Jack Smith reveals sweeping scope of bid to debunk Trump election machine claims

Special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday sharply rejected former President Donald Trump’s contention that foreign governments may have changed votes in the 2020 election, laying bare new details about his team’s extensive probe of the matter and its access to a vast array of senior intelligence officials in Trump’s administration

In a 45-page filing, Smith’s team describes interviewing more than a dozen of the top intelligence officials in Trump’s administration — from his director of national intelligence to the administrator of the NSA to Trump’s personal intelligence briefer — about any evidence that foreign governments had penetrated systems that counted votes in 2020.

From the document: The answer from every single official was no. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/jack-smith-reveals-sweeping-scope-of-bid-to-debunk-trump-election-machine-claims-00130965

Special Counsel Has Trump’s Cell Phone Data

Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election, Politico reports.

In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.183.0.pdf

A Catastrophic Climate ‘Tipping Point’ Is Imminent

The melting Greenland ice sheet is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise — and some experts are warning it could soon cross the threshold into a slow but irreversible death spiral.

A sweeping new scientific report, with contributions from more than 200 researchers, finds that continued warming could trigger not only the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet but a wide variety of tipping points in the Earth’s climate system. Once crossed, those thresholds would have unstoppable consequences. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/06/climate-tipping-point-emissions-ice-00130349
 

Russia Celebrates Republicans Blocking Aid to Ukraine With a Missile Barrage

Russia resumed its cruise missile attack on Kyiv after an 80-day hiatus early Friday morning, an action that critics say is the direct result of Republicans blocking a foreign aid package to help Ukraine.

The two-hour barrage was impeded by air defenses that thwarted all missiles headed for the Ukrainian capital, according to the Kyiv city military administration.

The missile barrage comes just two days after Senate Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill for Ukraine and Israel. Putin allies celebrated America’s right-wing party for what they interpreted as the first step in the total withdrawal of U.S. support from Ukraine. https://newrepublic.com/post/177432/russia-celebrates-republicans-blocking-aid-ukraine-missile-barrage
 

Fears of a NATO Withdrawal Rise as Trump Seeks a Return to Power

New York Times: In interviews over the past several months, more than a half-dozen current and former European diplomats — speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Mr. Trump should he win — said alarm was rising on Embassy Row and among their home governments that Mr. Trump’s return could mean not just the abandonment of Ukraine, but a broader American retreat from the continent and a gutting of the Atlantic alliance. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-2025-nato.html

Russia Has Suffered Staggeringly High Losses, U.S. Report Says

Since the beginning of the war Russia has suffered from a staggeringly high number of losses, according to another newly declassified assessment shared with Congress. At the start of the war the Russian army stood at 360,000 troops. Russia has lost 315,000 of those troops, forcing them to recruit and mobilize new recruits and convicts from their prison system.

Moscow’s equipment has also been crushed, according to the assessment. At the start of the war, Russia had 3,500 tanks but has lost 2,200, forcing them to pull 50 year old T-62 tanks from storage. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/us/politics/russia-intelligence-assessment.html

Netanyahu Rejects U.S. Plan for Postwar Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would block the Biden administration’s postwar plan to have the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza, the sharpest sign of Israeli pushback against the U.S. blueprint for administering the enclave after Israel’s invasion ends. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-rejects-u-s-plan-for-post-war-gaza-d60fc0c3
 

Texas Supreme Court Halts Court-Approved Abortion

The Texas Supreme Court late Friday temporarily halted a lower court order allowing a Dallas woman to obtain an abortion in spite of the state’s strict bans, after she learned her fetus has a fatal condition.

The state court’s ruling was in response to an appeal from Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who opposed the woman’s abortion. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/us/texas-abortion-court-ken-paxton.html
 

Arizona Is the Next Abortion Battleground

Arizona is poised to take center stage in state-level battles over abortion this week when its highest court weighs whether to allow a near-total ban on the procedure to take effect.

The case will kick off an election-year showdown over reproductive rights that is expected to heavily influence the outcomes of Arizona’s hypercompetitive 2024 races, including contests for Congress and the White House. Activists are gearing up to put an abortion-rights measure on the ballot in Arizona next year. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/arizona-is-the-next-abortion-battleground-afae13a3

Fifth of Voters Will Consider Voting for RFK Jr.

