker’ and pledging to shine a ‘bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings,’” the AP reported. “Five years later, James is on the verge of disrupting Trump’s real estate empire.”

James was reelected last fall just more than a month after she unveiled the $250 million lawsuit against the Trump family. Now James is on the cusp of capturing Trump’s corporate exile from the Empire State.

Arthur Engoron

The state-friendly judge presiding over James’ civil lawsuit against Trump is a Democrat who held the former president in contempt last year over subpoena violations. Arthur Engoron is a judge in the New York Supreme Court’s 1st Judicial District who ran unopposed for the seat in the 2015 general election.

In September, Judge Engoron devalued the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Florida estate from between $426 million and $612 million, as estimated by the Trumps, to a mere $18 and $28 million.

[READ: N.Y. Judge Cherry-Picks Lowball Mar-a-Lago Appraisal To Find Trump Guilty Of Inflating Property Values]

The stunning devaluation stands in contrast to smaller properties at Palm Beach, which sold for far more. Rush Limbaugh’s former residence, for example, sold for $155 million despite a $51 million appraisal. Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, is the only property at Palm Beach to face the waterfront on both the ocean and the waterway.

Last month, Engoron also implemented a gag order to prevent Trump from even speaking out against the accusations against him. Trump was fined twice over violations of the gag order for a combined $15,000.

Jack Smith

Jack Smith, 54, a veteran prosecutor with years spent at the Justice Department, was appointed last November to lead two of the federal efforts seeking Trump’s conviction. Now special counsel in a pair of cases prosecuting Democrats’ top political opponent, Smith was previously head of the DOJ public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015. Among his most notable cases was the prosecution of former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell, whom the Supreme Court exonerated of a bribery conviction in 2016. Smith was also involved in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax scandal targeting conservative nonprofits.

Now Smith is spearheading the federal government’s criminal efforts against Trump regarding classified documents and the events related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In June, Trump was indicted with 37 counts of mishandling classified information, with three more charges handed down in the case about two months later. Smith indicted Trump with an additional four charges in a separate case this summer over objections to electoral certification, such as Democrats have made for decades.

Tanya Chutkan

Smith’s team at the Justice Department could not have landed a more friendly judge in the government’s Jan. 6 case against Trump than U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. An activist judge with an obvious animus against the former president and his supporters, the Obama appointee was assigned to preside over the politically fraught Jan. 6 case after building a reputation as “a tough punisher of Capitol rioters.”

“Other judges typically have handed down sentences that are more lenient than those requested by prosecutors,” the AP reported. “Chutkan, however, has matched or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in 19 of her 38 sentences. In four of those cases, prosecutors weren’t seeking any jail time at all.”

When Trump complained the federal charges against him amounted to election interference by the DOJ, Chutkan shrugged off the accusations, saying, “That’s how it has to be.” Chutkan previously condemned comparisons between the Capitol turmoil and the far-left riots that characterized the summer of 2020 in other rulings of pro-Trump demonstrators. The fiery riots, she claimed, were actually “the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights.” Chutkan said comparisons between the two “ignore[] a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

In September, Chutkan predictably denied Trump’s request to recuse herself from the Jan. 6 trial. In October, Chutkan handed down another gag order to prevent the president from speaking publicly and openly about the case. On Nov. 1, Chutkan handed down an order allowing Smith’s team to conceal evidence from Trump’s attorneys that the DOJ has identified as “classified.”

Fani Willis

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia upset a six-term incumbent when she defeated her former boss, Paul Howard, three years ago. Willis, who beat Howard in the primary runoff, carried the general election unopposed after no Republicans qualified for the November contest.

Willis’ investigation of Trump and the former president’s campaign team was one of her first acts in office and will define her legacy. In August, the DA for Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta, charged Trump with 13 counts related to the former president’s efforts to protest aspects of the 2020 election. The Georgia prosecutor also indicted 18 Trump allies, several of whom have taken plea deals. Trump adviser Jeffrey Clark, however, filed a motion on Oct. 31 to dismiss the “massive and grotesque abuse of prosecutorial power.”

A September report from The Federalist revealed Willis possesses evidence exonerating Georgia’s alternate electors but continues to pursue criminal convictions anyway.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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10 Ways Democrats Are Already Rigging The 2024 Election

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | OCTOBER 05, 2023

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

It’s no secret by now that Democrats love rigging elections in their favor.

During the 2016 contest, agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI willingly partook in a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded operation to convince the American public that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to steal the election. The FBI didn’t just launch an investigation into Trump based on “uncorroborated intelligence”; it used the Clinton-funded Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on his campaign.

These kinds of nefarious activities continued into the 2020 election, in which these agencies (along with the CIA) worked overtime to discredit damaging reporting about then-candidate Joe Biden. These departments even went so far as to pressure Big Tech platforms in the months leading up to the election to censor information like the Hunter Biden laptop story when it became public. Like clockwork, these companies acquiesced.

And who could forget Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose “Zuckbucks” flooded local election offices in key battleground states to change how elections were administered and effectively fund a Democrat get-out-the-vote operation?

Now, as the country hurtles towards another intense presidential election, Democrats are once again putting their feet on the electoral scale to rig the 2024 contest in their favor.

1. FBI Targeting of Conservatives

Another facet of so-called “law enforcement” agencies’ election interference is their blatant targeting of conservatives. Within the past few years, the FBI has been caught directing its fire at parents attending school board meetings, Catholics who attend Latin Mass, and innocent pro-lifers, to name a few.

Given these actions, it wasn’t shocking when Newsweek reported on Wednesday that the agency is gearing up to single out supporters of former President Donald Trump as “domestic terrorists” ahead of the 2024 contest. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, “Testimony from more than a ‘dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism’ to Newsweek confirmed that this increase in targeting was born out of the FBI’s decision to lump Trump supporters into its expanded definition of ‘domestic extremism.’”

2. Protecting Joe Biden

Former business associates, IRS and FBI whistleblowers, bank records, text messages, emails, reporting from a “highly credible” informant, and even President Joe Biden himself have all corroborated different aspects of the latter’s involvement in his family’s corrupt foreign business ventures. But according to Democrats and their legacy media allies, this is just evidence of a father’s love for his son.

From the moment mountains of evidence began piling up, implicating Biden in playing a major role in his family’s international influence-peddling scheme, Democrats have done all they can to hide, excuse, and obfuscate the massive scandal surrounding the sitting president. With help from the DOJ — which almost got away with offering Biden’s son, Hunter, a sweetheart plea agreement to evade future criminal charges and has routinely hindered investigative efforts into the Bidens — these acts represent a clear attempt by Democrats to hide damning information about the sitting president from the American public ahead of the 2024 election.

