JIP Editor Warns In Sept. 26 Lecture, New Book Of Massive Foreign U.S. Election Interference

On behalf of the Justice Integrity Project (JIP), this editor closes a three-speaker series by the election protection organization Scrutineers with a Zoom lecture Sept. 26 warning about the massive foreign interference in U.S. elections documented in a new book.

The lecture title is “How to Understand This Year’s Politics, Scandals, and ‘Lawfare’ — Not Just Watch, Fear” on the Scrutineers virtual stage at 5:00 PM Pacific (8:00 PM Eastern).

The goal of the lecture series entitled, Truth and Consequences: Breaking Through Manipulation in a Landmark Election Year, is to share insights into legal abuses, election rigging, and how to counteract these manipulative tactics. Plus, you’ll learn strategies to protect democratic processes and support fair elections.

Buy your ticket here to listen to the Sept. 26 lecture at 8 pm (Eastern time) and / or listen to the entire series by recordings. This author volunteered to speak to support the work of Scrutineers, a non-partisan, non-profit whose work is especially vital this U.S. election season.

The hour-long lecture (including Q&A) draws on my book, The Complete Annotated Durham ‘Russiagate’ Report: A Corrupt, Cruel Fraud, right, which is being launched in a new edition Oct. 4 that includes recent indictments and other revelations regarding Russian interference into U.S. 2024 elections, as well as reports of interference into other pivotal elections around affecting nations that aspire to open and fair democratic elections.

The timely new book exposes Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham and his 2023 report as a Trump-friendly probe that weaponized law enforcement against Donald Trump’s opponents and absolved Trump supporters from their collusion with Russia to tilt the 2016 U.S. presidential election their way.

As Donald Trump and his allies at the Heritage Foundation pursue a 2024 campaign to win back the presidency and inflict further revenge on opponents using federal personnel via Project 2025, the case history examines  how Durham, left, and Trump’s Attorney General William Barr implemented such a process in ways that may be repeated by the next administration.

Durham’s report is presented along with exclusive, devastating critiques of his record and those of colleagues seeking partisan frame-ups. The book’s second edition reveals current Russian threats using spies, hackers and payoffs to advance deadly goals against U.S. targets and U.S.-allied targets, including Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Israel, Sweden, Ukraine and multiple West African nations.

The main case study, Durham’s report, shows that his zeal to protect his Trump patrons led him and like-minded colleagues to scapegoat targets who could not be convicted by juries, as this editor witnessed in covering trials in which each defendant won acquittal, a rarity in the federal system.

Worse, Durham cherry-picked evidence to avoid documenting serious threats to U.S. elections from Russians and their nefarious U.S. allies.

The special speaker series benefits Scrutineers’ election protection work, as noted above. The organization was founded by Emily Levy, moderator of the speaker series and an advocate of fair, secure, accessible, and transparent elections.

There’s still time to join us and support the work!  See below to see previous speakers in the series, Jenny Cohn and Sofie Pirkle. Invite friends and get your tickets now.

Meet The Speakers

Jenny Cohn, right: Christian Extremists Pushed the “Big Lie.” Where are They Now? Jennifer is a political writer whose work has focused on Christian nationalism, right wing extremism, election security, and disinformation. (This event has ended, but if you register today for a ticket that includes Jenny’s session, you’ll receive the recording.)

Sofie Pirkle, right: : When You Feel Like Screaming At Your Neighbor: Understanding Cult Dynamics in Politics to Connect Across the Aisle. Sofie is an international leader and mentor to cult survivors and a pioneer in the trauma-informed community. For over two decades, she has taught thousands of survivors of abuse, trauma, controlling relationships, toxic environments and cults.

She teaches these courageous and powerful people how to reduce physical and emotional pain and to feel safe, especially in their bank accounts, so they can actually have fun while making their true impact. Feeling their luscious creativity and having lucrative success on their own terms, whether in their families, business, Congress, or Hollywood, her clients go from being Survivors to Badass Leaders.

