Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    US Capitol attack: former Trump state department aide charged

    A former state department aide in Donald Trump’s administration has been charged with participating in the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January and assaulting officers who were trying to guard the building, court papers show.It is the first known case to be brought against a Trump appointee in connection with the Capitol attack, which led to Trump’s historic second impeachment.Federico Klein, who also worked for Trump’s 2016 election campaign, was seen wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat amid the throng of people in a tunnel trying to force their way into the Capitol on the day, the papers say.Klein pushed his way toward the doors, where, authorities say, “he physically and verbally engaged” with officers trying to keep the mob back.Klein was seen on camera violently shoving a riot shield into an officer and inciting the crowd as it tried to storm past the police line, shouting: “We need fresh people, we need fresh people,” according to the charging documents.As the mob struggled with police in the tunnel, Klein pushed the riot shield, which had been stolen from an officer, in between the Capitol doors, preventing police from closing them, authorities say.Eventually, an officer used chemical spray, forcing Klein to move somewhere else, officials say.Klein was arrested on Thursday in Virginia and faces charges including obstructing Congress and assaulting officers using a dangerous weapon.He was in custody on Friday and could not be reached for comment.It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf. A Trump spokesman said the former president had no comment.More than 300 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the deadly riots that day.Klein became a staff assistant in the state department shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, according to a financial disclosure report.He held a top secret security clearance that was renewed in 2019, according to the court papers.He resigned from his position on 19 January 2021.Klein reportedly worked in the office of Brazilian and Southern Cone affairs, according to the court papers. More

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Rightwing 'super-spreader': study finds handful of accounts spread bulk of election misinformation

    A handful of rightwing “super-spreaders” on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.” The report analyzed social media posts featuring words like “election” and “voting” to track key misinformation narratives related to the the 2020 election, including claims of mail carriers throwing away ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being counted, and other false or unproven stories.The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. It found during this time period, popular rightwing Twitter accounts “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on honest voter concerns or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic election fraud”.Ultimately, the “false claims and narratives coalesced into the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later propelled the January 6 insurrection”, the report said.“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to weaponizing viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and erode Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.Next to no factchecking, with Trump as the super-spreader- in-chiefIn monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than more than 22 million tweets sent between 15 August and 12 December. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread misinformation.“Influential accounts on the political right rarely engaged in factchecking behavior, and were responsible for the most widely spread incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 were verified Twitter accounts – which are particularly dangerous when it comes to election misinformation, the study said. The “repeat spreaders” responsible for the most widely spread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot, and Sidney Powell. All 21 of the top accounts for misinformation leaned rightwing, the study showed.“Top-down mis- and disinformation is dangerous because of the speed at which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, it can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or factchecker has time to review its content.”On nearly all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – Donald Trump played a massive role.It pinpointed 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account jumpstarted the spread of a false narrative across Twitter. For example, Trump’s tweets baselessly claiming that the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for election fraud played a large role in amplifying the conspiracy theory to a wider audience. False or baseless tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9m followers at the time – garnered more than 460,000 retweets.Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel was linked to six distinct waves of misinformation that, combined, were the most viewed of any other repeat-spreader’s videos. His Facebook account had the most engagement of all those studied.The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the massive influence Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between 1 January 2020 and 6 January 2021 – Donald Trump pushed disinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report from Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was ultimately suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will ever be allowed back.Specifically, 516 of his posts contained disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained election disinformation, and 683 contained harmful rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Allegations of election fraud earned over 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions on his posts in 2020. Trump had a unique ability to amplify news stories that would have otherwise remained contained in smaller outlets and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.“What Trump did was take misinformation from the rightwing ecosystem and turn it into a mainstream news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that, and inflame people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6.”Effects of false election narratives on voters“Super-spreader” accounts were ultimately very successful in undermining voters’ trust in the democratic system, the report found. Citing a poll by the Pew Research Center, the study said that, of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half had cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that absentee or mail-in ballots had been counted as intended.The report outlined a number of recommendations, including removing “super-spreader” accounts entirely.Outside experts agree that tech companies should more closely scrutinize top accounts and repeat offenders.Researchers said the refusal to take action or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped to fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly stated “three-strike” system for offenses related to the election. Platforms like Facebook reportedly had three-strike rules as well but did not make the system publicly known.Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January. Twitter has maintained that its ban of the former president is permanent. YouTube’s chief executive officer stated this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform once the “risk of violence” from his posts passes. Facebook’s independent oversight board is now considering whether to allow Trump to return.“We have seen that he uses his accounts as a way to weaponize disinformation. It has already led to riots at the US Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again,” Gertz said. “It would be a huge mistake to allow Trump to return.” More