3. Trump Indictments

Who needs free and fair elections when you can just throw your political opponents behind bars ahead of a major election? Spanning four separate cases and 91 felony counts, the DOJ and leftist prosecutors’ seemingly coordinated efforts to imprison Trump could not represent a more obvious attempt to interfere in the election process.

4. Zuckbucks 2.0

While 25 states passed legislation banning or restricting the use of “Zuckbucks” in elections, that hasn’t stopped nonprofits like the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — one of the Zuckerberg-funded groups that meddled in the 2020 election — from attempting to replicate their 2020 strategy for future elections.

Last year, CTCL and other left-wing groups launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, an $80 million venture designed to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices. Through the use of “scholarships” and low entrance fees, the coalition seeks to make the 2020 private hijacking of election offices look like child’s play.

5. Big Tech Censorship

It’s not surprising the same agencies that pushed Big Tech platforms to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election would continue their censorship practices years later. As indicated in several federal court rulings, the Biden administration has been actively colluding with social media giants like Facebook to suppress commentary and facts posted online that it claims are examples of “misinformation.” Equally alarming is that in spite of these rulings barring such authoritarian behavior, the administration has continued to appeal the decisions to regain the power to stifle speech online.

And these actions don’t even include the efforts undertaken by left-wing groups such as Vote.org, which have pressured Big Tech platforms to adopt plans to combat so-called “election disinformation.”

6. Passing Lax Election Laws

Sometimes the only way to win the game is to change the rules in your favor — and that’s exactly what Democrats have been doing to America’s election laws.

After expanding insecure voting practices such as mass unsupervised mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes during the 2020 election, Democrat-controlled state legislatures have sought to enshrine these policies into law across the country. States such as New Mexico, Minnesota, and Michigan have all adopted sloppy election procedures under the guise of “democracy” and so-called “voting rights.”

7. Lawfare Against Election Integrity Laws

Meanwhile, in states where Democrats don’t hold power, the DOJ and leftist lawyers have stepped in to launch dishonest lawsuits against Republican-backed election integrity laws. For example, the DOJ launched a lawsuit against a Georgia election integrity law requiring voter ID in June 2021, in which the agency parroted the lie that Georgia’s law was designed to “deny[] or abridg[e]” nonwhite Americans’ right to vote.

8. Partisan Voter Registration Paid for by U.S. Taxpayers

Shortly after taking office, Biden took the unprecedented step of ordering hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration. Executive Order 14019 mandated all departments use U.S. taxpayer money to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Agencies were also instructed to develop “a strategic plan” explaining how they intended to fulfill this directive.

While the Biden administration has routinely stonewalled efforts by good government groups to acquire these plans, available information reveals an apparently partisan venture aimed at registering voters who are likely to support Democrats. Recent reporting from The Daily Signal indicates agencies such as the Indian Health Service are collaborating with leftist groups like Demos and the ACLU to “register and turn out voters” under Executive Order 14019.

9. Media Attacks on Election Oversight

The Biden bribery scandal isn’t the only subject legacy media continue to lie about. In the months leading up to and after the 2022 midterms, media propagandists launched a full-scale attack on GOP voters seeking to legally observe the elections process. Despite their repeated insistence of a widespread conspiracy of Republicans threatening election officials, there is no evidence to suggest such an assertion is true. In fact, Biden’s own DOJ all but admitted as much last year.

The corporate press’s goals in regurgitating this false narrative are to both cast their political opponents as extremists and dissuade conservatives who have legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in legal forms of electoral oversight (such as poll watching).

10. Left-wing Nonprofit Voter Registration Ops

While federal law prohibits tax-exempt 501(c)(3) groups from engaging in partisan voter registration, that hasn’t stopped left-wing nonprofits from skirting the legal system by targeting voting demographics favorable to Democrats.

Organizations such as Restoration of America and Capital Research Center have issued reports in recent months detailing how leftist billionaires bankroll nonprofit groups to register likely-Democrat voters. Instead of explicitly stating they’re registering voters for the Democrat Party, groups like the Voter Registration Project target “people of color,” women, and young people. In other words, they specifically aim to register demographics likely to vote for Democrats.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – High Octane

A.F. BRANCO | on September 29, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-high-octane-3/

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Just in Time

A.F. BRANCO | on September 15, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-just-in-time/

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Rep. Clyde to Newsmax: Amendments Will End Trump Prosecutions

By Nick Koutsobinas | Tuesday, 29 August 2023 09:36 PM EDT

Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., told Newsmax on Tuesday he has two amendments for an appropriations bill to defund the prosecution efforts against former President Donald Trump. If enacted, his proposals would defund special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecutions.

Clyde tells “Rob Schmitt Tonight” that his “plan does have a shot.”

“We have not taken the Justice Department’s bill up in committee yet. I am on that committee, so I have the right to introduce an amendment to that committee, and I think when we do this amendment — that I will introduce — it will defund any federal prosecution of a presidential candidate prior to the November ’24 election.

“Also, a second amendment that I’m going to be adding to that is to defund any state or local prosecution — any federal money from going to that office if they decide to prosecute a presidential candidate prior to the 2024 election,” he adds. “And if we can do this, then I think it’ll work.”

The two proposed amendments to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill directly affects funding to the Justice Department.

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Why Twisting The 14th Amendment To Get Trump Won’t Hold Up In Court

BY: JOHN YOO AND ROBERT DELAHUNTY | AUGUST 25, 2023

President Donald J. Trump speaks with military service personnel Thursday, Nov. 26, 2020, during a Thanksgiving video teleconference call from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

JOHN YOO AND ROBERT DELAHUNTY

Four indictments of Donald Trump have so far done no more to stop him than two earlier impeachments did. He remains easily the front-runner in the Republican primaries, and in some polls is running equal with President Biden. But now a theory defended by able legal scholars has emerged, arguing that Trump is constitutionally disqualified from serving as president.

Even if Trump secures enough electoral votes to win the presidency next year, legal Professors Michael Paulsen and Will Baude argue, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution would disqualify him from federal office. Former Judge Michael Luttig and Professor Laurence Tribe have enthusiastically seconded the theory. While their theory about the continuing relevance of the Constitution’s insurrection clause strikes us as correct, they err in believing that anyone, down to the lowest county election worker, has the right to strike Trump from the ballot.

Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment is a load-bearing constitutional pillar erected during the Reconstruction period. Section 3 deals with the treatment of former state and federal officials, and their allies, who had taken sides with the Confederacy in the Civil War:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Although Section 3 unquestionably applied to Confederates, its text contains nothing limiting it to the Civil War. Rather, it has continuing relevance to any future “insurrection or rebellion.” Although it does not explicitly refer to presidents or presidential candidates, comparison with other constitutional texts referring to “officer[s]” supports the interpretation that it applies to the presidency too.

