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in ElectionsGeorgia Republican warns Trump is inciting violence over election: 'Someone will get hurt'
Gabriel Sterling tells president to soften his language or ‘someone is going to get killed’One of Georgia’s top election officials has made an impassioned plea to Donald Trump to tone down his rhetoric disputing the election results, saying the president is “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence”.Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system, also issued the stark warning that if Trump does not rein in his supporters then “someone is going to get hurt”. Continue reading… More
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in Elections‘It Has to Stop’: Georgia Election Official Lashes Trump
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}State Certified Vote Totals
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in ElectionsNo, Georgia’s governor cannot ‘overrule’ its secretary of state on voting.
President Trump on Monday morning inaccurately described Georgia’s vote counting process and implausibly urged the state’s Republican governor to “overrule” its Republican secretary of state.Why won’t Governor @BrianKempGA, the hapless Governor of Georgia, use his emergency powers, which can be easily done, to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State, and do a match of signatures on envelopes. It will be a “goldmine” of fraud, and we will easily WIN the state….— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2020
The tweet was the latest of Mr. Trump’s continuing assault on election results in Georgia and its top Republican officials, which has ignited an intraparty feud in the state.Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia does not have the authority to do what Mr. Trump is suggesting. Moreover, signature verification is already part of the vote counting process.When absentee ballots are received, Georgia’s election officials verify the signature on the envelopes. The ballots and envelopes are then separated to protect privacy, so rechecking the envelopes during a recount would be meaningless.“Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections. The secretary of state, who is an elected constitutional officer, has oversight over elections that cannot be overridden by executive order,” a spokesman for Mr. Kemp told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The notion that “the governor has inherent executive authority to suspend or investigate or somehow interfere with this process — that’s just not true,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University. “There is no plausible case here whatsoever.”Unlike the federal government, Georgia does not have a unitary executive and its governor and secretary of state have separate duties. Even the governor’s emergency powers are limited.Mr. Kreis said that Georgia’s code was “very clear” on the kinds of things a governor can do in a state of emergency. Mr. Kemp can move resources and funds and enact temporary measures, Mr. Kreis said, but “he does not have the authority to expressly interfere with elections.”Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, continued to push back on Mr. Trump’s and his allies’ baseless claims of mass voter fraud in a news conference on Monday.“The truth matters, especially around election administration,” Mr. Raffensperger said. “There are those who exploit the emotions of many Trump supporters with fantastic claims, half-truths, misinformation and frankly, they’re misleading the president as well, apparently.” More138 Shares129 Views
in US PoliticsTrump's baseless claims of Georgia voter fraud spark fears among Republicans
Despite giving his strongest hints yet that he is coming to accept his loss of the White House to challenger Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s continuing reluctance to leave office and baseless claims about electoral fraud are increasingly worrying his own party.
In particular, Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump’s stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state of Georgia, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party’s efforts to retain control of the Senate.
Control of the key upper chamber of the US Congress hangs in the balance as runoff races for the state’s two Senate seats play out over the remainder of 2020, with an election scheduled in early January. If Democrats win those seats, they grab the Senate while if Republicans emerge victorious, they keep control and can seriously hinder Biden’s agenda, including his ability to freely pick his cabinet.
Trump has attacked the election system in Georgia, even though it is headed by Republicans, after Biden flipped the southern state to the Democrats for the first time since 1992.
On Thanksgiving – a day usually reserved for presidential platitudes – Trump broke with tradition and repeated those attacks in a now rare face-off with journalists. “I’m very worried about that,” Trump said when asked about his previous baseless claims of fraud in Georgia. “You have a fraudulent system.” He then called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the state’s election process, an “enemy of the people”.
Such attacks have Republicans worried as they seek to motivate Georgia voters to come to the polls in January, volunteer for their Senate campaigns and – perhaps most importantly of all – dig deep into their pockets to pay for the unexpected runoff races.
In particular Trump’s comments have spurred conspiracy theories that the state’s electoral system is rigged and prompted some of his supporters to make calls for a boycott of the coming vote – something that local Georgia Republicans desperately do not want. “His demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate,” warned an article published by Politico.
Even Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, has jumped into the fray, tweeting: “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote.. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people.”