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    Most alleged Capitol rioters unconnected to extremist groups, analysis finds

    Nearly 90% of the people charged in the Capitol riot so far have no connection with militias or other organized extremist groups, according to a new analysis that adds to the understanding of what some experts have dubbed the “mass radicalization” of Trump supporters.A report from George Washington University’s Center on Extremism has analyzed court records about cases that have been made public. It found that more than half of people facing federal charges over the 6 January attack appear to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends. Only 33 of the 257 alleged participants appear to have been part of existing “militant networks”, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers anti-government militia.The dominance of these “individual believers” among the alleged attackers underscored the importance of understanding the Capitol violence as part of a “diverse and fractured domestic extremist threat,” and underscored the ongoing risk of lone actor terror attacks, the George Washington researchers concluded.Other analysts have argued the Capitol attackers should be understood as “not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but as a broader mass movement with violence at its core”.‘Mass radicalization becomes mass mobilization’While individuals associated with far-right networks were critical in escalating the violence at the Capitol, the report found that members of organized extremist groups make up only a small minority of the people charged so far.About a third of the people charged were part of “organized clusters” of family members or friends who planned their participation together. These small groups allegedly include a father and son from Delaware, a mother and son from Tennessee, several husband and wife pairs, two brothers from Montana, and a group of acquaintances from Texas, including Jenna Ryan, a real estate broker, who took a private plane to Washington together to storm the capitol.The existence of these clusters of participants “demonstrates the importance of involvement in friendship or kinship networks as a key factor in encouraging increasingly extreme beliefs and high-risk, often violent, activism”, the report notes.But the largest category of alleged rioters, according to the report, was a “hodgepodge” of individuals with a variety of extremist beliefs who made plans to come to the rally, originally billed as a “Stop the Steal” protest, on their own, and had no documented connections to existing groups, or even to small clusters of other Trump supporters. These “inspired believers” included adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as people who simply believed the false claims of Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers that the election had been stolen from Trump and wanted to do something about it.Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the results of the analysis were not surprising. “What we witnessed on January 6 wasn’t a one-off extremist plot,” he said. “We witnessed an instance of mass radicalization which turned into an instance of mass mobilization.”Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud, repeated for months across social media and traditional media platforms, had succeeded in radicalizing “potentially millions of individuals who have collectively adopted an extremist viewpoint” about the legitimacy of the election, Jensen said.“We’re seeing a lot of folks [charged] who look like pretty normal people,” he said. “They tend to be older individuals, that were married, with families, that had jobs. These are not hardcore extremists. These are individuals who got caught in a really extraordinary circumstance.”Many of the unaffiliated people charged in the attack might not have even known what an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy was, Jensen said, “but they know who the president is … and the president was providing a narrative of fraud”.A different analysis of court records by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, looking at 290 arrests connected to the Capitol attack, found very similar results to the George Washington University report, including that only 12% of alleged participants were part of militias or other organized violent groups.This initial data revealed, the Chicago analysts wrote, that “‘normal’ pro-Trump activists joined with the far right to form a new kind of violent mass movement”.The Chicago report also warned that typical counter-terrorism approaches, such as arresting members of dangerous extremist groups, would not be very effective to confront this complex threat, which may require “de-escalation approaches for anger among large swaths of mainstream society”.The George Washington University report also revealed how instrumental the alleged rioters’ own social media posts have been to building criminal cases against them. Roughly half of people charged over the riot had their own alleged social media posts used against them as evidence, while about 30% of people charged had “been possibly incriminated” by the social media accounts of friends. More

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Elections

    Donald Trump hints at run for president in 2024 – video

    Former US president Donald Trump has hinted at a possible run for president again in 2024 during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in Florida. Trump attacked president Joe Biden and repeated his fraudulent claims that he won the 2020 election in his first major appearance since leaving the White House nearly six weeks ago. ‘Who knows, who knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time,’ he said.
    CPAC: pent-up Trump denounces Biden at rightwing summit More

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Elections

    Militia attack groups want to ‘blow up Capitol’, police chief warns – video

    In alarming testimony to a House subcommittee, the acting chief of Capitol police, Yogananda Pittman, said threats were circulating that directly targeted Joe Biden’s first formal speech to a joint session of Congress – the date of which has not yet been announced.
    Militia groups involved in the 6 January insurrection want to stage another attack aiming to ‘blow up’ the complex and kill lawmakers, Pittman has warned
    Capitol attack groups want to ‘blow up Capitol’ during Biden speech, police warn More