Section 3 distinguishes between “rebellion” and “insurrection,” and we have a contemporary guide to the meaning of that distinction. In the Prize Cases (1863), the Supreme Court declared that “[i]nsurrection against a government may or may not culminate in an organized rebellion, but a civil war always begins by insurrection against the lawful authority of the Government.” “Insurrection” therefore refers to political violence at a level lower or less organized than an “organized rebellion,” though it may develop into that. Trump may have been an “insurrectionist” but not a “rebel.”

But was he even an “insurrectionist”? In their Atlantic piece, Luttig and Tribe find the answer obvious: “We believe that any disinterested observer who witnessed that bloody assault on the temple of our democracy, and anyone who learns about the many failed schemes to bloodlessly overturn the election before that, would have to come to the same conclusion.”

But that view is not universally shared. Finding “disinterested observers” in a country marked by passionate disagreements over Donald Trump is no easy task. Despite the scenes of the attack on the Capitol and extensive investigations, the American people do not seem to agree that Trump took part in an insurrection or rebellion. Almost half the respondents in a 2022 CBS poll rejected the claim that the events of Jan. 6 were an actual “insurrection” (with the divide tracking partisan lines), and 76 percent viewed it as a “protest gone too far.”

Other considerations also call into question the claim that Trump instigated an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense. If it were clear that Trump engaged in insurrection, the Justice Department should have acted on the Jan. 6 Committee’s referral for prosecution on that charge. Special Counsel Jack Smith should have indicted him for insurrection or seditious conspiracy, which remain federal crimes. If it were obvious that Trump had committed insurrection, Congress should have convicted him in the two weeks between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day. Instead, the House impeached Trump for indictment to insurrection but the Senate acquitted him.

The Senate’s acquittal is the only official finding by a federal or state institution on the question of whether Trump committed insurrection. The failure of the special counsel to charge insurrection and the Senate to convict in the second impeachment highlights a serious flaw in the academic theory of disqualification.

According to Luttig and Tribe, it appears self-evident that Trump committed insurrection. They assume Trump violated the law without any definitive finding by any federal authority. According to their view, he must carry the burden of proof to show he is not guilty of insurrection or rebellion — a process that achieves the very opposite of our Constitution’s guarantee of due process, which, it so happens, is not just provided for by the Fifth Amendment, but reaffirmed in the same 14th Amendment that contains the disqualification clause. It would be like requiring Barak Obama to prove he was native-born (a constitutional prerequisite for being president) if state election officials disqualified him for being foreign-born.

The Electoral College Chooses Presidents, Not State Officials

If this academic view were correct, it would throw our electoral system into chaos. One of the chief virtues of the Electoral College system is that it decentralizes the selection of the president: State legislatures decide the manner for choosing electors, with each state receiving votes equal to its representation in the House and Senate. States run the elections, which means that hundreds, if not thousands, of city, county, and state officials could execute this unilateral finding of insurrection. A county state election official, for example, could choose to remove Trump’s name from printed ballots or refuse to count any votes in his favor. A state court could order Trump barred from the election. A state governor could refuse to certify any electoral votes in his favor. The decentralization of our electoral system could allow a single official, especially from a battleground state, to sway the outcome of a close race in the 2024 presidential election.

Allowing a single state to wield this much power over the federal government runs counter to broader federalism principles articulated by the Supreme Court. In our nation’s most important decision on the balance of power between the national government and the states, McCullough v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall held that a single state could not impose a tax on the Bank of the United States. Marshall famously observed that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”

Marshall may well have frowned upon single state officials deciding to eliminate candidates for federal office on their own initiative. The Supreme Court lent further support for this idea in United States Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), which held that states could not effectively add new qualifications for congressional candidates by barring long-time incumbents from appearing on the ballot. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens argued that allowing states to add term limits as a qualification for their congressional elections conflicted with “the uniformity and national character [of Congress] that the framers sought to ensure.” Allowing state election officials to decide for themselves whether someone has incited or committed insurrection, without any meaningful trial or equivalent proceeding, would give states the ability to achieve what term limits forbid.

Congress Has Other Means of Enforcement

We are not arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment lacks the means of enforcement (though not every official who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution has such enforcement power). Each branch of the federal government can honor Section 3 in the course of executing its unique constitutional functions. Article I of the Constitution allows Congress to sentence an impeached president not just to removal from office, but also disqualification from office in the future. Congress could pass a statute disqualifying named insurrectionists from office — we think this would not qualify as an unconstitutional bill of attainder — or set out criteria for judicial determination.

Using its enforcement power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, Congress could conceivably establish a specialized tribunal for the handling of insurrectionists. The president could detain suspected insurrectionists, subject ultimately to judicial review under a writ of habeas corpus, or prosecute them under the federal law of insurrection and seditious conspiracy. Federal courts will have the ultimate say, except in cases of unilateral congressional action, such as lifting a disqualification by supermajority votes, because they will make the final judgment on any prosecutions and executive detentions.

We are not apologists for Trump’s spreading of baseless claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6. But as with the weak charges brought by the special counsel, the effort to hold Trump accountable for his actions should not depend on a warping of our constitutional system. Prosecutors should charge him with insurrection if they can prove it and have that conviction sustained on appeal. Congress should disqualify Trump if it can agree he committed the crime. Ultimately, the American people will decide Trump’s responsibility for the events of Jan. 6, but at the ballot box in 2024’s nominating and general elections for president.

John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Nonresident Senior Fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at The Hoover Institution. Robert Delahunty is a Fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life in Washington, DC.

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House Republicans Launch Probe Into Fulton County’s ‘Politically Motivated’ Trump Indictments

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | AUGUST 24, 2023

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Thursday demanding the Democrat prosecutor provide answers over her indictment of former President Donald Trump and his associates.

“Your indictment and prosecution implicate substantial federal interests, and the circumstances surrounding your actions raise serious concerns about whether they are politically motivated,” the letter reads.

Last week, Willis announced her office would be charging Trump and 18 of his associates for what she claims was an attempt to “conspire[] and endeavor[] to conduct and participate in criminal enterprise” to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Included in the bogus 98-page indictment are several acts Willis contends contributed to the “furtherance” of the so-called conspiracy, such as tweets issued by Trump encouraging people to watch Georgia legislative oversight hearings on TV and a text message asking for phone numbers sent by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

In their letter to Willis, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee questioned the Fulton County DA’s rationale for charging Trump and his associates and raised several examples indicating her prosecution of the former president is “politically motivated.” Among those cited is Willis’ purported launch of a new campaign fundraising site “that highlighted [her] investigation into President Trump” several days before her office indicted the former commander-in-chief.

