Showing posts with label Wayne County. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wayne County. Show all posts

Monday, March 28, 2022

December 2, 2020: Revisiting President Trump's Press Conference

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: In March 2022, I was reading a story about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. I noticed a comment President Trump had made on this day, and went looking for the source. Lo and behold, I turned up a transcript of his entire press conference, which lasted for almost three quarters of an hour. Looking back, here are a few of the whoppers he told on that day. 

It’s fun to remember that Ginni Thomas helped organize buses to transport Trump supporters to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. We all know now, how festivities ended. 


In any case, on December 2, Trump said all of this and more:

 

As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States.

 

That statement, at least, was true. He didn’t do it, though. 

For months, leading up to the Presidential election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks if not, months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots and to verify the results. … Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.

 

Surely, the dullest Trump fan would notice that now the president wanted to delay finalizing the vote. 

Previously, he had said he wanted the vote-counting to end in the early morning hours of November 4, when he had the lead in several states he eventually lost. See also, statements below. 

Trump claims next that tens of thousands of individuals showed up to vote on November 4, but were told they had already cast ballots. 

They didn’t know what to do. They had no one to complain to, most just left and said, “That’s strange.” But many people complained and complained vehemently, and in a lot of cases, they filled out a provisional ballot, which was almost never used, but in virtually every case was a vote for Trump. In other words, they went in to vote and they were told that they voted and they didn’t vote. They left and they felt horror and they lost respect for our system. This happened tens of thousands of times all over the country. That’s how desperate the Democrats were. They would fill out ballots of people not even knowing if these people were going to show up. When they did show up, they said, “Sorry, you’ve already voted.”

 

It would be a violation of the law for poll workers not to offer, accept, and submit provisional ballots to the proper boards. No evidence of this kind of subterfuge has ever been presented successfully in court. In 2016, research showed that 2.5 million Americans submitted provisional ballots. Only about 60% were “fully counted,” and another 10% were “partially counted,” as allowed by states. The most common reason for rejection of provisional ballots was that voters were not registered. 

Trump continued his ramble: 

In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch? Are there 100s of other examples throughout the country? Are there 1000s? We just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that evening.

 

This turned out not to be the tip of the iceberg. There was no iceberg. The mistake Trump refers to here, occurred in Antrim County, where the Board of Elections was in Republican hands. The mistake had nothing to do with Dominion systems being rigged. A hand recount of paper ballots later showed Trump gained 11 votes in Antrim, and Biden lost 1. 

A “risk-limiting” recount of a little more than 17,900 ballots, chosen at random from across the state, showed 17 ballots “out of balance.” 

A June 2021 report by the Michigan Senate, that body controlled by the Republican Party, can be summed up in one sentence: “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.” 

Yep. Trump lost. 


Then-President Trump claimed on December 2, that there had been massive fraud in Georgia – a state where the governor and secretary of state were both Republicans. 

In Georgia, it doesn’t work, but we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures. … Why? You’ll have to ask them, but without a signature match, or a check, it doesn’t matter. They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack, all against me. This was during a recount that I didn’t even think mattered. They found many thousands of votes, and that recount didn’t matter. The one that matters is the one that’s going on now, that because of the fact it’s so close, they had to by law give another recount, but the recount has to be a recount where they check the signatures. Otherwise, they’re just checking the same dishonest thing. It won’t matter.

 

In none of the three recounts performed in Georgia were “thousands and thousands of votes” found “out of whack, all against me.” Trump lost every time, in the final tally by 11,799. Biden’s margin of victory did drop by 1,779 votes out of five million cast. So the vote counts were 99.9+ accurate. The biggest mistake of all was made in Floyd County, where clerks initially failed to upload results from some precincts. The board of elections in that county, where Trump gained roughly 800 votes, was controlled by Republicans. 

So a big cream pie in their faces.


 

Many people received two, three and four ballots. They were sent to dead people by the thousands. In fact, dead people, and we have many examples filled out ballots, made applications, and then, voted, which is even worse. In other words, dead people went through a process. Some have been dead for 25 years. Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone, and if that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately. 

 

Note: The president wants millions of votes “overturned immediately.” As of February 2022, the situation in Ohio is typical – where a Republican attorney general has 27 possible cases of illegal votes being cast in the 2020 election. 

A special check of 5,000 ballots supposedly cast by dead people in Georgia turned up four examples. At least one of those four ballots was cast for Donald J. Trump. 

Trump was so full of shit in his comments on December 2, he was lucky he didn’t get mistaken for a porta-potty in a suit. 

He continued: 

Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win. In all states, I very easily win, the swing states, just like I won them at 10 o’clock in the evening, the evening of the election. 

 

Trump can’t even get his message straight in the same press conference. He wants to revert to Election Day itself, when he had the vote lead, and just declare himself the winner. 

Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people, and in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me. 