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    Capitol attack groups want to ‘blow up Capitol’ during Biden speech, police warn

    Militia groups involved in the 6 January insurrection want to stage another attack around Joe Biden’s upcoming address to Congress, aiming to “blow up” the complex and kill lawmakers, the acting chief of the US Capitol police has warned.In alarming testimony to a House subcommittee, Yogananda Pittman said that threats were circulating that directly targeted the president’s first formal speech to a joint session of Congress. A date for the event has not yet been announced.“We know that members of the militia groups that were present on Jan 6 have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible,” Pittman said.The police chief’s warning was made in the context of her trying to justify to Congress why exceptional security measures put in place in the wake of the 6 January assault needed to remain until alternatives could be devised. A large area around the Capitol is still surrounded by a 7ft non-scalable fence, and thousands of National Guard members continue to be deployed.“Based on that information, we think that it’s prudent that Capitol Police maintain its enhanced and robust security posture until we address those vulnerabilities going forward,” she said.Her words are also likely to be taken seriously as a clear indication of the ongoing threat posed by the armed militia members who took part in the storming of the Capitol in which five people died and almost 140 police officers were injured. Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and military veteran, was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer.Several of the most prominent armed militia and extremist groups in the US were at the forefront of the Capitol riot. The assault followed an incendiary rally by Donald Trump to promote his “big lie” that the November election was stolen from him by Biden.A number of militia members have been arrested and charged as part of the giant federal investigation into the events of 6 January. In an indictment handed down last week against six alleged members of the Oath Keepers militia, the justice department charged that the group had planned for several months to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college results of the presidential election.Several members of the far-right Proud Boys have also been charged with criminal conspiracy.This week’s congressional hearings are the start of what is expected to be a slew of official investigations into the drastic security failures that gave rise to the breach of the Capitol complex. In her testimony Pittman confirmed that some 800 rioters had entered the building and that the total number who were present amounted to as many as 10,000.Pittman has stepped up to lead the Capitol police force after the chief at the time of the storming, Steven Sund, resigned days after the catastrophe. In his evidence to Congress earlier this week, Sund said: “These criminals came prepared for war”.The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are tracking closely far-right online chatter for early warnings on any possible repeat attacks in Washington or other cities. In addition to Biden’s upcoming congressional address, law enforcement will also be on alert on the days leading up to 4 March – the date set by the extreme conspiracy theory QAnon for Trump to return to Washington to start a second term as president.Followers of the crank movement have been growing increasingly agitated by the fantasy around Trump’s comeback on 4 March, the date on which US presidents were originally inaugurated. More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Elections

