Burma Shave. The election deniers are beginning to take power. 2022 could be the last chance for democracy.
A well-known investment banker who spoke out fiercely against Russia’s Vladimir Putin after opening a popular nightclub in Moscow has been found dead in Washington, D.C.
Dan Rapoport, a Latvia-born American businessman who expressed support for Russia’s opposition while based in Moscow as the managing director of a brokerage firm there, was found dead on Sunday evening in front of a luxury apartment building, according to an incident report provided to The Daily Beast by the D.C. Metro Police Department.
Rapoport, 52, was rushed to a hospital but was ultimately pronounced dead.
www.thedailybeast.com/...
Trump has currently 38 lawsuits not including all the ones that will inevitably arrive.
Unfortunately, for the rest of the public, it’s not as easy to keep track, and you might find yourself confused between, say, the New York attorney general’s investigation into the Trump Organization and the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal probe, the latter of which is expected to lead to a guilty plea from the company’s longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg. You might also struggle to keep straight the subjects of the various federal investigations, which range from Trump’s plot to overturn the election to Trump’s decision to take classified government documents to his home.
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In the 41 states that have held nominating contests this year, more than half the GOP winners so far — about 250 candidates in 469 contests — have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat two years ago, according to a Post analysis of every race for federal and statewide office with power over elections.
The proportion of election-denying nominees is even higher in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results. In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests — more than 62 percent of nominees — have embraced the former president’s false claims.
The count covers offices with direct supervision over election certification, such as secretaries of state, as well as the U.S. House and Senate, which have the power to finalize — or contest — the electoral college count every four years. Lieutenant governors and attorneys general are also included, with each playing a role in shaping election law, investigating alleged fraud or filing lawsuits to influence electoral outcomes.
Among the six battlegrounds, only Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania have nominated statewide candidates who would have direct power over the certification process and who worked to overturn the 2020 result or have said they would not have certified it.
Candidates identified by The Post as election deniers have questioned President Biden’s victory, opposed the counting of Biden’s electoral college votes, expressed support for a partisan post-election ballot review, signed onto a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 result, or attended or expressed support for the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on Jan. 6, 2021.
Many of this year’s primaries have coincided with a series of dramatic hearings in which the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has laid out intimate details of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 result, his role instigating the violence and the knowledge among many of his allies that Biden had won.
Even against that backdrop, Republican voters have continued to choose candidates who have echoed the former president’s false rhetoric about a rigged election and, in some cases, shown a willingness to subvert the result of a free and fair vote if given the chance.
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- Presidential electors must be appointed by the manner the state’s laws dictated before Election Day. This would prevent a state legislature and governor from appointing sham electors after the voting.
- If a state appoints a slate of electors before a deadline — the sixth day before the presidential electors meet — it overrides any electors appointed after that deadline. This would also avert post-vote shenanigans.
- The governor of each state must certify the electors before that deadline. If a governor violates this duty, the aggrieved candidate can appeal to a three-judge panel of two circuit court judges and one district court judge.
- The slate of electors deemed the legitimate one by the federal courts is conclusive.
- Congress must count the slate of electors deemed the legitimate one by this revised process for states. This means if the federal courts deem one set of electors operative, Congress must count them, and must not count other electors, even ones certified by a state legislature or governor.
- If an election is disrupted by a disastrous event, the state legislature cannot simply appoint electors. It can only extend the voting period. This averts another scenario — a legislature finds a pretext to declare the voters failed to reach a decision, and appoints electors itself — which the current ECA might allow.
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July 2020:
I first reported on Trump in 1982, when he conned me into putting him on the Forbes 400 rich list. That Trump was just a younger version of this Trump, and now I worry that what happened in June was a mere prelude; he’s certainly capable of a far worse Reichstag-fire-like event that would allow him to steal the 2020 election. And if he does win a second term, legitimately or not, his words and actions of the past four years provide 12 indicators that he would seek to replace our democracy with a fascist dictatorship.
1. Trump uses military power and federal law enforcement to suppress peaceful political protest. In June, he deployed the National Guard and federal officers to violently evict protesters in Washington, terrorizing them with two military helicopters flying low near the crowd. Trump also had 1,600 members of the 82nd Airborne on standby outside the capital and readied tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. It’s reported that he wanted to deploy 10,000 troops to Washington alone. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took this so seriously that he got into a shouting match with the president over the prospect of deploying active-duty troops on U.S. soil.
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