We begin today with news of sweeping pardons issued on Monday to 77 people who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
Less important than the actual individuals who were pardoned — bizarrely, for many of them were not under threat of federal indictment, the only classification of crime that falls under the jurisdiction of a presidential pardon — is the message that these pardons send going forward: try to interfere with elections on behalf of Trump and Republicans, and Trump and Republicans will have your back.
Among those pardoned were two small-time Trump operatives who share the ignoble distinction of being the only Americans to have infiltrated voting machines in their futile attempt to find non-existent evidence of voter fraud. The American right absolutely loves to warn about the insecurity of voting machines but almost always fails to mention that it was their people in Georgia who were the only ones in recent years to actually illegally access election equipment.
Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton worked with Sidney Powell and members of the 2020 Trump campaign to infiltrate voting machines in Coffee County. They then shared sensitive information from the equipment online, where it was accessed by an unknown number of people within the election denial movement. Both were indicted in Georgia for their crimes — state cases that are in danger of being dropped after Republicans targeted Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis for having the audacity to prosecute obvious election crimes. Latham and Hampton are among a handful of election deniers and Republican officials who tried to overturn the 2020 election, and who were pardoned on Monday.
They include Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running to become Georgia’s next governor. Jones was one of the 16 Republicans who signed fraudulent documents purporting to allocate Georgia’s electoral college votes to Trump in November 2020. Jones and his “fake elector” co-conspirators were all pardoned by Trump on Monday.
The pardons come as the Justice Department increasingly operates as the governmental arm of the election denial movement. Across the country, the DOJ is demanding access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans as the Trump administration constructs a national database of voters. This database is currently being used to hunt for undocumented immigrants registered to vote — an occurrence so extraordinarily rare that it almost ceases to exist — and in the process likely purge many Americans from voter rolls.
The DOJ is also at work in Georgia, demanding access to ballots and other material from the 2020 election in Fulton County as part of yet another futile investigation into widespread voter fraud there. These two undertakings — voter purges based on overblown claims of voting by non-citizens and bogus fraud investigations — are lining up to be the central themes of election denial efforts going into next year.
Combined with executive orders targeting voting machines, mail-in and absentee voting and an insistence on one-day elections, the Trump administration, Justice Department, and officials at the state and local levels are all working in coordination to at minimum sow widespread doubt in any results of next year’s elections that don’t result in a win for Republicans.
In the event Democrats rack up large wins in next year’s elections, there’s a final stopgap available to Republicans in Washington. Those tools are part of a doomsday scenario that represents the next step in anti-democratic efforts to dismiss the will of the people and solidify Republican power for years to come. I’ll have more on that front in the coming weeks and months.
For now, know that much of this is happening right out in the open. Not only are Justice Department officials like pardon attorney Ed Martin bragging about pardoning those who illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 election, but allies across the country are in place in state and local governments working to implement the policies of the election denial movement. Those policies are rooted in a single, troubling goal: ensure no Republican can ever lose an election again.
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