A new Monmouth poll finds finds only 1 in 4 voters express at least some enthusiasm about a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump next year and 1 in 5 may cast a vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2024.https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_121123/

Republicans are pushing Washington toward a shutdown, says Dem appropriations chief
Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) said that her party would not agree to a bill that slashes spending any further than the debt ceiling deal Congress reached earlier this year.
She also directly criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson for refusing to live with the agreement that’s been signed into law negotiated by his party with the President. https://www.semafor.com/article/12/11/2023/republicans-are-pushing-washington-toward-a-shutdown-says-dem-appropriations-chief

'Confused and unlawful': Trump allies accused of pushing sketchy data to sow 2024 election chaos

Donald Trump's allies are developing new methods to potentially steal the 2024 election after removing a safeguard in several Republican-led states, according to a report.

Nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, after Trump allies targeted the multi-state database with conspiracy theories, and prominent election denier Cleta Mitchell has played a central role in persuading them to move away from that bipartisan security effort and instead use an open-source EagleAI software.

Their voter lists are likely to be significantly less accurate, said David Becker, a co-founder and former executive director of ERIC who left earlier this year following a right-wing pressure campaign. There will be old records on the voter lists of people who are no longer eligible in the state that will fuel false claims of potential voter fraud, and there will be inaccurate records [of those] who are eligible in the state who moved within the state that they will likely not catch.

Faulty voter lists create long lines at the polls, delay the return of mail-in ballots and create other obstacles to determining winners, Becker said, and that gives more space for losers to falsely claim the election had been stolen from them.

The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers, he said.

ERIC was established in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts to help modernize outdated voter-registration data and give trustworthy information to remove deceased or ineligible voters, but EagleAI draws from public data sources such as newspaper obituaries and property tax records to allow activists to challenge thousands of voters at a time.

Georgia's Republican-dominated Columbia County this month became the first government user of EagleAI, although the state's director of elections, Blake Evans, said earlier this year that the presentations he's seen for the tool were confused and seem to steer counties towards unlawful list-maintenance activities. https://www.rawstory.com/eagleai/

Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate

When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison, the New York Times reports.

It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.

If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to come after the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of ‘vermin’ echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ ‘sad, miserable existence will be crushed’ under a new Trump administration. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-dictatorship.html
 

Silicon Valley Makes Its Anti-Biden Move

A group of tech insiders has quietly raised a half-million bucks to launch a new super PAC backing Dean Phillips, the long-shot Democratic presidential challenger. https://puck.news/silicon-valley-makes-its-anti-biden-move/

The Texas Historical Commission Removed Books on Slavery From Plantation Gift Shops

The Texas Historic Commission was pressured into removing books about slavery from the gifts shops of two slave plantation historic sites it oversees. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-historical-commission-book-removal/
 

Group Sues to Block Donald Trump From the Oregon Ballot

Austin, Texas-based nonprofit Free Speech for People has filed a lawsuit in the Oregon Supreme Court seeking to block Donald Trump from Oregon’s 2024 ballot. https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/12/06/group-sues-to-block-donald-trump-from-the-oregon-ballot/

Inside the Troll Army Waging Trump’s Online Campaign

Led by a little-known podcaster and life coach, this meme team has spent much of the year flooding social media with content that lionizes the former president, promotes his White House bid and brutally denigrates his opponents.

Much of the group, which refers to itself as Trump’s Online War Machine, operates anonymously… Cheered on by Mr. Trump, the group traffics freely in misinformation, artificial intelligence and digital forgeries known as deepfakes. Its memes are riddled with racist stereotypes, demeaning tropes about L.G.B.T.Q. people and broad scatological humor. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/politics/trump-meme-trolls-2024.html

Trump Legal Defense Fund’s Top Expense Was Mar-a-Lago

New tax filings show Trump’s legal defense fund raising about $1.6 million over the last six months and spending less than $30,000. But more notable than how little the legal defense group has spent is what they didn’t spend it on—namely, legal services—as well as what they paid for: a party at Mar-a-Lago. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-legal-defense-funds-biggest-expense-was-mar-a-lago

Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas

For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them…

Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting.

The Qatari payments, while ostensibly a secret, have been widely known and discussed in the Israeli news media for years. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html

About half of Republicans now say the U.S. is providing too much aid to Ukraine

A new Pew Research Center survey, conducted Nov. 27 to Dec. 3, 2023, among 5,203 members of the Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel, finds that 48% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the U.S. is giving too much aid to Ukraine. This share is up modestly from June, when 44% said this, and is substantially higher than it was at earlier stages in the war. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/12/08/about-half-of-republicans-now-say-the-us-is-providing-too-much-aid-to-ukraine/
 

Missouri Republicans propose bills to allow murder charges for women who get abortions

Missouri Republican lawmakers are pushing a pair of bills that would allow for women to be charged with murder for getting an abortion in the state.