Also referenced are public remarks by Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the special grand jury convened by Willis, who openly bragged during interviews with regime-approved media “about her excitement at the prospect of subpoenaing President Trump and getting to swear him in.” The letter also invoked the decision by Fulton County’s superior court clerk to prematurely release “a list of criminal charges against President Trump reportedly hours before the vote of the grand jury.”

While a statement issued by the court clerk’s office originally claimed the document showing the charges against Trump was “fictitious,” the clerk later asserted it was a “mishap” and that “when [she] hit save, it went to the press queue.”

In explaining their rationale for federal oversight of the Georgia-based indictments, House Republicans referenced Willis’ alleged attempt to “use state criminal law to regulate the conduct of federal officers acting in their official capacities,” such as that of Trump and Meadows. The letter additionally raised questions about the involvement of Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and whether Willis’ office “coordinated” with Smith “during the course of [her] investigation.”

“News outlets have reported that your office and Mr. Smith ‘interviewed many of the same witnesses and reviewed much of the same evidence’ in reaching your decision to indict President Trump,” the letter reads. “The House Committee on the Judiciary (Committee) thus may investigate whether federal law enforcement agencies or officials were involved in your investigation or indictment.”

As such, House Republicans are demanding Willis turn over any and all documents related to her office’s “receipt and use of federal funds,” communications with the Smith and the DOJ, and communications between her office and any federal agency regarding her investigation into Trump and his associates by Sept. 7.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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SHAWN FLEETWOOD

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GOP Faith in ’24 Vote Count Low After Years of Election Claims: Poll

NEWSMAX | Friday, 14 July 2023 04:02 PM EDT

Few Republicans have high confidence that votes will be tallied accurately in next year’s presidential contest, suggesting years of sustained attacks against elections by former President Donald Trump and his allies have taken a toll, according to a new poll. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide fueled by a relentless campaign related to the 2020 presidential election. Even as he runs for the White House a third time, Trump continues to promote the claim that the election was stolen.

Overall, the survey finds that fewer than half of Americans – 44% — have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in the next presidential election will be counted accurately. While Democrats’ confidence in elections has risen in recent years, the opposite is true for Republicans. Ahead of the 2016 election, 32% of Republicans were highly confident votes would be counted accurately — a figure that jumped to 54% two years later after Trump won the presidency. That confidence level dropped to 28% a month before the 2020 election, as Trump signaled to voters that the voting would be rigged, and now sits at 22% less than 16 months before the next presidential election.

“I just didn’t like the way the last election went,” said Lynn Jackson, a registered nurse from El Sobrante, California, who is a registered Republican. “I have questions about it. I can’t actually say it was stolen — only God knows that.”

Trump’s claims weren’t sustained by judges, including several he appointed, nor did audits and recounts confirm widespread tampering. Even so, Trump’s attempts to explain his loss led to a wave of new laws in GOP-dominated states that added new voting restrictions, primarily by restricting mail voting and limiting or banning ballot drop boxes. Across the country, some Republican-controlled local governments have explored banning machines from tallying votes in favor of hand counts.

The AP-NORC poll suggests that the persistent messaging has sunk in among a wide swath of the American public. The survey found that independents — a group that has consistently had low confidence in elections — were also largely skeptical about the integrity of the 2024 elections. Just 24% have the highest levels of confidence that the votes will be counted accurately.

Chris Ruff, a 46-year-old unaffiliated voter from Sanford, North Carolina, said he lost faith in elections years ago, believing they are rigged to favor certain candidates. He also sees no difference between the two major parties.

“I don’t vote at all,” he said. “I think it only adds credibility to the system if you participate.”

About four in 10 U.S. adults are highly confident that scanning paper ballots into a machine provides accurate counts. Democrats are about twice as confident in the process as Republicans —63% compared to 29%. That marks a notable shift from a 2018 AP-NORC poll that found just 40% of Democrats were confident compared to 53% of Republicans.uracy testing.

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Here’s The Single Most Important Question 2024 GOP Presidential Candidates Must Answer

BY: BEN WEINGARTEN | JUNE 06, 2023

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BEN WEINGARTEN

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There is one fundamental question that any candidate vying for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2024 must answer — but that as of yet has gone largely unaddressed, at least publicly, as the field spars over significant but ultimately subordinate issues. The question is this: How will you win the general election under the present voting system?

An inability to answer this question clearly, compellingly, and convincingly imperils Republican odds of retaking the White House, no matter how favorable their prospects might look come next November. It is incumbent on anyone who wants to earn the Republican presidential nomination to answer this question at the outset, and to operate accordingly.

Over the last two election cycles, Republicans lost in historically aberrant if not unprecedented ways. That, or they underachieved relative to what conditions on the ground would have suggested. Political analysts have pointed to numerous factors to explain why the results broke the way they did, but perhaps the one constant in the presidential and midterm elections was that they were both held under a radically transformed voting system.

Democrats are so well-positioned to thrive under this system that even under the most favorable political circumstances, and with a “perfect” Republican presidential candidate, it is not at all clear that such a candidate would prevail. At least that is the prudent assumption under which Republicans serious about winning the presidency should be operating.

As Americans well know, we are lightyears removed from the election days of old — singular days when people voted in person, on paper ballots, after presenting identification. Now, we have mass mail-in elections, conducted over weeks, where those voting in person often do so on electronic machines, and with lax identification standards.

New Norms

Democrats largely developed and long fought for this system, willing it into existence under the cover of Covid-19. Naturally, they have successfully manipulated and exploited the voting regime they made.

Ballot harvesting is becoming an accepted norm. Candidates not only have to earn votes but figure out how to collect as many votes as they possibly can. Are Republicans overnight going to out-harvest their opponents, or figure out some new means to identify and turn out voters otherwise sitting on the sidelines in sufficient numbers to overcome Democrats’ ballot-harvesting superiority?

“Zuckerbucks” continue to loom over our contests as well, despite bans in many states. The left is doing everything it can to steer private money toward public election administration — administration done in conjunction with left-wing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seemingly targeting the Democrat ballots needed to win.

Prepare for Lawfare

Lawfare is also now an integral part of our election system. Republicans have started to devote significantly greater attention and resources to the litigation game, but to catch up to Democrats will require a long-term, sustained effort, backed with real money. And filing suit over election policies and practices after votes have already been cast of course has proven a losing proposition, as demonstrated by courts’ unwillingness to grapple with fundamental issues around the 2020 election largely on technical grounds.

Meanwhile, Democrats have engaged in efforts to ruin the lives of Republican election lawyers — in their own words to “make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” — seeking to kneecap their competition before it ever reaches the courtroom.

Are Republican candidates devising comprehensive election lawfare strategies right now to both aggressively target existing election chicanery and stave off that which is to come — with the courage and intellectual heft behind it needed to win in the face of an unrelenting and calculating opposition?

