>>15676401

Wisconsin has seen major voter fraud and irregularities, and they're acting on it! - President Donald J. Trump

ICYMI: "Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

https://nytimes.com/2022/02/19/us/

Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

False claims that Donald J. Trump can be reinstalled in the White House are picking up steam — and spiraling further from reality as they go.

State Representative Timothy Ramthun of Wisconsin is running for governor on a platform of decertifying the 2020 election and reinstalling Donald J. Trump as president.

State Representative Timothy Ramthun of Wisconsin is running for governor on a platform of decertifying the 2020 election and reinstalling Donald J. Trump as president.Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

Reid J. Epstein

By Reid J. Epstein

Feb. 19, 2022

MADISON, Wis. — First, Wisconsin Republicans ordered an audit of the 2020 election. Then they passed a raft of new restrictions on voting. And in June, they authorized the nation’s only special counsel investigation into 2020.

Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald J. Trump lost the state by 20,682 votes, an increasingly vocal segment of the Republican Party is getting behind a new scheme: decertifying the results of the 2020 presidential election in hopes of reinstalling Mr. Trump in the White House.

Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than the last, but the Republican effort to overturn the election results here is picking up steam rather than fading away — and spiraling further from reality as it goes. The latest turn, which has been fueled by Mr. Trump, bogus legal theories and a new candidate for governor, is creating chaos in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its push to win the contests this year for governor and the Senate.

The situation in Wisconsin may be the most striking example of the struggle by Republican leaders to hold together their party when many of its most animated voters simply will not accept the reality of Mr. Trump’s loss.

In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker who has allowed vague theories about fraud to spread unchecked, is now struggling to rein them in. Even Mr. Vos’s careful attempts have turned election deniers sharply against him.

“This is a real issue,” said Timothy Ramthun, the Republican state representative who has turned his push to decertify the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun has asserted that if the Wisconsin Legislature decertifies the results and rescinds the state’s 10 electoral votes — an action with no basis in state or federal law — it could set off a movement that would oust President Biden from office.

“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We’re not fringe.”

>>15676418

Although support for the decertification campaign is difficult to measure, it wouldn’t take much to make an impact in a state where elections are regularly decided by narrow margins. Mr. Ramthun is drawing crowds, and his campaign has already revived Republicans’ divisive debate over false claims of fraud in 2020. Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin Republicans were not confident in the state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to an October poll from the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.

“This is just not what the Republican Party needs right now,” said Rob Swearingen, a Republican state representative from the conservative Northwoods. “We shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves about what happened, you know, a year and a half ago.”

Wisconsin has the nation’s most active decertification effort. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, along with candidates for Congress, has called for recalling the state’s electoral votes. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Mr. Biden’s victory there, but no organized effort materialized.

In Wisconsin, the decertification push has turned Republican politics on its head. After more than a decade of Republican leaders marching in lock-step with their base, the party is hobbled by infighting and it’s Democrats who are aligned behind Gov. Tony Evers, who is seeking a second term in November.

“Republicans now are arguing over whether we want democracy or not,” Mr. Evers said in an interview on Friday.

Mr. Ramthun, a 64-year-old lawmaker who lives in a village of 2,000 people an hour northwest of Milwaukee, has ridden his decertification push to become a sudden folk hero to the party’s Trump wing. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, has hosted Mr. Ramthun on his podcast. At party events, he shows off a 72-page presentation in which he claims, falsely, that legislators have the power to declare Wisconsin’s election results invalid and recall the state’s electoral votes.

Mr. Ramthun has received bigger applause at local Republican gatherings than the leading candidates for governor, and last weekend he joined the race himself, announcing his candidacy at a campaign kickoff where he was introduced by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has financed numerous efforts to undermine and overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump offered public words of encouragement.

“Who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent election?” the former president said in a statement.

It did not take long before the state’s top Republicans were responding to Mr. Ramthun’s election conspiracies. Within days, both of his Republican rivals for governor released new plans to strengthen partisan control of Wisconsin’s elections.

During a radio appearance on Thursday, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the party establishment’s preferred candidate, refused to admit that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election — something she had already conceded last September. Ms. Kleefisch declined to be interviewed.

Kevin Nicholson, a former Marine with backing from the right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, declined in an interview to say whether the election was legitimate, but he said there was “no legal path” to decertifying the results.

Mr. Vos spent nearly an hour Friday on a Milwaukee conservative talk radio show defending his opposition to decertification from skeptical callers.

“It is impossible — it cannot happen,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I can say that.”