The proposed legislation would give fetuses the same rights as human beings, which would allow for criminal charges to be filed against anyone who gets an abortion, helps someone get an abortion or provides abortion care in the state, which implemented a near-total ban on the procedure after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/government-politics/missouri-republicans-propose-bills-to-allow-murder-charges-for-women-who-get-abortions/article_53b406c0-95c4-11ee-a67d-9339832ec1a0.html

Mike Johnson Compares Himself to Moses at Christian Nationals Gala

In a keynote speech to a gathering of Christian nationalist lawmakers Tuesday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses, leading the GOP conference — and America — through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

Said Johnson: “The Lord began to wake me up, through this three-week process, in the middle of night to speak to me.”

He added: “Now at the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses… Ultimately 13 people ran for the post. And the Lord kept telling me to, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ So I waited, I waited. And then at the end… the Lord said, ‘Now step forward.’” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-johnson-moses-christian-nationalist-gala-1234918565/

Nevada GOP ‘fake electors’ indicted for falsely claiming Trump won state’s 2020 election

A Nevada grand jury has indicted the six Republicans — including the chair of the Nevada Republican Party — who falsely pledged Nevada’s electoral votes to Donald Trump following the 2020 election despite President Joe Biden’s victory in the state. https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/nevada-gop-fake-electors-indicted-for-falsely-claiming-trump-won-states-2020-election

Obamacare Has Become Even More Popular Over Biden’s Presidency

A new Morning Consult poll finds 57% of voters approve of the Affordable Care Act, up 5 points over the past year.

Just 32% of voters said the health care law should be repealed partially or completely, lower than at any other time in Morning Consult surveys conducted since 2017. https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/obamacare-polling-popularity

GOP Wife in Sex Scandal Erased From Conservative Site

Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler appears to have departed her role at the conservative Leadership Institute, which removed her name from its website in the wake of a three-way sex scandal and criminal probe involving her husband, the Daily Beast reports.

The move comes days after a local journalism watchdog revealed that Sarasota police are investigating allegations that her husband, Florida Republican chairman Christian Ziegler, raped a woman with whom the couple had previously had a ménage à trois. https://www.thedailybeast.com/bridget-ziegler-wife-of-florida-gop-boss-christian-ziegler-erased-from-leadership-instit?source=twitter&via=desktop

NOTE: Florida Republican Party Chair Christian Ziegler is refusing widespread entreaties to resign amid a rape investigation, citing Donald Trump’s silence on the matter as an indicator of tacit support. https://themessenger.com/politics/florida-gop-chair-facing-rape-investigation-plays-trump-card-amid-former-presidents-silence

Georgia prosecutors predict jail sentences in Trump 2020 election case

Fulton County prosecutors have signaled they want prison sentences in the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and his top allies for allegedly violating the racketeering statute as part of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to exchanges in private emails.

Wrote Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis:  We have a long road ahead. Long after these folks are in jail, we will still be practicing law.

The previously unreported emails, between Willis and defense lawyers, open a window on to the endgame envisioned by prosecutors on her team – which could inform legal strategies ahead of a potential trial next year, such as approaches toward plea deal negotiations. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/georgia-fani-willis-donald-trump-election-trial-prison-sentence

Trump’s ‘dictator’ remark puts 2024 campaign right where Biden wants it

Donald Trump keeps returning the 2024 presidential race to the ground where Joe Biden wants to fight it.

After Trump told a Fox News town hall he would not be a dictator upon returning to office ‘other than Day One,’ the Biden campaign pounced. It highlighted Trump’s remarks as another moment in which the GOP frontrunner showcased his undemocratic and dangerous plans for a possible second term. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/07/trumps-dictator-2024-campaign-biden-00130488
 

Candidate for Santos' old seat is convicted on Jan. 6 charges after testifying he had 'no idea' Congress met in the Capitol

A New York man who is running for the congressional seat previously held by George Santos was convicted this week of charges relating to the Jan. 6 riot after he testified at his trial that he didn't know Congress convened inside the Capitol.

Philip Sean Grillo, of Queens, was found guilty Tuesday of the felony charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, along with a series of misdemeanors like entering restricted grounds and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, the Justice Department said in a news release. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/candidate-george-santos-old-seat-convicted-jan-6-charges-testifying-no-rcna128442
 

THE DAILY GRILL

“What’s in America’s best interest is to accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians and we need to bring this war to a close. The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 border was preposterous – nobody actually believed it.”— Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/11/republican-senator-jd-vance-ukraine-cede-land-russia-war-invasion

VERSUS

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Monday dug into Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) recent remarks against sending further aid to Ukraine, calling the Ohio Republican’s comments “total and unmitigated bullshit.” https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4354701-tillis-calls-vance-remarks-on-ukraine-total-and-unmitigated-bull/