Month: January 2021

Key Evvents this week:

January 3: the newly elected Congress is seated
January 6: the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote; 12th A: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

On Sunday the Washington Post released an hour long recording of a phone conversation between Trump and the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Trump is pressuring him to make him the winner in Georgia. Here is the recording and full transcript.

Here is the lead in the New York Times: President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense” during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

Below are key quotes from the transcript:

• so we’ve spent a lot of time on this, and if we could just go over some of the numbers… We think that if you check the signatures, a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County, you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures 
• You don’t need much of a number, because the number that in theory I lost by, the margin would be 11,779
• it’s been reported that they said there was a major water main break. Everybody fled the area, and then they came back, [name], her daughter and a few people…. Late in the morning, they went, early in the morning, they went to the table with the black robe, the black shield, and they pulled out the votes. Those votes were put there a number of hours before. The table was put there. I think it was, Brad, you would know, it was probably eight hours or seven hours before, and then it was stuffed with votes. 
• I mean you know, and I didn’t lose the state, Brad. 
• The other thing, dead people, so dead people voted. And I think the, the number is in the close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters. The bottom line is when you add it all up, and then you start adding, you know, 300,000 fake ballots. 
• You’re not the only one. I mean, we have other states that I believe will be flipping to us very shortly.
• RAFFENSPERGER: Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything.

TRUMP: Oh, this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not, it’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less. Social media is Big Tech. Big Tech is on your side, you know. I don’t even know why you have a side, because you should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican.

RAFFENSPERGER: We believe that we do have an accurate election.

• Potential Legal Threat: But the ballots are corrupt. And you’re going to find that they are — which is totally illegal, it is more illegal for you than it is for them, because you know what they did, and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.
• And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
• And flipping the state is a great testament to our country because, you know, this is — it’s a testament that they can admit to a mistake or whatever you want to call it.
• Look, we need only 11,000 votes. We have far more than that as it stands now. We’ll have more and more. And, do you have provisional ballots at all, Brad? Provisional ballots?
• So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. 
• Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan? What’s wrong with you? I heard your lawyer is very difficult, actually, but I’m sure you’re a good lawyer. You have a nice last name.
• And I think you have to say that you’re going to re-examine it, and you can re-examine it, but re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers. 
• And I know this phone call is going nowhere other than, other than ultimately, you know — Look, ultimately, I win, OK? Because you guys are so wrong. And you treated this. You treated the population of Georgia so badly. You, between you and your governor, who is down at 21, he was down 21 points. And like a schmuck, I endorsed him, and he got elected, but I will tell you, he is a disaster.

Sunday night, Senator Tom Cotton came out in opposition of the January 6 scheme. Some others followed as the vote neared.

—

Trump’s Job Approval:

COVID-19 Cases/Deaths:

Election Challenge

Senators began lining up this week in support of using Congressional action on January 6 to overturn the election, or against that plan. Josh Hawley was first, on Wednesday.

Ben Sasse criticized the move: “Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Mr. Sasse wrote. “But they’re wrong — and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”

Then on Saturday: In a joint statement on Saturday, the Senate Republicans — including seven senators and four who are to be sworn in on Sunday — called for a 10-day audit of election returns in “disputed states,” and said they would vote to reject the electors from those states until one was completed. They did not elaborate on which states.

The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Romney released a statement opposing the move: “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic. … Were Congress to actually reject state electors, partisans would inevitably demand the same any time their candidate had lost. Congress, not voters in the respective states, would choose our presidents.

“Adding to this ill-conceived endeavor by some in Congress is the President’s call for his supporters to come to the Capitol on the day when this matter is to be debated and decided. This has the predictable potential to lead to disruption, and worse.

“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

Toomey also opposes.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 42.6%

COVID Cases/ Deaths: 19,663,976 / 341,199

Trump pardoned Stone, Manafort, Popadopolous and others charged in the Mueller investigation: In complaining about “prosecutorial misconduct,” though, Mr. Trump seemed to be talking as much about himself as his allies. In the flurry of 49 pardons and commutations issued this week, he granted clemency to a host of convicted liars, crooked politicians and child-killing war criminals, but the through line was a president who considers himself a victim of law enforcement and was using his power to strike back.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 42.7%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 18,730,806 / 329,592

Electors gather on Monday December 14.

The gathering of electors in all the states went smoothly despite some fears of violence and more legal wrangling. Also more GOP publicly accepted the results: The comments amounted to a notable and swift sea change in a body that for weeks has essentially refused to acknowledge the inevitable, although the shift was far from unanimous. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, stayed conspicuously silent on Monday, declining to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory.