Image

A Tuesday rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison drew about 250 people who called for decertifying the 2020 presidential election. Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

Yet, Mr. Ramthun claims to have the grass-roots energy on his side. On Tuesday, he drew a crowd of about 250 people for a two-hour rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Terry Brand, the Republican Party chairman in rural Langlade County, chartered a bus for two dozen people for the three-hour ride. Mr. Brand in January oversaw the first county G.O.P. condemnation of Mr. Vos, calling for the leader’s resignation for blocking the decertification effort. At the rally, Mr. Brand stood holding a sign that said “Toss Vos.”

“People are foaming at the mouth over this issue,” he said, listening intently as speakers offered both conspiracy theories and assurances to members of the crowd that they were of sound mind.

“You’re not crazy,” Janel Brandtjen, the chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee, told the crowd.

One speaker tied Mr. Vos, through a college roommate and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, to the false claims circulating in right-wing media that Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on Mr. Trump. Another was introduced under a pseudonym, then promptly announced herself as a candidate for lieutenant governor.

The rally closed with remarks from Harry Wait, an organizer of a conservative group in Racine County called HOT Government, an acronym for honest, open and transparent.

The Trump Investigations

Card 1 of 6

Numerous inquiries. Since former President Donald Trump left office, there have been many investigations and inquiries into his businesses and personal affairs. Here’s a list of those ongoing:

Investigation into criminal fraud. The Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump Organization, engaged in criminal fraud by intentionally submitting false property values to potential lenders.

Investigation into tax evasion. As part of their investigation, in July 2021, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with orchestrating a 15-year scheme to evade taxes. A trial in that case is scheduled for summer 2022.

Investigation into election interference. The Atlanta district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation of election interference in Georgia by Mr. Trump and his allies.

Investigation into the Trump National Golf Club. Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office in Westchester County, N.Y., appear to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the property’s value to reduce its taxes.

Civil investigation into Trump Organization. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, is seeking to question Mr. Trump under oath in a civil fraud investigation of his business practices.

>>15676418

“I want to remind everybody,” Mr. Wait said, “that yesterday’s conspiracies may be today’s reality.”

Mr. Ramthun says he has questioned the result of every presidential election in Wisconsin since 1996. (He does not make an exception for the one Republican victory in that period: Mr. Trump’s in 2016.) He has pledged to consider ending the use of voting machines and to conduct an “independent full forensic physical cyber audit” of the 2020 election — and also of the 2022 election, regardless of how it turns out.

Mr. Ramthun has adopted a biblical slogan — “Let there be light” — a reference to his claim that Mr. Vos is hiding the truth from voters. If Wisconsin pulls back its electoral votes, Mr. Ramthun said, other states may follow.

(American presidents can be removed from office only by impeachment or by a vote of the cabinet.)

Image

Robin Vos, the speaker of Wisconsin State Assembly, told reporters on Tuesday that Republicans aiming to undo Mr. Trump’s loss were wrong to be angry with him.Credit…Andy Manis/Associated Press

All of this has become too much for Mr. Vos, who before the Trump era was a steady Republican foot soldier focused on taxes, spending and labor laws.

Mr. Vos has often appeased his party’s election conspiracists, expressing his own doubts about who really won in Wisconsin, calling for felony charges against Wisconsin’s top election administrators and authorizing an investigation into the 2020 election, which is still underway.

Now, even as he draws the line on decertification, Mr. Vos has tried to placate his base and plead for patience. He announced this week the Assembly plans to vote on a new package of voting bills. (Mr. Evers said in the interview on Friday that he would veto any new restrictions.)

“It’s simply a matter of misdirected anger,” he said, of the criticism he’s facing. “They have already assumed that the Democrats are hopeless, and now they are focused on those of us who are trying to get at the truth, hoping we do more.”

Other Republicans in the state are also walking a political tightrope — refusing to accept Mr. Biden’s victory while avoiding taking a position on Mr. Ramthun’s decertification effort.

“Evidence might be out there, that is something other people are working on,” said Ron Tusler, who sits on the Assembly’s elections committee. “It’s too early to be sure but it’s possible we try it later.”

State Senator Kathy Bernier is the only one of Wisconsin’s 82 Republican state legislators who has made a public case that Mr. Trump lost the state fairly, without widespread fraud.

Ms. Bernier, the chairwoman of the State Senate’s elections committee, in November asked the Wisconsin Legislature’s attorneys to weigh in on the legality of decertifying an election — it is not possible, they said. In December, she called for an end to the Assembly’s investigation into 2020. Three weeks later, she announced she won’t seek re-election this year.