The president has also pledged to visit Georgia to hold rallies in support of the two Republican candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. The first of those events is expected to be on Saturday 5 December and could be a double-edged sword. Trump is still a powerful force with a loyal following whose endorsement is a key mobilizing tool for the race. On the other hand, in freewheeling his rallies, Trump may spout conspiracy theories that undermine their campaigns.
Certainly Trump’s mood has become increasingly erratic even as he has made the clearest signs yet that he will eventually leave the White House, which he convincingly lost to Biden in both the popular vote and the vital electoral college that actually picks the next president.
On Thanksgiving Day, Trump grumpily said he would leave the White House when the electoral college voted for Biden. He has so far defied tradition by refusing to concede defeat and launching legal attempts to challenge the outcomes in battleground states includijng Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. So far, those efforts have largely failed.
New court defeat for Trump
On Friday, Trump’s legal team suffered yet another defeat as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected its latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.
Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the supreme court despite the judge’s assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit”.
The case had been argued last week in a lower court by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani without tangible proof presented. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the three-judge panel on Friday.
On Thursday, Trump had declined to say whether he would attend Biden’s inauguration, which is due to take place on 20 January, and called one reporter a “lightweight”, telling him: “Don’t talk to me like that.”
Trump continued his rant on Friday, producing a long string of retweets and tweets making untrue claims about the election and his opponent. “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained,” he tweeted.
He even retweeted a video of a fight between a lion and a pack of attacking hyenas, over which was narrated a piece of movie dialogue by the actor Christopher Walken, taken from the film Poolhall Junkies. “So much truth,” Trump remarked.
The Republican party has shocked many observers by mostly continuing its adherence to Trump and backing his wild claims and legal efforts, though daylight has started to appear between some top party figures and the White House.
“We’re going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, told reporters recently. “What we all say about it is, frankly, irrelevant.”
Also on Friday, Republicans picked up their third US House seat in California. David Valadao reclaimed the seat he lost two years ago, defeating the Democratic representative TJ Cox. More150 Shares199 Views
in ElectionsTrump, Still Claiming Victory, Says He Will Leave if Electors Choose Biden
President Trump said on Thursday that he would leave the White House if the Electoral College formalized Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election as president, even as he reiterated baseless claims of fraud that he said would make it “very hard” to concede.Taking questions from reporters for the first time since Election Day, Mr. Trump also threw himself into the battle for Senate control, saying he would soon travel to Georgia to support Republican candidates in two runoff elections scheduled there on Jan. 5.When asked whether he would leave office in January after the Electoral College cast its votes for Mr. Biden on Dec. 14 as expected, Mr. Trump replied: “Certainly I will. Certainly I will.”Speaking in the Diplomatic Room of the White House after a Thanksgiving video conference with members of the American military, the president insisted that “shocking” new evidence about voting problems would surface before Inauguration Day. “It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede,” he said, “because we know that there was massive fraud.”But even as he continued to deny the reality of his defeat, Mr. Trump also seemed to acknowledge that his days as president were numbered.“Time is not on our side,” he said, in a rare admission of weakness. He also complained that what he referred to, prematurely, as “the Biden administration” had declared its intention to scrap his “America First” foreign policy vision.The president was also strikingly testy at one point, lashing out at a reporter who interjected during one of several of his rambling statements about the supposedly fraudulent election.“You’re just a lightweight,” Mr. Trump snapped, raising his voice and pointing a finger in anger. “Don’t talk to me that — don’t talk — I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”If Mr. Trump sees the end of his presidency as inevitable, he clearly still believes he can bolster his legacy — and badly undermine Mr. Biden, the man who is ending it — by helping to preserve a Republican Senate that could serve as a wall against the new Democratic agenda.The election results left Democrats holding 48 seats in the U.S. Senate. If Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challengers in Georgia, can both pull off victories over Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, their party will gain de facto control of a Senate divided 50-50 because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would wield a tiebreaking vote.In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Trump said he would visit Georgia on Saturday. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, later clarified that the president meant Saturday, Dec. 5.The president added that he could return to the state to back the Republicans a second time, “depending on how they’re doing.”It is unclear how helpful Mr. Trump’s appearances would be for the two embattled Republican incumbents. After a hand recount of a close vote, Georgia declared Mr. Biden the winner there on Nov. 19 by a margin of 12,284 votes. Mr. Biden is the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1996.Mr. Trump insisted on Thursday that he had won the vote by a significant margin. “We were robbed. We were robbed,” he said. “I won that by hundreds of thousands of votes. Everybody knows it.”Asked whether he would attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, as is customary for a departing president, Mr. Trump was coy.“I don’t want to say that yet,” the president said, adding, “I know the answer, but I just don’t want to say.”At times, Mr. Trump shifted his explanation of his defeat from claims of fraud to complaints that the political battlefield had been slanted against him, casting the news media and technology companies as his enemies.“If the media were honest and big tech was fair, it wouldn’t even be a contest,” he said. “And I would have won by a tremendous amount.”After seeming to concede reality, Mr. Trump quickly caught himself and revised his conditional statement.“And I did win by a tremendous amount,” he added. More
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in US PoliticsRomance novelists raise $400,000 for Georgia Senate races – with help from Stacey Abrams
Rallying behind Stacey Abrams, the Democratic politician, voting rights activist and romance author, American romance novelists have helped raise nearly $400,000 to help elect two Democratic senators in Georgia.Now, Abrams herself has joined the “Romancing the Runoff” fundraiser, and has donated a copy of the first of her eight published romance novels–one signed with both her real name, and her pen name, Selena Montgomery.“I’m privileged to be one of you,” Abrams wrote on Twitter, praising the romance authors’ “amazing” fundraising efforts.Abrams’ work fighting against suppression of black voters and organizing voter registration efforts is widely credited with helping Joe Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in more than a quarter century. Democrats have said her work was “pivotal” in flipping Wisconsin and other battleground states.Thank you @RomancingRunoff for your amazing efforts. I’m privileged to be one of you. For the cause, I’d like to throw in an autographed copy of my first novel, Rules of Engagement, in the rare hardback version. Both Selena & Stacey will sign. 😉https://t.co/32aiezmJmW— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) November 25, 2020
Since election day, Abrams has not stopped fighting: a January runoff between two pairs of Democratic and Republican candidates in Georgia will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the US senate – and have the votes to block Democrats and the incoming Biden administration from enacting any substantial new policy agenda.In the week after the election, Abrams helped raise $3.6m in just two days to help campaigns for the Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as they fight re-matches in a runoff election against the incumbent Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.Meanwhile other American romance novelists, many of whom have active social media platforms, began organizing to auction off romance-novel related items to support the Democratic candidates through donations to the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and Fair Fight, the voting rights group Abrams founded.“Democracy only thrives when every vote can be cast and counted, and we are fighting to help dismantle the legacy of voter suppression in Georgia,” the four bestselling authors who organized the auction said in a statement.Political activism is not a new development in the American romance writing community, which has been fighting fierce battles over entrenched racism in the publishing industry, as well as within their own industry trade group, the Romance Writers of America, for years.But the Georgia fundraising effort is also a testament to romance novelists’ pride in Abrams, who has continued to tout her work as an author of romantic suspense, even as she has become a star in national Democratic politics and a bestselling author of political nonfiction, including her memoir, Lead from the Outside.When writers who got their start publishing romance novels move on to more prestigious genres, “they sometimes back away from romance, like it’s this dirty secret in their past: ‘Oh, I don’t write those kinds of books any more,’” the author Courtney Milan, one of the auction’s organizers, said. “Stacey Abrams has never once done that to us.”“She’s not playing the game of trying to advance where she is by denigrating where she’s been,” Milan said. “She’s very clear that she doesn’t think any apologies are needed, which they aren’t.