Daunting Challenges

These in-built challenges exist before even discussing election fraud, and the imperative for a Republican candidate to exhaust every available means to prevent it, and in the absolute worst case to detect and mitigate it — this at a time when voting happens at further remove from the election booth than ever before, making finding and proving fraud all the more difficult.

Layer on top of these issues the broader forces any such candidate will be up against, and the prospect of winning becomes even more daunting.

Among them is a concerted ruling-class effort to stymie any Republican nominee who might challenge its power and privilege, as President Donald Trump found himself up against in 2020. As Time’s Molly Ball described it in her infamous “Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” exposé, Trump faced: a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.

“They were not rigging the election,” Ball wrote, “they were fortifying it.”

This “cabal” will re-engage in 2024 and redouble its election “fortification” efforts, perhaps especially in “controlling the flow of information” — this is the working assumption Republicans must operate under. Candidates should also assume the deep state will engage in all manner of dirty tricks. The election interference has already begun in earnest. Frankly, it has been ongoing since 2016.

Given the Democrats’ advantages, it would be foolish for any Republican candidate, no matter how formidable, and against an opponent no matter how weak, to presume victory is preordained or even likely in 2024.

The two leading candidates have, to their credit, acknowledged the challenges presented by the voting system and Republicans’ failings in competing under it.

Former President Donald Trump has vowed that “we will become masters at ballot harvesting.” “We have no choice,” he has said, but to “beat Democrats at their own game.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also recently said, “We’re going to do ballot harvesting,” and that he won’t “fight with one hand tied behind [his] back.”

In that spirit, Republican candidates should devise and articulate a comprehensive plan to win, aimed at an electorate largely dubious of a system they see as rigged. Many are demoralized by this system, which could dampen turnout in key areas.

A Plan

In an ideal world, such a plan would begin with an effort to lobby state legislatures to pass a battery of election integrity-strengthening laws seeking to restore voting, to the greatest extent possible, to the standard of single-day, in-person, and with identification; purge voter rolls of ineligible names; provide maximum transparency and visibility into the voting process for observers, challengers, and the candidates; facilitate real-time arbitration over contested ballots and irregularities, and clear remedies for broader alleged malfeasance; empower state authorities to pursue vote fraud; and impose utterly crippling criminal penalties on anyone who engages in it.

Beyond a legislative effort to ensure end-to-end election integrity from delivery of ballot to vote-counting, candidates must lay out a realistic roadmap for success by internalizing lessons of recent election cycles and forthrightly recognizing Republicans’ strengths and weaknesses. They must determine how to optimally deploy finite resources to triumph in a bloody political war, and play on whatever advantages Republicans may have.

To prepare such a plan, candidates should seek to identify: Democrats’ most effective and decisive strategies and tactics in recent election cycles; what Democrats will do to improve upon these efforts; Republicans’ greatest strategic and tactical failures and successes in recent election cycles; Republican advantages yet to be exploited; and the most significant election integrity-eroding laws, policies, and practices on a state-by-state basis in recent election cycles.

Such an analysis would help the candidates determine which strategies and tactics to replicate, improve upon, experiment with, and totally discard. It would also help them anticipate the strategies and tactics they should combat using whatever means available, and, relatedly, discern what rules and features of the game they must relentlessly litigate over — as Democrats will no doubt be doing.

Then, candidates could develop a precinct-level plan to find and maximize turnout among voters in the most pivotal locales while building as strong and aggressive an on-the-ground poll challenging/fraud detection operation as possible to deter illegal or unethical Democrat behavior; develop a related lawfare plan; and determine how much money they must raise to implement the plans, when and where to allocate the funds, and to whom.

At minimum, this thought exercise would yield critical insights, and instill in voters and donors alike confidence there is a robust and coherent operation in place to maximize the odds for success.

The planning must begin now.

Only by competing and winning under a rotten system rewarding the kind of organizing and action historically anathema to conservatives will there ever be an opportunity to dismantle that system.

Ben Weingarten is Editor at Large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

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DeSantis: I’ll Pardon Trump, Other DOJ ‘Weaponization’ Victims

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Thursday, 25 May 2023 03:33 PM EDT

New GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said on Thursday that if he’s elected, he will “be aggressive” in using presidential pardons to free people charged or convicted through the weaponization of the Department of Justice, and that includes his main rival for the party’s nomination, former President Donald Trump.

“What I’m going to do is … on day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” the Florida governor told podcasters, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis.

DeSantis added that the DOJ and FBI have been weaponized in many ways under President Joe Biden, and he acknowledged that in some of the cases where people are charged with crimes, “people may have a technical violation of the law.”

“But if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice, and so we’re going to find ways where that did not happen,” said DeSantis. “And then we will use the pardon power — and I will do that at the front end.”

He said many presidents wait until the end of their administration, but he promised that his administration will “find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate.”

However, DeSantis also explained that the pardons will be considered “case by case,” meaning that a blanket pardon wouldn’t be given to Trump, who is facing several criminal probes.

“That could be from a grandma who got arrested and prosecuted too much all the way up to, potentially, Trump himself,” Travis said. He then asked the governor, “Is that fair to say when you analyze what the charges might have been brought on a federal level?”

“I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big,” DeSantis responded.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Not Your Kids!

A.F. BRANCO | on May 21, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-not-your-kids/

Governor Walz welcomes anti-parent teachers while working to exclude parental input.

Walz The Anti-Parent Governor — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – 2020 Hindsight

A.F. BRANCO | on May 22, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-2020-hindsight/

Trump focused on the 2020 election to prevent the Democrats from cheating again.

Democrat Elction Strategy — Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2023.

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump

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Feinstein, Fetterman, and Biden Illustrate Democrats’ Double Standard on Mental Acuity

BY: JONATHAN S. TOBIN | APRIL 21, 2023

Sen. Dianne Feinstein — The push to force the California senator’s resignation is hypocritical and raises questions about what will happen in a Biden second term.

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This week, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., went back to work after spending several weeks away from Congress due to being hospitalized for severe depression. But while Democrats, who were sorely pressed to maintain their narrow majority in his absence, celebrated his return, C-Span video of him chairing a Senate subcommittee provided sobering evidence of the recovering stroke victim’s limitations. Much like his disastrous election debate last October, at the hearing, Fetterman’s halting speech, barely understandable comments, and inability to communicate without electronic aid illustrated his incapacity.

But while Democrats are quick to slam as bigots anyone who had the temerity to notice Fetterman’s problems, they are not feeling quite so generous about another member of their Senate caucus. The double standard creates an ominous precedent that ought to hang over the 2024 presidential election.