“I have no explanation as to why legislators want to pursue voter-fraud conspiracy theories that have not been proven,” Ms. Bernier said in an interview. “They should not do that. It’s dangerous to our democratic republic. They need to step back and only speak about things that they know and understand and can do. And outside of that, they should button it up.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/us/politics/wisconsin-election-decertification.html

ICYMI: Majority of Donald Trump-Backed Candidates Expected to Win Midterms—Bookmakers

https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/

Majority of Donald Trump-Backed Candidates Expected to Win Midterms—Bookmakers

By Anders Anglesey On 2/16/22 at 1:09 PM EST

Most of the Republican candidates backed by former President Donald Trump are expected to win their midterm races in November, according to a betting aggregator.

The odds for his preferred contenders demonstrate that Trump still has a firm grip on the Republican Party, US Bookies has suggested.

The aggregator's predictions will be welcomed by Trump loyalists who are hoping to re-take the House and the Senate from the Democrats in November. Republicans have opened up a significant lead ahead of the midterms, a new poll has found.

Read more

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Maxine Waters Tells Opponent They 'Got Tricked' Into Running Against Her

Ron Johnson, who is running for re-election as senator for Wisconsin, has the best odds of the Trump allies. He is the overwhelming favorite to win his race at 1-10, according to US Bookies.

A US Bookies spokesperson said: "Control of Congress will likely come down to a few key races during the 2022 midterm elections and it looks like Donald Trump's endorsement will be a significant factor in securing Republican control.

"Most Trump-endorsed candidates are odds-on favorites to win, with some of the only exceptions being gubernatorial candidates."

Trump ally Herschel Walker has odds of 1-3 to win a Georgia Senate seat lost to the Democrat Raphael Warnock in a special election in 2021.

US Bookies has also highlighted the political cost to Republicans who oppose Trump, particularly Rep. Liz Cheney of Wisconsin.

Trump has repeatedly targeted Cheney, who said last week that the hearings of the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot would show the violence was caused by his baseless claims of election fraud. Cheney is vice chair of the committee and one of the former president's fiercest critics in the GOP.

The US Bookies spokesperson said: "Liz Cheney's story proves that not only does Trump's endorsement usually help Republicans win elections but that speaking against the former president also comes with grim results.

>>15676456

"Cheney now holds 4-1 to be re-elected to her seat in the House of Representatives, with Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman being the odds-on 1-3 favorite."

However, some GOP candidates who are competing against Trump picks are holding their own. In Alabama, the former president has endorsed Mo Brooks for Senate.

A US Bookies spokesperson added: "Of the congressional candidates endorsed by Trump who are favorites to win their respective elections, Mo Brooks has the worst odds. Brooks' 5-4 odds to win are best among all candidates, but fellow Republican Katie Britt is very close behind at 11-8."

Newsweek has contacted Trump's office for comment.

Although betting on elections is not legal in any U.S. state, US Bookies said its aggregate figures were for "illustrative purposes" and based on betting markets in Europe and the rest of the world, where it is legal.

Some polls have shown the Democrats gaining ground in recent weeks. Analysis from poll tracker FiveThirtyEight found there had been an upswing of support for the Democratic Party since late January, but it still needed to close a big gap in order to keep control of the House and Senate.

Should Republicans make significant gains in November it will allow them to significantly weaken President Joe Biden's agenda.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-backed-candidates-expected-win-midterms-2022-bookmakers-1679867

Notable

>>15676456, >>15676460 ICYMI: Majority of Donald Trump-Backed Candidates Expected to Win Midterms—Bookmakers

Notable

>>15676418, >>15676420, >>15676426 President Donald J. Trump ICYMI: "Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

ICYMI: Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?

https://thedeskofdonaldtrump.com/

Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?

‘Benevolent posse’ or partisans for Hillary Clinton? John Durham has the answer.

The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.

Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.

The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.

In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment

Mr. Joffe’s legal team continues to insist he is “apolitical” and wasn’t aware his lawyer, Michael Sussmann, was billing Team Clinton. (A grand jury impaneled by Mr. Durham indicted Mr. Sussmann in September on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI. Mr. Sussmann pleaded not guilty.) The press initially tried to ignore the story, then resorted to parsing the definition of “spying,” justifying the accused, and trashing Mr. Durham.

>>15676501

The problem for the last-gaspers is that the techies they seek to defend have already put too much on the record that suggests their real concern was a President Trump, not national security. Start with the company that the “apolitical” Mr. Joffe kept. One of his colleagues involved in the project and referenced in the Sussmann indictment is Paul Vixie, whose Twitter feed sports a long record of liberal, anti-Trump sentiments. Another member of the circle—who took on the job of publishing the Joffe data—is L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer-science professor and Clinton supporter who called on Americans to join the “resistance” against Mr. Trump. So much for the media’s description of a gang of politically innocent nerds.