 

Trump deserved to be disparaged. As of March 2022, none of his claims has been upheld in any court, state, federal, or The People’s Court. He wasn’t representing any of the people who voted for Biden. He wanted to overturn the results rendered by those 81 million. 

Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years…

 

Trump could never decide how much money the Mueller investigation “wasted.” He repeatedly changed the number – almost as if he was making it up. Which he was. The Justice Department said the final cost was $31.7 million. That investigation, and others, also turned up proof that multiple Trump advisors and campaign officials, and even Trump kids and/or their spouses, met with Russians during the 2016 election. The short list would include Don Jr. and Jared Kushner, which Don Sr. later admitted, Roger Stone, who lied to Congress about his meeting, Paul Manafort, who had multiple contacts, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who was working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal at the same time Trump was running for president. 

Trump kept going: 

Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement.

 

Rubio was never the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Trump can’t even get that right.

 

Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID. The voting took place entirely on the honor system, no identification of any kind was required.

 

Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that no state in the country verifies United States citizenship as a condition for voting in federal elections. This is a national disgrace. No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting, specifically, because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.

 

As always, with Trump you had the kind of vague claims that are hard to refute. What is a “very, very powerful ID?” 

Here in Ohio, Mr. Blogger had to supply the last four digits of his social security number or his driver’s license number when he filled out an absentee ballot. He also had to sign his ballot before mailing. In Arizona, you needed to prove citizenship in order to get a driver’s license after 1996. So you could have proved eligibility to vote by…having a driver’s license and placing the number in “box 9” on your voter registration form. 

Loser Donald kept babbling: 

In addition, thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters.

 

We covered the story of Floyd County, above, where GOP election officials screwed their own pooch. 

In Fayette County, Republicans again screwed their dog, failing to upload more than 2,700 votes. But of those votes, 1,128 were for Biden. Again these were red counties, muffing their own counts. In Fayette, Trump had a net gain, of 449 votes. Walton County is also a solidly red county, returning Trump more than 74% of its votes. Once again, the problem was failure to upload a voting card for one part of the county, which, when uploaded gave Trump a gain of 176 votes. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen also picked up 10 additional votes. 

Dozens of counties in the key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan. All of this is evidence.

 

This claim was egregiously false. Only 71% of Michigan voters bothered to mail in ballots or show up at the polls. 

Donald keeps juggling numbers and dropping them ever time. He’s either ill-informed, or he’s lying. 

Probably both: 

In Detroit, everybody saw the tremendous conflict and the horrible way that the two Republican canvassers were treated so horribly because they wouldn’t vote when they saw that 71% of the precincts didn’t balance. Also, there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.

 

Detroit is in Wayne County. The population of the county is nearly two million. A total of 867,409 votes were cast for president in 2020. As for Detroit, itself, a Democratic stronghold, turnout was grim, as the Associated Press noted. “According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the AP explained, “on Nov. 5, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.” 

This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. … We already have the proof. We already have the evidence, and it’s very clear. Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say, “You’re right.” Our country needs somebody to say, “You’re right.”

 

This serves as a fitting ending to a Trump “stolen election” diatribe. “Everybody knows it,” he claims. He was robbed of a second term. Everybody knows it. Well, maybe not all the judges who “have refused to accept it,” or the countless media outlets that accurately reported on results from both red and blue states. 

Sixteen months later, not a single court or recount or investigation of any kind as upheld any of Trump’s complaints.

December 4, 2020: Lame Duck Donald Suffers Five Court Defeats in Three Hours

 

12/4/20: The latest jobs report is out. In November, the U.S. economy regained 245,000 jobs. October gains were revised lower, to 610,000. Unemployment ticked downward to 6.7 percent, which was a positive sign. 

More ominously, the labor participation rate declined, from 61.7 percent to 61.5 percent, lower than the 62.8 percent the day Trump took office. 

The latest drop in the participation rate meant that an additional 560,000 Americans had stopped looking for work. 

Adding to the gloom, 12 million Americans are scheduled to see unemployment benefits run out at the end of the year. 

More than one in three American families report they are having difficulty paying ordinary household expenses. 

One of every eight households with children (13%) report “sometimes or often not having enough food to eat.” 

The president might not have noticed. If he did, we know he won’t care. But desperate families and desperate individuals are resorting to putting rent or mortgage payments on credit. Then they hope some miracle will occur and they can avoid paying the high interest they accrue.

 

*

____________________ 

“It would violate that oath, the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.” 

Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers

____________________


Speaker Bowers.


The president’s quixotic and crazy campaign to overturn the results of the November election continues mostly because Trump is incapable of facing up to the truth. 

He lost. 

As Politico notes, Team Trump continues to spin its wheels, unable to get any traction in a bid to steal the electoral votes of states Joe Biden supposedly stole from Donald J. Trump. In desperation, this week, Pennsylvania Republican state legislators, including the Speaker of the House, called on their “Republican-heavy congressional delegation to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when federal lawmakers certify the presidential election Jan. 6.” 

