“A senator at Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI director pressed him to articulate a simple truth: Joe Biden won the 2020 election,” the New York Times reports.
“Under three minutes of questioning from Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, Mr. Patel conceded only that Mr. Biden was ‘certified’ as the president.”
Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”
“Wisconsin prosecutors filed 10 additional felony charges Tuesday against two attorneys and an aide to President-elect Donald Trump who advised Trump in 2020 as part of a plan to submit paperwork falsely claiming that the Republican had won the battleground state that year,” the AP reports.
New York Times: “With Election Day only three days away, Mr. Trump is already claiming the Democrats are ‘a bunch of cheats,’ as his allies in battleground states spread distorted reports of mishaps at the polls to push a narrative of widespread fraud.”
“Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a ‘crushing victory,’ as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose.”
“And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted, a move that ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Sunday refused to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, USA Today reports.
Said Johnson: “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020.”
Mother Jones: Top Trump allies help set the stage for election chaos.
Donald Trump admitted on a podcast that he “lost by a whisker” in the 2020 presidential election, The Independent reports.
Following the indictment of Donald Trump’s allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Arizona, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told Margaret Hoover that those efforts came “quite close” to succeeding.
Said Richer: “I think we put ourselves in a pretty perilous situation.”
“After Arizona became the fourth state to bring charges against fake electors involved in the Trump campaign’s alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election Wednesday night, eyes turned to the three remaining states where the effort took place: New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” the Arizona Republic reports.
“Officials in New Mexico and Pennsylvania have said they are unlikely to prosecute Trump allies who sent documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence purporting to certify Trump won the election in their state, because those fake electors placed certain limits on their claims. That leaves Wisconsin as the state most likely still to pursue charges.”
“A state grand jury in Arizona on Wednesday indicted so-called ‘fake electors’ who backed then-President Donald Trump in 2020, following a sprawling investigation into the alleged efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the presidential election in the state,” NBC News reports.
“One month after the 2020 election, 11 Trump supporters convened at the Arizona GOP’s headquarters in Phoenix to sign a certificate claiming to be Arizona’s 11 electors to the Electoral College, though Biden won the state by 10,457 votes and his electors were certified by state officials.”
“The state Republican Party documented the signing of the certificate in a social media post and sent it to Congress and the National Archives.”
The upcoming solar eclipse path on April 8th voted for Donald Trump in 2020 by nearly seven percentage points.
Sasha Issenberg: “Amid reinvigorated interest in the electoral impact of Biden’s advanced age, these never-before-reported details reveal how his advisers attempted to manage this storyline during his successful presidential campaign and shed light on how they think about doing so today.”
Washington Post: “Two attorneys who advanced a strategy to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election by organizing rosters of Republicans to falsely portray Donald Trump as the winner of several states, have reached a legal settlement in Wisconsin with the state’s two rightful electors and a Democratic voter, ending a lawsuit.”
“As part of the settlement, the two lawyers — James Troupis, a former Dane County judge who oversaw Trump’s legal efforts in Wisconsin, and Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to try to invalidate Joe Biden’s win by convening Republican electors in seven states — released a trove of their communications Monday about their work after the 2020 election. The attorneys also agreed to not facilitate or send documents on behalf of future presidential electors who are not certified as true electors — unless there is explicit language that the electoral votes would be counted if legal challenges resulted in changes to electoral outcomes.”
“The former chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party said he feared for his family’s safety when he signed paperwork as a false elector for former president Donald Trump,” Wisconsin Public Radio reports.
“Andrew Hitt said he was scared of what Trump supporters would do to him and his family if courts later overturned President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin.”
Said Hitt: “If I didn’t do that, and the court did throw out those votes, it would have been solely my fault that Trump wouldn’t have won Wisconsin. Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?”
“Virginia conservatives have pointed to the prosecution of Prince William County’s former top election official for allegedly fudging 2020 vote counts as the strongest evidence available that fraud was a real concern in the last presidential contest,” the Virginia Mercury reports.
“On Thursday, after the case against former Registrar Michele White was dropped, the county’s elections office revealed that the tabulation errors actually worked in favor of former President Donald Trump.”
A new CBS News poll finds 39% of respondents do not consider President Biden to be the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.
“One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald Trump expressed deep regret about his participation,” the New York Times reports.
“The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors. In October, Ms. Nessel’s office dropped all charges against Mr. Renner after he agreed to cooperate.”
“The lie materialized on Friday afternoon and went viral on far-right social media accounts, just as a federal jury ruled that former President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani must pay $148 million to former Fulton County election staffers he falsely accused of voter fraud,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“The post wrongly claimed that Gov. Brian Kemp’s legal staff notified Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that more than 17,000 “invalid” votes were tallied in Fulton County in 2020, echoing debunked conspiracy theories that Trump’s allies have pushed for years.”
“The accusation was quickly repudiated by state officials, but that didn’t stop Trump’s loyalists from spreading it.”
“In a legal settlement Wednesday, the 10 Republicans who signed official-looking paperwork falsely purporting Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2020 have agreed to withdraw their inaccurate filings, acknowledge Joe Biden won the presidency and not serve as presidential electors in 2024 or in any election where Trump is on the ballot,” the Washington Post reports.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.