“I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are,” Abrams told Entertainment Weekly in an interview in 2018, when she was campaigning to be governor of Georgia.Asked by the Washington Post how she would respond to people who made fun of the romance genre, Abrams wrote: “Telling a well-crafted story is hard. Full stop. Regardless of genre, good writing is good writing”. She added that she was “honored to be in the company of extraordinary writers.”The “Romancing the Runoff” auction had grown past its initial goal of raising $20,000, Milan said, as a wide range of authors and romance fans donated thousands of items, including first editions of romance novels, including the first Harlequin novel published by a black author, Sandra Kitt’s Rites of Spring; one-on-one sessions for writing advice, a chicken recipe from Dame Barbara Cartland, and handmade crafts, such as a “blue wave” crocheted scarf to a hand-embroidered sampler reading “F*ck the GOP”.The fantasy and science fiction novelist Neil Gaiman also joined the effort, donating a signed collector’s edition of one of his novels that sold for $4,590.A spokesperson for Fair Fight did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment about the Romancing the Runoff fundraiser beyond Abrams’ tweet.Milan said she had “no clue” how much money the copy of Abrams’ own signed romance novel might raise for the Georgia election, but she expected it would “easily be four figures”.Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent on political advertising in Georgia in the weeks before the runoff election on 5 January, NBC News reported this week, with at least $46m already spent since election day. More150 Shares199 Views
in ElectionsStock Trades by Senator Perdue Said to Have Prompted Justice Dept. Inquiry
WASHINGTON — Early this year, Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, sold more than $1 million worth of stock in the financial company Cardlytics, where he once served on the board. Six weeks later, its share price tumbled when the company’s founder announced he would step down as chief executive and the firm said its future sales would be worse than expected.After the company’s stock price bottomed out in March at $29, Mr. Perdue bought back a substantial portion of the shares that he had sold. They are now trading at around $120 per share.The Cardlytics transactions drew the attention this spring of investigators at the Justice Department, who were undertaking a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading, according to four people with knowledge of the case who described aspects of it on the condition of anonymity. Though Mr. Perdue alluded to the federal inquiry in a campaign ad this fall, its details have not been previously reported.Investigators found that Cardlytics’ chief executive at the time, Scott Grimes, sent Mr. Perdue a personal email two days before the senator’s stock sale that made a vague mention of “upcoming changes.” The timing of the message prompted additional scrutiny from investigators in both Washington and Atlanta. But ultimately they concluded the exchange contained no meaningful nonpublic information and declined to pursue charges, closing the case this summer.The federal scrutiny, which also included attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the most vivid example to date of how Mr. Perdue’s complex financial interests and frequent trading have complicated his pursuit of a second Senate term. The results of January’s two Senate runoffs in Georgia, including Mr. Perdue’s race, will determine which party controls the chamber and with it, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ability to advance his agenda through Congress.Democrats have used details of his trades to accuse Mr. Perdue of lining his pockets when Americans were worried about their jobs and health, and in some cases, leveled corruption charges.Congress’s ethics rules do not bar lawmakers from holding or trading individual stocks, but like other Americans, they are not allowed to trade on inside information. Other lawmakers have decided it is not worth the political sweat that comes with the appearance of possible conflicts of interest and have steered their investments into diversified mutual funds. But Mr. Perdue, a former executive at Reebok and Dollar General, has been one of the most active traders on Capitol Hill.A spokesman for Mr. Perdue’s campaign confirmed the investigation in a statement, saying that investigators with the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission “quickly and independently cleared Senator Perdue of any wrongdoing — this story highlights that again.”“Senator Perdue has always followed the law,” the spokesman, John Burke, said.A Justice Department spokesman and Securities and Exchange Commission officials did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for the U.S. attorneys’ offices in Washington and Atlanta and the F.B.I. declined to comment.A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, which handles Mr. Perdue’s portfolio, said that the bank had “fully cooperated with inquiries” about Mr. Perdue but declined to comment further, citing a policy of not commenting on its clients.Mr. Grimes and officials at Cardlytics did not respond to requests for comment.The inquiry into Mr. Perdue roughly coincided with an unusual blitz of federal scrutiny on senators and their financial transactions, but it appears to have taken a somewhat different track.In the other cases, the Justice Department’s public corruption unit focused on stock sales