“As Georgia’s top elections official, Raffensperger rebuked efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, turning him into a target of attack from Trump and his allies for years. That has created a deep tear between the Georgia secretary of state and Republicans in his state, many of whom continue to echo the president’s false claims of widespread fraud.
Now, Raffensperger is running for governor — and Trump just made 2020 the top issue in the GOP primary again.”
Trump is personally involving himself in the investigation of the 2020 election. The investigation itself seems driven by Trump’s false beliefs, or lies, that the election was stolen from him. This could be an attempt to undemocratically steal the 2026 midterms, ironically using false claims of election malfeasance to commit election malfeasance.
“Trump’s use of the FBI to pursue his obsession with the 2020 election is part of a pattern of the president transforming the federal government into his personal tool of vengeance.
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Georgia has been at the heart of Trump’s 2020 obsession. He infamously called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, asking that Raffensperger “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state. Raffensperger refused, noting that repeated reviews confirmed Democrat Joe Biden had narrowly won Georgia.
Those were part of a series of reviews in battleground states, often led by Republicans, that affirmed Biden’s win, including in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump also lost dozens of court cases challenging the election results and his own attorney general at the time said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
His allies who repeated his lies have been successfully sued for defamation. That includes former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who settled with two Georgia election workers after a court ruled he owed them $148 million for defaming them after the 2020 election.
Voting machine companies also have brought defamation cases against some conservative-leaning news sites that aired unsubstantiated claims about their equipment being linked to fraud in 2020. Fox News settled one such case by agreeing to pay $787 million after the judge ruled it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations were true.
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As part of his campaign of retribution, Trump also has spoken about wanting to criminally charge lawmakers who sat on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, suggesting protective pardons of them from Biden are legally invalid. He’s targeted a former cybersecurity appointee who assured the public in 2020 that the election was secure.
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“So much this administration has done is to make claims in social media rather than go to court,” Becker said. “I suspect this is more about poisoning the well for 2026.””
“Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
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Also among the corrections: DOJ revealed that a DOGE team member was briefly granted access to private Social Security profiles even after a court prohibited it. Shapiro said the access was never “utilized.” And in another instance, a DOGE team member had access for two months to a “call center profile” that contained private information.
“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was accessed,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”
“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” Shapiro indicated.”
The US electoral system pushes politicians to the left and right due to primaries, where politicians need to win over a small number of more polarized voters. We can change this system into non-partisan ranked choice elections so that politicians don’t need to bend over for the extremes.
The Trump administration told Texas to gerrymander based on race. Texas did as asked. A judge said the gerrymander was illegal because it was based on race. The Supreme Court said that despite the detailed investigation by the lower court that showed a race-based gerrymander, they don’t think it was based on race. They based that opinion on very little, and overturning a lower court based on one’s opinions of the facts is illegal, unless the lower court decision was overwhelmingly erroneous, which it was not in this case. The Supreme court also said it is too close to an election to make a change even though the elections are a year out. This means state legislatures can illegally gerrymander half the years because House elections are every two years.
The Supreme Court is clearly ruling on freedom of religion cases in a way that is biased toward Christianity and that allows Christians to risk and hurt non-Christians as long as they consider it a part of their religion.
The conservative court decided no matter how extreme a partisan gerrymander, it is legal. However, they said racial gerrymanders are illegal. A district judge dug into the Texas gerrymander and concluded that the actors involved explicitly gerrymandered based on race. Without disputing the facts, the conservatives on the Supreme Court rejected it.
“Bray also addressed threats of violence against many of his own members received after signaling they don’t support remapping the state ahead of next year’s midterm election.
“It’s unsettling for all of our members and people across the state to endure that,” he said of the dozen or so elected Indiana Republicans who have faced threats of pipe bombings, swattings and unsolicited deliveries of Domino’s pizza.”