A Fraudulent Ethics Debate on Congressional Stock Trading February 10, 2022

Eric Holder’s ‘Democracy’ Con February 3, 2022

Biden’s Supreme Court Risk January 27, 2022

What Ails the Biden Presidency January 20, 2022

Biden Follows the Trump Playbook January 13, 2022

The researchers claim that by July 2016 they were alarmed by the security implications of their data, mined from government information. Yet they didn’t go to the government. Mr. Joffe instead went to Democrats—namely Mr. Sussmann, the Perkins Coie lawyer who in the summer of 2016 was regularly identified in the press as an attorney for the Democratic National Committee. The Sussmann indictment notes a meeting Mr. Joffe had with Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney for the Clinton campaign. And a deposition by a Fusion GPS staffer as part of continuing Alfa Bank litigation says Mr. Joffe attended a meeting with Peter Fritsch, a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Was he still confused about the partisan nature of this project?

He certainly couldn’t have been two years later. By that point, the roles Perkins Coie and Fusion played in funneling information to the FBI for Clinton were well known, while Fusion had gone on to team up with former Democratic staffer Dan Jones to keep advancing the claims. Mr. Joffe sat for that October 2018 New Yorker piece that pushed the Alfa claims, anonymously calling himself “Max” and admitting in the piece that he’d continued to help that effort long after the election, providing Mr. Jones’s team with 37 million internet records to examine. (A deposition in the Alfa litigation identified Mr. Joffe as Max.)

Here’s the most revealing bit: “Max” also explained to the New Yorker how vitally important it was in 2016 to make sure the threat his team discovered was “known before the election.” Which was why he and his lawyer first went with their information to the press. The Sussmann indictment says Mr. Sussmann tried peddling the data to the New York Times in late August 2016. He didn’t approach the FBI until the middle of September. Mr. Joffe’s spokesperson declined to comment.

The defenders of Mr. Steele’s dossier also spent years insisting that the oppo researcher was nonpartisan and his work beyond reproach—only to be humiliated. The media is stepping out again at its peril. There’s plenty to show an ugly tale already—and Mr. Durham will likely have plenty more to come.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-are-those-techies-who-spied-on-trump-clinton-2016-election-durham-data-fusion-gps-joffe-11645139606

Notable

>>15676501, >>15676503 ICYMI: Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?

Updated

Include 4th post, ty

>>15676418, >>15676420, >>15676423, >>15676426 President Donald J. Trump ICYMI: "Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

>>15676515

cia, fbi, mil?…

>>15676515

Australia…

>>15676564

NOT A FUCKING GLOBAL

>>15676542

F

too early in the morning for this shit, sorry BO, you are filtered till nb

>>15676568

>>15676577

link at the bottom of article posts, as usual..

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/us/politics/wisconsin-election-decertification.html

>>15676651

bakes

>>15676501 (You), >>15676503 (You) ICYMI: Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?

>>15676704

The NY times has been propped up by federal money for years, it needs to wind up and die already.

President Donald J. Trump:

My long-term accounting firm didn’t leave me for any other reason than they were harassed, abused, and frightened by DA’s and AG’s that for years have been threatening them with indictment and ruination.They were “broken” by these Radical Left racist prosecutors, and couldn’t take it anymore. Even the letter they sent stated, “Mazars performed its work in accordance with professional standards. A subsequent review of those work papers confirms this.” Further, their disclaimer clause in the financial statements has for years stated much the same.

My company is incredible with some of the greatest assets in the world and very low debt. Also, we’re loaded with cash. The Fake News Media hates talking about it!

https://t.me/s/LizHarrington76

While the Globalist Fake News Media says every single day that “RUSSIA IS GOING TO INVADE!”

…Also every single day we have both Russian and Ukrainian officials saying “Nope”.

The world is seeing how war-mongering and blood-thirsty that fake ass US Media is.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1495460619746689027

Breaking911

@Breaking911

DEVELOPING: Amid multiple reports that U.S. has intelligence that Russian troops have received orders to invade Ukraine, Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov says“there [are] no such plans.”

@CBSNews

>>15676631

>>15676427

Thanks!

>>15676829

Trudeau is a psycho, this is hilarious, cant stop laughing at his stupidity.

TOP KEK

>>15676891

==notable inclusion=

>>15676891

notable inclusion

>Alfa Bank L. Jean Camp's motion to quash subpoena

>>15676975

Fugly

>>15677070

Video, no dice,

>>15677087

Tyvm