Andrew Kreig, right : How to Understand This Year’s Politics, Scandals, ‘Lawfare.’ Andrew is the author of three books and founder of the pro-Democracy, non-partisan, DC-based Justice Integrity Project (JIP).

This event has ended, but new registrants may arrange to receive recordings. PLUS a Mixer with our speakers, Friday, Sept. 27, a more intimate group for discussion with and between our speakers.

About Scrutineers (Visit: https://scrutineers.org/)

We’re working to build the public trust in U.S. electionsby increasing their TRUSTWORTHINESS.

You’re in the right place if any of these describes you:

• Regardless of what candidates you support, you believe in fair elections (We’re nonpartisan)

• You’re concerned about the attacks on the freedom to vote

• You’re just beginning to learn about elections and want to get involved in making them better

• You’re an expert in some aspect of elections and want to share your knowledge

• You’re considering being a poll worker

• You want to help protect the elections but are worried about COVID and other risks of doing in-person work

• You’re already volunteering to work for a candidate, phonebanking/postcarding, etc.

• You care about the election but don’t have voting rights (due to age, immigration status, or prior convictions)

• You understand that action is needed because the election is not going to protect itself, but you don’t know what to do

The Challenge

The freedom to vote is under attack. Powerful forces are working hard to make it more difficult — or even impossible for people of color, students, people with disabilities, and other marginalized communities to vote. State legislatures around the country are passing laws to interfere with voting and sabotage our elections. Partisan forces are trying to take over the running of our elections, including by replacing nonpartisan election officials with partisan operatives.

The TV news tells you over and over again that concerns about election security are about “foreign interference” in our elections. It doesn’t tell you that our government is failing miserably to do its job to create and maintain robust election systems and procedures. Elections are vulnerable to manipulation from within the country and even from within election offices. Aging equipment can fail to count votes properly. Bias in the administration of elections can lead to some votes not being counted, especially in communities of color.

What else does the news fail to mention? That there are powerful actions YOU can take to decrease the impact of election tampering and voter suppression. That if we want fair and accurate elections, we need to show up. Not only to vote, but to protect the right to vote and the right to have our votes counted accurately.

Recent Relevant News Stories

2024

October

Oct. 1

Democracy Docket, Commentary: September was the busiest month for new pre-election voting litigation in recent history and probably ever, Mark Elias, right, Oct. 1, 2024. In all, 34 new lawsuits were filed — 15 from those protecting free and fair elections and 19 from those attacking them. Compare that to September 2020, when a total of 12 lawsuits were filed, and the dominant narrative was that the courts were being flooded with litigation.

During the last four years, our politics and culture have changed. While Donald Trump is a reason, he is not the only one. The transformation has been accelerated by the acceptance by the entire GOP that it is not a majoritarian party.

It no longer aspires to win the most votes. It no longer celebrates popular mandates. Instead, the party increasingly changes the rules of elections to allow a minority of voters to wield power.

First, it optimized itself to exploit systemic advantages — the Electoral College, the Senate and gerrymandering. When those failed in 2020, the GOP turned to state legislatures to enact new laws that tilt the scales in its favor. Still unable to prevail, the party has embraced the ugliest form of voter suppression and election subversion.

Inevitably, the courts have become a critical part of the GOP’s plan. Once insistent that “activist judges” stay out of elections, Republicans are now insistent the judiciary do more to aid their cause.

This explains why September 2024 was a historically busy month for litigation and why October will be even busier. In 2020 and 2022 the courts withstood these pressures. For democracy to prevail they will need to do so again.

September

Sept. 30

Spy Talk, Mistakes were made (CNN): A New Account from Inside the Mueller-Trump Probe, Michael Isikoff, below right, Sept. 30, 2024. Prosecutors detail what went right and wrong in the Russia investigation,

In early June, 2014, a shadowy outfit in St. Petersburg—controlled by the notorious pro-Putin oligarch and warlord, Yezgeny Prigozhin (shown above) — dispatched a pair of operatives to the United States on a secret mission.

