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.
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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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
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.
“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”
- Michael Cohen's House Testimony: The Complete Transcripts and Case Documents Learn More
Newsmax founder Ruddy became a full-time Trump functionary, cashing in on the demand for pro-Trump news, building up his TV network, dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and watching his revenue rise. “He made his pact with the devil,” as Leamer put it. “He knew what Trump was.”
Newsmax went all in as Trump sought re-election (Ruddy made another former National Enquirer editor, David Perel, the editorial director) and Newsmax TV gave credence to every lie told by Trump up to and including speculation that Biden was “cognitively impaired” and that the election was stolen through chicanery involving Dominion Voting Systems.
While the January 6 Capitol riots were under way, Newsmax initially reported that it was only “6 to 10 people” breaching the building and speculated that they were antifa, later providing uncritical airtime to a Trump rioter who declared “this is our house, and we have the right to be here.” Learn More
Not content with his highly reported attempts to overturn the results of several 2020 state elections, which supported Biden, Hawley also supported the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, giving an arm-raised fist salute to the somewhat-deluded people who stormed the Capitol in hopes of stopping the certification of state’s election results.
In April 2021, Hawley, a leading Big Lie advocate, said Georgia's controversial new voter suppression law is like his own attempt in January to get millions of votes thrown out of the 2020 presidential election.
After voters in the 2022 midterm elections signaled "thumb-down" to GOP election denier candidates, Hawley played the blame game. He fingered Minority Leader McConnell, who early on signaled consternation over election deniers running as GOP candidates. McConnell was right.
Former Senator Danforth views his prior political support of Josh Hawley as "the worst mistake" of my life".
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Rupert Murdoch doesn’t believe Trump was cheated. But he’s letting Fox personalities spin tales that could permanently harm America.
Murdoch tries to have it both ways and it’s time for Fox to dispense with the bad-faith, bifurcated approach to the truth it has used for years.
His news operation — the one Trump tweets angrily about — has told its viewers that Trump lost the election and that his complaints about voter fraud are made up.
But in the morning, and at night, Fox allows its most popular stars – Hannity, Carlson, Ingraham, the Fox & Friends crew - to peddle lies to its audience under the guise that they’re merely offering their opinions.
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Together with Steven Bannon, Peter Navarro developed a plan to block the Electoral College vote count, called the 'Green Bay Sweep' .
Its purpose?
To pressure Vice President Mike Pence to misuse his role as the person officially counting electoral ballots and instead reject them, delaying Congressional certification of Biden’s victory in order to give give Republican-controlled state legislatures time to overturn the election through baseless assertions of voter fraud. Learn More
McEnany on the Big Lie and the Capitol Insurrection - All In:
December 2020: An increasing number of Republicans and now even President Trump’s own Justice Department have undermined the White House’s baseless claims of massive voter fraud. So Kayleigh McEnany appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Tuesday night with a defiant message: This evidence is real, it’s from real people, and we’re not backing down.
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- Except the appearance only reinforced the true lack of evidence that the Trump team has produced.
- Hannity asked McEnany two questions, and in each case, she responded with a talking point that has been roundly debunked for weeks.
Jan. 6, 2021:
Even Fox News’s Sean Hannity tried to stop the madness, in a text to Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany:
“Hey now, no more crazy people, no more stolen election talk. Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real. Many people will quit.”
Replied McEnany:“Love that. That’s the playbook.”
Yet in public McEnany remains adamant about her baseless claims of massive voter fraud and Trump's role in instigating the U.S. Capitol riots. Hannity too.
“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