While they’ve been circling the wagons around Fetterman, Democrats have been pressuring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to resign due to the perception that she lacks the physical energy or the mental acuity to do her job. But unfortunately for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the California Democrats who want to replace her, the ailing 89-year-old has refused to step down, though she has already announced she won’t run for re-election next year.

Feinstein vs. Fetterman

Feinstein was hospitalized for shingles in February and has remained absent since then. With no date set for her return, the vacancy on the Judiciary Committee, where her absence leaves the Democrats without a majority, has created a serious problem for the efforts of the Biden administration and Schumer to confirm federal judges. The duel between the ailing Feinstein and her party has, at least for the moment, benefited Republicans. But the implications of the controversy go beyond its impact on her desire to stay on until her term expires in January 2025.

There are currently four senators who are over 80, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who returned this week from an extended medical absence after a fall. Thirty senators are in their 70s. Whatever one thinks about the question of elderly senators serving, the campaign to push Feinstein out of her seat sets an interesting precedent.

Democrats have reacted to questions posed by Fetterman’s obvious limitations as a senator with both denial and an attempt to shame skeptics with pious rhetoric about ableism. They have attempted to depict him as a poster child for tolerance for those who suffer from mental health issues.

But they are indifferent to criticisms of their effort to push Feinstein out of her seat on the grounds of ageism, which have just as much validity as their defense of Fetterman.

Feinstein vs. Biden

Even worse, their belief that Feinstein’s diminishing capacities render her ineligible for a seat in the Senate stands in even starker contrast to the position President Joe Biden’s mental state has placed Democrats in.

Ever since Biden became their presumptive presidential nominee in March of 2020, ignoring his decline has become a political necessity for Democrats, and even more so with each passing month. At the very least, his never-ending stream of gaffes, frequent confusion in public, and erratic behavior raises questions about his mental acuity. Yet the corporate media treat questions about his health as off limits and proof of the bad morals of conservatives.

Still, as was the case with Feinstein until recently, the 80-year-old Biden remains fit enough to silence inquiries from Democrats. As president, it’s far easier to shield him from public scrutiny. More importantly, most in the party are coming to terms with the fact that they may be stuck with him for the 2024 election.

No matter his mental state, having spent his entire life working to become president, Biden clearly has no intention of giving up after only one term. He will have to be dragged from the White House kicking and screaming. The obvious alternatives — Vice President Kamala Harris or California Gov. Gavin Newsom — lack much appeal for the party’s grassroots or its donor class. So, many on the left are convinced Biden may be their best bet for victory next year, especially if the election is a rematch of the 2020 race against former President Donald Trump.

Double Standard

Yet whether you think Democrats’ decision to get rid of someone who can’t do her job is sensible or insensitive and nasty, it does raise questions about the same standard not being applied to Fetterman and most especially to Biden.

Feinstein has met her Democratic colleagues halfway by asking to be replaced on the Judiciary Committee so they can continue confirming leftist judges at an even faster pace than McConnell confirmed conservatives during the Trump administration. But replacing her on the committee requires GOP acquiescence and, for understandable reasons, Republicans are only too happy to let the current stalemate created by her absence continue. That’s led to mounting anger from Democrats, who think Feinstein is being selfish.

The empty seat on the Judiciary Committee has turned the issue into a crisis for Democrats, but many of them have been pushing for her resignation for years. Feinstein’s voting record can’t be criticized by the left, but she has at times engaged in collegial or commonsensical behavior that they regard as insufficiently woke.

Feinstein Too Reasonable for Some

In 2019, she enraged global warming extremists when she brusquely lectured a group of visiting schoolchildren about the importance of compromise when they began to virtue signal to her about not supporting the most alarmist environmental measures.

Just as bad from their point of view were allegations that she behaved decently toward conservative judicial nominees such as Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which some characterized as treating her with “kid gloves.” That’s despite the fact that Feinstein had intolerantly targeted her for her Catholic faith, saying that “the dogma lives loudly within you.”

That goes a long way toward explaining why Feinstein’s incapacity has been an issue for left-wingers who have no problem tolerating a leftist like Fetterman, who, leaving aside his hospitalization for depression, also still needs special equipment to be able to understand his colleagues and who appears to converse only with difficulty.

But there’s more at stake in this discussion than the Democrats’ hypocrisy on the question of fitness for office.

What if Biden’s Health Can’t Be Hid?

Democrats appear to be serious about asking the American people to re-elect an already diminished man who will be 82 in January 2025 and presumably serve until he’s 86. So, the idea that the questions they are currently raising about Feinstein can’t be raised about Biden ought to be a bridge too far even for inveterate Trump haters.

Just as important, they need to ask themselves in the coming year what they will do if Biden’s health continues to decline and ultimately puts him in the same position as Feinstein, where the problems can no longer be concealed. By declaring that questions about Biden’s mental acuity are off-limits or in bad taste, they are essentially setting up a situation where Harris being forced to step in and govern is a realistic possibility sometime in the next five years.

The only realistic alternative to simply hoping and praying Biden will continue to decline at a slow enough rate that his problems can continue to be concealed or smoothed over without political consequences is to begin asking the same hard questions about his health that they are currently posing to Feinstein. It remains to be seen whether anyone of consequence in the party has the guts or the wisdom to point this out before it is too late.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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How Sarah Sanders Is Putting Arkansas On The Map

By: Brent Scher | March 13, 2023

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R.) / Getty Images

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Less than one month into her first term as Arkansas governor, Sarah Sanders was tapped to deliver the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, a speaking slot typically granted to rising stars in the party with the intent to elevate them onto the national stage. But stepping onto the national stage doesn’t appear to be Sanders’s goal—at least for now.

In her address, she used Arkansas as the example of what Republicans are doing across the country. “Here in Arkansas and across America, Republicans are working to end the policy of trapping kids in failing schools and sentencing them to a lifetime of poverty,” Sanders said.  ”We will educate, not indoctrinate our kids, and put students on a path to success.”

In an hour-long interview, the former White House press secretary dodged questions about the 2024 election, diverting the conversation back to what she’s doing in Arkansas.

She already has substantive accomplishments to point to. This past Tuesday, exactly one month after her State of the Union response, the state legislature passed Sanders’s signature legislation, an ambitious overhaul of Arkansas schools, and she has already signed it into law. Corey DeAngelis, a leading advocate for school choice, said Arkansas is now the “gold standard for educational freedom.”

The bill is a kitchen-sink approach to education reform—in addition to establishing universal school choice, it yanks obscene sexual materials and critical race theory from classrooms, sets stringent new learning standards, and raises the base teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000.

“This is what bold conservative education legislation looks like,” Sanders said from the governor’s office, where she monitored the debate on the bill taking place on the other side of the Capitol.

And Sanders says Arkansas as a whole can be the “blueprint” for what conservative states could do.