In their letter to their brethren in Congress, they wrote, we “the undersigned members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly urge you to object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” 

Originally, they claimed to have 75 signatories, more than half the GOP lawmakers in the state. 

Sadly, the letter had to be withdrawn when several “signatories” made clear they didn’t intend to sign on for the fight.

 

It can also be interesting to compare this approach to claim that the election was rigged with what the state’s Speaker of the House said in October 2019, when Pennsylvania altered its election laws. 

As we noted, before the election (see: 10/28/20), when Keystone State lawmakers passed a voting reform law thirteen months ago, GOP leaders in both House and Senate were on board. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the other, or any one candidate or single election,” said House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler. “It was developed over a multi-year period with input of people from different backgrounds and regions of Pennsylvania. It serves to preserve the integrity of every election  [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] and lift the voice of every voter in the commonwealth.”

 

* 

IN THE FACE of sustained attacks by the president and his legal minions and enraged and ill-informed supporters, many Pennsylvania lawmakers lost their nerve. Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives did not balk. Speaker Rusty Bowers called claims made by Rudy Giuliani, and repeated regularly by President Trump, about fraud in the Arizona election “breathtaking.” 

Not in an exciting way, rather a “I can’t believe the nerve” sort of way. 

“I and my fellow legislators swore an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and the constitution and laws of the state of Arizona,” Bowers said. “It would violate that oath, the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.” 

Rudy responded angrily via tweet, saying that, “Republican Legislature[s] let down America. I’m ashamed of them. They completely misled the President and me. All of us Republicans [who still believe in magic vote-switching machines should] let them know what we think of them.” 

To the surprise of almost no one, sources inside the White House told CNN that Loser Donald wasn’t budging from his position, no matter how many courts or state lawmakers shot down his claims of massive election fraud. “No one expects him to concede. No one!” a Trump adviser admitted.

 

Meanwhile, Team Trump suffered five defeats in court in a matter of three hours on Friday. At 4:30 p.m. the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed a case, in which Team Trump lawyers asked that the state’s electoral vote not be certified. Half-an-hour later, the Michigan Court of Appeals tossed out a challenge to certification of the vote in Wayne County. Nevada was next. A judge shit-canned a claim by several Republican electors that there had been widespread fraud in the November vote – and Nevada’s electoral votes should be transferred to Donald J. Trump’s win column – which was really a loser’s column. Judge James T. Russell rejected their arguments, writing in response that he found “no credible or reliable evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud.” 

At 6 p.m., Team Trump got knocked to the canvas and took a ten-count after a Wisconsin judge blew up their case. Asked to overturn the state’s entire vote, and let a Republican-led legislature decide who got the state’s electoral votes, Judge Brian Hagedorn expressed shock. “Such a move would appear to be unprecedented in American history,” he wrote for the court. 

“One might expect that this solemn request would be paired with evidence of serious errors tied to a substantial and demonstrated set of illegal votes. Instead,” he added, “the evidentiary support rests almost entirely on the unsworn expert report of a former campaign employee that offers statistical estimates based on call center samples and social media research.” 

Judge Hagedorn went on to say, “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.” 

Nevertheless, it was clearly a path that Donald J. Trump and his sycophants were willing to tread. Hagedorn and other judges simply said no.

 

Then came a fifth coffin nail. At 7 p.m. a judge in Phoenix denied a request by Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward to invalidate the results of that state’s election. And why did he turn her request down? 

Simple, really. 

In rejecting Ward’s request, Judge Randall H. Warner wrote definitively: “The court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcome of the election.” 

So, Team Trump went 0 for 5 in just one day. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Any fool can find Democrats criticizing Republicans, and Republicans attacking Democrats. See, for example: Sean Hannity (pick any telecast). 

So it should wake up those who care about democracy and free elections to note the number of Republicans calling out Trump for his post-election lies. Trey Grayson, former GOP secretary of state of Kentucky, referred to the president’s repeated claims of election fraud as “unfounded,” and pleaded with members of his own party to defend the election process. 

In Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors said he would not “violate the law or deviate from my own moral compass,” even though that’s what the President of the United States and his fanboys, like Rudy G., would like him to do. “No matter how you voted, this election was administered with integrity, transparency, and most importantly in accordance with Arizona state laws,” Chairman Clint Hickman says.

 

Brian Corley, GOP election supervisor of Pasco County, Florida also decides to speak out. Trump won his county by 20 points. Corley released a statement saying he felt compelled both in his professional capacity and as an “American citizen” to respond to all the lies about the process.

 

“I cannot stand by as my work, and the work of all professional elections’ administrators, becomes the scapegoat of those seeking political gain,” he explains. “I believe that history will not be kind to those who are cognizant of the truth and yet choose silence for political expediency.” 

“It just it boggles my mind that these appeals are still being believed with no evidence,” Grayson added with finality.