Posing as American citizens, the operatives traveled through nine states—scouting sites for political rallies, taking photos, and talking by burner phones. When they returned, they filed an intelligence report–the blueprint for an extraordinary “active measures” campaign to bamboozle the American public that would come to full fruition two years later during the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Amid mounting signs that the Russians this year have returned and updated their active measures playbook—while the Iranians and Chinese pursue their own versions— it is instructive to revisit just how extensive and creepy the initial Prigozhin disinformation campaign was.

Operating under the deceptively bland name of the Internet Research Agency, an army of trolls created phony Twitter bots and Facebook pages that pumped out thousands of scurrilous messages aimed at riling up U.S. voters, promoting the idea of election fraud and deriding the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. “JOIN our #HillaryClintonForPrison2016,” read one sample missive.

Prigozhin’s online minions also organized and helped pay for political rallies to benefit Trump, who by then had become the clear Kremlin favorite. “THANK YOU for your support Miami! My team just shared photos from your TRUMP SIGN WAVING DAY, yesterday!” Trump wrote after one such rally, unaware this outpouring of support in south Florida had been arranged by Russian operatives thousands of miles away.

“It was a remarkable feat,” write Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein, three former prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller, in their new book, Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia and the Mueller Investigation. “IRA operatives— sitting at their desks in St. Petersburg, Russia—planned and advertised rallies at specific U.S. locations, invited Americans to go there and wave banners the IRA had purchased, and then handed off logistical responsibilities for the event to real Americans.”

One of the virtues of Interference is that it serves as a timely reminder of a brazen threat to American elections that, with the advances of AI and Deep Fake technology, is only getting more menacing by the day. Indeed, Mueller himself underscores the point in a brief preface to the book, in which he revives warnings he tried to give in his halting, ill-fated testimony to Congress in 2019. “Americans have not learned the lessons of Russia’s attack on our democracy in 2016,” he writes. “We were not prepared then, and despite many efforts of dedicated people across the government, we are not prepared now.”

But the book also illustrates the set of daunting challenges the Mueller team had in trying to cabin the malign election activity it uncovered into criminal cases that could hold up in court. Consider the IRA troll farm and its efforts to boost Trump over Clinton. In Feb. 2018, Mueller’s office indicted the IRA, Prigozhin and 18 of his employees, as well as two parent companies also controlled by the oligarch, charging them with a conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Sept. 29

New York Times, Trump Allies Unleash Lawsuits, Setting Stage for Post-Election Fight, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 29, 2024. Republicans are filing a flurry of election suits in the final weeks of the campaign. The cases may be a road map for a legal battle to come.

Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day.

The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020, according to Democracy Docket, a Democratically aligned group that tracks election cases.

Voting rights experts say the legal campaign appears to be an effort to prepare to contest the results of the presidential election after Election Day should former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago. The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states — and key counties — likely to determine the race. Several embrace debunked theories about voter fraud and so-called stolen elections that Mr. Trump has promoted since 2020.

In Montgomery County, Pa., the state’s third-largest county, the party is seeking to force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines. A case filed by the Republican National Committee in Nevada this month falsely asserts that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the state in 2020, a claim that was rejected at the time by the state’s top election official, a Republican.

If successful, the Republicans’ lawsuits would shrink the electorate, largely by disqualifying voters more likely to be Democrats. They seek purges of voter rolls, challenge executive orders from President Biden aimed at expanding ballot access and create stricter requirements to voting by mail.

Election experts, including some Republicans, say a vast majority of the cases are destined to fail, either because they were filed too late or because they are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.

The volume and last minute timing of the cases, along with statements from party officials and Trump allies, suggest a broader aim behind the effort: Laying the groundwork to challenge results after the vote. The claims in the lawsuits may well be revived — either in court or in the media — if Mr. Trump contests the outcome.