Sanders joins a crowd of superstar Republican governors making headway by focusing on schools, and armed with a legislature of staunch conservatives, she’s charging ahead of other states. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is still fighting to get the sorts of reforms passed by Arkansas in Sanders’s first few weeks over hurdles in his legislature—his universal school choice bill, for example, faces even some Republican opposition. Sanders came out of her long campaign in Arkansas eager to establish herself as the “Education Governor” and thus far is doing just that.

Sanders’s growing profile has also made her a target of Democratic activists and politicians. Washington Post columnists are writing hit pieces questioning why anyone would move to Arkansas: “Good luck recruiting Californians for Arkansas, Sarah Sanders,” wrote Philip Bump. Shortly after Sanders’s national address, California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom took aim at Arkansas’s crime rate and last week was taking shots on Twitter about local Arkansas pieces of legislation.

Sanders acknowledges that she’s drawing more scrutiny to her state, but she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “We outkick our coverage, frankly, in a lot of places,” she said.

“When it comes to politicians on the national stage for a small state, we have some pretty big names out there,” the governor said. “I’m sure you’ll find people that will disagree, but my opinion is that it’s a good thing for our state, and I plan on using that platform to better us.”

Sanders says the critics are unavoidable. “I try to tune it out and stay focused on the objectives in front of us. There are people who wouldn’t care what’s in the bill, they’re gonna hate it simply because I’m associated with it. They don’t want to see me be successful. Certainly, that’s disappointing, but not surprising, and it’s not gonna slow us down from doing things that we feel like are the right thing to do.”

Sanders sharpened her ability to drown out the critics as White House press secretary. Not only was Sanders the longest-serving Trump administration press secretary—she was the only person to hold the job for more than a year—she was also the most successful, taking over as the daily briefing became a media feeding frenzy and adding a semblance of order to the chaos. She remains beloved by staff, some of whom followed her to Arkansas, and her former boss, to whom she still talks regularly.

Though Sanders is taking advantage of lessons learned at the White House, former colleagues say she’s also developed the ability to talk fluently about policy.

“We used to tell her, you need to get more detail,” said a former White House colleague. “Now the opposite is the case. She’s gone from somebody who was laser-focused on communications with a thin understanding of the policy to somebody who is a policy expert. It’s impressive to me.”

It’s not the first transformation of her career, Sanders says. When she first joined the Donald Trump campaign, she never foresaw that she’d become the lead spokeswoman for Trump’s administration.

“I was much more on the strategy and political operation side, and really didn’t see myself as a front person or the public-facing individual,” she explained.

Sanders joined the Trump campaign in 2016 to do coalition-building in the South, but after a few TV appearances, Trump called her to say he wanted to see her on television every day. And at the White House, after Sanders filled in for then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer while serving as his deputy, Trump tapped her to fill the job.

Her rise to the Arkansas governorship is a different story. Sanders announced her run in January 2021 and, as the prohibitive favorite from the outset, had two years to prepare for the job. It’s during that time that she decided she wanted to be the “Education Governor”—she not only became an expert on the issue but also gained confidence that she had to make it her trademark legislation.

“I went to all 75 counties,” Sanders said. “Everywhere I went as I traveled on the campaign for two years, every community wants their kids to do better. If we don’t have a good education system in place, then we are not setting our kids up for success.”

On the ground in Arkansas, Republicans say Sanders has brought a “new energy” to the legislature. “The whole atmosphere and mood of everything is different,” said Bart Hester, who leads the state’s upper chamber. “It’s such a fun energy, an exciting and new energy. It’s fun to come in everyday.”

Hester says the onslaught of opposition from teachers’ unions against the education bill was no match for Sanders.

“We have a governor now where members are more scared of her than they are their superintendents or the teacher union—we’ve never experienced that,” Hester said. “They don’t want to disappoint her—they know that she’s super popular, they don’t want to be the guy that was against their number-one priority.”

Sanders scoffs at suggestions that her education plan was a “copycat” of legislation championed by DeSantis, another high-profile Republican governor. “Hard to copy when ours is much bigger and goes much further,” Sanders said. But she has nothing negative to say about her Republican counterpart in Florida, and says there’s a “great sense of camaraderie and willingness to share best practices” between her and DeSantis, who has emerged as Trump’s chief competition in the Republican Party.

Sanders is yet to weigh in on who the Republican presidential nominee should be in 2024—her “focus is solely on Arkansas,” she says, in the same way every ambitious and upwardly mobile politician does. And Trump, her former boss, reportedly called Sanders in recent weeks to ask for her endorsement, which still hasn’t come.

But she also said she “maintains a great relationship” with Trump, and left the door open for an endorsement in the future.

“When the time comes, maybe, but right now, I don’t want to do anything that takes away from the huge agenda list that we have to get done here in Arkansas,” Sanders said. “I don’t intend on slowing down on that front at any point soon. And so I don’t want to do anything that takes away, not just my attention, but also the attention of what we’re accomplishing.”

A former White House colleague who remains close to Sanders doesn’t expect her 2024 neutrality to change any time soon. “Trump’s not her boss anymore,” the former colleague said. “Her boss is the people of Arkansas, and that’s where I assume her priorities will lie.”

Republicans in the state appreciate her focus on Arkansas and recognize she’s putting the work they’re doing in the Capitol first. “Everyone wants a minute with her—she can be Sarah the national celebrity, or Sarah the governor, and she only has so many minutes in a day,” Hester said. “She is spending those minutes as Sarah the governor.”

Republican state senator Matt McKee says Sanders has the whole legislature bullish on Arkansas.

“I know Florida’s been at the forefront, Texas has done things, but Arkansas can be the place,” McKee said.

Sanders says her appreciation for Arkansas has grown since moving her family back to her home state. After traveling to each county for her campaign, she has enhanced her ability to sell the state to visitors. The governor boasts that she can point to the best place to eat in any Arkansas town—this reporter was sent to CJ’s Butcher Boy Burgers in Russellville.

When it comes to dining, things are going more smoothly for Sanders in Arkansas. Thus far, she says she hasn’t been denied service, as she was in 2019 at the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia.

“You know, knock on wood, I have not been asked to leave any restaurant so far,” Sanders said. “It’s amazing to be home.”

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Political

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Zuckbucks 2.0 Recipients Turn Down Money After Leftist Nonprofit Fails Transparency Test

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

roll of "I voted" stickers on a table at a polling place — **Unless more localities reject these private funds and membership, CTCL will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.**

Author Victoria Marshall profile

VICTORIA MARSHALL

VISIT ON TWITTER@VEMRSHLL

Three of the 10 counties chosen as beneficiaries of a program from the nonprofit that helped fund the private takeover of government election offices in 2020 are refusing to accept those dollars leading up to the 2024 cycle.