    Rightwing group nearly forced Wisconsin to purge thousands of eligible voters

    [embedded content]
    A well-connected conservative group in Wisconsin nearly succeeded in forcing the state to kick nearly 17,000 eligible voters off its rolls ahead of the 2020 election, new state data reveals.
    The group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (Will), caused a national uproar in late 2019 when it successfully convinced a county judge to order the state to immediately remove more than 232,000 people Wisconsin suspected of moving homes from the state’s voter rolls. The state, relying on government records, had sent a postcard to all of those voters asking them to confirm their address, and Will sought to remove anyone who had not responded within 30 days.
    Democrats on the commission refused to comply with the order, believing that the underlying data wasn’t reliable, and wanted to give voters until April 2021 to confirm their address before they removed them. Appeals courts intervened and blocked the removals; the case is currently pending before the Wisconsin supreme court. There were still more than 71,000 voters still on the list at the end of January who did not respond to the mailer (152,524 people on the list updated their registration at a new address).
    But new data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows how disastrous such a purge could have been. And the dispute underscores the way fights over how states remove people from their voter rolls – often called purging – has become a critical part of protecting voting rights in America.
    Across the country, Republicans and conservative groups have pushed for aggressive purging, saying it helps prevent fraud. Democrats and voting rights groups say the process can be done haphazardly, leaving eligible voters, particularly minority groups and students, at risk of being wrongly purged.
    Bar chart showing people in non-white zipcodes were more likely to be on the purge list.
    In Wisconsin, of the 232,579 people who were flagged for potential removal from the rolls in October 2019, 16,698 people – 7.2% of the list – wound up confirming they wanted to remain registered to vote at the same address. Nearly 11,000 of those people voted in the November election (Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by just over 20,000 votes in the state).
    “7.2% never moved. That is a huge error rate,” Mark Thomsen, a Democrat on the bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission, said during a meeting earlier this month.
    “17,000 voters is a lot of voters,” said Ann Jacobs, another Democrat on the commission.
    Richard Esenberg, Will’s president and general counsel, however, said the new data was actually evidence that Wisconsin’s process worked. “If the number is 7%, then I think it’s fair to say that the movers list was reliable for the purpose that it is being used for, ie, to ask voters to confirm their registrations,” he wrote in an email.
    Timeline
    Wisconsin officials are still trying to understand exactly why so many voters were getting wrongly flagged. 2019 was just the second time the state used data from the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a multi-state consortium that uses records from the DMV, post office and other government sources to help election officials flag voters who may have moved. Thirty states and the District of Columbia belong to the consortium and the system is generally considered a reliable way of identifying voters who have moved.
    Wisconsin, however, is exempt from a 1993 federal law that requires states to offer voter registration services at DMVs. That may be leading to issues in matching DMV and voter records in the state; voters who change a car registration to a different address but haven’t actually moved may be getting incorrectly flagged as movers, Meagan Wolfe, the executive director of the Wisconsin elections commission, said during a meeting earlier this month.
    Figuring out whether or not the data Wisconsin is relying on is accurate is crucial because a state statute says that local election officials have to remove someone from the voter rolls if they have “reliable” information they have moved. Will says the data is reliable and so the voters must be removed. Democrats and voting rights groups say the data is not reliable enough to cancel registrations.
    The Guardian contacted more than 200 voters who informed the state at some point over the last year or so they were still living at the same address after they were flagged as movers in 2019. Several voters said they had temporarily moved out of Wisconsin but continued to vote absentee in the state.
    That’s what happened to Riley Freeman, a 23-year-old from Waunakee. In 2018, he asked the post office to begin forwarding his mail to his college address at Northwestern University, just outside Chicago, but continued to vote absentee in Wisconsin. He didn’t register to vote in Illinois, apply for a driver’s license or register his car there. The state flagged him as a mover, even though he was still eligible to vote in Wisconsin and wanted to do so. He voted by mail in 2020; had the 2019 purge gone through, he would have had to re-register to vote from college before he could vote by mail.
    “I still kind of considered myself a Wisconsin resident who just happened to live in Illinois nine months of the year,” he said, calling the process “a little bit unfair”.
    Carlos Martin Del Campo, a 20-year-old from New Holstein in north-east Wisconsin, was also among those flagged. Towards the end of 2019, he left Wisconsin to live temporarily in California with his father, but always intended to return to the state and vote there. By the time Wisconsin’s spring election in April came around, he was back in the state and voted in person at the polls after confirming to officials there that he had not moved.
    “In my case I would see why I was flagged. But it just concerns me the potential for my vote not being cast was there,” he said.
    It’s not clear why voters temporarily out of state may be getting flagged as movers.
    “If National Change of Address has it listed as temporary, and not with other codes or other dmv data also indicating a move, then we take them off the list,” Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in an email. “But it’s also possible they checked the wrong box on the change of address form, or there was a data entry error by the post office. Or they had some other transaction at DMV regarding their vehicle, etc.”
    Voters in non-white and low-income zip codes were all more likely to get flagged as movers subject to a potential purge, according to a Guardian analysis of state data. People living in those same areas were also likely to be wrongly flagged as movers.
    Map showing where people were most likely to be on a list to be purged from the voter rolls.
    Researchers found similar trends when they studied racial disparities the first time Wisconsin attempted to remove voters using Eric data. In 2018, 4% of the voters flagged as movers wound up casting ballots at the same address. Minority voters were twice as likely to do so than their white counterparts.
    The study suggests that simply sending voters postcards to confirm their address is probably not the best way to identify who may have moved.
    “It highlights the challenges in doing [voter roll] maintenance when people have unstable addresses,” said Marc Meredith, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “Postcards by themselves aren’t gonna cut it.”
    Esenberg and other defenders of the aggressive removals have argued that even if Wisconsin officials did erroneously remove some voters from the rolls, Wisconsin has same-day registration, which allows people to re-register when they show up at the polls. But several voters on the list also told the Guardian that they continued to vote absentee from an address abroad, casting ballots from places like the United Kingdom and Japan. Those voters are unlikely to have the option to re-register on election day, and it may be more difficult for them to get the necessary documents to prove their residency eligibility in Wisconsin.
    “We’ve just gotten through an election cycle where the right in this country, conservative activists and legislators are practically apoplectic over garden variety election irregularities. But in the context of this issue, they seem to be very comfortable with a 7% error rate,” said Jon Sherman, an attorney at the Fair Elections Center who went to court to try to stop the removals last year.
    “If a voting machine junked 7% of the ballots you fed it, I don’t think you would call that a reliable voting machine.” More