around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when markets dropped precipitously, by Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina, Dianne Feinstein of California, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. Ms. Loeffler is competing in the state’s other runoff election.Investigators scrutinized whether the senators had dumped stocks and bought others in key sectors after receiving nonpublic briefings on the virus from experts and ahead of the market drop. The cases were closed on all of them except for Mr. Burr.The investigation into Mr. Perdue appears to have started in a similar fashion, but came to focus more intensely on the Cardlytics transactions.F.B.I. agents in Washington spoke with Mr. Perdue in June, asking him questions about his financial transactions. The extent of the conversation was unclear, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.Mr. Perdue’s lawyers turned over hundreds of pages of information, including the emails with Mr. Grimes, in response to a subpoena from a grand jury.During the campaign, Mr. Perdue disclosed in a televised ad that a “full review of his stock trades” by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission had “cleared him completely,” but made no mention of Cardlytics or the extent of the federal scrutiny.Mr. Grimes and Mr. Perdue had known each other since at least 2010, when Mr. Perdue joined the board of Cardlytics, then a small and privately held Atlanta start-up. Mr. Perdue resigned his directorship in 2014 after his election to the Senate, but struck an unusual financial arrangement on his way out that paved the way for him to benefit from holding a stake in the company when it went public four years later.As a senator, Mr. Perdue continued to hold shares of Cardlytics, where executives said he had made valuable contributions to the company, along with scores of other stocks that he traded. In 2019, Mr. Grimes made the maximum donation of $5,600 to Mr. Perdue’s re-election efforts, in what appeared to be his only political contribution of the election cycle.The email correspondence between the two men began on Jan. 21 and took place just before Mr. Perdue placed the well-timed trades.“David, I know you are about to do a call with David Evans,” Mr. Grimes wrote from his iPad, according to a copy of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. “As an FYI, I have not told him about the upcoming changes. Thanks, Scott.”Mr. Evans, then the chief financial officer of Cardlytics, stepped down from that role six weeks after Mr. Grimes sent the email, at the same time that Mr. Grimes announced plans to assume a new role as executive chairman. Mr. Evans said in July that he was leaving the company.Mr. Perdue responded to Mr. Grimes’s email by saying he would check with his Senate scheduler but “I don’t know about a call with David or the changes you mentioned.”Mr. Grimes wrote back the next morning to apologize.“David, Sorry. That email was not meant for you. Wrong David!” he wrote.Mr. Perdue then contacted his wealth manager at Goldman Sachs, Robert Hutchinson, and instructed him to sell a little more than $1 million worth of Cardlytics shares, or about 20 percent of his position, three of the people said. One person familiar with the inquiry into Mr. Perdue’s trades said that the conversation was memorialized in an internal Goldman Sachs record later obtained by the F.B.I.Financial disclosure forms Mr. Perdue is required to file with the Senate show a Jan. 23 sale of $1 million to $5 million in Cardlytics stock.Investigators in Washington began scrutinizing Mr. Perdue in the spring; by June, the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta was handling the case along with prosecutors in the department’s criminal division in Washington.Mr. Hutchinson told the F.B.I. that Mr. Perdue and his wife weighed in only on broader investing issues, like the proportion of stocks and bonds to hold in their portfolio, according to a person with knowledge of his interview. But a person familiar with the senator’s money-management arrangements with Goldman Sachs said that Mr. Perdue retained some degree of discretion over which trades were made and when.In this case, Mr. Perdue’s legal team told investigators that Mr. Hutchinson had advised their client in October 2019 that he needed to sell Cardlytics shares to balance his holdings. The shares had increased in value and the advisers argued that Mr. Perdue should take the profits from the sales and reinvest them elsewhere to limit his exposure to the fluctuation of a single stock. Mr. Perdue elected to go forward with those changes in January, his lawyers said.Mr. Hutchinson declined to comment.After conducting interviews, including with Mr. Perdue and Mr. Grimes, investigators reached their conclusion that the senator had no nonpublic information about the company’s performance when he made the Cardlytics trade. The investigation was closed later in the summer, according to the people familiar with the case.If the email from Mr. Grimes was accidental, said Tai Park, a former federal prosecutor and white-collar crime partner at the law firm White & Case, Mr. Perdue “may be on firmer ground, because that’s objective evidence that the C.E.O. was not trying to tip him. In any event, trading on the basis of information learned from a C.E.O. of a company is exceedingly risky under any scenario and could draw attention from investigators.” More