Election officials from Brunswick and Forsyth Counties in North Carolina and Ottawa County in Michigan have chosen not to accept funds from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a program that plans to funnel $80 million in election grants to jurisdictions across the country over the next five years. The alliance is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of two groups that funneled over $328 million of private money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as “Zuckbucks,” to government election offices mostly in the blue counties of swing states, mobilizing Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and swinging the race in Joe Biden’s favor.

Many of the jurisdictions chosen as recipients for the 2024 cycle lean heavily Democrat and are located in swing states, indicating CTCL is hoping to replicate its successful scheme in the next presidential election in purple states Democrats need to win, such as Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. While CTCL might once again try to hide its efforts by claiming the alliance is also giving money to red counties, expect more than double or triple the funds to be spent on Democratic-leaning counties compared to Republican ones, just like in 2020.

Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told RealClearInvestigations he will refuse the grant money offered to his county because of transparency concerns. When Roebuck asked the alliance about its criteria for the amount of money given to each county, those running the program refused to give a clear answer.

Tim Tsujii, director of elections for the Forsyth County Board of Elections, told RealClear that Forsyth will not take any grant money because the county has adequate funds to administer its elections. Forsyth and Brunswick Counties will still be part of the alliance, but Tsujii raised concerns about members having to pay a fee for being part of the program.

“There is all this talk about the money going to elections offices and the counties, but what about the money going from the counties to the alliance?” Tsujii said.

To be a part of the alliance, election offices must pay an annual fee, $1,600 for a basic membership or $4,800 for premium, which the CTCL-created program says gives officials access to “coaching,” tutorials, consulting, and any other as-needed handholding, such as revamping voter forms and websites. The alliance also obligates members “to make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance,” such as participating in its events and sharing election data, documents, and forms.

While the program goes to great lengths to stress its “commitment to nonpartisanship” — “We will never attempt to influence the outcome of any election. Period” — its own founding organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has demonstrated the catastrophic and deeply partisan consequences of welcoming outside groups to infiltrate government election offices.

These three jurisdictions are not the only beneficiaries raising concerns about the integrity of the alliance and the problems associated with accepting its funds. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut, narrowly approved a $500,000 grant from the program after town representatives and concerned residents wrote a letter to their local newspaper signaling their opposition to accepting the grant. The letter cited outside influence by the partisan groups in Greenwich’s election process as one reason to reject the funds.

As RealClearInvestigations noted:

When [Greenwich] residents heard that its elections office was tapped to receive $500,000 in grant money from the CTCL, a member of the town’s legislative council sent an email to the center seeking more information, including audits of the group’s books, a copy of the group’s annual report, and its conflict-of-interest policy.

The CTCL declined to provide the documents, insisting that its audited financials and conflict policies “are not publicly filed documents.”

The alliance has also failed to disclose how exactly the grant money will be used, instead keeping things vague and saying it will vary depending on each office. But if CTCL’s past is prologue, that could mean working with left-wing third-party groups to create absentee ballot forms, targeting likely-Democratic voters by harvesting and curing their ballots, and crafting automatic voter registration systems. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is already hoping to do this on a much broader scale than in 2020. As The Federalist previously reported, CTCL has an elaborate plan to infiltrate more than 8,000 local election departments across the country by 2026.

That county election officials and town leaders are suspicious of the alliance and are starting to opt out of its grant money should set off alarm bells for other jurisdictions committed to conducting free and fair elections. Unless more localities reject these private funds and memberships, CTCL — under the guise of its new U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence program — will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Dig Her Up! Dig Her Up!

A.F. BRANCO | on July 5, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-dig-her-up-dig-her-up/

The Democrat bench is so bad that some Democrats are talking about drafting Hillary to run for President in 2024.

Hillary 2024? — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Tsunami Warning

A.F. BRANCO | on July 6, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-tsunami-warning/

Democrats are using Jan 6th, Abortion, and the gun issue as a deflection and defense against the coming Red Wave 2022.

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘2024 Election’

By: Beth Brelje | July 15, 2025

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By: Tristan Justice | November 08, 2024

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By: Reddit Lies | October 31, 2024

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BUSTED: The Inside Story of How the Kamala Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit (And Breaks the Rules) To Control the Platform

Astroturfing on Reddit

How Effective is This?

Why is This So Effective?

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By: Eddie Scarry | October 28, 2024

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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By: The Federalist Staff | October 10, 2024

Arizona

Georgia

Michigan

Nevada

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

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By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 09, 2024

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By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 08, 2024

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Walz Tried to Clean Up Falsehoods in Fox News Interview, But He Got Clobbered by the Facts Instead

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By: Sen. Ron Johnson | September 03, 2024

Biden’s Executive Order to Register Voters

States Cleaning Voter Rolls

Laundering Donations

Presidential Election

Sen. Ron Johnson is a Republican from Wisconsin.

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By: Eddie Scarry | August 30, 2024

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

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By: Shawn Fleetwood | August 23, 2024

1. Jan. 6

2. Supreme Court ‘Presidential Immunity’ Decision

3. Trump’s Record on Entitlements

4. School Funding Statistics

5. ‘Middle Class’ Roots

6. Trump’s Tax Cuts

7. Trump’s Tariff Policies

8. Nature of Abortion

9. GOP Pro-Life Laws

10. Trump’s Position on Abortion

11. IVF

12. Disastrous Border Bill

13. Trump’s NATO Comments

14. America’s Enemies

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By: Ben Weingarten | August 15, 2024

Rougher Weather Ahead

DHS’s ‘Slow-Walking’

‘Significant Inaccuracies’ in the Federal Database

Warning: Extended Lawfare Ahead

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By: The Federalist Staff | August 13, 2024

20. Harris Claims It’s Trump, Not Her, Who Will Weaponize DOJ

19. Harris Lies About Trump, GOP Abortion Platform

18. Harris’ Fracking Flip-Flop

17. Harris’ Team Falsely Claims J.D. Vance Endorsed Project 2025

16. Harris Denies Biden’s Obvious Decline

15. Harris Accuses Trump Of Trying To Cut Medicare, Social Security

14. Harris Repeats ‘Book Ban’ Falsehoods

13. Harris Allies Lie About Her Border Czar Appointment

12. Harris Wrongfully Asserts NCAA Women’s Brackets Were Banned Until 2022

11. Harris Repeatedly Lies About Georgia Voting Law

10. Harris Falsely Blames Republicans For Wisconsin Abortion Limit

9. Harris Fibs About Florida’s History Curriculum

8. Worst VP In History Claims ‘Great’ Approval Ratings

7. Harris Lies About Bailing Out Violent Criminals

6. Harris Claims Spending Sprees Won’t Raise Taxes

5. Harris Repeats Election Security Falsehood