“Many of these cases reinforce particular narratives, particularly those about immigrants and voting,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections. “Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy.”

Republican lawyers involved said their work was aimed at creating more confidence in elections.

The R.N.C. is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Mr. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Ms. Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.

Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the R.N.C.’s election integrity team. Ms. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.

New York Times, These are five court cases to watch ahead of election day, Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 29, 2024. The cases are largely aimed at influencing the election rules before Election Day, although they may also lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump to try to overturn the results, as he did four years ago.

Democrats, meanwhile, are using the courts to push back against last-minute efforts by some election officials to change the way votes are counted and results are certified.

While there are likely to be more cases in the coming weeks, here are five cases to watch in the run-up to Election Day:.

2023

Sept. 27, 2023.

Bucks County Beacon, Writer Spotlight: Jennifer Cohn, Cyril Mychalejko, Sept. 27, 2023. As part of our Fall Fund Drive, we are showcasing some of our writers so you can learn more about the people and journalism that you are supporting. Jennifer Cohn, right, writes her columns for the Bucks County Beacon “because I’m concerned about the ongoing attack on American democracy and the relative ineffectiveness of our government and corporate media in counteracting it.”

How did you first get into journalism and writing?

Soon after the 2016 election, I became concerned about Russia’s attack on our election infrastructure and began researching the issue. I had time because, although I had practiced law for more than 20 years, I was no longer working outside of being a mom.

I used Twitter as a platform to advocate for improved election security because, at the time, pretty much every politician and major news outlet was a frequent user of the site. A few media outlets asked me to write for them, and I spent the next three or four years researching and writing about election security pretty much all day every day.

My work received national attention, with Senator Ron Wyden’s office requesting my input on an election-security bill called the SAFE Act. It was a good bill, and I spent many hours promoting it. But Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who had served on Trump’s 2016 transition team, blocked it in February 2020.

Trump had also thwarted efforts to improve election security. In 2018, he blocked a bipartisan election security bill called the Secure Elections Act.

Imagine my dismay when Trump then hijacked and weaponized the election-security narrative in an effort to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020. Honestly, I was devastated. The “Big Lie” capitalized on vulnerabilities that Trump and the GOP had deliberately left in place, while aiming a firehose of falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims at the 2020 election. It was remarkable that they were able to gain so much traction, given the prior obstruction of election security bills by Trump and the GOP.

The Big Lie deceived large swaths of Republicans and led to an assault on our U.S. Capitol, but the toxic fallout also impacted Democrats. Because MAGA Republicans had falsely conflated voting system vulnerabilities with “proof” that Trump was cheated (and then used this “proof” to inflame and mobilize known violent extremists), Democrats have been skittish about acknowledging that our voting system remains vulnerable. This, in turn, has made it impossible to gain renewed traction for the SAFE Act or anything similar, although I tried for a while.

When that didn’t work, I began investigating the who and the how of the Big Lie, which led me straight to Roger Stone and his network of thugs and propagandists. My research into the Big Lie also led me straight to Christian Nationalists. So I’ve spent much of the past few years writing about Stone, Stone’s network, and Christian Nationalism. Give $10/month

What is your approach to journalism? Why do you write and what do you hope to accomplish with your articles?

My approach to journalism is to assemble as many undisputed and indisputable facts as possible (often using open source intelligence) and to use that as a building block for my articles. I try to write on subjects that the corporate media and/or elected officials have ignored or, in my opinion, misconstrued or given short shrift.

I write because I’m concerned about the ongoing attack on American democracy and the relative ineffectiveness of our government and corporate media in counteracting it. As others have observed, the far right has launched an information war, which means that we need effective messaging and journalism to help the American public cut through the propaganda and understand what is really happening to our country, and who is behind it. This is what I hope to accomplish with my articles.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/2078-jip-editor-warns-in-sept-26-lecture-new-book-of-massive-foreign-u-s-election-interference