But Scalise has echoed much of the same rhetoric:
In 2021, DeSantis endorsed President Donald Trump’s fight to hold onto his job, floating the idea that GOP-controlled legislatures in battleground states won by Democratic nominee Joe Biden could appoint Trump electors and override the popular vote.
In a playbook Republicans across the country are using after President Joe Biden’s decisive victory, DeSantis announced his support for new restrictions on voting by mail and on ballot drop boxes, needed, he claims, to clean up election nightmares that have plagued the state's reputation since the neck-and-neck George Bush vs. Al Gore fight in 2000.
As a state governor he has campaigned for election deniers, after bragging before the 2020 presidential election.that he had removed local election officials and even in the middle of the pandemic had not expanded mail-in voting.
More from mentor Trump's playbook? In 2022 DeSantis wrongly arrested Black voters . . . for voting.
And now this . . .
NYTimes: Today’s Top News: DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Loss, and More
Scalise is seemingly less aligned with the hard right on these issues than Jordan, who leads the House GOP’s “weaponization” subcommittee and has spun elaborate conspiracy theories.
- In August, he alleged that federal law enforcement is “being abused to go after political opponents.” He also baselessly suggested that Trump’s indictments are politically timed.
- Last year, he claimed that the FBI agents searching Mar-a-Lago went “rogue,” prompting pushback from a Fox News host.
- After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, Scalise called the events at the Capitol “domestic terrorism.” But he voted to reject Biden electors that day and later voted against impeaching Trump.
- Scalise last month called the evidence against Biden “incredibly devastating already,” despite the GOP’s own witnesses at the first impeachment inquiry hearing acknowledging there was little direct evidence tying Biden to anything nefarious.
"It was Mr. Meadows’s critical failure to tell the president what he didn’t want to hear that helped lead to the country’s greatest political scandal, and his own precipitous fall."
- Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.
Mark Meadows Spills to Special Counsel About Trump’s Election Lies: Report
Mark Meadows has reportedly testified before a federal grand jury impaneled by Special Counsel Jack Smith in exchange for immunity from prosecution in the Justice Department’s election interference case against Donald Trump.
According to ABC News, the former White House chief of staff has testified under oath at least three times, twice before the special counsel’s office and once to a grand jury, regarding the investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Meadows reportedly testified that he had told the former president the election was lost and, according to sources, testified to the DOJ that “obviously we didn’t win.”
As previously reported by Politico, Meadows’ testimony to Georgia prosecutors has provided hints that he may be prepared to flip on Trump there, as well.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-meadows-flips-trump-spills-jack-smith Learn More
November 2021: Jared Kushner advising Trump to 'pursue his legal remedies' to the election.
June 2022: Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.
He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”
Ms. Cheney: “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required.
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Ingraham: Two Tales of A City (under Siege):
As the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol unfolded, Meadows received texts from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, as well as Hannity, according to the newly released communications.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham wrote. “This is hurting all of us."
Ingraham’s private missives, however, differed starkly from what she said on her show later that evening, when she began whitewashing the violence of the day and claiming the attacks were “antithetical” to the Trump movement.
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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."
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Sept. 2013: Bondi, as Florida attorney general, drops probe into Trump University days following $25,000 donation from the future president.
July 2016: Bondi gives a speech at the Republican National Convention, during which she led "Lock her up" chants directed at the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.[39]
Nov. 2019: Bondi hired by the Trump administration to help the White House during Trump's first impeachment proceedings, being given special Government employee status, allowing Bondi to continue working for the Arab lobby.[40][41][42] Her position was described the following month as being to "attack the process" of the impeachment inquiry.[43]
Jan. 2020: Bondi named as part of Trump's defense team for the Senate impeachment trial.
Nov. 2020: “We’ve won Pennsylvania,” Bondi asserted. Trump’s campaign did not win Pennsylvania.
Nov. 2023: Bondi to lead new state chapter of new America First Policy Institute
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On the Hill, the different ideological factions inside the Party were known as the Five Families; the most unruly of these was the House Freedom Caucus, a group of thirty-three hard-line anti-institutionalists. The closest the conference came to a proactive message was its vow to investigate Joe Biden and to fight the scourge of the federal bureaucracy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/economy-default-2022-republican-midterm-elections/671707/
On January 2, 2021, Jordan led a conference call with Trump to discuss how they could delay certifying the election. One of the ideas was to encourage Trump supporters, via social media, to march on the Capitol on January 6th. Jordan spoke routinely with the President by phone during the next few days, including twice on January 6th, and he texted Trump’s chief of staff with advice on how to get Vice-President Mike Pence not to count electoral votes. Hours after the insurrection, Jordan stationed himself next to the House floor to whip votes against certification. Before leaving office, Trump gave him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan, Trump has said, “is a warrior for me.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/jim-jordans-conspiratorial-quest-for-power
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"John. C. Eastman, a key legal architect of the effort to keep Mr. Trump in power using bogus slates of Trump electors in swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/14/us/politics/trump-georgia-indictment-key-players. John Eastman drafted the memo laying out a plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to buck his ceremonial duty to certify the election results. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/trump-indictment-sidesteps-details-unearthed-jan-6-panel/
The convergence of someone who took part in the legal attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power with those who were central to bringing the force of a crowd to bear as Congress was certifying the election results was a powerful reminder of how many mysteries remain where Jan. 6 is concerned. But Mr. Chesebro hinted at those connections in an email exchange with John Eastman . . . . In late December 2020, the two lawyers discussed how to get a case before the Supreme Court. Mr. Chesebro told Mr. Eastman as they discussed filing a legal action that in terms of the highest court, the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/kenneth-chesebro-jan-6-trump
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“President Trump is wrong,” Mr. Pence said at the time. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
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