Kenneth Chesebro, a former lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to illegally conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, striking a deal in which he will avoid jail time and agreed to provide evidence that could implicate other defendants, including Trump himself.
The charge relates to Chesebro’s role organizing slates of pro-Trump electors to meet in seven states where Joe Biden had won. According to details of the amended indictment read in open court, prosecutors allege several other co-defendants were a part of that conspiracy: Trump, four other lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, and one campaign operative. Chesebro signed the amended indictment, though it was not clear if he had offered prosecutors evidence related to the alleged role those other defendants played.
“You’ve got two camps right now of people who should speak out and haven’t. The first camp knows Trump is a dangerous and vindictive man but doesn’t want to upend their lives by provoking his ire. The second camp is more nakedly transactional."
- Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration
McCarthy sided with Trump partisans in voting to toss out votes from swing state electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania just hours after a mob forcibly invaded the Capitol. In May 2021 McCarthy endorsed the Republican wave of state voter suppression laws because Republican voters lack “confidence in the electoral system".
McCarthy is not out to smooth out the Trumpiest elements of the GOP. And he’s rarely hinted that he finds the more bumptious members on his right flank to be real problems, including members of he Freedom Caucus, the hard-line group that is now less formally conservative than a vehicle for Trumpism, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), perhaps the most divisive member of his conference.
“For somebody who has the picture of Ronald Reagan on his wall in his office in the Capitol, the notion that now Kevin McCarthy is going to make himself the leader of the pro-Putin wing of my party is just a stunning thing.”
— Liz Cheney, Meet the Press, October 23, 2022. Learn More
“Marble Freedom Trust is Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar slush fund to erode democracy”
In 2018, during a live event, Justice Clarence Thomas joked about how honored he was to be sharing the stage with Mr. Leo, calling him “the No. 3 most powerful person in the world.” In 2020, Leo left the leadership of the conservative Federalist Society to become chairman of a company called CRC Advisors, which advises and helps manage conservative nonprofits. In 2021, Leo became “a kingmaker in conservative big money politics” as the trustee and chairman of the new $1.6 billion Marble trust, a political non-profit organization, created and funded by a 90-year old electronics manufacturing mogul, effectively giving Leo “the power to shape elections and political fights.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html Learn More
“Johnson was also integral to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, . . . and touted Trump’s conspiracy theories about election fraud.”
“The newly elected House speaker has ties to the far-right New Apostolic Reformation — which is hell-bent on turning America into a religious state.” ,/em>
Outside his district office in the Cannon House Office Building is a flag white which “symbolize[s] a die-hard vision of a hegemonically Christian America. Learn More
Noem, a presidential aspirant, clinging closely to the Trump playbook, was adamant that widespread fraud existed in the 2020 election, despite the lack of concrete evidence.
After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Noem tried to deflect blame from the president, blaming the Capitol insurrection on lack of civics education while making no mention of President Donald Trump’s role in the attack that sent Congress into hiding. Learn More
"And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Tommy Tuberville, it’s that he’ll never let what’s good for Americans, including his constituents, stand in the way of what’s good for him and his political party."
Learn More
2020: Steve Bannon sought to overturn the certified results falsely alleging illegal voting, mail-in ballots and voting machines.
He and Peter Navarro authored a plan "to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to misuse his role as the person officially counting electoral ballots and instead reject them, delaying the certification of Biden’s victory and giving Republican-controlled state legislatures time to overturn the election."
Learn More
Eric Trump ”liked” a Tweet identifying QAnon “Shaman” Jacob Chansley and the assault on the U.S. Capitol as “a staged #Antifa attack”.
In response to such false accusations: Fox News' Jeanine Pirro Blasts Pro-Trump Capitol Rioters, Says Don't Blame Antifa: ‘You Did It’
Mr. Flynn was also present at the Trump International Hotel on Jan. 5 for a meeting that included about 15 people, where the discussion centered on “how to put pressure on more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results,” according to one attendee, Charles Herbster, a Republican candidate for governor of Nebraska.
Among those in attendance, according to Mr. Herbster, were Mr. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr.; Mr. Giuliani; Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; the Trump advisers Peter Navarro, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie; and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and conspiracy theorist. (Boldface added) Learn More
Alt-right radio host Jesse Kelly, adoring Trump booster, and frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time Fox News show, agreed with a Twitter user's suggestion that “Weimar problems eventually lead to Weimar solutions."
Kelly's tweet?
America “needs a dictator.” Learn More
- Huckabee:“The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence. If anything, quite the contrary.”
- Trump: “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell .... I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise."
- Trump, inciting the insurrectionists: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And, if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”