“Supporters of former President Donald Trump privately discussed ways they could gain access to the Michigan Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, when the battleground state’s presidential electors met,” the Detroit News reports.
“The conversations reveal some of Trump’s Michigan backers were considering further escalating their unsuccessful effort to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory by getting inside the building where the state’s true 16 electors were scheduled to meet to solidify the result.”
“In the weeks after the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump’s allies sent fake certificates to the National Archives declaring that Trump won seven states that he actually lost. The documents had no impact on the outcome of the election, but they are yet another example of how Team Trump tried to subvert the Electoral College — a key line of inquiry for the January 6 committee,” CNN reports.
“The fake certificates were created by Trump allies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico, who sought to replace valid presidential electors from their states with a pro-Trump slate.”
Michigan Live: Republicans who falsified Michigan electoral college vote under scrutiny from Congress.
President Biden called the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection an “attempted coup.”
Said Biden: “That’s why we’re here today: to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle, forces that attempted a coup, a coup against the legally expressed will of the American people by sowing doubt, inventing charges of fraud and seeking to steal the 2020 election from the people.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) made it clear that he didn’t subscribe to Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen from him, Politico reports.
Said Rounds: “As a part of our due diligence, we looked at over 60 different accusations made in multiple states. While there were some irregularities, there were none of the irregularities which would have risen to the point where they would have changed the vote outcome in a single state.”
Nearly all of the 147 Republicans who voted to reject the 2020 presidential election results wouldn’t tell the HuffPost if they regret that vote.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro told Rolling Stone about his plan to block the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2021, saying “There were over 100 congressmen ready to implement the plan.”
Said Navarro: “One of two things could happen. They go back there to the states, they look at it and they say, ‘Nope. It’s certified.’ The votes come back, and that would be it. Fair enough.”
He added: “But the more likely scenario based on our assessment of the evidence was that states would withdraw any certification. And the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives. And even though the House is controlled by Democrats, the way votes would be counted in a presidential election decided by the House, Trump would almost certainly win.”
“Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence,” the Washington Post reports.
“The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously — turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.”
Philip Rotner: “Substitute Rudy Giuliani—or Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan or any other Trump cultist—for just five people who held state or federal office at the time of the 2020 election and think about what might have happened.”
The latest Cook Political Report ratings for the House show Democrats defending 8 Toss Up seats in next year’s midterm elections, while Republicans are defending six Toss Ups.
However, three Democratic-held seats are now rated Lean Republican and another two are rated Likely Republican. In comparison, just one Republican-held seat is currently Lean Democrat.
Republicans need to net just five seats in take control of the House, a goal these ratings show is clearly within reach.
David Wasserman has some important caveats, including the fact that 19 states still aren’t included on this chart because they haven’t finalized district lines.
It also doesn’t include two “safe flips” from Democrat to Republican in Georgia and North Carolina redistricting.
A new University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll finds 71% of Republicans — and one-third of the nation — continue to believe that Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was illegitimate.
Olivia Nuzzi called Dr. Mehmet Oz’s wife for a profile she was writing on him and Lisa Oz quickly hung up on her — or at least she thought she did.
“Dr. and Mrs. Oz did not or could not hear me, and they did not realize that, rather than end the phone call, Lisa Oz had mistakenly connected her device to what sounded like the sound system of a vehicle, meaning that as they engaged in paranoid conversation and argument for more than four minutes, I remained on the line, hearing every word of it.”
Politico covers some of the whoppers, but this is my favorite:
On the morning of Jan. 6, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt appeared on Megyn Kelly’s podcast and was asked a question on the minds of seemingly every political observer in America: “Joe Biden’s going to get certified today. What does Trump do over the next two weeks before the inauguration? I mean, he’s still going to be saying what he’s saying about the electoral process, and there’s a big rally in D.C. today, but what do you think we can expect?”
Hewitt responded: “I would just say to everybody: It will be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC) told Politico that he regrets his vote against certifying two states’ electoral votes for President Joe Biden in the hours after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Said Rice: “In retrospect I should have voted to certify. Because President Trump was responsible for the attack on the Capitol.”
He added: “In the wee hours of that disgraceful night, while waiting for the Capitol of our great country to be secured, I knew I should vote to certify. But because I had made a public announcement of my intent to object, I did not want to go back on my word. So yeah, I regret my vote to object.”
“A member of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign arranged and participated in a meeting at which a Georgia election worker says she was pressed by a Chicago publicist to falsely admit voting fraud,” Reuters reports.
“The revelation directly ties a senior figure in the former president’s political operation to an extraordinary late-night Jan. 4 meeting in which a $16-an-hour election worker faced pressure to implicate herself in a baseless conspiracy theory, stoked by Trump himself, as he sought to overturn his Georgia election loss.”
Daily Beast: “New documents show Kanye West’s doomed White House campaign—styled as an ‘independent’ third-party effort—appears to have disguised potentially millions of dollars in services it received from a secretive network of Republican Party operatives, including advisers to the GOP elite and a managing partner at one of the top conservative political firms in the country.”
“Potentially even more alarming? The Kanye 2020 campaign committee did not even report paying some of these advisers, and used an odd abbreviation for another—moves which campaign finance experts say appear designed to mask the association between known GOP operatives and the campaign, and could constitute a violation of federal laws.”
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“Michael Gableman talked up his review of the 2020 election at a Republican event over the weekend, telling the crowd he wouldn’t back down from Democrats and tipping his hand about his preferences in GOP primaries,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
“The former state Supreme Court justice at times has tried to portray himself as impartial and at others sought to stir up the Republican base. He’s on deck to speak at another Republican event later this month.”
An Associated Press review “of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.”
“Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.”
☑️ Life in the Middle: Marginalized Moderate Senators In the Era of Polarization is available on Amazon. It takes a deep dive into the power of moderates and why we see them behave so precariously.
☑️ SECRETS by Fred Ellis Brock, the 3rd novel in The Seven trilogy, now available on Amazon. A thriller out of today's headlines: murder, treason, and UFO conspiracies. Wyatt-MacKenzie, publisher.
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.