Trump announced Bill Barr’s resignation on Monday. He will stay on until December 23.

Also on Monday the first vaccines were given to the public: The day played out in a remarkable fashion as television viewers watched images of health care workers receiving lifesaving injections juxtaposed with live shots from state capitals around the country showing electors casting votes formally confirming the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris.

On Tuesday McConnell did congratulate Biden from the Senate floor. Also this: A short time later, on a private call with Senate Republicans, Mr. McConnell and his top deputies pleaded with their colleagues not to join members of the House in objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College’s decision

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.5%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 17,592,760 / 315,260

Tuesday December 8 – safe harbor day: each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.

In the New York Times on Monday: Intensifying his efforts to undo his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Trump twice called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in recent days to encourage challenges to the official results in the state…. Pennsylvania is the third state in which Mr. Trump is known to have reached out to top elected Republicans to try to reverse the will of voters. He earlier summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House, and over the weekend he pressed Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia to call upon that state’s legislature to reverse the election.

Then on Tuesday: The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a long-shot request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, delivering an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump in the forum on which he had pinned his hopes.

The Texas lawsuit to overturn votes in swing states that went for was released on Tuesday December 8. It asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures,” meaning it would allow GOP held state legislatures to appoint their own slate of electors for the Electoral College.

Here is the original filing.

By Friday the Supreme Court had rejected the Texas case.

Analysis by the New York Times: The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November…. And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.

During a Friday night, contentious Oval Office meeting Trump floated the idea of appointing election conspiracy theorist Sydney Powell to his administration, directing Homeland Security to seize voting machines, and using the military to help keep him in power. Flynn and Guilliani were present.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.5%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 15,718,811 / 294,535

This Washington Post story recounts Trump attempts to overturn the election: However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”

Bill Bar acknowledged that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 election.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 43.6%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 14,462,527 / 280,135

Monday evening’s New York Times: President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end.

Mr. Trump had been resisting any move toward a transition. But in conversations in recent days that intensified Monday morning, top aides — including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff; Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; and Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer — told the president the transition needed to begin. He did not need to say the word “concede,” they told him, according to multiple people briefed on the discussions.

Since the race was called Trump has made three televised appearances, none about the election. He has mostly addressed the country through Twitter: Since Nov. 3, he has posted some 550 tweets — about three-quarters of which attempted to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election results.

Legal Challenges

Then late Monday night Trump tweeted: Will never concede to fake ballots & “Dominion”.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 44%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 12,999,664 / 263,956

Trump fired a member of his administration responsible for election security on Tuesday. Chris Krebs “had systematically disputed Mr. Trump’s false declarations in recent days that the presidency was stolen from him through fraudulent ballots and software glitches that changed millions of votes.”

Legal Challenges

Lindsey Graham has been calling election officials trying to get them to toss out legal ballots: he suggested to the Georgia Secretary of State “had the power to toss out all of the mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures on ballots”

Georgia certified election results on Friday.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 44.2%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 11,843,490 / 253,600

Trump fired the Secretary of Defense on Monday: Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called Mr. Esper five minutes before the president’s Twitter post to tell him he had been fired. Mr. Esper was still at the Pentagon cleaning out his desk on Monday afternoon when Mr. Miller arrived, administration officials said.

Trump official Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, has refused to issue a letter of “ascertainment,” which allows Mr. Biden’s transition team to begin the transfer of power. An official “said it would be strange for President Trump to send some kind of a signal to allow the transition to start while he is still engaged in court fights.”

Habberman writes in the Friday New York Times: “He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.
There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.

Also in the New York Times: “The first small cracks have begun to appear in the Republican wall of support for President Trump and his unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, with a growing number of elected officials and party leaders signaling on Thursday that they would indulge Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories for only so long. A few were willing to openly contradict him.” These include the Governor of Ohio, Carl Rove, Grassley, and John Bolton.

Edsal: Many of those I questioned see this discrepancy as stemming from Trump’s individual personality and characterological deficiencies — what they call his narcissism and his sociopathy. Others offer a more starkly political interpretation: that the refusal to accept Biden’s victory stems from the frustration of a Republican Party struggling to remain competitive in the face of an increasingly multicultural electorate. In the end, it appears to be a mixture of both.

Legal Challenges

Leading Republicans rallied on Monday around President Trump’s refusal to concede the election, declining to challenge the false narrative that it was stolen from him or to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

President Trump suffered multiple legal setbacks in three key swing states on Friday, choking off many of his last-ditch efforts to use the courts to delay or block President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

—

Trump’s Job Approval: 44.8%

COVID Cases / Deaths: 10,690,665 / 243,580